5 Things you need to do in the First 3 months of a Campaign to Boost Traffic and Rankings
The common denominator in most of the questions was “what are you doing to see an increase in search traffic within the first three months?”
I wanted to answer that with this post where are explaining the “5 Things you need to do in the first three months of a campaign to boost traffic and rankings”. I am going to keep this as concise as possible while still maintaining enough good content to help you guys take your campaign to the next level.
This is not going to be a definitive guide to any one thing. I think with some of the data we release and some of the more technical things we talk about makes it is easy to overcomplicate some of the core ranking techniques that will push a site up the SERPs.
Without further ado, let us begin.
On-Page Optimization
This particular site is an e-commerce brand built on Bigcommerce so instead of us accessing and actually performing the optimization, which we typically do, we offered the client a roadmap so they could get that piece of the campaign squared away.
You can do some really in-depth stuff with on page, and I encourage everyone to work at dialing in the pages they want to rank, perform interlinking from other articles, etc.
Use that above link as a checklist and tighten up the on page first and foremost. If your on page is lacking you will spend a lot of money on links and content that will essentially be less effective than if your on-page was on point.
Press Release for foundational links
I think far too often in this industry we try and microscopically evaluate the effectiveness of certain things rather than taking a macro look at the campaign and seeing how well-engineered groups of strategies come together to build success in the SERPs.
We are constantly testing and discovering new ways to get additional mileage out of PRs and releasing training and articles about using press releases for SEO. One of the newest best practices that we implemented is modifying the titles so the brand is mentioned in close relation to the main target keyword in which you are trying to rank.
This helps Google see co-occurrence between the brand and the specified keyword that you decide to add. If you want to see a guide on doing press releases for SEO then click the link after you are done with this article.
Even though there are some tricks to getting better rankings with press releases the core idea behind syndicating a release is to gain some foundational links from authoritative news outlets, and to also help establish yourself as a brand in the eyes of Google.
Google has a sophisticated engine to determine whether sites are real entities or not. Brand links from press releases is one way we can work to influence that engine and shows the Big G that our site is indeed a real brand and related to the keyword we add to the title.
Pillowing/Brand Links
We do not discriminate. If we take on a client we analyze the backlink profile in comparison to the top three ranking site for the main queries and emulate their plan.
This always requires us to build some type of pillowing link to diversify the anchor text going to the site. I am also a big believer in diversifying the type of links that you are getting for your money site. It is hard to test this as a control and gain empirical data from the testing but I personally think it looks extremely unnatural for all of your links to come from blog posts.
The more patterns we build for Google the more link equity we lose as our links get devalued because of unnatural patterns.
We build audio and video links, blogs, profiles, and more. So, not only are diversifying the type of links that we are building but we also don’t have situations where all of your links are coming from homepages, blog posts, etc. Making things appear random and natural.
Our team usually builds the content for these links to be niche specific but we have been exploring geo-relevant content and other factors to build geo-specificity. I talk more about this in my post NIche Relevance is Dead?
Guest Posts
Now that we spent a few moments talking about foundational activities it is time to get down to the nitty-gritty. The meat and potatoes. Guest posts are offered by very few white label companies but they are an integral part of our SEO campaigns. Scaling the outreach and content creation can be a pain, but being able to get links from a plethora of real sites is a trophy worth winning.
I do not want to turn this into a guest posting guide by any means, but I just want to take a second to stress the importance of these for SEO purposes.
The biggest thing to avoid is buying links that are labeled as guest posts but really are not. This has become somewhat commonplace in the industry and I am not sure there are too many guest post services that exclusively sell links that they reached out to and pitched to get a post.
Right now we are not offering a la carte guest posting packages but we are creating the brand and site to do so as I am typing this. We will have training revolving around getting guest posts and other valuable white hat topics as well.
We usually drip around five of these per month to build a lot of powerful link juice to your money site. They work incredibly well and should be a part of every campaign.
Yes, we include guest posts as a part of our white label campaigns. So many vendors sell links on sites they own or try and pass off obvious pbns as guest posts. This industry-wide epidemic will hopefully be over soon.
Authority Placements
when guest posts are too much of a complete pita but you need some butt kicking links. Getting guest posts can be a lot of work, but grabbing links on aged pages is a quick way to really crush rankings for a money site. It is also a lot easier of a pitch a site owner on posting a link that doesn’t require them to proofread your article or approve ideas for a guest post.
They take the hyperlink HTML and throw it on a relevant page on their site and you reap the benefits. This also looks awesome from a natural link building perspective because a majority of your links are not coming from homepages of PBN sites that you own.
In some ways, they can be even more powerful than typical guest posts because the aged content most likely has links from other pages on the site and links that were built or earned to that page from third-party sources in the past.
Getting Google to recrawl the page is as easy as a simple submit.
Another strategy you can implement, and we do on more competitive campaigns, is to build some supporting links to these pages to pass even more juice through to the money site. All around very solid links and between them and guest posts they make up our power link toolbox, for the most part.
A few parting words
This is by no means a comprehensive guide on the link building we do for white label clients. I could spend 5-10k words delving through just a month or two of the service, and I might do that one day, but I just wanted to hit you guys with something actionable and brief.
If I were to get asked my top five things to throw at any site, which is what started happening when Brent posted his progress thus far, these are the points that came to mind. We still have some work to do to drive the campaign home, but we are seeing great movement in the right direction.
You can see the spike in traffic from search since we started the campaign.
Orders, sales, revenue, and visits are through the roof. Again, still a lot of work to do, but it’s a very promising first three months for a national ranking campaign. If you guys have any specific questions about any of these points or other stuff we do for our white label clients, please comment and I will respond.