Agency link building in 2013 has become a bad word based on the updates from Google. So people out shopping for a link building agencies should adjust their thinking from link building agency to seo and content marketing agency. Semantics, semantics, right? WRONG! Watch this video to learn the difference between link-building and earning links through great content....and what kind of agency you should be seeking out.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Hello, and welcome to our Link Building Agency video. I'm Chad Hill, and I have Adam Stetzer here with me to talk about agency link building.
Good afternoon, Chad. Link building for agencies is an interesting topic to talk about. As those who watch our videos know, agency link building, we think, in 2013 has become a little bit of a bad word based on the updates from Google, and what you hear coming from the web spam team. So people out shopping for a link building agency probably, right off the bat, need to adjust some of their thinking. Let's address that today, and let's see if we can help our viewers figure out how to select a good link building agency to help with what you used to maybe call link building, and now you would probably SEO or content market.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think a lot of people who probably have SEO for Dummies or other books out there that are reading these chapters talking about agency link building, and now we're saying you don't do link building, you do content marketing, probably are a little confused. But I think let's try to explain the difference.
So when we talk about content marketing, it's a great way of earning links. So what you're doing is you're identifying topics that people are interested in, you're writing compelling information. That could be, again, text that you write. Could be videos that you shoot. Info graphics you create. And then you're taking that information and your syndicating it out to other places on the web.
And then as a result of providing that great information, those sites are compelled to give you a link back to your site to source the person who's created the content. So that type of content marketing is a really powerful way of, again, expanding where your presence on the web, and earning links back to your website.
It's an excellent point. So the very first take home notion here for our viewers is if you're searching for link building agencies, you really shouldn't be. That thinking that is now quite dated. And in 2013, with Panda and Penguin updates, you really should be reaching for a content marketing agency, someone who's going to help you earn those backlinks, as Chad said.
You may see that as semantics. What you used to call link building now you just call content marketing. But as you peel back the onion and understand the activities that go into real content marketing, as Chad just articulated, you'll notice that it's actually a very different activity that has a much bigger focus on the end user and produces something of value.
And when you are looking for a link building agency, and again, transferring that over to more content marketing, you want to make sure you're working with a link building agency who's very transparent about the process. And again, we think that Semify, one of the things that we've done is we're very upfront about building the information and the facts that we're going to use in your content marketing. And then telling you very clearly where that information-- where it's going to go in terms of content created, as well as where it's going to be syndicated.
So transparency is really important. You don't want to have to wait three months or two months to really see what happened the first month you were engaged with a link building agency.
Right. This is an excellent point, too. We've been talking about this for years, Chad. Mean you just don't want to be working with a link building agency where everything is shrouded in mystery. You want to leaves that mysterious gray hat or pseudo black hat link building that your agency won't really even tell you about behind. That's really just not where you want to be.
If you want to build a web marketing SEO strategy for the long haul, you want to be doing things you can be proud of. You want to be creating content you can be proud of. And yeah, you want to acquire backlinks. Everybody knows that's still the name of the game here. But do it with a firm that's going to be very transparent, going to show you what they're doing, and even offers up, you could do this yourself.
That's one of the things we like to talk about quite a bit here at Semify. Everything we do, you could you yourself. We're happy to tell you about it, and we do tell people about in our video blogs every day.
But just like you could change your own oil in your car, it's often more efficient just to go to Jiffy Lube, because they're ready to do it quickly. They've got all the parts. You can drive in the back, and sit and use your Wi-Fi while they do it. We're the same way when it comes to SEO.
Right. And I think the final point we want to make, and we tend to make this point, is that once you put this in place and you execute this program, you really also want to track the results. And tracking for link building is important because one of the things that there's a lot of confusion in the market about is, is it the same just to get a lot of links even if I'm getting them from the same website, or do I want to have lots of links from many different websites?
And we are emphatic in that we say that you want to have as broad of a set of websites linking to you as possible. And so again, we look at things like root domain links, not total links. because getting 50 or 100 footer links on a forum website isn't nearly as useful as getting several different distinct websites linking to you. So we want to track that and provide that information back to you. And then also help you measure traffic to your website, rankings, as well as leads you're getting off your website.
Right. And we go out and try different link building agencies all the time, just because we want to see what they're doing. And we're surprised by the number of products out there that are still doing tactics from three, four, five years ago. Doing lot of comment spam on forums, getting you links that if you go click on them aren't there later, or are from free-for-all directories.
These are really not the kind of backlinks you want. They're not a good profile for you. And again, if you're keeping up with Google and Panda and Penguin in 2013, they actually now may even hurt you. So again, you want to steer towards the right side of the street when it comes to getting the right link building agency that's going to get your web presence where you want it.