This is John Locke, and today I want to talk about something that gets repeated
a lot when we talk about SEO. I want to really examine whether it's true or
not. That thing is, if you publish great content, if you put great
content out there, that you're automatically going to get backlinks.
I think in some cases that's true. But I think in the majority of cases, it's
probably not true. So I want to preface this by saying, that I do believe that
you're not going to get any backlinks without great content. You must have
good content for people to want to link to it. Whether it's a guide, PDF, video, how-to,
anything you have to put out there. It has to be good enough for people to
want to link to it. It must inspire them to link. It has to be useful. So what inspired
this video today is, I was looking through Reddit and the SEO
channel. Somebody was talking about the fact that they had found a lot of
success in ranking for their target terms. They owned a cleaning agency
and they were really successful with SEO. So they wanted to focus on creating
content and doing SEO. But they were focusing more on the home and garden
niche, I think that's what they were saying. I don't know all the particulars of
this case, but the person was saying that they were very frustrated, because they
had just put out a three thousand word article. The implication
was that they had paid to have somebody do it for them.What we call the
skyscraper technique or skyscraper content. Brian Dean, a famous SEO
consultant is the person that inspired that term, skyscraper content.
But the three thousand word article, I'm assuming it was on either home and
garden or cleaning, I'm not really sure which one. But they had shared it on
Twitter and Facebook and Medium to try and get Google to index it. But they were
frustrated that people weren't linking to it. So they were coming to the
conclusion that if you produce great content it's not going to
get backlinks on it's own. There's a fallacy about [good content automatically earns back links]. A couple
observations that I'm going to have here. One, is that most of the people that you
hear saying, "Create great content and it'll get backlinks on its own" are
usually marketers or people in web design, web development, or something
of that nature. Most of those people -- even if they don't have great
content -- it's going to get links from somewhere. Because people in the
marketing, web design space they all know each other.
Somebody's going to link to it at some point. One of their friends is going to
link to it from somewhere. So if you're a marketer putting out content, if
it's above average, if it's above the basic level, then it's going to
get links. If you do something that's truly groundbreaking, then it's going to
get more links, just on the fact that marketers know each other. For
everybody else that's in a blue collar industry, if you're out there cleaning
carpets, or repairing furnaces, or repairing cars, or manufacturing parts
for other people to use -- it's a little bit different. So here's what I
have found tends to get linked from my own site, and what I've seen other people
getting links for, no matter what the industry. Far and away, the type of
content that gets links more than any other type of content is either a
tutorial, or a how-to guide. So if you're solving a common problem, and you're
showing people how to do something, then it's probably going to get some links.
You can point at a site like wikiHow dot com [for an example]. Most of their content is
really basic, walkthroughs of how to do this, how to do that.
Some of its really basic stuff. Some of it's for some pretty outlandish stuff.
But they walk through step by step. They have illustrations. So they're putting a
little bit of effort into each piece of content
that they do. But that seems to get a lot of links. I can testify that most of the
things that I get links for on my site are how-to's or code tutorials. How
to tutorials or guides. Most of people I see that are out there creating
content, it's the same thing. For people in the blue collar thing. If you were a
person that was creating content for carpet cleaning, or home cleaning, and you
were ranking on that, there's not a lot of competition for great content. I
hate to say that, but there is a lower bar to ranking for [those categories], because the
level of content that's out there is not as extensive as it is in some other
areas. Now if you were a person that was branching out into [writing content about] home-and-garden,
there's a lot more competition. So getting it [your best content] to rank would be the
first thing that I would focus on. Because if you're buried on page 10 or
if you're on page 12 of Google, nobody's going to link to it, because
nobody's going to find it. The fact of the matter is there's so
much content out there for home and garden, it's really competitive. So even
getting to page two or three is going to be difficult. What I would do is a
couple things. If you're creating content, I would put your own personal expertise
into it. Give it your own brand voice. We've talked about this before, but I think
having your own voice on something really makes a big difference. Don't go
to Fiverr and have somebody create a long-form piece of content, because it's
going to be cobbled together from existing content out there. And it
might be grammatically correct, but that doesn't mean that it's high-quality. For
something to be truly remarkable and high-quality, it has to have some sort of
unique spin on it. So if you can interject your own personal experience,
or your own voice into that somehow, I think that's going to go a lot farther.
Number two, you might try and make some sort of tutorial or how-to, if
you're trying to just get links. I don't know what your particular piece of
content is -- the 3,000 words on cleaning -- I'm not really sure. But it's
got to be something [memorable]. If it's a how-to, one of the people
in the forum, they said this: if it was a how-to for college kids, "Five ways to
keep your pimp pad or your party pad clean", then that might be a better hook
than just, "here's a guide to cleaning". Because if it's too
boring, then people won't want to link to it, or even read it. That brings me
into the next thing. There's got to be some kind of emotional hook to your
content. It's got to resonate with people on some gut feeling level. Just having
things be statistically correct is not enough. You've got to have something
in there that resonates with them on a personal level, or they're
not going to want to finish reading it, much less link to it. The fourth thing that I
would say is, if you can invest in some sort of illustrations, or if you
can break that content up with images, something to where it's not
just a wall of text, that's a good way to go. If you're still not
finding success, if people are still not linking to it, reach out to some of your
friends that are in the home and garden space. If you're coming from a cleaning agency
background, and now you are writing about home and garden, you must know some people
that have blogs, that can throw you a link here and there. They might not do it
on their own. If that fails, what I would do is
go into home and garden forums, and seed the linking. Have
it start there. Be careful, or you might get thrown out of some of these forums for being
spammy. But if there's a way to genuinely interject your content into those
conversations, and you have to be a little
patient about that, and find the right thread to come in on [that would be helpful]. Don't come in on a
thread that's five years old and try and link to it. But if you
genuinely hang around there, trying to help people, when you find an
opportunity to put your long-form article in there, as a helpful guide for
somebody who's actually needing help, then that might be a good way to start
seeding that linking chain. Sometimes you have to employ a little bit of guerilla
marketing, if you're catching my drift. So I hope that
answers your question. Just because you create great content, it
doesn't mean that it's going to get links automatically. If you're a marketer,
maybe. But if you're in some other vertical, and there's a lot of
competition, it's going to be unlikely that Google's just going to
rocket you to the top for no reason. So be creative and be helpful in
trying to approach people about getting links. Don't expect it to happen on its
own. Don't be too proud to ask for links from other people that have websites,
that are in that particular vertical. Hope that answers your question. Hope
that gives you some insight. My name is John Locke. My business is Lockedown
Design and SEO. We help manufacturing and industrial firms with SEO, so they get
more RFQs. If you have a SEO question that you would like to see us answer,
go ahead and drop it in the comments below, and we'll answer it out in a
future video for you. We're publishing every week so there's no reason for you
not to subscribe. Hit that subscribe button. That's it for now. Until next time,
peace.