Want to see a simple SEO strategy?
This is the "middleman" method.
It's a highly effective way for websites both big and small to maximize their Google rankings.
And today, I'm going to show you exactly how to execute this strategy to get more
organic traffic to your website.
Stay tuned.
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What's up SEOs?
Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic,
research your competitors, and dominate your niche.
Now, this is one of my favorite SEO strategies and it's because literally anyone and everyone can
use it to get results.
So before we dive in, let's get on the same page.
In its simplest form, search engine optimization comes down to content and links.
And when I say links, I'm talking about both internal and external.
Now, content brings context to your pages.
Links, on the other hand, act as "votes" to show search engines
that your pages are worth ranking.
Most websites have two main types of content.
First are informational pieces, which I'll generalize as blog posts, interactive tools,
and other useful non-commercial content.
The second type of content is probably what you want to rank the most.
And that's "money" pages.
Think of these as product pages for an ecommerce store, landing pages for a services or SaaS
based business, and sales pages for things like online courses.
Now, if you've ever tried building quality links to these revenue generating pages,
I'm sure you found it quite difficult.
Generally speaking, people don't care to link to things like product pages because it provides
very little value to them and their audience.
But they do link to informational content like guides and reviews.
And this happens because:
a.) the external link may support a point or statistic they're mentioning.
And b.) it directs their visitors to helpful content that they might not want to expand on.
A prime example of this theory is HubSpot.
If you look at their top 50 most linked to pages, you'll see that 88% of them are blog
posts and free courses.
As a result, these pages have racked up huge amounts of authority.
And that's where the "Middleman Method" comes in play.
On the far left, you have a bunch of websites who might be interested in linking to your content.
Let's call them "linkers."
On the far right, you have your money pages.
And we've already established, that the vast majority of these people won't be linking
to your "money" pages.
So you add a middleman, which is your blog.
And this is going to bridge the gap between the linkers and your revenue generating pages.
And as your middleman builds more authority, it can pass that onto your "money" pages using
internal links.
And the result?
More powerful money pages that should help you rank and hopefully bank.
Now, you might still have some questions like "which pages do I link from and which ones
do I link to?"
Or you might be thinking...Sam!
I don't have any authoritative pages.
No worries. Because I'm going to answer the rest of your questions right now.
So step 1 is to choose money pages you want to boost.
You know your business best, so you'll have to use your best judgement to choose pages.
But if you're stuck, you can use this Venn diagram to choose.
The circle on the left are pages with the most traffic potential.
On the right are pages with the highest business value.
You probably want to look for pages that fall somewhere in the middle of the Venn diagram,
where a small SEO boost has the potential to lead to significantly more traffic,
and more importantly, revenue.
A great place to look is in the Organic keywords report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer.
As you can see, I'm searching pages across Ahrefs' entire domain
where keywords are ranking in positions 5-10.
And since we're looking for money pages to link to, I'm excluding blog posts.
Right away, you can see that both 'keyword generator' and 'keyword rank checker'
are in positions 9 and have commercial value to our site.
Another way to do this is to look in Google Analytics.
If you've setup ecommerce or goal tracking, you can look through your reports for pages
that have a good balance between traffic, conversion, and revenue.
Alright, step 2 is to find relevant 'middleman' pages to link from.
Now remember, the middleman is your blog.
So we want to find pages that are both authoritative and relevant.
There are two ways to do this.
The first is to do a Google search.
So I'll search for site:ahrefs.com/blog to narrow pages down to just our blog posts,
then I'll type in the keyword I want to rank for.
So let's click on this page and then do a find for "keyword generator."
And you'll see a perfect place to link to our keyword generator page.
So we got relevance down, but at this point there are only three pages that mention "keyword
generator" as a phrase match.
So let's change the query to search for the topic "keyword research," since it's related
to the page we want to rank.
And now we have a huge pool of blog posts to choose from.
To get all of the SEO metrics for these pages, just enable Ahrefs SEO toolbar,
and then hit the Export button here to download a CSV file of Google's SERPs.
Now, it's important to note that the toolbar will only download visible results on the page.
So you can go to Settings, Search settings, and set the Results per page to the top 100 pages.
Now you'll have a nice CSV you can filter through with all of the SEO metrics.
In order to determine "authority," I recommend sorting the pages by URL Rating, which represents
the overall strength of a page's backlink profile.
In general, the higher the UR, the stronger the page.
In fact, we've found a clear positive correlation between a page's UR and its organic search traffic.
The second way to do this is to use the "Best by Links report."
Just enter in the domain or blog subfolder you want to analyze.
Then go to the Best by links report.
This report ranks pages of your target based on the URL Rating.
If you prefer, you can sort your pages by the number of referring domains
pointing at your pages.
You can then use the Include search box to search for relevant pages where you can add
internal links to your "money" pages.
Ok, so everything that I've shown you to this point works well if you have authoritative pages.
But not all websites have these so-called "High-PR" pages.
So if you fall into the latter, then you're going to have to build them.
To do this, I highly recommend using the Skyscraper technique.
If you haven't heard of this link building strategy, then here's what it looks like.
You find an outdated piece of content that has links and is relevant to the page you
want to boost.
You create something that's better.
Then you reach out to all of the people linking to the inferior page,
and ask them to link to you.
So the first step is to find a relevant and outdated page that has links.
You can do this in Content Explorer, which has over a billion pages of pre-vetted content.
Just search for a topic related to your "money" page.
So if I were in the body building space, I might search for "protein powder."
Next, I'll set a requirement for the pages to have at least 100 unique websites linking to them
or some other high number.
And this one seems promising with over 240 referring domains
and the page is less than 200 words.
Now, while word count isn't indicative of a good quality page,
200 words just seems crazy low to me and is worth checking out.
The next thing you need to do is create a piece that's better.
Now, better doesn't mean that you should go and double the word count at a whopping 400 words
or a post with 51 recipes over their 50.
What you want to do at this stage is analyze the page and find points of weakness.
Can you create a more actionable guide?
Can you make it more user friendly?
Are there key points that are missing?
Whatever "better" is to you and your industry... do it.
So looking at the page, you'll see that the images are basically stock photos that
look like they've been spliced together.
Also, there are no recipes on the page as the title implies.
Instead, they have the name of the shake, a one-sentence description, and a link to
a recipe that you have to click to get.
So I think I could create a better user experience by adding printable recipe cards, talking
about the benefits of each shake and what type of athlete should use them.
Take an almond peanut butter shake as an example.
I could mention things about how this shake is packed with heart-healthy monounsaturated fats,
which is great for whatever type of person it would suit.
The point is that you want to find legitimate things that you would do differently that
adds more value to readers and linkers.
Finally, you need to reach out to the people linking to this page.
Just click on the caret beside the URL and go to the Backlinks report, which shows you
all pages that are linking to the target page.
From here, you can set some filters to narrow down your list of link prospects as well as
study the anchor and surrounding text column, which can give you context into how and why
the page got a link in the first place.
We have a full video on finding these types of pages for link building, so I'll link that
up in the description.
After you've built enough links and your page has gained some authority, you can use them
as a middleman to pass authority to your money pages.
But hey. Building an army of middlemen isn't just about boosting "money" pages.
It's likely that some of the content you create will start ranking too.
And if you've chosen a topic that's related to your business, you'll get targeted traffic
and most likely, more customers.
Now, if you enjoyed this video, then make sure to like, share and subscribe, and I'd love
to know what you think about the "middleman method." So leave a comment below.
So keep grinding away and I'll see you in the next SEO tutorial.