High Quality Content and Link Building Strategies That Will Generate More Traffic to Your Site

Yeah. Thanks for having me around. It’s good to be here. I’m Jeremy Moser, co-founder and CEO of uSERP. We run 45- 50% agency at this point and as you mentioned we are focusing holistically on SEO strategy including digital PR, serving venture-backed software and e-commerce companies. I’m originally from San Francisco, but it’s kind of like doing a few digital nomad things and bouncing around a few different places at the moment and just doing a lot of cool work in the content marketing and sales spaces.

Yeah, it’s a really good question. So, in the SEO space at least, I think one mentor that probably everyone can kind of relate to is Brian Dean from Backlinko, at a few different levels. And I number one, being obviously just bootstrapping, scaling, and business like that, that was really kind of content driven. It’s always interesting to at least myself, the folks in the different SEO spaces where you can essentially just focus for years and years and years, publishing really good content on specific needs and finding a really successful outcome. So, he’s really inspirational on that front. I know some folks may disagree with some of the content that he has with the sale that he has, sort of like the open title in that sense where either people love him or people hate him, depending on who you’re asking or shopping with. I think both are sort of inspirational in their own elements for different reasons. So, those would be some good ones like his off of my head from just the SEO level there. And then I think from a business standpoint to anyone that’s run a really successful agency that has scaled one really heavily. So I think folks, the outlines of Ted Grigg from Direct Consulting Agency are really interesting. Jonathan Day is also very interested in folks that are scaling large agencies and entities. There is a completely different business model than SAAS and content as a whole and so we’ve seen folks that have been really successful or not that have really good practical actionable advice are definitely folks that I look up to in the space.

Yeah, absolutely. I always really like to start with the technical foundation, and the technical foundation is really just key. Like if you don’t have good usability, site structure, or site speed, you have a bunch of broken pages or something like that. Just the continental links that you’re producing and earning are just not going to have the same impact. If you’re driving folks to slow pages that they’re going to bounce, they’re going to turn pretty quickly. If you’re building links and again, you’re changing a page structure, you’re going to have a bunch of dead wings, and you’re not redirecting properly. There’s always sort of like my new details that add up over time from a technical standpoint that you really want to address. So, where we always like to start is really just getting a baseline of like plug your site into something like page speed or GTmetrix. Those are free tools. You can get a quick idea of site speed, broken pages, and all these sorts of things, just to give you a little baseline there. Then you can also use tools like Screaming Frog is a good one. SemRush has actually improved a lot of their technical analysis lately, so I’m becoming a big fan of that for doing the site-wide technical audits, fixing any errors, etc. So, doing this monthly or even more frequently, is really depending on how big your site is. You’re like a brand-new start-up and you’re just kind of getting off the ground. You might not have much content or might not even have that many pages on sites. I think technical becomes less of an issue. This is obviously the baseline stuff that you want to make sure you’re doing, making sure pages are indexed like maps. All these kinds of things are really key. But beyond that, if you’re a smaller site, it is probably not all that much from a technical standpoint that you can really leverage or pull upon. But obviously, you make sure you’ve got a good foundation there. If you are a larger site, make sure you’re doing this pretty often because you’re probably going to have a lot of new pages monthly. Things are going to shift around and maybe you’re doing a migration like there are all these sorts of things that come up when you become a larger site. So, doing stuff on a more regular basis from a technical standpoint is definitely something I’d recommend.

Yes, absolutely. I think for smaller services especially, one of the biggest mistakes I see is publishing content without an actual strategy in place. So, most people would just have this idea that’s kind of been spread in SEO spaces that you just publish mass amounts of content, immediately get a ton of stuff on your site, get a million articles up on any sort of closely related topic to your business as a whole. But what we find there is that you’re really just creating more work for yourself down the line and now you have hundreds and hundreds of articles that are probably not interlinked at all about being interconnected. There’s no real page structure built out there for different sectors of content. There are no clusters built out. You just have like the whole blog list of random topics that are not really interrelated. So, that means that you’re going to have to refresh all those pieces. Probably 50 to 60% are not even going to rank well for anything realistically. So, you have what’s referred to as rotting or dead content in a sense, where none of that’s really helping you in the long term. So, I think if you’re a startup, especially a smaller one, or maybe you’re kind of in that mid-tier and you’re trying to get off the ground and try and put some fuel on the fire. I think pulling together a bigger strategy here in place is really key. Just like what sort of audience are recruiting content for? What sort of consumer profiles do you have? And maybe that’s multiple. Then how do you formulate a strategy that really connects those topics into your product or into some sort of service, whatever it is that you’re selling, where you want your content to at least have some sort of product and service standpoint to at some point in the funnel, you’re reaching customers, whether it’s top of the funnel information or whether it’s bottom of the funnel on the ready to buy. You want something that shows up in the right places so that when they do go to buy, you’re top of mind, they’ve already gotten familiar with your brand. So, I think really taking the time to formulate a strategy before you just go all out on content creation is really key to make sure that you’re not creating a massive backlog of dead content or work they have to do later down the line. You’re really just nailing it from the start and you’re really giving yourself a good foundation.

Yeah, absolutely. So, we tend to look at a few different things across the board. We like to look at sort of domain-level metrics as a whole, as a good leading indicator. So, anything around like a DR authority score or whatever it is, they’re all pretty much the same and have their little differences in there but they have the same goal. They’re just giving you at least some sort of baseline score of how authoritative, how good this domain is. Again, that’s one to take this as a leading indicator of not something to look at as like just the hard, fast-only metric to look at there. If you’re just looking at DR or a silo, it tends to not be super accurate. So, look at it as a leading indicator there. If it’s higher and it gives you a good baseline there, generally speaking, it’s a pretty good site but there are exceptions, obviously. So, if you want to look at things around like what kind of traffic they’re getting, where is that traffic coming from? Are they getting organic indirect traffic or are they getting branded search traffic? Like you’re looking at a few different traffic metrics there to see not only are they performing well from a keyword standpoint but are they actually driving branded search like, is this a real company, a real brand that’s getting mentioned? So, if it’s like HubSpot, for example, you just look at their traffic profile. A ton of people are just going to search in Google, and HubSpot, every single month. So, it’s a good indication that this is a strong, powerful brand that people know or resonate with. They’re searching it actively to get another good core metric to understand if it’s a real company. Then we also like to look at a few things beyond those core metrics, like obviously relevancy. If the relevancy of the site is good in terms of niche-wide relevancy, that’s great. If the topic is relevant to you in some sort of way. Awesome, even better. Then we’d like to see the links contextual there. So, no any sort of open submission sites or directories, or business listings. Those are good from a citation standpoint like building a foundation. Just like normalized links that you might get in, but they’re not necessarily the links that we’re talking about from an authority or equity standpoint, let’s get direct links back to specific pages on our site that we want to rank higher. Those are the ones you want to be contextually mentioned within an article. If you’re an HR who wants to be mentioned in a piece about the best HR tools or strategies, whatever it is, there are a bunch of different variations there that you can play with it. Those would be sort of the core functions we look at from a good quality standpoint. And then obviously like the visual test. Clicking on the sites, is it like a content form? Does it have just a bunch of random pieces that are not interrelated? Usually, a good sign that it’s just like a random site that’s meant to just publish guest posts versus an actual brand and so what we’re looking for there long term is really good large companies to link back to you from there on resource sections that the site is really kind of what we consider like a top tier backlink.

Yeah, absolutely. I think the best way to go about it is really just thinking of it from a value exchange standpoint. Obviously don’t want to be gaming the system like using PBMs or spending up your own PBMs to where your goal there is not really adding value to anyone besides yourself or like we’re just going to create this PBM and then link to yourself a million times and propagate rankings there. Stuff doesn’t work super well anyways. At the moment, just based on the last many years of updates, that stuff is just kind of a waste of time at this point, especially if you’re playing a longer-term game. I think when you’re going from an ethical standpoint, really your goal here is how do I add value to the readers of a given piece? So, that means creating more unique content on your own and building a longer-term relationship with other publishers where you can add value back. Like, maybe there’s sourcing for a quote in that article. Giving them some sort of value where you’re publishing and promoting that, you’re sharing that on socials or a newsletter. You are giving some sort of value in exchange there to where it makes some sense for them to link to you, maybe give you a quote, or anything like that. So, I think when you take it from an angle of like, how do add value to that given site or their given readers, you tend to get some more ethical practices there, where you can build links that scale from just better companies. Overall, I think it’s really a win-win for both sides.

Yeah, absolutely. I tend to like to do whatever is most natural in that sense. If you think back to like the idea of link building and what it should be, you really don’t have and shouldn’t have any control over what that anchor text is. So, if you’re working on links and you’re doing something where maybe you’re suggesting someone add a link somewhere doing anything like that, not trying to anchor text stuff of like, like you mentioned, if your keyword is whatever best credit cards, you should be trying to get a million links per month that all say best credit cards. Usually, just a pattern that’s getting created and it’s probably not natural that every single piece is linked back to you with the same exact anchor text. So again, you’re creating unnecessary patterns there. It’s not supernatural. No writer is just kind of stuffing random anchor text keywords in there. If you want to think about it really from the writing standpoint or like when you’re reading an article or you’re pitching to an existing piece that’s already out there, just read through the article and see what is the context of the topic that they’re discussing? How does your article fit within that? Maybe it’s more of a branded mention there in that case, or maybe it’s more and some need a little longer than the exact keyword string. I think as long as the URL or the anchor texts within the URL there describes what someone would be clicking back to is really the key part there. And generally, it’s going to be related somewhat to the core keyword that you’re targeting. But again, it’s not always going to be an exact match and if you are just creating a bunch of exact matches on that scale, you tend to run into issues there of creating patterns. So, I think just seeing what are the variations of the keywords for this page that I’m ranking for currently, there are probably dozens, if not hundreds, depending on the topic that you’re ranking for. So, you can pick and choose from there and see what’s most natural, what makes the most sense within the context of that page or topic or segments, and then kind of go from there.

Yeah, absolutely. It’ll depend a little bit on sort of the size of the site that we’re working with. So, if it’s like a larger brand, you obviously have a competitive advantage there in the sense that folks are probably naturally mentioning your brand in a bunch of different pieces, articles, whatever, even if they’re not linking back to you, that’s still really a big opportunity for you to claim those unclaimed mentions. So, you know, it’s the rich get richer unfortunately in SEO too, where if you’re a big brand, things are a lot easier for you. The catch-22 is that you need all those links, that effort, etc. to get to be a big brand in the first place. So, it’s a little bit of a difficult situation. But if you’re a larger brand for sure, there are a lot of untapped opportunities out there where campaigns are a little easier and a little more direct like, as you mentioned to me in the article here, you guys didn’t link to the specific page that you were referencing. Can you guys add a link here? You’ll be happy to share this around, etc. Campaigns like that tend to be really easy. You tend to see really high conversion rates depending on the given brand or space, whereas if you’re a smaller brand, you tend to have an uphill battle in sending out emails. Nobody’s ever heard of you. They don’t want to link back to you. They think you’re a very small site that you have no value to provide to them. So, you tend to think a little outside of the box in the early stages and that’s where I like to focus on creating some sort of unique, valuable content, whether it’s a study or a statistics page or a resource or a template library, something that is giving value essentially to the state that you’re reaching out to so that you’re not just reaching out cold and saying, Hey, I just ran an article that you’ve never heard of and it’s not super valuable. Please link to me. It’s just generally going to get you a super low conversion rate.

Yeah, absolutely. That’s an interesting subject. So, automated link building or like if we’re talking to you about just naturally occurring links. It again falls into that catch-22 of like, getting natural links just by happenstance. You have to be a large brand and you have to rank for big keywords there that are usually really competitive. But the catch-22 is that you have to get a lot of link strings for those pages that are super competitive in high-volume traffic, etc. So, you’re sort of in that rocket and a hard place where you need a lot of links to rank, but you may not have them, so you don’t pick up any natural links because of it. So, automated link building when you’re kind of a smaller brand is much more difficult and we’ve seen a couple of studies. I can’t remember who conducted this. I think it maybe was either Brian Dean or someone who signed on. But they found that essentially, I want to say 95 to 97% or something of articles online has zero backlinks. So, the idea that if you just publish constantly, you expect people to share it, it’s just not going to happen naturally. You really need to put some fuel on the fire there and even big brands like Nerdwallet still do manual link-building. So, you know, a simple analysis of their own backlink profile shows you things like quote-based links, syndications, and all these other things that are signs of manually building that or running campaigns or putting an effort there. So even, you know, the biggest finance brand in the world ranks for pretty much everything under the sun and is still doing manual link building there gives you an idea of the importance as well as just the need to run campaigns after a little more detail there. I think you can do some automated stuff, but generally speaking, the more time, the more effort you put into the campaigns directly around links, the better ones you’re going to get and the higher conversion rate you’re going to see.

Yeah, absolutely. That’s definitely one of the trickiest parts to be in when, as I mentioned, the rich get richer, in that sense when you have a bigger competitor, they just get more links naturally. More people want to collaborate with them. You’re facing an uphill battle there and I think the biggest key is not necessarily even one or the other. It’s sort of a mix of both and so you really do need some mix between quality and quantity. Like if you’re getting two great links per month, it might not be enough to really move the needle. If we’re talking about let’s say you’re a small competitor in the design space, you’re trying to go up against Canva. Getting two links per month is just not going to move the needle. They’re getting 50, 100, and 1000 plus links per month from pretty good quality sources. So, you’re really facing a dilemma there and I think the biggest key is really honing in on a small topical authority. So, finding a specific sector within your niche where you can become the topic expert, you can get really niche down in that one space, and then you can expand and go broader. Once you have a bit of authority coming in there that allows you to get rankings relatively quickly in competitors too if you’re going for really broad terms as a whole, you can sort of pick up a few natural links per month, and then you actually have some sort of content and leverage and promotional leverage there to where you can kind of work relationships, you can get more links placed then I think a really the key part there is focusing a little more on how do I create unique data sets or template libraries on these sort of things so that you can see success in outreach. So, as I mentioned, if you’re a low DR, most sites just don’t want to collaborate with you. You’re just not going to have any leverage there from that standpoint. So, I think try to create some really unique stuff. It’s what we did for our own company. We created a few different pages around unique studies, data sets, and hundreds and hundreds of IDR links coming back to us from those single pages alone and that was without any sort of leverage. We didn’t have a high DR at that point, but now we do because of it. So, there are a few different kinds of tactics you can get around that. But I think really focusing from the quality content standpoint and then tying that back to your outreach instead of just publishing another generic piece and expecting people to want to link back to it.

It’s a really good question. I’m a big fan of both. It really just depends on the sort of strategies that play there and the given site. So, we like to do a little bit of a mix depending on who we’re working with or usually see things like niche edits that can be really good for specific use cases like if your space already has a good number of topics created around it. So, taking that example earlier, like let’s say you’re HR tool or something, we’ve got like an HR software platform. If you just search a bunch of variations around like HR Tools, HR Management, tools for employers and employees, all these sorts of things. There are like a million variations of that, where folks are writing listicles or articles just in general, where they’re talking about different tools, etc. So, your opportunities there from a niche edit or link insertion standpoint, are just massive. You’re looking at other approvals that have existing traffic, they have existing links. Those ones are really valuable for quick wins like even if your site is new and you don’t have much traffic if you’re able to get listed on a tool or a piece that says here are the ten best HR Tools and you’re getting let’s say, number three on there or whatever it is. That’s a big opportunity for you to drive referral traffic, and get some quick wins, conversions, and some authority. So, I think niche edits from those standpoints can be really huge wins, and then guest posts are good for the long term too. Like if you’re getting mentioned in an article that some writer is writing on a given site, that’s usually going to be fresh content. It’s going to be hopefully related to obviously the link that you’re trying to get and the topic in general seems tougher for new readers there. It also has the chance to rank long-term on a given site. So we’d like to do a blend and I think both can really, really drive some big impacts.

Yeah, that’s a good question. So, we are seeing a lot of what we saw at the start, at least with AI-generated content, was that Google was pretty against it first and foremost. They were kind of saying, don’t commit to any AI-generated content and you’re going to get penalized. They recently obviously changed their stance. They’re kind of obviously developing their own competitor there. This is a broader trend and I don’t really recommend listening to Google whatsoever on any advice they give about SEO. They’ve made it pretty clear that they don’t really like SEOs as a whole who try to set up stuff for the algorithm on purpose. So, definitely, I wouldn’t take any advice directly from them. I take a lot of what they’re saying, with a grain of salt. But in terms of AI as a whole, we’re already seeing sites like Bankrate’s, CNET’s, and a bunch of other massive ones ranking AI-produced articles already. So, if you do a search operator string for the site, bankrate.com, and an article produced by AI. I forget what the exact string is that they use, but you can see that they’ve got hundreds of articles already that are ranking and published, that were generated by AI and then reviewed by subject matter experts. So, it gives you an idea that this is probably going to be a pretty popular thing in the future. Those articles already rank for competitive terms. I can remember who did this, but someone plugged it into interrupts and looked at the total traffic value that it gets. It was somewhere around 180,000 plus per year worth of traffic value that they’re getting from those articles, which are all AI-generated. So, it’s for sure going to be something that we’ll see increasing on uSERP unless Google changes its stance on it at some point or whatever becomes of it. I think we’re going to see more of it. We’ll have to adapt a little bit but the good news is that most of the AI driven content will be based around more top-level stuff like informational, very broad categories and keywords on the whole. If you’re in a space that’s more B2B, your product is more complex. The odds are that AI is going to replace someone with hands-on experience that’s never written about this before, etc. it’s just not going to happen. AI is pulling from existing stuff out there. So, if you learn new things in your industry, new ideas, new experiments, all this stuff that’s never been sort of documented and written before, AI just doesn’t have anything to pull from there. So, there are different kinds of scenarios where it’s good to have some AI content at some level where super basic keywords can be added really quickly. The more technical stuff is where people are actually making fine decisions. It’s hard for me to believe that someone will immediately take just a baseline like a sort of chatbot style of thing at face value like, you know, what shares should I buy and just immediately buying whatever the AI recommends versus doing a little more in-depth research.

For link-building campaigns in keyword research. What we’re really looking at here is a blend between specificity and volume. And so when you go too broad and you go to a high volume and you really are only focused, you lose a lot of the unique leverage that you have as a given brand. You want to be obvious within a certain niche, right? And so, if you’re going super provocative, like just SEO as a whole, for our example, we wanted to get a lot of links from SEO publishers in a given space. We just create a piece around like, here’s an SEO best practice guide. It’s like that and that’s been done thousands of times over and over. What we want to look at there is a blend between something that still has been up search volume to be relevant and that people are interested in, but has the specificity to where someone probably has not created a study around it or some sort of a unique piece of content so that you have the upper hand when you’re doing outreach and you’re actually being truthful when you say in your email, Hey, this is a unique piece of content, your readers will find it helpful, etc. You’re not just going to be sending a basic SEO guide that they’ve read a thousand times. So, finding that blend and mix between those two is really key. If you just use really any keyword tool there, plug in sort of your base level topics there and do like the matching terms section there, filter that by like the volume, pure difficulty, don’t be afraid to target lower volume keywords to something that 10-20 searches per month are probably much higher than that. There’s been a couple of studies around keyword volume within SEO tools which are just not super accurate. We’ve seen the same for ourselves in our clients where a given keyword search might say 10 to 15 searches per month. In actuality, get them ranking first, then generating 500 to 1000 plus for that one page. So there’s a lot of opportunity that’s uncovered there that people just won’t write articles around because the search volume is super low. So, from a keyword research standpoint, that’s where I’d recommend starting. You can uncover a lot of ideas and then also just think about sorts of developments in your space, right? A lot of those keywords aren’t going to show up in keyword tools because they’re brand new, they’re new topics, and subject areas that people are covering and are more interested in. Something like eight and a half billion searches up and down Google in 20%, I think they said are new on a daily basis or give you an idea like how many queries are happening at any given time. So, I always try to think to have new stuff in your space, what’s the innovation, what’s the current trend, and try to get ahead of those because if you can solidify rankings for some of those keywords pretty early on your chances of winning down the road in that space are really huge.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. I think really just finding the niche that you follow is really a key from just looking from SEO and link-building standpoint. How do you add a sort of unique value to your content, how do you add any value to the industry as a whole is really key? Even being able to see smaller brands structuring for more competitive stuff because they have some sort of unique value to add there from a topical standpoint of maybe they have new subject matter experts that are testing things and maybe other folks that space hasn’t done that before. So, just think about what sort of content you can create that adds unique value and then tie them to a proper and stellar distribution plan by just thinking about how these pieces work together. Like the build it and they all come to an era of creating content, just expecting people to promote it is not here anymore. There are just too many competitors, too many people out there that are doing the same thing, and have similar content. So, building that in your strategy, we didn’t take the time to reverse engineer and say, here’s our audience, here’s what they’re searching for. Let’s create dense networks of content around this, and then let’s be very active in how we promote and distribute that. The tendency is far better resulting than kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall with their content and hoping that it sticks. So, that’s what I’d recommend for sure for the long term. You’re also creating less work in the end. If you have less content on your site that’s more specific, you can really hone in on that niche, refine it over time, make it even better, and you’ll tend to rank their long term.

Yeah, absolutely.

Last vacation. Well, my wife and I moved to Hawaii for six months or so. So, I count it as not necessarily a vacation in the sense that I still obviously was working all the time, but it’s hard to complain when you’re there. So, I’ll count that as a vacation.

Yeah. My first salary, I want to say probably like 35 or 40k a year. And doing something like the content marketing space is like my first official salary. But making videos did stuff like hourly before that.

With the salary in terms of investing or anything like that.

Yeah. So, I’m a pretty big saver. I’m pretty frugal. So, a lot of what I do is just like, it’s super boring, right? Like, I try not to spend a lot of money, I just try to plug it away in index funds and take the safer route.

Yeah, I’d say basketball for sure. Played it growing up and like watching that as well.

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.