The niche that my startup operated in was eventually shut down, but we had a very similar situation. I emailed other sites and asked them to include a link (many replied back asking for compensation, which, according to Google policies, should've been nofollowed, i.e., made not to count for SEO), bought ads on private niche-specific sites/podcasts, and on Facebook, Twitter, and Google. I also paid someone to write "high-quality content", which Google claims is the #1 way to rank, for months.
In the big picture, these strategies are very expensive and not effective at all.
We had about a one year head start and were the only place that provided the service we offered. Eventually, a (bad) competitor showed up. They engaged heavily in spammy SEO tactics and social media astroturfing and surpassed us within a couple of months, even though their product worked only 10-15% of the time.
We refused to engage in those spammy tactics. Partially out of principle and partially out of just not having interest in that muck, as it's not remotely attractive to people who are used to being honest and doing meaningful non-spam work. But that decision absolutely did cost us.
My advice is to think carefully about what may actually be over the line and what you've been socialized to believe is "uncool" or "distasteful". Then do those "uncool" things without making much noise about it (potentially even making some noise against it). Like everything else, there is the written rulebook and then there is the way things are actually done.
Business is competitive and if you're not taking every advantage you can, someone else is going to come in and eat your lunch. You have to be aggressive. That's hard to internalize (for me, it's taken multiple significant business failures), but it's crucially important to be successful. It's a dog-eat-dog world out there.
As for Google and SEO in general, every successful firm is at least "grey hat"; they're absolutely leveraging their portfolio as a "private blog network" (that is, a large, high-quality link ring) and otherwise regularly doing things that are borderline or off-book. If you grill them long enough, you can get close to having them admit this.
Google has been totally and completely gamed for years. You have to know that going in. If you're dependent on SEO, you're going to have to play the SEO games with all of their uncomely accouterments, or your business will lose out to someone else.
It's really that simple, and no one wants to admit it. All these people say these tactics only work for "a little while", but they're mostly wrong; unless you're being blatant, it seems to be quite easy to hide from Google's spam team.
The real thing here is that Google is ripe for disruption. Virtually every query you input is going to be based on someone's application of SEO strategies meant to trick Google instead of based on the ultimate relevance/quality of the content.
I didn't buy links because they weren't SEO-legal, and because, to be honest, most people wanted an affiliate-style program to share the link. I tried to work that out with someone and they went dark and tried to launch a clone of our service (which failed after about a month) instead.
After that, I didn't spend much more time manually requesting links back. Whenever I did, I was always met with either no response at all or requests for money. Note that I was not really "link building" in the conventional SEO sense of emailing 1000 webmasters each week and getting 5 of them to add me back. I was just propositioning sites that I thought would have interested readers, under the naive assumption that they mostly wanted to be a useful resource to their readers.
I could've bought links in one of the various ways that's done: an SEO firm, a blackhat forum, etc., but I was naive and wanted to believe that word of mouth + social media + high-quality offerings and content would take us the rest of the way without making us a dirty "link buyer" who would surely get caught and destroyed by Google.
The competitor showed up and quickly demonstrated that none of that mattered (they actually didn't have any content at all, and ranked with about 4 pages total on their site). With a professional spam operation, you can rocket to the top pretty easily.
Even though SEO does not work well, my advice is don't buy links from link brokers...they won't work, and such services are almost always a scam. The websites selling the links have inflated/useless metrics... Hiring an SEO agency also not worth it, unless you have millions of dollars. Any mid tier SEO service is almost is guaranteed to be a scam. They will bill you $2,000/month for links they buy for $200 that you can buy yourself.
Buying links off forums worked well in 2005-2007 before Google cracked down and removed the pagerank metrics.
Zillow can spend millions buying links to rank for all the real estate and mortgage keywords, because they have a blank check. Few have that privilege.
In 2005-2007 SEO was much easier..now all those techniques no longer work well.
The problem is google changed their algos to discount links from many sites (such as Reddit and elsewhere); second, they have put much more emphasis on domain-niche authority. That means, if you write a viral article about daytrading and it gets shared and voted thousands of time on a social media sites, it may temporarily get a good SEO boost for those competitive keywords, but then slide back to page 8 or so. A the old, established daytrading sites established news websites will outrank, due to authority.
What's the guide to 2017 SEO? As far as I can tell, it involves a) begging for links; b) buying links; c) gradually building your own private link ring of "content sites" so that you don't have to do a and b so much.
Outside of SEO, now popular is also fake social media profiles. What's the guidebook there to "Social Media Optimization" (I'm sure there's a real acronym for that by now), and how are Facebook/Twitter policing their datasets to prevent spam and fraud? afaict they're not, beyond basic anti-scraping methods like blocking anonymous proxies, etc.
Not trying to be aggressive, just really don't think that there is any reasonable way to do organic internet marketing anymore. It all boils down to either spam or advertisements. Spam (used broadly here to include astroturfing, PBNs, etc.) is the more effective solution by far, which means if you don't do it, you'll lose to the competitor who will.
I've come across SEO guys who insist they have the secrets to modern SEO, but on further inspection, they're just referring to using all of their clients' sites to link back to each other and insisting that they're the only ones who know how to do this.
It is true that an SEO firm's rate may be worthwhile if it buys you access to a well-governed link ring, but personally I'm skeptical of the abilities of anyone who has chosen to be involved in that type of career path. It's usually sales types who think they're good at computers, i.e., people who don't really have any idea what they're doing beyond convincing someone to pay them money.
>I've come across SEO guys who insist they have the secrets to modern SEO
If you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him.
My experience is that there's 3 things that work:
1. Write a lot. No matter how much research you do, you can't predict what will rank. You can increase the odds, but there are no guarantees. In the context of a software company (one of my previous jobs) do customer support and post in-depth answers to support questions. Write about users' success stories. Write about product features that might be hard to understand. Write about industry issues. Eventually you'll start to get some results. It's not an overnight thing.
2. Keep writing. If you think you're writing enough, you probably aren't.
3. Build relationships in you domain. Contact other companies serving the same audience who aren't your competitors. Post on message boards and Facebook groups without ever selling anything. Give away the most valuable thing you have: expert knowledge. People will read what you write and share/link to it.
I know it's much easier to just write the whole thing off as scams and hucksters, but good writing is what it's all about today.
I'll add a big caveat that there are MANY industries I don't know the landscape of. In the past, I've written in-house for largeish ecom and saas companies. Currently I work for an agency on a variety of clients, mostly smaller local businesses.
So if you throw enough at the shit at the wall, eventually something will stick, in the sense that someone will link to it. That hardly seems like a viable or repeatable "strategy" for increasing search rank.
My personal experience with this, after paying for months of professional content writing, is that you get a few people posting links on their zero-PageRank Wordpress blogs and you get a few people attempting to share links or spread the word, but over-aggressive forum admins have filters that automatically remove all off-domain hyperlinks, and, in some cases, openly-hostile admins will remove any link to or mention of anything that isn't their own site. One of the largest forums in our niche had this policy; if you didn't pay them $5k for an ad package, any mention of your site whatsoever would be removed. You also get competitors, often large ones, blatantly ripping/reskinning your content without giving any credit, and then everyone shares the link from the better-known source instead.
Google claims that good content is key, but what they mean is that "good content will get links, so links mean content is good, so we just count links".
The premise that links correlate with quality is no longer valid in 2017. People no longer puts links on the internet to content they like, at least not in the format that Google expects and/or is able to access. The simple fact is that Google is made for the web past, and that it doesn't work on the web as it stands.
Our competitor had only 2-3 publicly visible pages that informed on the mechanics of their service and provided 0 related content. We had a blog that featured new posts with updates that were relevant to the niche almost-daily, including fully original high-quality photo essays with abundant explanatory text. Despite this, with a little bit of spam voodoo, they blew us away on SEO in every non-long-tail keyword.
In the big picture, these strategies are very expensive and not effective at all.
We had about a one year head start and were the only place that provided the service we offered. Eventually, a (bad) competitor showed up. They engaged heavily in spammy SEO tactics and social media astroturfing and surpassed us within a couple of months, even though their product worked only 10-15% of the time.
We refused to engage in those spammy tactics. Partially out of principle and partially out of just not having interest in that muck, as it's not remotely attractive to people who are used to being honest and doing meaningful non-spam work. But that decision absolutely did cost us.
My advice is to think carefully about what may actually be over the line and what you've been socialized to believe is "uncool" or "distasteful". Then do those "uncool" things without making much noise about it (potentially even making some noise against it). Like everything else, there is the written rulebook and then there is the way things are actually done.
Business is competitive and if you're not taking every advantage you can, someone else is going to come in and eat your lunch. You have to be aggressive. That's hard to internalize (for me, it's taken multiple significant business failures), but it's crucially important to be successful. It's a dog-eat-dog world out there.
As for Google and SEO in general, every successful firm is at least "grey hat"; they're absolutely leveraging their portfolio as a "private blog network" (that is, a large, high-quality link ring) and otherwise regularly doing things that are borderline or off-book. If you grill them long enough, you can get close to having them admit this.
Google has been totally and completely gamed for years. You have to know that going in. If you're dependent on SEO, you're going to have to play the SEO games with all of their uncomely accouterments, or your business will lose out to someone else.
It's really that simple, and no one wants to admit it. All these people say these tactics only work for "a little while", but they're mostly wrong; unless you're being blatant, it seems to be quite easy to hide from Google's spam team.
The real thing here is that Google is ripe for disruption. Virtually every query you input is going to be based on someone's application of SEO strategies meant to trick Google instead of based on the ultimate relevance/quality of the content.