It’s incredibly frustrating.
You spend countless hours and a ton of money to build a beautiful website. And then you watch, day after day, as the site receives very few visits and makes very little profit.
You have heard that compelling content and an easy-to-use website will earn you top search engine rankings. You have both. And they haven’t.
You’ve also heard lots of stories about people who have hired self-proclaimed “SEO experts” to rank their websites. They ended up spending a fortune for no results.
It all seems like a catch-22.
So, how do buy SEO services without getting burned? Here’s how we work at Randombyte.
Let’s get this straight from the very beginning: search engine optimization isn’t easy, and very few providers can do it effectively. It’s even more difficult in today’s online environment.
There are thousands of websites competing with you for the same visitors. And even worse, online search is controlled by a virtual monopoly. Google sets the rules and changes them constantly.
I’d like to say that search engine optimization is simple, but it really isn’t. It is quite hard to get from zero to hero in the SEO world.
SEO isn’t one-size-fits-all.
Sadly, most so-called SEO “experts” have a standard ranking procedure they follow for every client. If it works, great! If it doesn’t, they move on to the next client.
Content is king, but only when it’s utilized properly.
Yes, compelling content is king. But by itself, it doesn’t mean much. You need to make sure that your content is seen by the right website owners and social media influencers in your industry.
It’s the only efficient way of having your content shared widely across the Internet, and the resulting backlinks that point to your website are much more valuable than any links a self-styled SEO expert could build or buy for you.
What works in SEO is constantly changing. Research and testing, and then more research and more testing, are crucial.
Why go through all this trouble? Because SEO is a fierce competition.
It has a complex set of rules that are established by Google, and a ruthless referee – the very same Google. However, if you play by the rules, you are rewarded with top keywords rankings.
This means that when people search Google using keywords that are relevant for your business, your website has the chance of being displayed at the top of the search results.
Websites that are displayed on the first Google page receive a much larger number of visitors in comparison with the sites that don’t qualify for first page rankings.
The website which gets the #1 spot receives about 36% from the total number of visitors who are searching for a particular keyword. The site on the second place gets about 18% from the total number of visits, and so on.
As an example, if 1,000 people search Google for “seo companies” each month, the website that has got the #1 spot will be visited by about 360 people, the one on the #2 spot will receive about 180 visits, etc.
The last website on the first Google search results page will only be chosen by about 3% from the total number of people. This means that if your website is listed on the 2nd or 3rd page of Google, it’s as if it wouldn’t exist, because most people will never see it!
So, how does SEO work?
The formula used by Google to rank sites is secret. It includes over 200 independent parameters, some of them being random. Google does this to prevent people from manipulating its search results.
However, a few SEO companies have run extensive tests, discovering the key top ranking factors. The image below shows the results provided by our own research. And the good news is that several of these key ranking factors have been recently confirmed by Google.
In SEO terminology, a backlink is a hyperlink (a mention) that links somebody else’s website to your website.
Let’s review the key ranking factors:
– Backlinks. When many authoritative websites mention your site, creating links that point to it, its keyword rankings and website traffic improve significantly.
– Website content is also very important. Google doesn’t want its users to end up on a website that has texts with poor grammar and low-quality content. Otherwise, they will be disappointed by Google’s search results and may start using a different search engine. This is why Google only rewards the websites that create and publish high quality content.
– Website optimization, aka on-page SEO, is the process of optimizing a site with the goal of making it friendlier for people and search engines. HTML code is fixed, page titles, descriptions and URLs are updated, and so on.
– User experience is an important ranking factor that has been recently incorporated into the search algorithm. Google gives higher rankings to the sites that make its users spend more time browsing and reading many website pages. If people only visit your website for a few seconds, and then press their browsers’ “Back” button, returning to the search results list, Google will understand that they haven’t found what they were looking for, so it will lower your website rankings.
– Mobile compatibility. Google likes websites that are 100% compatible with Internet connected devices, be them computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones. Over 50% of people use mobile devices to access the Internet today, so Google rewards the websites that are responsive, adapting their size and functionality depending on the devices that are being used to access them.
– Social signals continue to be a less important ranking factor, because they can be easily manipulated. Shares or retweets from industry influencers are important, though, because they have the potential of attracting links and mentions from their fans and followers.
– Other ranking factors include domain age, website hosting quality, etc. They play their part, but they aren’t essential.
Effective SEO Techniques
The first SEO rule is to create great content that is bound to be shared by the top influencers in your industry. And the key to success is to create content that complements the existing resources on the best industry related websites.
You may have heard the “content is king” cliché over and over. And it is true! Your website can’t rank high in the search engines without having at least a few pieces of high quality, original content.
Nevertheless, I can assure you that no matter how many great content pieces you have, they will not help improve your website rankings until they are promoted in front of the right audience.
The “if you build it they will come” mantra may have been a good movie line, but nothing could be further away from truth when it comes to online marketing.
It is a huge mistake to create fantastic, thorough industry guides, for example, and then wait for them to become viral on their own – that will never happen!
If you take the time to craft outstanding content, be sure to show it to the webmasters that run the top industry related websites, asking them to share it with their fans.
Tools like Buzzsumo or Ahrefs can help you discover the most popular, most shared content pieces.
With tools like these, it is easy to determine what type of content people like to share and link to. And a content piece which has gotten thousands of social media shares can serve as a solid inspiration source.
Nevertheless, even the most popular articles overlook some information, have errors or don’t provide enough actionable information. So gather ideas, group them into categories, and then create mega-resources that fill in the information gaps.
Finding the Perfect Backlinks Targets
Now that your content is ready, it’s time to find the best industry related, authoritative web properties. For best results, try to find the high-quality websites that have already linked to popular industry resources. It’s the logical thing to do, because their webmasters have already demonstrated their willingness to promote other people’s content.
Evaluate website quality using factors like Domain Authority, Trust Flow, Alexa ranking, etc. Then, run targeted Google searches, gathering the URLs of the websites that are regarded as highly authoritative in your industry. Here are a few examples:
“industry links”
“industry” + inurl:links
“industry” + inurl:resources
“industry” + “helpful resources”
“industry” + “other resources”
“industry” + “resources”
“industry” + “news”
“industry” + “useful resources”
“industry” + “helpful links”
“industry” + “resource” + “email us”
“industry” + “resources” + “email us”
inurl:industry
intitle:industry
Make sure to replace “industry” with your niche, of course.
It’s time to discover the industry influencers’ email addresses and social media accounts. Visit their websites, and then read a few of their articles. Learn what they like to blog about. Finally, get in touch with them, sending personalized emails.
Here’s how a typical email outreach sequence looks like.
A few case studies
Here are a few examples of good quality articles on this site, which were built and promoted using this methodology. They have attracted lots of social media shares and backlinks from the Yale University, Wikipedia, and so on.
This is the typical number of people that read these evergreen articles each month.
The “Average Time on Page” shows that people are spending about five minutes on each page. It’s a great number, and it tells Google that the website has useful, interesting content, a factor that helps boost rankings.
As you continue to work on your site, the number of high quality, evergreen content pieces will grow as well, leading to bigger and bigger numbers of website visitors and clients.
It is true that search engine optimization requires specialized tools, knowledge, and hard work. Of course, you can buy SEO services from Randombyte and save a lot of time and trouble.
This is the essence of quality SEO work: the content that is being produced and promoted must add real value to the web. If you do that, I promise that search engines will love your website, rewarding it with great rankings.