Will Scott Answers A Lot Of Questions

Wednesday 12 Mar 2008

10 comments Wednesday 12 Mar 2008 | admin | Local SEO

10 Responses to “Will Scott Answers A Lot Of Questions”

1. on 12 Mar 2008 at 9:33 pm   Will Scott
   
   

   Miriam,

   I love that you draw me out with your questions

   I only hope to be more timely in my response next time.

   Will

2. on 14 Mar 2008 at 11:58 am   earlpearl
   
   

   I liked the question and Will’s response.

   I think Will might speak a bit to the level of competition for these long tail terms vis a vis the usage of these low value links.

   Man, oh man, I used them like crazy when they were “high value”. I stopped some time ago.

   but will’s ideas have real merit, I believe if there isn’t any competition. Will, could you comment on that a bit?

   Dave

3. on 14 Mar 2008 at 6:55 pm   admin
   
   

   I think a lot of people have stopped going after what are typically thought of as ‘low-quality’ directory links, Dave, but from what Will told me, he is still finding them nice and effective.

   So, maybe folks have overlooked something that can still be quite useful! Particularly if it’s possible to make the links target longtail terms, eh?

   Thanks, guys!
   Miriam

4. on 15 Mar 2008 at 9:42 am   earlpearl
   
   

   Miriam:

   For the sake of deep explanation and careful work with clients it might be important to take a hard look at what Will did and delve into it more deeply.

   I looked at links into will’s client and extracting out duplicate links from the site itself there were over 450 links per yahoo.

   Very nice.

   I noticed the weak value links to which Will referenced. Gawd knows I used them to great exent in the past.

   In fact I’m so happy this got reintroduced as a strategy for local businesses.

   Of interest, take a look at a variety of local oriented phrases that might work for the photography client.

   Will showed #1 ranking for “baton rouge wedding portrait photographer” for his client.

   Delve a bit deeper and look at organic rankings for either of two phrases that probably are searched on somewhat more; baton rouge wedding photographer or wedding photographer baton rouge.

   The client no longer ranks first, but rather 12th and 8th respectively.

   If you look at the site of a competitor in the market, garythibodeauxphotographer.com and eliminate duplicate links from both the site itself and wedj.com, you see the competitor site with only about 40-50 additional links.

   yet garythibodeaux outranks fineart for probably more active phrases such as wedding photographer baton rouge or baton rouge wedding photographer.

   Now, this is in no way a criticism of Tim’s work. In fact I was thrilled to find this entry and Tim’s entry on his blog and read about his actions.

   If anything Tim has done an incredible job with a client that might be paying next to nothing. And as Tim said, the lower the I in ROI, possibly the higher the return.

   I looked a bit harder at all this information, if only because I had SOOOOOO discounted this strategy some time ago.

   As Tim had said, certain types of easily accessable links have been significantly devalued.

   I guess what I’m learning is that there is a value to these links, though still low.

   Another potential learning experience is to look at the clients links and competition’s links and if maintaining a relationship with the client over the long term, the evidence from this one small sample is that a possible slight increase in budget by the client might enable the SEO to obtain just a few stronger links that would vault this client quite a few more rungs for some other phrases with somewhat higher activity.

   Of interest I will say, that with thousands of keyword phrase data of this ilk, I would suggest that the aggregate traffic potential from the 2ndary phrases might well significantly outrank the primary phrase.

   I suppose I did all this to satisfy my curiousity about these low value links. I’d also like to suggest that one doesn’t overpromise to clients based solely on this strategy.

   I’d bet Tim already knows this. He is practising something that has been largely discussed and essentially discredited in overall SEO.

   To me Tim has shown that it still has application in local SEO but it isn’t the only answer and might need to be buttressed with some other efforts if the clients budget is there.

   Dave

5. on 15 Mar 2008 at 1:27 pm   Will Scott
   
   

   Dave,

   You’re totally correct. With bigger budgets we acquire more authoritative links and rank for far more competitive phrases

   Thanks for the analysis and validation!

   Will

6. on 15 Mar 2008 at 1:42 pm   earlpearl
   
   

   Will:

   I appreciated the questions, your responses, and the mini study I did.

   I can see that it still works, but the benefit really must come from very 2ndary phrases.

   In fact after seeing your comments I went back and did a little ….lets call it “dp job” .

   for the tougher phrases it, and they may not be all that tough, the degraded links don’t seem to be the ticket.

   I’ll tell ya one thing though, it looks like bottom of the page footer links from totally non related websites definitely work, and it appears to me that there are areas where google isn’t seeing that.

   I’me seeing an example in an industry I review.

7. on 16 Mar 2008 at 12:01 pm   Will Scott
   
   

   Dave,

   First, I’d love to know more from your experience vs. just a review of these examples.

   Second, I want to make the point that “wedding portrait photographer baton rouge” was demonstrative that one can rank for a long tail phrase without that text appearing on the site and not what I would consider a money phrase. “baton rouge signs” is, and also took a lot longer.

   Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough that the point I was making there was that one can rank with only lower quality links and not page text.

   Finally, that client also ranks, Google page 1, for more valuable phrases (“wedding photography new orleans” and “informal wedding photography”).

   Granted, these weren’t immediate and have required some layering of other types of links and content, but were still achievable with a low budget and still deliver a huge ROI.

   So thanks Dave for asking questions to help me clarify the post, which I’ll do later today.

   And, I’m looking forward to some of your examples.

   Will

8. on 17 Mar 2008 at 8:11 am   earlpearl
   
   

   Nuts:

   I hesitate to give examples for 2 reasons.

   I seo for my own accounts, and I know competitors have tracked it.

   Prior to G devaluing directory links, I had hundreds, maybe over 1,000 with lots of varied anchor text that covered lots of long tail phrases.

   While standard SEO might characterize New Orleans Widget(s) as a long tail phrase, we might look at New Orleans widget(s) as the key money term and derivations such as New Orleans red/blue/fast/slow/cheap/used/etc. widgets as the long tail phrases.

   In that New Orleans red widgets has maybe only 3 or 4 competitors with no links, it would appear that possibly the directory styled links work well enough, for ranking for phrases without page text.

   Perhaps New Orleans Widgets gets 30% of the entire volume of New Orleans widget oriented traffic, while the New Orleans red/blue/fast/slow/cheap/used/etc. widgets gets 60% of the total New Orleans widget queries.

   It would seem that if you could dominate the serps for all the longER tail New Orleans widget traffic your client is really making out.

   Maybe we should email.

   Dave

9. on 17 Mar 2008 at 3:22 pm   earlpearl
   
   

   Miriam, Will:

   To go back to Miriam’s comment that directory links can work for a small business, my observation is that ever since G devalued most directories it has a very limited impact.

   Will has shown that it still can have impact, it still can have impact even without words in the text, yet, from the limited look I did on one example, it appears that it works for what I might call secondary and tertiary long tail phrases….not necessarily the more active and competitive money phrases (still sort of long tail in a general sense).

   In one business example I have a site that ranks primarily 1 in G and other engines for most geo oriented business phrases for 3 geo areas (2 states and a city).

   Where it ranks 2nd is a phrase wherein a competitor has the state name first and the business term 2nd. That combination is refleacted in the competitors url, title and metatags. Additionally it has a nice quantity of links.

   My site ranks 1st for a search for the phrase with the business term first and the state 2nd.

   I added a lot of directory links with specific anchor text with state name first and business service 2nd. How many? I forget…but a real lot.

   I think looking at the data from Will’s example, looking at that one competitor and looking again at my site I would need to add quite a number of higher quality links w/ anchor text for state name first business term 2nd to pass the competitor for first ranking in google.

   How many? I don’t know. Enough until I passed the other guy.

   Will: wasn’t it you who did a backlink analysis on the Denver florist situation, suggesting that the reason competitor, Lehrer’s flowers, ranked first and obtained an authoritative onebox was because of a lot of optimization work.

   I think analyzing that would provide answers, and then its a matter of the specifics of competition.

   Dave

10. on 02 May 2008 at 12:34 pm   Dave
    
    

    Miriam:

    Just so you know, I’ve been using Will’s method on a local business and it seems to be working.

    the site doesn’t have a lot of competition but for a 3.5 month old site it now is ranked respectively #1 and #3 for the 2 most important local phrases; has a bunch of other phrases in the top 1-5 and I’ve now got about 10 more phrases to work on. Most of the linking has been this low quality directory stuff.

    Dave

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