This article was originally published under Search Engine Land.
Without a sufficient amount of link authority, Google isnโt going to give your site the time of day. If it seems that despite all your content marketing efforts, the needle just isnโt moving in the Google SERPs, then youโre probably making one of these five avoidable SEO mistakes:
1. Hustling for likes instead of links
Your social strategy is completely misaligned if you arenโt incorporating SEO goals into it. SEO must underpin your social media strategy. Itโs not the likes, retweets, shares and plus-ones that are going to prop you up in Google; itโs the links. As such, getting influential bloggers to link to your site should be a primary raison dโรชtre for your social campaigns.
Consider, for example, Old Spiceโs gag website TheFlatteringMan.com. The site got plenty of press, but did they put even a single link back to OldSpice.com to leverage their link authority? Nope.
2. Misplacing the content
Remarkable content needs a home where it will attract the most links to your main site, where the links lead directly to your site and not through an intermediary site with lots of links to other folksโ sites, and where the links to your site wonโt be nofollowed.
Thus, a social site like YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook is a less-than-ideal home for your content because external links are nofollowed. Even a third-party site like Huffington Post or BuzzFeed can be less than ideal, since you are at the mercy of their editorial guidelines and the number of competing links on the page.
If you wrote a great listicle, youโd think it would be a huge win to get it published on BuzzFeed. Itโs not, at least not from an SEO perspective. Thatโs because BuzzFeed doesnโt allow you to drop links to your site, even if you are a paying advertiser such as Victoriaโs Secret.
Victoriaโs Secret may have received quite a few views on their โ12 Things Women Do Every Day That Are Fearlessโ piece in BuzzFeed, but take a look, and you will see that there isnโt a single link back to the Victoriaโs Secret website. Itโs only after you click the author link that you see a link to the main site.
For those of us trying to build up our link authority, the best spot for hosting our linkworthy content will almost always be on our own site.
3. Targeting the wrong audience
This can be tough to wrap your head around, but you already blew it if your content marketing campaign is laser-targeted to your ideal customer.
From an SEO perspective, your most important audience isnโt your customers, itโs the linkerati, i.e., the online influencers who have the most authority in the eyes of Google. Yes, you are going to get the most out of your campaign by targeting those who can link back to you from trusted, authoritative, important sites. If you are only writing content pieces for your customers, you are missing the boat.
Now of course, relevance is still a factor here. If youโre getting a link from a big player in the game design community and you sell yoga clothes, it isnโt going to necessarily be as helpful to you.
To target the linkerati, it becomes as simple (and as complex) as creating content that people want to link to. That sometimes means youโre going to need to think outside the box and branch out a bit from your traditional approach to content. Simply being helpful, useful or educational is not going to cut it. You need to create remarkable content โ content worth spreading.
Caterpillar hit it out of the park with their giant Jenga campaign, which featured a video of two CAT machines playing the worldโs largest game of Jenga with massive wooden blocks weighing eight tons in total. The video was hosted on YouTube (with almost 3.5 million views!), and CAT cleverly created a page on their site featuring the video to attract links.
ShipServ, on the other hand, lost the content game before it even started with their explainer video made with Legos. Cute concept, but a big disconnect: only serious prospects of their software would want to watch a video explaining how their solution worked.
It didnโt appeal to the army of influencers online, and it shows, with views in the thousands rather than the millions.
LifeInsure.com successfully tapped into an unexpected goldmine of links and buzz with their article, โ19 Things You Probably Didnโt Know About Death.โ It doesnโt seem like the type of politically correct fare a life insurance brokerage might feature, right?
But, brilliantly, that article wasnโt targeted to customers. In fact, you would never find the article by poking around for it on their site. Itโs an orphan page. The intended audience for the article were the linkerati, and it was seeded into social media sites where the linkerati hang out.
The approach paid off in spades. The lifeinsure.com home page ranked on page 1 for โlife insuranceโ in Google, Bing and Yahoo โ for years.
4. Being activity-focused
Many SEO practitioners, unfortunately, are task-oriented. They believe that just because itโs a โbest practice,โ it deserves to be on the to-do list. I challenge that thinking. Iโd argue you probably have items on your SEO to-do list that arenโt worth doing and should be removed; they simply arenโt going to move the needle enough.
Or they may be a second-order activity for when you have time after finishing all the first-order activities. Meta descriptions would fit in that category. They donโt influence your rankings, thus they donโt deserve to be prioritized up there with title tags.
Instead, I suggest being outcome-focused: creating a big, hairy, audacious goal, making sure everyone on your team is on board with the goal and systematically working to achieve it. Once the desired outcome has been achieved, come up with a new goal, rather than working through the rest of the to-dos.
5. No help from a power user
Power users are a link builderโs secret weapon. Power users are bloggers, social media mavens, journalists or celebrities with a huge following on social media, and thus, huge reach.
The amplification that power users can provide is game-changing. You donโt need an army of them. All you really need is one power user in your hip pocket.
It can be a challenge to recruit that power user, but once you do, that power user can provide the initial push that starts the snowball effect you need to go viral. In fact, the primary reason for the success of the aforementioned LifeInsure.com campaign was a power user.
Be prepared to pay for that power user, either in cash or in favors. Nothingโs free in this world. If you donโt know how to find that power user, look to your SEO or social media consultant. They may already have a relationship with one.
Over the years, I have developed relationships with power users on reddit, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram, among others. Those relationships are worth their weight in gold.
Case in point: Power user Jeremy Schoemaker, aka Shoemoney. I asked, and he agreed, to run a contest in conjunction with my client, OvernightPrints.com. My campaign idea was that an entrant could โWin Free Business Cards for Lifeโ by designing Jeremyโs new business card.
Jeremy is a major online influencer. His promoting the contest and my client on his blog, on YouTube and so on, made a huge and lasting impact. That contest got my client to #2 in Google for โbusiness cardsโ โ and they were buried deep in the SERPs prior to this campaign!
Thereโs also a surprisingly effective way to do cold outreach to influencers via email, but Iโll save that for my next column.
In that article, Iโll also discuss the wrong language to use in your campaigns, how to collect intel on your competitors and various inadvertent ways to destroy the SEO value of your campaigns.
