Given enough time, an authentic content strategy to create value for your community can create exponential growth for the business. This is owned, not rented, media, and the upside for edusson legit businesses is well beyond their expectations. Extend that upward and rightward trendline on the Kapost ROI chart another year and imagine what kind of growth that generates.
But let’s not kid ourselves about the kind of time we have to prove a concept and demonstrate results. Ideally, eighteen months would be acceptable, but since time is money and runways are always short…
quickwins
Include Short-Term Wins
Many SEOs will claim they have “zero risk tolerance” in the work they do. I call bull shit.
Embeddable infographics with optimized anchor text? These are risky. Badges with choice anchor text? Risky. Product giveaways for blogger coverage? Risky writemypaper4me writing freelance copywriters who loosely pose as members of the organization? You get it.
These might not constitute the kind of risk that’ll get you penalized or banned from the index, but eventually the value generated by these tactics is prone to evaporate (particularly if you’re doing these things in dumb, traceable ways).
All of the above tactics, however, can (when carried out with smart methods) yield quick wins when the business demands authority results now to sustain the budget.
Back at SearchLove Boston in April of last year, Justin Briggs gave a great presentation on Link Building Reporting. In it, he touched upon paid links* as a potential leading tactic, a way to build authority now while your legitimate content campaign builds steam.
* Justin didn’t qualify what he meant by “paid links,” but knowing how smart he is let’s assume he meant hard-to-detect, crafty methods of paying without links without “paying” for them, things that might get devalued later but would not draw a penalty
Justin’s model visualized the value of paid vs content based links over time
Justin’s point is that “paid” links (and I’m extending this to links built with some of the tactics mentioned above) can serve as sound early investments in your site’s authority, ways to move the needle, while you push on the flywheel of your bigger, grander, values- and vision-based content campaign.
The idea here is to emphasize the “short” in “short-term.” Go-to tactics like guest blogging, product giveaways and contests might work now, but if they make up the entirety of your strategy you are dangling at the end of a fragile limb. You need authentic authority to build sustained SEO traffic in the long-term.
Presenting options for quick wins should be accompanied by serious talk about the tradeoffs you are making to get results on a short timeline.
- Get clear, and loud, about the risks involved
Paint a vivid picture of what happens if these tactics are carried out foolishly, or if the big, authentic strategy is left aside too long in favor of more scalable, predictable methods. Share it with stakeholders and everyone else involved.
Businesses who let their appetite for links drive foolish decisions, who relied heavily on link networks and similar manipulative tactics, have been hurt in the last year. Some of them have had to close up shop entirely.
Useful information:
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