Marketing Experts Reveal Top Strategies To

Arlen
[00:00:57]
Welcome to the e-commerce marketing podcast, everyone. My name is Arlen Robinson, and I am your host. And today we have a very special guest Jon Lightfoot, who is the Founder & CEO of Strategic SEO Solutions (SSS). He has over 20 years of marketing experience in both brand-side and agency-side. Jon is an SEO expert with decades of experience in working with many SaaS brands, B2B enterprise firms, Fortune 500 and startups alike. He and his team are hands-on in managing their client’s on-site technical SEO, as well as offsite SEO, CRO, and overarching analytics. Additionally, Jon sits on the Customer Experience Advisory Board at the University of California Irvine. Welcome to the podcast, John.

John
[00:01:40]
Thank you very happy to be here today.

Arlen
[00:01:43]
Yes, definitely excited to have you on and we appreciate you joining us today. We’re gonna be talking a little bit about SEO optimization specifically for e-commerce businesses talking a little bit about one of the main reasons or one of, one of the main questions that comes up with businesses is link building and the effect of link building on SEO specifically for e-commerce brands, because there’s always a lot of buzz about building links. We know Google puts a certain amount of weight on it, but things change and anytime their algorithm changes, people start to get nervous and, and, you know, start to worry about, okay, is my particular strategy still effective? And you know, that’s, that always happens every few years. So I hope you are gonna, hopefully you’re gonna enlighten us a little bit on that. And before we do get into all that, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your background and how you got into what you’re doing today?

John
[00:02:39]
Sure. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, it’s true. I do have just about 20 years of marketing experience and about 10 years of it was spent agency side 10 years brand side, and I’ve had the opportunity to be robustly integrated into companies that do specialize in e-commerce and also service level based businesses and, and even incubators and things of that nature. So I’ve, I’ve touched a lot of spaces. And before the pandemic, I was leading the marketing efforts for Mathnasium in about their 1000 plus global centers. And when the pandemic happened, it was kind of the segue into this notion of, well, I’d prefer to be off ground in, in a little bit more insulated. And in doing that, I thought to myself, gosh, I could do anything at this point, as it relates to marketing, I I’d been touching traditional linear TV, everything right? SEO, of course, and also social media. And I thought this time I’m gonna go deep instead of wide in that depth that I chose was SEO. I’ve been a student of SEO for 17 years, almost 18 now, in fact, and it’s always changing. It requires constant learning. And so that’s, I’ve been doing solely that now for years ever since I made that transition and, and yeah, very happy to be doing it.

Arlen
[00:03:51]
Okay. That’s awesome. That sounds good. It’s an exciting field because it it’s ever changing as we all know with digital marketing SEO, but you gotta be on top of it, you know, not only do when we’re thinking about SEO or search and optimization, of course, there’s the side of the search engines and a lot of the technical aspects that, you know, you have to think about within your own web website, but then, you know, there’s other things that come into play with browsers. There’s certain things that are, that you have to work with and, you know, they’re, they’re ever changing as well. So it’s an exciting world.

John
[00:04:24]
Yeah. You know, it’s interesting because I think the big catalyst for me was this kind of notion around leveling the playing field. So often when working with companies, it can fold into this. Whoever has the deepest pockets kind of wins scenario, meaning if you’re doing paid media and you know, even paid search, right. Once you exhaust your budget, you go dark. And so whoever has the most budget to stay within that visibility for the longest duration often can really dominate some of those spaces. But with search engine optimization, it, it isn’t about who has the deepest pockets. It isn’t about just throwing money at it. It’s, it’s more about methodology. It’s more about strategy and where those culminate to give you a consistent level of visibility. And that’s what I love is that it, as companies, bay companies, small, middle, wherever they are in their, in their maturity, you know, in their stride, they can all compete just depending upon that methodology and strategy that’s happening. And that, that opens a lot of visibility, a lot of doors for growth for companies.

Arlen
[00:05:21]
Yeah, that is true. That is very true. It’s any business can compete and kind of get into the game. It, it, it’s true. You know, of course it is a lot easier for, for some than it is others. Of course, a lot of other companies have a lot more resources that can devote to some of these things, but the same time, they’re still kind of all following the same principles or at least we think they are, that’s a whole other discussion, but we can touch into it a little bit later, but we’re gonna go ahead and stay focused on the podcast and the topics that I kind of alluded at at the beginning, which is always a concern with businesses when we’re thinking of SEO is link building. And so in your whole world, your world view of this SEO space, how do companies safely build links that can help boost their domain authority and really grow their brand and their online presence?

John
[00:06:14]
Yeah, it’s interesting. I recently gave a webinar on that subject and it was an hour long just on that topic in a lot of ways, but to crystallize it down is a great question that you’re asking if I could bring it down, crystallize down, I would say two things. One of which would be consistency. I think one of the biggest issues that can occur with SEO and just about any tactic is this idea of let’s execute upon it and then step back and let that kind of ride and watch the progress and decide if we need to do any more of it. And then maybe do a little bit more and step back, I talk to lots of SEOs, lots of companies, and there are SEO teams and, and in their strategies you’ll often see at target, let’s say that target is 20 links per month.

John
[00:06:57]
So the new month starts, they race to get to the 20 links and then they step back and they wait for the next month. There is not a consistency to that. And they asked John Mueller not too long ago, what is the secret to SEO success? And I thought, gosh, that’s a really hard question to answer. And he did it brilliantly by just saying consistency. And it’s true. What, what I don’t think Google’s really looking for, they don’t wanna see necessarily see these needle on the record movements, meaning everything goes ripping north and then just falters and falls back off. And then back up again and falters off. You could say the same thing about a content strategy. It’s better to have this slow drip, consistent, methodical nature to what you’re doing. Same thing with link building. When we’re building links for our clients, the discussion circulates more around each week, what are we doing each week each and every single week outreach with press, you know, these sorts of things, curated lists and at link acquisitions, but every week a continuation of the link velocity.

John
[00:07:52]
So I think that’s a big part of it. The second part of it would be really dig deep into the metrics. So often when we build links, the caveat to, is it a quality link or not? Is what’s the da, right? The da stands for domain authority. So you’ll see link builders, selling links saying, Hey, you know, for X amount of money, I’ll get you a da 50, a da 60. And a lot of people are very impressed by that, but that is literally one, one metric of quality discernment. And you have to go far deeper than that and really peel back the layers of the metrics in particular, for example, maybe it’s things like, well, what’s the PA like, what’s that interior page authority, right? How long has the site been in existence? Like what’s the age of the domain, right? What’s the spam score. That’s huge. You have to know the spam score before you decide whether that link is gonna be able to provide you any long-term value and other metrics too, you know, Mo trust and, and citation flow and trustful, and all these things have to be synthesized into discern. If that link is actually gonna provide you real value.

Arlen
[00:08:54]
Yeah. I’m glad you mentioned that because a lot of times I think businesses kind of get caught up on just on that domain authority, the da, you know, a lot of people that do link building or are kind of in that whole game. I’m sure you’ve been on these lists. I’ve been on these lists where I’m getting these emails from people saying, yeah, da 80 link for, you know, they’re either selling it or they want to do a link exchange and you know, we’ve all kind of been there. And then, like you said, if you’re not very careful and do your due diligence, then even though it may have a high da, there could be some other issues there, like you said, it could be a high spam score that could be more detrimental to you than, than if you didn’t even have the lake.

Arlen
[00:09:32]
So very, you gotta be, you have to be very, very careful, but yeah, people do get caught up on that. Now, when we’re in this whole link building phase, as you mentioned, it’s, I think it’s very important. They understand that everybody understands that it has to, you have to be consistent. Like you say, you can’t just kind of go through these spurts. We’re saying, okay, this quarter, or this month, we’re gonna build 50 links. And then on the next, next quarter, or next month, we’re gonna be focusing on something else. You, you gotta be consistent with you doing it. I’m glad you, you pointed that out. That’s very key. But in general, doing this activity, are there any, what are some, a few basic dos and don’t when it comes to doing this stuff.

John
[01:10:09]
Yeah. That’s another great question. Let’s start with the dues. So on the dues side of the fence, I would say, do take a qualitative approach to this not quantitative. So maybe that ticks both dues and don’ts, but the qualitative notion, right? So this isn’t about, and it’s funny, you know, I I’ll, I’ll hear people talk about, oh, you know, here’s my competitor, right? They have 50,212 links, cuz they’ve been around for a long time. I guess I need 50,000, 213 to beat them. It isn’t about that. It really isn’t. This isn’t about that quantitative the number game. So what you wanna do is you wanna take a qualitative approach. I’d rather see companies have fewer links, but of higher quality than just haven’t be a numbers game. So you really want to make sure that what you’re doing is, is quality up. The other do, I would say, is gonna be, think about the thematic contextual nature to the link.

John
[01:11:02]
So in other words, if a website is talking about cars, car parts, and you are selling on your eCommerce site shoes, it wouldn’t behoove you even if their domain authority was in the seventies and everything else was created equal, meaning their spam score was low and trust flows high and things of that nature. So by all means it’s traditionally quote unquote, a good link. But if that doesn’t have that relevance, that contextual nature to it, you don’t want to be there on that page. So you want everything to have a rhyme and a reason you want it to be natural. You want it to be beneficial. If the person reading the content finds it and they click through, you wanna make sure that from the starting point to the end point, there is a dotted line of rhyme and reason. So the anchor makes sense.

John
[01:11:46]
The landing page that they land on when they click the anchor is contextual to the anchor. Everything needs to have a flow of consistency. And I think those are some dues, you know, some don’ts are in my estimation these days are gonna be things like don’t just get, like we talked about, don’t just get impressed by the da go deeper than that. In addition to that, you know, don’t just focus on any one tactic for link building. So don’t just do guest posts. Don’t just do link acquisitions and insertions, you know, really mix it up a bit, you know, try and, and do some, you know, skyscraper techniques and get into some curated lists, you know, do some press outreach, like actually acquire links in a variety of veins, not just any one particular vein. And here’s one more don’t, don’t just look at anchors in a very siloed way.

John
[01:12:33]
Think about diversification in the anchors as well. So what, what that really means is if you’re trying to rank for very specific keywords, as we all are, don’t just support the anchors of those keywords, which is called exact match. Also support your brand, also support naked URLs, where it’s actually the full string of the URL, the HTTPS colon slash slash those sorts of things. Think about the categorical anchors, think about value proposition anchors, right? And so the other dont would be don’t avoid exact match. There’s a lot of companies out there that think, well, I can’t just get a link and have it just be exactly the keyword I want. That’s exact match that could throw alarms to Google. No, that’s not true. It’s true. If that’s all that you’re doing, but here again, if you have balance in your anchor diversification, it’s fantastic to give that contextual relevance of that keyword back to the page that you want it to rank for. So I think diversification in those anchors is very important as well.

Arlen
[01:13:27]
Yeah. Great. Yeah, those, those are some awesome dos and don’ts for sure. And following those things, I think is just a really kind of a great way to get started with it. And speaking of getting started, let’s say a business, an e-commerce brand, maybe they already are doing some paid advertising. They’re doing, let’s say a Facebook, Google ads, Instagram, things like that. They some paying also for some content placement here and there, but they really haven’t launched like the serious effective, you know, link building campaign and they’re listeners podcast. They read blogs all about it and saying, and they know they need to do it. So I know the big question that most people are gonna have is okay, can anyone on their team do link building? Or is this something that they have to hire out does? And if they do have to hire, should it be somebody that has prior experience doing it?

John
[01:14:14]
I would say just about anybody can be trained to do link building, but I do think there should be some training. I, I don’t think you wanna put the keys in the hand of somebody doing it for the first time. The reason why is link building can be vastly impactful and effective to the growth of visibility and organic search. And it can really empower a lot of new traffic to the site. A lot of intent driven traffic and really it can propel revenues. There’s no doubt about it, but at the same time, if it’s not executed properly, it can cause manual penalization, truncation to visibility, and it can actually be detrimental to a website. This is not something that I would just easily entrust into the care of just anybody. I would make sure that the, the individual that is executing this type of initiative has a background in it, understands how to evaluate the metrics, understands the whole notion behind the keyword strategy and how that maps to the page level and how that builds a, a link building strategy.

John
[01:15:12]
That’s gonna be supported in that balanced way. And I think there’s also this background in understanding how do companies obtain links and how do they do it to some degree at scale. So how do you do, how do you perform the organic outreach? Who do you outreach to? What do you, what should you be saying to them cost and is gonna come into play? You know, there’s no doubt about it. Even if you have an internal team members that you’re tasking with this, the editors of the websites are at some point in time going to start discussing well, if you are looking to obtain a link on our site, here’s the cost that would be involved. And we could talk more about that if you’d like to, but understanding how to negotiate that cost, should you be paying for links? All of these things have to be evaluated and that typically does require some experience.

Arlen
[01:15:54]
Yeah, for sure. For sure. And I agree what you said initially that yeah. Anyone can really be trained to do it. You definitely have to have some training. You can’t just kind of throw somebody out there and say, you know, huh, do some reads, get me some links and that’s it. Yeah. So you definitely have to be trained and there’s a process involved with it because, you know, they have to be of course, familiar with your content. They’re gonna have to be familiar with what types of things and articles that you guys have that are gonna be available to link back to. And, you know, they just overall have to have, I think, a, a good grasp of, of the English language, I think, to be able to take a look at other pieces of content and figure out kind of where you can do some type of link insertion insertion.

Arlen
[01:16:36]
That makes sense. So yeah, all of that is, is, is very true. So you do, you definitely have to have somebody that is, that’s trained up prior to, prior to doing it. One thing I wanted to, you know, as far as link building is concerned, I wanted to kind of circle back just to kind of, kind of put that out there as controversial as this is, or, or not. You did mention that. Of course, every business has truly kind of like an equal playing field when it comes to this whole SEO get world when we’re thinking of e-commerce businesses. But from what I’ve seen, I don’t know if that’s entirely true and of of course, businesses or Google is never gonna say this, but from things that I’ve seen, there are certain brands that I’ve seen that it seems like they can get away with certain things that aren’t necessarily adhering to web standards or best practices.

Arlen
[01:17:28]
I’m not the only one to echo this of people that have always commented about some of the major portals. Like for instance, we have forbes.com is a good example when I’ve seen examples of different articles and different advertising things that they do on onsite with regards to popups, with regards to the way their pages are structured, that are not necessarily of the best standards, I guess you could say, in adhering to the best standards. And so I get what I wanted to get your opinion on is do you think some of these major companies, these major brands does Google kind of turn a blind eye to certain things that they’re doing because either they’re paying a large amount of money or they’re, they’re just such an established brand. Google is not going to question what they’re doing. What, what do you think?

John
[01:18:17]
I would say that it really is an algorithmic discernment. In other words, I think Google as a corporation, isn’t making that determination at a company level. I think their crawlers are going out. And I think that their sites are under the same scrutiny and algorithmic evaluation that any site would be. But that’s where it folds back into what you just said. And it technically supports what you’re saying, which is that sometimes they can get away with more, but why? Well, the reason why is when the crawlers take that pulse, when Google’s algorithms lay on top of those domains, those companies, what they are seeing is somewhat of a newer algorithmic addition to this whole equation, which is this E a T segmentation, which is this expertise, authority and trust really it bubbles back down to authority. So the Forbes and the major players, whereas the health of their site, like the SEO health discernment might be lower.

John
[01:19:13]
In other words, they could literally have more broken links as an example, or maybe they don’t have as cohesive as a keyword strategy, or maybe they weren’t really ideating as creatively around, you know, metas, the descriptions and titles and all tags and all the things that we would do. Maybe they’re not doing that. And you look at, and you think, gosh, their health scores not nearly as good. They’re still out ranking how well they have a lot of expertise, authority and trust. And today that is the epicenter of a lot of the discernment about who is out ranking, who is outperforming. Google’s gonna say there’s a lot of companies out there with a lot of opinions that they’re very good at what they do. Let’s look at the trust and the authority around them. And so that’s interestingly a dotted line back to link building, which is why link building’s so effective.

John
[02:20:00]
Why are we really doing it? It’s not necessarily so much to garner the link, interestingly it’s so that we can garner the trust. You see, when we talk about things on our website, when we have keywords baked into the pages and the titles and the descriptions and all the things that we’re doing, Google’s crawlers can see that they can pick that up and they make note of it, but do they trust it? Because you’ve said it because I’ve said it because people, they don’t necessarily trust it at that point, but they made note of it. But when other people talk about you in the same way, you talk about yourself. And if those other people are trusted, you start to lift a bit of that trust onto yourself. And now Google says, okay, well, you told me that, but they’re saying it as well. And I trust them from their domain authority.

John
[02:20:41]
And that starts to impart upon you. So as you build, as the companies in, e-com begin to build their E a T their ex expertise and authority and trust, they can then start to outran. Even if we take a look at their fundamentals underneath that, maybe aren’t as healthy as others. So it’s really about having that definitive trust. Those massive corporations are constantly in the press. They’ve been around a long time and their thought leaders in their spaces typically. And so they have that trust and authority, and that lets them kind of move forward in a way that newer startups or smaller brands may not be able to do, but they can build it consistently. And that’s part of the efforts of, of the link acquisitions is really just garnering that trust and thought leadership.

Arlen
[02:21:26]
Yeah. That, that’s a great explanation. And it makes a lot of sense because yeah, like you said, most of this is all an algorithm and the way things are ranked, it’s not like they have an army of, of, you know, of course they do have a large team of people that do work on Google’s end. But as far as the rankings and everything that we see displayed, all of that is really just an algorithm that’s being, that’s been coded. So it’s not like you have people manually looking at this site, I’ll say, okay, we need to rank this site for number one for this particular keyword, let’s make that adjustment. Yeah. That that’s not happening. That’s just not feasible. And it wouldn’t make sense, not, it would be cost effective to do something like that. So you’re totally right. I think what it is is that trust factor that a lot of those big brands have that is they’re not necessarily getting, allowing them to get away with certain things, but in, I guess in a way it kind of is it’s just that trust factor is so large is kind of outweighing any of the other, maybe technical things on their site that may not necessarily be up to speed or, or the best that it could be.

Arlen
[02:22:27]
So I totally get that makes total sense, you know, as gonna get rid, to wrap things up, thinking about link building in your experience and with what you’re doing with your company, or just what, you know, in general, what are some businesses that your e-commerce businesses that you’re familiar with that have done some successful link building and what are some results that you can speak to that they’ve had doing various link building campaigns.

John
[02:22:50]
I touch a lot of spaces with link building constantly. I mean, I probably spend more than half my day, every day, just working on link building initiatives for a variety of e-commerce companies. Some of those companies are in the product space and some of them are in this service space, but they all have benefited from the link building initiatives. And so whether it’s food or, you know, fashion, quite frankly, link building has been a really pivotal segment to building that organic impression share one company that I’ve worked with that I think would be worthy of discussion in this vein would be company that sells gift cards. So this company sells gift cards. So the keyword difficulty, the KD that most people think about for the keywords that they are trying to rank for are literally 98 and 100. And I know that because I work on it a lot, but also we were reflecting on this just a couple days ago.

John
[02:23:46]
If you’re looking at ranking for specific keywords, part of that equation is what is the KD meaning? How competitive it is it gonna be the even outran. And we’re looking at moving this gift card industry into the top one, two and three positions, and that’s been something that we’ve been able to do and the way we were able to do it, I mean, we are going up against a massive industry, visa gift cards and just gift cards. And, you know, all the, like that are just massive, right? With these upper echelon KDS of 98 to a hundred, literally through link building, we were able to move into the top positions and the structure to that it’s somewhat simplistic in nature, consistency, quality over quantity. I mean, we are really looking at, and that doesn’t necessarily mean always da 60, 70, 80 doesn’t mean that they can be da thirties and forties and still have enough strength behind them because their spam scores are low in their websites have been around for 12, 15, 18 years.

John
[02:24:43]
You know, they have good traffic coming into the sites, things of that nature. And it’s really just about thematic relationships contextually. So every link acquisition that’s happening. If you look at the URL structure, it might be a piece of content. That’s talking about the best gift cards for 2022. You know what to give for a wedding anniversary this year, creative ideas around gift, giving gift card, giving things of that nature. So this content is already being talked about indexed and trusted, and now we’re part of that narrative moving into, into the space. But, and I’ll say this one, last thing, the E a T algo that we talk about it also folds into something called your money or your life. And so e-com is very critical in this space because when you have a website designed to be transactional, there’s an exchange of money happening.

John
[02:25:32]
It’s gonna be really important that you have the trust and authority and certain verticals are far more important than others to meet that metric. And that would be something like education, any sort of education, healthcare, or health related products, finance, anything finance related, legal, anything along those lines, those verticals and niches within those industries have a far deeper discernment of what they need to have from a trust and authoritative space in order to even garner ranking or visibility and link building has allowed us to do that affiliate really last thing I’ll say real quickly, affiliates massive too, because a lot of times affiliates are giving reviews. We do a lot of work for a lot of review sites. Why? Because if you’re giving a review your opinion of a product, well, the first question that Google’s gonna say is well, and how, what makes you an authority in that space to give the opinion that should really lead people, transactionally imparting with their monies for a product. So really helping a lot of affiliate sites to outran because we’re building their authority. So when they speak about a product, they have that trust. And so yes, a lot, a lot of different verticals

Arlen
[02:26:36]
There. So that’s awesome. And yeah, thank you for sharing those, you know, real world testimonies. And it, it just sounds like you’ve also echoed what you said earlier in that it’s really about this consistency over the quantity. You know, you want to be consistent. You wanna, you, you wanna have a mix of, you know, getting links from higher domain authority sites versus some other smaller doesn’t have to be, you know, da 80 and all of that because that’s, yeah. It’s not feasible first off for you to consistently get clicks like that. It is can be difficult. So yeah, it just seems like, yeah, slow and steady wins the rates. I think that that echos in a lot of cases, so in link building as well, well, John’s been awesome having you on. I really appreciate you coming on. I’ve learned a lot and our listeners have as well, lastly, before we let you go, I always like to switch gears just so I get to know you a little bit better. Now, if you don’t mind sharing one closing fun fact about yourself that you think we’d be interested to know.

John
[02:27:28]
Well, I’m a lot taller than I look. No, I’m just kidding. That’s not it. Well, when I first, first first started my professional career, I was a clothing designer and by trade. And so I, I designed clothing. It was business suits and business shirts for men. Oh, wow. I got some women too, but it was 99% men. That those that was requiring the service traditionally. And so that was how I got my start in the business world. And I used the funds from that to start a fragrance business, which I, I did for 10 years and it had eventual acquisition. Wow. And so that’s kind how I got my start into the business world. Yeah.

Arlen
[02:28:00]
Okay. That’s awesome. Well, thank you for sharing that. So that does seem like quite a switch going from the closed designing the fragrance space into digital marketing. So yeah, it sounds like you kind of had a, a previous life to what you’re doing. Right. Now’s

John
[02:28:14]
True. I had to sign a non-compete when I sold the business and I thought, well, I can’t do anything for myself anymore. Well, maybe I could help other companies. And that was the segue to agency world. Yeah.

Arlen
[02:28:23]
Gotcha. Well, yeah, that, that makes sense. That makes sense. You can avoid having any type of competition issues. You’re, you’re just helping other businesses, even if they’re a space that you were in before, so great way to do it. Well. Awesome. Thank you for sharing that as well. And lastly, before we let you go, if there’s any way our, our listeners would like to reach out to you and pick your brain anymore about link building or any SEO, digital marketing subject, what’s the best way for them to, to reach you

John
[02:28:47]
Now, by all means happy to chat about it. Feel free to reach out to us via our website, which is strategic SEO solutions.com. And actually you can email myself or the team through the website and even my calendar, I just have it baked right into the website. So if anybody just wants to jump on calendar, talk about their companies, their growth, their strategy, and plans. Happy to do that too. So feel free to visit strategic SEO solutions.com you, you can reach out anytime.

Arlen
[02:29:12]
All right. That’s awesome. Thank you for sharing that, John. We appreciate it. And thank you for joining us on e-commerce marketing podcast.

John
[02:29:18]
Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

speaker 1
[02:29:22]
Thank you for listening to the e-commerce marketing podcast. 

Podcast Guest Info

Jon Lightfoot
Founder & CEO of Strategic SEO Solutions