Why Blogging isn't Enough When it Comes to Growing Your SEO
In this session, I got to chat with Abbey Oslin, and we're diving into the nitty-gritty of organic SEO and why blogging isn’t enough for your practice. We talked about building your authority with search engines, capturing website traffic, measuring SEO performance, and the need to set achievable goals and seek help when needed. If you're looking to boost your website's visibility and drive more traffic, this session is perfect for you!
Takeaways
Relying solely on blogging is not enough to effectively grow your SEO. Building backlinks and increasing domain authority are crucial for SEO success.
Backlinks are links to your website from other websites and are a trust factor for search engines. Quality backlinks from relevant and reputable websites are important for increasing domain authority.
Strategies for building backlinks include guest blogging, being featured on podcasts, and getting listed in directories. It is important to focus on quality backlinks and to capture traffic and convert it into revenue.
Measuring the success of backlink and domain authority efforts can be done using tools like Moz Authority Checker, Ubersuggest, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console. It is important to set goals, track progress, and have realistic expectations as SEO growth takes time.
Meet the Speaker: Abbey Oslin of Duo Collective
Abbey Oslin is one half of the Duo Collective, is a boutique organic marketing agency that specializes in search and design. Abbey and Court been a Duo for over a decade, dating all the way back to the big agency days, before they ventured off on their own to help small business owners grow their brands. They are one-part strategy and one-part creative giving you everything you need to get found online without pouring money into paid ads.
Transcript
Timestamps
[00:00:00] Welcome to Elevate Your Practice: The Importance of SEO Beyond Blogging
[00:00:21] Meet Abbey from Duo Collective: Your SEO and Design Experts
[00:01:08] Understanding SEO: The Client Education Approach
[00:03:46] The Limitations of Blogging for SEO Growth
[00:05:14] The Essential Role of Backlinks in SEO Strategy
[00:08:26] Exploring Effective Backlink Strategies
[00:10:36] Quality Over Quantity: The Right Approach to Backlinks
[00:13:57] Evaluating and Choosing Quality Backlinks
[00:17:25] Expanding Your Reach: The Value of Diverse Backlink Sources
[00:20:41] Measuring SEO Success and Setting Goals
[00:24:08] Discover Duo Collective's Free SEO Resources
Full Transcript
Welcome to Elevate Your Practice: The Importance of SEO Beyond Blogging
[00:00:00] Samantha Mabe: Thanks for tuning into this session of Elevate Your Practice. This session is specifically talking about why blogging isn't enough when it comes to growing your SEO. So we have another session all about setting up your SEO, and this one is getting the specifics into backlink strategy and blogging.
Meet Abbey from Duo Collective: Your SEO and Design Experts
[00:00:21] Samantha Mabe: I am talking with Abbey of Duo Collective, a boutique organic marketing agency that specializes in search and design. They've been a duo for over a decade, dating all the way back to the big agency days before they ventured off on their own to help small business owners grow their brands. They are one part strategy and one part creative, giving you everything you need to get found online without pouring money into paid ads.
And if you want to know more about SEO in general and how to get that all set up, make sure you listen to my session about optimizing your website for search engines. Thanks for being part of the Elevate Your Practice summit, Abbey.
[00:01:00] Abbey Oslin: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.
[00:01:03] Samantha Mabe: Can you tell us a little bit more about what you do and who it is that you work with?
Understanding SEO: The Client Education Approach
[00:01:08] Abbey Oslin: Yeah, for sure. So I am one half of the Duo Collective, so my other half is the beautiful branding expert and she actually makes everything in the SEO world look pretty, which is very necessary because SEO can be an ugly thing for the most part. We specialize in working with small businesses and entrepreneurs and people who aren't either aren't ready for a large, massive SEO agency, or the SEO agency route just feels yucky to them.
I'd say it can be really confusing and when you don't have a solid background on what it is that you want, and you're just jumping in and putting it in someone else's hands, it can be hard to know is it working? Do I understand what I need to know? Am I asking the right questions? Are these people being authentic? Can I trust them? There's just a lot of things that are happening.
And a big part of what we do is educate every client we work with. Even if you don't want to do the SEO yourself, you will understand what is important because that's how you measure the results. And as a business owner, that is so important to actually understand the results, see the needle moving and know for sure that you're putting a good investment into it.
[00:02:16] Samantha Mabe: I have talked to quite a few clients who have worked with SEO and marketing agencies, and they're not seeing results. And when you go into their websites and everything else, They're not really doing the things they should be doing. That's where having smaller agencies or individuals that are going to educate you, they're going to walk you through the whole process, is such a better choice for most of these businesses because we don't want to just be another client in the roster.
[00:02:46] Abbey Oslin: Yes, absolutely. And a lot of times like generating website traffic, great, but not all website traffic is created equal. And it's not just about driving as much traffic as possible because you could, there could be a great keyword out there. You could write a great piece of content that's driving tons and tons of traffic. But if it isn't people who are ultimately going to need your service or want to work with you, what's the point?
I think it's also thinking about, okay, I want to drive the right traffic from the right people so that when they land on my website, maybe they're not ready to work with me now, but in the future they might be. And now I'm in their ecosystem. They understand my brand, they understand me. And so I think that is really important is to understand what are you trying to gain out of this? Because some SEO metrics like traffic, sure it's great, but you also need to be really strategic in what types of traffic you're driving. So just understanding what it is that I want and being realistic about that is also so important.
The Limitations of Blogging for SEO Growth
[00:03:46] Samantha Mabe: I love the topic we're going to cover today because I think most people in this space recognize that blogging is a good way to get traffic to their website, but there is a missing piece if you are just blogging for your SEO. And so I'd like to know to start off, why you think that relying Solely on blogging isn't enough to effectively grow your SEO.
[00:04:11] Abbey Oslin: This all comes down to what you should be looking at in terms of your results. So there's four things that we look at when, after we work on a client or after we educate people on how it is that you need to update your website. Here's the four things you need to look at.
You need to look at how many keywords you have indexed. So how does Google know about you? Basically, those are the words that are on your website that when someone types them into a search bar, you can be pulled up. If Google doesn't know about you and can't connect you to those words, you're not going to appear. So having enough keywords and content is one.
Driving traffic to your website is two, especially from search engines. Solely from search engines, are you getting traffic?
The third is your domain authority, which I know we're going to talk about in a minute.
And then the fourth is backlinks.
Of these four, if you are just blogging, you are growing your keywords and you're growing your traffic, which ultimately is good, will grow your domain authority, which is basically how trustworthy are you in Google's eyes. It's like a popularity score.
The Essential Role of Backlinks in SEO Strategy
[00:05:14] Abbey Oslin: But then there's this other metric, which is backlinks, which are basically a link of your website living on someone else's website.
These links are the big trust factor. If people are talking about you and if people are linking your content, sharing your stuff, that means they must trust you. And so Google and other search engines are going to hold that with a higher authority. It's just if I gave you a recommendation of someone to work with. You are likely going to take that recommendation. That's going to be a little more valuable than just Googling a random person out there. So that's why these recommendations, or these links, on other people's websites, tell Google that you're more trustworthy.
And so these three things, your keywords, how much traffic you drive and your backlinks, are all going to dictate your authority and how trustworthy you are. The higher that authority number, the more trustworthy you are, and the easier it's going to be for you to rank on search engines.
So what I tell people is usually if you're just focused on blogging, that's great. It's great to focus on blogging and creating content, but you're forgetting about that backlink opportunity and that opportunity to help grow your authority. And you need all of them, like truly all of them to help grow at a faster rate. You might get there eventually, but I'd say focusing on both blogging and backlinks can give you a really big advantage over your competitors because a lot of times people aren't thinking about that.
[00:06:43] Samantha Mabe: Yeah, so before we dive into backlink strategy, you mentioned domain authority is really telling google that you are trustworthy. So in addition to like your content and backlinks, is there anything else we might need to consider or, recognize as to why this
[00:07:01] Abbey Oslin: is so important? Yeah. So I would say, and again, we'll talk about the strategies, but you can just go just like Instagram, you can go out there and you can buy a bunch of backlinks. Just like on Instagram, you can go buy a bunch of followers and chances are if you go buy a bunch of followers, or you go buy a bunch of bots to come like your content you're not seeing results from that. Right? And the algorithm likely figures that out. They can blacklist you for it. They can hide your content or people just think Oh, gross. What are all these random comments from people with no photos? You can tell something just feels inauthentic.
And that's the same thing with backlinks too, is that there are some really bad strategies out there where people will just go buy a bunch of backlinks to get featured on a website. And it's the same thing with search engines . They can tell things are spammy and gross, and sometimes spammy things happen without you trying they just take over and it just happens. It's not a big deal if you find that you have a few of these out there, but actively going and buying and seeking out I want to get thousands of backlinks. That's not going to do you much good.
When it comes to both content and backlink strategies, quality is key. And I would much rather watch people grow these slowly with really high quality websites and high quality content than to go take the shortcuts. And that's the biggest thing that can definitely hinder your success.
Exploring Effective Backlink Strategies
[00:08:26] Samantha Mabe: So we talked a little bit about backlinks, why they're important, but can you talk more about how they increase our domain authority? Why is this a strategy people need to implement in addition to the blogging and the content they're putting out there?
[00:08:43] Abbey Oslin: Honestly, it really is just that trust factor. If the number of links you have on high quality websites will help Google say okay, this person must really know their stuff. You need to be linked with like minded businesses, partners, things that make sense, that help Google understand more about you. So that is definitely really important.
I can start diving into the strategy piece of that too.
[00:09:07] Samantha Mabe: Let's do that.
[00:09:07] Abbey Oslin: There are easy backlinks to get and more difficult backlinks to get. So I'd say the lowest hanging fruit is directories. There are likely local directories or industry directories that you can jump and be on. Even things like your Google business profile. That's a link that links back to your website. Yelp, if you're a local business being on all of those different local opportunities. There are so many directories and there's tons of like health and wellness directories and niche directories that are specific to holistic wellness and services like that. Making sure that you just search around and see, okay, what's out there, what makes sense. These are the lowest hanging fruit, but sometimes they do cost a little bit of money.
So usually what I tell people is, don't go sign up for all of them, spend all your money on these backlinks because they also need to drive clients for you. So make sure that maybe you test two a year. You go on two directories, and then as long as you have your Google Analytics setup, you can actually track the results. So you can actually see, okay, are people finding me from these websites? Or you can just have a simple form on your contact page that says, how did you find out about me? With one of the options being those directories. And that will allow you to track it, because just paying for a backlink, isn't going to be worth it. You should pay for it to get the backlink while also getting traffic and conversions and all of the things that you want. So that's going to be super important.
Quality Over Quantity: The Right Approach to Backlinks
[00:10:36] Abbey Oslin: And then from there, moving into a couple of my favorite ways to get backlinks. One is things called listicles or list posts. So if you go out there and search the best fertility acupuncture specialist or the best holistic therapist in my area, or the best body work or massage therapists in my area, things like that. If you go and Google that, you'll likely find all these posts on page one or page two of Google that are like 10 of the best holistic therapists near you.
And you'll find some of these lists are pulled from directories. So people are technically paying to be there, but there are other times where they are actually pulled from, like people just created these lists and these resources. So this is the lowest hanging fruit because you can just email them and ask them like, Hey, can I be here too?
I always tell people like when you pitch this, you should be pitching it like a sales pitch. You should be telling them like, Hey, I should be here because I offer something that your client, like the rest of the people on this list don't offer. Or I noticed someone on this list is no longer in business and I want you to make sure that, you update it with someone relevant, you could replace me here, things like that. And then also telling them how you'll support them. I'll drive traffic to your article by sharing it in my stories, or I'll link this on my page on one of my blog posts, or a backlink for a backlink kind of thing, things like that.
So those are great because those list posts show up on, page one or page two of Google, because that's how you found them. So getting traffic from those, again, you can also measure in your Google analytics. So that stuff is really great to get on lists and people really love options. They love a good list post with a bunch of options because they want variety of what they're looking at, so those can be really great.
And then my other favorite is obviously because I'm here talking to you, I would much rather talk in podcast than I would write a blog post. If this is something you think you'd love, being a guest on podcast can actually be a really great backlink opportunity. Most podcasts, you want to make sure they have show notes or a blog post that accompanies them. And then in that blog post, they're going to include a link of you. And either way, you'll likely be linked in like the show notes, so you'll have that Apple or Spotify link driving back to you too. That's another really effective strategy.
And I'd say there isn't really a wrong way to go about it because if you really like to just write content, and you want to be featured on someone else's blog, you could do that. You could create long form content that people are going to share on their blog. It really just comes down to what do you like to do? How are you going to be able to accomplish getting backlinks in a way that's not going to feel like, Oh, I have to do this today. It should be something you like. And if you would like to be on podcasts, great. If you'd like to write long form content, awesome. Choose a strategy that works for you.
And then just set like a quarterly goal. I wouldn't recommend thinking like, okay, I need to be on 10 podcasts in the next two weeks. You will lose your mind. Just plan a quarterly goal of Hey, I'm going to try to get two backlinks a quarter. It's hard work to get a good quality backlink. So like just setting a goal low and then starting to go after it and then realizing how you can do that moving forward can be really great.
Evaluating and Choosing Quality Backlinks
[00:13:57] Samantha Mabe: Do you have any Tips or maybe things people should look out for if they want to implement this backlink strategy and they're not sure if the website is actually a quality one. I get a lot of pitches from people that are like, I'll link to your website if you do this and I'm like, I don't feel like that's very legitimate. Does it matter the size of the podcast? Does like, how do we make sure it's going to be a quality backlink as opposed to a spammy one?
[00:14:26] Abbey Oslin: Yeah, that is a really good question. We talked a little bit about domain authority and you might be wondering too what is my domain authority? Where do I rank on this? You can actually use Moz authority checker. So if you just Google that, it'll pop up. It's a completely free tool. So you can enter in your website and anyone else's website to go and check and see what their domain authority score is. That will likely give you a good radar of if they don't have a score, it's likely not helpful.
Most people who are doing strategies like that, I'll say do have a score. And honestly, I don't have the best answer for this because it's a gut response. Does this feel right? Usually you can take one look at someone's website and say, that's not for me. And maybe sometimes you'll look at it and you'll be like, actually, this might be a good test.
You can always Remove links like there are tools out there. So disavow links is a tool that you can use within your Google search console. So that's something where you can go and remove a link later, but it can be good to test.
Most people ask me too should you pay for backlinks? Because sometimes, and we'll get these Instagram DM messages of people being like, Hey, you can get featured in this and this, and so usually I'm just deleting and same thing in emails. People are like, Hey, can you link this blog? And it's sometimes I'll look at them and be like, Oh, actually that is a really relevant tool for my audience. So yeah, I will link it. So there definitely are some outreach strategies that make sense.
It's super important just to use your gut. Just think about, okay, does this feel right? Do I think that their audience is the same as my audience? Because that's super important. You, again, want to be driving the right audience to you.
From a paid perspective, we did do a test one time. There was someone who popped into our DMs from LA weekly, which is a very popular a digital magazine, has a good domain authority. Their episode was 15 of the best podcasts for female entrepreneurs. And at the time, our podcast is relatively new. We want to promote it. Let's test it. Let's see if it works. I think they wanted 500 for the article. I definitely bartered with them, which I highly recommend if you ever want to experiment with that and do it. So we were featured in this article. It is a high domain authority article And that is a good thing. It does count as a backlink, but within the last six months, when I went to look at if it drove any traffic, it was like five hits. In my opinion, that isn't worth it.
And from what I know of our inquiries, because we asked people how they found us, no one said they came from there or from a specific article like that. So it was a really fun test just to see Hey. Let's see what this does. Like this is a website that gets tons of traffic, that has high domain authority. So let's see if it works for us. And in my opinion, I don't think it's very valuable, but it's definitely something you can experiment with. I wouldn't spend thousands of dollars. If you have a few hundred bucks and you want to experiment with a really good post that someone's pitching you, give it a try and see how it works.
Expanding Your Reach: The Value of Diverse Backlink Sources
[00:17:25] Samantha Mabe: Do you have any suggestions about spreading out backlinks versus using the same website? So I know a lot of people will go blog places like Medium, or maybe they are a repeat guest on a podcast multiple times. Is that more or less effective than spreading out that effort?
[00:17:47] Abbey Oslin: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think there is some value to Spread it out because you're reaching different audiences. So that would be the biggest thing is that you want to try and reach a variety of audiences. It's not like Instagram where you're only reaching 10 percent of your audience so you need to post multiple times for people to see it. Most things on people's websites definitely get seen a lot more. So that would be number one is. I would think about that.
Two is I would look at the past content, like how it performed. Because if the content performed really well for you, being there again, it could also be really beneficial for you. Because at the end of the day, they're going to be sharing their newest pieces of content too. I would think about that. That new piece of content could help drive new traffic to your website or remind people of you because you've been there before.
Maybe the last time you were on someone's podcast, you didn't have a good enough resource or a way to add them to your email list or a way for them to actually jump from them to you. How am I going to take that opportunity where all these new people are hearing about me and get them to live in my community? Are they going to follow me on social media? Are they going to join my email list? How can I capture that? So that's also super important is making sure that if the first time you were linked, you didn't have a good strategy to capture them, maybe the second time you can think through that practice.
And then again, if it's a really good business partnership and it just makes sense to continue doing it, like you'll know if something's working for you, if it's working for you, you're getting new clients, you're getting new traffic, great. Keep doing it. That's not bad at all. It's still a new link. So it definitely will still count as a backlink number, so to speak. So it's just kinda, kinda depends on the result.
[00:19:30] Samantha Mabe: I think it's key when you're thinking about things like podcasts or guest blogging. Yes, you're getting a backlink, but you're also reaching that audience. And so something like a podcast can be really impactful beyond search results because people are hearing you and then they want to reach out. So none of these strategies are like, this is the only result that I'm going to get from it.
[00:19:55] Abbey Oslin: It's thinking beyond that. So those are things too where making sure that what is going to come out of that, that you're prepared for it. Because I think a lot of times we're not prepared for what's gonna happen beyond the moment. And so that's really important. Because if you get featured in an Massive articles or massive publications and things like that, that, we're going to drive traffic, celebrate that moment, but then plan for how to capture all that traffic and keep it so that you can continue to grow your audience and leverage it and speak to them. And that part is, I think the missing link because backlinks are great. But ultimately, you have something to sell and you want to bring in revenue. So figuring out how to take that backlink and bring in revenue is the magic piece in there.
Measuring SEO Success and Setting Goals
[00:20:41] Samantha Mabe: We talked about checking out what your domain authority is and like doing this kind of slowly. Do you have any recommendations for measuring this as in marketing effort? How long should it take before we start to see our search engine results go up for our domain authority? , how do we look at that and what should we expect?
[00:21:05] Abbey Oslin: You can use that Moz authority checker to check that stuff. I also really love using Ubersuggest to track performance in those four metrics that I mentioned. So keywords, traffic, domain authority, and backlinks. Using that can be really great. So if you get three free searches a day, so you can just search for your domain, take a screenshot of that right now, and then set a goal. So what is it that you're going to do? Do you want to be on podcasts? Do you want to sign up for a few directories? Do you want to focus on those list posts? What is it that you want to focus on?
Then wait until the next quarter. That is the hardest part is that we want to see instantaneous results. Long term growth of SEO is slow. It is painfully slow. So your domain authority number growing one point, two points, a couple points a year is actually really good. That number takes so long to grow. So that is super important. It's just, Having that expectation of okay, I can drive traffic maybe a lot quicker, but that domain authority score is going to take a lot longer to grow.
And you just want to make sure everything is in the upward trajectory. It doesn't need to have this massive spike and it likely won't, but knowing that things are growing in this forward movement is really important. And then just continuing to watch it. Because things will compound and grow faster over time as long as you are doing these strategies authentically. So you should start seeing movement and growth in that space. So I would take a screenshot of that, set your goals, and then maybe in 4 to 6 months, go check it again and then see how it's working for you. And then just keep that process.
If you want to be on a couple of podcasts, you need to pitch them. So set aside maybe one time a month that you can go pitch these podcasts and then afterwards, just start tracking When things go live, how many you've done so that you can hit your goal. And then you can track, okay, I was on three podcasts this quarter. This is how it looked from an SEO perspective. And this is the kind of growth I saw. And so then say next month, you want to double that. Now you can actually see what's happening.
We forget to set the goal ahead of time so that we can actually back into How to move the needle faster.
And The two tools that I really love that are also completely free, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, both of those will tell you exactly how your website performs. Uber suggests is a tool that's using methodologies. It is not going to be exact. It can be a really good tool to use to like peek at your competitors and see how they're doing, but it's not going to be exact data. The exact data will come in Google Analytics, which will measure the performance of your website, how people are finding it, who's visiting it.
And then also your Google Search Console will tell you how you perform on Google Search. So it will actually tell you what keywords people are searching for, if those keywords drive traffic to your website.
So both tools are super important. It's important to measure your traffic and that metric specifically to see how things are performing for you.
[00:24:06] Samantha Mabe: So where can people find you?
Discover Duo Collective's Free SEO Resources
[00:24:08] Samantha Mabe: And I know you have a couple of free resources that are going to be really helpful for people.
[00:24:13] Abbey Oslin: Yes, so two resources in the four metrics we've talked about. So one being SEO keywords. If you have no idea what a keyword is, you're struggling to figure out how to find the right one or what tools to use. We have four free keyword research tools that you can browse and look at and understand what really makes a good keyword. So that can be really helpful for your content.
And then we also have a five day free challenge that's takes you step by step every day, walk you through how to build your backlink strategy plan. So we'll set a goal together. We'll figure out what types of backlinks you want to secure. We actually share an email template within that challenge that you can steal from ours so that you can actually reach out to those list posts and use that as a guide. There's a lot of good things in there and it just breaks it down step by step so that you can build that backlink strategy plan so you can start securing some backlinks right after those five days.
We're at duo collective. com duo. collective on Instagram, and we have a podcast duo on air where we talk about all things SEO and branding.
Closing Thoughts and Summit Invitation
[00:25:14] Samantha Mabe: Thank you so much for tuning into this session of Elevate Your Practice. I was so excited to talk with all of the guests in this round of the summit, and I hope that you'll share it with a colleague or a friend who could use this magnetic marketing magic as well. You can send them to elevateyourpractice. co to register now, and they will get access to the summit right away.
