Advanced SEO - A fundamental problem for link builders

by searchpath

Posted: 15 years ago 6 replies

Hi guys - I'm new to Warrior Forum, but I have an SEO question for the advanced agency SEO's out there - help!

My problem is this - one of the key link building techniques today is content creation/link baiting. In order to write content for a client you need to have good knowledge of the client's industry. However, when I have 10+ SEO clients to work on every month, then my time spent on each client is so small as to mean its almost impossible to gain the industry knowldge to write effective content.

Many of my clients have spent years building up the experience to enable them to write well in a niche. How am I supposed to do the same with a couple of days per month?? :confused:

This has puzzled me for a while. Any thoughts?

Thanks

#advanced #builders #fundamental #link #problem #seo

esdavis 15 years ago

I'm not a big agency SEO person, but I do okay.

For what it's worth, not knowing your particular skills or your clients' skills, I generally do one of three things, depending on my pricing and my clients' budgets.

1. Do an interview with them based on some questions they feel useful and/or having them jot down an outline of major points to cover in an article, and dig out from that the industry background.

2. If they have more money than time, go to one of the better article marketing services with English-speakers who are used to writing industry-tech articles. You may pay more for that article, but you can get well-researched articles well-written by them pretty quickly. And you can either have the client pay for articles or build it into your fees to have 1-2 articles written per month.

3. Do the content curation route for a lot of it. Dan Thies' Link Liberation course (not cheap but really good) talks a lot about this and has some great info. Subscribe to some industry site RSS Feeds and mine for good content. Then add an opinion and thoughts about it and publish as a short blog post mentioning a quick link back to the original. And notify the original content provider that you've linked back. Develop relationships with the folks in your client's industry.

You can generally mine interviews or outlines from customers for a few good articles each time. 30 minutes with them will get you a lot of information. If the boss is busy, talk to someone who has been with the company a long time (institutional knowledge), an experienced customer service rep, a sales rep (always a good one), or a technical person on staff (who helps customers with problems).

The last one (tech) is great for writing up articles to help customers in that industry see you as a resource to solve their problems. Customer service folks can usually hand you a few good ones too.

Hope that's useful for you.
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- searchpath 15 years ago
  
  Thanks for that - some good tips there.
  
  My response to your points:
  
  1. Good idea. I find that my clients are usually too busy to write much content for their website themselves, so leveraging them to get outlines for articles for content is a good approach.
  
  2. I'm not a big fan of outsourcing any part of my SEO role, as I think my boss is thinking "well if that guy (the outsourcer) is so good then why doesn't he do the whole job for my SEO?" Basically if I start down the route of outsourcing then its like, "what am I paying you for??"
  
  3. Good point - blogger outreach is key to link baiting. Without having key influencers to tell about your (hopefully) great content, how are people going to know about it? But again the issue comes up - if you are seeking to establish a relationhsip with a blogger/website, you often need to comment on what they are writing/blogging on. To develop the industry knowledge to do this sharp, insightful commenting takes years of work. I have 2 days a month; the problem still remains.
  
  Still, I take your point about knuckling down and doing some research yourself.
  
  Anyone else got any ideas?
  
  Thanks
  
  Thanks
  
  1 reply
  
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  Mike Anthony 15 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by searchpath
  
  . I have 2 days a month; the problem still remains.
  
  Why do you only have two days a month with 10+ SEO clients? How much time do you spend each month on a client? My bet is that you are charging very little thats why you can't do a good job on it because if you were getting paid a decent amount you could hire good writers to work on that issue.
  
  Thanks
  
  1 reply
  
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  searchpath 15 years ago
  
  Hi Mike,
  
  Thanks for your input.
  
  I work out the two days a month as follows: 30 days a month, means 22 working days a month. 10 clients to work on = 2.2 days a month per client, on average. (We are a small agency and I am the only SEO working on these clients).
  
  We are a midrange agency for SME's and our fees reflect that.
  
  With reference to the hiring writers issue - please refer to my earlier blog post about not giving my job away.
  
  Cheers
  
  Thanks
  
  2 replies
  
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  BAcheson 15 years ago
  
  I think you've identified a weakness in your business model. If you only have 2.2 days a month to service one customer you will never have the time to accomplish what you just described.
  
  A typical, medium to large sized agency would charge enough money to be able to dedicate more resources to a particular client.
  
  Thanks
  
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  dburk 15 years ago
  
  Hi searchpath,
  
  It sounds like you have unreasonable self-imposed limitations on how you manage your labor activities. Ask yourself this question, if your were hired today to manage 500 SEO clients, how would you do it?
  
  At some point you must stop thinking that all work must be done exclusively by you and you alone. What if your clients used the same reasoning, would they even hire you in the first place?
  
  My advice to you would be to read "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith. Smith is widely regarded as the founder of economics and his landmark book lays out the principles regarding division of labor. If you read and understand this key priniciple you will at some point slap your forehead and say duh...
  
  The bottom line is that specialization leads to significant gains in productivity. Most large agencies break the broader tasks up into smaller specialized jobs. You can hire personnel in-house, which is what most large agencies do, or outsource to freelancers.
  
  Don't just hire writers, break it down even more by hiring researchers to do the expert research, writers to create content, and editors to polish the final result. That is how the large agencies do it, and the result per dollar spent on labor is greater than what can be achieved by an individual that is responsible for completing all of those task himself.
  
  Thanks
  
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Advanced SEO - A fundamental problem for link builders

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