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State Of Search Wrap Up Part 1

Let’s talk about the DFWSEM State of Search Conference that took place last week.  I’ve had a few days to reflect on the epic awesomeness of the conference, and there are some great take-aways from the day.  As I started writing this, I realized there was so much quality information to be shared that I needed to write a series of posts so you won’t TLDR (too long, didn’t read) me! So, watch for more soon.

The first session I went to was on Link Building with Wil Reynolds and Michael King.  I think that Wil Reynolds pretty much had the crowd saying “Amen!” during his talk on Real Company Stuff (#rcs).  So often we encounter clients that are “hooked on the SEO crack” of building 300 links for $10, that they don’t realize that this technique not only does not work post-Panda/Penguin, but is also, in fact, detrimental to their sites. I remember this time in our industry pretty vividly – shady link buying in India gave way to, “Let’s pay other people $20 for a poorly written guest post!”

One of the best examples of why you should start creating real content that is relevant to what people are searching for and related to your client’s field. Seer Interactive, the company that Wil Reynolds founded in 2002, had a client for which he was doing keyword research.  Using instant search on Google, he saw that there was a great interest among searchers about how sites like Facebook, Ebay and Twitter make money.

How Does Make Money SERP

That gave Wil the idea to answer these questions in one place.  He wanted to create content to answer the questions searchers were already asking frequently, and it applied to the client’s industry.  The idea was shot down by the client.  So, Wil put it on Seer’s site.  Here are the pages metrics from Open Site Explorer:

This is the power of Real Company Stuff.  Yes, this piece of content was not cheap to develop, but it got great results.

The concept was supported in the Content Marketing session when Elisabeth Osmeloski, from Search Engine Land, basically started yelling at us about how SEOs are killing the Internet through guest blogging.  If you’re trying to get links using third-party content and outreaching using a template – STOP.  If these are your standard operating practices then stop what you are doing and use RCS.  If you can’t get your clients on board with RCS … then get new clients.

Finding the need, developing the content, and then launching it on behalf of the client is the best way to get links in the new world.

At WrightIMC, we saw this future more than a year ago and started to create content that was both highly searched and answered pain points in a niche industry.  Looking at the nine months after we launched the first content piece for a specific client, we saw a 300+% increase in total linking root domains to the site.  That increased the client’s domain authority 48%.

Here is a sneak peak of my next post on State of Search: “Scale is code word for I’m LAZY.” – Michael King.

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