Transcription
Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Baitman and today I'm joined once again by Zach Blackburn. Zach is our director of SEO for the company as a whole and we are dead in the middle getting closer to the end of this this SEO master class series. We're talking about all the different components of SEO. Again, the goal of this is to make it so that SEO is no longer this black box. So hopefully you don't spend a bunch of money on SEO with an agency and not really know what you're buying, not know what you're getting. So this is this is for you to be educated, for you to be able to make better decisions, evaluate the effectiveness of what you're doing, and ultimately grow grow your business better. Zach, welcome to welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?
I'm doing well. Doing well. I'm really excited to dive into this one. This one has a lot of complexity to it. So, this is Yeah. Speaking of things that happen in SEO that you don't really see or notice happen, off- page SEO, I I'd say, you know, it's kind of sort of almost by definition something that happens, you know, off your website, right? So, you don't really notice that it's happening, but it's a it's a pretty big pretty big piece of of what Google does. We we've talked before about how Google's job as a search engine is to find the most relevant and authoritative content for whatever it is that somebody's searching. And off-page SEO is probably I don't know if you'd agree with me, Zach. I'd say probably the biggest factor in that that authoritative category.
Most could. Yeah. You could go like post certain content across or or like you know obviously you don't want to make kid duplicate, right? You could you could post like basically similar content up across a bunch of different websites out there. Yet, one of them is going to rank higher than the other ones. And that's often more often than not, it's going to come down to authority of that website. And and offsite SEO is how you make authority. And as it relates to off- page SEO, there are a few different categories of things that fall within this. What what Zach and I have chosen to do here is to talk mostly about one of them in this episode and then in the next episode, we're going to talk about the other two. So those three things are backlinks, citations, and Google business profile, which is kind of a citation. So we're going to do the whole next episode about citations in the Google business profile just because it's it's different enough from backlinks. There's there's enough to dive into and for this industry, it's much more important than it is for the average industry. So there's a little bit more to dive into. And today we're going to talk about backlinks specifically. And we're going to dive into what makes a quality backlink profile. Well, first, what are backlinks? What makes a what makes a quality backlink profile? And some of the mistakes that people make with backlinks that end up hurting them in the long run. So, Zach, I'll I'll pass the baton to you. If if somebody's never heard of a backlink before, if they have no idea what that is, how would you describe what a backlink is?
Yeah. So, the way I've always explained it, it's kind of a fun analogy. It's your clout online. The way I've always explained it is that if Michael Jordan came up to you and said, "Zack's the best basketball player you've ever seen in your life," you're going to believe that him because it's Michael Jordan. But if Joemo down the street said it, they're going to say, "Who are you and who's Zach?" So, it's really your clout online. And the way that Google determines this is other websites referencing your website through a backlink. So that is in essence exactly what a backlink is is someone is vouching for you systematically. It's not something saying that they condone you or or that they believe in you or or anything. It's just saying that they get you a backlink which in Google Google's eyes is you saying that there's an association.
Yep. Yeah. That's that I think it's awesome. And one thing that you hinted at here is basically it's it's your number of backlinks and the quality of those backlinks that makes a difference, right? If all the top players in the NBA say Zach is the best basketball player I know, like there's no doubt Zack's the best basketball player around, right? And and on the other hand, you know, it could also be true if maybe a million people who aren't that that important say that Zach's the best basketball player, that also means something, right? Maybe that means as much as Michael Jordan saying it one time. So there's there's this kind of balance, you know, the more people saying it, the higher quality those people are, the more it makes a difference. And and this like if we just go to the origins of this, this is basically Google in the early days looking at the fact that there's so much content out there. How are we going to prioritize this? If you ever want to if you ever want to see this, you just type in to Google something like sell my house fast and just look at how many search results it has. It probably well into the millions or the billions, right, of things that it's saying are relevant to that topic. Hence, it's included as a search result. Yet only some of those are going to show up at the very top. A lot of that's going to come down to authority and it's Google trying to figure out which which content is most valuable and the fact that other people are linking to your content from their websites is just a heristic for Google to say this is actually something valuable. It's something if you think about it that naturally happens. If you put something really valuable out there, there's going to be more and more people that link to it. Of course, in industries like in industries like ours, rarely is a home buying website going to like post something about selling your house fast for cash that's going to be so riveting that everybody in the world has to link to it. That's probably not going to happen, right? So, you have to be a little bit more intentional about how you're building these backlink profiles because it doesn't happen quite as organically, quite as naturally. Although, you get some of that, but it's not it's not the standard.
So, let's talk about what makes a backlink good or a backlink bad. Zack, what what are the key things? Like am I just looking for like tons of back ranks? Am I looking for better, worse backlinks? How do you know that they're better?
Yeah, all that stuff. So, the way that Google has prioritized their backlinks, there's a few things that is looked at, especially within the industry of SEO. So, it's relevance of the backlink. It is the authority that that backlink is giving you. So, if it's coming from Michael Jordan or if it's coming from a new basketball player in high school, like that's going to be weighted differently. That the next piece is the anchor text that's associated to it. So, an anchor text is the actual text that's linked to you. I'm sure back in the day when the internet was brand new, people did click here a lot. So, click here was very common. that is no longer relevant anymore because Google doesn't see that as providing value to a user. That is where in the content you're talking about selling your home fast and that text sell your home fast links to your website. Google is by association creating the relevance with that keyword to your website. So that is one thing and then I would say realistically that the next thing is a combination of how many you have but it's not a number schemes. It's not we're reaching 5 billion. That's not the the philosophy. It's how many do you have in correlation or in comparison to your competitor. That is something that we need to understand because it's not always an apples to apples number where you're looking at Amazon versus your business. Obviously, Amazon has billions of back links where we only need couple hundred, couple thousand, depends on your market, your region, things like that that are going to get you into that that fold. So, hopefully that that summarizes everything conc
So, first let's talk about relevance. What makes a backlink relevant versus not relevant?
Yeah, that that's a very complicated question. So, I'm going to try to summarize it really quickly. Google and users associate websites to a vertical or a concept, idea, principle, typically a vertical in most circumstances, but it assigns it to that vertical. So, if you're going to Amazon, that should be okay. That's like the general broad view of this. If you're going to Fox or MSN or what, whatever your preferred method is, you see that as news. that would be news category. So what they're looking for since REI specialists are in the home and real estate industry that is our vertical that is relevant to us. That is something that we have to make sure that when we're creating backlinks we're putting them in that vertical which is a huge sweeping vertical. Now, if you were to get a backlink from, I don't know, MMA, hypothetically, there's no relationship between you and that vertical. And that is where Google will say, "Wait a second, like, how is this relevant?" And it may let one or two slide, but after a little bit of that happening, Google's going to throw up the red flags and be like, "Hey, something is not right here. you're in the home real estate industry and you're getting a lot of backlinks from wherever in insert vertical that is not home and real estate. So that is that is how Google determines its relevance is is it literally relevant to the industry in the vertical you're in.
Yeah, that makes sense to to expand your analogy. You could take like, you know, Michael Jordan is being incredible in the basketball space and maybe like amongst like music artists, Taylor Swift would be like one of the most popular ones there, right? If Taylor Swift says you're the best basketball player, that doesn't mean as much as Michael Jordan saying you're the best basketball player. If Taylor Swift says you're the best musical artist, then that means something, right?
Exactly. So that that that makes a lot of sense. So it's it's about that relevance. And so so so relevance is it as simple as it just like comes from the right vertical, right? So you want to get it from websites where their core topics are mostly about these things. What about websites that are more spread across a lot of stuff like
Yes. That that's actually great kind of segue into this next part because it's not just about where the vertical is. It's also about the content that is being written about that links back to you. If you're in the real estate vertical and you are writing an article about the REI industry, yes, very relevant, very topical, very pertinent. But if you're in the real estate home vertical, but you're writing about underwriting in the loan officer view, obviously there's a disconnect here because you're in the REI space of that vertical and especially when you're dealing with websites that have many verticals. So those ones would be more considered generalists. Those ones have some value and equity for certain verticals but generally I would stay away from them because there is not that much validity in their vertical itself. The content could be relevant, could be topical but the vertical of the website itself is very sparse and very random. like this month it may be very REI focused but then next month and for the next five months it's all about basketball you know that doesn't really help.
So okay so if I'm understanding right this the the slam dunk here is basically if we have a website that's generally about real estate or even better real estate investing. Yep. And or it could even be like you know selling your house different because to Google those are gonna be similar things right. Yep. So, and they're they have a page that's content about this thing specifically. Yeah. And then that page links to your website. That would be like the the zam dunk. But there would be other things, too, right? Like the how authoritative that website is also matters, right? Like I can just go I can go launch a website myself and it could be just about real estate and it's going to have a page on it that's just about real estate investing and that page is going to link to you and that's probably going to do I imagine almost nothing for you.
Yeah. Well certainly because one one of the major factors that Google takes into consideration and users do nowadays is does that website get actual traffic? Does that website actually provide a relevant solution to their base? That is how good quality backlinks are done. One thing that we have to understand just a little bit about this in most circumstances these back links and in Google's eyes are created because it is relevance and topical and valuable. So that typically means you should generally in essence have no control over your backlink portfolio. It is more of a voting card that you don't get to participate in. But through creating good relevant valuable content, that's where good backlinks are supposed to come. And that is the philosophy of the back links itself is making sure that they're relevant and topical and have good traffic that can actually turn into a session on your website.
Okay, that that makes sense. So they have good quality traffic and and does Google know their traffic or is Google mostly looking at their domain authority?
It's looking at both. It it it understands and right now in our world this may change. Who knows what happens five years from now but right now we're most people are using Google tools. So they're using analytics, they're using Adwords, they're using Google Search Console, they're using a plethora of Google tools and Google knows generally speaking what is coming to your website.
Okay, that that makes sense. All right, so that covers relevance, which is about being about the same topic. And then authority comes down to do they have traffic and do they, you know, do they have a lot of backlinks themselves, right? This is kind of like it's it's another analogy I've heard for this. It's kind of like, you know, it's kind of like high school when you're trying to figure out who's popular and who's not. Like the if the popular people think that a different person is popular, that person is probably popular, right? All the nerds think that person's popular. It's probably not true, right? So there's this this game of like all of of like those people thinking that each other are popular if that's a large enough group that actually makes a difference. So So it's it's interesting like the same thing that happens on your website where if you get links from high authority places it makes you more authoritative. Those places need to have links from other high authority places in order for them to be authoritative, right? And it's it's like this this never-ending like web of everybody else is kind of giving to each other authority and some people are like significantly farther along on that and have some of the most authoritative websites in the world and others are others are really really brand new. So if I'm if I'm describing this slam dunk backlink based on what you just said it's going to be on a relevant site that gets a lot of traffic that has a high domain authority because it has a good backlink profile. And then the final thing, let's talk about best practices for this, is that it's going to be on a page that is topically relevant. And then that page is going to link to the site with an anchor text. Anchor text is going to be like that part of the text that looks blue or whatever it is that you can click on. And when you click on that, it takes you to the site. And Google looks at like what, you know, what does that text say as being really relevant? So, if you're building a backlink profile, Zach, what's the most relevant thing for you to put in that text that's going to help you the most?
Yeah. So, there's quite a few different variations for a healthy backlink portfolio. You're going to have a lot of them, and you what I had already stated is that most of this inqual's eyes should not be under your control, but you're going to have some that are it's called your naked URL, which is just your domain. it's just linking to johndde.com. So that's normal, that's natural, that's relevant. But you should also have a variety of keyword specific, industry specific terms. So as an example earlier, I had stated like buy my house quickly for cash. That could be one of those anchor text and that could be a little higher in that that node. There's also links that you can create that are from images or GIFs and those are also relevant and topical. So your backlink portfolio should not be 100% textbased. There should be images. There should be gifts or videos or whatever else is relevant to you and uh how you're marketing. But a lot of those are going to be textoriented. You're going to get some of them that yet again you do not control that are going to be kind of random kind of unique. You're going to get some that say click here. You're going to get some that says like it may be blank so someone did something wrong on the back end. But generally speaking, it should be a variety of different terms, keywords, locations that you are relevant for that are valuable to you and how you serve your market.
And I think I think the really key word here is relevant to what you're trying to rank for, but natural in a sense that like there were there are things that people did to rank years ago. And Google's gotten a lot smarter with this. But it used to be that like if I wanted to rank for sell my house fast for cash, I could just get like a bunch of backlinks with the anchor text sell my house fast for cash all linking to me. And then that would tell the algorithm this is this page is really relevant to this specific thing. rank it well for this specific thing. And Google just gets smarter and smarter over time, right? Google will just look at that now as like that's really sketchy that like all those links say the exact same thing. And you don't have this like normal mix of these different types of ways that they could be linking to your website, right? Because because Google's not looking for people who are good at building backlink profiles. Google's looking for people who just naturally get organic backlink profiles because they're so authoritative in their space and because they're so relevant, right? And SEO work is kind of this this this game of trying to influence the algorithm in your favor. But if you if you don't do it the right way, then then it looks really artificial. And if it looks artificial, then then Google does something like that.
So let's talk about so we talked about like what this slam dunk backlink to get is. How many of those do you need? That's that's the the magic number and what I always look at is your competitors. Where are your competitors at? So, when I do analysis for any of the audits that we perform for any new clients that are looking for SEO or just want kind of a a piece of information, one of the things that we look at is you. And then we pull up five to 10 competitors and we look at where they're at. And what a competitor for organic is is when we type in Google buy my house for cash quickly and we're looking at the top first, second and third organic result and then we grab a few variations of other keywords to see true competition in your area and then we look at their portfolio and determine based on them. So to answer your question very directly, there is no magic number. It is who are you ranking against and how can we provide a relevant backlink authority in the same way you alluded to it a little earlier is that you can have a relevant backlink from Michael Jordan if I'm a basketball player but if Taylor Swift did it it wouldn't have that same weight the same is true because Michael Jordan would be the pinnacle of that number but there are certain people in the industry now like Curry and and a few other LeBron and and various other players that are at their peak now, but some of the new players still are authoritative, but they're not LeBron or or Curry or or Michael Jordan, but they could still provide value. So, thinking of the scale because a backlink is weighted between one and 100, that is how the scale of a backlink portfolio is per me a domain authority is created. And it's not reaching to 100. It's a region where your competitors are at. So if your competitors all have 800 to a,000 backlinks and you have 50, we're not necessarily saying that we need to get you 800 new backlinks. What we're saying is that we need to find that one Michael Jordan backlink that outweighs those 800 that were already created. Does that make sense? It is a very complicated answer, but it is very direct.
Yeah. I the way I like to I like the example you just gave that a way I like to think of it is kind of like a like a bell curve or or like a distribution too. Yeah. Like people assume that like oh I just need like one just really slam dunk backlink or like I just need a ton of backlinks and it's probably like some answer of both. I don't know if you'd agree with me on this where there's like it's natural. If you just pull up any like natural website and you pull up how many backlinks do they have that have like a zero to 10 domain authority? it's probably their biggest bucket because you get a lot of those without even trying. They'll just like show up out of nowhere and you'll just wonder how do these how these backlinks even come into existence, right? And then 11 to 20 is going to be a little bit lower and then 20 to 30 is going to be a little bit lower, right? And it creates this kind of this this this sort of skewed right distribution of of backlink and that and that's that's what Google expects, right? you you're not going to find any websites out there that just have like no backlinks and then just like a hundred 100 domain authority backlinks cuz they're just like killing it with like all the most authoritative websites in the world. Like that's not how it works. If you're gonna have all the people in the NBA saying that that this person is is the or if you're gonna have like the top players in the NBA saying that this person is the best basketball player they know, there's probably also going to be a lot of other Joe that are saying that too because there's no world where everybody in the NBA believes that this is a great basketball player, but nobody else in the world knows about them, right? So that's that's natural for Google, right? But like it's it's so it's not just about the Michael Jordan. It's not just about Joemo down the street. It's sort of this like natural, you know, this natural distribution that you'll see. And like like Zach said, it's it's not about being good. It's about being better than your competition when it comes to this. You just got to have that skyscraper a little taller. And that's where in some industries, if you're entering it from a SEO standpoint, you're you're facing a tough challenge where there's other companies that have spent millions of dollars building their back league profiles. And here you are entering here, the new guy on the street trying to compete with that. And it takes a ton. And then there's other industries where it's less. Thankfully, real estate investment is kind of somewhere in the middle. Like there's people who invest a lot in SEO and real estate investment for sure. But what would you say of a company that's doing really well on on just SEO in general in this industry? What's a typical domain authority?
Yeah, that's a perfect question. So the industry standard right now is between 15 and 25. That is kind of the the standard 15 on the low end, 25 on the higher end. And that is more for like a state specific information. When we look at someone who does more regional or national, it's between like 30 and 40 in that area. And that that's very common. If you do the research of it and please come to me and I will do the research for you. But that is one of the things that I've done so much research in this that that is the the numbers. more local areas like if you're working in one particular state or maybe two states and you're kind of like close some in those like tri- city areas those ones are 15 to 25 area if you're looking more like all the west coast or all the east coast it's between 20 pardon me 30 and 40 range.
Yeah, that's that that's good to know for sure because if you rank your website nationally, it's it's a lot harder versus Google understands that like the local guy that's not that big of a business can be more relevant than the really big business if they're more specific to where they are. Again, that comes to that comes down to the relevance component here. So that that altogether makes a pretty big difference. But yeah, that's something to keep in mind. Like we're not you don't need 100 domain authority in the space. I also we we didn't really explain what domain authority is. it probably makes sense to explain it. There's basically this hypothesis that Google has this metric essentially called the domain authority that measures you know all this authority that's that's being transferred between websites as we described and Google does Google tell you that I think you have to simulate that with third party tools right
Yes. Google does has not specifically stated it they do show you your backlink portfolio in Google search console they've never associated an actual number this is the industry of SEO and and kind of domain authority has kind of come together and each tool will weight it a little different but if you compare apples to apples you'll be able to see that. So don't use Sam brush for one account and then ah rev for another like make sure that you're using the same tool and generally speaking you'll get a good view of what their domain authority would be seeing.
Yeah. So so these tools basically what they built is they've said well we know Google's algorithm works some way kind of like this. We're going to create our own algorithm that works the same way and then it's going to score websites based on domain authority so that we can use these kinds of metrics in SEO right so you can understand oh well I'm not ranking but my competitors are they have a domain authority of 25 my domain authority is three maybe that's why right so that gives you gives you some idea of the metrics so that you can get better and better also domain authority is like a algorithmic metric I think is the right way to say it where we're basically going from zero to 50 and going from 50 to 100, for example, are like significantly different leaps. Each little bit gets like harder and harder and harder, right? So, a lot of people don't like like you can get like 10 domain authority like pretty dang easy. It doesn't take very much, but that doesn't mean that, you know, it'll take that exact same amount to get from 10 to 20 where you really start to get value in this industry. And the domain authority takes into consideration your backlinks, but it takes into consideration your website holistically as well. So like content and things like that. So it is not just an a one metric number that matters. It is kind of a a bigger view of everything.
Cool. Yeah, that's awesome to know. And also important to remember that there's simulated metrics, right? So it doesn't know everything, right? like if there is like cross industry stuff going on you could create a website that has like in theory really high domain authority with these tools but Google's algorithm is smarter than that it's actually not high and that's you know when especially when we get to like black hat SEO type stuff that that gets really really common so so let's talk about that also Zach let's talk about some of the big mistakes that people make when they're building backlink profiles or working with an agency like if I if I'm working with an agency right now and all I know is like I think I get like a few back links a month from them or I bought this package or whatever the case is. You know, what are what are some red flags and what's what's some stuff that happens in the industry that I'd want to be aware of?
Yeah, I I think one of the biggest things that we have to take and be just honest from an industry perspective is that there is this shroud of mysticism like it is this magic fairy wand that is created. It is very programmatic and how they do it matters. Absolutely. So there was a philosophy about backlinky that revolutionized the the way the backlinks are done and it it's been coined kind of outreach instead of back links. Outreach is a more natural organic view. So everything that we spoke about that was good and valuable in backlinks is that kind of scope where backlinks kind of get is a company is unwitting to tell you how they do it. If it is something where they are clouding it with this mysticism and say it's our own proprietary stuff and we just don't give our way our secret sauce. That is something I would be very scared of is because it isn't mysticism. It isn't a a a wand or a singular button. It is a process. It is not easy to create back links and it is done so purposefully. The next thing I would be concerned with is that if you were given the the links, always view them. Always check it out. look at the back links. If you ever need an audit of your back links from one of your competitors or from one of your your agencies you work with, bring them to me. I will walk through that with you to show you what it is. And I will be completely honest if it's doing good or bad for your website. But generally speaking, some of the bad things that happen on backlinks is that they create what's called a link farm. And a link farm is where they own the back links. They own the websites and it is just their network of blogs that they've created to try to be vertically specific. But there is no traffic, there is no value. It is just trying to please an algorithm. And in some circumstances, it does in the very beginning, but it's not if, it's when Google catches it, those link fonts get taken down. There are tons of them throughout the SEO industry that has seen massive massive detriment to clients through many verticals because of this practice. The next thing is I I would say more of a location specific. So, if you go on Fiverr or you go on any of those paid tools and you look at the website and you find out that you're a local business in Utah, but you're getting a metric ton of backlinks from India, China, Vietnam, those are not relevant. Google knows that you're buying those that that that there's no it you're not putting the wool over their eyes like they know exactly what's happening there. And then the next thing is that when you do an audit of the actual backlink itself, there's something is called a no follow back links which they create an anchor text. It is relevant on a website. It gets good traffic but then they tag it with this thing called no follow. It's a programmatic term that is telling bots, not just Google, but bots to no follow the link, which means that you're saying to Google, do not give this website credit from my website. So, this is a way back links, the way I've always kind of equated it. Think of it like a big pole of water. And every backlink, you're creating a straw that drips a little bit of water from your tank to someone else's tank. Okay? When you do the no follow, you create the the straw, but there's a plug. So, you're not actually giving value to the client or to the website. My apologies. The next part is it's called a reciprocal link. So, that means I link to you, you link to me. there's no equity actually falling through. So Google has in essence basically said this provides no value. It's a wash. There's nothing that's done here. Those are some really big mistakes when you're speaking of backlinks is that it's nomnesticism. It it is something that they're doing to make it easy and scalable. Sure, I understand that. But I should be able to understand how you're acquiring those back links. That is something that we are very transparent in. That is something that we make sure you understand what we're doing generally, where we're going, why we're going there, and trying to provide those. And that is something that I I believe is like if I were to break it down, those would be the like big ones.
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And it's fascinating to me this this dynamic of of how agencies work in this space because there's in some ways a misalignment of incentives, right? Because you're a real estate investor, you hire an SEO company. What do you want to see and what do you pressure them to get you? I want to see rankings fast, right? And the crazy thing is then these agencies, they start to do this stuff that gets rankings but not the right kind of rankings fast, right? It's kind of like the artificial version of of what you actually want, right? So, so that's where like I get caught up. I honestly don't know how any real estate investor could reasonably pick an SEO agency. And the reason is if anything like c can they judge all the SEO agencies based on how they do their work? Probably not, right? because it takes expertise in order to figure that out. That's why you're hiring the experts, right? So, because you don't know that yourself, right? And and that's normal. That's how it should be. All right. So, then how do you know that they're good or bad? Well, by the results, right? But black hat SEO actually works faster and better than normal SEO does. It just crashes and burns at some point. And the agency collects all that all that money from the client. And then, you know, guess who doesn't answer their phone anymore after it crashes and burns? is that that same agency, right? So, it's it's an interesting kind of like misalignment of incentives where it I don't know how how that that's why we're making this series. I think it's good for a business owner to like learn a little bit about this so they understand what to do because if if you're just if someone's just selling you SEO. I mean, I could I could tell you like look, we'll get you a bunch of backlinks that are this domain authority, but then you know what about relevance? Oh, and if it's relevant, okay, I'll make sure that they're relevant. Okay. Well, what about like are they reciprocal links? Okay. Well, no, they're not reciprocal links. Well, are they part of a PBN? And like there's just a million little things that you could do that there's like no end to it, right? Where like I could always find some way to give you something that's like quote unquote valuable but isn't actually valuable. And there's so it's like there there's just ample opportunity for the agency to deceive the client, which I think is what makes it a little bit of a hard a hard game. I do want to talk I do want to ask you Zach though because you know we talked about what this slam dunk like link does look like and and what are backlink profiles that aren't good things to watch out for all that kind of stuff. So, I feel like I have this good idea in my mind of like, well, what what should it look like, but I don't have any idea how you actually get there. Like, I know I need a really high domain authority, really relevant site, and I need to have like the right mixes of different anchor text in there and relevant content that it's coming from and all that stuff and all that's really important, but how do you actually do that? Right? Because I can't just go on someone else's website and publish content.
Yeah. Yeah. That's the that's the magic sauce of it all, right? is the way that I believe it should be done is following the outreach approach where we connect with and build relationships with industry specific leaders that have blogs and content pieces that are relevant, topical, valuable, can generate lots of content. And the way that we work with them is we communicate. We say, "Hey, Joe, realtor, we see that you are a a prominent figure in this space. You have a really good blog that talks about all of the different things in our general industry and you're not associated to a specific broker or a competitor, but so we see that you provide value to the industry. What I would like to do for you, Joe website, is write an article for you that you can publish. It links to one of my clients. It is going to provide you with good relevant content that you don't need to pay for. And it's something that we'll provide for you. All we ask is this these few requirements, the anchor tags, making sure it's no follow, not reciprocal, and making sure that we're reaching out and creating those relationships. So, it is not just us creating our own network. We're reaching out to websites and and industry leaders that are able to create those backlinks for us. That is why we're not necessarily trying to pump out 500 backlinks in one month, one quarter, one year. We're working with in the confines of your vertical, working in a place or a website that is hyper relevant towards you. And the tool that we use to gather a lot of this information is called Soundrush. It's a quite expensive tool, but it is that for a reason, but it allows us to find those opportunities for you and we reach out to them and coordinate and make sure that we're getting you the best possible links. So in a nutshell, summarizing a couple hour process into a few minutes, but yes, because it is timely. You got to go back and forth. You have to create the content yourself. In some circumstances, we also try to review their website to see if there's a place that can easily link to you because it would be relevant already. But yet again, that's a lot of leg work that I know as a real estate investor, you just don't have time. You need to be out there making the deals. we get the backlinks for you.
Yeah. No, it's super fair. So, yeah, to summarize that, it's basically a sales outreach strategy where you reach out and it's against Google's policies to go to someone and say, "Hey, I'll pay you this money to put this back link." Now, it's not against Google's policies to pay someone else to then spend the time trying to get a backlink organically, right? But it has to be organic, right? How do you get someone to do something? You have to give them something of value, right? So, you have to understand what kind of content you could write for them. sometimes writing an article in advance to show them, hey, I have this available for you and I'd like to post it on your website. And for them, it's kind of a no-brainer, right? It's like they're they're working hard to build their own content all the time. Well, now I've got more content and I didn't have to pay anything for it. All I have to do is just link out to the site from the content, which is a normal thing to do. Content that won't necessarily hurt them. I do want to share one other thing though that investors can do. There is a specific tool if you're looking to add a little bit of your time towards building your backlink profile where you can do something as like as the investor, as the owner of the business that it's kind of hard for an agency to do for you. And that's a tool called Harrow. It's H A R O. And what it stands for is help a reporter out. And this is a tool you can go sign up for it. And what you'll get is an email. I want to say, Zach, isn't it like three times a day or something?
Yep. It's it's pretty it's pretty often. I actually did this to get some backlings for my own business probably five years ago. I haven't touched it since. But what you do is is they'll give you this emails. The reason it's called help a reporter out is because a reporter goes to this tool when they're wanting to site an expert in something that they're that they're writing and you'll get this email that breaks out like all these different topics of articles that reporters are writing on and they'll be asking for experts to help with different things there. If you then respond and send to the right person your like quote or your insight on it or whatever the case is. In some rare cases there might be an interview or something that they want to do with you. A lot of people are going to do that. But if you can provide them something that they like more than those other options or something like that then they will they will post the the article and you know common is for them to link to you and your website when they when they site you as a source. So, do you just kind of get those emails and you focus on responding to them pretty frequently? You'll you'll notice, I mean, you won't win every single time, but you'll you can kind of organically gather some authority from that having other reporters writing articles where they're citing you as the expert on a particular thing and linking back to your website. And that's that's good good quality backlinks for Google as well.
And that that's that's perfect. Just one final thing as well and this is a a free tip is that there is a lot of local websites that are maybe local or regional or multi-state that work. I live in Utah, so KSL is one of them. And it's a gigantic website that houses news, classified ads, it houses, you can get jobs, you can post job listings, like it just kind of like this all-encompassing thing basically, but for Utah.
Exactly. Exactly. So there are websites that are regionally specific, state specific, city specific that you'll be able to go on as well to create those individual listings, postings, backlinks, and from there that's going to generate a lot of value as well cuz they do get a lot of searches. They do bring a lot of value to you and the business. I I believe when I did the search last time, KSL regionally here, I think it was like 2.7 million a month users that searched for that website. Like that is no small drop in the hat and I live in Utah.
Yes. Yeah, fair enough. Although, tell me this, Zach. So, yeah, KSL is valuable, but I mean, is it valuable for me to just like go on Craigslist and go link to my website there? Like, that's a backlink. It's technically from a website that has high traffic.
It depends on how it's done. I would say it dep I I guess it depends on the intent because Craigslist has such a aversity in in what you can do. Generally speaking, I would say staying away from like national things because then it's unless you're a national company, it isn't going to be as relevant for the users. So, but if they do have a very I'm not using just Craigslist, but any website that's national. If they do have a location specific section, absolutely. That would be absolutely valuable, would be incredibly useful, and would provide you a good back link.
Okay. Amazing. Well, thank you for taking the time today, Zach. For everybody else listening, we will have what I plan on being our last episode of the series. Next time we're going to talk all about Google business profile and local citations. And that's a fun one because it's a pretty big important and growing and important thing in in this particular industry. So we'll jump into that next time and thanks for listening and I'll see you next week.