Kevin Phelps – Locally Focused Link Building

This deep dive by Kevin Phelps during Digital Marketing League covers the role and importance of link building locally-focused marketing campaigns. The afternoon was powered by Textbroker and friends.

Kevin W. Phelps, of Leadgenix and Multifuse, leads a deep dive Digital Marketing League session covering the role and importance of link building in locally-focused marketing campaigns.

Read the full transcript

[00:00:04.970] – Kevin Phelps

Well, thank you, Cody, and again, very happy to be part of the digital marketing league and to be here talking. I definitely got started pretty young in the digital marketing world. And so I’m thirty now, but I got started, I got started in high school with a lot of this working for a company called Orange Soda and eventually worked at SEO.com and then went out on my own. I’ve owned a link building agency that I eventually sold.

[00:00:40.880] – Kevin Phelps

After a few years, I was part of another link building agent. Well, I’m still part of another link building agency and just yeah,  my experience kind of goes in a lot of different directions. But right now I’m focused on Leadgenix, which is a locally-focused agency, digital marketing agency that kind of focuses on the customer journey as a whole. So it’s end to end type of marketing instead of just being focused on an exclusive area.

[00:01:16.880] – Kevin Phelps

So you can go to the next slide, Cody.

[00:01:22.080] – Kevin Phelps

And so a little bit more on that, I’m going to throw in my shameless plug here again, my current focus is Leadgenix and we do focus on that more integrated marketing type of approach. So that covers everything from organic SEO, organic social to to paid ads and development. The email marketing, part of it, analytics reviews, setting up CRM to the full thing, because it’s a lot of locally focused companies that obviously they need all of this, all of these solutions to really have each part of that buyer’s journey, of that customer journey accounted for.

[00:02:01.050] – Kevin Phelps

And so we’re really trying to be that instant marketing department. So getting started on this on this next slide, Cody. So, you know, when we look when I look at a well-rounded marketing campaign, local or not, you need a solution for each stage of that customer journey. And so naturally, it’s going to be one of those stages and link building is going to be a big component of that. And so, you know, in my experience of running campaigns and building campaigns, I would definitely say that within a locally focused campaign, which is more specifically what we’re trying to tailor this presentation around 25 to 40 percent of that campaign, the efforts, the budget really should be taken using link building.

[00:02:54.620] – Kevin Phelps

And so in this presentation, when I’m talking about how the importance of link building plays into a locally focused campaign, I really want to speak to those that that might be running locally focused campaign or whether you’re an agency or in-house. But, you know, when I when I look at this and we look at the big picture of your overall marketing campaign budget, if that’s if that’s like most businesses, eight to 10 percent of your gross revenue and you’re doing a million a year, then about seven thousand dollars a month needs to be going to your marketing efforts.

[00:03:33.410] – Kevin Phelps

And if so, is hypothetically 20 percent of that budget, then that means you have a fourteen hundred dollars locally focused campaign, which is a healthy budget, an appropriate budget, in my opinion. There’s plenty of lower budget options out there. But I won’t I won’t go into detail on what I think about that. But if you’re if you have a fourteen hundred dollar per month budget, three hundred and fifty to six hundred dollars of that is would typically go to one building, in my opinion.

[00:04:07.340] – Kevin Phelps

And when you look at that, that’s about four to six links per month for a locally focused campaign. That’s pretty that’s pretty normal. That’s going to be able to get you enough targeted links over the course of six to 12 months locally-focused you’re going to really see those results in your campaign. Most of them, anyways, that’s probably pretty appropriate. So moving on to that next slide, what does the industry think? Are backlinks essential? I won’t spend too much time on this.

[00:04:42.470] – Kevin Phelps

But, you know, link-building, while it is certainly in some ways, I feel like it’s universally accepted as being critically important, it’s one of the more opinionated topics aside from politics and religion, in my opinion. I think  link-building is probably one of those topics that everyone has a different experience with. And that’ certainly great. But sometimes you can get some conflicting opinions and information when you when you start trying to learn and research these things.

[00:05:18.260] – Kevin Phelps

While Google has gotten smarter, links are just as important as ever and they’ve ever been. I mean, I include a few of these quotes from three notable publications, a trust being a major one, obviously, search engine journals of popular ones as well as local. And all of them very much continue to understand that link building has always been important. It’s important now and it’s going to be important in the future. And so making it part of any campaign, but certainly a local campaign is going to yield results if done right.

[00:05:53.420] – Kevin Phelps

So next slide. Now, since my talk is about how links relate to a local campaign, there’s definitely some clear difference between link-related building at the national level and the local level, national campaigns, generally speaking, the higher authority of links and more of them overall local campaigns, since the companies that you are trying to compete against traditionally don’t have quite as many links, so you don’t need quite as many of them. But something that’s fairly beneficial for local campaigns that maybe isn’t as necessary at the national level is making sure that there is some local relevance to those links.

[00:06:42.470] – Kevin Phelps

Not all of them have to be locally-focused and relevant. I would probably recommend not spending all your time on building locally focused campaigns for your local campaign just because you can start to run out of opportunities and ignore other really good opportunities. But it’s certainly a good idea.

[00:07:01.400] – Kevin Phelps

So, you know, national campaigns, like I said, need those higher authority links and more of them. And there are always outliers, as some local markets are. Extremely difficult, but I think most would agree that the most competitive local campaign isn’t anywhere as competitive as the most competitive national campaign. So, you know, for local campaigns, there’s a greater need for those locally relevant links and to be more targeted. But for the sake of clarity here, I’m not saying that all links for local campaign need to be locally relevant, but it’s a good idea.

[00:07:39.230] – Kevin Phelps

And I’m not saying that relevance isn’t really important with the national campaign either, but this is just a broad differentiator of between what should be emphasized for a local campaign and a local one. Next slide.

[00:07:54.610] – Kevin Phelps

So overall, when you’re developing a link building campaign for local business or national one, for that matter, you need to based on what Google already considers to be eligible and profile, you need to know what Google is looking for and ranking already so that you can start to develop a plan based on it.

[00:08:14.590] – Kevin Phelps

And so what better way to do that than to let Google give you those answers and develop your own answer to the quality and quantity argument? And the best way to do that is to base it on your competitors that are already leading in your space. So to do this, to do this easily, find your trophy keyword or at least a few of them and gather the domains that organically rank know, I probably wouldn’t include results or competitors that are within the local park.

[00:08:46.420] – Kevin Phelps

But if you are looking at the organic section, grab the ones from there. But omit the directories and the other large companies like Yelp and like Yellow Page type of results. What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to find the average amount of referring domains, not backlinks, but referring domains in each domain authority tie across all of those competitors. You don’t have to use domain authority as as your leading indicator. A domain language, which is just as fair, in my opinion, as Moz. But, you know, when you search in Moz, they give you this nice handy graph that I’ve included in this example of.

[00:09:38.980] – Kevin Phelps

Where and where links and of how many links you fall into, into these domain three buckets. So I’m just using them as the example. So what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to find that average. What is the average amount of referring domains that Google is telling us that are needed to rank for this the whatever given keyword? And to do this again, we just use the law of averages. And looking at this data and as a side note, you know, this is a really great way to set expectations with clients and and base your strategy on something that’s actually data driven as opposed to I’ve seen a lot of companies that try to run a campaign, an SEO campaign or they’re getting started and they’re just saying, let’s try telling of it’s like not basing it off of anything.

[00:10:37.030] – Kevin Phelps

You’re just throwing something at the wall, seeing if it sticks. And you know that sometimes that works out, sometimes it doesn’t. But if you can come at this a little bit more intentional than your results are probably going to be a little bit better. And so this is also a great idea to use this when it comes to trying to find a budget during the proposal process for your potential clients. If that’s your campaign, it takes up, you know, like I said, 25 to 40 percent of a budget.

[00:11:05.530] – Kevin Phelps

Then you need to, this is an easy way for you to start to figure out and calculate how much they need to be spending for them to be able to actually get results. Because if you know, if you’re trying to rank a dentist in New York City on a $1,000 a month, that’s your budget. Probably not going to work out strictly because of what the competition and search result pages are demanding. So next slide.

[00:11:39.070] – Kevin Phelps

Once you have the answer to your building strategy by using that that method and you need to execute on it, you know, the best way I can recommend doing this, first and foremost, is just making sure that you approach every link, opportunity or strategy with just this underlying concept of making sure that the links are justified.

[00:11:59.130] – Kevin Phelps

And what I mean by this is make sure that your links have a purpose for existing once you build them and make sure they deserve their spot on, that page and that they are actually helping the end user, the reader. You know, a great example of this in this slide from our wonderful event coordinators, Textbroker went through their links to have a lot of links. And actually they’ve been around for quite some time. And most of them fit that mold of what I would consider to be justified, whether men, whether they were manually built or not.

[00:12:36.510] – Kevin Phelps

When they are justified, you really can’t tell if they were built naturally or not. But that’s also kind of the point. A justified link stands on its own and it doesn’t look at it doesn’t look out of place. And so in this example, Martech.zone published an article titled Your Complete Content Marketing Checklist and used Textbroker’s infographic as as a supplementary source for that information that they’re providing to their users. This is a very common way to build links.

[00:13:06.570] – Kevin Phelps

This is a natural way to build links. But, you know, I want to call attention to it because you notice what you don’t see or try to notice what you don’t see. You don’t you don’t see generic. You don’t see it being on a generic website. You may not see categories on this website fr for gardening and home improvement alongside something about recipes and how to tell your kids  they’re very much on a topic website.

[00:13:38.040] – Kevin Phelps

And you don’t and you don’t see exact match or text or that that idea of just like a baseless mention that that doesn’t contribute to the article, the mention of that link for Textbroker. It’s very natural. It’s very it’s justified. Also, if  you need content writers, take a look at Textbroker you know. That’s often times whatlink-building sometimes can turn into as just these baseless mentions that don’t actually contribute at all to the articles.

[00:14:12.260] – Kevin Phelps

It’s a random recommendation and it just makes you wonder why is it even here if it doesn’t? The topic is about content writing. Sure, but we’re not talking about trying to find the content writer necessarily. And so that’s just what you don’t want to do. But this is a great example of what you do want to do next. OK, so justified links, again, mean that you’re providing value and, you know, you can provide value in a lot of ways.

[00:14:43.990] – Kevin Phelps

You can educate or you should be educating on some type of topic or are providing a useful tool. Whether, you know, lots of times people build calculators for whatever relates to their field. You can answer a question on a Q&A type of website citing a source or providing credit to the image or the infographics like the one that we just viewed. That’s what linkoftentimes another good example of what it means to be building just five links.

[00:15:18.950] – Kevin Phelps

And on the next slide, you know, to truly  understand the idea of a justified link means to also understand the opposite, what is not justified. And so, you know, potentially there’s new SEOs that may be in this in this conference. And so I do want to touch on it. And so, like it says, obtaining a link without any reason or merit, for example, being including a link within an article that may be topically relevant but doesn’t contribute to the article’s purpose or answer any further questions the reader might have.

[00:15:55.040] – Kevin Phelps

And so much of this sounds like common sense. Of course, all links should be there for a reason. But unfortunately, when links become a commodity, as they did many, many years ago, profit will take precedence over purpose. And you’re left with mindless links strategies that will get you penalized like by using a private blog network, or other strategies whose purpose is more so to trick Google, or just get the job done as opposed to actually contributing value to the Internet or that website or the article that your link is within.

[00:16:34.340] – Kevin Phelps

So next slide. So this is what leads me to what strategies are actually worth pursuing. And so, you know, if you want to be on the right side of Google’s guidelines, I would recommend using tactics and means that maintain editorial control. So editorial control, meaning something where the the webmaster, again, the editor is adding the link for you or you’re providing content and they’re publishing it for you. It’s not just you adding something, clicking, publish, and there it is for the world to see.

[00:17:14.130] – Kevin Phelps

It’s going through somebody else’s eyes. That that. Own potentially owned or controlled that website, so strategies that traditionally maintain editorial control around the top half of this graph, the lower half of the graph are strategies that you can use that don’t really require a human to allow that to exist. Not all of them are ill advised local citations, slide sharing. Still, Q&A websites, they’re all great to get links from. They’ll probably be no follow links. So depending on how you feel about no follow links, you can use those user strategies.

[00:17:55.910] – Kevin Phelps

But still, they’re not typically spammy strategies inherently. But once you get on the lower end of that graph, start getting in the strategies that I personally don’t believe have a place in a legitimate marketing campaign anymore. I’m sure some would disagree with this, but I don’t think that most would, you know, press release, distribution companies, the  PBNs or doing comment links, just to general web directories, Web 2.0 links, buying spy domains and redirecting them or anything from Fiverr.

[00:18:34.970] – Kevin Phelps

Generally speaking, these are strategies that are, you know, again, like coming off easy and don’t require editorial review and so much so that either Google has outright come come out against them or or Google has gotten so good at figuring out how to how to combat these, that even if you do use them, they may not provide anything for you. And if they do, maybe it’s temporary. It’s just it’s just risky. And it’s certainly not worth having as part of a client campaign since, you know, you’re supposed to be in that position of being the agency.

[00:19:15.020] – Kevin Phelps

You’re supposed to be the one that’s providing them with value and results in a safe way. But if you’re in-house, I also think it’s kind of ill advised. But, you know, everything on the right side of this graph I typically consider to be it’s just they’re harder, more unpredictable strategies, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But if you’re running a campaign that’s really tight on budget, these can be kind of difficult as well. Link reclamation can be extremely effective for some industries, but not all asset promotion, you know, like infographics that we looked at obviously requires the effort and funds of building an asset that’s worth sharing first.

[00:20:01.760] – Kevin Phelps

And you better hope that others find it as interesting as you do. Then there’s manual outreach, which is just kind of the catch all you need to make sure that you’re reaching out. You need to make sure that you’re reaching out with a real purpose to the webmaster. It’s not like webmasters are just itching to take time out of their day to add links to their sites. So your intent better be creative and meaningful. And so sometimes that can be just time consuming and and difficult to figure out and certainly very difficult to scale.

[00:20:33.990] – Kevin Phelps

Now, looking at that top top left section, scholarship’s can be pretty useful, but obviously you need the funds to back it up so that can get kind of expensive. Industry directories are typically paid at this point for any type of helpful listing, but they’re great sources for links and leads. Like I wouldn’t really consider that a paid link because you’re not exactly paying for the link and it might it might very well be nofollow anyway. So it’s a link.

[00:21:04.850] – Kevin Phelps

And I would recommend doing it because it’s certainly helpful, even just from a lead standpoint. There’s guest blogging, which is my personal favorite. It’s what I’ve modeled two companies around that I’ve been successful with. And it’s my personal favorite. Like I said, it’s also kind of a favorite of the industry because it’s scalable. It’s easy to provide value. And with those two, that’s kind of a winning combination. You know, Google likes to talk about, you know, the guest blogging may not work or some people are adamantly against guest blogging. It’s one of those strategies where, you know, if you if you stay true to it and in its purest form, it’s still legitimate and effective.

[00:21:52.100] – Kevin Phelps

It’s one of those things where, you know, how much time you spend to show value is directly going to correlate with how legitimate your link is going to be. And that’s very, very true with guest blogging. Any of those strategies on the Top End could legitimately be spammy, just depending on your mindset. But they’re also very easy to just, you know. Work and work well and be a link that you don’t have to really worry about coming back to bite you.

[00:22:27.690] – Kevin Phelps

And so. Then naturally, tht that bottom right section is going to isn’t going to have any strategies in it, and you know why? Well, it’s because why would someone put great effort towards a link that isn’t going to be legitimate? It’s easy for someone to justify getting a lot of links illegitimately because it doesn’t require a lot of effort. But why would someone spend a lot of effort on a illegitimately? You know, it just wouldn’t make sense.

[00:22:54.730] – Kevin Phelps

But now that only lends additional credibility to just the idea of working with websites that maintain editorial control.

[00:23:05.380] – Kevin Phelps

And so next slide. And that’s part of my pitch to be  part of this conference. I kind of made a funny mistake that I didn’t realize until after I got into building my slide that it’s just I mentioned that as part of my talk we’d look at campaigns. That do and do not utilize link-building and that will look at the differences in results. And while that seems helpful, I’d literally just be showing you slides of websites that rank well and their competitor that doesn’t see.

[00:23:42.840] – Kevin Phelps

Look, he ranks well, and that’s also because he has a better profile. And so it’s I think it’s I think that’s a given at this point from the billion studies that have been done about link building before this talk. And so I figured we’d still take a look, a quick glance at the search result and compare the count of referring domains the website has in relation to what position they are in search results. This is for the keyword of Atlanta heating and AC, and as expected, those with more referring domains generally ranked better than those that don’t.

[00:24:17.890] – Kevin Phelps

Big surprise. And so I didn’t quite think that through and wanting to include this part, this type of information in my slide deck. But ultimately, the search engines need to see links. They need to see plenty of other things, too. But I’m going to die on the mountain with this opinion that links are the most valuable ranking factor, if for nothing else. But to start conversations with my colleagues and argue with them about X, I think it’s fun.

[00:24:47.780] – Kevin Phelps

But obviously, for you, you can’t rank with junk content either. Links aren’t going to get you there. And there’s just there’s no silver bullet when it comes to the search engines. And so we can certainly accept that link building is very much a top ranking factor and that you need it. But it should be. There are things that you need to be doing for that. You certainly need to make sure that your website is nicely optimized, that it’s fast, it’s mobile-friendly, all that stuff.

[00:25:13.100] – Kevin Phelps

But, you know, naturally, a lot of that stuff can be done the first couple of months of a campaign. And it’s it’s not something you need to do every month, but link-building is. And so definitely get that stuff done before you start the linking campaign. And please, please make sure that you’re building campaigns are actually based on data that you see within the Google search result page. Don’t just, you know, freely go out and try to throw links at your website and see what sticks.

[00:25:43.070] – Kevin Phelps

It’s so it’s a little bit of a waste of time. It’s still obviously might work, but, you know, we can be smarter, I guess. And so I appreciate the time that I’ve had to speak with you guys. I’m getting done a little bit early on this. I’m sure it might be a little bit welcome since it’s Friday afternoon. So everyone’s kind of eager to get  their weekend started. And so I’ll definitely be here for questions.

[00:26:12.680] – Kevin Phelps

But that was my talk. And thank you for for being a part of it.

[00:26:25.990] – Cody Christensen

Thank you for taking the time, having to get to the slide deck. Obviously with links and content, like you said, that’s an age old argument that you can see a new blog post on it every day. But I think we’ve kind of been we have a good balance, right. Textbroker is a content expert with the content company. We’ve had multiple presentations of leads, or links, excuse me.

[00:26:52.900] – Cody Christensen

So at the end of the day, they’re definitely both very important. And I think we will open this up now to the Q&A session. Go ahead and ask questions. I know a lot of questions have already been asked about links, but if you have any remaining questions, please ask what we have. Kevin here. Like I said, he’s been doing this for a while. He said multiple businesses that specialize in links and building great link profiles.

[00:27:19.750] – Cody Christensen

And so, yeah. Phillip, I don’t know if you have some questions you want to start out with and kind of let you ask and then I’ll group what’s left?

[00:27:32.230] – Phillip Thune

We we had Jim Boykin on earlier and he mentioned something that I thought was really interesting. And then you kind of mentioned it as well. So he was talking about, you  go look and see if there are websites that have a link on their page.

[00:27:52.000] – Phillip Thune

But that link is now dead, right? There’s there’s no site anymore. And so his his advice in that scenario was reach out to whoever owns that page and say, hey, I noticed that you have this link. There’s something that doesn’t work anymore. I just thought you might want to know that I’ve written this great article on the same topic and an honor if you link to me instead of something like that. And then he said, once you’ve done that, there’s tools where you can just find maybe  100 other people linking  to that site which is now dead. The one thing he didn’t say and I didn’t have a chance to ask him this question

[00:28:26.800] – Phillip Thune

So, I’ll ask you, what about just buying that domain? You said sort of an easy no editorial part of your chart or your graph. You said, well, you could buy expired domains. Is there a reason to do it the way Jim was talking about just buying that domain, and then putting your content on that domain? I mean, if obviously, if you’re running out like link reclamation campaign because you see a competitor has a broken link and that website is available to buy.

[00:28:59.900] – Kevin Phelps

I mean. You certainly could do that. It seems like a lot of effort, especially if you’re going to set that website up and then try to link. But I mean, that seems like the big effort part. But if you’re just buying that domain and then redirecting it to you for that one link, you’ve got to understand you’re getting a whole lot of other links, too. So, you know, if it’s a whole lot of other links that are still relevant, then you can certainly could do that.

[00:29:36.970] – Kevin Phelps

I’m more talking about probably just doing that a lot. That’s probably what you probably wouldn’t want to do if you’re just doing it here and there, that that might be helpful. But if certainly if that website’s already up, and that page is up, and they just it’s a broken link to your competitor, then email that webmaster and say, hey, can we swap this out? It might work. It might not. That’s the problem with outreach.

[00:30:05.740] – Kevin Phelps

And, you know, in that example, you’re you are providing value because you’ve identified a broken link. But, you know, it’s going to be pretty low on that webmaster’s to do list to go swap this link out. I don’t know that there are situations where that does work, but it’s got to be a big play to get any links at scale.

[00:30:32.560] – Cody Christensen

So, we have a question here from Scott, he asked it this morning. He also wants to hear your take on it. He said if you have a blog on your website and of course, you’re linking to one of your product pages, is it also a good idea to link from that blog that you wrote to another website that might be an authority with the content you’re writing? Of course assuming obviously you’re not to a competitor?

[00:30:56.750] – Kevin Phelps

I’m just trying to understand, if you have a blog on your website…

[00:31:01.630] – Phillip Thune

In other words, if you have a blog on your website about cameras, you’re going to point to the camera you sell on your website. I think he’s asking how important is it to link to, you know, not somebody else who sells the same camera, but somebody maybe who’s done a review of the cameras? Is there somebody who’s an authority on cameras? So  how important is the linking out versus linking in?

[00:31:24.850] – Kevin Phelps

I ean, I haven’t really seen any studies that that talk about how much more valid. Google may consider your blog post for linking to other relevant topics. It seems logical that. That if you are if you’re outbound links are relevant, that that they they would see that as just being normal and effective. The rational side of me thinks that that’s hat’s still a good idea. The SEO side of my brain says you’re giving somebody else link equity, which obviously is something that in some ways kind of want to hoard.

[00:32:08.790] – Kevin Phelps

But if they’re deserving of that link, then and they helped contribute to the article that you wrote, then you probably should, more morally speaking. When it strictly comes to if your belief is in link equity, then there is a part of me that says that may actually hurt you kind of a little bit. I guess what I’m trying to say is. certainly, build your content. That s going to help your business grow and do it in a way that’s going to benefit the reader the most.

[00:32:51.330] – Kevin Phelps

And if that means linking to another source, then I think that you should do that.

[00:32:57.140] – Cody Christensen

Yeah, I think that’s a great, great answer. I think that answer this question is the key. Obviously, you can see his response, but in Phillip’s example and I know, Scott, this probably not in the camera industry, but just something to look out for, too, is even though you’re linking to maybe like a review of that certain camera. You’ve got to be careful that they’re not an affiliate for somebody else. Where you’re passing that link along, where you’re not getting a return out of it. You’re actually giving them the opportunity to promote whatever they’re affiliated with.

[00:33:29.090] – Kevin Phelps

If you can turn and if you’re concerned about the linkages argument and then just throw a no follow tag on it, I guess. I mean, Textbroker’s becoming an authority in this space, do you think that their outbound links and the link equity that they were giving away is really hindered teir their progress? It’s not a measurable thing.

[00:33:57.220] – Phillip Thune

Yeah, I was gonna say you mentioned no follow, and I think it’s been interesting to kind of see what smart SEOs, people smart on link-building have reacted to Google’s different stances on that.

[00:34:13.900] – Phillip Thune

I think initially it was if there was no follow, then what was what point? Why am I working hard to get this link if it’s a no follow link? And now Google is saying, well, you know, even though it’s no follow, we sort of  don’t just ignore that completely. Where do you come out on that?

[00:34:36.530] – Kevin Phelps

In my opinion, it starts to look so granular that you start driving yourself insane when it comes to link building because there’s not a definitive answer on whether or not no follow is actually helpful. Does it or does it not contribute to a balanced profile, or whether that matters or not.

[00:34:58.010] – Kevin Phelps

You know, it’s just like it gets links that help the user and and the rest will follow. You can  just start to get so ingrained in it that you’re so overly concerned about no follow tags. You’re so overly concerned that, you know you found a link in your link profile that was from like a questionable science. Like as long as that’s not like the bulk of your links,  links not going to matter. It’s like people need to be looking at link-building a little bitmore on a 10,000 foot view instead of driving themselves crazy about the little things. I see that a lot that’s hard to deal with.

[00:35:49.700] – Cody Christensen

So kind of my question, and obviously,  you were focused on that with your presentation and in the presentations prior, it was kind of just I don’t know which way from international building. I know you said in your maybe second slide about the local links. I know you had the results of like it was like pro auto or something like that.

[00:36:19.160] – Cody Christensen

So I’m just wondering, for people who may be in the audience who are just local businesses, what are maybe some tips and tricks you would recommend that they could start with in terms of link building or generating interest to get them competing with who’s already doing? Well, like you said, you could look on Mars or you could look on Majestic or whatever and see what your competition’s doing. But what are some tips and tricks they could take as kind of like smaller stores to get up to that before they hired somebody like Leadgenix to help push them even further?

[00:36:55.060] – Kevin Phelps

For the traditional business owner to attempt to link building on their own. I think it’s I think it’s a complete waste of their time, honestly, because if you can buy. And if you can if you can use a link building agency like the one that I’m still affiliated with named I called multiphase, but there’s there’s plenty of link agencies which lets, you know, finding the right one is told a whole nother conversation. But for you to be able to spend one hundred bucks on that, you’re going to be saving yourself.

[00:37:35.720] – Kevin Phelps

And just hours of annoyance and frustration, I really don’t think for a business owner to be building their own links that it’s worth it. It’s Lauras got it right, ours and so forth. And if you can work with a company that can just take care of this, it is completely worth your time and money. One hundred percent. Right.

[00:37:57.760] – Cody Christensen

And that’s a fair answer. Like the tip is don’t genuinely. Yeah, it’s just. You know, the reason why it’s so easy for me or for multiverses is because we already have those relationships with publishers. We only have the processes in place and we know what to do for a business owner. It’s like building is already kind of a foreign concept on its own when it comes to marketing. It’s something that’s very unique to just the CEO type of marketing and that it’s just not worth your time.

[00:38:39.710] – Phillip Thune

I think you gave kind of interesting guidance into which a pretty valuable in terms of how to think about how much money you can afford or how much money you should be spending on marketing than on a CEO, then maybe unlink building. I think the next question, which is what you just kind of raised, is how do you how do you pick somebody? Right. So if the advice is, well, this is not something you should be doing yourself, you’re not an expert in it.

[00:39:05.300] – Phillip Thune

It’s going to take you way too long for the return. And we all know, right, that there’s once you get into local marketing firms or firms that can help you there, it’s its could be a minefield.

[00:39:16.550] – Phillip Thune

Any advice on what to look for, what signal to somebody that that this is a company they should hire for kind of the full spectrum marketing spectrum?

[00:39:30.800] – Phillip Thune

And then I don’t know. Is it if you can find somebody who’s good on the full spectrum, do you then need to hire even subspecialty experts beyond that?

[00:39:39.290] – Kevin Phelps

I mean, you shouldn’t need to because ideally that’s something that is within their wheelhouse, too. And so, you know, my advice to finding a local marketing firm would  certainly be one that. That that understands that has some reputation, but that that understands that. Understands the needs that you have that doesn’t just try to pigeonhole you into already a paticular package, especially without doing any type of, you know, due diligence on what you actually need in that package, because, you know, if you already have certain things taken care of or you’re in an industry that doesn’t need a particular line item that they’re already rolling up into that package, then you’re paying for stuff that you don’t need.

[00:40:34.210] – Kevin Phelps

And so the types of companies that obviously I see doing that are the ones that are definitely like it was $500  even like 750. What would you do for ?$500. You exactly feel like what would you do for five hundred dollars? It ain’t going to be running a marketing campaign.

[00:40:55.680] – Phillip Thune

So you got to get back into the hours, right? How many hours does that get you back?

[00:41:00.210] – Kevin Phelps

You got to understand the company here that you’re hiring, like, what could they possibly do for me with five hundred dollars? It’s just not much. If they do, are they outsourcing it? If they are, is it are people actually working on my campaign know what they’re talking about or is this like we’re all learning together type of thing? You know, it’s just like these little budgets, they just don’t make sense. And so and so or even for a local marketing campaign, I would definitely say a thousand dollar bare minimum fo for a marketing campaign.

[00:41:41.500] – Phillip Thune

I mean, is there a question you can ask which if the answer is one thing, you know, you should be running for the hills, or is it that way to think about it? Hey, here’s one or two questions you should be asking before you hire somebody. And here’s what you would expect to hear. Or is it not that easy?

[00:42:00.250] – Kevin Phelps

I mean, the budgets that the biggest giveaway, the budget is definitely the biggest giveaway, the other one would definitely be. You know, I would I would I would ask what kind of link building you guys do like. As part of the campaign, just a couple of examples, and they’re providing links that are that look like they’re in that bottom left quadrant, then I would be a little bit concerned because, again, they’re just they’re just kind of doing that the bare minimum to obviously do what businesses need to do and try to make money.

[00:42:40.100] – Kevin Phelps

They’re having to do that because you’re not spending enough. Usually, OK.

[00:42:48.740] – Cody Christensen

All right. I don’t know. It doesn’t look like we have any more questions coming in, I think. I mean, you’ve answered a lot of great questions to help. I know. Obviously, Philip and I can see kind of behind the scenes of Textbroker, but we have a wide range of whether small businesses or big enterprises. So I think it was good to touch on kind of the link-building as you go up the chain internal from small to large in terms of businesses.

[00:43:12.940] – Cody Christensen

So just, I guess one more time. OK, we got one more question coming in at the finish line here. When it comes to internally linking how often to write blogs with internal thinking.

[00:43:26.050] – Kevin Phelps

So, internally, it’s definitely it’s kind of a while. It relates to links. It’s a different spectrum. It’s not linked building. It’s it’s just internal linking. And it’s very important. But you’re not exactly building your link equity by just internally linking.

[00:43:44.530] – Kevin Phelps

You know, you build your link equity in your authority by getting links from other websites that pass that link equity to yours. But when it when it comes to internally linking how often to write blogs and then linking it, I mean, it’s one of those things where part of me would just say it’s all relative to your competition and your competition is pumping out, you know, an article, a day of good content. Then that kind of should be your answer. If if you’re in an industry that like.

[00:44:22.660]

I don’t even know if you’re in an industry that blogging really isn’t a thing, I probably wouldn’t worry about it that much or or maybe do it a little bit just to try something new that your competitors aren’t doing, but certainly doesn’t need to have a huge emphasis. But with all strategies, I would I would definitely say, you know, choose how you are prioritizing your efforts based upon what Google is already ranking and let that be your guide.

[00:44:53.580] – Kevin Phelps

Whether it’s link-building or blogging or the amount of pages on your website or the amount of content on your website, you know, let et those who are ranking be your guide and try to do a little bit better.

[00:45:04.880] – Phillip Thune

Actually think that is that is the a great piece of advice to end the day on the job.

[00:45:09.170] – Phillip Thune

Now, I echo that I because we get that question too, is like how much content should I write, how long should it be? And the answer is totally dependent on your competition. If you’re the only chiropractor in a small town. The answer is super completely different than if you’re some huge e-commerce site. So now I think that was great advice and a perfect way to end.