Expert Interview: Why Building Search Engine Authority is Key to Visibility
Proper SEO can do much more than get you great Google rankings. A website with good SEO also has better visibility, is more attractive to visitors, and can even help you generate more sales.
A website with good SEO also has better visibility, is more attractive to visitors, and can even help you generate more sales.
We talked to Scott Ryann Kennard, an all-around marketing expert and SEO specialist at 911 Restoration – a company that specializes in disaster restoration and water removal for homes – about what makes or breaks a website when it comes to SEO.
How do you obtain relevant links for high authority pages and directories for your website? And how does this impact SEO?
Relevant link building can be done in a variety of ways, but all of them depend on the nature of the business being marketed and the objective of those links. For example, for 911 Restoration, we build links through relevant websites that are industry related by reaching out to these locations and offering our expertise and authority on the nature of the restoration business in the form of insightful and informative articles, quotes, mentions and studies.
Link building impacts SEO by advancing the authority of the website and company branding within the industry as a whole which becomes an autocatalytic feedback loop for the business.
Any tips on doing link exchange properly?
We build authority for our search terminology by getting authoritative backlinks with websites related to our search. SERPS do not penalize you for doing legitimate link building, even if those sites are not industry related.
Link exchange is delicate because if you are doing it quid pro quo, then this will result in penalties. If your link to content goes viral, then this is not only okay but desired. If efforts turn into a link wheel then this will result in problems.
How do you make the most of search engine spider activity when it comes to content?
Internally, we make sure that whenever we update a page, it matches Google’s latest algorithm changes to index. Externally, we make sure to have high quality content that is insightful and informative about our site, services or something else that is unique to build our authority off-site.
Internally, we keep the word count to a point at which people will want to read for the subject matter that they are looking for information on. With links we make sure to use internal links to our other main pages and services within those pages. We distribute link authority from page to page so that our most competitive landing pages have the best opportunity to rank highly in SERPs.
Additionally, to improve your SERP visibility we focus on the end user. Not only is your content important but also the navigation, layout, link structure, wording and aesthetics is all geared toward your typical site visitor.
From a social media perspective we repost content across our sites, but rarely on the same site. Content is new for the medium, but can be recycled in terms of conceptual format. Of utmost importance is to not spam any of the content anywhere. If it feels dated, then it is.
Why is it important to install and monitor analytics? What type of information can you gather doing this?
Analytics tell you what is working and what is not. With this information you can make the proper changes to increase traffic and conversions. You can also determine exactly who your user is, who is visiting the site, where they spend time, where they go next, what draws them in, and what actually instigates a conversion.
From there you can design and restructure the site around what the user wants and needs to become a customer. When you have a site that is pleasing to the user, it will be recommended on what amounts to essentially a word of mouth approach between searchers.
How important is it to make sure internal links are working properly? Do broken links affect search engine ranking? Why and how?
These days SERPs have been traveling away from simply written content and focused authority more on links both internally and externally as well. Having an appropriate link structure is vital to how bots crawl from page to page. If they encounter a 404 or any other error code then SERPs will know that the site isn’t maintained properly. This can create a user experience problem which could end in penalties from SERPs.
Have any questions or comments on improving visibility? Please leave us a comment here or tweet us @testomatocom
