Alan Silvestri says: “Be proactive in promoting your content and acquiring backlinks and don't wait for the backlinks to come naturally, even though that should be the primary goal. The main thing for me is trying to not get stuck in what they called the ‘content graveyard’, which is having a bunch of content that you publish, that's not really doing much for your business.”

The content graveyard? Are you talking about un-indexed content?

“No, this is specifically content that you’ve published in the couple in the last couple of months which is maybe ranking page two and lower. The reason for that is because a lot of companies focus too much on content production and content publishing, without focusing on content promotion. There's a lot of this content, usually more than 50%, that is bringing in traffic to the site, but usually ranks page two or lower. I’ve found that if these companies can be proactive and promote some of this content to acquire more backlinks and get it to rank slightly higher, like the bottom of page one, then their traffic would increase quite dramatically.”

What are the best practical ways to promote your content and acquire backlinks now?

“If you're an SEO or a marketer, the first thing is to try and see link building more as content promotion. So the idea is you have some amazing content published and you really can't wait to get it out there in front of the right people. Don't just see this as something that you need to do because of some metrics that you need to acquire, but try to actually see it as a legitimate promotion tactic. If you're reaching out to people to get them to see your content, then eventually they will link to it if they find it interesting.

In terms of the tactical steps you need to take, the first thing is to find those pages that are ranking between the bottom of page one and maybe page two, which we call the ‘quick win’ pages. First thing is you need to do is make sure that those pages match the search intent, the content type, and the overall quality with the pages that are ranking on page one, because otherwise, the backlinks that you'll build are not going to be as effective.

Once you have those pages, the next best thing that you can do is to make sure that they have some kind of business potential. Most of the time, the main goal of your content will be to bring in signups or more conversion for your business. When you have the shortlist of pages that have the potential to rank higher, and that also have business potential for your business, you need to make sure that they have the actual ability to rank higher in the next 90 days. Do a competition analysis and identify those keywords and pages that have less competition, which maybe just need a couple of extra backlinks to shoot up into the top five in the SERPs. We call this shortlist of these pages the ‘content promotion roadmap’, so we know exactly how many and which pages we will be working on every single month for the next quarter.

The next step is to figure out the type and the quantity of backlinks that you need to be able to increase the traffic for each of them. Step one is to determine what we call the link gap, which is how many links you need to close the gap with the competition. Step two is to figure out the quality of those links in terms of domain level and page level metrics. And step three, is to determine the topical relevance, which is the anchor text type and distribution as well as the topics that the linking pages should be covering.”

Is there a particular search intent that you prefer to focus on to begin with for these quick wins? And is there a particular type of content that is best to focus on first?

“I would say that for companies who are just starting out, it's probably best to focus on what I call pain-point-driven content. This is all of those middle-to-bottom of the funnel content that's covering questions or pain points that the target audience have about your product or service. Typically, those pages are targeting very longtail, low-competition keywords that still have some business potential. What will happen is you're able to get just a couple of links to rank pretty well for these very niche, very small, low volume topics that can still bring in some signups for you. So you should definitely focus on these first and then move on to the more ‘higher competition’ keywords that have more volume, and are more of like the top of the funnel type content.”

Would you ever attempt to optimize for keyword phrases that apparently have zero search volume? Or do you always look for some keyword volume?

“It can depend on if there's some traffic potential. Some SEO tools can give you an estimate of the overall traffic potential, and the chances are that if your page is ranking for this very low volume keyword, then maybe the page could also be ranking for a ton of other longer tail keywords that when combined will bring in some search traffic. It's not necessarily that you have to have search volume, especially because that's also something that's not super accurate. I would focus mostly on seeing whether the big picture, the bulk of the keywords that that page can rank for has the potential to bring in some kind of search traffic.”

You mentioned doing a link gap as well to establish the link gap between you and your competitor. So when you're talking about link gap, are you just looking at the number of links, are you looking at the quality of links, and are you also incorporating the relevance and authority of the two websites that you're comparing?

“We like to separate the link quality into these three different steps, right. So number one is the ‘Link Gap’, and for link gap, I only mean the quantity and the velocity of the links. You need to establish how many links you need to close the gap with the competition, and to do that, we simply take an average of how many referring domains the top 10 ranking pages have. Now we know how many we need to kind of get there, the second step to determining the full link gap is also to taking into account how many new links these pages are building every single month. Links are not static, so every page, especially the ones that are ranking the top five, keep acquiring new backlinks every month, which is important to take into account.

And so for the other things that you mentioned, those are this, the subsequent steps, right. So the metrics, that's step number two, so we determine the best possible metrics both at the domain level, but also at the page level, that we should be targeting to get the best possible links. And to do that we, we simply look at what the top 10 ranking results are doing. So for the topical relevance, that's step three, and that comprises the anchor text distribution that we want to kind of shoot for, as well as the Trust Flow and Topical Trust Flow, and we get those from Majestic, which are all very helpful to tell us the topical relevancy of the backlink profile that we want to target.”

In terms of anchor text distribution, are you just going for a certain percentage that incorporate the target keyword phrase?

“Yeah, again we simply get an overview for the top 10 ranking results and what kinds of distributions those have, and we use that for different types of anchor text to keep things slightly simpler. So the main one is the exact match anchor text, then we have phrase match anchor text, which is essentially containing some of the main words from the main keywords, then we have the naked URL, and then we have generic. Generic is anything else, that's not one of the other three types, right? So even brand terms, or things like ‘click here’, see this link. These are all generic for us. So what we do is we simply get an overview of what the current distribution for the top 10 ranking results is, and so this gives us something that we need to kind of shoot for, because most of the time we won't have control over the anchor text specifically. But it's still good to have some kind of percentages that we can aim for now.”

If you did have control over everything in terms of anchor text, what kind of percentage of exact match keyword phrase anchor text would you be looking for?

“That totally depends on the individual keyword that we're targeting. So every single keyword, and every single page is going to have a different anchor text distribution, which you determine from looking at the top 10 results. What we do is we get a huge list of all of the backlink profiles for the top 10 ranked results, then we classify the anchor text that they have, and then we determine the percentage based on that.”

What would be an example of a great link nowadays, and what would be an example of a link that perhaps used to be good to get a few years ago but isn't so good there?

“A good link is all about relevancy and traffic. For us it's more important that the link is relevant both at the domain level, so the overall website is talking about this specific niche, but also the specific page that we get the links for from. Both of them should be relevant to the topic to the niche. If you can't get one of those to be relevant, typically we prefer the page level to at least be relevant, and then the domain might be slightly less relevant. The second thing is the traffic, and this is similarly both at the domain level, but also the page level, because if you can get a backlink on a page that has some traffic, then together with the SEO benefit, you also get the potential to get referral traffic, which is also pretty good because it might bring you customer signups straightaway. So I would definitely say relevancy and traffic are the most important things in 2023.”

In terms of links, what would be an example of a type of link that used to be good to get a few years ago, but probably isn't a good now?

“A couple of years ago we would focus only on metrics, and that used to have some kind of impact. Nowadays, I’ve definitely seen that a lot of websites have been able to kind of falsify some of the metrics, for example, Domain Authority and Domain Rating. This is something that a lot of sites have been able to kind of falsify by just publishing a ton of content on all sorts of different topics that are not niche specific. You’ll see websites that are called ‘link farms’ that are just being built with the purpose of selling backlinks that have all sorts of topics and niches in the main menu bar. The reason for that is since they're able to publish a ton of different content on different topics, they are able to get more traffic, and more backlinks eventually, so this will increase what's called the Domain Rating/Domain Authority. But the problem with this is that the site is not relevant on any specific niche, it's very broad. So if you get a link from this site, it's pretty much irrelevant, right? Nowadays link metrics still matter for SEOs to be able to make informed decisions, but less than they used to do a couple of years ago.”

Many websites will get many backlink requests, so what's the most successful way of reaching out to people and actually getting them to consider linking to you, what would you include in your message, and how do you go about approaching people to get them to listen to you?

“The first thing to do is to get their interest. So the first email might as well just be something super quick, where you just ask them a question. It doesn't have to be a straight pitch, but can be to just pique their interest. If you see that they publish something on social media, then you can make a comment on that, and then you can ask, ‘are you the right person for a question on your content’, or maybe, if not, can you point me to who the right person is. This is a great way to get the conversation started, which is always positive in trying to build any kind of relationship, especially online. Once we have their attention, maybe they replied, maybe they found your comment kind of funny, or maybe interesting, then you can start to get into the pitch. The best way to do a pitch is to actually show them how your page is adding some kind of value to their page. So it can either be that you have some more up-to-date research or data in your page, or maybe you have some expert quotes that they could use to prove some of the points that they make in their article, or like anything like that. The more newsworthy or the more shareable your page is, that all kind of helps too, and I will say these are the key aspects. Also, don't just promote any page. As I said in the beginning, try to see link building as content promotion. So you actually have something very good that you would like to put in front of the right people, because it makes sense for them to see it.”

I love that. See link building as content promotion. So you've shared what SEOs should be doing in 2023, now let's talk about what SEOs shouldn't be doing. What's something that's seductive in terms of time, but ultimately counterproductive, what's something that SEOs shouldn't be doing in 2023?

“There's a lot of people talking about ChatGPT nowadays, and I’m already seeing a lot of people that are just publishing content that's completely written by artificial intelligence. So my main advice is to not rely on these tools as the creative maker, and try to use them just as a brainstorming partner, or as some kind of assistant for the main research, so that then you can add your own spin or your own creativity to the process. Google is basically an AI as well, so the chances are that sooner or later they will catch up and they will basically realize that most of content has been written by ChatGPT, and they will penalize your site for it, so you don't really want to do that.”

Alan Silvestri is the managing director of Growth Gorilla, and you can find them over at mygrowthgorilla.com.