Ahmed says: “Keep consistent with link building and content marketing.”

Consistent with link building and content marketing. Okay, so what does that consistency look like?

“We all know the foundations of SEO are link building, you have on-page SEO, and you have content marketing.

Link building is something that all your competitors are doing and, if you continue building links towards your key keywords alongside content marketing on the website (which Google loves), this is going to boost your rankings higher and higher.

You can only really gain page 1 rankings for high traffic, useful, competitive keywords with both good content and link building. All your top competitors are going to do this and, if you really want to grow in 2024 and beyond, you have to consistently build links. If you do too many, then you'll potentially be penalised. If you do too few, you're not really going to surpass your competitors.

Along with this, building good, human-written content will benefit you continuously – whether it's writing good blogs, location pages, service pages, etc.”

Great, Okay. So, link building and content publishing go hand in hand. What are good links in 2024?

“Okay, that's a very interesting question. With regard to links, there are hundreds or maybe thousands of different variations of links. Back in the day, you used to get directory links, and you used to get links on websites that had nothing to do with the service you were providing. There used to be link farms.

In 2024, you want to focus on links where the page itself is strong as well.”

How do you define strong?

“I run a digital marketing agency and, if I had a link from brightonSEO, for example, right? They have a strong website, meaning they also have lots of good links.

You can use tools like Ahrefs to look at their domain authority – if the domain authority is quite high and if the page authority is quite high.”

What's a score that is quite high?

“That depends on the nature of the industry. For some industries, if it's less competitive, scores of 20, 30, or 40 will do the trick for you. For more competitive industries, such as fashion, SEO, watches, etc., you might want domain authorities of 60, 70, or 80.

However, you can't only gain high-quality links. You have to have some low-quality links as well.”

Just to clarify, when you say low-quality links, you probably mean low-authority links but from websites that are still relevant.

“Yes, I would also recommend some of those. Generally, most of the time, you want good links from good websites, and you want some links with low page authority on good websites. Then, you will naturally want some not-so-good links, but a very small amount.

When anything grows naturally, you'll always see that things will have amazing links, and they'll also have some low-quality links. This makes it natural.”

Do you think SEOs should actually take the time to build low-quality links as well or is this something that will happen naturally, so you don't have to worry about it?

“It will happen naturally but, if you really want to rush the rankings a little bit (meaning not waiting a year or waiting 18 months), you could potentially build a few low-quality links.

You have to do this alongside building really good links as well. I've seen this in numerous clients with numerous businesses across numerous industries. One of the recent successes we had was for an online pharmacy that is now ranking in the top 3 positions for some highly competitive prescription medications that doctors approve, etc.

It literally revolutionised the business, and now the business is looking to sell to a few businesses, but we achieved this by building many good quality links. At the same time, we had to build some lower-quality links. Not bad links – not links on some website with other languages or random link farms. They're still low quality (meaning maybe a page authority of 30 or between 0 and 10 or 0 and 20).

We like to analyse all of this. It's good to analyse all of these in the tools – and obviously, never purchase links directly.”

You also mentioned the importance of not building too many links. You can build too many links. Do you have any quantity in mind over a monthly basis that is too many?

“I always get asked by clients about this. If it's a brand-new website, I always go bare minimum for the first 3 months.

I don't have a quantity. Regarding the types of backlinks we do for clients (alongside content and everything else), we do PR, and we do some good quality one-way links on sites. We mix our links effort each month, not just building the same type. We'll do different types.

If it's a new site, start with the bare minimum. Let Google understand the website and build content, which is more important for the first few months of a brand-new website. If the website's big and it's been around for over a year, I would build a lot more links.

I can't quantify it. Every industry is different. How many links does the website already have? If they have 2,000 links, then I might go towards building 10% of that or less per month.”

That's a good number to go for. Is that a reasonable percentage for each website to go for?

For instance, if they only have 200 links in total, then you wouldn't want to build more than about 20 a month.

“Yeah. If it's on 200, then I'll probably go for maybe a bit higher; 20%/30%. But, if they have more than 1,000, 2,000, or 3,000 links, then I wouldn't go more than 10%.”

Okay. That's good to know. You also say that constant content creation goes hand in hand with this. What does that look like?

“Especially in this day and age, this is very important. For example, for the online pharmacy client, one of the strategies we did for content marketing was to look at the top 100 locations by population in the UK and then build pages for ‘online pharmacy’ in those locations: ‘online pharmacy Manchester’, ‘online pharmacy London’, ‘online pharmacy Birmingham’, etc.

Now, that's not enough. Along with this, you want to build backlinks towards these pages for these terms and keywords. The same goes for products and product category collections.

Every product collection can be renamed in different ways. For example, I've got a client who sells jewellery. You've got rings that can be called ‘travel rings’, ‘couple rings’, or can be called ‘friendship rings’.

Build these pages – build content on these pages – and then build backlinks to those pages, and you can't lose.”

What about the quantity of content required in these pages? Because it seems to be product pages that you’re describing. What does content on product pages look like?

“Again, it depends. On product pages, it can depend on the product as well.

If it's simple products, we have seen amazing results for 300 to 500 words. Unique and human-written. Don't copy from the manufacturer. Don't copy and paste from anywhere – from competitors I've seen as well.

So, uniquely written. If it's a How-To guide or a guide to travel or if you're doing honeymoons, for example, your content can go into 1,000, 2,000, or 3,000 words, if it's in-depth. Generally, for categories and for products, 300 to 500 has been the sweet spot.”

But you did say ‘human-written’. Does that mean that you've never tested AI?

“We have. We have tested AI. In this industry, I like to test everything.

I have another site, which is a printing site that I don't use, so I use that as my experimental site for all the tools and everything we do. I thought, you know what, AI, let's try it. Let's build a hundred pages in minutes and let's publish them.

What happens is Google understands AI. Google have their own AI tools. There are tools like Quillbot, and there are many APIs that detect AI content, and Google's very, very good at this. They will penalise you.

They will penalise your website, they will penalise your pages, and you will lose rankings. We've seen and we've heard of many, many sites that have used AI, and they've lost and dropped all rankings.

I've got a few new clients where they've lost rankings. We went through the full site, and it was all AI-written. We've started to humanise every page and now we're starting to see an increase in the traffic again.”

You also say that this overall strategy helps to compete with larger companies.

How does that take effect? How does it actually work when you're competing against companies with many more pages, and perhaps more authority?

“That is interesting. Again, through our own experience, there are two sides here.

One side is going for lower-traffic keywords – again, location pages, etc. A lot of large competitors and a lot of large companies don't have pages for everything. If you build pages which they don't have, you will rank for them, and you'll gain traffic for the same services.

However, we've got an online fashion brand we're working with. We build pages, we build categories, we build content, and we build backlinks – and Google likes this. The website’s clean, the website’s optimised and, within 3 to 6 months, we were ranking on page 1 above many, many competitors.

This could be due to the consistency of content with backlinks to the internal pages. Many larger sites don't focus on link building to internal pages. They can't. They have thousands and thousands of pages. Where does the effort go? You can't build so many links to everything.

When you're direct on your link building to the pages you're creating on a brand-new site, we've surpassed numerous competitors. We're not talking about the very highly competitive keywords such as ‘maxi dresses’, ‘blue dresses’, or ‘red dresses’.

Maybe just slightly under those, for the next set of keywords, we've seen page 1 and we’ve surpassed numerous competitors for brand-new sites, and then we can focus on the more competitive ones. Building backlinks to content as you're creating content is a cheat code.”

One other thing that I've heard you mention is that Google updates, when they come, can actually benefit rankings. How does that work?

“I noticed this with one of my sites. I suddenly saw a surge of ranking increases and I was thinking, ‘Wow, what's happened?’ Then I saw the updates and all the SEOs talking about Google updates where AI content has been hit, but all the content we wrote was human-written. This was content written a couple of years ago.

Being consistent with natural language, natural content, and a natural, good flow of link building will benefit. There's no easy way to success. There has to be hard work and consistency.

If you're consistent with your content throughout the website – location pages, category pages, product pages, service pages, questions/answers, blog posts, etc. I always tell clients, would you read this yourself? Would you benefit from this? Writing for yourself – something that would benefit you – and building good consistent backlinks will reward you in the long term.

It's a strategy that hasn't failed and, in my opinion, it's not going to fail. As long as you put the work in, it can't fail. I've never seen it fail – across numerous industries, from pharmacies to fashion to heaters to earwax removal to opticians, and so on.”

You've shared what SEO should be doing in 2024. Now let's talk about what SEO shouldn't be doing. What's something that's seductive in terms of time, but ultimately counterproductive? What's something that SEO shouldn't be doing in 2024?

“Avoid AI. Avoid AI-written content. Do not fall into that trap. Just don't do it.

Look, what's happening is more and more people are using AI, so this is actually a good thing for you. If you don't use AI, you're going to surpass all of them.

You will get penalised by Google and other search engines. It will happen. You have to avoid it. Stick to your tools, stick to your spreadsheets, and stick to the human voice and the human-written content: good grammar, good spelling, it makes sense, and it’s written by humans for humans.”

I can certainly understand not using AI to produce ‘original’ content, but is it not a reasonable use of AI to have the content produced and use AI to do some touch-ups, just to improve the phraseology and edit it a little bit?

“I would reverse it. Don't use AI at the end, use AI at the start, if you want to just understand a topic, understand some subheadings, etc. Then reword the whole thing but use it as a guide.

If AI wasn't there, what a person would sometimes do is go and research online – look at Wikipedia, look at other websites – and then rephrase, reword, and add their own 2 pence onto this.

If you use AI at the end, you're still at risk. Depending on how much AI you use, you're at risk of being penalised.”

Ahmed Bhula is Founder at REM Digital, and you can find him over at REMDigital.co.uk.