SEO Reseller Services – Call Semify today to outsource SEO.

Semify Acquires Dragon Metrics to Accelerate Global AI Optimization Capabilities and Expand International Market Reach

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 21:49:41 GMT

Semify Acquires Leading Digital Marketing Reporting Platform Dragon Metrics to Accelerate Global AI Optimization Capabilities and Expand International Market Reach

Strategic acquisition brings world-class SEO/AI/PPC reporting software platform and international expertise to leading white-label digital marketing software platform

ROCHESTER, NY — December 8, 2025— Semify, a leading white-label digital marketing software platform specializing in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Paid Search Advertising (PPC), Paid Social Advertising, and AI Optimization (AIO), today announced the acquisition of Dragon Metrics, an international SEO/AI/PPC reporting software platform based in Hong Kong. The strategic acquisition significantly expands Semify’s global measurement capabilities and accelerates its AI optimization offerings.

Dragon Metrics, founded in 2011 by Simon Lesser (CEO and co-founder) and Richard Mabey (Advisor and co-founder), has built a reputation as the premier SEO platform for international markets. In addition to support for Google and AI platforms, Dragon Metrics also offers comprehensive support for massive non-Google markets including China, Korea, and Japan. The platform currently serves multinational companies and global agencies across more than 50 countries.

“This acquisition represents a pivotal moment in our evolution toward comprehensive AI optimization services with best-in-class reporting software,” said Patrick Briggs, CEO of Semify. “Dragon Metrics brings not only world-class reporting technology but also deep expertise in international markets that will be crucial as AI optimization expands globally. Simon’s vision for AI-powered SEO, PPC, and social advertising reporting perfectly aligns with our AIO strategy, and having him join as our Chief Product Officer will accelerate our service and software development significantly.”

As part of the acquisition, Simon Lesser will join Semify as Chief Product Officer, leading the company’s AI optimization product strategy. The Dragon Metrics engineering team will integrate with Semify’s existing engineering team, led by CTO Brian Sappey.

“Joining forces with Semify allows us to take Dragon Metrics to the next level by combining our international reporting expertise with Semify’s proven white-label fulfillment model,” said Simon Lesser, Co-founder and CEO of Dragon Metrics. “Our clients will now have access to full-service digital marketing execution, while Semify’s partners gain access to enterprise-grade reporting capabilities that rival any platform in the market.”

The integration will provide immediate benefits to Semify’s Resellers, who will gain access to enhanced reporting features through a Dragon Metrics account and eventually, through Dragon Metric’s software, become integrated into Semify’s software. Under Semify’s program, partners can retain advanced reporting, content editing, and keyword research capabilities that eliminates the need for multiple SEO software tools.

For existing Dragon Metrics customers, Dragon Metrics will continue as a standalone brand with additional engineering support and white-label fulfillment services available only to Dragon Metrics-approved agency customers to adhere to Semify’s Reseller model.

“This acquisition perfectly illustrates the convergence we’re seeing between sophisticated SEO, PPC, social ad, and AI-powered reporting,” said Richard Mabey, Co-founder of Dragon Metrics. “The combination of Dragon Metrics’ global capabilities with Semify’s AIO and SEO expertise creates a uniquely powerful platform.”

The acquisition comes at a critical time as search marketing evolves rapidly toward AI-powered experiences. Semify has been pioneering the AIO (AI Optimization) methodology. Dragon Metrics’ existing AI Overview tracking capabilities and international market expertise will accelerate Semify’s ability to deliver AIO services globally.

About Semify

Semify is a leading white-label digital marketing platform that helps organizations scale their SEO, PPC, and AI Optimization services. Founded in 2009, Semify enables growth by plugging directly into existing ecosystems, consolidating marketing stacks, and supporting product fulfillment without requiring changes to current operations. Semify’s unique blend of expert service from a US-based team and cutting-edge software platform with enterprise API enables efficient service delivery at scale. The company is pioneering AI Optimization (AIO) methodologies and is renowned for its commitment to constant innovation in the white-label digital marketing space and providing its partners with best-in-class marketing solutions. For more information, visit www.semify.com .

About Dragon Metrics

Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Hong Kong, Dragon Metrics is a comprehensive SEO/AI/PPC reporting platform designed for international markets. The company specializes in providing enterprise-grade SEO tools with exceptional support for both Google and additional search engines popular in China, Korea, and Japan. Dragon Metrics serves multinational companies and global agencies across more than 50 countries, offering features including AI overview tracking, keyword rank monitoring, competitor analysis, content optimization, technical site audits, and backlink analysis. For more information, visit www.dragonmetrics.com .

Media inquiries:

Valerie Silverman Kerr

VSK Public Relations

valerie@vsk-publicrelations.com

914-806-6647

Should You Outsource SEO? Find Out the Advantages of Outsourcing Your SEO With Us

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 22:08:14 GMT

How to Outsource SEO in a Successful Way

When you outsource SEO, it’s not that you are only physically losing control of your marketing, but that you have no way of knowing whether the same strategy is being put into place. Are you looking to boost your search rankings, attract better leads, or find new customers? Good objectives will also allow your SEO partner to develop a plan that reflects your vision.

After you know what you need to accomplish, vet providers thoroughly. Your best bet is to find a reputable SEO agency, like Semify , that provides results, honest reporting, and good communication. We will provide a full range of services from keyword research and link building to technical audits and content optimization. We can help you choose the plan that aligns with your budget and stage of growth, whether you are a single business looking to scale or an agency handling multiple clients.

When done right, outsourcing is a partnership where you continue to do what you do best, but let specialists, like us, handle the nitty-gritty of the technology behind getting measurable results.

Should You Outsource SEO?

The idea of in-house management of SEO sounds like a great thing until you realize how much work it really is. It’s not just about keeping an eye on what the competition is doing; you need to grow it and generate consistent content, or you can quickly be left behind. Many businesses find that in-house staff just don’t have the time or proficiency to manage it effectively.

If you’ve ever felt at a loss for staying abreast of Google’s shifting algorithms, or if the responsibilities of SEO consistently end up at the bottom of your to-do list, then handing it over to us could be the best approach. Using Semify will allow you to open up time while leading the rest of the experts who know how to grow your business.

The Benefits of Outsourcing SEO

Outsourcing SEO gives you access to expertise, and that’s one of the most significant benefits of outsourcing with Semify. Instead of trial and error, you get a team that lives and breathes SEO and stays on top of algorithm updates and what’s new in the industry. This not only saves you from expensive mistakes but also expedites the results.

Another key benefit is scalability. As your business or agency scales, though, your SEO needs will change. We can be flexible and scale up in terms of content production, link building, or technical support on short notice—whereas you’d typically have to spend time and money hiring (and possibly even training) new staff otherwise.

The potential for cost savings also adds to the appeal of outsourcing. You have a salary and benefits, and perpetual training for your in-house people. In comparison, outsourcing affords you a complete team of professionals at a fraction of the expense. And because reputable carriers are transparent with information and have detailed reporting, you will always know the dashboard kind of view into how your campaigns are doing and where your dollars are going.

In short, outsourcing SEO can save you time, give you more control over the costs, and, most importantly, drive better long-term results than in-house teams can routinely achieve on their own.

Why You Should Consider Semify for Your SEO Services

Not all SEO services are created equal, so who you choose to partner with matters. At Semify, we pride ourselves on being one of the most successful companies in providing white label SEO that has been proven through years of experience to help your agency unlock the potential of its online presence.

There are a couple of reasons companies rely on us to do their SEO:

We offer clear reporting, so you know where you stand at all times.
Our approaches are rooted in long-term growth — not short-term, patch-the-holes measures.
We see clients as partners, discovering what drives their business goals and sustained success — not just gaining short-term victories.

Whether you are from an agency looking to expand services for multiple clients or are a single business that wants to increase visibility, we have a flexible and scalable plan for you.

The Bottom Line

So, should you outsource SEO? For a lot of businesses, the answer is yes. With the time and money-saving and expert strategy-building benefits it has to offer, outsourcing SEO is one of the soundest investments you can make for your growth.

If you’re having to choose a provider, Semify is a partner you can trust. We bring together transparency, expertise, and scalable solutions whilst keeping it real and delivering tangible results.

SEO Reseller Services - Call Semify today to outsource SEO.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential for online success these days. Whether a small, medium, or large business, search visibility has a direct impact on traffic, leads, and revenue. But SEO is not a set-it-and-forget-it proposition. That enduring strategy requires a unique set of skills, long-term focus, and continuous adaptation. It’s no wonder that so many agencies and businesses ultimately come back to the same conundrum: Should you outsource SEO or keep it in-house?

19 Top Strategies to Improve Your Website’s Authority Without Spending a Dime

Thu, 08 May 2025 19:32:35 GMT

Improving your website’s authority is essential if you want to rank higher in search engines and build long-term digital credibility. While paid SEO tools and services can speed up the process, there are plenty of ways to strengthen your site’s authority without spending a single dollar. Here are 19 actionable and completely free strategies to boost your domain authority (DA) and online presence.

1. Create High-Quality, Shareable Content

Content is the cornerstone of a successful SEO strategy. To improve your visibility in search engines and engage your target audience, focus on producing content that is:

In-depth: Go beyond surface-level information by thoroughly exploring your topics.
Original: Provide unique insights or perspectives that set your content apart.
Highly Relevant: Directly address the specific needs, questions, and pain points of your readers.

To achieve this, be sure to:

Support your points with credible sources to build authority and trustworthiness.
Offer practical takeaways or solutions that users can apply immediately.

High-quality content benefits your SEO in several ways:

Build trust with your audience, encouraging them to return and engage with your site.
Increases the likelihood of earning valuable backlinks from other websites that reference your content.
Encourages social shares, helping your content reach a broader audience.

When your content provides genuine value and stands out in your niche, it naturally attracts attention. This leads to:

Other websites linking to you, enhancing your domain authority.
More users sharing your content across platforms increases visibility.
Improved search engine rankings and stronger online authority overall.

2. Start a Blog on Your Domain

Launching a blog on your domain is a powerful way to enhance your website’s SEO and establish your brand as a trusted authority in your niche. A regularly updated blog allows you to:

Consistently publish fresh, relevant content that keeps your site active in the eyes of search engines.
Signal to search engines that your website is alive and providing ongoing value, which can positively impact your rankings.

Blogging also creates an ideal platform to:

Target long-tail keywords —these are more specific and often lower-competition search phrases your potential customers use on Google.
Attract more qualified traffic by crafting content that directly addresses these specific queries, often reaching users further along in the buyer journey.

Maintaining a blog helps you:

Demonstrate topical expertise through comprehensive and insightful posts.
Establish credibility in your field, building trust with your audience.
Encourage return visits from readers who find your content valuable.
Increase engagement, shares, and backlinks —all essential components of strong SEO performance.

3. Optimize On-Page SEO

On-page SEO involves optimizing individual pages on your website to help search engines understand your content and improve your rankings. Paying close attention to key elements on each page not only boosts visibility but also enhances user experience.

Be sure to include the following components:

Meta Title : Create a unique and keyword-rich meta title for each page. This title appears in search engine results and should accurately reflect the page’s topic to encourage clicks.
Meta Description : Write a clear and compelling meta description that summarizes the page’s content. While it doesn’t directly impact rankings, it can significantly influence your click-through rate.
Header Tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) : Use header tags to structure your content logically. The H1 tag should be used for the main title, followed by H2s and H3s for subheadings. This helps search engines and users navigate your content more easily.
Image Alt Text : Add descriptive alt text to all images. This improves accessibility for users with visual impairments and helps search engines understand and index your visual content.
Internal Linking : Link to related pages within your website. Internal links keep users engaged, guide them through your content, and help distribute page authority across your site.

By optimizing these on-page elements, you make it easier for search engines to crawl and rank your content, while also improving the overall experience for your visitors.

4. Earn Backlinks Through Guest Posting

Guest posting is a powerful and strategic way to earn free backlinks for your website , which are essential for improving your website’s authority and search engine rankings. This tactic involves reaching out to other reputable blogs, websites, or online publications within your industry or niche and offering to contribute valuable, well-written content that aligns with their audience’s interests.

When your guest post is accepted and published, you typically include a backlink to your website, either within the content itself or in the author bio section. These backlinks act as a vote of confidence in the eyes of search engines, signaling that your site is trustworthy and relevant, which can significantly boost your SEO.

Here’s how to make the most of guest posting:

Identify Relevant Websites : Look for websites and blogs in your niche with a strong domain authority and engaged audience.
Pitch Thoughtfully : Reach out with personalized pitches that highlight your expertise and suggest unique topic ideas tailored to their readers.
Provide High-Quality Content : Ensure your guest posts are original, informative, and actionable. The better the quality, the more likely the post will be accepted and shared.
Include Natural Backlinks : Strategically include a link to a relevant page on your site where it fits organically, offering additional value to readers.
Build Relationships : Treat guest posting to build long-term relationships with editors, bloggers, and influencers in your industry.

Consistently contributing guest posts not only helps you build a diverse backlink profile but also increases your brand exposure, drives referral traffic, and positions you as an authority in your field.

5. Use Internal Linking Strategically

Internal linking is a crucial SEO practice that involves connecting related posts, pages, and other content within your website. By thoughtfully linking your content, you create a clear pathway for both users and search engines to navigate your site more efficiently.

For users, internal links guide them to additional relevant information, keeping them engaged longer and enhancing their overall experience. This can reduce bounce rates and increase the chances of conversions, whether that means making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or exploring other valuable resources you offer.

From an SEO perspective, internal linking helps search engines understand the hierarchy and relationship between different pages on your site. This improves the way search engines crawl and index your website, ensuring that your most important pages receive the attention they deserve. Internal links help distribute page authority (or “link juice”) across your site, boosting the ranking potential of key pages.

To use internal linking effectively:

Link related blog posts, product pages, or service pages where relevant.
Use descriptive anchor text that shows what the linked page is about.
Avoid over-linking; only include links that provide genuine value and context.
Regularly audit your site to fix broken links and update outdated links to maintain a healthy site structure.

When done strategically, internal linking not only improves SEO but also enhances user experience and encourages visitors to explore more of your content.

6. Claim and Optimize Your Google Business Profile

If you run a local business, claiming and optimizing your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is one of the most effective ways to boost your visibility in local search results. This free tool allows your business to appear in Google Maps and the local “pack” results, which are prominently displayed when users search for services or products near them.

To optimize your Google Business Profile effectively, make sure to:

Provide complete and accurate business information , including your address, phone number, business hours, and website link.
Write a detailed description of your products or services that highlights what makes your business unique.
Add high-quality photos of your storefront, products, or team to make your profile more appealing.
Post regular updates or special offers to engage potential customers and keep your profile fresh.
Encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews , which boosts your credibility and influences search rankings.
Respond promptly to all reviews , both positive and negative, to show that you value customer feedback and maintain active engagement.

By maintaining a well-optimized Google Business Profile, you increase your chances of appearing at the top of local search results, drive more foot traffic to your physical location, and enhance overall trust and credibility with your audience.

7. Take Part in Industry Forums and Q&A Sites

Engaging actively in industry-specific forums, Q&A platforms like Quora and Reddit , and niche online communities is a valuable strategy to build your reputation and expand your online presence. These sites provide excellent opportunities to show your expertise by answering questions, sharing insights, and contributing to meaningful discussions related to your field.

By consistently offering helpful and knowledgeable responses, you can establish yourself or your brand as a trusted authority within your niche. This not only builds credibility among community members but also drives targeted traffic back to your website when you link to relevant content. However, it’s important to be genuine and avoid spamming or overly promotional behavior, as these communities value authenticity and helpfulness.

To maximize the benefits of participating in these platforms:

Identify relevant forums and Q&A sites that align closely with your industry and target audience.
Create a complete and professional profile to build trust and recognition among community members.
Contribute high-quality, detailed answers that provide real value rather than short or generic responses.
Include links to your website or blog only when they are highly relevant and add value to the conversation.
Engage regularly to build relationships and stay visible within the community.
Follow each platform’s rules and guidelines to avoid penalties or being banned.

By actively participating in industry forums and Q&A sites, you not only generate potential backlinks and referral traffic but also deepen your understanding of your audience’s needs and challenges, which can inform your broader content and marketing strategies.

8. List Your Website on Free Directories

Submitting your website to credible online directories is an effective way to improve your SEO and increase your site’s visibility. There are many reputable directories, such as Crunchbase, Hotfrog, Yelp, and others, that offer free business listings. These directories serve as trusted sources that search engines often rely on to verify and validate your business information.

By listing your website on these platforms, you not only gain valuable backlinks that can help boost your domain authority but also increase the chances of potential customers discovering your business through different channels. Many directories include user reviews, ratings, and detailed business descriptions, which further enhance your brand’s credibility and reputation.

To maximize the benefits:

Ensure your business information is consistent and accurate across all directory listings.
Complete every section, including your business name, address, phone number, website URL, hours of operation, and an interesting description.
Choose directories that apply to your industry or geographic location for more targeted exposure.
Monitor and respond to customer reviews to engage with your audience and maintain a positive online reputation.

Overall, listing your website on free, credible directories is a straightforward yet powerful tactic to improve your SEO, increase online visibility, and attract more qualified traffic to your site.

9. Engage in Broken Link Building

Broken link building is a highly effective SEO strategy that involves identifying broken or dead links on other websites within your niche and offering your relevant content as a replacement. When webmasters encounter broken links on their sites, they often appreciate helpful suggestions to fix them, especially when you provide a useful, high-quality resource to replace the dead link. This method not only helps improve the user experience on their site but also allows you to earn valuable backlinks that can boost your website’s authority and search engine rankings.

To get started with broken link building:

Use tools like Ahrefs Broken Link Checker (which offers a free plan) to scan relevant websites for broken links.
Identify broken links that are related to your niche or content area to ensure your suggested replacement is relevant and valuable.
Reach out politely to the website owner or webmaster, informing them of the broken link and recommending your content as a suitable alternative.
Provide clear explanations and links to your content to make it easy for them to update their site.

This approach benefits both parties: webmasters improve their site’s user experience by fixing broken links, and you gain high-quality backlinks with no paid advertising or complicated outreach. Broken link building helps you build relationships with other website owners, potentially opening doors to further collaboration and guest posting opportunities.

10. Leverage HARO (Help a Reporter Out)

HARO , which stands for Help a Reporter Out, is a valuable platform that connects journalists and bloggers with expert sources for their stories. By signing up as a source on HARO, you gain the opportunity to respond to media queries relevant to your industry or expertise. This is a powerful way to gain exposure and earn backlinks from reputable, high-authority websites, which can significantly boost your SEO and credibility.

Here’s how to effectively leverage HARO:

Sign up as a source on the HARO platform to receive daily emails containing queries from journalists seeking expert insights or quotes.
Monitor queries closely and respond promptly with well-crafted, informative, and relevant answers tailored to the journalist’s request.
Provide simple contact information and a brief bio that highlights your credentials to increase your chances of being selected.
Be concise and professional in your pitches, focusing on delivering value and expertise that directly addresses the query.
If your pitch is used in an article, you typically receive a mention along with a backlink to your website, which can drive referral traffic and improve your search engine rankings.

By regularly engaging with HARO, you not only build your brand’s authority and reputation but also develop relationships with journalists and influencers who might feature you again in future stories. It’s a cost-effective way to secure high-quality backlinks from well-established media outlets, enhancing your site’s domain authority and trustworthiness.

11. Promote Content on Social Media

Sharing your content on social media platforms such as LinkedIn , X (Formerly Twitter) , Facebook , Instagram , and niche-specific networks is an essential part of any effective SEO strategy. Social media promotion increases your content’s visibility far beyond your website visitors, allowing you to reach a broader and more targeted audience. The more exposure your content receives, the higher the chances it will be noticed, shared, and linked to by other websites, bloggers, or influencers.

Here’s why promoting your content on social media matters:

Increases visibility: Social platforms have massive user bases where your content can quickly gain traction if it resonates with the audience.
Drives targeted traffic: Sharing content in relevant groups, communities, or niche networks attracts users who are genuinely interested in your topic.
Encourages engagement: Likes, shares, comments, and discussions increase your content’s reach and can improve its perceived value by search engines.
Boosts backlink potential: When your content is widely shared, bloggers, journalists, and webmasters are more likely to discover and link to it, enhancing your SEO.
Builds brand awareness: Consistent social media activity helps establish your brand as a trusted authority and fosters relationships with your audience.

To maximize the effectiveness of social media promotion:

Tailor your posts to each platform’s style and audience preferences.
Use engaging visuals, compelling headlines, and clear calls to action.
Participate in relevant groups and communities to share your content with interested users.
Collaborate with influencers or industry leaders to amplify your reach.
Track engagement metrics to understand what types of content perform best and refine your strategy.

By actively promoting your content across social media channels, you create a multiplier effect that increases exposure, drives more organic traffic, and improves your website’s chances of earning valuable backlinks and higher search rankings.

12. Collaborate With Other Creators

Partnering with other content creators—whether bloggers, podcasters, influencers, or industry experts—is a powerful strategy to expand your brand’s reach and boost your SEO efforts. Collaboration can take many forms, including co-authoring blog posts, participating in interviews, guest appearances on podcasts, or contributing to expert roundups. These joint ventures expose your brand to new and relevant audiences who might not have discovered you otherwise.

By working together, both parties benefit from shared expertise, increased content variety, and cross-promotion opportunities that can lead to higher engagement and traffic. Collaborations often result in backlinks to your website, which are valuable for improving your domain authority and search engine rankings.

To make the most of creator collaborations:

Identify partners whose audience aligns with your target market and whose content complements your niche.
Propose ideas that offer mutual value, such as insightful blog posts, engaging podcast topics, or collaborative video content.
Promote the collaborative content across your channels and encourage your partner to do the same, maximizing visibility.
Build long-term relationships by maintaining communication and exploring future opportunities together.

Collaborating with other creators not only helps you tap into new networks but also enhances your credibility and authority in your industry. It’s an effective way to grow your online presence organically and generate high-quality backlinks through authentic and valuable partnerships.

13. Add Schema Markup

Implementing schema markup—also known as structured data—is a highly effective SEO tactic that helps search engines better understand the content and context of your web pages. Schema is a form of code (usually written in JSON-LD format) that you can add to your website’s HTML to define specific types of information, such as product details, reviews, FAQs, events, local business info, and more.

By using schema markup, you enable your content to appear more prominently in search engine results through rich snippets—enhanced listings that can include elements like star ratings, prices, publication dates, breadcrumbs, and other eye-catching features. These rich results can dramatically increase your click-through rates (CTR), drive more qualified traffic, and improve user experience by helping users find what they need more efficiently.

Here are the key benefits of adding schema markup:

Improved visibility: Rich snippets help your listings stand out in crowded search results.
Higher click-through rates: Enhanced listings often attract more attention and engagement from users.
Better content comprehension: Search engines can categorize and index your pages more accurately.
Support for voice search and AI tools: Structured data helps smart assistants retrieve precise answers from your content.
Local SEO boost: Local businesses can benefit from LocalBusiness schema to highlight location-specific details.

Popular types of schema you can use include:

Article or BlogPosting for blog content
Product for eCommerce pages
FAQPage for frequently asked questions
Event for promoting upcoming events
Review and AggregateRating for testimonials
LocalBusiness for service-based companies

Adding schema markup doesn’t guarantee rich results, but it significantly increases your chances. You can use tools like Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper or Schema.org to get started, and always test your markup using Google’s Rich Results Test.

14. Encourage User-Generated Content (UGC)

User-generated content (UGC) refers to any form of content, such as reviews, testimonials, blog comments, forum posts, photos, videos, or social media mentions, that is created and submitted by your users or customers, rather than your brand. Encouraging UGC is a powerful way to keep your website fresh, dynamic, and engaging while also boosting your SEO performance.

Search engines favor websites that consistently publish new, relevant content. UGC naturally contributes to this by continuously adding fresh material to your site without requiring you to create it all yourself. Whether it’s a customer leaving a review on a product page or a user posting in a discussion forum, this type of content increases keyword diversity, enhances topic depth, and signals community engagement—factors that can help improve your site’s rankings.

Benefits of encouraging user-generated content include:

Improved SEO performance: Fresh content keeps your pages active and helps target long-tail keywords organically.
Increased time on site: Visitors are more likely to engage with content written by fellow users, which reduces bounce rates and increases session duration.
Higher trust and credibility: Reviews, testimonials, and community discussions add authenticity and social proof.
More inbound links and shares: Users often share their contributions, driving traffic and potential backlinks.
Valuable insights: UGC helps you better understand your audience’s needs, preferences, and language, which can inform your future content strategy.

Ways to implement and encourage UGC on your site:

Enable product or service reviews and ratings.
Allow and moderate blog comments to foster discussion.
Feature customer testimonials or case studies.
Create community forums or Q&A sections.
Run social media campaigns that invite users to share content with a branded hashtag.
Offer incentives or recognition (like contests or featured posts) to motivate contributions.

By actively promoting user participation and making it easy for users to contribute, you not only enrich your site with valuable content but also build a more loyal and involved audience.

15. Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly

Ensuring your website is mobile-friendly is no longer optional—it’s essential. With most web traffic now coming from smartphones and tablets, providing a seamless mobile experience is critical for both user satisfaction and search engine rankings. Mobile usability is a confirmed ranking factor in Google’s algorithm, and sites that don’t perform well on mobile devices are likely to see lower visibility in search results.

A mobile-friendly website is one that adapts to any screen size, loads quickly, and maintains usability across a range of devices. This includes responsive design, readable text without zooming, intuitive navigation, properly scaled images, and buttons that are easy to tap without accidental clicks.

Benefits of a mobile-optimized site include:

Improved SEO performance: Google uses mobile-first indexing, which means it primarily uses the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking.
Enhanced user experience: Visitors are more likely to stay on your site and engage with your content if it functions smoothly on their device.
Lower bounce rates: A responsive, fast-loading mobile site reduces frustration and encourages visitors to explore more pages.
Wider reach: A mobile-friendly site ensures accessibility for users on any device, increasing your potential audience.
Increased conversions: A better mobile experience can lead to higher conversion rates, especially for e-commerce or lead-generation websites.

To evaluate and improve mobile usability:

Use Bing’s Mobile-Friendly Test to quickly identify any issues.
Implement responsive design so your layout adapts fluidly to various screen sizes.
Optimize images and assets for faster mobile loading.
Avoid intrusive interstitials and pop-ups that disrupt the mobile experience.
Ensure touch elements (buttons, links, forms) are sized appropriately and spaced out to prevent misclicks.

Investing in mobile optimization not only aligns with current user behavior but also strengthens your site’s overall performance, accessibility, and competitiveness in search rankings.

16. Improve Page Load Speed

Page load speed plays a critical role in both user experience and SEO performance. In today’s fast-paced digital world, users expect websites to load within just a few seconds—and if your site is slow, they’re likely to abandon it and move on to a competitor. From an SEO perspective, Google uses page speed as a ranking factor, meaning a sluggish site could harm your position in search results.

A faster-loading website not only improves engagement but also boosts metrics like time on site, pages per session, and conversion rates. Plus, search engines are more likely to crawl and index your pages efficiently if they load quickly.

To enhance your website’s load speed, focus on the following key strategies:

Compress images: Use tools like TinyPNG or ImageOptim to reduce image file sizes without sacrificing quality.
Minimize HTTP requests: Limit the number of elements on your page (scripts, stylesheets, images) to decrease the time it takes for the browser to load content.
Leverage browser caching: Store frequently used resources in the user’s browser so they don’t have to be downloaded again on repeat visits.
Use a lightweight, performance-optimized theme: Choose themes that are well-coded and optimized for speed, especially if you’re using platforms like WordPress.
Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML: Remove unnecessary characters and spaces to streamline file sizes and reduce load time.
Enable lazy loading: Delay the loading of images and other media until they are needed (i.e., when a user scrolls to them).
Implement a content delivery network (CDN): Distribute your content across global servers to deliver it faster to users based on their geographic location.
Choose fast, reliable hosting: Your web host’s server speed and performance play a huge role in how quickly your pages load.

You can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights , GTmetrix , or Pingdom to analyze your site’s speed and receive actionable recommendations for improvement.

Optimizing page load speed is a win-win—it creates a better experience for your visitors and signals to search engines that your site is technically sound and user-friendly.

17. Submit Your Sitemap to Google Search Console

Submitting a sitemap through Google Search Console is a simple yet highly effective way to ensure that your website’s content is properly discovered, crawled, and indexed by Google. A sitemap is essentially a file—usually in XML format—that lists all the important URLs on your website, including pages, blog posts, videos, and images. It acts like a roadmap for search engines, guiding them through the structure of your site.

While Google can find pages on its own through internal and external links, manually submitting a sitemap gives you more control and ensures that all of your content, especially newly published or hard-to-find pages, is noticed more quickly and accurately.

Benefits of submitting your sitemap include:

Faster indexing of new content: When you publish new pages or posts, submitting your sitemap can help Google discover and index them faster.
Improved crawl coverage: Search engines are more likely to find every important page, even those that aren’t easily accessible through internal links.
Transparency and insights: Google Search Console provides feedback on which URLs were indexed successfully and highlights any errors or issues in your sitemap.
Better structure recognition: A sitemap helps Google understand your site hierarchy, which can enhance how your content appears in search results.

To submit your sitemap:

Create a sitemap: Most CMS platforms (like WordPress with SEO plugins such as Yoast or Rank Math) autogenerate a sitemap for you (e.g., yoursite.com/sitemap.xml).
Verify your site in Google Search Console: If you haven’t already, add and verify your site ownership using methods like HTML tags, file upload, or domain verification.
Submit your sitemap:

Go to the “Sitemaps” section in Google Search Console.
Enter the URL of your sitemap (e.g., https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml).
Click “Submit.”

After submission, check back periodically to monitor indexing status, identify crawl issues, and optimize your site based on the data provided. Having an up-to-date and accurate sitemap is essential for strong technical SEO and ensures your valuable content gets the visibility it deserves in search engine results.

18. Monitor and Fix Crawl Errors

Regularly monitoring and resolving crawl errors is a crucial part of maintaining a healthy website and ensuring strong SEO performance. Crawl errors occur when a search engine, like Google, tries to access a page on your website but fails. These issues can prevent your content from being properly indexed and may negatively affect your site’s visibility in search results.

Google Search Console provides detailed insights into crawl issues through the Pages or Coverage reports. These reports show which URLs couldn’t be crawled or indexed, the specific errors involved, and when the issue was last detected.

Common crawl errors include:

404 Not Found: The requested page no longer exists or the URL is incorrect.
Server errors (5xx): These indicate issues with your server, preventing the page from loading.
Redirect errors: Improper or excessive redirects that confuse crawlers.
Blocked by robots.txt: Pages that are disallowed in your robots.txt file and can’t be accessed.
Soft 404s: Pages that return a “page not found” message but still load with a 200 OK status, misleading crawlers.

Why fixing crawl errors matters:

Ensures content is indexed properly: If a page can’t be crawled, it can’t be ranked.
Preserves user experience: Broken links or inaccessible pages frustrate users and increase bounce rates.
Prevents loss of link equity: If inbound links point to broken pages, the SEO value of those links is wasted.
Improves overall site health: A clean, crawlable site signals quality and professionalism to search engines.

Steps to fix crawl errors:

Log in to Google Search Console and navigate to the Pages or Indexing > Pages section.
Review the error types (e.g., Not Found, Redirect Error, Server Error) and affected URLs.
For 404 errors, either:

Restore the deleted page.
Redirect the URL to a relevant page using a 301 redirect.
If the page is intentionally removed, mark it as no index or leave it as-is if it’s not important.

For server errors, check your hosting environment or CMS for stability and capacity.
For redirect loops or chains, simplify the redirect path.
Once resolved, click “Validate Fix” in Search Console to prompt a re-crawl.

By regularly checking for and correcting crawl issues, you ensure your site is easy for search engines to navigate, which helps maximize your visibility and rankings.

19. Stay Consistent and Patient

Building domain authority and improving your SEO presence is not something that happens overnight—it’s a long-term commitment that requires consistency, strategy, and patience. While some quick wins may happen early on, real, sustainable results come from continued effort over weeks, months, and even years.

Consistency means regularly:

Publishing high-quality content that addresses your audience’s needs and remains relevant to your niche.
Earning backlinks through guest posting, collaborations, and outreach efforts.
Optimizing technical SEO elements like page speed, mobile usability, and internal linking.
Tracking performance using tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics to identify what’s working and where improvements are needed.
Engaging with your audience through blog comments, forums, social media, and user-generated content to build trust and loyalty.

Why patience matters:

SEO is competitive and ever-changing. Algorithms evolve, competitors shift tactics, and ranking takes time—even with a solid strategy.
Backlinks and trust don’t build instantly. Earning credibility with both users and search engines is a gradual process.
Domain authority grows as a result of cumulative efforts. Each optimized page, each earned backlink, and each positive user interaction contributes to your long-term growth.

Think of SEO like planting a garden: you need to nurture it regularly, water it with effort, remove weeds (errors), and wait for it to flourish. If you stay the course, the results—higher traffic, better rankings, and stronger domain authority—will come.

Ultimately, persistence and consistency separate successful sites from those that give up too soon. Stay focused on your long-term goals, refine your strategy as needed, and celebrate small wins along the way—they all contribute to the bigger picture.

By implementing even a handful of these free strategies, you can significantly enhance your website’s authority and search engine performance without spending a cent. Focus on delivering value, optimizing for users, and building relationships online—your rankings will follow.

What Is a Backlink Profile and Why Do You Need One?

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 22:48:02 GMT

Fleetwood Mac once mused, “You’ve gotta prove your love to me.”

Interestingly enough, Google feels much the same way. But instead of grand gestures of undying affection, what Google cares about are backlinks.

And like it or not, the types of backlinks a website receives – which are all part of that site’s backlink profile – can make all the difference between languishing in obscurity and nabbing a coveted spot in Google’s top search results.

With the right strategies and knowledge, you can harness this powerful (yet often misunderstood) aspect of SEO to boost your clients’ traffic and authority online.

In this article, we’ll cover our backlink profile definition and why it matters, show why you need to pay attention to the kinds of links your clients are getting, and illustrate how you can improve their profiles for better SEO results.

Key Takeaways

Your client’s backlink profile serves as their portfolio of recommendations from other sites
An exemplary backlink profile includes a diverse set of high-quality and relevant links from trusted sources
Backlink profile health requires consistent monitoring and management (using tools like Google Analytics, SEMrush, and Semify’s white label dashboard)
A step-by-step backlink profile analysis process can help you determine where improvements can be made

What Is a Backlink Profile?

At its core, a backlink profile is a collection of all the backlinks that point to a given website.

But not all backlinks are created equal.

There are those that enhance a site’s credibility in the eyes of search engines, and there are others that could potentially harm a site’s standing in search. Still others are relatively neutral, neither helping or hurting in any significant way.

Single links matter, but the way in which those links are gathered and combined over time – as part of a backlink profile – will make a difference in how Google views your client’s site is viewed by search engines.

By identifying what an ideal backlink profile looks like and how to spot a poor one, as well as understanding the importance of diversifying anchor text and the pitfalls of over-optimization, you can help your clients acquire better, more diverse links that will improve both their rankings and their perceived authority.

Backlink Profile Basics

What many people fail to realize is that a site’s backlinks are one of its strongest ranking signals, meaning they carry a lot of weight in Google’s algorithm ranking calculations. A robust backlink profile acts as a beacon for search engines, allowing the credibility and authority of a website to shine through the darkness and guide others to a safe harbor of solutions.

But what exactly is meant by “robust” in this context? Typically, a good backlink profile values quality over quantity – but it should also have a healthy number of backlinks from a variety of respected sources. In other words, you’ll need to diversify.

Think of diversifying a client’s backlinks like spreading your investments in the stock market. By securing backlinks from a variety of credible sources – and including a wide range of visible text anchors for those links – you’ll minimize the risk of being penalized by search engines for over-optimization or coming across as spammy, all while helping your clients be viewed as trustworthy by association.

Ultimately, this can help your clients stay resilient in the face of algorithm updates and other SEO changes while boosting their presence to their target online audience.

In order to accomplish that goal, however, you’ll need to have a clear picture of what makes a strong profile (as well as what makes a weak one) so you can make more informed link-building decisions.

What Does a Good Backlink Profile Look Like?

Back in the early days of SEO, it was common to focus on link quantity. Search engines weren’t always so skilled at determining the value of linking domains, which means it really was a numbers game. At that time, more equaled better.

But now, it’s a completely different story. While you still see spammy link-building tactics being performed, Google cares much more about the quality, diversity, and relevance of the links pointing to a website. Now, it’s much better to have 100 great links than 2,000 spammy ones.

The ideal profile boasts backlinks from authoritative sites that share a connection with your client’s niche or industry. This ultimately showcases the credibility of your client’s site and helps it rank more effectively in search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s viewed as a testament to a website’s value, indicating to Google that the site’s content is not only worth indexing but also deserving of a prominent position in search results.

While these backlinks need to come from authoritative sources, the overall diversity of a backlink profile matters just as much. A healthy mix of backlinks from various sources – blogs, news sites, and quality directories, for instance – combined with a variety of different anchors will signal to search engines that your client’s backlink profile was built naturally over time. It suggests that, rather than follow a spammy or pay-to-play model, your clients have made the effort to publish content that different webmasters across the internet find valuable enough to link to organically.

For best results, those webmasters’ sites should have real, established traffic that can result in actual link clicks. In addition to the site’s vertical and how well it aligns with your client’s niche, you’ll also want to pay attention to the linking domain’s perceived authority or rating, comparative to other sites on the web. You can use a tool like SEMrush’s Domain Rating Checker or Moz’s Website Authority Checker to assess which sites might provide the highest link-building value.

To sum up, a healthy backlink profile might contain a good mix of the following:

Generally speaking, a high-quality backlink profile contains a variety of link types (including editorial, press releases, guest posts, and directories); a combination of follow and no-follow links (some say a 60-40 ratio is a good goal); and an assortment of anchors (including branded, exact-match, generic, and naked URLs). With all three of these categories, you should make every effort to build a profile that appears as natural as possible while still pursuing the best link-building opportunities as part of your SEO strategy.

What Does a Bad Backlink Profile Look Like?

Traditionally speaking, a client’s profile has ample room for improvement if it’s a minefield of low-quality, irrelevant links. If they’ve participated in link exchanges, they’ve purchased links outright, or they’ve had links built through link farms or other shady practices, your client’s site may appear untrustworthy by association. While these tactics may once have had positive effects in the past, search engines now view these links with skepticism at best and condemnation at worst.

It’s not just poor quality links that can act as warning bells to Google. Over-optimization of exact match anchor text links can also be a big red flag. Although it might seem beneficial to include target keywords in your link-building practices, you can easily have too much of a good thing. In many cases, it can set off Google’s “spidey senses” that you’re trying to manipulate rankings, which can impact your client’s perceived integrity and even trigger penalties that can tank their rankings for the foreseeable future.

Speaking of over-optimization, you’ll want to be careful about your linking domains or link attributions, as well. While neither repeated linking domains or having lots of do-follow links are inherently bad, they can spell trouble if used to excess.

Link juice can be passed from one site to another, but acquiring more than one link from the same domain won’t necessarily double the amount of juice you get. That said, it’s not uncommon to naturally receive more than one link from the same website. In fact, Ahrefs found that almost 80% of websites that rank within the top 10 SERP spots for at least one keyword publish two or more links to the same domain. It’s a phenomenon that happens naturally, particularly when a respected website is linking to another trusted information resource.

Still, that doesn’t mean your clients should obtain the majority of their backlinks from the same domain. Not only does a diverse link profile suggest that your client’s site is helpful and valuable to a variety of people, but it can also protect your clients in the event that a site is unexpectedly shuttered or their links are suddenly removed. A link profile with very few referring, repeated domains has significant room for growth. It would be wise to take a closer look at how relevant those links are for your clients and whether the total number of links might look suspicious to search engines. However, this may not necessarily be cause for alarm.

In reviewing a link profile for clients, you’ll also want to pay attention to the type of link attributions they’ve received. While most marketers will agree that do-follow links are the gold standard, that doesn’t mean they’re always better than no-follow links 100% of the time.

A follow link from a low-quality website isn’t going to help your client more than a no-follow link from a highly reputable source like the New York Times, for example. Although the NYT link might not pass any link juice, it’s still a great source of traffic that can boost your client’s reputation. In addition, acquiring only follow links with an absence of no follows can appear manipulative. Google might assume your client is paying for follow links in an effort to cheat the system.

While no-follow links typically indicate that the referring domain simply doesn’t want to endorse the website for whatever reason, that isn’t necessarily an indicator that your client’s site is considered untrustworthy. Search engines recognize that many websites publish no-follow links by default. No-follow links don’t count against you; they just don’t really give you a direct endorsement, either. However, they’re a natural consequence of publishing good content – and Google expects to see some in any link profile. Without them, Google might think something’s fishy about your client’s site and their approach to SEO.

Aim For: High-Quality Backlinks and Varied Anchors

When it comes to link-building, quality is key. Your clients’ links should come from reputable, well-regarded sites within a similar industry or niche. Acquiring quality links for your clients can boost their site’s authority in the eyes of search engines while driving meaningful, engaged traffic.

Just as important as link quality is link text variation. When building backlinks for your clients, you’ll want to give careful consideration to the keyword phrases, branded terms, and generic words used in the clickable text portion of the hyperlinks pointing to your client’s site. Maintaining diversity here can help clients avoid having the appearance of manipulative SEO tactics to search engines, but it also arguably creates a better experience for users.

Together, these two factors can indicate a healthy link profile that can build trust and authority while improving rankings and traffic.

Avoid: Over-Optimized Anchor Text

Search engine optimization can do wonders for helping your clients be found online. But it’s easy to take it too far – especially with link text. When too many links to your client’s site use the exact same keyword-rich phrases, this can make their overall profile look spammy or artificial to search engines. This overuse alerts Google that you might be attempting to manipulate search results, a practice that can lead to big penalties that can disrupt rankings progress.

These penalties can have an impact on your client’s PageRank , which Google uses to evaluate a site’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust). When a site’s PageRank is negatively impacted, it can affect where that site appears in SERPs. And if your client’s site doesn’t appear as prominently in organic search results, it’s going to inherently receive less traffic – and that can tank your strategic efforts overall.

The chart below shows the potential consequences that can come with over-optimization (or under-optimization!) of visible link text, as well as recommendations for positive outcomes.

Overall, diverse and natural-looking anchors rank better and help sites avoid the harsh scrutiny of search algorithms. Rather than reduce link quantity to avoid over-optimized anchors, you should focus on enhancing link quality, diversity, and applicability while being mindful of the visible link text being published. This can help your clients avoid potential penalties while improving user experience and authority.

Understanding Link Relevance

The degree to which the content published on a linking page relates to that of your client’s website can impact a link’s relative value and how it may move the rankings needle. In other words, you need to ensure that the sites linking to your client’s site make logical sense.

When Google makes a rankings determination, it assesses both the quality and applicability of the links pointing to a given site. Relevant links are considered a vote of confidence from one site to another, underscoring a site’s authority on a particular subject or industry. When it’s clear that a link comes from a site that’s pertinent to what your client does, that’s going to be seen as a natural fit that benefits web users.

Irrelevant links, on the other hand, can do more harm than good. Google may view an irrelevant link as an attempt to trick its algorithm, which can come with steep penalties. Too many irrelevant links will appear spammy and can ultimately keep your clients from appearing prominently in SERPs; in some cases, they could cause your client to be excluded from search results entirely.

Keep in mind that there are degrees of what’s considered relevant. Just because a site has decent traffic and a healthy domain rating doesn’t automatically mean it’s a good fit for your client. If your client owns a restaurant and you’re getting them a lot of links from websites in medical, industrial, or entertainment news niches, those links aren’t going to be nearly as beneficial for your client as ones from sites in a food, business, or local events vertical. The literal link may be there, but the figurative one won’t be! You’ll often need to employ your best judgment to discern which sites are a great match versus too much of a stretch.

Overall quality can also affect how relevant a link is (or how much it actually matters in practice). Highly respected national news sources, for example, cover a wide variety of subjects. If you happen to secure a do-follow link for your clients from a site like this, the content’s subject and its relation to your client certainly matters – but the genre of the website itself probably won’t be called into question. Conversely, a small-scale industry blog or a lesser known news site should have a clear connection to your client’s industry or expertise, both on the individual post level and on a broader, site-wide level.

The chart below shows how acquiring backlinks from web pages closely connected to your client’s niche can pay off:

When building a backlink profile, it’s essential to focus on quality over quantity – and link relevance plays a major role in quality. Without this piece of the puzzle, your efforts to improve your client’s standing in SERPs may fall flat. Strategically attracting links from highly relevant sources can enhance your client’s perceived authority and trust while building relationships with high-caliber publishers and driving traffic to both sites.

Where to Find Your Backlink Profile

Improving a client’s link profile will require you to first analyze what already exists. So where can you find it?

Google Search Console is a great place to start; if you have access to this resource, you can access a detailed overview of who links to your client’s site, as well as how your client’s site links to itself internally. You can also use Google Analytics to take a closer look at referral traffic, which can indicate which external pages drive traffic for your clients (though you’ll have to do some detective work yourself to connect the dots).

But to bolster your link-building strategy, you’ll need more than the basics that Google provides. For a deeper dive, tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs – or Semify’s white label dashboard, which gives you access to a plethora of SEMrush and Ahrefs data – are priceless resources. These platforms provide you with a granular look at your client’s link profile, including link volume, link quality, rating/authority of linking domains, anchor text diversity, and more.

Remember, the goal is not merely to gather data but to gain actionable insights. What matters most is how you use this information to refine your link-building strategy for clients. As your SEO fulfillment partner, we can make this process even easier by importing all of the data you need directly into our dashboard in real time via APIs (and helping you make sense of it all through strategic support!).

Backlink Profile Analysis: A Step-By-Step Guide

Using third-party tools can help you understand how your client’s site is being perceived across the web. By observing fluctuations in your client’s PageRank, analyzing the quality of backlinks, and identifying potentially harmful links early on will empower you to make data-driven decisions that align with your marketing strategy and safeguard your client’s reputation online.

That said, performing a backlink profile analysis can be a complex process. Whether you handle this yourself or entrust a partner like Semify to determine the strength of your client’s profile and identify areas for improvement, you’ll generally want to follow a systematic approach like the one outlined below.

Step #1: Look at Referring Domains

You’ll want to start your backlink profile analysis by taking a closer look at the domains that have already published links to your client’s site. Whether your clients have engaged in link-building efforts in the past or these links were acquired naturally, this can give you a better idea of how diverse and authoritative their average link source is before you do any additional link-building work.

Dive deep to discover the nature of their referring domains. Are they esteemed industry blogs? Authoritative news outlets? Niche-specific web forums? While it’s not a hard and fast rule, these categories and their impact can usually be broken down by value as shown in the chart below.

You should also take the time to analyze domains based on their domain rating or authority, which can give you additional insights as to how those referring websites are perceived. Since do-follow links can pass link “power” from one site to another, it’s beneficial to your clients if these referring websites have a notable DR or DA to indicate relative value. This can show you where your client’s strongest support comes from and where you might need to foster new relationships or enhance existing ones to bolster their standing in SERPs.

Step #2: Check the Number of Backlinks

While quality matters more than quantity, you should still pay attention to backlink volume when analyzing a client’s complete link profile. The number of links they’ve received can give you a broad idea of how popular or established their site is in the digital space. Although more doesn’t automatically equal better here, an older site with widely recognized and robust content will typically have more backlinks than a new site with very few written and visual assets. In many cases, you can use link volume to determine a site’s potential reach and influence – or discern whether your client received bad SEO advice in the past.

Backlink velocity is crucial here, as well. The rate at which new backlinks are acquired can make the difference between a good profile and a bad one – and this is where context really comes into play. A sudden spike in new links could mean your client’s content has gone viral, but it could also signal unnatural link-building efforts, which could attract Google penalties. Spammy SEOs have been known to build hundreds of low-quality links at a time in an effort to manipulate search engines. But if all the links are of a certain caliber and can be traced back to a specific story that really took off, your client isn’t likely to be penalized as a result. Overall, maintaining a healthy link profile requires a delicate balance of quantity and pace – so don’t rely on a singular viral moment to develop a healthy profile.

Finally, you’ll want to scrutinize the distribution of backlinks. Are they evenly spread across your client’s website, or are they concentrated on specific pages? While having a concentration of backlinks pointed at a certain page isn’t necessarily bad, it’s usually more beneficial to maintain consistent, site-wide link growth; this indicates the overall worthiness of an entire site, rather than a single piece of content. If you know which pages are already receiving attention, you can make more informed decisions about your future link-building efforts (and even your larger content strategy moving forward).

Step #3: Zero In on Anchor Text

While it often goes overlooked, the clickable text within hyperlinks can tell both marketers and search engines quite a lot. Ideally, your clients should have a rich variety of anchor texts within their profile of links. Diversity can help your clients avoid over-optimization penalties while maintaining a natural-looking profile – and that really is the ultimate goal.

Your client’s anchors should include a broad range of related phrases, with a mix of branded, generic, and keyword-rich options that provide additional context to both human readers and search bots. Finding the right balance here can be challenging, but it’s worthwhile. This can help search crawlers categorize your client’s site more effectively while building trust with web users (who want to know what they’re getting into before they click!).

Conventional SEO wisdom tells us that the majority of your client’s anchors should be comprised of:

Branded anchors (i.e., your client’s company name)
Naked URLs (i.e., www.theirsitehere.com)
Generic anchors (i.e., “click here,” “visit,” “learn more,” etc.)

Partial-match and exact-match anchors, which usually contain target keywords related to both your client’s linked content and their overall SEO strategy, should be used more mindfully. While they can be effective, overuse will dilute your efforts and run the risk of raising a red flag to Google. We talk much more about the art of anchor text selection, especially as it pertains to guest post links, in our 2025 guide to SEO backlinks .

If your client has too many keyword-rich anchors, you may want to look for other signs of potential over-optimization. On the other end of the spectrum, if your client’s profile has only generic anchors, that provides you with an opportunity to focus a bit more on some partial- and exact-match link building opportunities in the near future.

Step #4: Separate the Good From the Bad

Once you’ve done all that, you can separate the good links from the bad ones. High-quality backlinks are those that contribute positively to your client’s authority and search rankings, while poor-quality links can be an active deterrent. Keep in mind that many links are neither inherently good or bad; some may have little to no effect on how your client’s site ranks in SERPs. But for unequivocally bad links, you’ll need to take action.

The chart below shows a few basic steps you’ll want to take as you categorize your client’s existing links.

If you’ve determined that there are, in fact, some spammy links that need to be dealt with to avoid potential penalties, our team can help with this identification process, as well as with disavowing any harmful links. By signaling to Google that you don’t want those links to “count” against your clients, you can help protect their reputation as a trustworthy source and potentially improve their rankings. Next, we’ll cover how to spot those bad backlinks.

Toxic Backlinks & How to Spot Them in 2025

We’ve talked about what a bad backlink profile looks like, but a few bad links does not a bad profile make. Still, a few bad apples can spoil the bunch if you aren’t careful. That’s why you’ll want to learn how to spot toxic links and deal with them properly.

Toxic backlinks are essentially poor-quality links that can negatively affect your client’s rankings. They often originate from spammy, irrelevant, or untrustworthy sources, and can be a signal to search engines that a site might not be a credible source of information.

Identifying these harmful links requires diligence and an understanding of what Google considers to be indicators of link quality. Factors such as the linking site’s irrelevance to your client’s content, the presence of keyword-stuffed anchors, or links from domains known for low-quality content should raise immediate red flags. These indicators help in pinpointing which links might harm your client’s reputation and search visibility:

We can help you identify and deal with any spammy or toxic links your clients might have, as well as avoid them entirely in the future with an improved link-building strategy.

Step #5: Craft a Link-Building Strategy

Once you’ve completed a thorough analysis of your client’s backlink profile, you’ll want to use that information to develop a strategy for link-building moving forward. Your audit can tell you where your client’s vulnerabilities lie, as well as what their current strengths are. This data can point you in the right direction for building future links on their behalf.

For example, say your client already has a number of industry blog links they’ve organically received from their content. Not only can you cross these referring domains off your list of potential outreach sites (since chances are good that they could publish additional links without your efforts!), but you can also assess the kinds of linking domains that are lacking in their profile and determine an appropriate cadence for link acquisition. You’ll then be able to create a list of possible publications and outlets that are a good fit for your clients, develop even more valuable website content, and reach out to those website owners about guest blogging or broken link opportunities to continue building on your client’s existing link profile.

As your white label link-building experts, we can give you the support you need to craft an exemplary backlink strategy for clients to build trust and increase their SERP presence.

Backlink Profile Frequently Asked Questions

What is a backlink profile and how does it impact SEO?

A backlink profile is a comprehensive catalog of all the incoming links to a website, essentially capturing the volume, quality, and diversity of other web pages that link back to that site. Because we know that links are one of Google’s most important ranking signals (though it’s no longer in the top 3 ranking factors , as of last year), we can gather that search algorithms give backlinks more consideration in their calculations. That means that your client’s backlinks have a direct impact on where their site appears in organic search results.

While links certainly aren’t the only factor that affects SEO, they remain crucial to any SEO strategy. Your client’s total collection of backlinks tell the story of how valuable, trustworthy, and authoritative they are so that Google can make the right rankings determinations about where your client should appear in SERPs relative to other, similar sites.

What's the most important consideration when developing a great backlink profile?

Diversity, quality, and relevance are the top 3 considerations to keep in mind here. But while diversity of links absolutely matters, whether those links are both from high-quality sources and are relevant to your clients are even more crucial. Quality and relevance often go hand-in-hand, but they are distinctly different metrics. A backlink’s quality can be determined by things like monthly traffic and domain rating/authority, while relevance refers to how aligned the referring domain is with the industry, niche, and topics of the site receiving the link. A relevant link will share contextual or thematic similarities to your client’s site, while a link from a high-quality site can have a positive effect on your client’s reputation and perception.

Where can you locate and access a backlink profile for analysis?

To analyze your website’s backlink profile, you can utilize tools like Google Search Console, SEMrush, or the Semify white label dashboard to access data involving the types and sources of your client’s backlinks. These platforms provide deep data analytics and visualization to help you understand your client’s backlink landscape, identifying both the strengths and areas for improvement within their backlink portfolio.

Why is analyzing a backlink profile crucial for improving a website's SEO performance?

With SEO, ignorance is anything but bliss. To set your clients up for SEO success, you’ll need to have a crystal clear idea of which sites are linking to theirs and whether those sites are helping or hurting. Analyzing their backlink profile offers insights into the websites linking to your client’s site, which has a direct influence on their search rankings. Moreover, this analysis helps identify and remove potentially harmful links that could damage your client’s credibility and visibility in Google Search.

How can a strong backlink profile help drive exceptional SEO results?

Google views backlinks as an endorsement of sorts. When a well-respected website gives your client’s site a proverbial thumbs up, Google generally values and trusts that endorsement. A strong backlink profile can significantly enhance your SEO efforts by improving a site’s visibility and credibility in the eyes of search engines, leading to higher rankings in Google search results and increased organic traffic. Further, it signals to algorithms that your client’s website is a valuable resource, which can increase both web traffic and other citations from reputable sources.

Knowing What is a Backlink Profile is Only the Beginning

A high-quality, diverse, and relevant backlink profile is essential for boosting any client’s SEO performance, as it signals credibility and authority to Google while driving more traffic to their site.

But while having a strong link portfolio remains a vital part of successful SEO strategies, link-building can be both time-consuming and complex, leaving little room for many agency owners and enterprise teams to focus on growing their business and delivering other services for their clients.

At Semify, we can give you the link-building support you need to deliver better results for clients as you scale. To learn more about our white label link building services, get in touch with us today.

Semify Receives RedHawk50 Award to Celebrate Outstanding Growth

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 21:51:17 GMT

Rochester, NY White Label Marketing Platform Named Among the Fastest-Growing Companies Led By Miami University Alumni

Semify was officially named a RedHawk50 honoree this past Friday, March 15, 2024, cementing its position within the inaugural list of the fastest-growing private companies founded or led by graduates of Miami University .

Launched in June 2023, the RedHawk50 program was designed to identify and celebrate the achievements of notable Miamians in business. It also serves as a vehicle to connect Miami University graduates and business leaders with the next generation of Miami entrepreneurs, reinforcing the impact of the “Cradle of Founders” – the moniker for the University’s John W. Altman Institute for Entrepreneurship in the Farmer School of Business , named 7th in the world by the Princeton Review.

Said Miami University President Gregory Crawford upon the program’s launch, “Entrepreneurs propel the economy forward. RedHawk50 offers an opportunity to celebrate the incredible impact of Miamians in the business community and serve as a vehicle for these leaders to pass their insights on to the next generation.”

Out of 360 nominated businesses, Semify was named to the inaugural class of the 50-fastest growing private companies.

CEO Patrick Briggs (class of 2006) said of the honor, “My time at Miami University undoubtedly shaped my professional aspirations and the trajectory that ultimately led me to the incredible work we’re doing at Semify. Miami lit my entrepreneurial ‘fire,’ so to speak, and that fiery spirit is alive and well in all of us. I’m thrilled that Semify has been recognized in this list and that we can continue to build on all the growth we’ve already achieved with our partners.”

Semify’s inclusion among the RedHawk50 honorees highlights the company’s notable achievements since its inception in 2008. Originally founded by entrepreneurs Adam Stetzer, Ph.D., and Chad Hill as a cutting-edge digital marketing solution for direct clients, Semify has since become a leader in the white label marketing sector. Over the past 16 years, Semify has supported hundreds of agency owners in scaling their businesses through its private label software, U.S.-based team, and dedication to growth-oriented partnerships. This award also reinforces Semify’s commitment to continued innovation and success in the digital marketing space.

Semify CFO Amit Dixit (class of 2010) added, “One of our core values at Semify is ‘We Am’ – the idea that we grow together through operating collaboratively. It is a privilege to be a part of the Miami RedHawk50 community, which is an excellent example of exactly that collaborative environment which fosters growth between successful Miami alumni in business and future leaders.”

About Semify: Established in 2008, Semify, LLC (formerly known as HubShout, LLC) is a team of enthusiastic and highly trained digital marketing professionals providing white label SEO and PPC services to hundreds of customers under its white-label reseller program. The Semify family of brands, which includes SEO Reseller and Agency Elevation, aims to serve agency owners and enterprise organizations at all levels with high-quality white labeled services at-scale. With its proprietary and API-integrated software platform, U.S.-based team, and commitment to the highest level of customer service and transparency, Semify has paved the way for business owners who need high-performing digital marketing services at-scale. Semify’s digital marketing insights and cultural accomplishments have been featured in the Washington Post, the Star Tribune, the Las Vegas Sun, and the Rochester Business Journal, among other publications.

About RedHawk50: RedHawk50 is an annual program to identify, recognize, and celebrate the 50 fastest growing private companies around the world founded or led by former students of Miami University. This program plays an important role in identifying and collecting information about promising and/or accomplished Miamians in the business community and about Miami-led companies. It also reinforces Miami University and the John W. Altman Institute for Entrepreneurship as the “Cradle of Founders” and serves as a vehicle for the Miami University graduates and former students who lead these companies to pass lessons learned to the next generation of Miami entrepreneurs.

About The John W. Altman Institute for Entrepreneurship at Miami University: The John W. Altman Institute for Entrepreneurship, past winner of the Nasdaq Center of Entrepreneurial Excellence Award as the top entrepreneurship program and institute worldwide, has earned a “Top 10” ranking among public schools in The Princeton Review® and Entrepreneur Magazine annual ranking of the Top 50 Undergraduate Entrepreneurship Programs in the world for sixteen consecutive years (No. 7 overall and No. 5 among publics in 2024). Distinguishing features include small class sizes and teacher-scholars with founder experience that annually engage more than 5,000 students from every undergraduate major across campus; immersive, practice-based experiential learning opportunities in every class and in every co-curricular program; and access to entrepreneurial ecosystem builders across the U.S. and around the world.

The 2025 Guide to Different Types of Backlinks for SEO

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 22:18:11 GMT

2025 SEO Backlink Strategies: A Comprehensive Guide

As the SEO landscape constantly evolves, so do the best methods of building a robust backlink profile for your clients. With so many ways to pass positive link juice, you’ll want to have a handle on the best types of backlinks to acquire for optimal organic results – even if you’re relying on a white label partner to do the fulfillment work for you.

So what are the pros and cons of different types of backlinks? And which types of backlinks in SEO should you focus on for maximum ROI?

We’ll highlight a few different strategies that can guide your link-building strategy for 2025, including…

Guest Posts: You’d be remiss to overlook the ever-critical practice of guest posting, as it provides a dual benefit of brand exposure and valuable website links, along with opportunities for publisher relationship-building.
Broken Link Replacement: Broken link building has emerged as a savvy technique to replace the web’s lost connections with your client’s superior content while helping publishers improve their site’s own performance.
Social Media: Meanwhile, the surge in social media’s societal influence opens new avenues for link acquisition, providing additional opportunities to build authority and trust.
Content Marketing: Perhaps most importantly, the effort you put into developing high-value content can naturally yield positive link results, as well-researched website assets will typically translate to more web shares and links from other reputable sources.

Keep reading to unlock the full potential of these strategies and how they can elevate your search engine optimization efforts in 2025.

Key Takeaways

Guest posting is a strategic collaboration that enhances visibility and amplifies brand voice
Broken link building revives valuable SEO opportunities and amplifies online positioning
Social media engagement proves crucial for link generation and brand advocacy
High-quality content formats like interactive infographics and original research naturally attract engagement, citations, and links

Harnessing the Power of Guest Posting in 2025

As you refine your search engine optimization approach in 2025, it’s essential that you leverage the power of guest posting. While guest posts are far from new, they’re considered a timeless tactic that continue to maintain relevance – even in an ever-evolving SEO landscape.

What is Guest Posting in 2025?

While you may already be familiar with guest posting (or guest blogging) as a concept, understanding the finer points of this practice and how it’s evolved can inform how you approach guest posting in 2025.

Guest blogging isn’t just a means of building a link to a client’s site (though that is admittedly an important piece!). Ideally, it also involves collaborating with an established publisher to facilitate a mutual benefit.

The guest blogger contributes a high-quality, highly relevant piece of content and a naturally placed link back to their site, while the publisher provides the web platform and a real, engaged audience of readers. The publisher receives valuable content with relatively low effort, while the guest contributor has an opportunity to amplify their brand recognition and overall credibility both with web users and search engines. It really is a win-win scenario, which is perhaps why it’s withstood the test of time.

That said, you’ll get out of guest blogging only what you put into it. The publishers with whom you develop relationships and the caliber of content you submit for publication will ultimately determine the results you can expect to see reflected in your clients’ search rankings. Ensuring that both the publisher and the content itself are highly relevant to your client’s niche and provide ample value will increase the likelihood of positive ranking factors and, ultimately, improved SEO results.

So, how do you determine the best types of backlinks from guest posts for your clients? Start by evaluating potential publishing partners.

Identifying Suitable Guest Posting Opportunities

When you make the decision to add guest posting to a client’s SEO strategy, you’ll first need to search for websites that align with your client’s industry and intended audience. However, those aren’t the only attributes you’ll need to consider when vetting potential guest posting platforms. Ideally, the website you choose should have a high domain rating (DR), real traffic from an engaged audience, and undeniable relevance to your client’s niche.

Performing your due diligence during the research and outreach stages will include the review of the website’s backlink profile, average traffic, time on site/page, and other performance and engagement metrics, as well as an evaluation of existing content and topic verticals.

You’ll want to see indicators of robust search algorithm ranking factors and evidence of the publisher’s own perceived value, determined by both Google and actual readers. While “link juice” can be passed even when your link isn’t clicked, higher user interaction often translates to increased visibility for the guest post and, by extension, more meaningful referral traffic to the landing page being linked.

While there are no guarantees that one guest blog will have a massive impact on your client’s position on a SERP, it’s essential to choose your “host” wisely. Long gone are the days of the successful link farm; no longer can you build 1,000 spammy links in one day and see positive results. Instead, search engines reward valuable sites that include equally valuable backlinks.

Because a backlink is seen as an endorsement, of sorts, Google doesn’t take kindly to low-quality, irrelevant websites that offer thousands of links to anyone who asks (or pays) for them. You’ll need to prioritize acquiring links from authoritative and relevant websites in order for search engines to view your client’s own site as authoritative and relevant.

However, publisher selection isn’t where your guest posting obligations end. Once you’ve chosen the right website for a guest post and developed a mutually beneficial relationship with the publisher, you or your white label partner will need to develop high-caliber content for their site that speaks to a real audience.

Crafting Valuable Content For the Publisher's Website

Creating an effective guest post involves more than disseminating basic information; you’ll need to provide something truly unique in your blog post that resonates with the publisher’s audience. Your clients will need to flex their muscles, so to speak, as an authority on a given subject while also catering to the site’s target readership. Your clients will need to share their knowledge in a way that speaks to the website’s typical visitor.

That typically means you’ll have to meticulously tailor each guest blog to reflect not only your client’s and point of view, but also the host site’s specific content standards and expectations. While you may be given an in-depth style guide to follow, you may also need to draw your own conclusions about how you can address common web queries and existing content gaps for both specific website readers and more general web users. To be successful, you’ll need to contribute content that sparks conversation, drives engagement, and “knits” your client’s authority into the fabric of the host’s existing community. That’s no small feat! (This is just one reason why agencies and enterprise organizations rely on a white label fulfillment partner like Semify to handle guest posting and the acquisition of other types of backlinks for their SEO clients.)

Above all, your post should be informative, engaging, and unique – providing undeniable value to the publisher, the website’s audience, and your brand as a whole.

But within the content itself lies one final piece of the puzzle: your client’s backlink.

Incorporating Your Client's Link in Guest Post Content

What many business owners fail to realize is that the best types of backlinks included in many guest posts may not always be the most obvious or commonplace ones. Knowing precisely how to construct a link’s anchor text or whether to accept a nofollow link from a specific website can help you create a better, more diverse link profile that helps your client more adeptly move up the rankings in SERPs.

Understanding the Different Types of Links and Anchors Found in Guest Blogs

While there are a few different link attributes that can come into play with guest post content (including sponsored links), you’ll mainly be concerned with two main options. Understanding the difference between nofollow and follow links can allow you to determine the best opportunities for your clients and maximize potential link-building returns.

Nofollow link: A nofollow link contains a special attribute (rel=”nofollow”) that instructs search engines to avoid crawling the linked webpage. While most marketers agree that this prevents link “juice” from being passed from one site to another, it doesn’t discourage referral traffic from real users or general exposure. It can also help to promote link diversity, particularly from highly respected websites and media outlets, which all websites need.
Follow link: Generally seen as the more coveted option for guest post backlinks, follow links (also known as dofollow links) are the default type of link that “count” as an endorsement from the publisher to the website being linked. Without any additional HTML attribute present, search engines will follow those links and allow link equity to be passed from one site to the other. Essentially, the linking domain can have a positive influence on the site receiving the link. That said, you won’t want every link your client receives to be a dofollow, as that can actually raise Google’s suspicions about the methods being used to acquire links.

The above attributes aren’t the only factor to weigh here. When evaluating publisher guidelines and developing guest post content, you’ll also need to give careful consideration to how your client’s link is physically displayed. While search engines expect to see a combination of different types of visible link text pointing to any given website, you and your white label partner will need to be strategic about the specific text used in the clickable portion of the link. Knowing which type of text is most appropriate for a given situation will allow your clients to get the most out of a guest post opportunity.

Branded anchors: Occurring when a brand’s name is used as the visible text associated with a hyperlink (i.e., Semify ), these typically make up a significant portion of a website’s entire backlink profile.
Generic anchors : Also known as organic anchors, generic link text can include phrases like, “click here,” “visit,” or “website.” While they often instruct web users with a call-to-action, they’re not particularly descriptive or unique, which can inhibit trust-building. However, most reputable SEOs would expect to see a substantial number of generic anchors within a site’s link profile.
Naked URL: In these instances, the visible text and the URL are one and the same, with no attempt to describe the webpage being linked beyond its web address (i.e., “ https://www.searchenginejournal.com “). Naked links are relatively commonplace; along with generic and branded anchors, these three link types typically make up the highest percentage of all links within a site’s profile.
Exact-match anchors: Sometimes called “money anchors,” these are types of link text that correlate to a specific ranking keyword being targeted. For example, if Semify created a relevant guest post for a publisher that linked back to this exact blog post you’re reading on our website, using the keyword “types of backlinks” for the link’s visible text would fall under the exact-match category. While it’s tempting to follow this strategy for SEO purposes, it should actually be used sparingly.
Partial-match anchors: As you might be able to guess from the description above, these (which are sometimes referred to as “compound anchors”) contain a portion or a variation of a keyword related to the linked webpage and that the linked website would like to target. A partial-match option of the aforementioned example for this post could be “types of SEO backlink strategies.” While that isn’t the main keyword being targeted here, it’s still semantically and contextually close enough for search engines to recognize. Although these kinds of terms are certainly relevant to the content being linked, this tactic can also appear spammy if used to excess.

To be clear, guest blog posts provide a unique opportunity to build highly relevant links for your clients – so you’ll want to include a well-placed link in your content submission! However, those links should be introduced mindfully. They should both add value to your client’s link profile while providing additional context for the website’s readers.

When adding your client’s link to guest post content, consider the chart below.

In 2025, guest posting is far from dead. When you’re able to combine carefully crafted content and effective backlinking practices with mutually beneficial publisher relationships, your clients will be in a better position to increase their visibility in organic search results. This strategic collaboration allows another website owner to benefit from your client’s expertise, while your clients get a boost from the publisher’s overall influence. It’s considered a classic for good reason – and it continues to be an integral part of any good SEO strategy.

Mastering the Art of Broken Link Building

Guest posts are all well and good, but building high-quality links doesn’t always require you to start completely from scratch. Your clients can often benefit from existing content on reputable websites. The catch? You’ll need to analyze what’s already on the web and identify opportunities to replace an outdated link to one for your client’s site.

This tactic can act as a great supplement to your other outreach efforts, as it requires little to no content writing and often limited back-and-forth with other site owners. But because it also provides a chance for publishers to improve their site experience with very little effort on their part, it can yield even more positive results for your clients within a relatively short period of time.

By gaining access to the right tools, you can find the broken or outdated links placed in pre-existing content and suggest more recent and relevant substitutes that point back to your client’s site.

Defining Broken Link Building in 2025

Broken links are fairly commonplace, especially for larger publishers. Unless you regularly perform website audits to assess which links are delivering 404 errors or that point to dead sites, it can be tough to stay on top of it all.

When you add broken link replacement to your link-building strategy, you’re effectively doing a favor for another website owner. Whether you’re suggesting a new version of a link that used to point to your client’s web page in the past or you’re hoping to replace a competitor’s outdated link, you’re helping the publisher’s site run more smoothly – and potentially earning a link for your clients at the same time.

Generally speaking, this process involves identifying an existing broken link on a relevant, high-quality website, reaching out to the site owner to let them know you found the broken link, and suggesting your client’s link as an alternative resource. In a perfect world, the site owner would reply to your email to chat further or simply update the link to your client’s without any further discussion. And voila! A new link for your client.

That scenario doesn’t always play out, of course, but this tactic is something of a numbers game. If you can develop a fairly low-effort, streamlined way to identify broken links, match those opportunities to your clients and their content, and send pitches to site owners en masse (without spamming!), you’ll have a greater likelihood of link-building success.

Using Tools for Effective Broken Link Identification

Doing this kind of work manually without technological support will take far too long; the whole point is to lighten your backlinking workload, after all! Typically, you’ll need to use an outside tool or platform to crawl the web for broken backlinks that are relevant to a client’s industry, products or services, expertise, and/or website content. You can use a source like Semrush to analyze a competitor’s backlink profile and find broken links that might be a good fit for your parameters. There are a number of other software platforms and browser extensions you can use to scrape website data and help you zero in on these kinds of opportunities, as well. Your white label SEO partner may be able to suggest a specific tool or even include these services as part of your client’s link-building strategy.

Once you’ve decided on the tools and tactics you’ll use to find these links, you’ll want to:

Comb through your client’s backlink profile to determine whether they have outdated or broken links of their own that can be replaced with working alternatives
Analyze the backlink profiles of your client’s competitors to check for broken pages and identify relevant matches for your client’s content and resources

After you’ve performed this initial leg work and have found some options that seem worthwhile, it’ll be time to make your pitch.

Developing Outreach Strategies For Viable Link Replacements

Crafting a pitch to send to website owners requires a good amount of personalization and tact. While you won’t want to spend hours writing a single outreach email, you’ll increase your chances of receiving a positive response to your request if you take the time to make your message feel tailored to the individual recipient and use a tone that balances the conversational with the professional.

First, for the personalization element. The platform you use for outreach should be able to provide you with contact information for the site owner. Be sure to use that in your salutation, at a minimum. You should also take five to 10 minutes to review some of the other great content on the publisher’s site and mention specifics in your email. While you shouldn’t be disingenuous, including particular takeaways from a piece of content can show you’ve put in more effort than a mere form letter that’s been blasted to thousands of other contacts.

Now, time to identify the dead link and suggest your client’s in its place. It’s often effective to present your replacement link as a simple solution for their already awesome website. While you may not be writing to them merely out of the goodness of your heart, your suggestion is ultimately a helpful one. Broken links can have a negative impact on both user navigation and site rankings, so the publisher already has an incentive to fix them. By having a high-quality alternative at the ready (especially if the existing link text format requires very few changes), you’re presenting an easy swap that has a huge value add without an extra time suck.

To ensure this message exchange and subsequent link replacement are both hassle-free, be sure to include the exact URL of your client’s resource, as well as the dead link and the URL of the existing content on the publisher’s site. Add a couple of sentences about why the publisher might want to replace the link with yours and a short description of the suggested resource to show a good faith effort.

While there are no promises that the site owner will be keen to replace the link with your client’s or even respond to your message, we’ve found that approaching these requests with an emphasis on genuine connection and helpfulness yield the greatest outcomes. With any luck, you’ll gain some valuable links and build ongoing publisher relationships just by doing your due diligence.

Exploring the Impact of Social Media on Backlinks

Social media may not traditionally be considered one of the top places to acquire different types of backlinks. But it’s definitely something to consider as you hone your 2025 SEO strategy for your clients.

It’s no longer enough to have social accounts or pages; your clients need to consistently post and actively engage with their audience on these platforms if they want to increase brand awareness, website traffic, and even backlinks.

Although it’s not necessarily as direct a process as with guest posting or broken links, acquiring backlinks via social sharing can be a valuable part of your strategy. It’ll require some more finely tuned social platform management on the part of your agency or your clients, but many brands find that it’s well worth the effort – especially if you’re already creating and sharing content that audiences find valuable.

Using Social Media to Build Links

Having a vibrant social media presence can translate to all kinds of opportunities, from overall brand visibility and perception (including a greater share of voice) to more specific performance goals like increased traffic and sales. But what many business owners and even marketers fail to realize is that the work we put into social sharing and engagement can actually help site rankings, as well.

Officially, social signals aren’t one of Google’s hundreds of ranking factors. In other words, search engines don’t directly use a brand’s social media accounts or the number of social shares a piece of content receives in their ranking calculations. Additionally, links that appear on social media platforms with user-generated content (like Facebook, Reddit, X, and Instagram) are automatically given a nofollow attribute, decreasing the amount of impact these links can have for your clients. However, that doesn’t mean your client’s social presence won’t have any impact at all on how they rank in organic search results.

For one thing, social posts and accounts do often appear in SERPs. Google has also admitted that its quality raters will often verify posts and accounts on these platforms to help determine a site or author’s reputation under E-E-A-T guidelines. And even if any links that are shared via social are typically nofollow, they can still increase both traffic and brand awareness for your clients – and those can actually have a ripple effect on the types of backlinks your clients will get in the future! If your client’s social post (or another user’s post that includes your client’s content) gets a lot of traction, it might naturally get picked up by a media outlet or included in a popular blog by its merits alone. And that can translate to a major link-building boon.

In other words, sharing quality content to social can have some distinct benefits, even with link-building. It’s certainly a less direct route to take (and one that’s a bit riskier in terms of potential payoff), but it may be worth exploring for certain clients looking to focus on PR and share of voice.

Utilizing Content Marketing For Better Backlinks

There’s no doubt that you’ll need to make and follow a strategic plan on behalf of your clients to generate quality backlinks that point to their site. But that doesn’t always mean every good link they receive will be the result of a completely calculated effort.

The reality is that there is some truth to the phrase, “build it and they will come.” Truly valuable content still garners unsolicited shares and links from reputable sources. Because website owners, bloggers, content creators, and media outlets generally want to provide their audiences with the best information on a given topic (just like Google does!), they may well throw your clients a proverbial bone if their content outpaces the competition in terms of helpfulness, authoritativeness, or entertainment.

Game recognizes game, so to speak.

By helping your clients zero in on opportunities for thought leadership via well-researched content (like case studies, survey data reports, ebooks, and white papers) and unique media offerings, you’ll naturally improve brand perception and trust while increasing the likelihood of reputable citations and reshares. Ultimately, this will result in a more robust website for your clients that can improve their SERP positioning in more ways than one.

Developing Original Content That Attracts Citations

While on-site blogs and off-site articles are necessary building blocks of any content strategy foundation, your clients need more in-depth pieces to flex their knowledge and to naturally generate links from reputable sources. Prioritizing content that has an emphasis on original research, a unique knowledge set or perspective, and compelling results can not only improve your clients’ perceived E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) but will typically yield a greater likelihood of citations from equally respected thought leaders and outlets, including scholarly journals, industry websites, online publications, and official reports.

Whether you help your clients develop case studies that illustrate their success in particular market, create a survey with findings that send shockwaves throughout their industry, or write a whitepaper or ebook that positions them as a trusted resource, your clients will present valuable data in a compelling and professional way that can heighten their brand profile while improving their odds of acquiring natural backlinks. Keep in mind that while you absolutely can and should plan to share this resource through targeted outreach efforts or even a press release or media pitch, this in-depth asset may actually result in link acquisition with little effort based on the content’s value and shareability. It can also easily be repurposed for bite-sized content or shared across a multitude of channels, including emails and social, making it the gift that keeps on giving (especially if it’s updated regularly!).

Creating Interactive Infographics and Videos

So how can you easily explain the value of an interactive infographic to your clients?

Interactive infographics break down complicated information into digestible visuals, increasing shareability.
Clear, engaging content is seen as valuable by both readers and search engines, allowing you to establish your brand as a trusted resource.
Adding an accompanying text portion with your visual content can provide extra opportunities for search engine optimization, which means more chances to rank in search results.
Shareable visual content can encourage references and links from other trusted sources.

Infographics aren’t the only type of visual media that can support your link-building efforts, either. Videos have become an immensely powerful and popular way to communicate information and create memorable interactions. Not only can they be used to educate your client’s audience, but they’re often used to build trust and forge more personal connections. And because they’re so easy to share and even embed, they can support your link-building efforts while driving other performance goals.

Best Types of Backlinks in SEO: Frequently Asked Questions

How can guest posting help improve my client's backlink profile in 2025?

Often considered a cornerstone of any SEO strategy, guest posting involves crafting valuable content for another website’s blog. You’ll typically include a link back to your client’s web page within this guest post, which acts as an endorsement in the eyes of search engines – indicating that your client’s content provides value worthy of citation. Google’s algorithms are designed to recognize these indicators as part of their ranking calculations, which means that quality backlinks obtained through guest blogging can have a positive impact on your client’s ability to rank well in organic SERPs.

A guest blog on a site with high domain authority that offers dofollow backlinks can become a powerful tool for boosting the visibility of your client’s site. Backlinks placed on sites with real, significant traffic can also yield referral traffic, conversions, and sales. Generally speaking, guest posting can naturally expand your client’s digital footprint, making it an excellent addition to any SEO strategy.

That said, you’ll need to keep link diversity in mind. Having too many of the same types of backlinks or overly similar link text can raise a red flag to Google. In addition to guest posting, consider how press release backlinks, forum comment backlinks, or even editorial backlinks can act as a welcome and well-rounded complement. The goal is to have your client’s backlink profile appear both natural and authoritative. While guest blogs can certainly help you accomplish that, they aren’t the only types of backlinks in SEO that your clients need.

What are some effective techniques for adding broken link building to an SEO strategy?

Broken link building involves identifying links on other websites that are no longer functional – those that lead to web pages that have since moved or cease to exist – and proposing a substitute link that points to relevant content on your client’s own site. This proactive approach is a mutually beneficial one, as it provides your clients with a valuable link and helps site owners clean up their resource pages and improve overall site navigation.

You’ll need to use a software platform or tool to discover broken hyperlinks within your client’s niche. Make sure to focus on sites with high domain ratings, real traffic, and relevant content. Once you identify the right opportunities, you’ll then need to write a personalized outreach message to the target website owner. Your message should express how replacing the broken link with a working one that points to your client’s content will improve both page experience and even their site rankings. Make the proposed replacement as easy as possible by including both the proposed link and your desired text.

One final caveat: It’s not enough to simply find a broken hyperlink; the alternative you propose needs to add real value to the publisher’s site. Otherwise, your outreach may come across as self-serving rather than mutually beneficial. Be sure to express genuine sentiments and write with a sense of real, human connection in your outreach email! A little bit of thoughtfulness and personalization can go a long way.

How do social posts help build backlinks for my clients?

While social media shouldn’t be your primary means of link-building, it can certainly benefit your clients if you include this as part of their marketing strategy. As social content is shared on platforms like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), or LinkedIn, you’ll increase the chance that it might catch the eye of website owners and content creators. If you’re creating valuable content and reaching the right audience to begin with, these influential publishers might reference it within their own content, adding valuable backlinks to your client’s profile.

However, it isn’t just about casting a wide net and hoping for the best. Quality matters here. After all, no one will want to share something that’s unhelpful, rudimentary, or poorly presented. Thought leadership pieces, infographics, and interactive content can set your clients up for link-building success across all channels.

Remember that even though social signals are reportedly not among search engines’ direct ranking factors, they can still indirectly boost a site’s position in SERPS by amplifying content reach and engagement – especially if your social posts acquire backlinks for your clients. While some marketers treat social and SEO strategies as disparate elements, the reality is that they can and do work together to determine the sway your clients hold in digital conversations, as well as the quality and quantity of backlinks your client’s website receives.

What content formats should I focus on to generate more backlinks for clients in 2025?

Backlinks remain an integral component of search engine optimization, as they’re still considered one of the top ranking factors and indicators of credibility, according to search engines. To maximize your link-building efforts, you’ll want to emphasize the acquisition of high-quality editorial backlinks through authoritative guest blog posts. By positioning your content on reputable industry sites, you’ll create a two-fold advantage: you get to tap into the publisher’s established audience and gain referral traffic while also adding some of the best types of backlinks to your client’s profile.

To supplement other approaches like broken link-building, which relies less on new content generation, you’ll want to consider adding interactive infographics, original research content like white papers and industry studies, and even video media to your strategy. By focusing on opportunities for thought leadership within your client’s niche, you can open the door to being featured by reputable sources like industry magazines and journals and well-known media outlets, as well as in the occasional press release. Not only will these citations add backlinks for your clients, but they can also help to build trust and authority in a world that increasingly requires us to prove our credibility.

What are the best types of backlinks to build for clients in 2025?

We know that not all links are created equal. Some are deemed better than others, particularly as Google’s algorithm increases in its sophistication. Link-building techniques that used to produce overwhelmingly positive results have since fallen out of favor; as a result, marketers have had to develop more finely tuned tactics that satisfy the needs of both humans and search bots.

The simplest answer to this question? The best types of backlinks in SEO are the ones that provide undeniable value (to more than just your clients!). Effective link-building in 2025 requires far more effort than what we saw a decade ago. To see real results, you’ll need to focus on quality over quantity in virtually every respect.

Undeniably, some of the best types of backlinks are those acquired naturally or through highly relevant relationship-building. This means that, generally speaking, the bulk of your link-building efforts should center around guest posting, content marketing and outreach, social sharing, and even broken link building. When done correctly, all four of these methods can help your clients connect with other reputable site owners and creators who have a shared goal to educate, captivate, and improve the lives of their audiences.

On the flip side, the worst types of backlinks are those that are acquired en masse with little regard for user value or building mutually beneficial relationships with publishers and industry leaders. Steer clear of low-quality sites that accept payment in exchange for links across a variety of verticals, as well as outreach or link placement efforts that are designed to cheat the system. We may not always like every change Google makes, but we’ve got to play by the rules if we want to win out in the end.

Helping You Build the Best Types of Backlinks For Your Clients

There’s no doubt that acquiring different types of backlinks for your clients should be a critical part of any white label SEO strategy. But with so many types of backlinks in SEO and so many changes impacting the marketing landscape, it can be tough to know which to focus on – much less find the time to actually deliver them for your clients.

By capitalizing on the timeless power of guest posting, using the right tools to facilitate broken link building, leveraging social media’s share-worthy potential, and creating content that prioritizes original research to showcase expertise and authority, you’ll be in a great position to elevate the authority of a client’s website.

But to stay relevant in the ever-competitive SEO landscape, you may find you need more support than your in-house staff can provide. We’ve spent more than15 years honing our link-building strategies, publisher networks, outreach techniques, and off-site SEO approaches to provide the best possible results for our partners. To learn more about getting the white label link building support you need to grow your organization and exceed client expectations, get in touch with us today.

Everything You Need Under One Roof

Traffic and Conversion Summit: Digital Marketing Conference Takeaways For Your 2024 SEO Strategy

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 19:43:04 GMT

Last month, several Semifyers – including account managers, digital marketing specialists, and members of the sales and marketing team – traveled to Las Vegas to attend the Traffic and Conversion Summit. Known as one of the best marketing conferences for agencies and entrepreneurs, T&C focuses largely on AI-powered marketing, as well as the latest developments in paid traffic, influencer marketing, email marketing, ecommerce, local search, and more.

We caught up with a few digital marketing conference attendees to find out what they saw as the biggest SEO predictions and trends from the Traffic and Conversion Summit that are likely to impact our work here at Semify, as well as how our partners can leverage this information to maximize growth in 2024. Here’s what they had to say about getting to the top of the marketing mountain.

Artificial Intelligence Isn't a Passing Fad

Because the Traffic and Conversion Summit is most notably billed as a digital marketing conference for AI-powered marketing, it’s no surprise that artificial intelligence was prominently featured in its programming. But that’s reflective of the state of marketing as a whole in 2024.

In fact, as Semify Chief Revenue Officer Dave Thomson points out, AI is almost inescapable.

“Everyone is jumping on the AI bandwagon, from AI-powered features to company branding,” says Thomson. “For example, chatbots are no longer chatbots; instead, they’re ‘AI support.’”

Indeed, AI seems to be permeating virtually every corner of the marketing sector, as well as the workforce in general. Members of the operations team were eager to learn about other ways in which AI can be utilized, especially to speed up or completely eliminate mundane or complicated tasks.

Semify Digital Marketing Specialist Cassia Kuhn says, “I was particularly impressed by the talks given by Roland Frasier, Ross Simmonds, and Adam Chronister, who demonstrated some interesting uses for AI. For example, instead of manually creating and formatting a spreadsheet, you can use AI to not only help you find the right formulas but also create the actual spreadsheet and format it in a way that’s easier to understand.”

Kuhn notes that these uses have potentially big applications for an white label SEO agency like Semify: “These kinds of applications can allow us to put even more time into creating the high-quality content we’re known for.”

Semify Digital Marketing Manager Shelby Toth echoes these sentiments.

“From my perspective, one takeaway was quite clear: AI is coming. From blogs for websites to entire podcast-style videos, AI is making a huge impact in the marketing world,” says Toth. “Of course, I knew AI was growing even before attending the conference. While it’s a scary reality for many, it’s our duty to see it and embrace it fast or be left behind. I’ll be curious to see how AI content ranks against human-generated content in the coming year.”

For our part, the growing emphasis on AI and how it’ll power digital marketing moving forward supports our current innovation efforts. While we as a team feel strongly that AI will never replace real, human experts, it’s an impressive supplemental tool that can help us and our clients reach new heights.

Local Search Deserves More Strategic Attention

AI received ample attention at this year’s Traffic and Conversion conference, but it wasn’t the only topic that got our wheels turning. Local search is getting its due, especially as the interplay between Google’s generative AI tool (SGE) and Google Business Profiles (GBP) will make a big difference in how we perform web searches in 2024 and beyond.

As Google prioritizes fast, easy-to-digest answers, the search engine aims to keep web users on the SERP itself, rather than clicking away to independent websites. That presents a challenge for small business owners (and the marketing agencies that provide services for them) to increase visibility and traffic without requiring customers to click away from search results.

Kelly Donald, Semify’s Director of Sales, says: “My biggest takeaway was that GBP activity and accuracy are crucial for local businesses and are a really amazing way for them to get in front of the traffic that they want to receive. Consistent activity makes a massive difference in visibility and 0 click searches are only likely to increase in the year ahead.”

Thomson also recognized the need for better local search visibility for marketers at the Traffic and Conversion Summit.

“I noticed a lot of attendees were smaller agencies and even brand owners with multiple locations,” explains Thomson. “The interest in how to better leverage the map pack and GBP in 2024 was definitely the topic du jour.”

Adds Toth, “Semify just recently launched our Map Pack product, which allows us to optimize end clients’ Google Business Profiles in a more effective way. It was great to hear session leader Norm Farrar reference things we’re already doing with this product, as well as areas we can focus on to improve it in future iterations.”

While Google’s SGE has yet to be rolled out more widely, we suspect that it’s only a matter of time before it becomes the standard. As your white label SEO agency fulfillment partner, we’ll continue to stay ahead of the curve to provide your clients with new and better ways to drive traffic and conversions – even when Google tries to throw us off course.

We're Ready For What's Next

Above all, these 2024 SEO trends and predictions are telling us to stay on our toes and lean into what we already do well.

Kuhn says, “My biggest takeaway from the Traffic and Conversion Summit is that, when it comes to SEO, Semify is unique. Our dashboard is one-of-a-kind, and so many attendees were surprised to see an entirely US-based team.”

“My hope is that we can continue sending team members across all teams to the best marketing conferences so they can learn more and bring it back to their everyday work,” Toth adds. “It’s likely we’ll even develop new processes and products as a result. I’m eager to continue learning and growing so we can keep Semify on the cutting edge of SEO for years to come.”

Semify’s Director of Marketing Innovation, Jeff Shipman, agrees.

“Attending the Traffic and Conversion conference really solidified that we’re heading in the right direction,” says Shipman. “In order to develop an effective 2024 SEO strategy – and especially an enterprise SEO strategy for larger organizations – we have to embrace the latest developments without forgetting about what’s helped us get to this point. Innovating around tools like AI and Google Business Profiles, while staying true to our customer service-centric roots, is what will inspire mutual growth for both Semify and our partners.”

To learn more about how our white label SEO reseller program can give your agency the fulfillment and innovation support you need, get in touch with our team today.

SEO Keyword Research 101

Fri, 19 May 2023 22:05:22 GMT

As a marketing professional, you probably reference SEO keywords on a near-daily basis. Identifying relevant search terms for your clients – and helping your clients rank on those terms in search results – is a huge part of any successful SEO campaign.

If you want to target the best terms for a client, a wild guess typically won’t do the trick. A standardized keyword research process will give your clients the best chance of seeing great results in Google.

In today’s Keyword Research 101 “course,” we’ll revisit some of the basics and expand on our own approach to keyword research for SEO. These insights can help you get a sense for what it’s like to work with a white label SEO agency partner, or you can grab some ideas and methods to try for yourself.

What Is SEO Keyword Research?

We’d define keyword research as the practice of investigating and identifying the best search terms to target as part of a marketing strategy. In so doing, you’re learning what the client’s target audience is searching for and finding ways to help your client’s website appear more prevalently in relevant searches.

When performing SEO keyword research, you’ll want to consider factors like monthly search volume, user intent, competitor analysis, user demographics, and relevance to help you choose the right terms to target.

Why Is Keyword Research Important?

No matter what anyone might tell you, keywords aren’t dead … and neither is keyword research. In fact, we’d argue that keyword research is more important than ever.

SEO keyword research can help both Google and human users understand context and nuance. Language is ever-evolving – and so is Google’s algorithm. If you’re not performing keyword research or you’re using an outdated strategy, you could end up targeting popular-but-irrelevant search terms that won’t provide web users with the information they seek. That’ll backfire on your clients and could damage the trust they instilled in you.

Keyword research can also help you reach the right people. It’s not enough just to get eyes on a website; the wrong kind of traffic won’t translate into sales for your clients. When you have a specific keyword research process in place, you can zero in on the search terms that align with your client’s goals and their audience’s interests. Specific keywords within that overlap will be more likely to result in both rankings and conversions.

Additionally, keyword research can act as a great jumping-off point for content creation. The more you learn about end customers, the more content marketing ideas you can generate that will serve their needs. You may find out they’re asking questions your client is uniquely positioned to answer – or that they aren’t searching for the terms you assumed they would. This information can help inform your overall content strategy by providing the solutions the end customer needs most while also differentiating the client from industry competitors.

When you research keywords, you’ll also set realistic SEO expectations with clients and ensure everyone’s on the same page. When there’s a knowledge gap, some clients assume they can easily outrank major corporations on overly broad keywords.

Amanda Geraghty, Semify’s Director of Accounts and Operations (and keyword research virtuoso), explains: “Say your client owns a car dealership in Topeka, Kansas and wants to sell more Ford Focus cars. He’s convinced he should be ranking number one for ‘Ford Focus.’ We know that’s not a realistic goal, but he doesn’t. Doing keyword research and showing how your client’s desires don’t reflect their budget (or even their true competitors) will highlight what’s truly feasible for their SEO campaign. That can keep them grounded – and prevent them from firing you later on.”

When you can prove how much a keyword is worth and show it’s possible to win big on less popular keywords, you can challenge a client’s misconceptions and get them on board with an effective strategy that stays within their budget.

Finally, keyword research can create direction for the client’s campaign.

“If, for example, your client is a law firm with several different attorneys, you might have a handful of different legal specialties to choose from,” Geraghty explains. “During your keyword research process, you can come up with a plan that’ll help the client focus on specific areas for six months at a time, rather than trying to target all of those different legal keywords at once.”

Geraghty points out that another good example of this is with HVAC services clients or other businesses with seasonal offerings. Performing keyword research – both at the start of the campaign and on an ongoing basis – can provide the opportunity to build a strong organic foundation and drive traffic for the client’s most popular services during the appropriate time of year. Being able to provide both initial keyword research and an ongoing strategy can make your services that much more indispensable to your clients.

How Do I Choose the Right SEO Keywords for a Client?

Understanding the importance of SEO keyword research is one thing. Knowing how to choose keywords for SEO is another.

That said, getting started with keyword research isn’t really rocket science. Typically, you’ll begin with a basic idea – sometimes called a “seed keyword.” Seed keywords are usually pretty broad; they probably won’t show up in your final list of keywords to target, but they act as the initial catalyst that can allow you to find the right search terms for a client.

An example of a seed keyword might be “running shoes” for a footwear retailer or “coffee” for a local cafe. Keep in mind that these keywords likely won’t end up in your final list of target keywords, as their search volume is simply too competitive:

However, these seed keywords give you somewhere to start. You can then use one of several keyword research tools available to get more information on related terms, find new iterations of certain keywords, or expand on your initial list with relevant additions like locations or specific product and service offerings. Below, you’ll see some expanded versions of these seed keywords that you might consider instead.

You’ll also want to find out whether the client’s site is already ranking on any existing keywords, as well as which keywords are being targeted by their competitors. This data can help inform your strategy by building on an existing foundation or filling in the gaps in SERPs.

Popular Keyword Research Tools to Try

If you’re ready to give SEO keyword research a shot or you want to strengthen your existing efforts, we’d recommend the following platforms:

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools and Keyword Generator/Difficulty Checker
Semrush Keyword Magic Tool
Google Keyword Planner
Google Trends
Answer The Public
Google SERPs (“Related Searches” and “People Also Ask”)
Google Search Console
Semify’s white label dashboard tools

Narrowing Down Your Keyword Selections

Once you’ve plugged in your seed keywords and made a more expansive list of possibilities, it’s time to narrow down your options. What’s tricky is that there isn’t only one way to choose the best SEO keywords. There’s no instruction manual that’ll point you to the exact terms you should be targeting. That means you have to become comfortable with making educated guesses.

Geraghty says, “Experimentation is a huge part of SEO keyword research, but it’s not an exact science. Although you can get really technical and add numbers to it, it’s sometimes more of an art. Everyone’s keyword research process is different. You’re making a hypothesis based on what you know about Google, what you’ve learned about your client, and all your previous experience as a marketer.”

Generally speaking, though, there are a few basic considerations to keep in mind as you research keywords for your client campaigns.

Search volume: A keyword’s monthly search volume can indicate how popular the search query is. Broad keywords will typically have a higher search volume than long-tail keywords. That said, a keyword with a lower monthly search volume can still have a high conversion rate and will often be better aligned with a client’s budget and other goals. Unless your client has an unlimited budget to spend on SEO every month, you won’t want to target search terms with tens of thousands of monthly searches. Especially at the start of a campaign with a modest service plan, choose search terms with respectable-yet-realistic monthly search volumes that range somewhere in the low-to-mid-hundreds.
Relevance: The keywords you target should directly relate to the client’s website, their products/services, their industry, and their customers. Rather than try to game the system with buzzy keywords that don’t fit the user’s needs, find keywords that accurately reflect the client’s brand and what they have to offer. Keep in mind that this can change over time, depending on seasonality or product focus; the keywords you choose to target during the campaign’s first six months may not be the same ones you highlight a year in.
Search intent: Understanding user intent is a crucial component of keyword research and selection. For instance, we’re not trying to target the term “keyword generator” in this article. It has 3,600 monthly searches, so we know users are looking for it – but because it doesn’t fit with the content we’re offering here, it’s not going to satisfy what those users are seeking. That keyword has commercial intent, according to Semrush; our post is aiming to educate, rather than to immediately make a sale. The keywords you select for clients need to align with where their customers are in the funnel and your overall SEO strategy. Otherwise, you’ll bring in irrelevant traffic that won’t convert.
Budget: Although SEO is more affordable than PPC, that doesn’t mean all SEO keywords are worth the same. Some keywords will be more expensive to rank on than others. It’ll require far more resources to rank number 1 on a broad term than to snag the third spot in the ranking for a long-tail keyword. In many cases, the second option will come with a higher ROI. Consider the client’s monthly SEO budget when selecting keywords to ensure they get the most bang for their buck.
Competitiveness: You’ll want to consider both competitor analysis and overall keyword competition when determining your keyword SEO strategy. Identifying keyword gaps ignored by competitors can help get your client ranking, while going after overly competitive terms can waste their resources. Cost per click and keyword difficulty are two ways to figure out how competitive a keyword is; we also provide a keyword budget breakdown that expresses keyword competitiveness by assigning a dollar value to each keyword recommendation. When you understand keyword competitiveness, you can divvy up a client’s SEO budget more effectively.

Once you’ve used these considerations to narrow down your list, you’ll be left with some high-value keywords to recommend to your client.

What’s Included in Semify’s Keyword Research and Competitor Analysis Process?

Keyword research for SEO can be complex (and even intimidating!). There’s no one definitive tool that every expert uses to research keywords, and data can vary based on platform. Most marketers would agree that using a variety of keyword research tools – for inspiration, comparison, and ultimate selection – is the best way to go.

In the end, that means that keyword research can take up a lot of your valuable time. When you have an agency to run and grow, devoting several hours to SEO keyword research for each client may not be a viable option.

While keyword research for SEO is a necessary step in setting your clients up for success, that doesn’t mean that you have to be the one to execute it. As your white label SEO partner, we’re here to make your life easier while delivering better results for your customers.

Although some clients will provide a wishlist of keywords to target, Geraghty explains that most account managers will require keyword research to be performed before the campaign officially starts. Doing our due diligence from the beginning can help avoid frustration and confusion later on.

Our SEO keyword research process usually starts with competitor analysis, says Geraghty.

“I’ll request information on the client’s competitors from the reseller and perform some keyword research based on what those competitors are ranking on,” explains Geraghty. “Then, I’ll send that list to the reseller to make sure those terms make sense for the client and what they want to focus on. This is especially important for highly technical or more ‘niche’ industries. We’ll also chat about where the client’s business is currently growing and where they want to focus their efforts for the next six months or so.”

Once Geraghty confirms she’s on the right track, she’ll use Semify’s keyword research spreadsheet to determine the best keywords for the client’s service plan and budget. She’ll plug in her keyword recommendations, as well as data like the number of monthly searches and the keyword’s cost per click (as reported by Google Ads and Semrush), to show the value of those chosen keywords and how well they align with the client’s service plan and monthly budget.

As you can see from the example below, that car dealership client would easily go over his monthly budget by targeting “Ford Focus” with his site’s SEO. Choosing less competitive terms will help the client target the right audience without overspending. Although higher-tier plans allow for larger keyword budgets, that won’t automatically help the client rank on more competitive terms (especially if their site has a lower domain rating and isn’t currently showing up for much in SERPs).

Throughout the campaign, Geraghty monitors keyword rankings progress and other campaign metrics in real time (which are accessible to our partners within the “Research” and “SEO” sections of Semify’s white label dashboard) and recommends a keyword research refresh every six months.

What Are Some Common Misconceptions About How to Choose Keywords for SEO?

Knowing how to choose keywords for SEO isn’t always obvious. Making matters more complicated, there are some pervasive myths about keyword research and selection that can work against you (and your clients). Let’s dispel some of the most common misconceptions about how to perform keyword research and how to choose keywords for SEO to help you avoid these pitfalls.

1. What’s Popular Is Always Best

When it comes to search volume, it’s easy to get tunnel vision. After all, if a lot of web users are searching for a specific term, it has to be valuable… right?

It really depends on the situation – but in many cases, you shouldn’t get too caught up in monthly search numbers. Just because a keyword is incredibly popular doesn’t mean it’s a good choice for an SEO campaign, especially if your client runs a small business and has a limited marketing budget.

Broad keywords tend to have the highest search volumes. But as buyers make their way through their journey, queries start to become more refined. By the time they’re ready to purchase, users have narrowed their search from “shoes” to “cheap women’s Nike sneakers near me.” If you optimize for the former instead of the latter, you’ll miss out on the traffic that’s more likely to convert – and spend way too much trying to compete with global competitors.

Remember: Search volume doesn’t always align with search intent or your client’s key demographics. While the number of monthly searches matters (as you don’t want to target a term that has virtually zero traffic), be sure to weigh monthly search volume against other factors like intent and relevance to find the keywords that will actually serve your clients’ needs.

2. Don’t Narrow Your Reach

Some business owners are afraid that if they get specific with their keyword targeting, they’ll risk missing out on potential customers. But instead of trying to appeal to everyone within a 1,000-mile radius, it’s actually better to target the true service area.

Unless your client actually has a business location within a major city center or they’re located reasonably close by, trying to target a major metropolitan area the client doesn’t serve will hurt more than help. For one thing, it can keep them out of the map pack (which means they’ll have lower visibility in SERPs anyway!).

For another, it won’t help them reach their actual customers. Say you live in Frederick, Maryland and are looking for a dentist. You probably won’t even search for dental providers in Washington, D.C., an hour’s drive away. Instead, you’ll look for dentists nearby. Choosing accurate location-based keywords, even if they have a lower search volume, will be better for your clients in the end.

3. Keyword Research Is “One and Done”

Keyword research and competitor analysis are undoubtedly important. And because they can also be time-consuming, many business owners (and even some busy marketers!) may hope that it’s a one-time process.

Realistically, though, keyword research is never really finished. To help your clients reach new heights, you’ll have to evaluate what’s working and what could use improvement. Additionally, business owners will often shift their focus based on the seasons, produce or retire services and products, and adjust their budgets over time. That means you’ll need to monitor progress, make adjustments, and research new keyword options as needed. We recommend performing a keyword research refresh twice a year for this reason. Even if you stick with the majority of your existing keywords, this will make sure your bases are covered.

4. There’s No Difference Between SEO and PPC Keywords

It’s true that you can target (or bid on) the same keywords for both SEO and PPC campaigns. But should you? In a lot of cases, the answer is no. Even if you’re running simultaneous organic and paid search campaigns for the same client, you’ll likely want to choose different keywords for SEO vs. PPC. Some keywords (like very long-tail search terms or informational keywords) will be a better fit for organic results. Others (such as commercial or transactional keywords) will be better suited for paid search campaigns. In addition, some keywords may be too expensive for a PPC campaign but are a good fit for SEO. Consider the interplay between organic and paid search when selecting your keywords to give your clients the best chance of competing in SERPs. If you’re unsure of which keywords are better for SEO or PPC, your dedicated account manager can make personalized suggestions based on the client’s budget and overall goals.

5. SEO Keyword Research Should Be a Snap

While it shouldn’t take several weeks to perform keyword research for a client, it shouldn’t be a 10-minute process, either. You may have to immerse yourself in the client’s world, especially if they operate in a niche industry, they offer B2B services, or their offerings are highly technical.

It can take time to discover which keywords their customers are actually searching for, rather than relying on the business owner to provide you with technical, industry-level terms that only they use and understand. A dermatologist might say they specialize in helping patients with seborrheic dermatitis, but that won’t help people who want to find out how to treat dandruff.

It’s also easy to disregard context when you’re trying to perform keyword research too quickly. If you’re unfamiliar with the client’s products and you don’t take your time to delve into what they really offer, you might make keyword recommendations that are completely irrelevant to their business. We’ve seen overburdened agencies do things like optimizing a client site for specific keywords related to handheld digital devices (tablets) rather than the product they actually sold – medical supplements (tablets).

Although learning how to do keyword research for SEO will take time and effort, it’ll become easier when you do it more frequently. Still, it’s never going to be something you can complete during a brief break between meetings. If you simply don’t have the bandwidth to perform thorough keyword research, you may want to consider seeking out additional SEO support. That way, you can make better recommendations to your clients without taking on too much.

Can I Improve My Keyword SEO Strategy and Research Process?

You may know the answer to “why is keyword research important,” but how do you know whether you need to revamp your SEO keyword research process for your clients? Here are a few quick indicators that you might want to get some extra help from Semify:

You can’t spend more than a few minutes on keyword research and selection for a client
Your existing clients haven’t seen positive keyword movement in months
Your clients have gotten more organic traffic, but their conversion rate is low
Your client’s site has a high bounce rate with no obvious technical issues
You’re optimizing only for the keyword list your clients themselves provided
Your clients are directly competing against large corporations for keyword rankings
You don’t feel confident in your ability to improve a client’s keyword selections
You can’t figure out why your clients aren’t (or are!) ranking on a search term
Your clients are threatening to leave due to a lack of results

Dealing with how to choose keywords for SEO can be tedious, confusing, and sometimes overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be. We’re here to support you so that you can focus on running (and growing) your business. To learn more about joining our white label SEO reseller program, get in touch with us today.

Semify’s Small Business Survey Finds Half of SMBs Don’t Use SEO

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 21:57:58 GMT

In October 2022, we conducted our “Small Businesses and SEO” survey to learn more about the relationship between SMBs and search engine optimization. We’ve already shared some of our survey data related to the average cost of SEO per month, but there’s actually an even bigger takeaway:

Over half of small businesses we surveyed either aren’t using SEO or aren’t sure whether SEO is part of their marketing strategy.

As a marketer, you may find this hard to believe. After all, we feel the value of SEO is pretty clear. Not only is the ROI of SEO more substantial than other marketing channels, but it provides a cost-effective way to build trust with customers without relying solely on external platforms.

Still, the numbers don’t lie. Let’s unpack the data and discover how you can turn these findings into growth opportunities for your own agency.

40% of Small Businesses Don’t Use SEO; 16% Aren’t Sure, According to Our SEO Survey

In our “Small Businesses and SEO” survey, we asked, “Is SEO (search engine optimization) part of your marketing strategy for your business?”

While around 44% of respondents answered yes, another 40% definitively stated that they do not use SEO to market their business. Another 16% of respondents in our SEO and small businesses survey weren’t sure about whether they use search engine optimization.

It’s certainly possible that this 16% may include businesses that rely on other experts (e.g., in-house employees or external agencies) to develop their marketing strategy. But if you have no idea how your business is promoting itself online, you’re probably not prioritizing it enough – and there’s a good chance you don’t know because your company isn’t doing it at all. Either way, this data suggests that a good portion of small businesses aren’t sure about what SEO involves.

What really caught our eye was the fact that nearly 40% of businesses aren’t using SEO at all. Our results support similar findings in the small business world. In 2020, a survey conducted by The Manifest found that only 30% of small businesses were using SEO, meaning that 70% of SMBs had no established SEO strategy.

When The Manifest released updated survey data for 2021 , the company revealed that 49% of small businesses were investing in SEO, with 31% saying they don’t currently use SEO but eventually plan to. A shocking 18% of participants answered that they have no plans to ever invest in SEO to market their businesses. That’s like 1 in 5 people saying they care about dental hygiene but refusing to brush their teeth.

While we’re encouraged by the fact that almost 44% of businesses in our survey are already using SEO in their marketing plans, that still means that more than half of SMBs aren’t convinced that SEO is worthwhile.

If 56% of Small Businesses Don’t Use SEO, Is It Really Essential?

It may seem hard to prove why SEO matters when you learn how many respondents in our small business survey still aren’t using it (and presumably don’t believe their results are suffering as a result). But while you can drive traffic quickly to your site with an ad, that ad will do nothing for your brand’s reputation – and it certainly won’t help you once your advertising budget has run out.

For small businesses that do use SEO, the potential payoff is huge. Because more than half of all web traffic comes from organic search and 93% of buying experiences start with a search engine, SMBs that focus on improving their search ranking receive a higher portion of relevant web traffic (and, potentially, more customers).

SEO also gives business owners more control over their marketing efforts than social media marketing or paid ads. Meta and Google Ads determine what they charge for advertising and how many people see your posts, which can throw a wrench in your marketing plans (and budget). But SEO only builds on itself over time and does so in a way that doesn’t cause advertising fatigue for your customers. Although we can’t control how quickly Google ranks or indexes websites, we have a pretty good idea of how to improve a site’s SEO over time. Once those improvements are made, no one can take that away from you – even when Google inevitably updates its algorithm. Business owners can set themselves apart by publishing helpful, optimized content to create trust and drive traffic at the same time.

With so many businesses neglecting to use SEO, the ones that do will find it easier to outpace the competition. Although you may have some hurdles to clear as an agency owner, proving why SEO is important for small businesses can allow you to scale your business while helping your clients succeed.

Small Business SEO Survey Reveals Strategic Opportunities for Agency Owners That Address Common Concerns

So why isn’t SEO more of a priority for many SMBs?

Although SEO has been around since the 1990s, it’s still a concept that many small business owners aren’t too familiar with. They may use search engines to find information on a daily basis, but they may not give a lot of thought to how search results are actually determined. Unless you’re already aware of SEO and how Google’s algorithm works, it’s all a bit of a mystery. If you’re finding the information you need without much fuss, it makes sense that you might not dwell on how that information is delivered.

Keeping up with SEO best practices and changing trends can be a heavy lift, especially for small business owners who believe they have to do everything in-house. By offering a reliable outsourced small business SEO solution, you can relieve them of that burden and help them get results without a huge investment.

SEO also requires a lot of patience. We know that setting SEO expectations with clients can ensure they have a realistic timeframe in mind, but some small business owners will reject SEO entirely because of how long it takes. We know, however, that this longer time frame allows for organic trust-building and visibility that doesn’t depend on ad spend or social media followers. Long-term growth tends to get overshadowed by fast results, but slow and steady really does win the race.

You just need your clients to see that those benefits outweigh instant (but fleeting) gratification. Of course, grabbing the attention of these hesitant(or even dismissive small business owners can be a challenge. But if you can counter SEO client pushback and show them why it pays to stay the course, you’ll stand to grow their business and yours.

That’s especially true if you can offer affordable SEO services for small businesses. We now know from our survey how much small businesses pay for SEO every month. By working with a white label SEO company for fulfillment, you can offer small business SEO services that align with your clients’ budgetary goals – which means you’ll have an easier time convincing them why SEO matters for their marketing efforts.

Show Why SEO Is Important for Small Businesses to Gain Big

As someone who already knows exactly why SEO is important for small businesses, you may feel discouraged to learn that many small business owners still fail to see the value of SEO.

But viewing this small business survey data as an opportunity, rather than as a setback, can put your agency on the path to success. There’s a large untapped market of businesses not currently using SEO. By bridging the knowledge gap with your prospects, you can prove that small business SEO services are not only accessible but highly valuable.

Ultimately, the results of our SEO survey should empower you. When you’re able to show your prospects why SEO matters and how it can have a positive impact on their business, you can convince some of those people in that 56% that this area of marketing is worth investing in.

Play Nice: The Interplay Between Paid and Organic Search

Thu, 18 Aug 2022 22:22:34 GMT

What Do Paid and Organic Search Mean?

Paid and organic search provide two different ways to get noticed in Google search results. You might know paid search by another name, like Google Ads or PPC. These are the advertisements that appear at the very top of Google’s search results pages. Organic search refers to the results that appear below those ads. Google ranks organic results based on a number of factors, including topic and keyword relevance, user experience, and website authority.

In the SEO vs. PPC debate, some marketers will take sides. And although it’s true that one strategy could be better suited for certain situations than the other, that doesn’t mean that there’s a clear winner. Paid ads can often drive traffic to a website more quickly than what you’ll experience with SEO – but it can be tough to win both trust and clicks. While SEO takes time, it’s seen as an affordable way to improve both web visibility and credibility.

Ashish Agarwal, Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the study , “Do Organic Results Help or Hurt Sponsored Search Performance?” explains, “You could say, ‘If I have good organic listings, should I even care about having a paid ad?’ People have studied and found that both these listings complement each other and you should not avoid a paid ad.”

Still, there are patterns you’ll want to be aware of when you’re strategizing for your clients. When you understand the relationship between organic and paid search, you can set clearer expectations from the onset.

Help or Hurt: How Organic and Paid Search Interact

We know from Google that any investment a business makes in paid advertising has zero direct impact on their organic search results. Google reportedly “ maintains a strict separation ” between organic and paid search, meaning that no matter how much or little you spend on your Google Ads, that won’t cause your organic search ranking position to increase or decrease.

But that doesn’t mean that organic search results won’t ever impact paid ad performance. The perceived value of organic search results can influence ad clicks and conversions, while having a high-ranking site can correlate to higher Google Ads quality scores (and subsequent PPC performance).

Once we add the idiosyncrasies of user behavior to the equation, we start to see certain trends take shape.

Organic Search Impacts PPC Click Performance

The click performance of a given ad will largely depend on the organic results that appear on that same page. If the organic results that appear on page one for a given keyword are particularly helpful and diverse, your ad is less likely to be clicked.

Agarwal says, “The natural thought process is, because [ads are] what people first see, they’re more likely to click. From what I’ve seen and evaluated, people are wary of ads. If you’re comparing the effect of the click performance of top organic and top paid listings, the top organic gets more traffic because people don’t trust ads.”

In the data Agarwal and his study co-authors analyzed, the better the organic search results, the less frequently that any ads appearing on that same page were clicked.

Simply put, a lead probably isn’t going to click on your obvious ad if there are valuable organic results that already show up – especially if the lead is in the information-gathering stage. This goes to show how big a role search intent and user behavior can play in your strategy.

That doesn’t mean that having your client appear in both organic and paid search results on page one of SERPs will backfire, though. That scenario is actually to their benefit.

Agarwal says the combination of a paid ad and a related organic search result from the same site or company will increase brand familiarity and encourage clicks. “Let’s say I get a Best Buy listing as a top listing but an ad [for Best Buy] also shows up. It’s not going to hurt; it’s going to help.”

We know that web users are likely to avoid ads based on principle, even when ads take up the whole first part of a results page. But when an organic search result and a related ad appear in the same space, we typically see ad clicks increase. It’s only in completely distinct organic and paid search results with no website repetition that we see users preferring valuable organic results over Google Ads.

Better Organic Results = Better Ad Conversion Rates

Say your client isn’t yet appearing on page one of organic SERPs. Should you still run an ad? If the organic results for the keyword you’re targeting are valuable, the answer may be yes.

While it’s true that ads that appear on these pages tend to yield fewer clicks, there’s an important caveat to remember. If and when the ad is clicked, it’ll have a higher conversion rate.

“What we found is that looking at [ad] click performance, the click performance goes down if the quality of organic listings goes up,” Agarwal says. “But your conversion performance can actually improve if the quality of the organic listings goes up.”

It can be tough to convince web users to forgo organic results for paid ones. But once they cross that threshold and decide to click on an ad, they’re more likely to make a purchase.

Again, this speaks to user intent. If a consumer isn’t primed to purchase, they’ll turn to the SEO-driven results in the meantime. But after they’ve exhausted all of the best organic search results and are ready to buy, they’ll turn to paid search instead. Whether the organic results don’t provide enough quality information or they’re simply no longer a good fit for where the user is in their buyer’s journey, paid ad performance stands to benefit.

Remember: clicks aren’t everything! Conversions matter more for a client’s bottom line. An ad that receives a lot of clicks but comparatively few conversions won’t help your client succeed. Conversely, an ad that receives fewer clicks with a higher ratio of conversions is seen as far more effective and aligned with the needs of your audience. Don’t make the mistake of focusing on the wrong metrics.

Google holds a staggering 92.47% of search engine market share , so every business wants to appear in Google’s SERPs as much as possible. Small to medium businesses, in particular, need a well-designed strategy if they hope to level the playing field against larger competitors. And generally speaking, your clients will need both SEO and PPC to maximize their visibility in search results.

That said, the relationship between paid and organic search can be a multifaceted one. There’s a complex interplay between organic and paid search – and they don’t always play nice. In other words, the little details can have big consequences.

With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at how organic and paid search interact with one another… and whether your approach could help (or hurt) your success in SERPs.

Keyword Quality and User Intent Matter For Both Organic and Paid

With this information in mind, the question isn’t whether to pursue SEO or PPC. It’s more about how to win in both categories. In most cases, keyword research and selection will play a substantial part.

Agarwal explains that the keywords you choose for paid search, in particular, should align with your immediate goals. “If the objective is to have conversions [e.g., people making purchases], then I should pick long-tail keywords where there are good organic listings because good organic listings bring traffic to my site. If my objective is just to get traffic, I should avoid keywords where there are very good organic listings.”

So if you want to drive sales by reaching your ideal audience, bid on an ad search term that has some really valuable organic results already. But if you’re just looking to boost traffic, you could run an ad on a keyword that doesn’t bring up many valuable or relevant results.

What about when you factor competition into the mix? If a competitor is already ranking well organically on a keyword, it might not make as much sense for you or your client to run a paid search campaign. That’s especially true if the competitor source provides a lot of helpful information (which is often the case with high-ranking sites). It can be harder to overcome a competitor who already has the advantage in both arenas.

It’s not just about the competitiveness of keywords, however. When selecting your target search terms, you’ll also need to be mindful of user intent and behavior.

When organic results aren’t aligned with the searcher’s needs, that’s when ad clicks increase. “People that are clicking these ads… probably looked at organic results and didn’t find what they were looking for,” says Agarwal. “When they click, they’re more likely to buy from the ad. It sort of gives validation to the ad: the search engine is giving good results, so the ad is relevant and useful.”

Agarwal and his colleagues found that, assuming organic search results satisfied the needs of users, users were likely to favor these SEO-driven results – despite having to put in extra work to navigate past ads. If the organic search results aren’t helpful (either due to poor quality or misalignment with user intent), then the ads will shine.

In short, the keywords you choose can make or break your performance in both paid and organic search. So if you don’t feel confident in your own keyword research abilities, it’s smart to partner with a white label SEO and PPC provider like Semify to provide you with the information you need.

Paid Vs. Organic Search: Should You Still Include Both in Your Strategy?

We’ve seen how organic and paid search work together – namely, the effect of organic search on paid ad performance. Ad clicks go down when the diversity and perceived quality of organic search results go up. When users do click on the ads, however, those clicks are more likely to turn into conversions.

All that being said, is it possible for paid search to have a negative impact on organic?

You may have heard that paid search “cannibalizes” organic traffic. The idea here is that paid ads eat up most of the traffic for a given search result because they take up more “real estate” at the top of search results. But Google ran a study that debunks this concept, showing that when paid search ads are paused, the vast majority of traffic and clicks are not subsequently given to organic search results. In other words, the complete removal of paid ads doesn’t cause organic search results to skyrocket in popularity.

What’s more, the idea of cannibalization doesn’t take user behavior into account. Not only do many consumers avoid paid ads on principle alone at first, but they may subconsciously start to trust a brand more if they see its name in both organic and paid search results.

“Let’s say as a firm, I need to make a choice about keywords,” Agarwal says. “The natural thought process is, if I’m going to get a lot of organic results for a keyword, I don’t want to show an ad because I don’t want to take away my [own] traffic. But organic listings could help, especially with long-tail keywords. I want [to run an ad on a keyword] where I’m going to expect very good organic listings because they can actually improve my conversions.”

The bottom line is that you shouldn’t worry too much about paid search cannibalizing organic. While ads take up more visible space at the top of SERPs, customers will still seek out organic results first. And when they’re ready to buy, Google Ads can point them in the right direction. The data shows that including both SEO and PPC in your strategy is ultimately the smartest choice.

Make Sure Organic and Paid Play Nice

As long as you’re mindful about the terms you’re targeting, a combination of SEO and PPC can lead to success – especially for small businesses that find it more difficult to compete.

When you’re looking to outsource your marketing fulfillment, you’ll want to work with a white label SEO company like Semify that also offers PPC management. Because we understand both aspects of your strategy, we’ll help you select the right keywords for each to ensure that organic and paid search will complement (rather than compete with) each other. We’ll also make sure there aren’t any underlying issues that could compromise your success in either space. And we’ll provide you with ongoing analyses that include the right metrics to help you report on the progress you’ve made to your clients.

As we like to say here at Semify, we’re all about growing together. Not only are we invested in your growth as an agency, but we also execute strategies that are greater than the sums of their parts. Organic and paid search can have a mutually beneficial relationship – and we can help you use the data-based interaction between organic and paid results to your advantage.

Direct Response Vs Brand Awareness: Which is Best For Your Strategy?

Wed, 10 Aug 2022 19:51:54 GMT

Whether you’re helping a small business owner or you’re trying to get new clients for your own agency, you’ll have to highlight how to solve customer problems. But that comes down to more than offering the best products and services for the best possible price. Sometimes, you may not even be looking to drive immediate sales. Depending on where the customer is in their buyer’s journey, you may need to take some specific steps to improve brand perception before someone is ready to make a purchase.

This all comes down to choosing between direct response marketing campaigns and building brand awareness. And while it’s entirely possible to do both at the same time, you’ll still need to decide whether a given part of your strategy falls under brand content marketing or under direct response digital marketing. Understanding the greater purpose of each strategic component can help you make stronger, smarter choices along the way.

If you’re feeling a little lost, don’t worry. As your white label SEO partner, we’re breaking down these terms to help you make the right moves for your agency and for your clients.

What is Brand Marketing?

First, let’s talk about brand marketing. In its simplest form, brand marketing refers to how a business develops a relationship with its customers. The idea here is two-fold: to differentiate your brand from others in the marketplace and to build a real connection with consumers.

When you develop a brand content strategy, you won’t be focusing on the products or services the business provides. Rather, you’ll be coming up with ways to promote the brand as a whole. Generally, that involves establishing and highlighting the unique attributes of your brand in ways that resonate with and provide value for your target audience.

Why Does Brand Content Marketing Matter?

Think about some of the most well-known brands in the world – like Apple, McDonalds, and Nike – and ask yourself: are they loved and revered specifically for their products or services? Or are these offerings actually secondary to something greater?

Arguably, the most successful companies are selling something more than cell phones, hamburgers, and sneakers. They’re selling a lifestyle. A promise. A dream. Will the newest iPhone, a Big Mac, or a pair of Air Maxes really change your life? Probably not in any meaningful way. But if you’re a fan of these brands, you can’t resist the allure of what might be.

All three of these companies understand the importance of brand marketing. Of course, they know how to promote their latest releases. But the reason those releases are so successful is because there’s a solid foundation of brand marketing on which to build those promotions.

Brand marketing is what encourages emotional buy-in. Although we sometimes like to tell ourselves that brand loyalty is dead, that isn’t really true. It’s just a lot harder to come by these days. With so many options available, brands have to stand out from the crowd – and do more than merely sell a product. They need to sell what the brand represents.

There are a lot of companies out there that have managed to build their brand equity to the point where their customers won’t even think about looking elsewhere for similar products or services. From Trader Joe’s to Coca Cola, these brands manage to not only establish their own distinctive identities but actually become an integral part of their customers’ identities. Trader Joe’s fans are reluctant to shop elsewhere for groceries, while Coke drinkers would never be caught dead sipping on a Pepsi. That’s not necessarily because these products are objectively better; it’s because consumers identify with the brand itself.

So with that in mind, why does brand content marketing matter? Because without it, you’re just another business providing the same products or services as your competitor. When done well, brand marketing will strengthen a customer’s emotional connection to your company. And that’s what makes the difference between a one-time purchase and a lifelong buyer.

What’s Involv ed in Brand Marketing?

Getting your audience to love your products is one thing. But getting them to love your company is another. And because today’s consumers tend to be skeptical by default, it’s tougher than ever to convince buyers to make the leap and trust you.

Before anyone can even like your brand, however, it needs to be clearly established. If you’re confused about your brand attributes (like your visual identity, your values, your persona, your voice, and anything else that makes your brand unique), your prospects will be confused, too. It’s crucial to get into the nitty gritty of your brand and your audience before you attempt to market it. If you don’t know your brand like the back of your hand, you’re going to have a tough time convincing customers to come along for the ride.

This may require you to undergo a brand refresh or even a complete rebranding, in some cases. (We rebranded to Semify back in 2020, so we know how big an undertaking it is!) Your agency or your clients may not need a totally new name, but it may be worth exploring whether there are attributes that can be updated to accurately reflect the direction of the company. If the logo, tagline, mission statement, or overall ethos doesn’t speak to you, it definitely won’t speak to prospective customers.

Once you’re clear on what makes the brand unique, you’ll typically want to create a strategy around building brand awareness, brand loyalty, and other goals. Remember: the objective of brand marketing isn’t necessarily to directly make more sales. You might be more focused on improving web traffic, boosting your customer Net Promoter Score (NPS), increasing engagement on social media, or establishing authority through thought leadership.

What Are Some Common Brand Awareness Content Ideas?

Let’s say you’ve done all that prep work and are now in need of some brand awareness content ideas for your brand marketing strategy. Brand marketing content may involve:

The imagery, colors, font, and logos associated with your business
Infographics
Review management programs
Partnerships with other businesses
Sponsorships and charitable work
Branded product giveaways
Behind-the-scenes visual media
Social media contests
Case studies and ebooks
Informative blog posts
LinkedIn courses and published posts
Podcasts or webinars
Posts related to social or environmental causes

Can these tactics sometimes result in sales for the business? Sure. But that’s not the #1 goal. All of these examples can help brands connect on a deeper level with potential customers and position the company as a leader or even a friend.

According to a study from Sprout Social , that connection matters. Around 57% of consumers say they’ll increase their spending with a brand that they feel connected to, while 76% say this connection will convince them to buy from that brand over a competitor. When you prioritize brand marketing, you’ll ensure that the other aspects of your strategy are that much more effective.

That being said, brand marketing isn’t the only thing you’ll need for a successful strategy. Direct response marketing also has its place in promoting your agency or your clients’ businesses.

What is Direct Response Marketing?

Direct response marketing, sometimes called direct response advertising, intends to elicit (you guessed it) a direct response from a customer – namely, a sale. Rather than having a goal of increasing general awareness, direct response marketing is all about influencing behavior directly and immediately.

Unlike with brand marketing, direct response marketing campaigns will usually feature more of a “hard sell.” It’s not meant to be subtle; while direct response marketing can be educational and will demonstrate value, it’s also intended to drive results almost instantaneously. As the name suggests, there should be a direct and identifiable link between the promotion and the desired result (i.e., web traffic and/or sales).

Why Use Direct Response Marketing?

Although many of today’s customers don’t like obvious sales tactics, direct response digital marketing is both appropriate and necessary in a number of scenarios. It’s generally a more effective option when a brand is trying to influence certain behaviors or attain more quantifiable, immediate goals. If there’s a sense of urgency surrounding your desired outcome, chances are good that direct response marketing may be the right choice.

Whether you’re trying to generate more leads, sell more products, or get more folks to sign up for your email blasts, you’ll want something with a strong call-to-action. CTAs are a hallmark of direct response marketing campaigns because they tell the customer exactly what you want them to do next. Instead of an open-ended, informative article that may show your brand in a positive light, you’re guiding the consumer through their buyer’s journey with your company.

Not only does direct response tend to produce faster results, but those results are also easier to track. While there are KPIs that can measure brand awareness and loyalty, they may be a bit more subjective or out of your control. With direct response marketing, on the other hand, you can see exactly how successful each campaign is and how much you’re spending to target each customer. On that note, direct response marketing provides more accurate targeting and personalization than brand marketing. Because you’ll have more data at your disposal, you can reach specific audiences more effectively – resulting in greater conversions.

What Are Some Direct Response Internet Marketing Examples?

Direct response marketing might make you think of your basic advertisement, but it’s more than that. Here are just a few direct response internet marketing examples you might already be familiar with:

Product and landing pages
Google Ads (PPC) or display advertising
Social media advertisements
Special offer email blasts or targeted emails (i.e., cart abandonment, remarketing)
New product launch announcements
Newsletter enrollment pop-ups
Customer referral programs
SMS (text message) marketing
Chatbots and social media messaging platforms

It’s not just digital marketing that uses direct response principles. Materials like promotional mailers would also fall under the category of direct response marketing. Additionally, print ads, radio spots, and TV commercials would be categorized this way. While these might seem outdated, many businesses still use them to diversify their strategies and reach certain key demographics.

Branding Vs Direct Response: Which Should You Choose?

Understanding the difference between direct response marketing vs branding is only half the battle. You’ll need to know which type of marketing to focus on at any given point in your strategy – and that choice isn’t always as straightforward as it might seem. Here are a few ways to determine which option is best for your needs.

Audience

Brand marketing is a great equalizer, allowing you to reach all kinds of people with a singular piece of content. When you’re looking to introduce your brand to the general public, brand marketing is the natural choice. But if you’re at the point where you need to target specific buyers, direct response marketing can help you segment your audience and zero in on the folks who are ready to purchase.

Buyer’s Journey

When a consumer isn’t yet familiar with your brand, you need to put in the legwork to build trust, authority, and likeability. That’s what brand marketing is all about. Before you ever try to sell them on a product or service, these prospects need to know and love you. But if they’ve already been introduced to your brand and made up their mind that they connect with you, it’s time for direct response marketing. Now that they’re further along in their buyer’s journey, they’ll be ready to hear why your offerings will change their lives for the better.

Timeline

In the SEO vs. PPC debate, one of the main differences is time efficiency. The comparison between brand marketing and direct response is similar. Both SEO and brand marketing take longer to build, but their effects are longer lasting. In contrast, PPC and other direct response marketing techniques have more immediate results. The downside is that after those campaigns have ended, you won’t keep driving sales or traffic. (This illustrates why you need both types of marketing in your strategy!) If you’re promoting a short-term offer, direct response should be your top priority. But you can’t rush building your brand awareness. As they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Goals

One of the easiest ways to establish the winner in your branding vs direct response race? Zero in on exactly what you’re trying to accomplish. If you know you need to make a certain amount of sales as soon as possible, you may want to prioritize a direct response strategy. Not only will this highlight specific products or services, but you’re directing customers to take a very specific action (a.k.a. making a purchase). On the other hand, if you’re still trying to reach a certain demographic and you aren’t focusing on immediate sales, brand marketing might be the strongest choice. With your brand content marketing, you can build connections and trust with your audience without the pressure of a hard sell.

In Direct Response Marketing Vs Branding, It’s Not Either/Or

In the branding vs direct response argument, you don’t need to take only one side. You’ll ultimately need to cover both marketing types for any strategy, whether it’s for your own agency or on behalf of a client. But which one you choose at any given point will largely depend on the specific goals (both immediate and long-term) you want to achieve. And in many cases, you may be working on both at the same time!

When you partner with a white label SEO provider to outsource your client marketing, you’ll want to have a clear understanding of whether the content will be largely focused on branding and education versus direct response. Some pieces may have elements of both. By and large, though, the majority of optimized blog content will be geared towards building trust and providing value. On the other hand, content like web and ad copy will usually fall under the direct response umbrella.

In the end, one isn’t inherently better than the other. Each type of marketing serves a different purpose – and both are crucial to a successful strategy. When you decide to employ one over the other is a totally personal choice, but you should plan to include both when marketing any business online. And knowing which one to recommend or utilize at any moment will solidify your leadership as a marketer to watch.

How to Calculate Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) For Your Agency

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 20:25:32 GMT

Acquiring new customers for your agency can be tough enough. But what if you’re spending too much (or too little!) to attract those customers?

When you feel like your profits are at a standstill and you don’t know what you’re doing wrong, it may be time to take a closer look at your customer acquisition costs. Understanding the impact of CAC – and knowing how to reduce it – can get you on the right track to boosting profitability for your business.

What is CAC?

CAC stands for Customer Acquisition Cost. This represents the total monetary amount that a company spends (in terms of both sales and marketing costs) to acquire a new customer over a specific period of time.

Keep in mind that these costs include not only marketing spend (i.e., paid advertising, SEO, marketing emails) and sales tactics (lead generation programs), but also things like employee salaries and any overhead costs that relate to attracting and converting leads. Don’t forget to factor in things like software systems, technical and creative costs, bonuses or raises for your marketing and sales team, and other creative or production costs.

When you calculate your Customer Acquisition Cost, you’re determining how much you’ll spend to generate a lead and turn them into a customer during a given timeframe.

Why Does Customer Acquisition Cost Matter?

You might have a vague idea of how much you’re spending on customer acquisition, so why do you need to use a precise customer acquisition cost formula?

If you care about your bottom line (which, let’s face it, every agency owner does!), you need to have a more accurate understanding of how much you’re investing in your marketing and sales efforts. Knowing whether you’re over-investing – or under-investing! – in your customer acquisition process can help you improve profitability and reduce inefficiencies.

When you know how to calculate and improve CAC, you can stop wasting time and money on leads that won’t pay off in the end. Without tracking this metric, you could find yourself in an endless cycle of paying too much for poor-quality leads that lead to high customer churn.

What’s the Difference Between CAC and LTV?

CAC isn’t the only metric businesses use to figure out their relative investment in new customers. Customer Lifetime Value or Lifetime Value of a Customer (sometimes expressed as LVC, CLV, LTV, or CLTV) also plays a role in determining how much a given customer is worth to your business.

Whereas Customer Acquisition Cost represents how much the business will spend to acquire the customer during a specific period, Customer Lifetime Value shows how much the customer will spend with the business throughout the relationship. It’s also worth noting that figuring out your CLV requires some other numbers and a slightly more complicated formula. (Luckily, we have a free LVC calculator to help you out!)

Both of these metrics involve customer-related expenditures, but it’s best for your business if they’re on opposite ends of the spectrum. To maximize profitability, your CAC should be on the lower end, while your CLTV will ideally be on the higher end. That way, you’re not overspending to acquire a customer who won’t be profitable.

CAC and LVC are both crucial metrics for your business to track. You need both of these figures to have a clear picture of where your business stands and where you need to go.

How to Calculate Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

It’s actually pretty simple to calculate CAC for your agency. You’ll just divide your sales and marketing costs within a given period by the number of new customers you acquire within that same period.

Most businesses will measure those figures monthly, though others will opt for quarterly or even yearly CAC metrics. Calculating CAC on a monthly basis can help you really zero in on trends and figure out where improvements can be made.

For example, suppose your agency spent $5,000 on marketing and $8,000 on sales during the month of June. Overall, that means your monthly marketing and sales costs came out to $13,000. If you brought on 10 new customers in June, you’d divide 13,000 by 10 to find your CAC of $1,300.

Here’s your customer acquisition cost formula laid out:

CAC = Sales + Marketing Costs / Number of New Customers

As long as you have a clear idea of all your marketing and sales costs and a precise number of new customers you’ve acquired all within the same period, you’ll be able to calculate your CAC with relative ease.

What’s an Ideal Customer Acquisition Cost?

All that said, making sense of your CAC may be a little tougher. Is your CAC within the right range? Or should it be lower than what you’re currently achieving?

When determining your ideal CAC, you should keep the 3:1 ratio in mind. Once you calculate your Lifetime Customer Value, that number will represent the “3” in this ratio. In other words…

LVC:CAC = 3:1

If you achieve this ideal ratio, you’re in a good spot. It means that your customers are spending significantly more with your business than you’re spending to acquire them. Ultimately, that means bigger profits for your agency.

When your LCV-to-CAC ratio is closer to 1:1 or 2:1, that means you’re probably over-investing in your sales and marketing costs compared to the quality of customers you’re bringing in. You’re spending too much money on clients who don’t spend enough with you.

On the other hand, a higher ratio may not always be a good thing. If your LCV-to-CAC ratio is closer to 5:1, for instance, you’re probably not spending enough on your sales and marketing efforts. While lower costs are usually better, your unwillingness to invest more in these areas could mean your agency is missing out on potential clients. You do need to spend (at least some) money to make money!

Let’s expand on the example we provided in the prior section, where the agency’s CAC equaled $1,300. If the agency’s LCV was just under $4,000, the agency would be in pretty good shape. That would mean their customers spent enough with them in a given month to justify those sales and marketing costs. And, presumably, their team would take steps to keep those customers engaged and growing to maximize retention potential. Over time, that initial $1,300 investment would absolutely pay off.

But what if the LCV for that agency was approximately $1,500? That would bring their LCV-to-CAC ratio much closer to 1:1, meaning the company would spend almost as much to acquire a customer as that customer would spend with their business. That lowers profits considerably and is a good indicator that the agency needs higher-quality leads that convert into more loyal customers.

You can use Semify’s free LVC calculator and our simple customer acquisition cost formula to determine and compare these metrics. Remember, a 3:1 ratio is the gold standard! That means the value of your customers is three times more than what you spend to acquire them.

How to Improve the Cost of Customer Acquisition

Let’s say you’ve calculated both your LVC and your CAC. If it’s too far off from the 3:1 ratio, you’ll want to take steps to address these issues so you can boost profits for your agency.

Many businesses find that they’re spending too much on marketing and sales relative to the value of their customers. That doesn’t necessarily mean you need to cut back on your efforts, though; it often just means you’ll need to work smarter. With that in mind, here are a few steps you can take to improve your CAC and get your LVC:CAC ratio closer to 3:1.

Grow Your Existing Customers: We know that it can cost up to five times more to acquire a new customer as it does to retain an existing one. High customer churn rates will lead to a lower LVC metric and force you to spend more on marketing to new leads. Finding ways to keep (and grow!) your current customer base can help you maximize profits while preserving your brand perception. Finding new ways to sell in-demand products and services to your existing clients – and providing them with impeccable customer service – will go a long way in reducing churn and increasing financial success.
Start a Referral Program: If you work with small business owners, your clients probably know a number of folks who can benefit from your services. Customer referral programs can help you expand your reach while significantly lowering your CAC. Since you won’t have to spend much money on marketing to these business owners (aside from potentially providing a discount to your referring customers), you can improve your profits without driving up your overhead costs.
Revamp Your Audience Personas: It’s possible that you’re spending too much time focusing on the wrong leads. If you know that a certain type of customer is more likely to churn and spend less than others, it may be time to reconsider whether you should be marketing to them at all. You may need to think critically about your target audience; someone who was once your ideal customer may no longer represent what your business needs to grow. It may help to add some criteria for defining a sales qualified lead (SQL) so that your team can spend their resources wisely.
Focus On Your CRO: Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO, refers to making your website or other lead generation tool more adept at converting potential customers. The easier you make it for a lead to convert into a customer, the lower your CAC will be. This may involve adjusting your web contact form, adding better copy on your landing pages, or A/B testing landing pages to assess conversion rates. The aim here is to make the process as painless as possible by removing barriers to conversion.
Try Out Marketing Automation: While we’re inclined to believe that there’s no substitute for real human interaction in many scenarios, marketing automation can certainly reduce your cost investment while providing better data insights. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software can allow you to target leads in a personalized way without monopolizing your staff’s time on menial tasks. With tools like these, you can streamline your sales process, increase your reach, and bring in more qualified leads – often while reducing your CAC in the process.

Keep in mind that if you’re under-investing in your marketing efforts, you can still try out these tips to achieve a more ideal ratio. You might also consider giving yourself permission to increase your ad budget (assuming your ad campaigns are already doing well) or experimenting with other sales and marketing tactics, like social media marketing, email and SMS marketing, and other lead generation platforms.

Get Your CAC in Check For Next-Level Wins

Customer Acquisition Cost is one of the easiest metrics to calculate. But if you don’t know your CAC and your LVC, you won’t know whether you’re targeting the right leads or whether your marketing and sales efforts are justified.

Once you calculate your Customer Acquisition Cost and your Customer Lifetime Value, you’ll be able to identify areas for improvement. By streamlining your processes and ensuring you’re qualifying the right leads, you’ll improve profitability and grow your agency more efficiently.

To learn more about how Semify’s white label SEO program can allow you to grow your agency together with us, contact our team today.

Why Page Speed Matters (And How to Fix It)

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 22:58:32 GMT

In a time when we want immediate answers, the speed of a website matters more than ever. If a web visitor is unable to get the information they need within a matter of only a few seconds, the unfortunate reality is that they’re going to give up and look elsewhere. In fact, Neil Patel tells us that 40% of people abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

But sales aren’t the only thing you’ll lose when your website is sluggish. Whether you’re looking to improve your own rankings or to take your clients to the next level, you’ll be held back by a slow-loading site – or a singular, slow-loading page.

Since many business owners may not realize the gravity of their stagnant sites, agency owners need to take action when developing an SEO strategy. Page speed matters so much that it should be addressed before you fully launch into link-building or blog content creation. But why is it so important? And what can you do to fix it? Let’s talk about it.

What is Page Speed?

Site speed, as you may already know, simply measures the amount of time it takes for a website to load for users. Site speed is actually based on an average of multiple instances of page speed throughout a given website. It’s really a sample view of how quickly your site loads as a whole.

That means that the term “page speed” isn’t interchangeable with site speed. Instead, this is the base measurement that tells us how long it takes for all of the elements on a given page – like the text and visuals – to completely load.

Page speed can be expressed in a couple of different ways. Page load time is the most accessible, as it’s easy to see how long it takes for 100% of the content to be displayed on a given web page. It’s also possible to measure page speed in what’s known as “time to first byte,” which describes the time it takes for a web user’s browser to receive the very first byte of information about a web page from the web server.

There are a few other ways that search engines can measure the speed of a page, including First Meaningful Paint (FMP) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). FMP refers to how long it takes for the most impactful content to appear on the screen and allows users to interact with the most important element on the page. LCP, a metric to which we were introduced during Google’s Page Experience update, measures the amount of time it takes for a page’s largest element to fully load. (Both of these metrics apply to the most important or largest element “above the fold,” which is the part of the web page that’s visible without a user having to scroll.)

While all of these methods for measuring page speed matter, focusing on page load time is seen as the most comprehensive. If your entire page loads quickly, your FMP and LCP rates will usually be impressive, too. That said, page load time alone won’t always give you the full picture of whether users really have to wait that long to interact with your content.

Why Does Page Speed Matter For SEO?

We know what page speed is, but why does page speed matter so much? Think of your clients’ web visitors like Veruca Salt – they don’t care, they want it NOW.

Patience may be a virtue, but it’s not one that many of us have (especially online!). Just think of the last time you tried to search for vital information, only to encounter a spinning wheel or a server that couldn’t handle your request. You probably let out a huff and hit the “back” button immediately. Your client’s customers will be quick to do the same.

According to Google research :

But, as Backlinko points out, the average website took over 10 seconds to load fully on desktop in 2019. On mobile, it’s even worse! The average site took 27.3 seconds to fully load on smartphone screens that same year. And while those figures might have improved since then (thanks in part due to Google’s emphasis on page speed), most websites are likely still too slow to satisfy today’s shoppers.

With so much choice available to us and a wealth of information at our fingertips, we’re simply not going to wait around in most cases. For hard-to-get concert tickets or limited designer drops, maybe. But on the average day, we’ll just pivot and look elsewhere for what we need. Data shows that conversion rates drop by anywhere from 2% to 7% for every second a page’s load time is delayed.

Keep in mind, however, that a slow-loading site has both immediate and long-term consequences for your clients. Not only will they alienate potential customers, but they could also have trouble improving their SEO or their PPC ad performance. Because both site and page speed are now considered to be ranking factors for Google Search and Google Ads, a lagging website can tank your client’s ability to rank – or to appear in their desired ad space.

When Google released its Core Web Vitals a couple of years ago, it became clear that one of their primary focuses was on the user experience. Loading time, along with interactivity delays and visual stability, is now a critical component in how websites are evaluated.

That being said, speed isn’t exactly a new ranking factor. As Search Engine Journal points out, Google’s algorithm prioritized speedy websites as far back as 2010. While it wasn’t until 2018 that mobile speed and mobile-first indexing came to the forefront, Google’s decision to view fast sites more favorably all comes back to providing the best possible results for end users. (Note: Google has said that the newest iteration, the page experience update, has essentially replaced its former speed-based ranking factors to reduce redundancies.)

SEO isn’t the only place where site speed matters. It can impact your PPC campaigns, as well. Site speed can affect your Google Ads Quality Score, which influences both ad placement and cost per click (CPC). A client with a slower site may end up paying more to run their ads – and those ads might not be as visible as they could be. Since this can adversely affect customer satisfaction, paying attention to page speed can pay dividends for your agency.

Although relevance is still more important than page speed in both organic and paid search, we know that the loading pace of a page can help break the tie between two otherwise equal options.

How Do I Measure Page Speed For My Clients?

Now that you know why page speed matters, you need to know how to identify a slow site. One of the easiest ways to do that is to turn to Google’s PageSpeed Insights or to run another page speed test.

Google’s page speed insights tool allows you to enter a URL and assess how quickly it loads for both desktop and mobile users. The page speed insights platform will break down specific aspects of page speed (like the Core Web Vitals and other performance issues) so you can easily identify what needs to be improved. Google even provides recommendations to guide you.

Google also has a Mobile Speed Score , which was introduced in 2018 as part of Google Ads. This is evaluated a bit differently from other site speed measurements, as it’s a 10-point scale that evaluates the relationship between page speed and an ad’s potential conversion rate. You can view the mobile speed score for a given page as part of your Google Ads campaign.

There are a number of other page speed tests available, such as Pingdom, WebPageTest, and more. While Google’s version is seen as the gold standard, there are other platforms that may be a bit more user-friendly for beginners or that provide additional features that may be helpful in managing your campaigns.

At Semify, we also make it easy for our partners to access the page speed insights they need. In the first month of a campaign, we provide a comprehensive report that includes the fully loaded site time. We also include the site’s initial response time in our agency dashboard so you can access this data at any time.

Of course, simply knowing how fast or slow a site is won’t be enough. You also need to know how to speed up a site to improve responsiveness and overall results.

How Can I Improve Page Speed For Better SEO?

Say that you’ve entered your client’s information into Google’s Page Speed Insights tool or another page speed test and you don’t like the results. Now that you know why page speed matters, you need to know how to speed up a site to improve SEO or PPC campaign results in the future.

Fortunately, there are many potential ways to improve page speed and the overall user experience. As your white label SEO agency guide, we’re outlining a few suggestions for you below.

Compress Images

When you’re first trying to figure out how to speed up a site, you need to look at the components that take the most time to load. Chances are good that a page’s visual elements are slowing its speed down. That said, web pages need images and other visual media to engage readers and even help them retain information .

Rather than get rid of these elements altogether, we suggest that you compress them. Image compression will reduce the size of the file without compromising on quality. That means your images and videos will still look sharp and captivating without taking what feels like years to load.

Depending on the content management system (CMS) your client uses for their website, there may be easy-to-use plugins that will automatically compress anything uploaded to their image library. There are also a number of free tools and software programs that can help you compress images before they’re uploaded to the client’s site.

Web visitors won’t ever be able to tell that the images are compressed by looking at them, but they’ll notice a huge difference in how quickly a page will load as a result. This is a simple step that can add tremendous value for your clients.

Reduce Redirects

Redirects can be useful, in some cases, but they can also slow down a website considerably. Both temporary and permanent redirects are meant to guide visitors to the right destination. If it takes too long to bring them there, however, they may abandon their journey entirely.

Each time one page redirects to another, the web user has to wait for what’s called the HTTP request/response cycle to finish. That can add seconds onto the final page’s loading time. That may not sound like a big deal, but we know that every millisecond counts.

Although some redirects may be necessary, others can be removed or avoided entirely. It’s good practice to audit the client’s website to eliminate non-vital redirects or amend redirects to reduce “hops.” Remember, the fastest way to get anywhere is via a straight line!

Use Browser Caching or a CDN

A browser cache is like a visitor’s individual memory bank. Without caching, your browser will experience every website like it’s 50 First Dates. Every time you visit a familiar website, it’ll behave like it’s the very first time. But when you use caching, your browser will remember and pull up the site’s elements a lot more quickly. Although this won’t improve page speed for first-time visitors, it can make a big difference for those who have visited the website more than once.

A content delivery network (CDN) provides another way to speed up a website. A CDN will essentially store copies of your website within different data centers. When a visitor pulls up the website, the site will be distributed to the visitor from the server located closest to them. With less distance to travel, the site’s information will load more quickly for the user.

Clean Up Code

With back-end coding, there can be too much of a good thing. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other kinds of code do take up a lot of space. Although a lot of this code may be necessary for ensuring the site runs smoothly, some of it may be extraneous. Extra code can slow down a site’s speed, so it’s beneficial to minify unused or duplicated code.

There are a number of plugins and other tools you can use to identify excessive code and clean it up. That said, any white label SEO agency would recommend you hire a qualified web developer to avoid any mistakes.

Upgrade Web Host or Server

It’s also possible that your client’s site functions well under ideal circumstances… but that their host or server is holding them back. If your client’s site is on a shared server or their hosting service can’t provide the necessary capacity, it may be time to talk to them about upgrading.

If the host or server is behind the site’s slow speeds, it won’t matter how much you optimize. You’ll still run into issues with the site’s loading time until you fix the root cause. Remind them that it pays to invest in a server or web hosting service that can handle their traffic! While $10 a month for hosting may sound like a bargain, they may end up missing out on a lot of sales due to slow speeds.

With Page Speed, Slow and Steady Doesn’t Win the Race

Certain aspects of SEO require a lot of patience. But web visitors don’t have time to waste. Addressing sluggish site speeds can markedly improve user experience, bounce rate, conversions, and search rankings – so don’t sleep on the need for speed. To learn more about how we can help set your clients up for success with our white label SEO program , get in touch with our team today.

Domain Rating Vs Domain Authority: Do These Made-Up Metrics Matter?

Fri, 17 Jun 2022 19:57:11 GMT

When evaluating the value of a website, you’ve probably learned to focus on a few specific factors. These factors might include the site’s Domain Rating or, alternatively, its Domain Authority.

Either one of these metrics can provide you with valuable information about the perceived quality of a site. But what you might not know is what goes into these calculations – and how much they should actually be taken into account.

To clear up this confusion, we’re taking a deep dive into both Ahrefs Domain Rating and Moz Domain Authority. By the time you reach the end of this article, you should be able to define each of these metrics for your clients, understand the differences between Domain Authority vs Domain Rating, and decide for yourself whether DA and DR are all they’re cracked up to be.

What is Domain Authority?

First, what is Domain Authority (DA)? This scoring methodology was developed by Moz to predict how likely a site is to rank in search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s basically an estimate of how well a site might perform in a relevant search.

One a scale from 1 to 100, Moz Domain Authority uses data from the platform’s Link Explorer web index, as well as numerous algorithmic factors, to make these complex predictions. Moz reportedly uses at least 40 different factors to tabulate your score. The higher your DA, the better your chances of ranking well in SERPs.

It’s important to note that DA has no direct impact on how Google’s rankings are calculated. In other words, improving a client’s DA may not have a direct impact on where they rank on a keyword or on how the site’s quality is perceived by Google. Moz’s metric is a completely independent rating that estimates a site’s SERP strength. It’s not officially endorsed by Google, nor is it a ranking factor in search algorithms.

However, it can still play an important role in your SEO strategy. We can typically assume that a higher DA corresponds to an increased ability to rank well in SERPs. If your client has a more desirable position in search results, they may receive a greater portion of the traffic share over their competitors. So while DA doesn’t have a direct impact on rankings and traffic, it can be a good indicator of where a site stands.

How Domain Authority is Calculated

Like Google’s own algorithms, Moz Domain Authority involves a number of complex (and somewhat mysterious) calculations. Moz states that factors like the site’s total number of links and linking root domains are considered, as well as how frequently the algorithm predicts that Google will serve a given domain in search results. We found sources that state content quality, age of domain, and social signals all play a role in the final DA score.

Additionally, Domain Authority is essentially calculated on a curve. Your score is relative to the scores of other websites on the internet. Highly authoritative sites take up more of the spots earmarked for higher scores, which means there are fewer opportunities for sites with less rich backlink profiles. Among other things, this means that it’s much harder to increase your DA from an 80 to a 90 than it is to grow it from a 10 to a 20.

To make matters more complicated, DA isn’t a consistent number you can calculate once and be done with it. Because machine learning is involved, DA scores will change over time as additional data emerges. So your DA may fluctuate a lot over time, especially if you fall behind on link-building or a higher authority site acquires a lot of great links within a short period.

Confused yet? You aren’t the only one. Good thing you don’t have to calculate this metric for yourself. There are tons of DA checkers and software platforms you can use to track DAs for your clients without having to crunch any numbers on your end.

What is Domain Rating?

With all that in mind, what is Domain Rating? This metric comes from Ahrefs, another leading SEO authority. Like DA, DR uses a 100-point scale to make a determination about the strength of a site using its backlinks. According to Ahrefs, it’s “a less granular version of Ahrefs Rank (AR),” which the platform uses to scale all of the sites in its database by both the size and quality of their backlink profiles.

In other words, Ahrefs Domain Rating ranks sites based on the perceived strength of their backlink profiles. It’s important to point out that Ahrefs really doesn’t utilize an algorithm or complex calculations to reach these determinations.

Per Ahrefs: “Please note that Ahrefs’ DR metric is purely link-based. We don’t take into account things such as the search traffic of a given website, the age of its domain, or the popularity of its parent brand.”

Although DR reportedly takes both link quantity and quality into account, Ahrefs is the first to admit that link spam doesn’t always have a negative effect on Domain Rating. That means you could technically be going against Google’s guidelines by hundreds of spammy backlinks and actually see improvements in your DR as a result.

Consequently, it’s necessary to point out that – just like Domain Authority – Domain Rating isn’t directly connected to a site’s ranking in SERPs. It’s an independent calculation that doesn’t factor into Google’s algorithm at all. And since Ahrefs doesn’t even try to predict how sites in its database will be ranked according to DR calculations, it’s just one piece of the puzzle.

How Domain Rating is Determined

Like Domain Authority, DR uses a site’s backlinks to determine its overall strength. But DR seems to involve a simpler calculative process and fewer attributes.

Ahrefs specifically says that when calculating DR, the platform considers the Domain Ratings of the sites providing links to the domain in question, as well as how many links each of those sites provides overall. This is based on the idea that higher-DR sites provide more “link juice” to referring sites, while a domain splits that “link juice” equally among the sites to which it links. To put it another way, a link from a site with a lower DR and fewer outgoing links could actually have a greater impact on your own DR than a link from a high-DR website that provides do-follow links to thousands of other sites.

These calculations are then repeated (though that process isn’t exactly spelled out for us) until the domain is rated on a scale of 0 to 100. And like with DA, DR is all relative; your rating will fluctuate depending on not only your links but other sites’ links, as well. Again, it’s much harder to move the needle when your domain rating is high than when it’s on the lower end of the scale. Even if you don’t lose any backlinks, your DR could drop if another site gets a lot of them.

Again, you don’t have to figure out everything that goes into DR calculations. You can use the Ahrefs platform (or Semify’s white label dashboard!) to determine the Domain Rating of any site and take a closer look at the backlinks being considered.

Domain Authority Vs Domain Rating: The Main Differences

Moz Domain Authority and Ahrefs Domain Rating have a number of things in common. Either one can be used to analyze a website’s SEO value. Additionally, they’re both independent metrics that have no bearing on a site’s current or potential ranking. While they might indicate how likely a site is to rank well, they are not ranking factors in and of themselves.

They also both involve a 100-point scale where sites are ranked relative to other domains in the database. Therefore, your DR and your DA both depend on what other sites have; they don’t exist in a vacuum. There’s also a lack of complete transparency surrounding exactly which factors are used to calculate these metrics and how they’re weighted.

However, Domain Authority and Domain Rating are not interchangeable. They do have some distinct differences that often cause marketers to prefer one over the other.

Here’s the main way these two metrics diverge:

DA = uses links and other factors to calculate how likely a site is to rank
DR = uses links to determine the strength of a site’s backlink profile

While Ahrefs really only looks at a site’s backlinks, Moz will also take factors like spam scores and even ranking keywords into account. DA is a more complex calculation that may give a broader view of a website’s overall value and predicted performance.

Should You Care More About Ahrefs Domain Rating or Moz Domain Authority?

The question at-hand: in the domain authority vs domain rating debate, which is better? Like with so many things in SEO, there’s no one clear answer. But it ultimately depends on why you’re using the metric in question.

If you’re looking to build links, DR can give you a quick overview of how valuable a link from a given domain might be. This can help you make speedy, sound decisions about which link-building opportunities are actually worth your time. Conversely, DA can be used to assess a site’s performance potential overall. While having a great DA score shouldn’t be your ultimate goal, it can help with competitive analysis and give you a broad idea of a site’s health.

The Problem With DA Vs. DR: Neither is Perfect

We’d caution you against being strictly Team Domain Rating or Team Domain Authority. The truth is that each of these metrics has merits – but each is also flawed in its own way.

Having a high DA score is likely to correlate with a high DR score. So if you’re tracking your DA score and are pleased with the results, you may be able to correctly guess that your DR is in good shape, too – assuming you’re actively engaging in quality link-building practices. Since DR is based solely on backlinks, you’ll need to keep up with that area of your strategy if you want both numbers to look their best.

On the other hand, DR is the more suitable alternative to the now-defunct Page Rank . Google no longer provides this metric to the public (which was essentially a backlink profile analysis based on link quality), so Ahrefs stepped in to fill the gap. While PageRank was at one time a ranking factor, that’s no longer the case. And even though DR isn’t factored into Google’s algorithm, it provides comparable information on a simple logarithmic scale.

It’s also worth noting that Domain Authority may be more easily manipulated than Domain Rating. DA reportedly takes factors like domain age and social presence into account, which means that older websites may have a great score without providing a ton of recent value. It’s also possible that an older site may have a high DA without ranking well in SERPs.

Having a strong backlink profile doesn’t always mean you’ll rank well either – and it’s also possible that hundreds of spammy backlinks could result in a great DR with less impressive results in SERPs. But the argument is that DR is often more reflective of consistently sound SEO practices than DA will show.

The Answer? Use Both Domain Rating and Domain Authority

A lot of SEO experts have strong feelings about DA vs. DR. We tend to keep close tabs on Domain Rating when we’re handling link outreach and link-building, but that doesn’t mean Domain Authority never comes into play.

We believe one of the smartest things you can do is to monitor both metrics and use that information to guide your strategy. While that may mean using additional tools and compiling longer reports, we think it’s better to have all the data at your disposal.

How Much Do Domain Rating and Domain Authority Really Matter?

These metrics are valuable, but they aren’t the be-all and end-all of SEO.

DR can give a great overview of a site’s backlink profile strength, but it leaves out a lot – like the user experience it provides, the quality of its content, and its ability to generate actual traffic. And even though DA may be more all-encompassing in terms of the factors it calculates, it still won’t tell you everything you need to know about a website’s ability to rank in SERPs.

Ultimately, DR and DA are imperfect metrics – but that doesn’t mean they should be ignored! By including Domain Rating and Domain Authority in your website analysis process, you stand to gain significant knowledge. Just remember not to stop there. There are a whole lot of other factors that determine how valuable, popular, and profitable a site or strategy will be for your clients.

Are No Follow Links Important For SEO?

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 20:28:51 GMT

Link-building is an important part of any client SEO strategy. After all, Moz data reveals that off-site SEO factors are likely to represent more than 50% of ranking factor weight. Therefore, any white label SEO agency will tell you that the work you do off-site matters just as much (if not more than) the on-site optimizations you’re making.

Building backlinks can be a great way to improve the domain rating of your client’s site. As we’ve learned, there are two main types of links you can build – follow and no-follow. We’ve broken down the basics of no follow vs follow links before, but we’re still haunted by a frequently asked question: Are no follow links useless for your SEO strategy?

Quick Refresher: No-Follow Links

Let’s quickly re-introduce the idea of link attributes. When a link is a do-follow, it passes along “link juice” from the referring domain. That means the first site gives a thumbs up to the second. Google will perceive the site being linked more favorably because the referring domain is willing to endorse it.

When a link contains a no-follow attribute, on the other hand, it’s essentially telling Google that the domain publishing that link does not endorse it. It’s not saying the link is bad, but it suggests that the referring site doesn’t want to give the link its seal of approval (for whatever reason). The no-follow link will theoretically not receive the “link juice” from the referring website in this scenario.

No-follow links can come from a wide variety of websites. Some sites (like many news outlets or large brands) treat all outgoing links as no-follow, while others will pick and choose which links they’ll provide a do-follow attribute to. For example, some websites might only provide do-follow links to educational resources, government agencies, or unbiased industry organizations. Another website might be happy to provide a do-follow link to a non-competitor with a great resource to share.

If you use a service like Ahrefs, you can determine which backlinks are no-follow by looking at your referring domains. You can also examine the source code of a given website to determine whether a link has a no-follow attribution in its URL structure. It’ll look like this:

Contrary to what some people believe, no-follow links aren’t bad. You’ll naturally find no-follow links in most backlink profiles, and they do serve a few important purposes.

Are No Follow Links Important For SEO?

We often hear from folks who ask, “are no follow links useless for my clients?” We’re inclined to answer no because:

No follow links can drive traffic to your client’s site
No follow links can assist in creating a more natural (less spammy) backlink profile
No follow links can keep a website from receiving a Google penalty
No follow links may still pass some sort of value from one domain to the other

Are they as valuable as do-follow links? Typically, no. But they usually won’t hurt your SEO when used in moderation. In some ways, they can help you by allowing you to avoid penalizations or to raise brand awareness and conversions.

But how much do no-follow links factor into how a website’s value is determined?

Semify’s Original Research: How No-Follow Links Impact Backlink Profiles and Overall SEO

Understanding the true impact of no-follow links is a huge undertaking – and it’s an area without much clarity. We wanted to perform some original research to see whether we could illuminate some truths about how much no-follow links impact SEO. (Spoiler alert: we now have more questions than answers.)

Looking Deeper Than DR

We started with some data we sourced directly from an Ahrefs post discussing how domain rating is calculated. In that article, we learned that three popular websites have something in common:

huffingtonpost.com = DR 92 (93.7 million backlinks)
techcrunch.com = DR 92 (97 million backlinks)
salesforce.com = DR 92 (113 million backlinks)

Yep, these very different websites all have the same domain rating. But DR doesn’t tell the full story. DR ranks a website on a scale from 0 to 100 based on the size and quality of its backlink profile; however, it doesn’t compare backlink profile strength relative to other websites.

According to data compiled by Ahrefs (using Ahrefs Rank, the platform’s ordering system based on backlink profile strength), HuffPost’s backlink profile is actually stronger – despite its lower number of referring backlinks – than those of both TechCrunch and Salesforce. HuffPost has an AR of 316, while TechCrunch comes in right behind at 317. Salesforce, conversely, has an AR of 346 and has the highest number of referring backlinks, suggesting that its link-building strategy may prioritize quantity over quality.

Do-Follow Links = A Stronger Backlink Profile (Despite Questionable Practices)

When we take a closer look at the backlink profiles for these websites, this assumption seems to ring true. Of Salesforce.com’s 273,130 referring domains, roughly 209,919 (or 77%) of them are do-follow links. TechCrunch , on the other hand, has 603,200 referring domains – 558,304 (or 93%) of which are do-follow. When we examined HuffPost’s referring domains, we found a similar ratio: out of 1,022,251 referring domains, 973,865 (or 95%) provided do-follow links.

Salesforce:

Huffington Post:

TechCrunch:

With this data in mind, it’s clear that having more do-follow links can often have a positive impact on domain rating and backlink profile strength. (No surprise there!) Having a higher percentage of do-follow referring domains correlates with a higher DR. Thus, we’d conclude that having a higher percentage of no-follow links in a site’s backlink profile won’t be quite as beneficial to its SEO (or at least this particular calculation).

That said, things get interesting when you take a closer look at the referring domains. Here’s a peek at some of huffingtonpost.com’s most recent do-follow referring domains:

There are some sites with decent DRs listed, but all of those DRs are lower than that of HuffPost itself. There are also some low-DR websites there, like city-star.org, buycelebrityclothes.com, and truejustice.org. Despite two of those URLs having .org domain extensions, it seems Google doesn’t find them to be particularly valuable. What’s more, these referring domains run the gamut in terms of vertical (which may be expected, considering that HuffPost is a massive news outlet that covers a wide array of topics).

Now, let’s do the same thing for TechCrunch. Relevance aside, we’re seeing a similar pattern. There are a few DRs that are relatively high (though still less impressive than TechCrunch’s own DR), with some very low DRs mixed in. Again, these are all from do-follow links.

Another interesting thing to note is that the top-listed websites in these examples are pointing an unfathomably large number of links at our DR-92 examples. In the screenshot above, you’ll see that parkme.com (which essentially functions as a map directory website) has published 12,856,485 do-follow links that direct to TechCrunch. Even though TechCrunch may not be actively going after 12 million links from one domain, it’s not something we’d ever personally advise doing for SEO – and yet, it hasn’t seemed to hurt the site’s DR very much.

And what about the do-follow referring domains for Salesforce, the site with the weakest backlink profile? You might be inclined to think this site has a stronger profile if you were to use only the site’s recent referring do-follow domains as a reference point:

Generally speaking, this short list of DRs seems more impressive than the other two. The DRs are higher, at least. But as we continued to scroll down the list, we did find some very low-DR websites, as well. Many of the referring domains seem to be based outside of the U.S., with several URLs containing similar structures, as seen here:

When you consider only DR, having thousands of links coming from salesforce.de or these coolshop sites may seem like they’re better than the top referring websites for HuffPost and TechCrunch. But domain rating doesn’t paint the whole picture – and there’s more than one way to succeed at SEO.

Additionally, it’s tough to view these do-follow links in a vacuum. How do we know how Google weighs one link over another? Does Google care that these sites receive thousands of do-follow links from websites that aren’t particularly relevant or valuable? And even if Google does care, are those thousands of links being offset by other, better links somewhere in the site’s backlink profile? It’s nearly impossible to tell for websites that are this established.

No-Follow Links = No Clear-Cut Answer on Significance

But for the sake of argument, let’s look at the domains that are providing no-follow links to these sites. We expected to see some low-quality, spammy websites here. For example, even though it has a relatively high domain rating of 79, soup.io is clearly a private blog network. (Interestingly, TechCrunch has both do-follow and no-follow links from this site in its backlink profile.)

PBNs are controversial because they can serve a purpose (i.e., passing link juice), but they can also be lacking in organic traffic and overall content value if they’re poorly maintained. It’s possible that this site is scraping TechCrunch’s content and reposting it independently. Again, it’s hard to believe that TechCrunch would be purposely going after over 2 million links from one website – no-follow or not.

TechCrunch does have a couple of good referring domains in the no-follow section of its backlink profile, including several Yahoo! URLs, socialmediatoday.com, Business Insider Australia, and Search Engine Land. Again, these sites reportedly don’t pass any link juice – but it’s possible that having them included might provide some sense of legitimacy (or diversity, if nothing else). But if those links truly aren’t being followed, it’s unclear whether they add much meaningful value.

As you can imagine, our heads were spinning at this point. What does it all mean? Other than helping you create a more natural-looking backlink profile and potentially driving some traffic to your site, are no-follow links worth getting? Can they actually help your SEO in a way that’s significant enough to warrant a place in your link-building strategy?

What Other Experts Say About No-Follow Links

We decided to see what others in the industry have to say on this subject. Neil Patel boldly claims that Google has likely incorporated no-follow links into its algorithm in some way, meaning that no-follows almost certainly have an impact on SEO:

And here’s what Search Engine Journal reported when Google amended how it counts no-follow links back in 2019:

“Previously nofollow links were treated as a directive, meaning Google obeyed the nofollow, period. Starting today, for ranking purposes, Google is treating nofollow as a hint. This means that Google will decide whether to use the link for ranking purposes or not. This change impacts on-page SEO, content marketing, link building and link spam.”

Google, vague as ever, seems to answer the “are no follow links important?” question with an infuriating “it depends.” But what we do know is that there’s no longer a strict policy that keeps Google bots from following no-follow links. Now, there’s a chance (no matter how slim) that these links will still “count” towards how your site is ranked. The directive is now merely a suggestion, rather than a steadfast rule.

Finally, Semrush published some original research that suggests high-ranking websites have ample no-follow links pointing to them:

According to their data, about 20% to 40% of the backlinks pointing to #1-ranked sites in SERPs are no-follow links. Clearly, no-follow links aren’t hurting the SEO of these sites. These links are arguably necessary; the question is how big of an impact they might have.

When we analyzed the backlink profiles of those three well-known sites, it seemed obvious to us that having more do-follow links resulted in a stronger backlink profile. But are no follow links useless? We’d say no! Although we weren’t able to discern whether a specific no-follow link from a reputable, high-DR website has a measurable impact on a site’s ranking factors, general wisdom tells us that you’ll still want some to appear in your backlink profile.

Keep in mind that a site’s ability to pass link juice value actually depends on how many domains that site links out to with do-follow links. Even if you get a do-follow link from a high-DR site, the effects on your own DR will be diminished if that site provides do-follow links to just about anyone who asks. While that do-follow link probably won’t hurt, it also won’t make your DR jump a significant amount. In some cases, it may not be that much more beneficial to get a do-follow link than a no-follow link from a national news outlet – so even if the site isn’t officially endorsing yours, don’t panic! As with any SEO topic, multiple factors are considered here.

A Final Word on No-Follow Links

Ultimately, we can’t go so far as to say that no-follow links will definitely improve a site’s ranking. But we also can’t claim that no-follow links have zero effect on SEO. Even if a link is not technically followed (or “counted” in the eyes of Google), it can still improve your backlink profile’s organic perception and drive traffic to your site. In order to reap those benefits, however, you’ll want your no-follow links to be from reputable, relevant sites that have a tangible readership.

Should you turn down a no-follow link opportunity? If it’s from a website with a low DR that’s irrelevant to your niche, or if you already have a lot of no-follow links in your backlink profile, you’d probably be better off skipping it and trying to get a do-follow elsewhere. But if the site is relevant, has good traffic and a decent DR, and doesn’t require you to pay or spend lots of time on content creation, you might consider it if your backlink profile lacks no-follow links. Whether or not link juice comes into play, you could still boost sales or brand awareness if your audiences overlap.

Our takeaway: No-follow links can be useful, but they shouldn’t be the main focus of your link-building strategy. As with countless other digital marketing topics, there’s nuance and balance needed. Before you dismiss a potential backlinking opportunity just because of its attribute, work with your white label SEO agency to look beyond the no-follow and assess whether it could help (or hurt) your clients in other ways.

Are Web 2.0 Backlinks Good For SEO?

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 20:49:13 GMT

The fact you’re here means you already know that link-building is a crucial component of SEO. And that puts you ahead of the pack, considering that Ahrefs reports 66.31% of web pages have no backlinks at all. As a marketing expert, you may already be partnering with a white label SEO agency like Semify to ensure your clients consistently have backlinks built to their sites.

But not all backlinks are created equal. And the difference between a good backlink and a not-so-great backlink isn’t always crystal clear.

One of the most common questions we get from our clients – marketing agencies that need fulfillment support to scale their businesses – is about web 2.0 backlinks. Whether you choose to outsource SEO or build backlinks in-house, here’s what you need to know about web 2.0 backlinks and their potential impact on your strategy.

What Is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 refers to the whole of the modern internet. (Talk about overwhelming!) Compared to “web 1.0,” when people talk about web 2.0, they’re describing a shift in how the internet is used. In the past, internet users were passive readers. Now, they’re active contributors. For example, social media platforms depend on independent users sharing information in order to function.

In a nutshell, you can think of this as the difference between an old-school encyclopedia website and the modern Wikipedia, where anyone can edit and change entries.

What Are Web 2.0 Backlinks?

In the context of SEO, “web 2.0” has morphed into shorthand for a specific type of backlink building. These are links that originate from content a user can control. To give yourself a web 2.0 backlink, all you need to do is create an account and publish a post or a comment with your link.

Some examples of web 2.0 backlinks sites include Blogger and WordPress blogs, Tumblr, Reddit, Quora, Goodreads, Medium, Wikipedia, Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo, directory websites, and comments sections on articles.

What Are the Benefits of a Web 2.0 Backlink?

There are a few reasons to consider building backlinks on web 2.0 sites into your SEO strategy:

Domain rating: Established websites such as Facebook or WordPress likely have a higher domain rating than newer websites. Theoretically, a link in a comment on a blog with a 79 DR could help your SEO strategy a lot more than a random link from a new site with 15 DR.
Immediate publishing: Instead of having to perform tedious link outreach tasks, you can take the DIY route and post links without publisher approval or relationship building.
Free or low-cost: Marketers working with a limited budget may be interested in alternatives to strategies like creating guest posts or buying backlinks for SEO (which don’t always pay returns on your investment).
Search engine visibility: These backlinks will be indexed and crawled quickly, thanks to high user activity. Backlinks on these indexed pages are more valuable than links on sites that aren’t crawled regularly.
Link control: You have more control over anchor text and link context since you’re writing the content yourself. If you’re specifically trying to build your backlink profile to contain a certain type of anchor text (like branded anchor text, for example), you can more easily make that happen.

Are web 2.0 backlinks do-follow links?

This is the big catch when building web 2.0 links. All backlinks come in two primary categories: do-follow and no-follow links. Do-follow links are typically the more desirable option because they pass “link juice” from one website to another and can boost your site’s reputation. They’re the gold standard.

A no-follow link is neutral – it doesn’t necessarily endorse the website it links to, but it doesn’t say anything negative about it, either. No-follow links can be part of a healthy backlink profile, and they can still drive traffic to your site. That said, you don’t want no-follow links to make up the majority of your links because they’re missing that valuable endorsement.

The vast majority of web 2.0 links you add as a user of larger sites will default to no-follow. (Note: Twitter just removed the rel=nofollow attribute from its links. It’s unclear whether these links will count as do-follow links moving forward, but it’s something to watch!) If you’re publishing links on a site you own, however, you control whether a link is no-follow or do-follow. If you’re specifically looking for a few quick, low-cost backlinks and no-follow links aren’t a deal breaker, a quality web 2.0 backlinks site can feel like a reasonable option. But we’d still recommend you proceed with caution.

Avoiding toxic backlinks

Our friends at SEMRush explain that “toxic” backlinks can come in many folinks on Reddit forums

rms. Generally, toxic links aim to manipulate a site’s ranking in SERPs or a site’s incoming or outgoing links. Toxic links frequently come from sites that have been established for the sole purpose of providing links, sites that haven’t been indexed by Google, and non-relevant sites and content.

One toxic backlink might not do irreparable harm to your SEO. But if a marketer hoping for a shortcut attempted to publish, say, 100 links from poor-quality or irrelevant sites just to boost SEO, Google is likely to see those spammy links as red flags. A spammy backlink profile could also be hit with Google penalties. These are fixable over time, but the work probably entails removing the offending backlinks in the process – meaning a lot of extra work and little or nothing to show for it.

You could avoid being spammy by taking the time to create or buy websites that publish great content. If that content is indexed by Google and actually becomes popular, you could end up with a successful site with a lot of valuable traffic. You’d have to pay for additional hosting and web design, keep up with content creation and marketing, and take on the additional responsibility of owning multiple sites to get a single backlink per site.

That long game sounds pretty labor-intensive to us. You’d likely get a better SEO strategy payoff putting that level of effort into pursuing link outreach instead.

Original Research: Semify’s Web 2.0 Backlink Experiment

There’s a lot of misinformation online about which (if any) web 2.0 opportunities provide do-follow links. We set out to field-test some shortcuts to see if they’re worth your time.

The hypothesis: Reddit do-follows links with more than three upvotes

We heard rumors that links on Reddit forums will change from no-follow to do-follow links if the comment or post is upvoted three or more times. (Check out the inline link there – we linked to this particular source with a no-follow link of our own.) Before we recommend hacks like these to our clients, we want to make sure they actually work.

So we tested it.

Test 1: Upvoting a low-volume comment

Here’s how we tested the three-upvote hack: On a local Reddit forum, we found a helpful comment containing links , which had 2 upvotes. We added our own upvote and monitored the comment for two weeks. The comment now has 6 upvotes (bringing it above the rumored 3-vote threshold), but we saw no change from the default do-follow HTML structure. Here’s what it looked like both before and after:

Result: We debunked this rumor.

Test 2: Investigating a higher-volume comment

Maybe the three-vote rule doesn’t take effect immediately. The comment on that post might take time to get on Reddit’s radar, we figured. So we looked at a different Reddit comment with 58 upvotes. This comment had been in place for three weeks, which meant it might have had more time to accrue upvotes or for Reddit to “notice.”

Alas, this link contained the same no-follow link structure as our first test:

Result: This rumor stayed debunked.

The hypothesis: Reddit adds do-follow attributes depending on a link’s “hotness”

Supposedly, a Reddit post needs to be trending (categorized as “rising” or “hot”) for at least 24 hours in order for any links to become do-follow. The poster’s Reddit “ karma ” may also be a factor in the algorithm, according to black hat SEO web forums. (Don’t worry, we’re not giving even a no-follow link to black hat forums!)

Test: Examining trending posts

Ideally, we’d examine a selection of trending posts that trend for 12, 24, and 48 hours to determine when the “do-follow trigger” kicks in. There’s no clear indicator of how long a post has been trending, so it’s difficult to find a post that’s been trending for each precise amount of time. We didn’t see the value in wasting hours and hours to validate a Reddit rumor that would be even harder to harness. (It’s not easy to purposefully manufacture a post that trends for at least half a day on such a highly trafficked forum!) Frankly, we don’t think this is worth your time, either.

So we tested one link on a post that was trending for at least seven hours after it was published, and it was still a no-follow. When we checked back a day later, the post had 11,000 upvotes and nearly 300 comments. However, the link to the Twitter post was still specified as no-follow.

Result: Three strikes and you’re out, Reddit rumor. Getting 11,000 upvotes on a Reddit post is no small feat, and we don’t think it’s worthwhile for marketers to spend that much effort on an unverified strategy. There are better ways to do SEO. Sure, Reddit has a DR of 95, but we don’t see a way for a marketing agency or most other businesses to reliably benefit from its link juice.

The hypothesis: Other web 2.0 opportunities might have do-follow links

Even if Reddit doesn’t have magical do-follow links that you can game by simply upvoting your comment a few times, we wanted to know whether other common web 2.0 sites do have better backlinking opportunities.

Test: Tumblr, Flickr, Quora

First, we looked at other UGC-heavy sites like Tumblr and Flickr. These employ a default link structure known as “noreferrer.”

If you get a noreferrer link, you won’t be able to track it. If people click on the link, you’ll simply see it in your analytics as direct site traffic. In other words, no one will know that Flickr or Tumblr is referring traffic to your site. You can think of it as no-follow to the nth degree.

Quora is even more impregnable. From what we could tell, Quora’s source code doesn’t contain the user-generated content displayed on the site at all. That means Google won’t see (much less follow) any links published there. There could be exceptions, but it doesn’t seem worth it for marketers to devote excessive time to finding them if they do exist.

Result: We couldn’t find trustworthy reports of any of these sites providing do-follow links, nor could we verify them ourselves. That makes us confident that these backlinks aren’t going to make a major difference in a site’s SEO.

Semify’s Take: Web 2.0 Backlinks Aren’t Worth Your Time

Let’s assume that links you publish on Reddit, Quora, or Tumblr are no-follow or noreferrer links. That means there’s no major SEO benefit to these links except for fleshing out your backlink profile with some no-follow links. But if you’re developing a natural backlink profile and your brand is becoming more well-known, this should happen naturally over time regardless.

Google reps say that web 2.0 backlinks are often seen as spammy. According to Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller, relying on web forums or blogs to drive traffic for your brand isn’t exactly recommended.

“All of those examples… are really terrible ways of promoting your website,” Mueller explained during a 2020 Webmaster Office Hours Hangout . “This kind of activity has zero value for SEO. They’re spamming the web. That’s something I would strongly discourage anyone from doing.”

Keep in mind that Google won’t be the only one judging your backlinks. Redditors and users of websites like Tumblr, Quora, and WordPress domains will see your posts or comments and make their own determinations. If your posts are helpful and send traffic to your client’s website, then they could improve people’s perceptions. If you post links in a way that’s spammy or uninteresting, you’ll hurt the company’s reputation and users could downvote your content – which could hurt your strategy, anyway.

That’s not to say that all web 2.0 backlinks are harmful. But it’ll take work to create web 2.0 links that are genuinely helpful and interesting. If you’re going to put in the work, we think your time would be better spent focusing on natural or editorial backlinks instead.

Oh No! What if I’ve Already Started Web 2.0 Backlinking?

You probably don’t need to panic if you’ve already started. You may not have to remove any of these backlinks from your profile, either. If you’ve made a good-faith effort to use backlinks on posts where the links add value, a few web 2.0 backlinks probably won’t read as spammy.

Going forward, we’d just recommend you stick with link outreach and link-building through natural means that offer better value. And if you’re really worried, you can physically remove the UGC backlinks or disavow them through the Google Search Console .

Bottom Line

As a marketing professional, you know that offsite SEO is essential and link-building has a place in any client’s SEO strategy. But most of us don’t have extra time to waste. While web 2.0 backlink-building may seem like a shortcut, it could actually make the journey to SEO success a lot longer.

Really, there are no shortcuts in SEO. Although web 2.0 backlinks aren’t innately bad, they’re also not going to get you where you want to go.

The straighter, clearer path involves building relationships with publishers, creating highly valuable content, and working with a white label SEO agency that can expertly perform link outreach for your clients.

Semify Acquired By Broadtree Partners

Fri, 11 Feb 2022 21:46:48 GMT

Semify Acquired By Broadtree Partners

Acquisition to Further Semify’s Mission of “Growing Together”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Rochester, NY – February 11, 2022 – Semify, LLC, a white-label digital marketing service provider, announced today its acquisition by Broadtree Partners, LLC, a lower-middle market private equity firm. The acquisition was completed in strategic partnership with Pinnacle Financial Partners.

With nearly 15 years in the SEO and PPC sector, Semify will continue to serve its SEO Reseller Partners and clients with the highest quality services and support that they’ve come to expect from the brand. This acquisition will allow Semify and its customers to reach new heights with additional resources, infrastructure, and investment.

Semify’s mission of “Growing Together” is shared by Broadtree Partners’ Principal and Operating Partner, Patrick Briggs. Briggs, who has transitioned to Semify full-time as the President and CEO, will apply his experience as a digital marketing and growth leader at Zazzle, Jetty, and Yumble to guide the company forward.

“Semify is the ideal partnership for an investment from Broadtree Partners,” Briggs explains. “Our shared commitment to exceptional culture, teamwork, and a growth mindset puts us in perfect alignment for the future of Semify. I’m excited to explore new opportunities with this incredible team and to be part of the next stage of growth.”

Founder Adam Stetzer will continue to support the growth and innovation at the company in his new role as Chief Technology Officer.

“At Semify, we believe that growing together creates the freedom to be more,” said Stetzer. “Broadtree’s vision is completely aligned with ours and will take Semify to the next level. I’m excited for the future of Semify and for how we can continue to help small businesses achieve their dreams through our relationship with our SEO reselling partners and with Broadtree’s support.”

Brad Batten, Managing Partner at Broadtree, added: “Broadtree is thrilled to partner with Adam and the team at Semify. Adam has done a fantastic job of building a strong business with a very thoughtful and intentional culture. We look forward to leveraging Broadtree’s experience growing and scaling tech-enabled services and digital marketing businesses to further support the mission of growing together.”

“We are excited about the opportunity to continue to grow Semify,” added Johannes Zwick, Managing Partner at Broadtree. “Patrick’s leadership background in digital marketing, and SEO specifically, together with Adam’s extensive experience in the space and technology expertise creates a powerful combination to deliver first class service to all of Semify’s current and future customers.”

Broadtree Partners’ operator-centric model is a great fit with the goals of Mr. Stetzer and the Semify team. Mr. Briggs’s leadership will ensure a smooth and stable transition while preserving the company’s core values and fueling further development.

By partnering with businesses like Semify to provide additional capital and resources, Broadtree assists businesses in achieving their goals without sacrificing company culture, brand identity, or operational excellence.

Semify’s focus on customer service, best-in-class deliverables, and high-performance culture will remain. With this acquisition, Semify will provide even more opportunities for career and product development.

Moore & VanAllen served as legal advisor to Broadtree.

About Semify, LLC

Established in 2008, Semify, LLC (formerly known as HubShout, LLC) is a team of enthusiastic and highly trained digital marketing professionals providing white label SEO and PPC services to hundreds of customers under its white-label reseller program. With their proprietary and API-integrated software platform, U.S.-based services team, and commitment to the highest level of customer service and transparency, Semify has paved the way for business owners who need high-performing digital marketing services at-scale. Additionally, Semify’s digital marketing insights and cultural accomplishments have been featured in the Washington Post, the Star Tribune, the Las Vegas Sun, and the Rochester Business Journal, among other publications.

Learn more at www.semify.com .

About Broadtree Partners, LLC

Broadtree Partners, headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, is a lower-middle market PE firm with an operator-centric model. Broadtree’s team of operators and entrepreneurs work very closely with owners throughout the transaction process and transition to running the day-to-day operations after an acquisition. By leading with its high-caliber operating talent, Broadtree’s unique executive-in-residence approach provides owners with the flexibility to preserve their legacy by either smoothly exiting their companies and seamlessly changing leadership, or by partnering with Broadtree’s operational and financial resources to further accelerate growth. Broadtree seeks to partner with business owners and entrepreneurs to provide operational resources and institutional capital to transform and grow founder-owned businesses in the lower-middle market. Broadtree’s goal is to fuel stable, long-term growth while preserving the company’s core values.

Learn more at www.broadtreepartners.com .

About Pinnacle Financial Partners

Since 2000, Pinnacle Financial Partners has provided a full range of banking, investment, trust, mortgage and insurance products and services designed for businesses and their owners and individuals interested in a comprehensive relationship with their financial institution. Pinnacle operates in 15 primarily urban U.S. markets across the Southeast. Pinnacle earned a spot on the 2021 list of 100 Best Companies to Work For® in the U.S., its fifth consecutive appearance. American Banker recognized Pinnacle as one of America’s Best Banks to Work For eight years in a row and No. 1 among banks with more than $10 billion in assets in 2020.

Learn more at www.pnfp.com .

How to Respond to Glassdoor Reviews

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 21:07:38 GMT

What is Glassdoor?

Glassdoor is primarily an online review platform with a twist: instead of featuring reviews from customers, your company’s profile includes honest feedback from real employees. According to Glassdoor, the site “allows employees to provide ratings and feedback for career opportunities, learning and development, senior management, compensation and benefits, and company culture.”

Not only can Glassdoor reviews help job-seekers who are looking for new employment opportunities, but they can also guide business owners to make better branding and hiring decisions. Recruiters can also use Glassdoor to gain insight into the companies with which they work and improve on their processes moving forward.

If you’ve never used the site or mobile app before, you can essentially look up any business to instantly find out what their employees really think of them. And yes, that includes your business.

Does that thought make you nervous? Or would you be eager to receive constructive feedback from former and current staff members? Your initial reaction might say a lot about your brand – and so will how you publicly respond to these reviews.

But before we get into that, let’s talk about why these reviews even matter.

How Important Are Glassdoor Reviews?

The short answer is: pretty darn important.

With more than 32 million unique monthly visitors using the Glassdoor site and app in 2017, this platform had already become immensely popular before the pandemic. But Glassdoor reports that they now have 55 million unique monthly visitors . And with over 100 million reviews, salaries, and insights listed on the platform, it’s easy to understand why so many are using it to obtain trustworthy data about employers all across the globe.

Ultimately, it’s one of the quickest ways to get an accurate sense of what it’s like to work at a company. If you’re actively hiring, that’s going to matter a lot to candidates. But even if you’re not looking to fill any open positions right now, your Glassdoor profile can carry a lot of weight.

That’s because it isn’t just job-seekers who are using Glassdoor. Customers are also readily checking these profiles to find out whether they want to support certain companies or work with them on an ongoing basis. In another recent blog post, we outlined the importance of online reviews from customers. We trust online reviews just as much as (or sometimes more than!) personal recommendations from people we know.

With Glassdoor, you’re getting insider knowledge that goes beyond a one-time customer interaction; you’re learning about how companies treat their employees, which can give you a greater sense of a brand’s values and whether they align with your own. Among those surveyed by Glassdoor, the majority of users on this platform read at least 7 reviews before forming an opinion of a company. And while 89% of Glassdoor users are actively seeking a new job or would consider better opportunities, others will use the platform to monitor brands they have an interest in on a consumer or vendor level.

In other words, you have a huge opportunity to win over job candidates, clients, partners, and even members of your community with your Glassdoor reviews. On the other hand, a poorly managed Glassdoor profile can be the final nail in your brand’s coffin.

The Drawbacks of Glassdoor Reviews

Glassdoor has found a way to provide some much-desired transparency for job-seekers. That said, it’s sometimes appropriate for readers to take Glassdoor reviews with a grain of salt.

For one thing, these reviews are essentially published using the honor system. The platform doesn’t take action to verify that a reviewer was or is employed by a certain company, nor is there anything that stops users from posting multiple reviews for the same company. This could unfairly skew a company’s perception in a positive or negative way. A wronged employee could plague the company with unfair negative reviews, while an employer could theoretically spam their own account with unwarranted positive ones.

Glassdoor reviews are anonymous, which can be helpful in preventing employee retaliation and can promote honest and empowered feedback. But it also has the potential to be abused. And as with any other review system, people are more likely to leave reviews when they’ve had a negative experience. This means companies need to be proactive about encouraging reviews from employees in a way that still shows integrity.

Unfortunately, some companies will reportedly force current employees to leave a positive review (sometimes during the beginning stages of their employment) in an effort to counteract negative feedback or inflate their overall perception on the platform. We all know this is a shady move, but there’s not much that can be done to stop it.

However, we can take some solace in the fact that job seekers and leads alike will probably smell a rat. Suspicions start to arise when a company has only 1-star and 5-star reviews from employees with drastically different experiences that come in around the same timeframe. Unlike a singular customer experience, which can often vary quite a bit during a set period, that’s a far less likely scenario for employees who interact with the inner workings of a company on a daily basis.

It’s also worth noting that companies can change a lot over time. At Semify, we’ve recently undergone major changes in our culture and our infrastructure. While Glassdoor allows employees to leave reviews for up to 5 years after their employment has ended, a review from even a year or two ago might not accurately reflect the current experience someone might have with your business.

The drawbacks of this particular platform can feel discouraging. But knowing what they are can actually strengthen your brand’s approach to reputation management. When you understand the limitations of Glassdoor how to respond to negative reviews won’t be such a difficult question to answer. You’ll be better equipped to face those challenges head-on and in a way that puts a positive light on your company.

What Do Job Seekers Look For in Glassdoor Reviews?

If you’re wondering how to respond to Glassdoor reviews, your first step should involve gaining a clear understanding of what job seekers want to read.

It’s not enough to respond to potential criticism; you’ll also want to highlight the positives of your company that prospective employees care about. That’s a good strategy for when you receive positive feedback, as well!

But before we talk about your response to reviews, let’s go over the parts of initial employee reviews that job seekers want to see most often.

According to Glassdoor data, here are the highlights that show up frequently in reviews that candidates find to be useful in evaluating opportunities.

Remote Work Options

Even before the pandemic, job-seekers really liked the thought of flexible work arrangements. But now, remote work may be non-negotiable for many prospective employees. Glassdoor data suggests that 86% of employees would prefer to keep working from home on at least a part-time basis after offices reopen. Reviews that mention ongoing remote work can attract applicants, while reviews that allude to a full-time office work requirement could hurt your brand.

Employee Safety

Candidates want to work for companies that care about their well-being. Glassdoor reports that 70% of employees feel COVID-19 vaccinations should be required before returning to the office, and nearly the same percentage also say that employers should offer worker incentives to encourage vaccinations. Between March 2020 and February 2021, 58,000+ published Glassdoor reviews mentioned keywords related to COVID-19 and its vaccine – so the pandemic is clearly at the forefront of employees’ minds.

Glassdoor also found that anywhere from 38% to 79% of employees expect their companies to take steps related to provision of hand sanitizer, mask-wearing policies, properly spaced-out workstations, and employee temperature checks. Employers that fail to follow health guidelines will often be passed over for companies that are actively taking steps to keep their staff safe.

Diversity and Inclusion

Job seekers want to see themselves represented in your company. According to Glassdoor, 76% of current employees and job seekers say that having a diverse workforce is an important factor when evaluating job offers and employers. This is especially true for those within the Black, Hispanic, and LGBTQ+ communities.

Nearly 1 in 3 job seekers say they wouldn’t even apply for a job with a company that has a lack of diversity among its workforce. Moreover, 66% of employees and job seekers will trust a company’s workers regarding the real story of workforce diversity and inclusion over senior leaders, recruiters, or a company’s website.

Healthy Work-Life Balance

Are your claims of work-life balance actually backed up by the employee experience? Roughly 45% of employees say they now work more hours than they did prior to the pandemic, thanks to the blending of personal and professional life. Understandably, 41% of workers feel burned out, while 45% feel emotionally drained due to their work.

Glassdoor recently put together a list of the top companies and industries that prioritize work-life balance for employees. But even if your brand isn’t included, you’ll want to make sure that your policies regarding workload, paid time off, mental health services, and more truly prioritize the well-being of your employees. Your reviews will probably be a good gauge of how effective those policies are.

Employee Engagement

Employee satisfaction is one of the biggest indicators of a good employer on Glassdoor. Glassdoor claims that boosting employee satisfaction by one Glassdoor rating point increases the market value of a company by 7.9%! Of course, there are a lot of factors that go into employee satisfaction, including leadership, culture and values, career advancement opportunities, work-life balance, compensation, and more.

Different employees may feel motivated by different factors, but overall engagement and satisfaction can tell you a lot about whether you want to work with or for a company. If a worker actually likes their job, they feel valued, and they feel they’re receiving the guidance and support they need, they’re likely to stay a lot longer. Conversely, if you’re seeing a lot about high rates of turnover in a company’s reviews, you can probably assume that employee engagement is low.

Compensation and Advancement Opportunities

It shouldn’t take a genius to figure out that employers need to 1) pay a living wage and 2) provide opportunities for employees to advance their careers. If you fail to address either one of these issues, you’re bound to have a lot of turnover – plain and simple.

We’re starting to see the effects of the “Great Resignation” and many employers are currently in a hiring crunch, unable to find the candidates they need to fill open positions. At first glance, employers might be quick to blame the unemployed workforce, claiming that “no one wants to work anymore.” But we’d implore you to look closer.

If you’re getting a lot of reviews that mention low pay, a lack of paid time off or benefits, or no real opportunities for growth, you’re really not giving employees a reason to stay (or candidates a reason to apply). It’s rare to find workers in their 20s and 30s who are willing to stay with a single employer for more than a few years. The reason? Most feel they’ll have a greater chance of increasing their compensation if they jump ship.

On the flip side, Glassdoor reports that 84% of employees with high benefit satisfaction also report high levels of job satisfaction. Having health insurance, vacation time or PTO, and retirement planning options are the most important benefits to employees. And overall, 95% of employees say that compensation plays a key role in their job satisfaction – but only 65% of those surveyed could actually say they were happy with how much they were getting paid.

Job-seekers and potential clients will absolutely form negative opinions about your company if you aren’t paying your employees what they’re worth. You might be concerned with your bottom line, but Glassdoor users want you to be more concerned with how your people are being treated. By fixing those basic human issues, you can often fix the negative feedback patterns that pop up in your Glassdoor reviews.

Do Clients Care About Glassdoor Reviews?

Prospective employees will often research a possible employment opportunity on Glassdoor first to get a better sense of what it’s really like to work at a given company. But that’s not the only reason to use this site.

At Semify, we constantly hear from resellers who have looked us up on Glassdoor before partnering with us (or even before scheduling a call with us).

Google Business Profile and Facebook reviews from customers matter, of course. But they only tell part of the story. Since Glassdoor is specifically geared towards current and former employees, many clients will seek out these reviews to get a sense of what an organization is like behind the scenes.

Anyone can talk the talk. But if you don’t walk the walk, it’ll be reflected in your Glassdoor reviews.

Outsourcing your SEO and PPC fulfillment requires a substantial leap of faith. Our partners want to do their due diligence before they choose a white label agency – and that means they want to know the ins and outs of how we operate.

There’s arguably no better way to get the full picture of what it’s like to work at Semify (or at any business) than to take a peek at Glassdoor. And even if you’re not looking for a job, the information you find there can let you know a lot – like whether your values align or whether the partnership will be doomed from the start.

So do clients care about your Glassdoor reviews? It’s a safe bet. Even if you’ve never directly heard from a customer that they looked at your reviews on Glassdoor, the truth is that you have no idea how many leads you’ve lost out on because they didn’t like what they found.

Why Should You Know How to Respond to Glassdoor Reviews?

From all of this information, we can gather that job applicants, recruiters, and customers care about what your employees are saying about you. But does that mean you need to publicly respond?

In a word, yes.

The platform itself reports that 87% of Glassdoor users find the employer perspective to be useful when learning about jobs and companies. What’s more, almost two-thirds of Glassdoor users say their perception of a company improves after seeing an employer respond to a review. Even if the review is already positive, you can drive those points home by taking the time to reply to your feedback.

Consider, too, that 74% of Glassdoor users say they’re more likely to apply to a job if the employer actively manages its brand. Additionally, Glassdoor data shows that companies with poor reputations pay more to recruit new hires. Your company might also receive a lower approval rate for potential acquisitions if your company and CEO ratings on Glassdoor are lacking, which means you may have fewer opportunities for growth.

By responding to Glassdoor reviews and sharing updates on your culture, you can improve your reputation in massive ways.

If you regularly respond to your Glassdoor reviews, you’ll show that:

You care about your employees
You’re dedicated to improving company culture
You want to understand where things went wrong
You have a desire to be seen as an industry leader

Responding to customer reviews is crucial, and so is responding to reviews from your employees. But you need to know how to respond to Glassdoor reviews effectively before you dive in. And there’s no better way to learn than by example.

Glassdoor: How to Respond to Negative Reviews (and Positive Ones!) – With Real Examples

We’ve certainly received our fair share of negative feedback over the years. And we’ll freely admit that in many cases, it was totally warranted.

That’s actually the first step in knowing how to respond to Glassdoor reviews: Being humble enough to acknowledge your shortcomings. That doesn’t mean you should be self-deprecating, but readers will generally respond well to a company that can admit when they’re wrong.

Negative employee reviews are essentially unavoidable; not every employee will be a good fit, no matter how rigorous your hiring process. But you can’t fall into the trap of blaming employees for their poor experience with your company. Instead, you need to be accountable for your missteps and be proactive in managing your brand.

Responding to employee reviews will often involve many of the same steps you use when responding to customer reviews. You’ll want to use your active listening skills, respond promptly, keep the emotion out of it, thank the reviewer for their feedback, and share how you’re going to do better in the future.

It may surprise you that you’ll probably want to put even more thought and effort into responding to your employee reviews. Not only do you have an established relationship with the reviewer, but how you respond might hold more sway in terms of your company’s future.

A customer will often be happy to do business with you even with a couple of negative reviews. They understand that not every experience can be a great one – and they’ll be suspicious of a profile that has only 5-star reviews. But a potential hire or business partner might be scared off almost immediately if they see that employees are taking issue with how you run things. A few years ago, we had at least one prospective reseller decline to partner with us after looking at our Glassdoor reviews:

If you’ve built your business from the ground up, it’s hard to be objective about your brand. But if you want to improve, you’ve got to learn how to take criticism in stride. And when an employee takes you to task, you’ll want to respond in a way that protects your reputation.

While this feedback might feel more like an attack at first, it’s actually a priceless gift to your organization. Knowing how to respond to Glassdoor reviews will help you make necessary improvements, attract top talent, and avoid a PR nightmare.

Let’s take a closer look at how to leverage Glassdoor reviews to your advantage.

Ouch.

While this definitely wasn’t what we wanted to hear, it made us realize just how crucial this platform was to our success. Prior to this feedback, we hadn’t been paying close attention to our reviews on Glassdoor – and our internal structure was about to go through a big change.

We decided that our response to reviews needed to evolve, as well. With that in mind, we’re sharing some real-life examples of Semify’s Glassdoor reviews and how we responded to them.

Review #1: An Honest Take From a Long-Time Employee

Although we hope we’ve created a culture wherein our people feel psychologically safe enough to discuss with us what we can be doing better, current employees are more than welcome to anonymously leave a review on Glassdoor. These reviews have prompted a lot of important discussions and we’re grateful to receive feedback in any form.

In 2020, we received a review from an employee who had been with us for more than 5 years. While a lot has changed since this review was published, we think it represents a lot of growth.

The reviewer here didn’t go into a lot of extra detail, so the response is understandably a bit on the short side. There are a lot of pluses mentioned, and the minuses were fair to point out at the time. As a team, our goals have evolved since 2020. We’ve also done a lot of work to make workloads more manageable while striving for a high-performance culture.

One of the first things we do when responding to any review is to thank the individual for sharing their thoughts. We’re a learning organization at heart, which means that feedback truly is a gift. It’s how we grow together… which perfectly ties into our mission as a company.

We addressed the majority of the reviewer’s points while driving home our values. In this case, the employee isn’t citing a bad experience – and they were still with us after 5+ years! – so this kind of response feels appropriate for the situation.

TIP: Whether the reviewer is a current or former employee, it’s crucial that you not attempt to identify the person in your review. (Glassdoor even cautions employers to ensure anonymity in their responses.) You might be able to narrow it down if you know your people well enough, but the reviewer’s identity ultimately doesn’t matter. They should feel validated in their experience no matter what.

When you receive a Glassdoor review like this, you’ll typically want to thank the reviewer for their feedback, restate the positives, reaffirm your brand values, and give a sense of what improvements you could make in the future.

Review #2: An Opportunity to Evolve

We know that we aren’t always going to get it right. The key is to learn from our past mistakes and take actionable steps to improve.

One example of that can be seen in how our internal structure has shifted in recent years. Prior to our rebranding, we had a team of dedicated content writers who frequently felt like they were drowning in work. Due to the workload, they often felt isolated and unable to balance their goals with other cultural opportunities. This, combined with lower-than-average compensation, led to high rates of burnout and turnover. As a company, we felt stuck with this structure we had created – until we received important feedback from current and former employees that changes needed to be made.

At the same time, we were experimenting with what we now call the “Matrix” structure. This new way of working was more team-oriented, allowed for a greater variety of work, and gave employees a greater sense of ownership over their jobs.

Thanks to the feedback we received and the innovation led by our team members, we were able to find a better way forward. We now have a team of highly trained Digital Marketing Specialists (many of whom started out on our content team) who have real opportunities for growth within the organization. We’ve also created other positions that didn’t exist just a few short years ago in order to support our employees who want to build their careers at Semify.

Knowing this background can be helpful in understanding how to respond to Glassdoor reviews like the one below.

Although this review was published in 2021, we realized from the job title that this employee had left prior to this restructuring. They didn’t include a ton of information in their review, but we felt that the mentions of burnout and compensation warranted a lengthier explanation.

We’re sad that this employee wasn’t able to benefit from all of the changes we made after their departure. Admittedly, it took us far longer to address these concerns than we would have liked. However, their review provided an awesome opportunity for us to be clear about the steps we had taken to show future employees that we care, that we’re not afraid of change, and that we’re always striving to do better.

This exact scenario could play out for your business. As people leave for other opportunities, they may miss out on the work you’re doing to improve. Showing them the actions you’ve taken – without getting defensive! – can entice potential employees and demonstrate you’re committed to making things better.

Review #3: Culture Is a Real Stand-Out

In years past, our culture was lacking. We’re the first to admit it. That’s why we’ve worked so hard to make our culture what it is now. And while we know we can always improve, we’re thrilled to see that even new employees feel that Semify is a special place to work.

This reviewer hadn’t been part of the team for very long when they left us a review, but we feel this means we’re doing something right. Our hiring, onboarding, and training processes have improved a lot over the past few years, so it’s a relief to hear that our newest team members feel welcomed, supported, and empowered.

At the same time, we’ve always known that Semify isn’t going to be the right fit for everyone. We grew a lot in 2021, which meant there was often more than enough work to go around. And while our job positions have evolved quite a bit, we know that compensation is a top priority for today’s workforce – and that we need to find ways to stay competitive.

In our response here, we expanded on some positives mentioned by the reviewer, like our decision-making process. We also noted our promotion paths and raises as a way to answer the reviewer’s concerns about compensation. Although we could have done a bit more to address the fast pace of our work environment and how we’d like to increase pay even for entry-level positions, we highlighted our gratitude, appreciation, and overall ethos in our response.

When learning how to respond to Glassdoor reviews like this one, you’ll want to echo the reviewer’s positive points, expand on your values, and show the progress you’ve made as a company. Bonus points if you can show how passionate you are!

Review #4: A Tough Pill to Swallow

No job is ever going to be perfect and there will always be things we can improve on. But for the most part, we’re pretty lucky in that most of the employee reviews we receive on Glassdoor are positive.

We feel it’s important, though, to be transparent about where we’ve failed and how we’ll do better in the future. Even reviews that contain some harsh criticism tend to include some positives, but it can be tough to keep emotions at-bay when we’ve worked hard to make improvements. We know how important it is to be accountable and to recognize that we always have room to grow together.

TIP: When this review came in recently, several members of our management team met to discuss how we’d respond. This is a strong policy to have in place for reviews like this one, as it can keep you from getting defensive or having blind spots. See what the reviewer had to say and how we responded below.

Truthfully, this one stung. But rather than ignore it or strike back, we decided to take this opportunity to really lean into what Semify is all about.

In this scenario, we wanted to give a bit more background information. While it’s clear the reviewer had been a Digital Marketing Specialist with us during the pandemic, we weren’t sure whether the reviewer had been on the team when we made across-the-board changes to compensation.

We also felt it was appropriate to apologize for the reviewer’s experience and let them know we value negative feedback. Additionally, we feel that it’s sometimes fair to include what might have been left out of the initial review. This should never turn into a personal attack or an ego trip, but discussing the processes you have in place to remedy these situations can be helpful to other readers.

The truth is that we care deeply about our team – and it hurts to hear that we didn’t do a good job of showing it with this former employee. We always strive to do better. At the same time, there’s more than one side to this story. There may have been other factors at play that impacted this employee’s experience, but that doesn’t negate our responsibility to do better in the future.

This review may not have been what we love to read. However, it’s a good reminder that we can’t let the work we’ve done fall by the wayside. We have to keep going – and growing together.

At some point, your company might receive a review like this. You might have already gotten a few of them. It’s easy to feel discouraged, but remember: negative reviews are actually opportunities in disguise.

Whether or not the reviewer’s account aligns with your version of events is irrelevant. You’ll want to validate their feelings, apologize for your shortcomings, and cite improvements that you’ve already made to break this cycle in the future. Prospective hires will probably care more about how you respond to this type of review than the review itself.

Review #5: Ending on a High Note

Knowing how to respond to negative reviews on Glassdoor is a skill that can be honed over time. But these days, we receive a lot of positive feedback – and we know it’s important to respond to these reviews, as well.

Glassdoor readers might trust reviews from former employees over current employees, as they may not know what kind of office politics are coming into play. However, we value this kind of feedback because it provides us with an opportunity to improve our practices and benefit the reviewer.

When a former employee leaves a review, it’s typically too late to make any changes that would have made a difference in their personal experience. Of course, we can take steps to keep those scenarios from repeating themselves for others. But we’d ideally like to have the chance to address feedback before it reaches a critical point and results in turnover.

Interestingly, this reviewer feels that remote work is a major challenge (whereas the previous reviewer cited it as a plus). This difference in opinion is mirrored in our team as a whole; many are eager to return to the office once it’s safe, while others want to continue working remotely 100% of the time.

We wanted to highlight the decisions we’ve made as a team and demonstrate our commitment to radical autonomy and ensuring our employees have the ability to work in a way that best fits their needs. Since we know that remote work is in huge demand among job-seekers, addressing flexible work arrangements (or how you’ll specifically handle the need for a hybrid work environment) in your responses can go a long way.

We love hearing that this employee feels supported at Semify. It’s also reassuring to hear that our mantra of “growing together” really does resonate. To us, it isn’t just a catchy phrase; it’s a way of life. We did a lot of work during our rebranding phase and we feel it shows in our identity and our culture today.

With a short-and-sweet review like this, you’ll want to express gratitude, empathize with their struggles, and give a shout out to your team. If they mention remote work options, seize the opportunity to expound on what you offer. Give credit where credit is due and show how you’ll keep putting your people first. Your response can impact how long the reviewer sticks around!

Whether positive or negative, responding to reviews on Glassdoor requires patience, compassion, and humility. We hope that sharing how we’ve responded to rave reviews and valid criticisms will help guide you in your own responses.

Knowing How to Respond to Glassdoor Reviews is Only the Beginning

We’ve done a lot of work over the past few years to improve our business from the inside out. Not only does that mean we’ve improved our products, but we’ve also made our people a top priority.

During this process, we’ve also had to take a hard look at ourselves and where we were coming up short. In the past, we had high levels of turnover – and we know that a lot of that was attributed to low compensation, stressful workloads, and a lack of support. We’ve made a lot of mistakes with our business in the 14+ years we’ve been around.

So why are we sharing this?

It might seem weak to admit your shortcomings, but we’ve learned that doing so has made us a lot stronger. And one of the biggest factors in making these necessary changes was actually our employee feedback. Although some of what was said was difficult for us to hear, we knew how important it was to listen and to prevent these situations from happening in the future.

In 2019, we actually held a series of meetings to discuss some of our Glassdoor feedback with our employees. We actively wanted to make their experience better and we knew that empowering our people was one of the best ways to accomplish that. What came out of those meetings was incredibly valuable to our company. It prompted us to make huge changes to our internal structure, our compensation, our culture, and our entire direction as a business.

We’re still growing and learning from every single review. And while it starts with how you choose to respond to that public feedback, it can’t end there. Take that feedback to heart and use it to make meaningful changes within your organization. Your business will be all the better for it. We promise.

Semify Reviews GMB Word Cloud: Are Your Values Clear to Customers?

Mon, 19 Apr 2021 21:54:55 GMT

In the digital landscape, online reviews play a critical role in brand awareness and overall perception. Increasing and protecting your agency’s reputation on the web is essential to your long-term success. We even wrote a blog post about how to generate and manage your online reviews to help you reach your growth goals.

Online reviews can be a great way to increase traffic to your website and boost your company’s visibility. But they can also provide a wealth of valuable information. The feedback you receive — whether positive or negative — can help you to determine whether you’re striking a chord with customers or you’re missing the mark entirely.

At Semify, we pay close attention to every online review we receive and make sure to engage with the people who took the time to share their thoughts on what we do well (and how we can improve). If you want to grow your agency, you’ll want to keep a close eye on your reviews and assess how you can start using them to your advantage. Whether you determine you need to focus more on customer service or you discover that your prices aren’t competitive enough, it might all start with delving into your online reviews.

We recently decided to examine what our customers were saying in their Semify reviews on the Google My Business platform. From there, we created a word cloud that we think really sums up what our agency is all about. Let’s take a closer look at the process we used, why you might want to follow it yourself, and what you can glean from your online reviews.

What is a Word Cloud?

Word clouds are a relatively simple concept, but they’re often overlooked in favor of data-heavy charts. But it’s important to remember that word clouds capture data, too. Instead of using numbers, however, word clouds essentially use reported feelings or written experiences to create a visual representation of data.

Word clouds may look appealing, but they serve an even greater purpose. Word clouds “pull” text-based information into an aesthetically pleasing image that contains different sizes of words. While all of the pictured words are important, those big and bold phrases are among the most significant. The bigger a word is within the word cloud visual, the more frequently it appears in the data. This can provide you with critical feedback into how customers (or even employees) feel about something — whether it’s a new product or the overall manner in which you operate your business.

How and Why Should You Use Word Clouds For Growing Your Business?

Word clouds can be a fantastic way to visually display data you’ve gathered. In some situations, customer feedback might go in one ear and out the other. But by creating a word cloud of your feedback, you can really assess whether you’re on the road to success.

For one thing, word clouds can be utilized to determine where you’ve gone wrong. If you’re getting a lot of feedback from customers that doesn’t align with your business goals or your values, a word cloud can drive home those issues in a manner that isn’t so easy to explain away. While you can easily dismiss the importance of a single review every now and then, it’s harder to argue that point when you see a repetitive piece of data staring at you in the face. Word clouds derived from online reviews can help you “turn over rocks and look at the squiggly things,” to borrow a concept outlined in Good to Great. By confronting the brutal facts about your business, you can start to make the changes you need to improve the customer experience.

Creating a word cloud from online reviews can also provide you with more opportunities to connect directly with your customers. Whether or not you actually replied to those reviews in the past, you’ll have a chance to touch base with current and former clients about their feedback. If you can show that you’ve implemented necessary changes and are excited to share that with the people closest to your business, you can show how much you care about what they have to say. That, in turn, can go a long way in improving your brand perception and building customer trust or loyalty.

In many ways, word clouds can be a highly effective tool for business owners to address underlying issues. But in some cases, they might actually provide confirmation that you’re on the right path. In pulling data from your online reviews, word clouds can illustrate whether your customers are seeing your values in action. If the words you see in this visual representation largely align with the experience you’re trying to create for your customers, that feedback can let you know that you’re achieving your goals. Having this information at your fingertips can tell you that your corporate values are coming through loud and clear — and that they’re resonating with your customers. Ultimately, that means you’re doing business with the right people.

There are many different ways you can use word clouds in the pursuit of business growth. In addition to pulling data from your online reviews, you can create word clouds from employee or customer surveys, utilize popular web search or blog post data to develop a word cloud for SEO, or turn your brand identity and mission statement into a word cloud that can guide your team.

While word clouds aren’t ideal for more complex, number-driven data sets or for data with little context, they can be an impressively effective way to facilitate an emotional connection to your customers, your employees, and your overall business goals.

How Did We Create Our GMB Word Cloud?

The way in which we created our word cloud here was relatively simple. We first combed through 61 Semify reviews on the Google My Business platform for adjectives that customers used to describe our agency or their experience with us. We then plugged these adjectives into an Excel spreadsheet and organized them in alphabetical order. For phrases that contained two or three words, we used dashes in between.

Then, we put that data into a word cloud generator, which basically scans the text and develops a visual representation of the data for you. Depending on how frequently a word is repeated, the word will appear larger or smaller in the final product. Many word cloud generators will allow you to have control over how the graphic is displayed, with different layouts, color schemes, and font to choose from.

After our word cloud was created, we shared it with our team at our weekly Operational Excellence meeting so that we could reflect on what our customers are saying. Since one of our main objectives is to “get the customer in the room,” this was a great way to delve into their feedback and assess their overall experience with us.

Which Values Stand Out in Our Review Word Cloud?

In creating our word cloud through our GMB Semify reviews, we discovered that our brand personality is really coming through to our customers. The main takeaway was that the word cloud aligned very well with our values and our overall brand identity, as outlined below:

While there’s always more work to do here, it’s crucial to know that the things we care about are resonating with our customers and shaping their experience with us. In our analysis of Semify reviews, several words and phrases were repeated by different customers, including:

Professional
Helpful
Great Communication
Teamwork
Dedicated
Above and Beyond
Support
Prompt
Growth

These words, among many others that were included in GMB Semify reviews from our customers, are exactly the values we want to live by. Not only do we want to provide stellar results for our clients, but we want to build relationships with them and help them grow their businesses. We’re thrilled to know that our customers see and respond to what we’re all about — and we want all of our partners to feel the same way about their experience with us.

How Can You Generate Reviews That Highlight Your Business Values?

You might already have gotten some reviews for your business, especially if you’ve implemented some of the tips we shared on how to generate online reviews for your agency. But just because you’re getting some customer reviews doesn’t necessarily mean that this feedback will speak to your corporate values.

Some customers will care only about their results — and if your business personality aligns with that, maybe that’s to your benefit. But if you really want to facilitate meaningful solutions for (and create long-term partnerships with) your clients, it might be worth exploring something a bit deeper.

Establishing your brand values is a critical part of building your business. These values will guide and shape your organization; they should be at the heart of every decision you make and they tell you (and others) who you are. If you want to compete in a crowded marketplace, you’ll need to solidify your brand values and make them an enduring part of the conversation.

It’s clear to us that our customers who left reviews have a clear understanding of our brand, whether or not they consciously realize it. We’ve made a point to highlight our culture and our dedication to the growth of our partners while taking a hands-on approach to customer service. We aim to respond quickly to concerns and prioritize communication, both internally and externally. A professional-yet-approachable team, we want to be down-to-earth while delivering beyond expectations.

Ultimately, we believe that ensuring our values are ever-present in our customer interactions is key. Not only does this effectively communicate who we are, but it also helps us attract the kinds of clients we want to work with.

As Simon Sinek says in Start With Why, “The goal of business should not be to do business with anyone who simply wants what you have. It should be to focus on the people who believe what you believe… When we are selective about doing business only with those who believe in our WHY, trust emerges.”

Judging from the Semify reviews we analyzed via our Google My Business platform, it’s clear that we have a number of partners who believe in our values and our “why.” When you lead with those values and use them as your guide, you’re going to attract others who believe in them, too. That lays the foundation for reviews like these that really encapsulate the experience you provide and what makes you different from your competitors.

If these values resonate with you, let’s talk about how we can grow together . For more information on joining our white label SEO program , get in touch with our team today.

HubShout Announces Exciting New Rebranding as Semify

Fri, 17 Jul 2020 21:36:01 GMT

Rochester, NY – July 17, 2020 – HubShout, LLC, a Rochester-based SEO reseller and white-label service, announces its corporate name change to Semify, LLC, effective July 17, 2020. After over 12 years in business, the digital marketing agency has embraced a new identity to reflect its commitment to shared growth and collaboration.

Now rebranded as Semify, LLC, the company’s new logo and philosophy, “Growing Together,” reflects the company’s relationship-driven and authentic customer service.

“Our agency partners tell us every day that they need our help to achieve their dreams,” says Matt Beaulieu, the Vice President of Business Development. “Semify seeks to provide them with opportunities and resources they couldn’t create on their own. We want to give them the freedom to be more by shaping a better tomorrow hand-in-hand with each agency.”

Since 2008, HubShout has made a difference for hundreds of small businesses by increasing leads and sales with strong, sincere partnerships. Customers can expect an honest and fun experience with HubShout they can’t get with other digital marketing agencies. The agency genuinely cares about its customers and helping their businesses grow.

As Semify, the agency will continue to provide customers with that sincere, personal touch they have come to expect but with a defined emphasis on connectivity, opportunity, and shared knowledge. Semify aims to provide its clients with the freedom and support they need to do more, have more, and be more.

The White-Label Reseller Program

Semify was originally established as HubShout in 2008 by accomplished entrepreneurs Adam Stetzer, Ph.D., and Chad Hill with the mission to help growing businesses achieve their dreams. Five years later, that mission blossomed in the form of the agency’s white-label reseller program. The program, developed in 2013, gives marketing and web development firms the ability to provide all-in-one services for their customers without increasing overhead costs.

For many businesses struggling to compete against larger companies, the white-label reseller program changed the game. It takes time and money for a marketing firm to develop a successful SEO and PPC campaign for their customer’s unique needs. For smaller firms with fewer resources, it may take longer to deliver the results a customer is looking for. In that time, a firm may lose its customers to bigger companies who are capable of delivering the solutions they need more quickly.

Stetzer and Hill developed the white-label reseller program in an effort to give firms the ability to keep up with larger marketing companies. Under the white-label reseller program, a firm’s customers can see the solutions they need when they need them and firms can rest assured that they’ll retain their customers. With Semify, agencies can deliver quality results to their clients without breaking a sweat.

Since the program’s inception, Semify has taken on over 250 agencies. The reseller program has grown to include a local SEO reseller program and PPC reseller program, both of which are operated by an experienced team of analysts, developers, designers, marketing specialists, managers, and marketing writers.

Growing Culture, Growing Together

In 2018, Stetzer stepped up from the role of co-founder to CEO. The agency saw new heights in company culture, and the seed was planted to rebrand in an effort to reflect the company’s growing values and sense of purpose. HubShout’s prior mission statement no longer seems to fit the company’s why, but its what.

“The biggest reason cited in favor of changing [our company] name was that we no longer [felt] our company name matched our why,” says Stetzer. “As big followers of Simon Sinek, we think that everything we do and say needs to reinforce our why. We believe that this philosophy, in part, helped move our culture so significantly over the last year.”

The top priority of the agency has always been its company culture, which is just as collaborative and empowering as Semify’s relationships with its customers. For the last year, the company has hit a record-high score on its culture survey and the team is incredibly proud of this feat.

The company’s activities committee works hard to make sure that there are always activities and social events for employees to enjoy even while adhering to social distancing guidelines. From bowling to Netflix parties to video game nights online, the team makes sure that everyone feels connected and knows they belong even when they’re far apart.

In an effort to reflect that sense of community and collaboration, it’s only right to rebrand the business to reflect those growing ideals. While the company still believes in helping businesses achieve their dreams, Semify acknowledges that there’s more behind why we do what we do. The agency believes in not just helping businesses achieve their goals, but helping businesses enhance their goals for a stronger, more authentic connection.

The team is genuine and results-driven, and they’re willing to have difficult conversations with resellers to get their clients the results they want. In the agency’s multi-year push on customer service, Semify’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) is above 60 and the team is determined to reach “world-class” territory above 70. Company culture directly impacts a company’s ability to deliver great customer service, and it’s Semify’s honor to know that the team’s honesty and fun is reflected in the agency’s customer reports.

In 2020, Semify and its partners are positioned to thrive both in our results and our relationships. The agency’s dedication to new product development and ability to operate in a completely remote work environment gives Semify and its partners the ability to truly grow together during these uncertain times.

About Semify, LLC: Established in 2008, Semify, LLC (formerly known as HubShout, LLC) is a team of 30 enthusiastic and focused digital marketing professionals providing SEO and PPC services to hundreds of customers under its white-label reseller program. Semify’s digital marketing insights and cultural accomplishments have been featured in the Star Tribune, the Las Vegas Sun, the Rochester Business Journal, and other newspapers.

Contact us:

Office Hours: Monday – Friday 9:00 AM – 5:30 PM

Guest Post Services

Mon, 20 Jan 2020 20:00:28 GMT

Guest Post Services

As you probably know, there’s a lot that goes into search engine optimization. In order for your strategy to be successful, you’ll need to focus your efforts on both on-site and off-site optimization. Even if your website looks incredible and provides all the information web users need, you’ll be doing yourself a disservice if you aren’t making an effort to form relationships with other site owners and obtain reputable backlinks to your own.

The Best Guest Posting Service For Your Needs

That’s where our guest post services come in. Rather than trying to solicit guest post links on your own (to varying degrees of success), we can increase your web visibility via our guest post outreach service. Thanks to our innovative methods and established partnerships with high-level publishers, we’re able to create and post outstanding SEO guest posts for our clients that highlight their expertise and provide the caliber of backlinks Google likes to see.

What Is Guest Posting?

Before really delving into our guest post services and how they can help your organization grow, it might be helpful to know: what is guest posting, anyway?

The name almost says it all: a guest post is a blog post written by someone other than the main author of a website but that is published on that author’s site. In this scenario, someone agrees to publish a post from another contributor onto their own website. To get that person to agree to publish the post, the information needs to be relevant to the site’s audience and provide valuable information.

The guest blog post also needs to contain a link back to the contributor’s website, as this can help readers find the author and drive traffic to the site. Even more importantly, that link shows Google that the site on which the post is published feels that the contributor (and their website) is reputable and worthy of recognition. Obtaining a backlink like this from a website that’s already seen as authoritative can help to boost your own site’s ranking. By passing on its “link juice” to you, the site publishing your guest post is basically showing Google that it supports your business.

The Benefits of SEO Guest Posts

Search engine optimization involves countless techniques and trends. While there should be certain mainstays found in virtually any strategy, the results will be stronger if the methods are diversified. Working with a firm that offers a guest post outreach service should be just one part of executing an SEO strategy — but it’s certainly an important one.

There are several compelling reasons to explore guest blog posting services. One such reason is the ability to establish yourself as a leader within your industry. While you can accomplish this to a certain extent on your own website by publishing relevant information for readers, you can reach a wider audience if you branch out beyond your own online hub.

Guest post services can provide your business or your clients with the opportunity to be seen as credible and knowledgeable. By contributing a well-written, entertaining, and accurate piece of content to a well-regarded website, you’ll show readers that you’re an authority. At a time when brand loyalty is hard to come by, being able to illustrate exactly why you’re the best in your business is key. This is an excellent way to increase brand recognition and overall reputation.

Guest blog posting services can also aid you in increasing your referral traffic. While not every visitor who navigates your site will end up being a viable lead, the link from your guest post will provide a consistent source of site traffic for your site. Unlike paid search ads, guest posts are permanent fixtures — meaning that your site traffic will increase over time and can reap the benefits for years to come. According to Ahrefs, the average guest article receives 50 site visits, while about 15% of guest posts receive more than 100 visits to the business’s website as a result of those backlinks.

And speaking of backlinks, the best guest posting service can provide you with ways to obtain some great ones. Since Google’s algorithms do take site backlinks into account when tabulating search rankings, it’s important to increase the number of links pointing to your site while ensuring those referring websites are considered to be credible. An agency providing guest post services can strengthen your backlink profile, improve your domain authority, and subsequently help to boost your site ranking. Although these calculations are complex and SEO is certainly not an exact science, guest posts can allow you to build up higher quality backlinks on other sites in an effort to make a difference in how your site is regarded by Google.

Keep in mind, of course, that guest posting — like many other facets of an excellent SEO strategy — provides excellent ROI and long-term gains. When you work with a guest blog writing service that focuses on developing truly outstanding content and obtaining excellent backlinks, you’ll be alleviating risks and investing in your company’s ongoing success. In lieu of directly paying for links (which is a practice that’s frowned upon by Google) or devoting large portions of your marketing budget to paid search campaigns, you can get more for your money and see improved results when you implement strategies like guest posting.

Why Do You Need Guest Blogging Services?

You may know the general advantages that guest posts can provide. But some business owners are tempted to go the DIY route in order to save money or to maintain control. In the majority of cases, this isn’t recommended. You’ll likely end up wasting time, experiencing frustration, and seeing very little payoff. Guest blogging services (also known as guest post services) make it far easier for you to generate incredible content and to find respected site owners in need of that content.

Instead of having to devote your own resources to these time-consuming tasks, you can entrust a guest posting agency to zero in on worthy publishers and establish mutually beneficial relationships with them. Moreover, a professional guest blog writing service will craft a wholly unique and high-quality post that will offer an immense amount of value to readers.

This isn’t about buying links or publishing spammy content on websites that no one ever sees. Our guest post links are obtained through white hat SEO methods. That means that the content we create is developed and read by real people — and is published on authentic, independently owned, and highly ranked websites.

In other words, you’ll be making a wise investment in your SEO strategy. It’s still true that content is king, but remember: if you want to rule all, you need to concentrate on quality. Website owners want to know that they’ll be getting an asset for their readers — and, of course, you’ll want a post that reflects favorably on your business and a link that offers real value. A guest posting agency with a team devoted to every step of the process can help to diversify your backlink profile, improve your rankings, and amp up your visibility online.

White Label Guest Posts

As a reseller, you’re responsible for communicating all things SEO to your clients and for making smart, strategic decisions for their success. We’re in pursuit of the same goals. We want to help growing businesses — like yours and like the ones your clients run — achieve their dreams. Our white label guest posts can play an important role in achieving those dreams.

When you sign up for our SEO guest posting service, you’ll obtain the content and backlinks your clients want — all within a wholesale model that allows you to streamline your business and never sacrifice on end results. We’ll provide you with all of the information you need and do all the work for you, enabling you to discuss reseller guest posts with your clients with ease and show them how these efforts are impacting their traffic, rankings, and more. Reseller guest posts can help you to impress your clients and establish a great working relationship with our core team. That’s a win for everyone involved.

Guest Post Services For Your Business

If you’re serious about improving your digital marketing efforts, you can’t afford to overlook the importance of guest blogs. Although they’ve been around for quite some time, that doesn’t mean that SEO guest posting services are antiquated. We know what works and know how to create the kind of content search engines like to see.

Small business owners, in particular, can benefit from guest blogs. Being able to increase web traffic, brand presence, and overall authority with a single piece of well-placed content is nothing short of a digital marvel. If you aren’t currently exploring guest post services for your website or for your clients’ SEO strategies, you’re undoubtedly missing out on major growth.

In addition, investing in this growth doesn’t take a lot of effort on your part. Provide our team with just a bit of essential information, and we’ll take care of the rest. We’ll conduct extensive research, outreach to a huge network of highly regarded websites, and develop a one-of-a-kind piece of content that will speak volumes to your target audience. Of course, we’ll include a link back to your site or to your client’s site (that’s the whole point!) to make sure web visitors can easily navigate there to learn more.

Is It Time to Consider Guest Blogging Services?

Guest posts can serve as a powerful way to share your brand’s voice and even improve your site’s rankings. But it’s often a task that business owners will put off. If you’re redesigning your website or recently launched your company, guest blogging might seem like a waste of time. After all, what’s the use of directing traffic to a website that’s thin on content or that’s totally outdated?

While those are valid points, it’s important to remember that guest post services can assist you with more than just increased website traffic. Certainly, you’ll want your website to look its best and function in a way that users expect. It might not be the right time to consider guest blogging if your website needs a massive overhaul or you’re just starting out.

However, you shouldn’t discount guest blogging simply because your web presence isn’t where you want it to be. In fact, guest blog links can help with that!

Sure, there are other SEO and paid search methods that can make your brand more visible online. But Pay-Per-Click ads have a defined life expectancy — and some SEO techniques can take a while to show results (though they are still very much worth doing). By adding guest blogging to your digital marketing arsenal, you’ll have one more way to build your backlink profile and signal to Google that your website is worthy.

If you’ve already devoted a considerable amount of time to your search engine optimization, it’s understandable why you wouldn’t be eager to add another piece to the puzzle. But when you opt for guest post services offered by an experienced agency, it’ll be that much easier to put everything together and discover the solution.

When you’ve been struggling to deliver results to your clients or you’ve hit a plateau in your SEO strategy, it may be time to explore some different tactics. An agency that provides guest post services can reinvigorate your marketing campaign and offer creative ways to reach target audiences.

While SEO can be complicated, it doesn’t have to be torturous. Instead of hitting your head against the wall and sticking with techniques that simply aren’t working, you can diversify your strategy and take the pressure off with help from a guest posting agency.

Ready to take your SEO strategy to the next level? Our guest post services offer the high-quality content readers expect to see and the high-quality backlinks businesses need to grow. White hat SEO techniques, white label services for resellers, and unique guest posts that benefit all parties: that’s what we’re about. No short-cuts necessary; just incredible content and valuable backlinks, all provided by us.

All About Domain Rating: Your Questions Answered

Thu, 31 Oct 2019 19:55:18 GMT

If you run a business or are responsible for executing a digital marketing strategy for a given website, you’ll need to keep a close eye on how a domain is perceived — both by the general public and by Google through its search rankings. This can be a lot more challenging than you’d think, considering how many factors may come into play. Everything from overall user experience to optimized content can impact how a website is recognized and rewarded.

But human visitors and Google bots aren’t the only entities out there that determine the value of your website. There are also some reputable third-party tools that are able to analyze a large amount of data with the aim of providing you (or others) with information about your site.

Ahrefs’ Domain Rating (or DR) does just that. This valuable metric can provide further insight into both your site and your digital marketing strategy. But what exactly is domain rating and how is it calculated? And furthermore, why does it matter? We’ll be answering all of those burning questions in our post.

What Is Domain Rating?

First, let’s talk about what Domain Rating (DR) is. It’s a metric determined by a third-party source, Ahrefs, that reveals the strength — in both quality and size — of a website’s backlink profile. The DR strength is measured on a logarithmic scale from one to 100, with 100 being the strongest domain rating available. “Logarithmic” means that the gap between higher DR numbers is actually larger than the gap between lower DR numbers, making it more difficult to increase your domain rating when it’s higher.

Essentially, a website’s DR is just one number that can be used to determine how “valuable” a website is or how well a digital marketing strategy is working. If you’re trying to obtain relevant backlinks to improve your own DR, having accurate information pertaining to other sites’ DRs will allow you to make better choices when executing a marketing strategy. After all, you won’t want to waste time trying to obtain backlinks from a website with an unimpressive DR or multiple links from a website with a mediocre DR, as this won’t help your own site to improve. You can also keep an eye on how your site’s DR moves over time to assess whether your strategy is being executed properly or whether you may need to pivot in order to see the results you’re after.

How Is Domain Rating Calculated?

You’ve probably heard that Google’s bots crawl websites to find out certain information that can influence ranking. Ahrefs’ DR calculations also involve web crawling in order to find out information pertaining to referring domains (e.g., websites that are linking to your own).

In simple terms, Ahrefs determines a website’s domain rating by examining how many unique domains have sent at least one do-follow link to a given website, as well as the DR values and links sent out by each of those referring domains. After that, Ahrefs will conduct some further calculations and do some coding to come up with what are called raw DR scores, which are then put onto that aforementioned scale to come up with the final domain rating.

Ahrefs takes into consideration the fact that domains with higher DRs transfer more “link juice”– meaning that when these authoritative websites link to another website, these endorsements carry more weight than links from websites with weaker backlink profiles. The source (linking) domain will also “split” its rating equally among the domains to which it links; in other words, a website with a lower DR that links to only a few sites will actually have more influence over those sites’ DRs than a higher DR site that links to thousands of other websites.

Basically, this means that having more than one link from a given website to your own won’t help your DR, nor will a website that links to yours via a no-follow link. If a domain links to millions of other websites, that domain will transfer less “link juice” (e.g., the link won’t mean quite as much) to one of those websites. But if a given website receives more backlinks and their own DR improves, that improved DR will have a positive effect on the DR of other websites to which it has linked, assuming they’ve used do-follow links.

Keep in mind that a website’s DR can actually drop without losing backlinks. If other sites obtain a lot of high-quality backlinks, your site may be pushed down the scale as a result. Moreover, Ahrefs made some pretty major changes to how DR calculations are made last year, meaning that some sites saw huge drops in their domain ratings without any adjustments being made to their websites or their backlink profiles. According to Ahrefs, the sites that experienced these drops weren’t deserving of the higher DRs they once had; the new formula now used for DR calculations is more accurate.

Why Does Domain Rating Matter?

It’s important to note that Google does not take a website’s DR into account when determining its search ranking. In official statements, Google has maintained that the company doesn’t even have anything similar to a website authority score, so there’s no evidence to show that this kind of calculation will have an impact on where a website ranks in a Google search. Even Ahrefs doesn’t believe that the authority of a website doesn’t act as an isolated ranking factor. Further, Ahrefs has conducted experiments which have shown that a site’s URL rankings (which basically measure the DR of individual web pages, rather than entire websites) align more clearly with Google rankings than the DR of a whole website does.

That doesn’t mean that a site’s DR is useless, however. If your site has a high DR, it can actually allow you to improve your rankings in Google. A site with high-quality backlinks can take advantage of its own “link juice” through internal linking. By pointing links at its own pages, a website can retain its link juice without diminishing its DR — and since this can also help with SEO, it’s entirely possible that your DR can end up improving your search ranking in Google.

Nothing is guaranteed, of course, and there are hundreds of other factors that will determine where your site ranks in search. Knowing more about another website’s DR can also allow you to execute a better link building strategy, which can help you build connections and potentially improve your search ranking in other ways. It’s merely one piece of the puzzle — but it’s one you shouldn’t overlook.

Which Tools Are Used to Determine Domain Rating?

Although there are a number of third-party tools you can use to determine the authority of a website, there are a couple that are used more than others. For example, Moz developed a Domain Authority tool, which works a bit differently from Ahrefs’ Domain Rating. While Moz claims that its DA will “predict how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs),” it does likely use more data than backlinks to determine its final score. But like the Ahrefs DR calculation, Moz’s system also works on a 100-point logarithmic scale.

According to experts, Ahrefs performs a more comprehensive website crawl than other third-party services use. In addition, Ahrefs doesn’t claim to “predict” how well a site will perform in a Google search; instead, their tool reveals how popular a website is and how valuable the backlinks a site obtains really are. In that sense, Ahrefs is more transparent about its process than other options. That said, some people will refer to both DR and DA to gain as much information as possible — though this can be confusing in some situations.

Ultimately, we use Ahrefs to determine the Domain Rating of websites in order to gain a comprehensive overview of client websites, referring domains, and competitor sites. We feel Ahrefs provides more detail while letting those results speak for themselves, rather than speculating about how a site’s search rankings might be impacted. And while the DR of a website certainly isn’t the only factor we take into consideration when developing a digital marketing strategy, it’s definitely one we don’t ignore. By using this top-rated tool, we’re able to gain more insight into the health of a campaign and the value of a given website, which allows us to customize plans that lead to noticeable results.

Have more questions about Domain Rating or how this information is used to help businesses grow? Leave your comments below!

How to Increase Customer Satisfaction Survey Scores

Sat, 13 Oct 2018 20:57:30 GMT

Want to learn how to increase customer satisfaction survey scores? There’s no great mystery here. Just hard work.

We’ll show you exactly how we accomplished this…

…And we can do it in 2,000 words.

In September 2017, Semify introduced a Net Promoter Score survey.

The initial scores were… not ideal.

For a company that prides itself on customer service, these scores were BAD.

In that first month, our NPS score came in at a dismal 10 out of 100.

That was a tough truth to face, but it motivated us.

These scores forced us to find the weak spots in our customer service. They required us to listen – really listen – to our customers. They pushed us to innovate based on that feedback. And after implementing some new customer service strategies, we saw our NPS scores rise to “world-class” levels.

In October 2018, our NPS score reached 81 – an agency record. For the last four out of five months in 2021, we exceeded the 70-score mark, indicating our world-class customer service and our commitment to grow together are here to stay.

In this post, we’ll show you exactly how to increase customer satisfaction survey scores. Using the customer service strategies outlined here, Semify moved its NPS scores from “mediocre” to “world-class.” We truly believe any company can see the same results.

4 Simple Steps You Will Learn

Measure Customer Satisfaction Consistently
Use NPS Surveys Correctly
Focus on Company Culture
Create An Action Plan For Responding To Bad Survey Scores

Case Studies in this Article

How to Increase Customer Satisfaction Survey Scores

Before you try anything new, you have to measure customer satisfaction consistently.

When you receive a bad survey score, your account managers should call that customer for feedback the very same day.

Train your employees to practice active listening during these feedback sessions. We’re huge fans of Julian Treasure’s work , which can help your team learn how to “RASA.”

Once you’ve documented the feedback from your customer, ask a simple question: “How can we get a better score on the next survey?”

To increase your customer satisfaction survey scores, you can also follow our proven formula, outlined below:

1. Measure Consistently

How do you measure customer satisfaction?

You want your customers to be happy.

Because, unless you own an airline, it’s hard to stay in business without happy customers.

But do you know exactly how happy your customers really are?

To translate this feeling into measurable numbers, most successful companies utilize customer satisfaction surveys.

Your company might even measure customer satisfaction in several different areas.

Here at Semify, we measure customer satisfaction with our software, our onsite content, and our customer experience as a whole.

Here’s HubSpot’s definition of Customer Satisfaction :

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is a metric used to quantify the degree to which a customer is happy with a product, service, or experience. This metric is usually calculated by deploying a customer satisfaction survey that asks on a five or seven-point scale how a customer feels about a support interaction, purchase, or overall customer experience, with answers between “highly unsatisfied” and “highly satisfied” to choose from.

HubSpot research shows that growing businesses are more likely to prioritize their customer satisfaction scores than organizations that have stagnant or decreasing revenue.

Additionally, happy customers can become your organization’s best salespeople; the same research shows that 77% of people have shared positive customer experiences in the past year.

While the traditional customer satisfaction survey has its uses, more companies are adopting the Net Promoter Score as a tool to measure CSAT.

2. Use NPS Correctly

What is a Net Promoter Score (NPS)?

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) and its metrics are a proven tool for measuring customer loyalty.

It’s a nationally recognized survey. NPS helps organizations gauge how loyal their customers are by sending out short, two-minute surveys.

Forget the long, convoluted surveys of the past. Your Net Promoter Score can be based on a single question:

“On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend [insert your organization’s name] to your friends, family, or business associates?”

Customers who give your company a score of 9 or 10 are considered your “Promoters.”

Those who give you a 7 or 8 are known as “Passives,” while those who give you a 6 or below are called “Detractors.”

To calculate your Net Promoter Score, detract the percentages of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters.

For example, if 60% of your respondents were Promoters and 10% were Detractors, then your NPS score is 50.

So why is that important to you?

Your NPS will give you insight into your customer’s loyalty spectrum.
You’ll be able to see how retention improves as your move up the scale.
Happier customers also end up spending more and spread positive word of mouth for your business.

Once you start measuring your NPS, you can find out which of your customers are Promoters, Passives, and Detractors.

This is vital information for your organization. You would be wise to get feedback from all of your customers based on their survey scores.

You should:

Ask your Promoters why they’re giving you such high scores.

AND

Ask your Passives what you can do better.

But the feedback from your Detractors is especially critical.

They’ll tell you why they would not recommend you to their friends, family, or business associates. Pay special attention to their feedback so you can start to make changes to your products and services.

These changes can turn Detractors into Passives, and then Passives into Promoters.

Remember, happy customers become your best salespeople.

3. Focus on Culture

To learn how to increase customer satisfaction survey scores, you’ll want to focus on your company’s culture.

If you want your customers to be happy, then you need your team members to be happy, too.

You might be thinking, “How can making my employees happy help with my customer satisfaction scores?”

Well, when your employees are happy, they’ll provide better service to your customers.

Study after study has proven that employees perform better when they feel appreciated. If your employees can take pride in their work, then their engagement with customers will improve dramatically.

How did Semify increase its customer satisfaction surveys?

Most business owners understand the importance of customer satisfaction in a general sense.

But how often do these business owners talk about their CSAT or NPS metrics with their employees?

If you want to learn how to increase customer satisfaction survey scores, then the first step is to talk about these results with your team.

In fact, you want to over-communicate this information.

When we decided that improving customer satisfaction would be a top priority in 2018, we made sure to talk about that goal. We talked about it a lot.

In one-on-ones, team meetings, coffee breaks, and quick standups, we talked about our NPS scores.

Next, we made sure we were really listening to our customers.

We made and consistently follow a playbook for responding to customer satisfaction surveys.

Back in 2018, an upset customer called Semify a “dumpster fire.”

Amanda, the account manager for this reseller, along with the president of the company, immediately got on the phone to hear his concerns.
After the specific incident was resolved, the leadership team held weekly calls with this reseller to hear their complaints.
Semify worked intensely on our relationship. We created solid agendas for the meetings and practiced active listening during the calls.
In June 2018, this reseller gave us a 5 on the NPS survey. In August 2018, this reseller gave us a 10. Now, they’re expanding their SEO services with Semify.
Additionally, they’ve asked for consulting on a growth strategy for their agency.

Turning a Passive Into a Promoter

This reseller gave us an NPS score of 8, stating that they wanted more proactive suggestions from Semify.

The account manager, Andrew, identified potential projects that this reseller could pitch to their clients.
We held regular conference calls with this reseller as they pitched these ideas and brought feedback to us from their clients.
Based on the feedback from this reseller’s clients, we helped them massage the proposals until some of their deals closed.
Several months later, this reseller gave us a 9 on their NPS survey, switching from a Passive to a Promoter.

The Tracking Nightmare

We built this customer a landing page but left out an important form tracking element, which resulted in lost leads. This reseller demanded a $2,000 refund and gave Semify a 3 on the NPS survey.

During the initial incident, Semify PPC analysts showed intense urgency in responding to our mistake. We used our core value of accountability to own this mistake without making excuses.
Semify negotiated a refund with this reseller that was based on accountability and integrity.
The account manager actively listened to the complaints from this reseller in order to make positive changes. Our company president got on the phone repeatedly with the reseller to hear his concerns first-hand.
On the last NPS survey this reseller took, they gave us a score of 10.

 All companies make mistakes. What matters is how you respond to those mistakes.

4. Create an Action Plan

When Semify decided we wanted to learn how to increase customer satisfaction survey scores, we went looking for resources. Along the way, we’ve found some fantastic resources for further reading.

How To Increase Customer Satisfaction Survey Scores: Further Reading

One of the most essential tools we use to deal with customer issues is the “Autopsy Without Blame.” These meetings come from a book that Semify holds near and dear, Good to Great by Jim Collins. We order pizza, invite the whole company to the meeting, and talk through these mistakes without placing blame on anyone. At that point, we can all learn from the mistake and move forward, working hard to correct the mistake and grow from the experience.

Semify also relies on Listen Up or Lose Out, an incredible book written by Robert Bolton and Dorothy Grover Bolton. Thanks to this inspiring piece of literature, the team has learned the invaluable skills of active listening, reflections, and asking productive questions. Without these skills, Semify would not be able to build the relationships we have with our customers today.

Ultimately, without the proper tools to increase your customer satisfaction scores, sending out all the NPS surveys in the world won’t do you much. That being said, they are a great place to start.

White Label PPC Case Study

Mon, 30 Jan 2017 22:53:30 GMT

Pay-per-click advertisements play a crucial role in digital marketing for virtually any industry. While white label SEO addresses long-term growth, PPC can fulfill more immediate needs for lead generation and conversions. Together, these two components can strengthen client success.

But if your client is accustomed to more traditional print ads or you haven’t really delved into the world of PPC yourself, this method can seem intimidating. Certainly, PPC campaigns are more complex than your average newspaper or magazine ad — and that’s really to your advantage.

PPC ads can be finely tuned to reach your target audience and learn more about their online behavior. You can’t gain that kind of insight with traditional forms of advertising, which means you’ll be swapping out a leap of faith with an informed choice when you opt for PPC. You’ll also be able to tailor your PPC campaigns to fit your client’s budget — freedom that doesn’t really exist when you’re restricted by the ad prices of a given outlet. Moreover, it’s a cost-effective maneuver that can be scaled or paused as needed over time.

Of course, when you choose to work with a partner who can offer white label PPC management, you won’t even have to work out the nitty gritty details for yourself. You can trust your provider to conduct thorough market research, bid on the best keywords, set up the right kinds of ads, and monitor these campaigns for maximum return. In addition, they’ll be able to provide you with reporting tools that will allow you to improve client relationships and grow your business in the process.

Every PPC campaign is different, of course, which is why you need an experienced and highly adaptable source for white label PPC management services. We understand that making the right outsourcing decision isn’t easy — and that our resellers deserve to feel confident in their choice before their clients ever spend a dime.

That’s why we put together this PPC case study. We’ll reveal some insights from a variety of pay-per-click campaigns and explain what steps our team took to ensure these clients achieved their goals. We’ll also include some snapshots of previous campaigns to illustrate our PPC management capabilities and how these businesses have grown as a result of our efforts. We believe that by growing together, we create the freedom to be more. There’s no better way to show exactly what we mean than by providing living proof of our campaign success stories.

Orlando Car Dealership

This PPC campaign for an Orlando area car dealership has been running only a short while, but the results are undoubtedly impressive. In this case, the reseller wanted to keep the cost per action under $150 ($130 was the goal). Our PPC analyst used their expertise to determine the best keyword bids — and a combination of core and branded campaign ads — to yield high conversions and low costs. In fact, the current cost per action for this campaign is $19.24. That translates to a major return on investment while minimizing initial spend. There’s still room to grow this early in the campaign and our analyst expects to continue this positive trajectory.

Seattle Luxury Apartment Building

Although this campaign doesn’t look like it’s been as successful at first glance, context matters. This client owns a brand new luxury apartment building in the Seattle area. The client’s main goal? To eliminate unit vacancies. Our analyst carefully selected and monitored this campaign’s PPC ads over the past year — and their efforts paid off. Now that every apartment has been rented, the client has decreased their ad spending. As a result, their ad clicks have slowed. But that’s exactly what should happen as part of this strategy. And while the cost per action goal was around $13.50, our actual cost per action ended up being only $1.78. In the end, that’s a substantial number of impressions for the investment.

Apartment Rental Campaign

Here’s another apartment rental PPC campaign managed by our team. In this case, we measured phone calls and contact form fills to provide conversion reporting. As you can see, leads increased from just 23 in July 2019 to 56 leads in October. This campaign also experienced a 55% decrease in cost per lead (CPA). Lowering the cost of each lead is accomplished through diligent work on our side to improve the quality score of the campaign. In just three months, this campaign saw a tremendous amount of growth and was able to achieve its advertising goals.

Englewood Urgent Care Center

Switching gears, let’s take a quick glimpse into a PPC campaign we ran for an urgent care clinic in Englewood. The urgent care industry is becoming more crowded by the day, which means that PPC analysts need to bid carefully, monitor their campaigns closely, and make small adjustments as needed. In this case, we also had a conversion goal, which means we measured phone calls and website forms. Over the span of a year, leads increased from 46 per month to 124 per month — representing a 169% increase. During that same period, the client’s budget increased by only $20. Notably, the cost per lead dropped from $99 per lead to $37 per lead (a 62% decrease). In other words, that minimal increase in investment translated to major savings and significant lead generation. This perfectly illustrates the cost-effectiveness of PPC and how vital a role it can play in your marketing strategy.

Eyelash Sculpting Salon

The beauty and personal care industry is booming, which means that the market is highly saturated. When you own a brick-and-mortar business in this sector, it makes sense to advertise with PPC in order to appear more prominently in local search results. In this case, a salon that offered eyelash extensions and other related services decided to venture into PPC ads in order to increase their conversion goal. From phone call and website form tracking, we know that the salon was receiving only two leads per month in January 2019. But by March 2019, the client generated 17 leads (a 750% increase!). Although the budget did increase 99.8% during the three-month period, their cost per lead actually dropped from $159.66 to $37.53, representing a 76.49% decrease in cost per lead. Clearly, this can be a viable solution for small, independently owned businesses that need to see immediate results.

Although PPC is just one component of digital marketing, it’s one that many of your clients should be careful not to overlook. When you partner with a PPC provider who can deftly handle all of the setup and management, you’ll be able to share the stellar results with your clients while you focus on other integral aspects of your business. In short, we’ll be able to grow together so we can be more, do more, and have more.

Ready to take the next step? To learn more about our white label PPC management services , contact our team today.

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Dentist SEO Case Study

Mon, 30 Jan 2017 19:45:33 GMT

Most of us know that it’s not enough to have an attractive, functional website. If no one can find a business online, that business will likely have trouble staying afloat. And when a competitor is getting a large share of the web traffic, something needs to change in order for a client to rise to the top.

You’ve probably already know that “something” involves SEO. Search engine optimization is a pivotal part of any digital marketing strategy. Although you might already realize you need an SEO provider for your clients (or for your own business), it’s not always easy to know which vendor to choose.

Understandably, you’ll want to feel confident that your choice of digital marketing firm will be able to deliver the results your clients want to see. That’s especially a concern for businesses operating in highly competitive industries. The dental field, for example, is an extremely saturated one. In fact, the American Dental Association estimates that there were almost 200,000 dentists working in the industry in 2018, representing 61.0 dentists per 100,000 U.S. population. The ADA also predicts these numbers will continue to increase through 2035.

While this means you might have a number of clients in this market (which is good news for your growing business!), it also means you’ll need to work with a partner to devise a strategy for success. Improving your dental client’s search rankings and web traffic isn’t impossible — not by a long shot. But you do need to have strong data to inform your marketing decisions.

That’s why we’ve put together this SEO case study involving one of our recent success stories. You’ll find out how we helped to achieve outstanding results for a dental practice in a competitive area — in only a short time — with our SEO Soar plan.

Client Background

We work with resellers of various sizes; some have only a couple of main clients, while others bring on hundreds of accounts. In this case, a reseller with roughly 10 to 15 campaigns wanted to focus on one particular campaign: a dentist in Orlando, Florida.

The reseller indicated that this specific client is a leader in their industry within the Orlando area. Competitors often look to this client to see what’s next on the horizon. But despite their market influence, the client was struggling to rank on certain keywords. And while they were seen as an authority within their industry, their website wasn’t being viewed the same way by Google.

The reseller here had worked with another SEO provider in the past. The keywords they had targeted for this campaign at that time simply weren’t moving in the right direction. They also had a number of missing keywords (meaning that their site didn’t show up for those terms within the first 11 pages of SERPs). What’s more, the client’s backlink profile was relatively limited. As a result, the client’s domain rating was 0.3 upon starting their campaign with us in August of 2019.

Dentists, orthodontists, and other dental industry campaigns are relatively commonplace in our line of work. The real challenge here is that Orlando happens to be a highly competitive market for this client vertical. Still, we were confident that we could facilitate website improvements, target the right keywords, and improve the site’s domain authority with our strategy.

Our Approach

Any SEO case study example needs to provide data related to specific deliverables. For this campaign, the client opted for our SEO Soar and Local Listings offerings. Our SEO Soar SEO Plan is ideal for local businesses in large cities like Orlando.

The SEO Soar plan includes the following start up onsite optimization activities.

An in-depth onsite report that makes page level metadata recommendations that align with our keyword research for up to 20 pages. The onsite report involves a detailed audit of the client site, as well as specific recommendations made by our web analysts to improve ranking and conversion
We conduct a 23 item site audit that checks for things like 404 errors, duplicate content, site speed, page indexing, robots, and a Canonicalization check.
Phone and contact form tracking scripts so we can track every call and lead form fill that resulted from our SEO efforts

Highlights of our SEO Soar monthly SEO activities

5 Backlinks per Month
Two featured news backlinks from independently owned websites that have an average domain rating of 41 and have unique readerships. These publishers are vetted for quality.
Three Article backlinks: Article backlinks are industry relevant, in this case those links are dental, related. Our article backlinks are over 2,000 words long and we place your clients on sites that carry similar keyword rankings. Includes anchor text specific to the client’s targeted keyword list.
3 Blog Posts per Month
Our team created 3 blog posts that contain research, include important keywords and are enjoyable to read. We follow industry best practices when posting blogs including inking to the appropriate service/product page on the client’s website.
Visual Assets
We create engaging infographics to pair up with the blogs we create. Our visual assets make your clients blogs more shareable and help pull readers into the post.

To see exactly how we achieved these fantastic SEO results for our agency partner’s dental client, we provided the full list of deliverables below.

Keyword research was an essential ingredient to our SEO success

Although we gladly conduct keyword research for our clients, the reseller in this particular case provided us with a specific list of keywords they wanted to target. Using that list, we developed a detailed plan based on the client’s budget. We make sure to target keywords that are appropriate for the industry and budget; we don’t want our clients aren’t wasting money on keywords that are simply too competitive to produce realistic results or that don’t receive enough search volume to make a substantial difference in leads and conversions.

Selecting the optimal keywords represents just one piece of the puzzle. Within the SEO Soar plan are a number of key content deliverables. Among these deliverables are monthly on-site blogs and customized images, on-site web copy, off-site articles, and off-site featured news stories. In this case, Pay-Per-Click advertising was being handled in-house by our client, which means we could solely focus on building organic traffic.

The Results

Although SEO is meant to be a long-term solution and isn’t intended to provide immediate results, our local SEO case study reveals that this campaign still experienced an impressive amount of growth in a short time. Organic website visits increased from 593 in August (the campaign’s first full month with us) to 896 in January. Many of the client’s keywords showed massive improvements, as well. The search term “affordable braces orlando fl” has jumped from the ninth spot on the second page of SERPs to the second spot on page one. In addition, two of the campaign’s “missing” keywords saw major movement. All told, five of the client’s nine target keywords can now be found in positions on the first page of search results.

The end client’s domain rating and backlink profile saw massive gains, as well. In less than six months, our team was able to obtain almost 60 links for this client and increased their referring domains to 66. The client’s domain rating also moved from a 0.3 to a 2. While that might not sound like much, it’s a major improvement within a short period. (Have questions about domain rating ? Check out our post explaining how DRs are calculated!)

Overall, the first six months of this particular dental campaign show a lot of promise. It’s still in the early stages, but it’s clear that the campaign is finally experiencing the momentum the client wants to see and that our strategy will only help them to grow. In the coming months, we’ll continue to create fresh content, seek out more opportunities for backlinking, and make adjustments to target keywords to ensure long-term success.

Of course, this particular client isn’t the only one operating in the dental vertical that has shown immense growth. Our SEO case study also includes a couple of other examples of campaigns in this industry that have been set up for ongoing gains.

Our Approach

Highlights of our SEO Grow monthly SEO activities

An in-depth onsite report that makes page level metadata recommendations that align with our keyword research for up to 20 pages. The onsite report involves a detailed audit of the client site, as well as specific recommendations made by our web analysts to improve ranking and conversion.
We conduct a 23 item site audit that checks for things like 404 errors, duplicate content, site speed, page indexing, robots, and a Canonicalization check.
Phone and contact form tracking scripts so we can track every call and lead form fill that resulted from our SEO efforts.
2 Backlinks Per Month
one featured news backlink from independently owned websites that have an average domain rating of 41 and have unique readerships. These publishers are vetted for quality.
One Article backlink: Article links are industry relevant, in this case those links are dental, related. Our article backlinks are over 2,000 words long and we place your clients on sites that carry similar keyword rankings.
1 Blog Post Per Month
Our team created 3 blog posts that contain research, include important keywords and are enjoyable to read. We follow industry best practices when posting blogs including inking to the appropriate service/product page on the client’s website.
Includes anchor text specific to the client’s targeted keyword list.

To see exactly how we achieved these fantastic SEO results for our agency partner’s dental client, we provided the full list of deliverables below.

As you can see from the charts included in this dental SEO case study, we’ve seen major movement for several clients operating in this industry. Each client has come in with their own set of goals and challenges, but it’s clear that investing in a long-term strategy has paid off.

Case Study 3

Our Approach

Our agency partner needed to get the most for their money because their dental client had a very limited SEO budget despite the fact that they were located in the extremely competitive city of Las Vegas. Our SEO Grow package is extremely cost efficient and addresses major ranking factors such as link building, content marketing, and onsite SEO, and local SEO all for the low price of $294 per month.

Highlights of our SEO Grow monthly SEO activities

An in-depth onsite report that makes page level metadata recommendations that align with our keyword research for up to 20 pages. The onsite report involves a detailed audit of the client site, as well as specific recommendations made by our web analysts to improve ranking and conversion.
We conduct a 23 item site audit that checks for things like 404 errors, duplicate content, site speed, page indexing, robots, and a Canonicalization check.
Phone and contact form tracking scripts so we can track every call and lead form fill that resulted from our SEO efforts.
2 Backlinks Per Month
One featured news backlink from independently owned websites that have an average domain rating of 41 and have unique readerships. These publishers are vetted for quality.
One Article backlink: Article links are industry relevant, in this case those links are dental, related. Our article backlinks are over 2,000 words long and we place your clients on sites that carry similar keyword rankings.
1 Blog Post Per Month
Our team created 1 blog post that contains research, includes important keywords and are enjoyable to read. We follow industry best practices when posting blogs including inking to the appropriate service/product page on the client’s website
Includes anchor text specific to the client’s targeted keyword list

The screenshot below provides you with a detailed list of all monthly deliverables your SEO clients will receive each month.

UPDATED 12/16/21

Taking a Diverse Approach to Dental Marketing

Since we first published this case study, we’ve worked with other resellers who have clients in the dental industry. And while the pandemic has changed a lot about how businesses market themselves, one thing hasn’t changed:

It’s always best to diversify.

With both stock market investments and marketing your business, you don’t want all your eggs in one basket.

There’s a lot we can’t control about consumer trends and the internet at-large. Google often updates its ranking algorithm with no warning, while even small changes on your site can throw your SEO efforts for a loop.

That’s why we always recommend that you take a more holistic approach to your digital marketing. As your white label SEO fulfillment partner, we believe in the power of search engine optimization. We also offer white label PPC services, link-building opportunities, and website audits to ensure your strategy is as strong as it can possibly be.

With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at three additional dental clients that have grown with our help – and how we’ve provided the support to make that happen.

Content is King For VA Dentist

You’ve probably heard the expression “content is king.” We truly believe that our content quality sets us (and our customers) apart.

Many of our resellers agree. When strategizing with one of our partners, whose client operates a pediatric dental practice with multiple locations throughout Virginia, we really focused on content creation.

This client hoped to increase traffic to their site and get more appointments booked. Over time, this reseller and their client decided to increase their investment in content marketing with us. They decided to upgrade their plan to include long-form content, which we know provides more value to visitors and keeps them on a page for a longer period of time.

During a 21-month period, this client improved their online presence and reputation tremendously. In fact, they increased their organic web traffic by a staggering 83.72% within that time frame.

While there are certainly other important factors to consider when developing a marketing strategy, we’ll always recommend content marketing. Publishing relevant, useful content on a regular basis helps Google view your site as an authority – and that’s key if you want to improve your rankings.

For AZ Dentist, PPC Plays an Important Role

We work with a number of resellers who come to us when they want to supplement their in-house efforts. While we’re known to excel in SEO, our pay-per-click marketing services can make a huge difference for many clients.

One of our partners relies on us to provide white label PPC services for the majority of their clients. The reseller handles other strategic aspects themselves (like SEO and phone tracking), but they depend on us to manage their campaigns in Google Ads.

We made recommendations for new landing pages on the client’s website to better align with their ads. This is essential for improving or maintaining your Google Ads quality score. In addition, clicks and conversions are dependent on relevance, so this recommendation likely saved the client both time and money.

PPC can be a great way to drive traffic to a site within a shorter period. Unlike SEO, PPC starts working almost immediately. However, you need an experienced PPC analyst to set up, monitor, and adjust campaigns as needed.

When you join our white label PPC program, you’ll gain access to the transparency and hands-on account management your clients need to grow.

Link Outreach Boosts Chicago Dental Practice Results

Another service we offer is link outreach. Backlink building can improve a website’s authority, which will typically have a positive impact on its Google ranking. By acquiring backlinks from reputable and relevant websites, you can supplement your other marketing efforts and ensure your clients’ sites are seen in a positive light.

In many cases, resellers will include link outreach as part of the white label services they receive from us. But in others, link outreach may be an appropriate measure to take on its own.

Instead of focusing directly on keyword rankings or paid traffic, one of our resellers chose to focus solely on link outreach for a Chicago cosmetic and orthodontic dentist.

With over 1,000 backlinks to this website, our strategy is to build the most relevant and authoritative links to create a diverse backlink profile with a higher number of referring domains.

As you can see from the chart above, this client has also experienced gains in organic web traffic – a positive side effect of link-building. When a site is perceived as more valuable by Google, it’ll be more likely to show up in search results. Subsequently, it’ll benefit from a larger traffic share.

Not every dental practice marketing strategy will look the same. By working with a white label marketing company, you’ll have the chance to develop a personalized campaign that addresses your clients’ goals and budgets more effectively.

Although we typically recommend a multi-pronged approach to marketing, that doesn’t mean you have to rely on our team for everything. We’re happy to lend our expertise in any way that helps you grow your business and helps your clients see results.

How We Can Help SEO Resellers

Many SEO strategies utilize similar tactics, but that doesn’t mean you can approach every client campaign the same way. Our search engine optimization case study proves that you need an intimate understanding of the client’s industry and their location, reliable tools for keyword research and budgeting, a variety of high-quality deliverables, and the ability to customize a strategy to fit a client’s needs. What works for dental clients won’t necessarily translate to clients from other industries — or even other clients within the same industry! — without adjustment. You may already know your client’s goals and the unique challenges they face, but we have the experience, the tools, and the team to execute and monitor the strategy. Our hands-on approach and learning mindset means that we’re not only invested in the success of your clients — but we’re invested in the success of your business, too. If the data outlined in this SEO case study resonated with you — or you’re eager to gain insight into your clients operating in similar industries — it might be time to consider a white label SEO agency. Ready to learn more about our SEO Soar plan and the other services we offer? Book a welcome call with us today to get to know our team. Other related keywords: dentist seo case study, dentist seo services, dentist seo, dentist seo keywords, dental seo companies, dental seo tips, general dentist seo, dental seo company, marketing for dentist, marketing for dentist seo

Text Link Ads

Tue, 28 Jan 2014 22:09:11 GMT

Text Link Ads: A text link ad is text on a website or blog that contains a hyperlink to a specific page on a different website. The individual who runs the blog or website, who is referred to as the publisher, is paid by an advertiser who’s using their site to drive traffic to the page in the link.

The pay publishers receive from this advertising technique consists of either a flat fee or pay-per-click, which generates revenue for the site for every time the link is clicked.

Text link ads have caused controversy in recent years because sites that feature them (and sites that pay for them) often see a drop in Google search rankings, or are eliminated from Google search results altogether.

Some publishers have tried to use HTML No-Follow tags in text link ads to disguise them from Google search spiders, but many advertisers don’t approve this practice. Major link seller Text Link Ads took a major hit from Google’s attempts to curb spam linking in 2013.

Examples of popular text link advertising program’s include Kontera and Google’s own AdSense, which both offer contextual text link advertising. This means that rather than targeting random words, linked ads will only appear in relevant content.

Reverse Index

Mon, 27 Jan 2014 21:45:09 GMT

Reverse Index: a reverse index is an index of keywords which stores records of documents that contain the keywords in the list. Database management systems provide a number of types of indexes to complete a wide variety of tasks, including bitmaps, r-trees, and b-trees. A reverse index is a version of a b-tree index, and is particularly useful when it comes to indexing sequence numbers and high volume processing systems.

Unlike other b-tree structures, reverse indexes process key values before inserting them into the index. By reversing these steps, the index spreads new values across the entire system instead of concentrating them in a set order. This means the index can operate without slowing down when multiple users attempt to insert values at the same time, as it doesn’t have to classify the new information according to a set order. This is a common problem in other indexes, particularly clustered databases, which requires the system to copy the current database from another computer’s memory before allowing a new user to enter values. However, reverse indexes are primarily used for finding specific values, and are therefore less helpful for range queries. This typically is not an issue, as sequence numbers and other values are unlikely to subjected to such a search.

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