We’ve compiled a list of 50 of the best SEO blogs, courses, videos, podcasts, conferences and tools to get you started.

50 FREE Ways to Learn SEO (Updated for 2023)

1. The Best SEO Guides and News Sites
2. The Best SEO Blogs
3. The Best Free Tools for Learning SEO
4. The Best Videos for Learning about SEO
5. The Best Places To Learn SEO in Person
6. Social Media Accounts to Follow to Learn About SEO
7. Free SEO Courses with Certification

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The Best SEO Guides and News Sites

1. Google’s SEO Starter Guide

What better place to start than Google’s very own starter guide to SEO? While search engines and SEOs tend to have different goals in mind, there’s no doubt that it’s worth listening to what Google has to say about making websites rank.

2. Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO

Moz creates useful tools for both web marketers and SEOs. Its Beginner’s Guide to SEO is one of the most authoritative pieces of content on the subject and a must-read for newbies.

3. Google (Search)

New resources are being created all the time and the best way to find them is via a search engine like Google. SEOs tend to focus almost exclusively on Google as the market leader, but don’t forget about Bing and other competitors.

4. Search Engine Land’s SEO Guide

Designed as a companion piece to the periodic table of search factors, Search Engine Land’s SEO Guide is a nine-step tutorial.

5. SERPStat’s SEO Guide

This SEO guide explains how you can use the SERPStat tool to improve your website’s SEO.

6. WordStream’s SEO Guide

Had enough SEO guides? WordStream brings something slightly different to the table by approaching SEO from a PPC (Pay Per Click) perspective.

7. Search Engine Roundtable

At Search Engine Roundtable, some of the biggest names in SEO report on the latest updates and trends in the world of search.

8. Search Engine Journal

Search Engine Journal is a community-based alternative to Search Engine Roundtable, with comprehensive reports on the latest Google updates and marketing trends.

9. Search Engine Land

Search Engine Land is one final SEO news site to add to your bookmarks. It’s worth reading all three and sticking with your personal favourite!

The 10 Very Best SEO Blogs

10. Backlinko (Brian Dean)

Described (by his friends) as “a unicorn among a sea of donkeys”, Brian Dean is a superstar in the SEO world. Anyone wanting to learn more about SEO should read his blog on the Skyscraper technique — a method of building backlinks — at an absolute minimum. While you’re on Backlinko, check out its SEO Guide. This guide has two distinguishing features:

• It’s super up-to-date with best practices from 2023
• It’s focused on helping you learn as quickly as possible

11. Watch Alexis Sander’s Class: “Developing Search Strategies”

This class, which is hosted on Skillshare, teaches students how to create and implement organic search strategies. You can get this class for free by signing up for a month’s free trial with Skillshare

12. Quick Sprout (Neil Patel)

Another famous figure from the world of search, Neil Patel is someone you can’t go far in SEO without hearing of. His freemium keyword research tool, Ubersuggest, is a good, quick alternative to some of the more complex (and paid) tools out there.

13. Neil Patel and Sujan Patel’s Advanced SEO Guide

This advanced guide SEO touches on some points not included in other guides, such as search verticals.

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14. Yoast SEO Blog

This blog is brought to you by Yoast, the people behind the ubiquitous SEO plugin for WordPress sites. To this day, I recommend that new SEOs read the Yoast blogs on page titles and meta descriptions — which are key to ranking successfully on Google and securing organic traffic.

15. Copyblogger

Among other innovations, Copyblogger founder Brian Clark coined the term “cornerstone content” in blogging and search marketing. This is the first resource on the list to consider SEO from a copywriting point of view and the site includes some excellent introductions to copywriting.

16. ProBlogger

ProBlogger includes tips and tricks for blogging. There’s a good chance that the majority of your SEO campaigns will involve a blog or two at some stage, so there’s no excuse for neglecting this fundamental aspect of the craft.

17. The Thinkplus Digital Marketing Blog

We finally get to the good stuff! Thinkplus’s very own blog is where you’ll find gems like this very list! We also have plenty of insights into how big businesses became successful through digital marketing, how to increase traffic to your website, how to get started with Google Analytics 4… the list goes on.

18. Thinkplus Podcast

Thinkplus’s founder Tim Cameron-Kitchen dives deep into marketing strategies, industry trends, and top tips for getting the most from your digital marketing.

19. Thinkplus Knowledge Base

What’s the difference between a knowledge base and a blog? That’s the kind of question you wouldn’t have to ask if you’d already read our knowledge base, which is a veritable treasure trove of SEO riches.

20. SEO Blog by Ahrefs

It’s absolutely my favourite non-Thinkplus blog of the moment, with the blogging team at Ahrefs bringing A-grade content to life in this beautiful blog.

The Best Free Tools for Learning SEO

21. WordPress

There’s no substitute for getting out there and trying to do some SEO for yourself, and you can’t really do SEO without your own website. WordPress allows you to quickly build your own website and start messing around with some of the techniques you’ve learned so far. Many of our best Ninjas were hired on the strength of their WordPress websites, so don’t be afraid to dive in.

22. Google Analytics

Once you’ve got yourself a website, it’s time to dive into the data using Google Analytics. Google Analytics is arguably the best tool web marketers have for measuring the success of their campaigns. Use Google Analytics to review your traffic sources, dive into your user demographic information and more. You can then use this valuable data to improve your website’s performance.

23. Google Search Console

As per the Google site, “Google Search Console helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results.” Everybody who wants to learn SEO should take a look at a Google Search Console account and understand how to submit pages to Google and review any warnings at a minimum.

24. Google Skillshop

Feeling intimidated by Google Analytics? You’d have to be superhuman not be! But fear not — Google Skillshop provides an extensive online course that explains how you can make the best use of this powerful tool. You’ll even earn a qualification once you complete all the modules!

25. Google’s Online Marketing Challenge

Do you ever wish you could get access to a real-life marketing campaign and budget just to see how you would do? Well actually, you can! Google’s Online Marketing Challenge pairs students of online marketing with charities in need of online marketing help. The idea is that the students get a chance to learn their trade, while the charities benefit from some marketing. Even better, Google will gift you $10,000 in ad spend to get the campaign rolling.

26. Majestic

Majestic is a powerful backlink profiler that gives free users a limited number of tries per day. At Thinkplus, our SEOs use Majestic on a daily basis to research our competitors’ backlink profiles and build our own outreach plans.

27. Yoast SEO

Yoast is a WordPress plugin designed to make SEO easy for WordPress websites. While dedicated SEO students will quickly outgrow Yoast’s recommendations, the tool does help people start to think about SEO.

The Best Videos for Learning about SEO

28. Google Search Central on YouTube

It surprises me that more people don’t rave about the Google Search Central YouTube channel. These completely free videos, which include some of the most technical SEO videos I’ve ever seen, are recorded by Google’s very own webmaster team.

29. The Thinkplus YouTube Channel

We’ve added ourselves here for good reason. Six of our ten most popular videos are about SEO. We share at least one new video a week about all things marketing and, more often than not, our videos always include an SEO element. We upload every Monday. Don’t forget to subscribe and turn on notifications so you don’t miss a video.

30. Ranking Academy on YouTube

Run by Luc Durand, Ranking Academy shares weekly videos on all things SEO, with a focus on small businesses.

31. Crawling Mondays on YouTube

This new video series from technical SEO mastermind Aleyda Solis is well worth checking out! Aleyda’s channel combines instructional deep dives into technical SEO with interviews with SEO professionals.

32. Income School on YouTube

Income School is a YouTube channel run by Ricky Kesler and his team. Their goal is to teach SEO, along with internet marketing, blogging and Youtube. Many of Income School’s top videos focus on SEO, with some videos lasting up to an hour.

33. Moz’s Whiteboard Fridays

Whiteboard Friday is the 800-pound gorilla of SEO videos. While founder Rand Fishkin has since moved onto pastures new, the Moz team still creates or sources a fifteen-minute video every week. The videos range from beginner-friendly to deceptively advanced.

Get to the top of Google

Learn how to get your website to the very top of Google (and turn that traffic into revenue).

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The Best Places To Learn SEO in Person

34. BrightonSEO (FREE tickets!)

“Free” and “conference” don’t normally go together, but BrightonSEO dishes out thousands of free tickets via ballot every six months. The conference, which is held twice a year in Brighton (England), is quite possibly one of the world’s largest SEO conferences, boasting 4,000+ attendees and some of the industry’s most innovative speakers.

35. MeetUp

There are 100s of groups dedicated to SEO on MeetUp, a social networking platform designed to facilitate face-to-face meetings. If you live in a major city, there’s a reasonable chance there’s already one near you. And if not? Why not be the person to start one in your local area?

Social Media Accounts to Follow to Learn About SEO

36. Quora SEO

Over 94,000 SEO questions have been submitted to Quora — that’s a mind-janglingly large data dump. If you add the related topics, including SEO Tools, Search Engines and Web Marketing, then chances are that any SEO question you have has probably already been asked somewhere on this enormous forum.

37. Reddit SEO

With 90,000 subscribers, the SEO community on Reddit actively discusses all things search, from algorithm updates to the fine line between white and black-hat practices.

38. John Mueller on Twitter

John Mueller is Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst and a key spokesperson for Google on SEO matters. He’s worth following on Twitter and via Google Webmaster Hangouts.

39. Follow Rand Fishkin on Twitter

Rand may no longer work for Moz, but his insightful analysis of SEO trends is still worth paying attention to as part of a tightly curated SEO and social media marketing feed.

40. Brian Dean’s YouTube Channel

Brian Dean doesn’t upload to YouTube as often as he used to, but on his channel are a huge amount of informative videos about SEO. If you enjoyed the Backlinko blog, you’ll love these videos.

41. Follow Buzzsumo on Twitter

Buzzsumo is a piece of software that analyses content performance, especially across social media. Their Twitter shares insights into every aspect of marketing.

42. Follow Screaming Frog on Twitter

Screaming Frog enables you to see key SEO stats for each page on your website. They keep their Twitter updated with SEO news and updates to their software.

43. Thinkplus FREE Marketing Review

Thinkplus’s free marketing reviews help website owners understand any underlying issues with their website. Each website review is unique and created by a living, breathing marketing professional, which is probably why we’re averaging five stars on Facebook reviews for this service!

44. Slideshare

Got your eyes on a big SEO conference but can’t convince your boss to buy you a ticket? Many SEO speakers upload their slides to Slideshare after a speaking event, making it yet another key resource for learning about SEO.

45. See what’s trending on SparkToro

SparkToro crawls the major social media platforms so that you don’t have to. For the hottest news, head straight to its trending page, which curates the top search marketing stories from across the web into one easy feed.

Free SEO Courses with Certification

46. Semrush Academy

Semrush Academy is one of the best courses available. One course we love is the SEO Fundamentals course with Greg Gifford. Create a free Semrush account to get started.

47. HubSpot Academy

HubSpot Academy contains a more content-oriented set of courses, including videos on inbound marketing, email marketing and even Instagram marketing. While I love and appreciate the content that the HubSpot team has put together, I do recommend you watch this content at 1.5x speed — you’ll see what I mean after your first module!

48. Udemy SEO

One of the kings of online courses, Udemy has a substantial library of free SEO courses. To find them, head on over to the Udemy site and filter by price (selecting free)!

49. Codecademy

Codecademy isn’t necessarily an SEO-focused website, but there’s not a week that goes by where I don’t use some (extremely basic) HTML or CSS that I picked up from one of its free courses. Highly recommended.

50. Coursera SEO

Amazingly, Coursera still offers courses from top universities for free, including “Introduction to Search Engine Optimization” from the University of California, Davis.

In Summary

There are so many great places where you can learn how to do SEO for yourself, including many which didn’t make this list.

Start teaching yourself SEO today and you too will know how to increase organic traffic for your website or online business.

What to Read Next

Check out our guide on how to learn digital marketing skills

This article was originally published by Luke Nicholson. It was updated in 2022 by Jess Percival, and in 2023 by Luke Nicholson.

The post How to Learn SEO Completely Free (Including Step-by-Step Guides) appeared first on Thinkplus.

Generally, if something costs more money than it brings in, then it should be either tweaked or dropped. And yet, many businesses don’t know whether their marketing activity is bringing them ROI or not.

Why? They just aren’t tracking the figures.

In this blog:

• What does digital PR success look like? Reviewing the metrics of success
• Setting SMARTer goals
• Example digital PR goal #1: direct sales
• Example digital PR goal #2: become an authority figure in your field
• Example digital PR goal #3: gain influence on social media
• Example digital PR goal #4: gain blog readers and influence them
• Example digital PR goal #5: create an awesome email database

Now admittedly some activities are easier to track than others. If you spend $500 promoting a product and you make a profit of $1,000 as a result, that’s simple. But calculating the value that a social media campaign or a digital PR campaign adds to your business can be trickier.

Still, too many business people throw their hands up at the first hurdle and say: “Well it looks kind of tricky so I won’t even try.” This is an attitude that is unacceptable in every other area of running a business, so don’t allow it here.

To this end, we’re going to use this blog to talk about:

• Measuring the current success of your business objectives
• Identifying clear and achievable goals for your digital PR campaign
• Measuring the success of your digital PR campaign, and making adjustments accordingly

As with a traditional PR campaign, your digital PR goals will be based on the need of your business. Different businesses should have different objectives. Every business aims to make money, but the best route to this goal will depend on the state that they are in.

One company might make the most money by expanding its existing product or service into a new market, but another might do better by expanding its range of products or services.

An effective digital PR strategy is only possible if your objectives are clearly outlined and measurable.

A plan such as “be the best accountancy firm in my city” gets points for ambition but falls flat because best is something that can be defined in multiple ways. Are we talking about being the firm that makes the most money, is best known, or delivers the best service here? The three aren’t mutually exclusive but each requires a very different plan to achieve them.

A clear objective makes it much easier to assess your performance and make changes as you go along.

Very few people get any online marketing activity perfectly right on the first attempt, but so long as you are measuring your targets you can see how or why you’ve drifted off course. Doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t is an admirable marketing strategy, but to be effective you need to have “working” and “not working” clearly defined for your business.

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Reviewing the Metrics of Digital PR Success

Sales. Web traffic. Keyword rankings. Backlinks. Domain authority. Klout.

So let’s look at various ways of measuring the success of your business’s digital PR strategy. Whilst a traditional PR campaign might be judged on the number of mentions you earn in print publications, a digital PR campaign will be firmly related to the success of your business’s website or social media channels. If you haven’t already done so, now would be a good time to get a free website review.

1. Increasing Sales

Tracking sales is mandatory. Sales are the oxygen that keeps any business alive and is a perfectly good metric for tracking your digital PR success. Sales results are also numbers that are fairly hard to argue with or misinterpret. However, it’s important to identify which of your sales are the most profitable.

Remember that tracking sales, or any other metric, isn’t simply a case of comparing your January numbers to your February numbers and attributing any increase (or lack thereof) to the digital PR campaign that started on February 1st.

We’re big fans of conversion tracking using analytics software such as Google Analytics. By seeing how many of your customers came through PR links (referral traffic) and increased organic search traffic, you can far more accurately assign sales to your digital PR activity.

Does your business take sales calls by phone? As well as having your sales team ask leads where they discovered you, consider using call tracking software to generate trackable numbers which give accurate data down to the outcome of the call.

If you’ve got a niche e-commerce property and your goal is more sales, for example, a blogger outreach program that has high authority niche bloggers reviewing and running contests giving away your products can drive a lot of highly qualified and convertible traffic to your site.

2. Generating Website Traffic

If your PR work isn’t focused on driving sales of a particular product or service, but rather on raising awareness of your business as a whole, then website traffic can be a good measure of performance.

A certain percentage of the visitors to your site will convert to customers (your website’s conversion rate) and a certain percentage of visitors will click off of your website without taking any meaningful action (your website’s bounce rate).

Getting a lot of traffic is important, but it won’t mean anything for your business if you have a low conversion rate or a high bounce rate, because these generally mean that either your website isn’t up to scratch or the traffic you are generating isn’t qualified.

(Quick caveat, a high bounce rate can be okay in some cases, depending on the page’s purpose!)

As mentioned above, Google Analytics provides interesting data that you can use to measure progress.

Many clients who come to our digital PR agency complaining of a traffic problem (“not enough people are visiting my website”) are suffering from an even worse conversion problem (of the visitors that arrive, too few are sufficiently motivated to enquire or buy).

Ranking for a target keyword might help you reach your organic traffic goals. If you rank highly in Google for a keyword like “buy phone online” then you could be just one or two moves away from an early retirement on a beautiful Mediterranean island.

Studies show that ranking in the top ‘organic’ (free) position will get you over 30% of the clicks from that search results page, so it’s no surprise that ranking well for appropriate target keywords is top of many marketers’ priority lists.

A strong digital marketing campaign is one of the most effective ways we’ve found to improve the ranking of any website because it’s a good way to attract quality links.

A bunch of backlinks from relevant websites is one of Google’s three main ranking factors. This is because the internet is a lot like a popularity contest — and a backlink is just like being talked about. If you are being talked about (shown by how many links you are earning), then you must be popular. And if you’re being mentioned online by a credible source, then Google will think you must be one of the cool kids too!

It’s worth mentioning press releases here too. Done correctly, online press releases may be a good source of relevant links for your website. However, there are also some spammy online press release services that should be avoided.

For more advice on improving your website’s ranking, check out the book How To Get To The Top Of Google.

Perhaps more important than the amount of traffic you receive is the type of traffic you receive. As alluded to before, you are rewarded when visitors have meaningful engagements with your website and you get penalised when people bounce off it. This means that you really should be identifying what your target audience actually looks like, taking time to understand its pain points, and tailoring your online marketing efforts accordingly.

Are your biggest customers 18 to 28-year-old Asian men that went to university, have no children, and have an income of $120k+? Then you should be advertising in (or at least emulating) The Economist, a website that is most often read by people of the above description. One tool for target audience analysis of this kind is quantcast.com.

While a good digital PR campaign will increase your website’s traffic, a Ninja digital PR campaign will emphasise driving the right kind of traffic.

As an example, creating high-quality infographics that get shared in the right places can be an extremely effective way to increase traffic as people share and repost them, funnelling more traffic to your site each time.

3. Building Authority

So far we have been thinking in terms of easily quantifiable stuff such as sales, traffic and ranking, but what about those concepts that are fluffier but no doubt business-defining, such as influence, trustworthiness and authority?

These concepts have always existed in business. For as long as there have been traders, there have been traders that people trust and traders that are known to cheat. Traders that are known to have the best goods and traders that are known to have the worst goods stand out from the crowd. Until the digital age, this kind of knowledge was difficult to measure.

But now that everyone is online and our conversations, emails, and interactions are stored in Google’s archives and the NSA’s databases, it is becoming possible to quantify previously intangible concepts such as authority.

One of the most useful tools for measuring a website’s authority is domain authority, which was popularised by Moz. Domain authority, known as DA, looks at a website’s popularity, age, and size and gives you a number between one and a hundred. The most authoritative websites are scored highly, while less trustworthy sites get a lower score.

The venerable BBC website has a DA of 100, whereas a brand new site might have a score of 10 or lower.

A website’s DA is not yet a measure that typical customers use knowingly, but users are more likely to buy from a high DA website as this score reflects website ranking on search engines as well as website quality and user-friendliness. A site with a high DA might also have many authoritative links.

A higher authority website is likely to be one of the first, good looking websites someone lands on when searching on Google. You can add a toolbar to your browser that lets you see a website’s DA at a glance over at moz.com/products/pro/seo-toolbar.

We’ll look at how to get your business covered in the media in a later blog of this series on Digital PR and you’ll learn how it’s possible to get your business featured in many of the highest authority sites online, piggybacking their authority in the process.

4. Exerting Influence

Influence is a key concept in public relations.

The idea is simple: some people are particularly influential and these people set the trends that the rest of the world follows. People like Elon Musk and Billie Eilish are followed by hundreds of millions of people and can catapult businesses to new levels of popularity with a Tweet, photo or video featuring one of their products.

Top fashion bloggers can command $5,000 to $25,000 just to feature a brand’s product in one post. Brands have been reportedly paying as much as $100,000 to $300,000 to appear in Kylie Jenner’s Instagram posts. The size of these payments shows the perceived impact of such a mention on a brand’s reputation.

If you know that your target audience is obsessed with a particular influencer, then having your product appear on that influencer’s social media feed could be a game-changer for your business.

5. Increasing Overall Brand Awareness & Brand Reputation

Converting traffic into customers requires trust.

We already touched on the fact that a higher authority website is more trustworthy because it is well established and already used by lots of other people.

Another way to increase brand awareness is through influencer marketing and having influencers vouch for your brand on their blog or social media channels. The saying “people trust people” rings true; it’s easier to trust a face than a logo.

Gaining online reviews is a particularly important aspect of building brand awareness.

How you go about gaining product reviews will depend on your business. E-commerce websites like Amazon have an on-site review section under each product listing where customers can leave reviews. This also works well for new e-commerce websites.

Businesses may also look to Google or Facebook to collect reviews.

Off-site reviews are another option. These are reviews of your products or services that are written on external online publications, including websites or blogs, that include a link back to your business website. It’s important that the blogs or sites you use here are trusted by your target audience.

Many potential customers will search google with a phrase like “[product name] review” before making a final decision to purchase. By inviting prominent websites and blogs to review your products, you can make sure that these searches throw up highly authoritative reviews. Off-site reviews can be organised with bloggers through a blogger outreach strategy (we’ll look at how that works later on).

Whether your business is new or established, being seen in high authority publications is a quick way to get credibility with your target audience. Imagine you are looking for a personal trainer, for example, and you’ve narrowed it down to two candidates. Finding out that one has just been interviewed by the BBC and been on television might well sway your decision.

Being associated with this sort of authority has a hypnotic effect on potential buyers.

Now that we have the tools for measuring success at our disposal we can begin to set goals. This involves looking at where we are, where we want to be, and then identifying the correct marketing strategy for our desired outcome.

Setting SMARTer goals

We’ve been consistently amazed at how poor most business owners are at setting goals for their marketing. Most business people simply don’t think about their long-term and short-term goals beyond “make more money by selling more stuff.”

If they do think about it a little more, it rarely gets further than “sell more of my most expensive stuff.”

We can use the tried-and-tested SMART acronym to help us set goals.

• Specific: “Sell more stuff” is what all businesses want to do, but it is a terrible goal for a business because it is so unspecific. Does it matter which stuff we sell and how? Instead of “sell more stuff” we could say “increase sales of product X through my website.”
• Measurable: The next step is to make the goal measurable. What counts as success in this instance? An increase in sales of one compared to the previous month is an increase, but most would not call it a success. Instead, we can say “increase sales of product X through my website by 10%.”
• Agreed on: Here is where most people come unstuck. It’s unlikely, unless you are still in the very early caffeine-infused days of your start-up, that there will be only one person involved in setting and completing a goal. It’s normally the work of a team of people. If you want your goal to be effective, every person involved must understand and agree on the goal.
• Realistic: Any goal needs to be realistic otherwise it is at best pointless and at worst demotivating. We all want to be on page one of Google as of this very second, but realistically these things take time. You want to hit that sweet spot where a goal is stretching but not demoralisingly impossible.
• Time-bound: Perhaps most importantly of all, your goal must be attached to a time frame. From “increase traffic to my website by 10%” to “increase traffic to my website by 10% within the next 12 weeks.” Set milestones and break longer tasks up into achievable sprints. If you haven’t seen a 2.5% increase by the end of week three, then you may need to evaluate your SEO strategy and check what’s working and what isn’t.

Action Point

Using the smart criteria outlined above, set a goal for your first digital PR campaign.

You can use any metric you like to measure your success, though the ones mentioned above (sales, keyword ranking, conversion rate, bounce rate and backlinks) could be useful depending on your aim.

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Once you have your ultimate goal in mind, it’s time to think about which digital PR strategies will help you achieve it!

Picking the right strategy for your goal is something that takes years of practice to master. One thing is for sure — few people get it completely right on the first attempt. That’s why it’s important to break your goal up into distinct sprints and review and readjust at the end of each sprint according to your progress.

To help you identify which method might work best for your particular goal, we’ve run through five different examples:

Example Goal #1 — Direct Sales and Generating Leads

The most obvious goal of all is earning sales through your website. First of all, you’re going to need to calculate your current sales (a number you should be holding close to your heart!) as well as your projected sales.

Remember to factor in seasonal changes that might affect your business, such as Christmas shopping. It may help to compare a given month to the same month in a previous year if you have a lot of seasonal fluctuation.

Then you need to set a realistic target and a timeframe for achieving that target.

Your sales figure will be broadly driven by two different variables:

1) the number of people visiting your website (your traffic) and…

2) the number of visitors that convert into customers (your conversion rate).

Both variables are important. A website with lots of traffic but no conversions is most likely unprofitable, and the same applies to a website with a high conversion rate but only a small handful of visitors.

Broadly speaking, a website with high ticket items can get away with (and even expect) a lower conversion rate, as people need more time to decide that they want to spend a significant amount of money. The opposite is true for low ticket items.

While digital PR has a role to play in increasing your conversion rate through adding perceived value to your product or service, optimising your website for conversion by removing barriers to sales can help you unlock hidden profit from your existing website traffic.

Where digital PR excels is in driving more traffic to your website. Ways to do this will differ depending on your circumstances, but it will probably include the following:

• Creating quality content on your website.
• Getting featured in relevant publications.
• Using blogger outreach and influencer outreach.
• Amplifying your successes with an engaging social media campaign.

A key metric that will determine the amount of traffic that your website gets will be your keyword ranking, so take some time to determine which keywords are most relevant for your business (that you can compete on).

If you need some help identifying suitable keywords, or on how to optimise your existing site for conversions, then we suggest claiming a free website review from one of our marketing experts.

Example Goal #2 — Become an Authority Figure in your Field

More subtle than directly selling your product to as many people as possible, is being seen as an authority in your industry.

This is a goal that is just as applicable to small businesses as it is to large ones. One of the key mistakes we see small businesses making is undervaluing their knowledge. You might think that your insights are not valuable because you learned them a long time ago, but that doesn’t mean that they are obvious to your customers.

In all likelihood, your market is craving an expert who takes it upon themselves to educate the masses and build their credibility at the same time. Think of TV personalities who have side businesses relating to their area of expertise. This is no accident, and they’re not usually doing it for the fame – they are using their public visibility to build their authority in their field.

There are many ways to measure your influence and authority online. One method is to track your subscriber count on a social media platform such as YouTube.

It’s a good idea to target an engagement metric alongside your subscriber count. Subscribers alone aren’t worth much if they don’t ever engage with your channel.

Example Goal #3 — Build your Website’s Blog into an Awesome Resource that Attracts Traffic and Converts

Some marketers classify blog content as content creation or content marketing, rather than digital PR. But content creation can be a key part of an effective digital PR strategy, even if it sits outside the normal limits of what most people think of as PR. There are a whole bunch of reasons why you should include a blog on your business’s website.

A popular blog can contribute to brand awareness or your personal branding, as well as attract more potential customers to your website. It’s where you can promote other marketing channels. Blogging also has Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) benefits. Creating content gives search engines more text to crawl and more pages to rank.

What we see all too often is random, undernourished content on whatever topic has come to mind thrown for the sake of just getting new content on-site.

Somebody at a company, normally not someone hired for this person, gets “create content” in their list of tasks for the month, and they do this with all the enthusiasm of a child doing their homework whilst their friends play outside on a summer’s evening.

Building a blog can be an incredible tool for maximising your reach, keeping potential customers on your website and making conversions, so for it to feel like a chore is a chronic waste and a sure sign of a lack of strategy.

There are various metrics you can use to determine the impact of your blog, such as:

• The amount of traffic coming to blog pages.
• The number of blog subscribers or newsletter signups.
• The number of clickthroughs to product pages from blog pages.
• The number of social media shares that your blog posts earn.
• The number or percentage of readers who convert into customers.

To build your blog into an incredible resource, you could set a goal along the lines of “gain X new leads from my blog each month by producing and promoting y amount of content.”

When we’re working on client campaigns, we’ll usually write a blog post or series of posts around a certain topic whilst we are doing outreach to promote high-quality articles about that subject.

To be able to show publishers an example of our writing on that subject or a close variant is useful and it is relatively low effort because we’ve already taken the time to do thorough research on the topic.

Example Goal #4 — Gain Followers and Influence Them (on Social Media)

Social media is a great place to engage with your customers and even make some of them into living, breathing, Tweeting, liking, and sharing spokespeople for your products or services.

Social media comes with a wide range of metrics that you can use when setting goals — perhaps you want to reach a certain number of followers, likes or shares.

Both Twitter and Facebook increase the visibility of profiles that attract engagement and decrease the visibility of profiles that don’t get any responses, creating a virtuous cycle for engaging profiles and a vicious one for those that are seen to be spammy.

If you share content on your pages that has proven viral spread, you’ll notice that the odd self-promotional post gets significantly more reach.

An example of an influence-related goal might be “improve the average number of times that promotional posts are shared by followers from X to Y by Z”.

As always, having a couple of key metrics can keep you honest. You might also have a goal follower count, as you wouldn’t necessarily want to hit an engagement goal but lose all your followers in the process.

You could write a whole book on the intricacies of social media marketing and we have, it’s called Profitable Social Media Marketing and you should read it if your digital PR work hinges on successful social media.

As always, regularly review your goals so that you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

Example Goal #5 — Create an Awesome Email Database

The vast majority of underperforming websites have only one goal in mind: to make a sale. If the visitor is not ready to buy right now, there is little for them to do but wander in, have a look around and wander off.

The highest performing websites will often segment their visitors into multiple levels of ‘willingness to buy’. Those who are ready to buy right now can do so, but those who are in the research phase, curious or just killing time are catered for too.

By offering lead generation ‘bait’ such as a free guide, sample or some other tasty tidbit, high converting sites collect the names and email addresses of people who, whilst they’re not ready to buy now, might be ready to buy in the future.

Creating this type of email database of existing and potential customers to market to (email marketing) is something that every business will need to do at some stage and most of them will say to themselves, “I wish I had started doing this earlier! It would have made life so much easier!”

Make life easy for yourself and start collecting emails now if you haven’t done so already.

Collecting emails is useful on many levels, but the key reason is that it is a relatively easy way of retargeting old or potential customers who at one stage were interested in your business.

The goal is clear, get a certain amount of customers to sign up for your newsletter by a certain date, or simply get a certain amount of emails in your database for use at a later date.

The methods for achieving this goal vary, but you have to think in terms of “what’s in it for them?” We all strive for an empty inbox, so I have to be getting something of value if I’m going to give a company my email address.

One of the most effective lead generation baits we’ve found is a giveaway.

Run a competition and give your most sought after products away to a couple of lucky winners in exchange for the email addresses of everyone who takes part. You can use a simple tool such as rafflecopter.com to get a competition live and online in a matter of minutes.

If giving away products isn’t relevant or is too expensive this early on, you can give away information instead. If you sell HR software, for instance, you can invite people to attend webinars on popular topics related to HR. Collect the email addresses of those that sign up in exchange for a free place at the event. Don’t forget to ask for social media followers while you’re at it!

To run a strong digital PR campaign, you need to create a digital PR strategy tailored to the needs of your business. That might mean increasing brand awareness and bolstering the client’s reputation, it might mean doing what it takes to generate leads, or it might mean going after high-quality backlinks.

Whatever your digital PR goal, I hope this blog has helped you think more clearly about your strategy!

First written in October 2017. Revised in June 2022.

The post How to Set Goals for Your Digital PR Campaign appeared first on Thinkplus.

Buying “cheap” backlinks in bulk from disreputable sources is a Black Hat SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) technique — a way of cheating or misleading Google and other search engines so that your website is ranked higher than it deserves to.

If you buy backlinks and have little to no control over where the backlinks are placed or what kind of content your backlink will appear in, you’re not doing off-page SEO right.

If you pay for a service that helps you to generate exposure, awareness of your brand, and backlinks, that’s a little different.

Generally speaking, the easier it is to buy a backlink, the less it’s worth.

This is because Google and other search engines don’t want to reward spammy behaviour. On the other side of the coin, backlinks that are very hard to secure, such as backlinks from government websites and university websites, tend to be worth a lot more because they’re harder to manipulate.

An example of the types of backlinks you want to avoid at all costs

Why You Should Not Buy Spammy Backlinks

Even though it doesn’t work anymore, it’s still possible to buy backlinks in bulk at ludicrously low prices. Ever seen this advert before? Or perhaps something like it?

Avoid this pop-up ad like the plague!

This is the essence of black hat SEO. If there was ever a link building or SEO strategy to categorically rule out, this would be it. Services like these tend to rely on link farms or low-quality “news” websites that link out to as many different services as possible.

The content on these sorts of websites is often gibberish and the links themselves tend to be completely useless.

Google’s Stance on Link Buying

Google is explicitly against the exchange of money in return for links.

This exchange of money can happen in many ways, and Google doesn’t say that all these so-called “link schemes” will definitely lead to a negative impact on a website’s search engine rankings. Rather, it says that these schemes “can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results” (emphasis ours).

The takeaway from this should be that the more direct and obvious an exchange of money is in return for a link, the less natural it is. The less natural it is, the more likely Google is to punish it. The reason Google uses “can” and not “will” is that there are some link building strategies which — while they involve the exchange of money — don’t fall into the same spammy bucket as some paid-for link schemes.

What’s the Difference Between Follow and No Follow Links?

We’ve already seen the difference between internal and external links. But there are also follow links and nofollow links.

Nofollow is an attribute that can be applied to a backlink by webmasters. It looks like this:

rel="nofollow"

In 2019, Google announced that it would treat nofollow links as hints rather than directives. In other words, sometimes Google will “count” a nofollow link and sometimes it won’t.

We’re not quite sure why Google made this change, but there’s some speculation that it was a response to many major websites moving to nofollow links as standard across their websites. Rather than lose these news sites as sources of information completely, Google made the change so it could continue counting backlinks from some of these sites. But as said, this is unconfirmed speculation.

Screenshot from Google’s Outbound Link Qualification guide

When Are No Follow Links Used?

Google gives us an example of when they recommend using the nofollow attribute:

“The nofollow attribute is for cases where you want to link to a page but don’t want to imply any type of endorsement, including passing along ranking credit to another page.”

At the same time that Google made changes to the nofollow attribute, they also added a new attribute named rel=”sponsored”.

Google explicitly stated that this is the attribute you should use if the link has been created for advertorial purposes or in exchange for any compensation (in other words, a paid-for link).

This article was first written by James Speyer and published in August 2020. It was revised and re-published by Luke Nicholson in July 2021.

The post Should You Buy Backlinks? appeared first on Thinkplus.

Choosing the right keywords for your content is half the battle when it comes to attracting organic traffic to your website. (The other half of the battle is creating killer content!) But don’t be daunted! We’ve divided the task into six easy-to-follow steps.

Ready to begin? Here’s how you can choose the right keywords for your content in six easy steps.

1. Start with Keyword Research
2. Think About Search Intent
3. Plan Your Buyer’s Journey
4. Analyse The Level of Competition
5. Think About the Correct Content Format for Your Keyword
6. Map Each Keyword to a Specific Page on Your Website

Start with Keyword Research

Any keyword-related task starts with one fundamental activity: keyword research. Before we get stuck into the nitty-gritty, let’s have a quick refresher on what we mean by keyword.

What Is a Keyword?

“In terms of SEO, [keywords are] the words and phrases that searchers enter into search engines” (Moz).

For those with a sizable marketing budget, it makes sense to commission an SEO agency to carry out your keyword research. SEO professionals do keyword research day in day out and will have bought expensive software licenses to get more technical information. SEMRush, Ahrefs and Majestic are all great tools for conducting keyword research, but they can be expensive. Any agency worth its salt will start each campaign with a dedicated keyword research phase.

For those with smaller budgets, you could use a site such as Upwork to find a freelance SEO specialist. This is cheaper than using an agency, but the quality of work will be varied and you’ll have to put some time into finding and managing a suitable freelancer.

Struggling to find two pennies to rub together or just plain curious about how the whole thing works? You can do your own keyword research by following any reputable online guide. We’ve written a guide on how to do keyword research and analysis with free tools, as have the team over at Moz.

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Think about Search Intent

While doing your keyword research, it’s important to think about the search intent behind each query. SEOs sometimes divide keywords into different categories with navigational, informational and transactional being three common examples.

• A navigational keyword is when a searcher uses Google or another search engine to navigate to a webpage. For example, they might type “Facebook” into Google in order to reach facebook.com.
• An informational keyword is when a searcher uses Google to find a specific piece of information. They might type “who owns Facebook?” into Google if they’ve somehow never heard of Mark Zuckerberg before.
• Lastly, a transactional or commercial keyword is one which suggests that the searcher wants to make a purchase. Words like “buy” are strong indicators of commercial intent. For example, a searcher who types “buy gold-plated iPhone X” into Google is pretty clearly thinking about spending too much money on a phone.

Search intent is an important part of keyword research because it enables you to plan your content in such a way that it meets your users’ needs. If we go back to the previous example, our “buy gold-plated iPhone X” searcher most likely doesn’t want to read a blog post at this point! They want to be directed to a product page which includes everything that they need to know about making a purchase, including prices, specs and shipping information.

Plan Your Buyer’s Journey

Think about the typical journey that takes a potential customer from hearing about your product to making their first purchase. For many businesses, especially those that sell high-ticket items, most people won’t make a purchase the first time they hear about your website. Instead, they might go through a number of different stages, such as awareness, consideration and decision. In marketing jargon, this is known as the buyer’s journey.

Awareness is when a potential customer realises they have a problem. Potential customers in the awareness stage may not even have a name for their problem — they are just aware that their problem exists. For example, an office worker might experience wrist pain at work — but not necessarily have diagnosed the exact issue.

During the consideration stage, the potential customer starts to give their problem a name and research possible solutions. To stick with our unfortunate office worker, they might see a doctor for their wrist pain and discover that they have RSI.

The final stage is the decision stage. This is when a potential customer takes a long list of possible solutions and decides on a course of action. As marketers, we hope that the customer chooses to buy our product rather than one of our competitor’s products! Our office worker might decide to buy a gel mouse mat and an ergonomic keyword. They’ll also have to decide which brand to choose and where to make the purchase.

When planning content, it’s useful to think about your target reader and their stage in the buyer’s journey. A manufacturer of ergonomic keyboards might decide to write a blog post about RSI that is targeted at potential buyers in the awareness stage. That blog post might end by asking readers to signup for a newsletter which includes special offers aimed at those in the decision phase.

Analyse the Level of Competition

When doing keyword research, it’s important to pay attention to the competition for your target keyword phrase. The simplest way to analyse the competition for a given keyword is to put your keyword into Google or another search engine and see what comes up.

The first thing to look for is ads. In Google, these are marked with either the “Ad” tag or the “Sponsored” tag. Google will always display paid-for ads above other results, so it’s worth assessing the ad landscape before you commit to creating a big piece of content.

The second thing to look at is the websites that are organically appearing on the first page of Google for your target keyword. Is this page dominated by brands with enormous marketing budgets? If so, it’s unlikely you’ll take the top spot with your very first blog post.

Lastly, take a look at the results themselves. Is the content beatable? In other words, can you create content that the average searcher will find more useful than the content currently in the top spot? Weak content is often short, poorly formatted and lacking in key details. You can claim the top positions by meeting the searcher’s needs more thoroughly than the competition.

Think about the Correct Content Format for Your Keyword

One of the writers at Thinkplus recently confessed that she was having trouble getting her blogs to rank for a particular client. To make matters worse, someone else had also written a couple of blogs for the same client’s site and their content had started ranking! The first writer — let’s call her Alex — was distraught.

I promised to take a look for Alex and I soon discovered the problem. While her written content was excellent, as always, she simply hadn’t included enough images in each blog. The client sold clothes and in that particular industry, a picture outranks a thousand words. For searchers trying to learn about fashion, excellently written content without supporting images just doesn’t meet their needs.

This might seem obvious from a distance, but it illustrates the importance of identifying the correct content format for your target keyword. And it goes beyond choosing either text, video or sound. Consider whether your content is best expressed with graphs, lists, tables, charts, maps, infographics, lots of images — or very few. You can use a tool like Buzzsumo to help you identify the best performing content formats in a given industry.

Map Each Keyword to a Specific Page on Your Website

The final step in the process is mapping each target keyword to a specific page on your website. The best way to keep your ideas organised is via a simple content schedule. You can view and copy Exposure’s Ninja’s free content schedule by using this link.

A content schedule is useful for two main reasons:

1. A content schedule keeps you organised throughout a long campaign
2. A content schedule can stop you from targeting the same keyword on two different pages on your website

On point two, it’s important to remember that websites don’t rank — web pages do.

In general, it’s a good idea to make sure that your web pages each target different keywords. Usually, you’ll want your products and services pages to target keywords with a lot of commercial intent. Your blog posts, on the other hand, can target informational keywords. Try to avoid targeting the same keyword in two (or more) different places on your website.

Ready to get started? We’ve written a guide to choosing the best keywords for your blogs. If you’re a business owner and you’re unsure what to do next, you might like to request a free marketing review from one of our experts. It’s a no-obligation service that’s available to all businesses.

The post How To Choose The Right Keywords for Your Content appeared first on Thinkplus.

Here are our top seven tips for holding remote meetings that don’t waste time.

1. Set Expectations

Just like in-person meetings, latecomers and distractions can upset the flow of a meeting. The first step to great meetings that don’t waste time is to ensure your team’s expectations are set right from the outset.

The quickest way to start this is by booking the meeting into their calendars with a specified time, location (such as Skype) and invitee list. At Thinkplus, we use Google Calendar, which syncs across every Ninja’s calendar to ensure they don’t get double-booked.

The beginning of the meeting is a great time to lay out the “ground rules”. These should include things like the use of mobile phones, messengers and emails. Ideally, everyone in the team will silence all their notifications for the duration of the meeting. It’s not always possible, but it makes for a much more focused call with fewer interruptions.

You should also set hardware expectations. If you’re delivering a briefing, then it’s a good idea to ask your team to temporarily mute their microphones unless they have a question. This cuts out the opportunities for barking dogs and typing noises interfering with the speaker’s message.

2. Share the Agenda Ahead of Time

Sharing the agenda before the meeting gives everyone time to prepare and also helps to run an essential check. That check is whether a meeting is genuinely needed. If you’re struggling to put together an agenda, then there’s a strong possibility the meeting may not be needed at all.

Your agenda will also give you an easy way to pull the meeting back on track if you’re drawn away from the focus of the call. Just as with a physical meeting, it’s easy to say something like, “I think we’re starting to get off track. Let’s put a pin in this and revisit it later”.

3. Use a Reliable Platform

There are many different call options out there, and choosing one that is reliable and well-suited to your purpose is essential. There’s nothing worse than a call that continually drops out or has to be abandoned due to poor connectivity!

If you’re looking to recreate calls that you might have with a customer over your office phone, then an app like Yay or 8×8 can be powerful. These offer call-recording features and can be set up to make and receive calls using your office number. They’re an easy service for your clients, as they will receive the phone call directly to their number as usual — there’s nothing for them to download or do before they can use it.

For meetings where cameras are more appropriate — or if you want to screen share — then there’s a wide choice of platforms. A few of our favourites include Google Hangouts, Skype and Zoom.

Google Hangouts syncs with Google Calendar seamlessly. You can share your screen and there’s also a subtitles option for those who are hard of hearing or struggle to hear in a noisy environment.

Skype is a well-known video conferencing platform with some great inbuilt features like a screen recorder and screen sharing. Skype also doubles as a messenger for sending quick messages or making sure everyone’s ready before starting the call. It can be difficult with large numbers of people, however, as stability sometimes becomes a little patchy.

Zoom is a paid-for service, but there is a fantastic free version available allowing you to have meetings for up to 45 minutes. There is also a meeting recording feature as well as screen-sharing options. It tends to be a very stable platform and can handle large numbers of people.

4. Use Cameras

“Camera on” meetings offer so many benefits for efficiency but also from a team-building perspective. Having everyone with their cameras on helps avoid people talking over the top of each other because the verbal cues that someone is about to speak are the same as they are in a face-to-face meeting. With cameras off, there can be a lot of apologising for speaking over one another — a time drain in an otherwise effective meeting, not to mention embarrassing.

Having cameras on helps to gauge a team’s reactions during announcements and, of course, it helps everyone to see the way things are said! It’s easy for something to come across in a manner different to the one intended. Being able to see everyone’s faces helps with this.

Generally, the best thing to do is to let your team know which meetings they should be on camera for so they can prepare in advance. We usually recommend certain meetings are video calls — but we also never insist on it, as some members of the team may feel uncomfortable.

5. Designate the Next Speaker

A really simple tip for keeping meetings on track is to make sure you direct your question towards a specific person. Leaving a question hanging can result in silence, as you can’t rely on your usual visual cues to address a person. In a face-to-face meeting, you can look at the person you’re hoping for an answer from. On a screen, it’s not always clear who you are looking at — you can stare at your colleague in the corner of the screen, but to everyone else, you’ll just be looking down! A simple, “Is this possible? What do you think, Andy” can cut out unnecessary uncertainty and idle time.

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6. Encourage Psychological Safety

Meetings can sometimes get derailed by the loudest voices in the room. This problem is no different in remote meetings, although you can help some team members feel more confident when interacting online.

A point of psychological safety is reached in a team when everyone feels comfortable contributing and all members of the team are respected. To help facilitate this, you can encourage equal contribution from different team members by designating the next person you’d like to hear from. In an office, you can use visual cues. It’s the same online, but you may have to work a little harder.

Psychological safety helps you to get everyone’s thoughts during the meeting, limiting the contributed points after the meeting. Having it as one of the things you’re looking to facilitate also helps you to spot “sand-bagging”. Sand-bagging is the moment a team member begins to repeat their points or go off-topic and pulls the meeting off-track. Keeping contributions equally distributed will help you to keep your meetings on track and make your team stronger.

7. Don’t Be Too Ruthless

Keeping meetings on track and reducing wasted time is great, but take care not to be too ruthless. Working remotely can reduce the amount of team-building time you have and a little social interaction time is important. Allowing a few minutes at the beginning or end of a call to catch up on everyone’s evening or weekend can help to keep the team feeling connected.

If you’re adapting to working remotely and finding ways to help your team thrive in the remote environment, Thinkplus is offering businesses a free working remote webinar and consultation call to get started. We’ve designed our Remote Working Revolution Training and Consultancy to skip the hard lessons of doing it on your own and get you to where you need to be as soon as possible.

Get started today by booking your Free Consultation with a Ninja.

The post How to Hold Remote Meetings That Don’t Waste Time appeared first on Thinkplus.

Better yet, brand guidelines can save you time in the long run. Have you ever been in one of those senior meetings where three (or more) of your best people end up arguing over font size? A clear set of brand guidelines eliminates these kinds of debate, allowing your decision makers to focus on more important tasks.

Ready to design your brand guidelines? Follow these six simple steps to successful branding:

1. Choose a logo (and think carefully about composition)
2. Pick a colour palette
3. Decide on typography
4. Showcase your brand images
5. Include examples of correct and incorrect usage
6. Put your brand guidelines together in a brand manual

1. Choose a Logo (and Think Carefully about Composition)

Our branding guidelines include notes on which colours are permitted for the logo

Perhaps the most important element of your brand guidelines is your logo. Your brand guidelines need to include your official logo, as well as advice on composition and use cases. The more details here, the better. What are the exact colours of each element of your logo (including each colour’s hex code)? How should each element of the logo be positioned in relation to each other element and at what angle?

It’s important to think about how your logo might be used in different environments. For example, how should your logo work with a circular background, a square background and a rectangular background? How should your logo look as a favicon, on Facebook and elsewhere on social media? And how should it look against a white background and a dark background?

The beloved software company Slack recently redesigned its logo, which upset a lot of Slack’s long-term users. But the decision makers behind the change explained why they had to make them in an excellent blog post. I recommend you read that post before making a decision on your logo, as it illustrates how logo design can go wrong and how difficult it is to fix a problematic logo later on!

2. Pick a Colour Palette for Your Brand

Thinkplus’s branding guidelines also state which colours are permitted for use

After you’ve decided on a logo, the next step is to decide on a suitable colour palette for your brand. Colour is an important way of distinguishing your brand identity, so it helps to take a look at what your competitors are doing. It’s also worth thinking about what your company stands for and choosing colours that support that position.

If your company has a number of different products and services, you might use different colours to distinguish your products from one another. Internally, you might use different colours to represent different departments. Having said that, even if your colour palette does include different colours, those colours should have some unifying characteristics. For example, you might choose a number of fun pastels.

Don’t forget to include a colour hex code for each colour and consider how other visual elements, such as text or your logo, will look against your colour backgrounds.

Our primary colours in use in our digital marketing podcast branding

3. Decide on Typography to Express Your Brand Identity

Our branding guidelines also include rules for font usage

Font is about more than just a font type, size and style (although those elements are important too!) Think about how your brand will express headings, subheadings, standard text and much more. Should headings be capitalised? If so, which capitalisation format should be used? Should subheadings follow different capitalisation rules to titles? These may appear to be minor points, but deciding on a single rule and enforcing it early on is much easier than wading back through your website when you have well over a thousand (or more) live pages.

When deciding on a font type, think about how your employees work and when they will need access to it. While custom fonts are brilliant for branding, the drawback is that you’ll need to make sure that each employee has access to those fonts from day one.

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4. Showcase Your Product Icons and Brand Mascots

Shinobi is the mascot of Thinkplus

You might find it useful to express your brand identity via an icon or an image. For example, while Google’s brand logo is the company name in the famous blue, red, yellow and green lettering, the Gmail product icon is a picture of a white envelope with four red lines. This helps users distinguish between Google the company and Gmail as one of many different Google products.

At Thinkplus, we developed Shinobi, our brand mascot, alongside our logo, colour palette and typography. Our brand icon enables us to give documents or images a unique Ninja stamp, even in places where our logo wouldn’t work. Your brand guidelines should include all product icons and brand mascots, as well as clear usage guidance.

5. Include Examples of Correct and Incorrect Usage of Your Brand Guidelines

We also include examples of incorrect logo usage in our guidelines

If your company lasts for any substantial length of time, your employees will be tempted at some point to misuse your logo. Most often, this will happen when someone needs to resize your logo for a different use case and they take a shortcut, rather than ask the designer for help…

Don’t let this slide! By including clear examples of how your brand materials should and should not be used in your brand guidelines, you demonstrate to the rest of your team that your brand image needs to be treated with respect.

6. Put Your Brand Guidelines Together in a Brand Manual

All of our branding rules are compiled into a singular set of branding guidelines for everyone to follow

The final and most important step in designing your company’s brand guidelines is to put everything together in an accessible brand manual. Your brand manual should be something that your entire company knows where to find. Be sure to review your brand manual at least once a year. While your branding shouldn’t change too often, it’s worth reviewing your branding guidance as your company grows to be sure that everything is still aligned.

Throughout this blog, I’ve included references to the Thinkplus brand manual. For more inspiration, you can also check out Google’s visual asset guidelines and Twitter’s brand guidelines.

Want to learn more about brand guidelines? Subscribe to the Thinkplus Podcast. We discuss branding with some of the brightest minds in the business, including Disney World’s very own former Executive Vice President Lee Cockerell.

And as always, if you want a free and completely bespoke review of your website by a living, breathing human being, get in touch with us!

The post Design Your Company’s Brand Guidelines In 6 Simple Steps appeared first on Thinkplus.

There three main reasons to build a Knowledge Base are as follows:

• To educate customers
• To generate leads
• To increase traffic

Let’s say you sell a complicated piece of software. Customers might decide not to purchase if they think they can’t learn how to use the software. A Knowledge Base removes this objection by educating the customer.

A Knowledge Base might also generate leads for a business. The Thinkplus Knowledge Base teaches visitors everything they need to know about online marketing. Many visitors come, learn and never return to our website. Other visitors decide that they don’t have the time or the inclination to teach themselves online marketing and instead become clients.

Knowledge Bases may also rank highly on Google and other search engines, which can provide an SEO benefit.

What does a Knowledge Base look like?

A Knowledge Base will generally be organised around a Menu Page, which will look something like this:

A Menu Page should let the visitor easily navigate between different categories. Ideally, a Menu Page will also feature a search bar so that the visitor can search for a specific topic.

A Knowledge Base is often divided into Category Pages, which look something like this:

A Category Page enables the visitor to find more information about specific areas of interest. Like the Menu Page, the Category Page should contain a search bar.

Finally, we have the articles themselves.

Articles in a Knowledge Base should teach the visitor about a specific topic. As above, we want a search bar as well as links to other useful related articles. Credit goes to Free Agent for the Knowledge Base shown above!

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Can a Knowledge Base increase sales?

Yes, they can! But they’re not the place for the hard sell. Think of your Knowledge Base as a teacher rather than a salesperson. Which of the two professions is more trusted? It’s the teacher. Your visitors won’t be able to learn from a Knowledge Base that acts like a salesperson. They’ll have their defences up.

Instead, Knowledge Bases work best as a soft sell. Be genuinely useful to the reader (as a teacher would be) and answer whatever search query brought them to your site as best you can.

The sales will come when you earn the trust of visitors by demonstrating your authority on a subject. Use a soft Call to Action (CTA) to direct visitors who are ready to become customers to the right place on your website. A soft CTA might ask visitors to sign up for a newsletter or an online course.

What’s the difference between a Knowledge Base and a blog?

Assuming that you’re using WordPress, the key difference between a Knowledge Base and a blog is that Knowledge Bases are made up of pages, while blogs are made up of posts.

Posts and pages are the two default content types in WordPress. The difference is the way that they are organised. Think of blog posts organised in a line, with the newest at the front of the queue and the oldest at the back. Each time you add a new post, it takes its place at the front of the queue and the other blog posts move one position backward.

In contrast, pages are static and do not have a date. A Knowledge Base tends to be organised hierarchically. The broadest and most important pages are at the top. As we move down the hierarchy, pages become much more niche.

What’s a blog post?

Blogs are best organised into posts because blogs tend to be timely. You’ll usually write a blog about a recent event or development. “5 Content Marketing Predictions for 2018” is a good blog title as it’s very time sensitive. Each time a new blog post is published, it appears at the front of the line and the older blog posts are pushed backward.

Here’s an example of a blog post on Mostly Amelie:

You can tell it’s a blog post because it has a date below the title. It’s a timely announcement for a road trip happening in the next couple of months. By the time you read this, the blog post will be out of date and the delicious vegan road trip will be a distant memory. That’s not a problem, as Amelie will have written newer blog posts by then which will have taken this post’s place at the front of the line.

This isn’t to say that all blogs are timely — there are plenty of evergreen blog posts too.

What’s a web page?

Pages, on the other hand, are meant to be timeless. The reason you have a Contact Page rather than a Contact Post is that you’re planning to keep your contact details unchanged for as long as possible. Pages can be updated, such as if your business address changes, but in general they are always relevant (evergreen).

A strong Knowledge Base is also evergreen. If your Knowledge Base explains how to use a physical product, it might rarely or even never need to be updated. A Knowledge Base on fidget spinners written in 2017, will (probably) never need to be updated.

If your Knowledge Base explains how to use software or how a particular service works, you may need to update it as the software is patched or if new best practices emerge.

Here’s an example of a page on the Thinkplus website:

This is our review request page, where business owners can get a free review of their website from a marketing professional. It’s a good example of a page as it’s timeless. We plan to offer businesses free SEO reviews as long as we have a website, so this page will only need occasional updates.

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Who’s involved in building a Knowledge Base?

There are four or five different roles involved in building a Knowledge Base. Sometimes, an exceptionally talented individual can fulfil more than one of these roles. Other times, it’s best to use a small team.

SEO

An SEO can do keyword research and tell you which search queries you can rank for and how much traffic they might get, through competitor and search volume data. This helps you plan your Knowledge Base.

Also, an SEO should also be involved in planning how a Knowledge Base should be added to your website’s existing architecture.

Copywriter (and Editor)

The copywriter researches and writes the articles that make up the Knowledge Base. They need to be able to write clear, compelling copy. If you want your Knowledge Base to help you sell a product or service, then it’s best to enlist a copywriter with a keen marketing mind.
Get the copy checked before it goes live. A professional editor is the best choice.

Web Developer (and Designer)

The web developer uploads the pages of the Knowledge Base. They’ll also add any functionality you need, such as a search bar or a form if you’re collecting contact information too.

It’s the designer’s job to make sure that the Knowledge Base matches your brand guidelines. They can also create custom images to illustrate certain points.

Project Manager

A Project Manager takes responsibility for… managing the project. They organise the other members of the team, aid communications and make sure deadlines are hit. You don’t have to have a Project Manager, but they do help make sure that projects are delivered on time.

How to write a Knowledge Base

Once your players are in position, it’s time to get started. At Thinkplus, we use a simple shared Google Sheet so that all the stakeholders can check the progress at a moment’s notice. The SEO researches the page titles we should target, the copywriter creates the content and the web developer uploads the Knowledge Base according to the URL structure identified by the SEO.

Everything is checked thoroughly before and after the go-live date. But go-live is not the end of the process. We recommend doing some User Testing via a heat map. This might uncover an unexpected difficulty — maybe your visitors are completely missing your contact form or navigational features.

Ready for that free website review we mentioned earlier? Head on over and snap one up. Still looking to learn more about online marketing? Try subscribing to the Thinkplus online marketing podcast.

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The aim of the game is increase your odds of producing a superstar post — and there’s a great technique for doing this that’s right under your nose. Simply take your old, almost-made-it blog posts and give them just the nudge they need to reach superstar status!

Estimated read time: 7 minutes
Difficulty level: Intermediate

Contents

• How to find “almost-made-it” blog posts with Keyword Explorer
• How to actually update old blog content
• How to republish old blog content

How to find blog posts that need updating with Keyword Explorer

Every SEO expert and content marketer has a different favourite technique for identifying which old blog posts should be updated. I’ve tried a couple of different versions and my current favourite is the one advocated by Dr Pete. I like this version because it’s easy(ish) to do and is highly keyword-focused.

I’ve summarised the technique here.

1.Head to Keyword Explorer

2.Select “root domain” from the drop-down menu in the search bar

3.Add the the root domain of the URL you want to look at to the search bar

The root domain (for today’s purposes) is just the domain name plus the top-level domain. So if the domain name is exposureninja and the top-level domain is .com, the root domain is exposureninja.com.

4.Click “search”

This will give you a list of all the keywords that a site is currently ranking for.

5.Click “See all ranking keywords > Export as CSV”

6.Open up a new Google Sheet

7.Select File > Import > Upload > Select a file from your computer

8.Select the CSV file from earlier and select “Replace current spreadsheet”

You’ll end up with all the pages on a website, as well as all the keywords that they are ranking for. In my example, I’m looking at a blog, so I don’t need to filter the pages. But if I were looking at a business website, I’d need to filter the other pages out.

9. Select Data > Filter

10. In the column labelled “top ranking URL”, click the green downward arrow

11. Select filter by the condition > text contains “/blog/”

12. Copy the filtered data to a new spreadsheet, and delete the old spreadsheet

13. Select the data on the new tab

14. Select Data > Pivot table…

Hold onto your hats, things are about to get a little tricky! We need to use a pivot table to sort the data more easily.

15. Selecting “Pivot table…” will open a new tab

16. In the Report Editor on the right, add “Top Ranking URL” under “Rows”

17. Click… Values > Add Field > Top Ranking URL >  summarize by COUNTA

18. Then… Values > Add Field  > Max Volume > summarize by SUM

 19. Copy and paste this data into a new spreadsheet! Delete the old one

20. Label columns A, B and C “URL”, “Keyword Count” and “Potential Traffic”

21. Use Data > Sort range… > Sort by column B (or C) to sort by Count or Volume

Ta-da! We’ll end up with a list of blog posts that we can sort by keyword and potential traffic. Now we can look for blog posts that are ranking for lots of keywords (high number in the “Keyword Count” column) and have the potential to earn lots of traffic (high number in the “Potential Traffic” column).

I can see that the post “15 best things to do in Turks and Caicos” is worth taking another look at, as it has the potential to attract a lot of traffic.

The next thing I’ll do is head back to Keyword Explorer and add the URL for the Turks and Caicos page into the search bar again, this time performing an exact page search.

The results tell me that the page is ranking about 9th to 11th for some keywords with decent monthly search volume. If the page’s owner can do some rewriting and move those terms to page 1 or even above the fold, they’re going to earn themselves a metric tonne of traffic. But how do you actually go about rewriting an old blog post?

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10 Ways to Update Old Blog Content and Add Value for Your Readers

So, we’ve got a list of blog posts that we know have huge potential, and a list of keywords that can unlock that potential.

What’s next?

It’s time to start re-writing!

1. Rewrite with your new target keywords in mind

Avoid keyword stuffing, but do use your target keywords:

• In the title
• In the first 100 words
• In headings (especially anything with the h2 tag)
• As the anchor text for both internal and external links

Also look at LSI keywords and include them where appropriate. LSI keywords are words that are semantically related to your original keywords.

One of the best things to do is add a new heading that targets one of your identified keywords and answers a related question that might be useful to your readers.

2. Consider updating the structure of the blog

Think about changing the structure of the blog, especially if you’re adding in a new heading or two. This might mean shortening the introduction or moving the paragraphs around so that the blog flows better.

3. Remove any outdated references and outdated practices

Scan your old blog post for dates and dated references. If the hottest new trends of 2012 are mentioned, that line either needs to be rewritten or deleted. The same thing applies if best practice has changed significantly in your industry since the blog was originally written.

4. Remove weak copy

Check every single line of copy. Does it a) contain valuable insights that your reader absolutely must know? Or b) make the reader spit out their coffee in a gale of laughter? If not, cut it out! (Though of course, be careful removing keywords and ideally you’ll add more than you cut).

5. Change images if needed

As it says on the tin. Are you using the best possible images? It should go without saying, but are the images compressed? Have they been assigned keyword-rich alt tags?

6. Replace old studies or statistics

As with old dates and references, old studies and statistics need to be replaced with newer versions.

7. Check old links

Go through each link and make sure that they’re all working as intended. If any links are broken or could be pointed somewhere more useful, point them somewhere more useful. This applies to both internal and external links (yes, you should have both in your blog).

8. Update the CTAs

Calls to action (CTAs) need to be updated, too! These usually go out of date, as they’re often pointed to old resources or offers that no longer apply. Make sure each CTA is doing some heavy lifting.

9. Add an editor’s note explaining the changes that you made

Add a note explaining your changes. “Editor’s note: this blog post was updated in November 2017 for accuracy”. This is especially necessary if the blog has comments that will become redundant as a result of the update.

Add this to the bottom of the post, just above the final CTA.

10. Do a spelling and grammar check

Now’s a good time to remove any typos that were in the original piece and check that you haven’t added any new ones while editing. Run the blog through Grammarly and give the piece to a fresh pair of eyes for a glance over.

How to republish old blog content

The hard part’s over, All that’s left is to actually press publish… but wait. This is a republish. So you actually need to update the original post, rather than posting the updated version as a new post. Make sure that you also do the following:

1. Update the publication date/time
2. Don’t change the post’s URL
3. Promote the post again through social channels

Further reading

As stated in the introduction, the credit for the content audit outlined above goes entirely to Dr Pete of Moz. Here’s his original article, as well as other pieces that I read while researching this blog:

• moz.com/blog/how-to-do-a-keyword-driven-content-audit
• searchenginejournal.com/quick-seo-wins-google-analytics/219559/
• blog.hubspot.com/marketing/guide-to-updating-republishing-blogging-content-ht
• neilpatel.com/blog/bring-old-blog-posts-back-to-life-5-strategies-that-work

If you’d like to free up your time by outsourcing your digital marketing, get a FREE marketing review from the digital marketing experts at Thinkplus today. Our in-depth review of your online presence will outline the areas for improvement and the tactics you can use to boost your SEO and marketing game, driving profits up. Or, leave it to our experts to do it for you and put your feet up!

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How does getting a link from the 5th most popular website in the world sound? How about a Moz DA 100 website? How about a website with nearly two billion visitors every month?

That’s right. It sounds damn fine.

We’re talking about links from Wikipedia here. The tactic is simple: insert a link in a Wikipedia article to somewhere on your or your client’s website. However, to justify this link, the website needs to be a reliable source for a claim that’s already been made on Wikipedia.

Anyone can edit Wikipedia, but Wikipedia’s editors are fierce and will come down on any low-quality or irrelevant link like a ton of bricks.

Step 1: Find Articles That Need Sources or Sources Which Could Fit Into Articles

In this section, I’m going to explain how to find an article to fit a source (or a source to fit an article). Let’s start with what the big names say…

Neil Patel, Matthew Woodward, and Content Marketing Institute

Content Marketing Institute recommends using Wikipedia itself to find out where the website needs sources. Its advice involves going to the “articles to be expanded” page, finding a relevant article which needs expanding, and then adding in a relevant source.

The issue with this technique is that the “articles to be expanded” page is vast. Nearly two thousand articles are added to this list every month. Surely, there is a tool out there which allows you to do this quicker?

Indeed there is. Both Neil Patel and Matthew Woodward recommend using Wikigrabber to find either dead links which need replacing or relevant Wikipedia pages where sources are needed.

Still, I didn’t do any of that. So, here’s what I did do…

What I Did That Worked

I generated three backlinks from Wikipedia which have stayed there. One is for Thinkplus and the other two are for our clients.

Our Link: Thinkplus

The Wikipedia article on bounce rate is where you’ll find Thinkplus’s backlink. It’s the fourth source. I started by looking for articles where I felt that Thinkplus would be a reputable source. I didn’t go to the “articles to be expanded” list and I didn’t use Wikigrabber.

Rather, I asked myself what Thinkplus is an authority on. Hence, I found myself on the page about bounce rate.

It didn’t take me long before I found what I was looking for. The “Purpose” section already had two sources, but I felt that it could do with one more. Wikipedia editors recommend no more than three sources for one claim, but it’s a shade more nuanced than that.

I knew full well that Thinkplus had an article on bounce rate, what it was, and what measuring it was for, so I linked directly to that.

Client #1 Link

Our client is an expert on warehouses, so finding the one page where they could provide a source was pretty easy in that sense. It simply had to be the page on warehouses.

The way I found somewhere to link to our client was just by reading the article. I skimmed certain parts. However, when I found the “storage and shipping” section, I knew that this would be the perfect place to add a link to our client. Being such a niche client, they are experts in warehouse storage in a way I knew Wikipedia would respect.

The section was missing an entry about cantilever racking. So I added a short sentence with a link to a blog post I wrote about the difference between cantilever racking and pallet racking.

Client #2 Link

In the two examples I just gave, I started with the Wikipedia article first and then I went looking for a source on the client’s website. For our second client, I did the reverse. This isn’t something which Patel or Woodward recommend, but it’s something I would highly recommend — especially for clients who write their own blogs.

Our second client’s blog is vast and informative, so I knew it would be worth my time going through the posts to see what would work as a source. What I was looking for was a very specific post which talked about a very specific issue which they would qualify as experts in.

I eventually came across this article about Jersey Post investing in a US business. Our second client had the scoop on this story, as it were, being Jersey Post’s legal team. When I found the Wikipedia page for Jersey post, I found it very thin.

What’s more, there was no entry on the company investing in a US business. In fact, the article had no information on what Jersey Post was doing past 2016. So, I added the final sentence about what Jersey Post was doing in 2017 and used the our second client’s blog post as a source.

Why I Think It Worked

Not all of my attempts at Wikipedia editing have been successful (I’ll get to that later on), so why did these opportunities work? I have several theories…

• Article quality — I’m not just blowing Thinkplus’s trumpet, but the blog posts we produce at Thinkplus are of a very high quality. We insist on external links to support our claims and everything we create is triple checked for quality.
• Website quality — For the websites where we don’t produce the blogs, such as our second client, this is particularly important. I would assume that Wikipedia editors are as savvy about what makes a website trustworthy as we are. As such, when they checked our clients’ and Thinkplus’s websites for Moz DA, Trust Flow and Citation Flow, and spam scores, I feel they would have been satisfied that these were quality and trustworthy websites.
• Specificity — Vague claims don’t necessarily need sources: The sky is blue. Specific claims, though, need specific sources: The sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light. [1] Wikipedia wants sources which directly back up a specific claim. Using an article about racking systems, in general, would not have sufficed for a source about the definition of cantilever racking. That’s why I linked to a post which defined cantilever racking specifically. Using an article about conversion rate optimisation (even if it mentioned bounce rate) would not have sufficed for a source about the purpose of bounce rates. That’s why I linked to a post which explained the purpose of bounce rates specifically.
• Expertise — The article may be great, the website may be high-quality, and the source may back up the exact claim made on Wikipedia. However, none of that matters if your client is not an expert. This is one of the biggest reasons three of my attempts failed. Which brings me to…

What I Did That Failed

A smart person learns from their mistakes. A smarter person learns from the mistakes of others. With that mind, learn from my mistakes and you’ll all be smarter than me.

An ad network client

To generate a backlink from Wikipedia for our ads client, I found an article which I felt would work as a source and worked backwards. After discovering an article which the client had written on fake traffic, I thought I’d found a winner.

Wikipedia has an article on web traffic, but the article doesn’t mention fake traffic. So, I added in a sentence about fake traffic and used the client as a source. Less than an hour later, my source was removed by an editor but a lot of what I had written remained.

A septic tank installation client

Our septic tank installation client is an expert in a very niche industry. They specialise in developing and installing wastewater treatment equipment. In other words, if you live in the countryside and your house isn’t connected to a main sewer system, our client will supply septic tanks and other equipment to deal with your wastewater.

I scrolled through the Wikipedia entry on septic tanks to find somewhere to insert a link. In the section about emptying septic tanks, I linked to this article which the client had written about emptying septic tanks. Just over one week later, the edit was removed.

A divorce lawyer

This client provides family law services, but one of the blogs I wrote for them was about the greatest divorce lawyers in London’s history. One of those people was a woman named Caroline Norton who campaigned for a woman’s right to divorce a husband. For years, this right was exclusive to men; Caroline Norton changed all that.

I found the blog post on the client’s website first, felt that this would work well as a source, and then searched through the entry on Caroline Norton to find a place to link to my source.

In the blog post that I wanted to link to, I wrote about how Norton had written a letter to Queen Victoria during her campaigning. This information was missing from the Wikipedia article. As such, I added this little tidbit of information in and used our divorce lawyer as the source. Less than half an hour later, an editor had kept my tidbit about the letter to Queen Victoria in, but changed the source from the client to this article from the BBC.

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Why I Think It Failed

After having read through the successful attempts, you might already have an idea as to why the unsuccessful attempts were unsuccessful. Even still, this is what I made of it…

• Lack of expertise — Our septic tank client is an expert in septic tank installation, rather than septic tank emptying. The latter is a separate industry. Our divorce lawyer client is an expert in divorce law, but they aren’t an expert in history or the life of Caroline Norton.
• Website quality — None of these websites are bad. However, two of them are below Moz DA 30. If Wikipedia can find the same information elsewhere from a higher DA website (such as the BBC), that source is preferred.
• Article quality — For two of the three failed links, I used client-written blog posts. They are not terrible posts, but they are not as informative as they could be. The post on fake traffic is very short, which is one reason why I think it was removed.
• Lack of Specificity — For our divorce lawyer, I would argue that the article was of a high quality (because I wrote it…), but it wasn’t as specific as it could be. The post was about two other historical figures aside from Norton. Wikipedia wants sources which directly back up specific pieces of information.
• Rocking the boat — There’s something to be said about shorter edits being easier to defend. For the ad network, I added a whole sentence to the introduction section. For the edit for our HR client (which I’ll talk about later), one of my colleagues added quite a large section to the introduction, too. You only have a few sentences to defend an edit, so the shorter and less earth-shattering it is, the easier it will be able to explain yourself.

Step Two: How Is The Actual Editing Done?

Once you’ve found an article which needs a backlink and a high-quality source on your client’s website, it’s time to actually add the link in. First, click [edit] on the section you want to edit.

Once you’re on the editing screen, switch to “visual editing”. The other kind of editor involves using code. If you’re proficient in this, go ahead. However, the Wikipedia visual editor is incredibly easy to use, so you’re best off just using it.

As a quick aside, note that Wikipedia makes a point of telling you (if you don’t have a Wikipedia account) that it’s using your IP address to track the changes you make to Wikipedia. Your IP address is the address of your router (not your computer) and you can change it by either connecting to the internet somewhere else or by unplugging your modem for a few hours. When you turn your modem back on and reconnect, you will likely be given a new IP address.

Why does this matter? It doesn’t, necessarily. However, if you make lots of bad, spammy edits that are rejected under the same IP address, Wikipedia editors might consider rejecting further Wikipedia edits from that same IP address. This is just something to bear in mind. Here’s the edit history for the IP address of my home internet.

The top two are from me. The rest appear to be from my dad, who seems to have been editing the Wikipedia pages on a couple of footballers. Why he was doing this on a random Wednesday afternoon in June, I have no idea…

When you are on the visual editing page, you can directly edit Wikipedia. This is where you can either add a sentence and a source to an article where you feel it is needed, or you can simply add a source to an already existing sentence. To add a source, click “cite” at the top…

…then enter the URL into the box which appears. Click “Generate” and then click “Insert”.

After you’ve done this correctly, click “Save changes” at the top right.

After clicking that, Wikipedia will ask you to briefly explain what you’ve done and why you’ve done it. You don’t have many characters to do this, so keep it short and sweet. If you scroll back up to my IP address’ edit history, you’ll see in brackets a couple examples of the reasoning I used for our second client backlink and our client backlink respectively. Both of those edits remain, so I’d take what I wrote as a decent example of what works.

Finally, be sure to check back and see whether the Wikipedia editors have kept your source or not. Sometimes edits are removed almost instantly, but sometimes it may take a week or two.

Assessing Failed Wikipedia Edits

If you check back to find that your edit has been removed, it’s important to find out why so that you can learn what the Wikipedia editors do and don’t like. Click on “view history” at the top.

Below is the edit history for an article where I tried adding our divorce lawyer as a source. I mentioned this above but, just to recap, I originally used a blog post I’d written for our divorce lawyer as a source for the claim that Caroline Norton had once written a letter to Queen Victoria during her women’s rights campaigning.

The issue was that the blog post where I made that claim used this article from BBC as its source. As such, the editor (quite rightly) didn’t feel that the link to our divorce lawyer was needed. Instead, they cut out the middleman and changed the link to the BBC source.

The Wikipedia editor made this change within less than half an hour after I’d made my edit. So, don’t underestimate the speed of Wikipedia editors!

Sometimes, Wikipedia editors use their own terminology. The more time you spend on Wikipedia, the easier it is to understand this terminology. Take a look at this (sadly unsuccessful) edit which would have linked to an HR client of ours.

The edit is the second from the top.

At the very start of the entry, you see “(cur | prev)”. If you click on “prev”, you’ll be taken to a page which compares our edit to how the page was beforehand. If you click on “cur”, you’ll be taken to a page which compares our edit to the current page.

If you click on “Revision as of 19:19, 22 August 2017”, you’ll be taken to the page itself and you can see what our edit would have looked like within the actual article.

Going back to the “view history” page, after the “(cur | prev)”, you can see that our edit was made on the evening of the 22nd August 2017. After that, you can see the IP address of my colleague. If you were to click on that, you would see the history of edits made at that IP address.

The entry also tells you that the edit was 1,450 characters long and the reason for the edit is in brackets.

Above this, you can see the edit from Doc James and the reason they gave for changing our edit:

“Reverted good faith edits by 82.34.23.230 (talk): Spam links. (TW)”

Those numbers are our IP address, so the editor is referring to us directly. “Good faith” is a Wikipedia editorial concept and this Wikipedia editor has linked to a Wikipedia article defining it. He also links to a Wikipedia article defining TW. Clicking on these links gives you a better idea of what Wikipedia editors like and don’t like. For any unsuccessful edits, this is why it’s important to check why your link was removed; doing so allows you to learn more about Wikipedia’s standards.

In this particular case, “good faith” refers to the idea that we were acting in good faith. As in, the editor felt that we were genuinely trying to improve the article. TW refers to “Twinkle” which is a gadget Wikipedia editors use to keep things in order. Doc James found our link using Twinkle, but removed it because it was “spam”.

“Spam link” is perhaps an unfair way to label a Clear Review blog post. However, as with most other removed sources, the underlying reason it was deleted by the editor was that the material could be found elsewhere on a website with a higher authority.

Final Thoughts

I focused a lot on what I did and not what Patel and Woodward recommended, as I’m not exactly blown away by Wikigrabber. It works by finding articles which need citations based on the keywords you type into it. It’s helpful, but the citations that are needed are often for very specific pieces of information. What’s more, you likely know better than an internet search tool what you or your client are an expert in and where that expertise would be most relevant.

I also don’t think that Wikipedia backlinking building is a technique that would work for everyone. For websites without a blog — or for businesses in a saturated market —  it’s hard to make the case to the Wikipedia editors that the page on you or your client’s website which you are linking to is the best possible source. For niche businesses, however, Wikipedia backlink building could be a real winner.

All that said, my experience has been very hit and miss. So, if you fare better in your Wikipedia backlink building (and if you find Wikigrabber to be really useful) be sure to let everyone know what you did and why you think it worked.

Need more Content Marketing goodness in your life? There’s so much more! Check out our Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing.

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