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For Jeff Oxford, the founder of Oregon-based 180 Marketing, search engine optimization boils down to four buckets. Link building, he stresses, is the priority.
“The first [bucket] it’s link building from quality sites,” he told me. “You might have great content and a fast, mobile-friendly site, but you’re probably not going to rank well without backlinks” .
Oxford founded 180 Marketing in 2013. Fast forward to 2022, and the company is made up of project managers, specialists and link builders.
He and I recently discussed the state of SEO in 2022. The entire audio of our conversation is embedded below. The transcript has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Eric Bandholz: Should Marketers Look For SEO?
Jeff Oxford: Yes, although SEO doesn’t have the publicity it used to.
Google has its official guidelines, which state certain things you should do to optimize your organic search rankings. These include creating great content and having a user-friendly, mobile-optimized website.
The opposite is so-called Black Hat SEO, such as keyword stuffing, invisible fonts, auto-generated links from forums, comment posts, and the like.
I can simplify effective SEO into four buckets. The first is link building from quality sites. You may have great content and a fast, mobile-friendly site, but you likely won’t rank well without backlinks.
The next bucket is happy. Original, well-written blog posts and product descriptions are essential for merchants looking to rank organically. Never use manufacturers’ product descriptions.
Next is on-page optimization: title tag, header tags like H1 and H2, and image header tags.
The last cube is technical SEO. Search bots need to easily crawl a site, have no duplicate content, and most importantly, load quickly. Organic rankings on Google are now “mobile first”. Therefore, a mobile-friendly site is essential.
bandholz: Say I’m looking to outsource SEO. What questions should I ask a potential company?
Oxford: Ask about how the company builds backlinks. Do you have examples? Can they explain their strategies and expectations? Ask about their content capabilities.
Link building is the most important thing. It’s hard to get other sites to link to you. Changing the structure or content of a site is relatively easy. Attractive links are not. A newer site with a lower domain authority will not rank well without backlinks.
When it comes to content creation, an SEO company should research keyword opportunities and provide a list of top topics to cover. The company should prepare a summary of contents explaining which questions to answer and which keywords to include.
bandholz: How can merchants generate backlinks themselves?
Oxford: Offering products that people love will naturally attract backlinks. Therefore, selling quality products is the first step. Asking bloggers for product reviews could also be effective, although Google doesn’t technically allow the exchange of reviews for free samples.
Guest posting is another method. Find a relevant site with a good reputation. Write an article that includes links to your product pages. Then approach the publisher to publish it. Be careful with guest posting, though. People will buy a blog and turn it into a guest post farm where 100% of the articles are just guest posts.
Podcasts are another strategy. Research the top podcasts in your industry and offer to appear as a guest. Then request a backlink when the episode is published.
Sometimes you can turn discount codes into links. Promote the code on related blogs and websites to attract backlinks.
bandholz: How can marketers learn SEO on their own?
Oxford: One of my favorite resources for beginners is Backlinko. It provides useful and easy-to-learn SEO information for beginners, all for free. Another great resource is Ahrefs. They have an excellent blog with actionable content and a good YouTube channel that breaks down the concepts step-by-step.
bandholz: How can listeners reach you?
Oxford: Our website is 180marketing.com. I’m on LinkedIn.
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