<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“The first [bucket] is l<\/a>building ink from quality sites,” he told me. “You might have good content and a fast, mobile-friendly site, but you’re not likely to rank well without backlinks.”<\/p>\n Oxford founded 180 Marketing in 2013. Fast forward to 2022, and the company is made up of project managers, specialists and link builders.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Eric Bandholz:<\/strong> Should Marketers Look For SEO?<\/p>\n Jeff Oxford:<\/strong> Yes, although SEO doesn’t have the publicity it used to.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The opposite is so-called Black Hat SEO, such as keyword stuffing, invisible fonts, auto-generated links from forums, comment posts, and the like.<\/p>\n I can simplify effective SEO into four buckets. The first is link building<\/a> of quality sites. You may have great content and a fast, mobile-friendly site, but you likely won’t rank well without backlinks.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Next is on-page optimization: title tag, header tags like H1 and H2, and image header tags.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n bandholz:<\/strong> Say I’m looking to outsource SEO. What questions should I ask a potential company?<\/p>\n Oxford:<\/strong> Ask about how the company builds backlinks. Do you have examples? Can they explain their strategies and expectations? Ask about their content capabilities.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n bandholz:<\/strong> How can merchants generate backlinks themselves?<\/p>\n Oxford:<\/strong> Offer products that people naturally love attract backlinks<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Sometimes you can turn discount codes into links. Promote the code on related blogs and websites to attract backlinks.<\/p>\n bandholz:<\/strong> How marketers can learn how to do SEO do it themselves<\/a>?<\/p>\n Oxford: <\/strong>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.<\/p>\n bandholz:<\/strong> How can listeners reach you?<\/p>\n Oxford:<\/strong> Our website is 180marketing.com<\/a>. I’m on LinkedIn<\/a>.<\/p>\n