Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Mac: Hi, this is Mac.
Jeff: And I'm Jeff.
Mac: And we're here to talk a little bit about community building and...
Jeff: And SEO. Mostly SEO because we're not really going to talk about the soft and fluffy
community building.
Mac: Whatever. We're going to talk about SEO and community building and then we're also
going to talk a little bit about the experience and then we're also going to talk about guest
blogging and the latest updates with Google and all that stuff that's going down. That's
the lay of the land for today. Let's talk first about SEO and community building and
how those two work together because community building is not fluffy; it actually involves
SEO.
Jeff: We'll see. Explain this to me, Mac.
Mac: Here's the deal: the basic gist is you want to always start from goals. Let's say
you have some things that you want to do with your company, which is usually where goals
come from, you would set those for the entire company not just for SEO or social media or
content or any of those siloed things separately. You want to think about it holistically for
your whole company and then you can move from there. When you're doing that then you can
determine the right tools to match with those goals in order to meet them. Most of the time
we use things like SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, outreach,
in person stuff. There are all kinds of things you can use and it doesn't all have to be
online stuff; it's whatever it is that's going to help your company accomplish those goals.
SEO fits into that mix.
Jeff: Sure. So maybe SEO fits into it well by really bringing in people to your site,
your community and helping expose them to your brand and giving them the opportunity
to make them part of your community, to colonize them.
Mac: Very true. That leads really well into the experience part of all this, right? Because
if you're not providing a good experience then people are not going to want to be part
of your community or whatever you sell or anything like that. I wanted to talk a little
bit about how you're always wanting to think about building your community and building
your business from the inside out. By that I mean you're always working on improving
your products and services, you're always thinking about ways to become internally more
efficient and have better systems and processes, you're always wanting to talk to your customers
and get their feedback. When you're doing all of those things, inherently you're going
to build a better company, you're going to attract people to your community and things
just naturally come together that way when you're building that experience around your
brand.
Jeff: Experience is important for SEO as well because if you don't have a good experience
on your site, if people come to your site and it has poor UX, it's just not welcoming,
they're going to leave. It doesn't even matter that you brought them to your site in the
first place.
Mac: That's very I think we're in agreement about how everywhere you are in terms of where
the experience is happening, whether it's on social, on your blog, on your website,
in person, online, wherever it is that you always have to be working on that experience.
Jeff: Exactly. Or at least for now.
Mac: Hopefully. That third part we really want to talk about today is a little bit more
current news. It's that whole thing with Google and how they're 'penalizing', I used air quotes,
yes, and how they're looking at guest blogging and whether that's good or bad. We use guest
blogging a lot in terms of a tool or a tactic for building community. So I wanted to get
your take on it on the SEO side and then I can share a little bit about how that also
helps build community.
Jeff: I think as you say, guest posting is great for both our goals: it helps with SEO
to build links and it helps with community and exposing people to you and the brand.
From the SEO side I don't think that guest posting is something that Google wants to
get rid of. When you write for SEOmoz, or Moz now, you're adding value, you're helping
their users understand something new and strange and different. Like community. So there's
a lot of value and Google wouldn't want that to go away. I don't think. They don't want
sites offering less value to users because they're afraid of [inaudible 0:04:43] Google.
I think as long as you're keeping it topically focused, keeping it relevant to your business,
again, to talk about you and Moz, writing about community on Moz is great. It's a good
fit with inbound marketing, SEO and everything else you write about.
As long as you have that focus and you really want to do something that will be of interest
to your business and what you have to say is of interest to someone else's readers then
that's great. I'm not concerned about a few off topic links, either from my blog to someone
else's site or coming into my site from a different blog because that's normal. That's
just how the web works; you get random links all the time. When it's something of concern
and something I think Google would start to action on is when most of your site's back
link profile is from these off topic sites or you have links from guest posting sites
where all the content they have is guest posts and there's no consistent theme or topic with
that site. It's just like this mash up of whoever will give them content and they'll
let them link to wherever, whether it's casinos or sports or whatever. They don't care; they
just want the content. If you're guest posting on sites like that, yeah, that can be dangerous
for you. Same thing with exact matching of anchor text. If you're going out there and
doing guest posting to build a ton of exact match anchor text that's something that'll
probably come back to you later and could cause problems.
Mac: This really brings it back to the experience piece we were talking about earlier and the
fact that if you're doing that just for the sake of getting links then obviously you're
not providing any value; you're not enhancing the experience. But also, on the other side
of that when you're building community, especially for companies who are starting from nothing
they think they actually have to start from nothing but that's not true. If you leverage
a community like Moz and you say, 'That's a community I can contribute a lot of value
to' and obviously you can get a lot of value from, then that would be a great place to
guest post, guest blog because you're contributing to that community and it's relative [sic]
there.
Now you've put yourself into maybe a newer audience that you haven't quite targeted before.
Stepping outside of Moz it would be really important to do some audience targeting and
figuring out those other places, those other quality blogs, those other quality forums
for you to get in front of and say, 'I have some value to share, I have some information
to offer that's really useful to you.' Not self promotional and then you attract that
audience to your community and now you've become part of their community. So it's a
win-win on both sides.
Jeff: Exactly. Good for SEO and good for community. I never thought I'd say it.
Mac: We work together.
Jeff: Thanks for talking with us and come see us at SearchLove in September in San Diego.
Mac: Both Jeff and I are speaking there and we would love you to come and have a vacation.
And come to a conference.
Jeff: And learn something.