Marie Haynes will be speaking on Linkbuilding at Engage 2018, which will take place March 8th, 2018 in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.
When I was in high school I was torn between becoming a veterinarian or “doing something with computers”. I ended up going to vet school and being obsessed with the internet throughout my career. In 2008 I learned HTML, CSS, MYSQL, and PHP and created a veterinary Q&A website. I was getting about 30 visitors a day to the site and was trying to figure out how to make more searchers find the site. That launched my fascination with SEO. This site now gets over 12,000 daily visitors.
By 2012 I was spending several hours a day in SEO forums and was doing SEO for some friends’ businesses. I was pregnant and was put on bedrest. At the same time, Google released their Penguin algorithm. The SEO community was flabbergasted and did not know how to figure out Penguin. It became my life’s mission to understand Penguin and to be able to help businesses that had been hurt by this Google change.
Eventually I had forum members asking me if they could pay me for consulting. Initially I said, “No, I’m a veterinarian not an SEO.” But eventually I started to consult where I felt that I could help out.
When it was time for me to go back to my veterinary job, I was making good money working from home and absolutely loving my “job”. I spent several years doing almost exclusively Google penalty work. I eventually transitioned to offering more high level consulting on overall site quality. In the summer of 2017 I leased office space and hired three amazing people to help expand our consulting offerings. Today, our team is located in office #404, and for some reason my husband doesn’t understand when I make “office not found” jokes.
We spend our days improving on websites and helping them to get more Google traffic. My newsletter helps thousands of people stay up to date on the latest changes in search. I also travel several times per year to speak on understanding Google’s algorithms.
2) How viable a link-building tactic is direct link outreach currently?
We still have some good success with direct outreach, but only if we are doing outreach for an amazing client with fantastic content. If you’re trying to build a site in a competitive niche and you’re not doing anything awesome, it’s going to be really hard to get people to link to your content. But, for some of our clients link building is super easy because they are brands that everyone wants to talk about.
3) Are Moz and other “Link Power” metrics helpful or do they cause people to narrow their link targeting to the “top” sites?
We do look at these metrics, but don’t put a lot of importance on them. If a DA 10 site wants to link to a local client of ours we’ll gladly take that link! We do sometimes use these metrics though in doing traffic drop assessments. For example, if our client has a DA of 35 and all of the top ranking competitors have a DA above 60, then it’s going to be really, really hard for our client to build content that is good enough to compete.
We find that many business owners are stuck in an outdated mentality that says that you can take any website and if you get enough links to it you can make it rank. That may have been true in the past, but today, as Google gets better and better at figuring out which websites truly are the best, in order to rank at the top you truly have to offer an awesome experience to your readers.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.