Category: SEO

SaaS SEO Guide: 5-Steps to Generate 1,000’s of Visits

Posted on by Daniel E. Lofaso

This is a tried and true guide to SaaS SEO for companies looking to increase their traffic, rankings, and ultimately, sales.

We’ve used this exact strategy to help countless SaaS companies get 100s of thousands of visits from SEO.

So tune in, buckle up, and enjoy the ride.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

  1. Ensure Issue-free Technical SEO with an SEO Site Audit
  2. Perform Keyword Research for the Top, Middle, and Bottom of the Sales Funnel
  3. Perform an SEO Competitor Analysis to Understand the SEO Landscape
  4. Write SEO-optimized Product, Solution, and Blog Content
  5. Use “The Skyscraper Technique” for Content Marketing and Link Building Prowess

Ensure Issue-free Technical SEO with an SEO Site Audit

The first thing you want to do to ensure you have a strong SEO foundation for the rest of your efforts is to address any technical issues your site might have.

SEO technical audits are relatively straightforward, but your site may not rank to its full potential without addressing technical SEO issues even if you do all the other things on this list right.

The good news is that you can find any technical SEO issues your SaaS site might have with existing, free tools: Google Search Console. 

After logging in, go to the Coverage area of the site to see what types of technical SEO issues your site may have.

The “Error” section shows how many pages can’t be indexed by Google. If your site looks like this one with zero issues, you are in pretty good shape.

However, I can see that 240 “Excluded” pages were intentionally not indexed. This is probably a non-issue, but I’ll want to check them out to see if I do want these pages to appear in Google.

After drilling down a little further into some of the non-indexed examples, I can get more details and decide whether or not these should be left alone or included in the index.

Any issues I see in the Coverare report should be addressed to make sure my site’s health is as good as possible.

For an even deeper dive on your site’s technical SEO issues you can use a tool like Ahrefs Site Audit or other popular tools like the SEMRush Site Audit or Screaming Frog SEO Spider.

According to the Ahrefs site the tool will help to check for issues related to:

A tool like this is great because it allows you to run automated reports, but the Google Search Console tool is highly effective as well.

Note that technical SEO increases in importance the more traffic your site receives. For new sites it may not hold as much weight, but for higher traffic sites it can be really detrimental to your success.

Now that we’ve performed an SEO technical audit of our SaaS site we can move to the next step.

Perform Keyword Research for Top, Middle, and Bottom of the Sales Funnel

Now it’s time for the fun stuff: keyword research.

But what is SaaS keyword research for top, middle, and bottom of the sales funnel?

The purpose of this type of keyword research for a SaaS website is to drive traffic for searchers who have varying levels of intent.

This is important because you want to attract people to your SaaS at all stages of their research and interest in products like yours.

We have a very in-depth post on SaaS keyword research that you should check out, and I also encourage you to buckle up for this extremely informative video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_G6hgqBQsYs

Let’s take a look at some of the top keyword rankings of Unbounce, a popular landing page software, to see some of the differences between each stage of the sales funnel.

 Here, we can see that most of the top keywords are top of the funnel and informational:

  • What is a landing page
  • Landing page design

We also see some middle of the funnel keywords related to commercial intent:

  • Landing page builder
  • Landing page template

For a bottom of the funnel and decision making search, check out this branded search:

  • Unbounce ab testing

Here are some takeaways for SaaS keyword research that you can learn from the above:

  1. Top of the funnel keywords generally have the most search volume yet have the least amount of intent for a transaction.
    1. Ex. “What is a landing page” has 5,500 searches per month but this searcher is unlikely to be looking for landing page software at this point.
  2. Middle of the funnel keywords have modest search volume and cater to the searcher who is discovering that there are software solutions out there that can be used.
    1. Ex. “Landing page builder” has 1,600 searches per month but shows a high commercial intent of someone who is exploring different kinds of landing page building software.
  3. Bottom of the funnel keywords are highly transactional in intent although they generally have very low keyword volume. These searches are often, but not always, branded.
    1. Ex. “Unbounce ab testing” has only 40 searches per month but shows the intent of someone who is familiar with the software’s capabilities and digging in to learn more before making a purchasing decision.

Now that you understand the different types of SaaS keyword research you need to do I’ll show you an awesome shortcut to your research, starting with your competitors.

Perform a SEO Competitor Analysis to Understand the SEO Landscape

In SaaS SEO just like any SEO, the challenge behind top rankings is always about the competition.

So, before you begin creating any content and dedicating a bunch of time to it, you should see what the competition is up to.

You’ll want to perform competitor keyword research around the same areas you intend on creating content. 

I’d recommend doing this around product, solution, and blog pages to start.

Start with a simple Google search of one main solution your software provides, such as “landing page software” in the case of our Unbounce example.

With this search we can see a “best of” roundup post in the top spot, a People also ask section, our site, and a top competitor, Leadpages. 

Let’s use the competitor found in the roundup post, Instapage, as an example to see how they compare to Unbounce.

You’ll need a keyword ranking software for this type of reverse engineering. We’ll use Ahrefs for this example, specifically their Ahrefs Site Explorer tool and the Top pages filter:

We can sort through Instapage to gain valuable insight into what they are targeting, what they are ranking for, and more relevant information.

As you can see by looking at the URLs, most of the top pages on this site are blogs. This is consistent with our comment on top of funnel content having the most volume, and since this data is filtered based on traffic, it makes sense.

When finding this type of data, make a note of all the types of content that are relevant to your SaaS as topics to cover. Since the majority of this content is blog content, you should have a bunch of top of the funnel content you can create.

But what about product and solutions pages?

Since these types of keywords have less volume, they are buried a bit more in our keyword research tools. However, there is a shortcut to take that involves using the website folder structure of the products or solutions.

Let’s take a look at how we can do that for Instapage.

In Ahrefs, you can look at data from a prefix, or in this case, a specific folder path. All Instapage’s product pages fit nicely into this /products/ path, so I will use that to dig deeper.

Because I want to look at all keyword data from each of these pages (there aren’t too many), I like to use the Site Explorer tool called “Top pages” under the “Legacy” section.

This gives me a nice breakdown of all their product pages with keyword data:

Now, I can isolate specific product page keyword data to see if I want to use the same keyword targeting for my product pages.

Let’s isolate their landing page builder page as this is very similar to the Unbounce product.

I can see that the keyword that matches commercial intent with the most volume is “landing page builder.” If I were creating a landing page builder product page, I may consider this keyword as my primary keyword target.

I could also consider the other keywords particular to that product page for secondary keywords to place in my H2s or elsewhere in my content.

Similarly, I can do this same type of SaaS product page keyword research for Solutions pages.

Pro Tip: When doing SaaS competitor keyword research compare at least three top ranking competitors to see if there is any variety in keyword rankings. Sometimes one site will target different keywords than another and understanding why can be helpful in creating your plan.

Write SEO-optimized Product, Solution, and Blog Content

Now that you have done your keyword research around product, solution, and blog content it is time to write. 

It makes the most sense to create the foundational content for your SaaS website first, so I recommend creating the content for your product and solution pages first. 

These are also your money-making pages, so spend some time creating effective content that really helps your SaaS stand out amongst competitors and by optimizing it for your target keywords.

Product and solution pages are very subjective to your SaaS, but you have a bit more flexibility in creating blog content. 

However, you just don’t want to find a bunch of blogs that your competitors are writing and ranking for and duplicate them.

There are multiple factors you need to consider before putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard).

Factors to consider before writing SaaS blog content are:

  1. Is the topic related to a solution that my SaaS provides?

For example, check out these recent blog posts from Unbounce that are all related to a landing page solution.

  1. Does the topic have ample keyword volume?

For example, does the primary keyword or the combination of potential keywords you can rank for add up to an attractive total.

Unbounce’s page on “What is a landing page?” targets the following keywords (and 955 in total!) making for an attractive target:

  1. How many links do I need to rank for the primary keyword?

The competition of a primary keyword is a very important consideration in determining how much effort you want to put into going after it.

Using the same example above, let’s  drill down on the top ranking keyword of “landing page” and see some data from Ahrefs.

This keyword has a Keyword Difficulty (KD) of 83 out of 100 and is estimated to take 427 links to rank in the top 10. 

Consider Keyword Difficulty when analyzing content you might want to rank for. 

As a good rule of thumb, early-stage SaaS websites should target topics with really low KD to give themselves the best chance of driving traffic.

Ok, now you have decided on some blog content to write and you are onto the next step.

Use “The Skyscraper Technique” for Content Marketing and Link Building Prowess 

You may have heard of The Skyscraper Technique in the SEO world before. 

If not, it is a content marketing and link building strategy made popular by Backlinko to drive lots of traffic and backlinks to one huge content piece. According to Backlinko, the steps to execute The Skyscraper Technique are:

Step 1: Find link-worthy content

Step 2: Make something even better

Step 3: Reach out to the right people

Step 1: Find link-worthy content

Finding link-worthy content is actually quite easy based on some of the steps for finding keywords I showed you above. The same keyword research tools also show link metrics.

For example, the Top Pages report – which shows you the pages with the most organic traffic – also shows how many referring domains (RD) a URL has.

Unbounce’s “What is a Landing Page” guide has 1,377 links at the time of this writing!

This is a very linkable asset it seems. Now on to step two.

Step 2: Make something even better

The definition of “something better” is somewhat subjective. In the SEO world however, we can look at some key factors to determine how awesome a page is and why so many people link to it.

The Unbounce “What is a Landing Page?” page has a lot of great user experience queues. 

For starters, it has a clean, simple to read design with lots of graphics and even a high-quality video.

It has custom infographics like this one above on how landing pages fit into a marketing funnel.

It also answers all types of questions related to landing pages such as “What are the types of landing pages?” These sections are very intentional and versed in SEO keyword research (remember our teachings above!).

The page is also super in-depth, coming in just shy of 2,000 words.

But one thing that really makes this page awesome is that it is part of a content hub.

Unbounce, in an effort to dominate searches around landing pages, have created this section on landing page articles.

In addition to the “What is a Landing Page?” piece, they have created seven other articles to compliment this classic Hub & Spoke model of content hubs. 

If your SaaS is targeting a very specific hub topic, I encourage you to create your own content hub. Check out this post for some awesome examples, or this post on a great resource hub case study.

You could say that it would be really hard to create “better” content than Unbounce has around landing pages, but you could certainly try.

According to Ahrefs, the four criteria used to assess content quality are:

  • Content clarity
  • Content depth
  • Usefulness
  • Presentation

Check out their video on How to Create Content that’s “Better” than Your Competitor’s for an additional perspective.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5KKbPS6N-g

Step 3: Reach out to the right people

Reaching out to people is perhaps the most important aspect of getting your content to rank. After all, we established that you generally need more links than your competitors to outrank them.

Basically, you want to perform outreach to site owners who have shown that they already link out to similar topics.

Here’s how to do this.

  1. Find the top 10 sites on a topic similar to yours.
  2. Export the links pointing to your competitors into one spreadsheet
  3. Filter your spreadsheet down and remove links from sites that are low-value directories, forums, or sites that may not meet your Domain Rating requirements (such as sub DR15).
  4. Send a custom email with some personalization

Here’s Backlinko’s outreach example:

Now, email outreach to sites that already link to your competitors is not the only way to perform link building. However, if you want to play the numbers game it may be a very viable approach.

You can also consider guest blogging, podcast links, press mentions, or other popular link building strategies.

One criticism of The Skyscraper Technique is that it does not take into account Domain Rating. 

From Ahrefs: Domain Rating (DR) shows the strength of a website’s backlink profile compared to the others in our database on a 100-point scale.

For sites with a high DR, they may inherently be able to rank easier than you, with much fewer links than you.

So for SaaS sites with small DRs (<30) going after keywords that are dominated by sites with big DRs (>60), you’ll want to consider this before you start Skyscrapering content. 

The Benefit of SaaS Content Marketing 

SaaS companies who invest in long-term content marketing strategies have a lot to gain, especially when compared to other marketing channels. Some revealing data from a ProfitWell survey called “Does Content Marketing Actually Work?” provides some of the following benefits:

Admittedly, it is getting harder to stand out from all the noise as so many companies are creating good content. However, this data reveals that it is likely more costly to not invest in content marketing than it is to remain on the fence.

On to You

SaaS SEO is an investment in research, content development, and link building. 

Done correctly, it can provide the best ROI of all your marketing efforts which makes it a very viable strategy to execute and get right.

If you need help with your SaaS companies’ SEO, feel free to reach out and get a free consultation. 

Posted in SEO

9 Link Building Strategies to use in 2022

Posted on by Daniel E. Lofaso
https://youtu.be/9J618i_RMpI

If you want your content to rank, you will need to know the best link building strategies to use. In today’s video, Digital Elevator Founder and CEO Daniel Lofaso goes over 9 of the most popular link building strategies to use in 2022 with a breakdown of their pros and cons.

These strategies include:

1. Guest Blog Posting
2. Link Requests
3. Broken Link Building
4. Directory Links
5. Reciprocal Link Building
6. Unlinked Mentions
7. Syndication
8. Community Site Links
9. Paying for Links

After watching this video you’ll know about the various ways to approach link building and which strategies you should consider to help rank your, or your clients’, content.

References:

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-guest-posting-for-links-warning/372115/#close

https://ahrefs.com/blog/broken-link-building/

https://ahrefs.com/blog/reciprocal-links/

https://ahrefs.com/blog/unlinked-mentions/

https://visual.ly/view

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/link-schemes

Posted in SEO

How to Forecast SEO ROI for Ecommerce Businesses

Posted on by Daniel E. Lofaso

Are you a marketer trying to forecast the potential SEO return on investment (ROI) for an ecommerce website but don’t know where to start?

Good news. You’re going to learn how to do that today.

Here’s a little technique you can showcase to huge ecommerce sites to let them know the potential SEO ROI they can get by ranking for some target keywords.

Here’s the other good news:

 
  • You don’t need access to their site’s analytics
  • You can compare their site to that of their main competitors
  • The whole analysis will only take you about 30 minutes
  • You’ll be able to communicate SEO ROI in dollars

So, before you learn how to forecast SEO ROI on ecommerce sites, let me give a little context to this particular evaluation.

Grand Western Steaks: Ecommerce SEO ROI Forecasting

Did you know that you can order steaks, seafood, poultry, and other meats straight to your door?

Of course you did, and this is actually quite a large market, particularly dominated by Omaha Steaks. Perhaps you’ve even ordered a ribeye or two. Mmm.

Anyhow, for this ecommerce SEO ROI forecasting example the focus of my example will be Grand Western Steaks, an ecommerce meat and fine foods provider that doesn’t have anywhere near the search engine results pages (SERPs) dominance of Omaha Steaks.

Because they don’t have the SERP market share of their competitors, therein lies an opportunity to see what the potential ROI of SEO can be.

To do this, I looked at the following areas:

 
  • ​Competitive Analysis & Traffic Value
  • How Context Matters in Website Optimization
  • A Potential Monetization Example (Post Optimization)

One thing that you’ll notice in this SEO audit of sorts is that I used some domain-level metrics as well as broke out one example of a single product for a comparison point. If you were to break down the SEO potential of each product on a site of this magnitude, you might as well just go ahead and get the authorization to perform SEO on the whole site.

Breaking out a product or two makes this sort of recommendation easier to digest for the powers that be and almost makes your job of providing this type of analysis a little bit easier.

With some imagination, it would be easy to see how much revenue potential a finely tuned SEO campaign could work across all products.

Anyhow, the first step in this SEO ROI audit is to determine who the competitors are.

Competitive Analysis & Traffic Value

Start with the below competitive analysis to identify opportunities within the search engine results pages for queries related to the products and services provided by Grand Western Steaks (or your client). Namely, high volume keyword opportunities that show buyer intent (more on this below) indicate great potential to increase sales if search engine rankings can be increased. 

By evaluating the equivalent monthly cost of traffic from all keywords that the target website/URL ranks for if paid via PPC instead of ranking organically, we are able to get a sense of how valuable a domain’s keyword profile is. @daniellofasoClick to Tweet

We can also compare that to other competitors in the space to estimate how profitable their websites are due to their SEO efforts.

I use Ahrefs to get an idea of these metrics very quickly. Their Site Explorer tool provides a quick overview of the initial information we need to compare competitors.

In this case, I was already familiar with their competitors and ran them each manually through Site Explorer. However, if you are unfamiliar with the competitors of a site you are looking to compare, simply enter some keywords that your target site sells into the SERPs, document the sites that rank in the top three, and then run those sites through Site Explorer to get the below high level info.

Note: Ahrefs also has a “Competing Pages” feature you can use to see what sites they think are similar in keyword targeting.

For this approach, I don’t want to confuse non-marketer CEOs with metrics about backlinks or referring domains, so I just took a screenshot of the metrics that they would actually understand (definitions pulled from Ahrefs):

 
  • Organic keywords– Shows the total number of keywords that the target website ranks for in the top 100 organic search results.
  • Organic traffic– This metric estimates the total monthly search traffic to the target website from the top 100 organic search results. It is calculated as the sum of traffic from all organic keywords for which the target ranks across all countries in our database.
  • Traffic value– This metric shows the equivalent value of the organic search traffic, should that traffic have been acquired via Google AdWords.

With those definitions in mind, here are the screenshots of the competitors I pulled for this analysis:

ecommerce SEO ROI

Now we have a baseline for how many keywords our site and our competitors have within the top 100 results (organic keywords), how much traffic from those keywords Ahrefs estimates (organic traffic), how much the organic traffic that comes to the site would cost if paid via Google Ads (traffic value), and much Ahrefs estimates a site is paying for Ads (traffic value: PPC). 

To help provide a side-by-side comparison, here’s a graph that shows those metrics.

  Organic Keywords Share Organic Traffic Organic Traffic Value PPC Value
Grand Western Steaks 6,400 2,100 $2,500 $93
Omaha Steaks 114,000 276,000 $193,000 $134,000
Kansas City Steaks 33,100 37,400 $46,700 $14,700
Allen Brothers 36,000 52,300 $42,800 $12,800

When you put a site up to competitors like this, it’s easy to see how Grand Western Steaks is leaving money on the table.

They have about one fifth of the keyword share as the next closest competitor (Kansas City Steaks), and about 1/18 of that of Omaha Steaks. If you’re wondering why the organic keyword share and the organic traffic share can be so far off, remember that organic keywords shows keywords that rank in the top 100 while organic traffic is an interpretation of clicks.

Solely on the above we know that there is tremendous opportunity to gain some traffic share. You can move straight on to the potential monetization example below if you’d like from here, but I want to show where, exactly, I believe this site is missing out on this traffic.

This is where context comes into play.

Context Matters in Website Optimization

One of the primary opportunities found with the site is the potential optimization of each product. For example, not optimizing for purchase-related keywords — buy, shop, order, sale, wholesale, etc — can lead to lack of rankings for potential customers who have online ordering intent, or as we have seen, lead to the ranking of paid ads where the intent for a purchase is not evident.

For example, a search for “veal cutlets” (something Grand Western Steak is targeting with ads), indicates, according to Google, the intent for a searcher to look for recipes.

Search results for “veal cutlets”

SEO ROI keyword context

What has been identified across the board on the site, and an area for opportunity as it relates to gaining market share in search engines and better competing for more keywords and selling more products, is including buyer intent optimization to all the products.

For example, the current veal pages are not optimized for buying intent as they lack buying keywords in their title tags. In a way, this site is competing for the recipe searches rather than transactional ones the way it is currently optimized.

SEO ROI ecommerce mistake

An example of an optimized title would be something like “Buy Veal Cutlets Online | Overnight Shipping | Grand Western Steaks”. Additional optimizations to the product pages could also be implemented to better compete for buyer intent keywords (but that is a separate blog altogether).

Potential Monetization Example (Post Optimization)

To forecast the ecommerce SEO return on investment, what I want to do now is find some product-related examples, determine their total search volume, and do some quick calculations. From there, you’d just divide the amount you’d make from the potential revenue by the amount you pay for SEO.

For example, the search “steaks online” gets around 2,900 searches per month in the US. Generally, the top three spots in the search engines get the majority of the clicks:

 
  • Rank 1: 70% of clicks = 2,030 clicks
  • Rank 2: 20% of clicks = 580 clicks
  • Rank 3: 10% of clicks = 290 clicks

Now let’s assume a 5% conversion rate of paying customers with an average order of $200.

 
  • Rank 1: 2,030 clicks x 5% (x $200) = $20,300/month
  • Rank 2: 580 clicks  x 5% (x $200) = $5,800/month
  • Rank 3: 290 clicks  x 5% (x $200) = $2,900/month

Of course, this is just one keyword example amongst 100s of products which demonstrates why the organic values in the chart above for the competitors are so much higher than Grand Western — the competitors have invested in SEO and have keywords that rank well that account for their larger percentage of traffic from search engines.

Calculating Ecommerce SEO ROI

Now, I’m assuming you already know how to calculate ROI but we’ll want to make this really easy for those CEOs to understand, right?

Rather than going after the entire site and trying to dominate rankings for each product, I’d suggest you take your/your client’s ‘s top five products. Let’s also assign your SEO investment so we can mash the numbers together to get the ROI.

In this example, let’s also assume the five products all have the same search volume, same conversion rate, and average cost of the example above (2,900 searches, 5%, and $200, respectively) for simplicity sake.

You can then calculate the potential revenue of ranking 1-3 for those five, $200 products.

 
  • Rank 1: 10,150 clicks x 5% (x $200) = $101,500/month
  • Rank 2: 2,900 clicks  x 5% (x $200) = $29,000/month
  • Rank 3: 1,450 clicks  x 5% (x $200) = $14,500/month

Now, let’s assume the SEO fee is $5,000 a month. We just divide the above revenues by $5,000 to get the ecommerce SEO ROI:

 
  • High end ROI: $101,500/month / $5,000 = 20.3 x ROI
  • Middle ROI: $29,000/month / $5,000 = 5.8 x ROI
  • Low ROI: $14,500/month / $5,000 = 2.9 x ROI

Of course, this doesn’t account for caveats like the fact that not every product will rank #1, 2, or 3, that these are the only keywords that will result in sales, or that ranking outside of the top three could still equate to sales, or that there will be a ramp up period.

These are just general, big picture numbers, that showcase the potential of SEO for a few select products. But as you can see with Grand Western Steaks, the potential to target some lucrative keywords can pay off.

I use this formula as sort of a proposal for bigger ticket clients and you can too.

What else would you add to this or what other techniques do you use to showcase what SEO can do?

Posted in SEO

Holy Grail SEO: How to Find Low Competition, High Volume Keywords

Posted on by Daniel E. Lofaso

Content Marketing Case Study: How to Find Low Competition, High Volume Keywords

If keywords are the core of SEO, why is it that so many people still go after the wrong ones?

In order to drive traffic to your website you have to utilize keyword research and content marketing strategies that actually give you a chance of ranking quickly.

In today’s post, I want to introduce a content marketing technique that allows you to rank your content with little to no links (links are still one of Google’s most highly aspects of ranking). I call this technique “Holy Grail SEO” and I covered it in-depth on a beautiful post featured on Search Engine Journal.

So what is Holy Grail SEO?

In Arthurian literature the Holy Grail is a cup that allows it’s owners to have infinite abundance. In SEO, using the Holy Grail technique will give you abundance in the form of boatloads of traffic.

The difference in the Holy Grail SEO technique and the actual Holy Grail is that you don’t need to embark on some mystical journey to find it; I’m going to show you how to rock it out right now.

Read on to learn more about how Holy Grail SEO can help you:

 
  • Understand how important low competition keywords are to your overall SEO and content marketing strategy
  • Identify low competition, high volume keyword resources
  • Utilize keyword competition data to create in-depth, high ranking blogs

The Importance of High Volume, Low Competition Keywords to Your SEO Strategy

Traffic from search engines is an obvious benefit to any website. However, generating that traffic with content that is related to your brand can often prove to be challenging, especially for sites that don’t have the luxury of being able to publish content and automatically begin to drive loads of search engine traffic to it (like some big brands can).

Don’t get caught up in the “publish and pray” approach so many content generators utilize to create content. Don’t just create content for the sake of creating content; be intentional about the content you create as it should provide a return on investment to your business based on the time and resources you put into it.

Whether you are an SEO yourself or doing SEO for your own website, your goal is the same: try to drive (relevant) as much traffic as possible as fast as possible. Because fast traffic is more of a luxury than a reality, we need to implement strategies that help us to satisfy the goals of our clients as well as our own websites. We also want to be able to pull off strategies that allow us to benefit from the search engine traffic that bigger, more established sites generate.

This is especially true for:

 
  • Startups
  • Brand new websites
  • Websites with little or no domain rating
  • Brands that are in super competitive industry’s
  • Any combination of the above

 

Who should go after low competition or high competition keywords?

As alluded earlier, some sites just can’t compete for certain keywords or topics and therefore may want to consider not exhausting the resources to go after them. These sites might be better off going after topics that are low competition — meaning easier to rank for — while still maintaining some degree of search volume.

So who should go after high competition keywords and why?

When it comes to search engine rankings and correlations, there tend to be a number of important factors that will dictate whether a page will rank or not. To oversimplify what these are (there are over 200 Google ranking factors), here are some of the main factors that may dictate a pages ability to rank:

 
  • Topical relevance to search query
  • Domain rating of the website
  • Links to the page

 

In terms of topical relevance, we can all go after any topic that we want and publish pages on them. This, of course, does not mean we will rank for them mostly based on the other two factors mentioned above.

Domain rating, a proprietary Ahrefs’ metric that shows the strength of a target website’s total backlink profile, can provide a major headstart for brands attempting to rank for certain topics. The metric is measured logarithmically from 0-100 to showcase, essentially, how popular a site is. Forbes.com for example, has a domain rating of 93.

This is why a site like Forbes can virtually publish an article on any topic and rank for it. However, smaller sites — or those with smaller domain ratings — may have to work harder at the next metric to get more attention from Google (i.e. rank better).

Links to a page is the other metric that influences how well a page can rank. Often, a page with more links will outrank a page with less links. Sometimes the page with a higher domain rating and less links will still outrank the page that is on a site with a lower domain rating. There is no exact rule for this, this is purely based on correlation.

Anyhow, you need to keep this in mind as a content creator because you should obviously be creating content with the intent of getting as many eyeballs on it as possible. The Holy Grail approach, however, accomplishes this goal by allowing you to be strategic in what topics you target, or put another way, topics you don’t.

Below I will detail how to use data to understand what topics you can potentially rank for easily and how to find them.

Using the Holy Grail SEO Technique to Find High Volume, Low Competition Keywords

Before diving into how to find high volume, low competition keywords we must first understand that the definition of “high volume”  is subjective. For example, in some industries a high volume topic may be 500 searches a month, while in others a high volume topic may be 50,000. Either way, you must keep in mind long-tail traffic, which is why we will discuss how to create complete topics that rank for boatloads of keywords.

Method 1: Using Google SERPs to Reverse Engineer Results

When you want to cover a specific topic this is probably one of the best approaches to take. The second approach also allows you to target specific topics, while the third approach involves stealing topics from your competitors.

Starting with the Google search engine results pages (SERPs) to reverse engineer results is a good foray into one of the three options for finding high volume, low competition topics. Here is a case study from one of our financial planning clients, Castle Wealth Management, where we used this approach to great success.

Castle Wealth wanted to cover a blog post on trusts as many of their clients are high net worth. While we like to tackle topics that our clients want, our job as an SEO and content marketing agency is to have conversations with our clients about how to be intentional about the topics we cover. Plus, we knew a topic in the finance industry would put us up against sites like are likely to dominate the space such as Kiplinger (DR 84), Nerd Wallet (DR 86), and Forbes (DR 93).

Here’s how we, and you, can tackle this type of keyword research and determine if a topic is worth going after.

You’ll need some software to make this kind of advanced prospecting happen, and in this case, I use Ahrefs. More specifically, I use their Chrome extension for its data on Domain Rating, Referring Domains, and the Keywords a page ranks for. It’s cool because you can get data directly in the SERPs without having to visit a site or run it through the software.

Anyhow, with the software in place and the topic of trusts to evaluate, we start with some initial searches on generic queries such as “What is a trust.”

As you can see above (and as highlighted), the top result for the topic has a high Keyword Difficulty (29), has a bunch of links (Referring Domains (RD)), and is on a site with a massive Domain Rating (DR) of 89. As you may expect, a topic like this gets a lot of searches per month, 17,000 (indicated by “Volume”).

Because our goal is to be able to realistically rank within the top three search results, we decided to stay away from this topic.

Eventually, we found that the search for “Why would you put your house in a trust” was a really great candidate.

The number one ranking site had these factors that make the topic ideal for our client to go after:

 
  • The site has a DR of 31 (not much higher than what our client was at)
  • The post only had seven Referring Domains
  • The topic only had a Keyword Difficulty of 5 out of 100
  • The topic had a search volume of 200

 

While the search volume of 200 is not particularly high, something we picked up on was the total amount of keywords this post ranked for, over 1,600 (as indicated by the “KW” on the page level).

These signs all looked pretty good, but we wanted to look closer at all the potential long-tail traffic (in Ahrefs) before committing:

As the Darrow Wealth Management site ranked really well for loads of keywords that were related to trusts and many with really low Keyword Difficulty, we knew this was a win.

To summarize why this was a good topic to emulate:

 
  • It was related to our clients offerings — they provide financial advice on setting up trusts
  • The topic had a lot of long-tail traffic potential
  • The sub-topics and related keywords to the topic were all relatively low Keyword Difficulty
  • The top-ranking spot did not have a lot of links and was not a site with a really high Domain Rating

 

So, what are the next steps? Write a bigger, badder blog post!

Let’s teleport about 3-months after we published the blog for Castle Wealth Management and see how we started to compete:

As you can see, the page ranks really well for a large amount of long-tail keywords. What’s more, we only built one backlink to the page and have now benefited from high rankings for nearly 500 keywords.

Take a look at the Google Analytics traffic to see how this post for Castle Wealth continually grew:

And just to provide some silence to the negative Nancy’s out there who think this strategy only works because the target competitor (Darrow Wealth Management) had a modest Domain Rating, check out all the other sites we outrank that are way bigger in DR than Castle Wealth:

This is just one strategy to use when you have topics in mind. In addition to doing research from the Google SERPs, you can go straight to Ahrefs to do the work for you.

Method 2: Using Keyword Software to Target Specific Topics

Another excellent way to find that low hanging fruit content is to use the Ahrefs Content explorer tool. This too allows you to search by topic but offers some additional filters that make it a joy to use.

For this example, we decided to write about the topic “garment bag.”

Start by throwing your topic into the Content explorer:

For generic topics like this, you’ll likely see something like the below — a result with 1,000’s of pages in the index that you’ll want to filter down.

There are a lot of filters that can be utilized and it’s actually quite fun to play around with the tool to generate results, but there are some rules to live by to start finding topics with a lot of keyword traffic.

As you can see above, I set the organic filter to “From:500” to see pages that rank for 500 or more keywords. You can get more aggressive if you have a lot of results to shift through, and vice versa.

In this scenario, filtering out pages without at least 500 ranking keywords left us with 173 pages. Because that is still a lot of pages to review, I can apply more filters to determine if there are better options. Thus, I set an additional filter for a DR above 30. Filtering out sites with a higher DR shows results that apply to smaller sites I can likely compete with easily with good content alone.

This is not a hard and fast rule however; just because a page that lives on a site with high DR ranks well, does not mean it won’t have low competition, high volume topics. In this case, however, there are a lot of results so we have more play in what we can filter out.

Now, with filters set to organic traffic above 500 keywords and sites with a DR below 30, we now have 10 pages to review based on the “garment bag” topic:

The next thing to do is open up the Organic keywords tab on each site to see if there are low competition, high volume keywords that are Holy Grail material.

Boom! And just like that we have our first candidate meets our criteria for Holy Grail SEO:

 
  • First off, this page has about 1,200 keywords it ranks for
  • The page itself only has one referring domain
  • The volume behind a bunch of the searches compared to the KD is great. Lots of long-tail keywords to consider in our blog post that we’d likely rank for easily.

 

Now, I can repeat the same process with the other sites in the filtered list to document the keywords my writers should cover in the blog post.

I really like this approach, but my favorite way to find Holy Grail opportunities is analyzing competitors sites and stealing their high volume, low competition topics.

Method 3: Looking at Competitors to Find HV/LCK Keywords

So far we’ve looked at two ways to use topical analysis to find blogs. But what do you do if you don’t have a particular topic in mind or can’t seem to find anything that you like using the other approach?

You mine competitors’ sites, find their best content, and rewrite it.

Let’s check out another example in the financial industries space, an industry that is extremely competitive and full of great content everywhere you look.

To start, you’ll simply want to visit a popular site that is in the same niche as your site. For this example, I referenced NerdWallet because they are really popular in the space and rank well for a lot of topics.

Grab the NerdWallet domain and plug it into the Ahrefs Site explorer to begin the process.

Because this site is a behemoth, it is going to rank for a ton of different keywords so we want to filter down our results. First, I’m going to click on “Top pages” — pages Ahrefs is telling me ranks for a ton of keywords — and set the Keyword Difficulty filter down to 10 (although you can get more aggressive and go lower to see how many results you get).

With our Top pages and KD 10 or below filter in place, we immediately see some really good candidates such as “how to fill out a money order” and “best time to buy a tv” as potential options to cover. Of course, you want to make sure any option you choose to cover is relevant to the audience of your site.

To dive a little deeper, I can open an Organic keyword report for the pages I want to investigate and reference the Volume and Keyword Difficulty. Here’s the report for the “how to fill out a money order” post:

I can see this post ranks for a lot of high volume, low competition keywords making it a solid candidate for a similar post on my (or my clients’) site.

I can even take the main keyword a step further to see how many links I might need to build to rank for it on the first page. “How to fill out a money order’ gets 23,000 searches per month and is a KD 6! According to Ahrefs, I’ll need about seven links to rank on the first page.

Utilize Keyword Competition Data to Create In-depth, High Ranking Blogs

Now, if there is something that needs to be mentioned it’s the fact that you can’t simply publish any old blog and expect it to rank. In other words, you’ve only done some of the hard work required to give yourself the best chance of ranking. The next part is actually writing the blog you want to rank.

Great keyword research needs great writing!

While this is not a post on how to write a good blog, it is integral that you carry out good copywriting to give yourself the best chance of ranking. Here are a few resources that may help you with that:

 

 

In addition to good writing, I want to emphasize the importance of being truly exhaustive with the topics you cover. This means doing a competitive analysis of the other pages that rank for your target keyword and making something more in-depth and ultimately better.

A great way to do this is with the inclusion of keyword rich subtopics. The good news for you is that these should already be revealed when you did your initial topic research.

For example, let’s review the keyword data from the “garment bags” research to see if we can pull some sub-topics.

Ok, great.

We have a bunch of good data on volume and KD but is this alone going to make your blog rock? No, it needs a little logical thinking to ensure the post has good talking points while also being intentional about the keyword opportunities.

Let’s go with a topic for our post that is general but seems to cover the keyword opportunities we found. Something like “17 Best Garment Bags of 2019.”

Now, let’s take your keyword data and make something of an outline for the post that flows logically and still leverages the keyword data intelligently.

 
  • Best roll up garment bags
  • Best carry on garment bags
  • Best garment bags with wheels
  • Garment bag carry on rules
  • When to get a tri fold garment bag

 

As you can see, my keyword research has dictated my subtopics. If you think about it, it really should as volume has everything to do with interest in a topic. Thus, it makes sense to cover high volume subtopics.

Another great area to pull additional sub-topics (leaning more on the logical side) is within the Google SERPs. Check out the “People also ask” section as well as the “Searches related to” sections for inspiration:

Embark on Your Quest for Holy Grail SEO Today!

Holy Grail SEO is something that will work for every kind of site, big or small, high DR or low DR, and those with lots of human resources at their disposal and those without.

The research portion gets easier the more you do it and can actually become second nature once you get the hang of it. And while we never rule out content promotion or link building as additional was to drive traffic and exposure, it’s nice to know you can lean on Holy Grail SEO without having to dedicate a bunch of resources to social promotion or link building.

Try Holy Grail SEO yourself and enjoy the abundance it brings your website!

 

Advanced Link Prospecting Using Google’s Panda Questionnaire (Video)

Posted on by Daniel E. Lofaso

Save Time and Get More Backlinks with these 11 Link Building Prospecting Hacks

If you’ve ever tried to do the manual outreach of link building you know how hard it can be. You can do email outreach to dozens or 100’s of sites and get little to no responses.

More often than not, I’ve learned that the reason for this is that you have chosen a poor site to perform outreach too.

In today’s video, (which is something of an advanced SEO tutorial) I’ll show you 11 quick link prospecting hacks — in part based on Google’s Panda Questionnaire — that will save you time, help you filter your link building prospecting sites more quickly, and ultimately, give you more outreach success, resulting in better rankings and more traffic.

What is the Panda Questionnaire?

Before we begin, here is some context to using the Google Panda Questionnaire and why the questions that were used to help people vet “high-quality” sites are some of the same ones we use for building high-quality links.

Here’s how this process came to be:

Google gave questions to a group of people, had them assess a bunch of websites, and then ran machine learning algorithms on top of the human data. In effect, these questions helped move up or down search results based on human feedback. The primary factory of “what makes a quality website” was incorporated into Google’s Panda algorithm.

You can use variations of these same questions when link prospecting to ensure you are getting the most value out of your link building efforts. These are some of those Panda questions mixed in with some of our own link prospecting questions.

1. Does the site contain contextually relevant content

Is the site’s content you want to build links from similar in scope or nature to that of your site? If so, that means it is likely a strong link candidate. Now, not all sites have to cover the same types content as yours, but it definitely is a preference.

For example, if you run a fitness website, you could make a connection with a nutrition website as the two main focuses of content — fitness and nutrition — are related.

2. Would you trust information from this website?

Does the site’s aesthetic meet your professional “website sixth sense?”

You can easily tell if a site looks credible or not. If it doesn’t, don’t waste your time prospecting it.

3. Would you recognize this site as an authority?

Sites that cover all sorts of different, irrelevant content are usually a waste of time and link farms. On the other hand, if the content seems very credible, well-researched, and professionally made, then it likely makes for a good link prospect.

4. Would you give this site your credit card info?

We’ve all been to websites that sell products or services that we instantly have a sense of trust with. Some of these trust signals may include an SSL certificate, professional design, and a strong brand presence.

If the site doesn’t pass the “smell test” of one that you’d make a purchase from, scratch it from your link outreach list.

5. Does the domain rating match what you are looking for?

At Digital Elevator, we use the Ahrefs Chrome extension to quickly see the Domain Rating (DR) of a website. You can also use the MozBar which displays Domain Authority.

Internally, when we do link prospecting, we’ll generally set a floor for the DR of the sites we want to get links from. For example, often this floor is a DR 30 meaning that a site with a DR under 30 will be thrown out immediately.

This is especially true if you are using guest posting as a link building strategy – you don’t want to dedicate a bunch of time to a site that demands 1,000 word posts when they have a low domain authority.

The idea is to prospect quickly, and that also means that you don’t want to waste time on a site that may give you a link if the link is weak and doesn’t provide the SEO value that you want in your link building efforts.

6. Is the site written by subject matter experts?

Does the site seem to let anyone guest post? Do the writers seem to conduct thorough research and have insightful content?

Read through a blog or two to get an idea of the quality. If it is choppy and littered with grammar errors, it probably is a poor outreach partner for you.

7. Does the site get any traffic for relevant keywords?

Check the keywords the target site is ranking for to determine if it actually gets any traffic. We use Ahrefs to do this, but there are a number of SEO software tools you can use. A trustworthy site will generally rank for a number of keywords whereas a spammy site will likely rank for none.

You have to watch out for spammy sites that have artificially inflated DR; these links look good on paper but are unlikely to help your efforts.

8. Does the site regularly post or are they an active brand?

There are a few ways you can do this:

 
  • See if they publish blogs regularly
  • If not, check their social media feeds to see if they are active
  • On that note, see if their content actually gets any social shares (an indication of some sort of following)

9. Is there actually a person you can contact (rather than just a generic email)?

Many sites hide their email because they don’t want to get spammed. While you can use a service like Hunter to find emails, if there is no real contact information you may want to scratch them off the list.

10. Does the site have a “Sponsored Post” option?

This means they are big enough to get money for their posts and means, technically, it’s only an advertising opportunity. If you do outreach to these types of sites, expect them to respond with a “yes, but it will cost you ‘x’” for a post.

11. Is the site a really large brand?

Large brands typically have in-house teams that create content and are unlikely to respond to any link outreach. While you can certainly try to perform outreach to them, I generally find them unlikely to respond.

What other vetting questions do you use to prospect sites? Please let me know in the comments.

How to Sell SEO to CEOs (or the c-suite) VLOG

Posted on by Daniel E. Lofaso

Are you tasked with selling SEO to your CEO? Or, do you know that SEO is a really good option for your company’s marketing dollars but you need to get the c-suite on board with your SEO recommendation?

This blog is for you.

As someone who has sold or pitched SEO to countless CEOs and c-suite executives, I’ve learned a thing or two about talking the talk and walking the walk. Also, for what it’s worth, I’m a CEO too.

What Not to Say to CEOs When Selling them SEO

One thing I’ve learned about about talking to CEOs about SEO is that they have no desire to hear about how much you know about algorithms or how it all works. Don’t waste your time talking about link profiles, canonical URLs, alt tags, meta data, or any technical SEO.

CEOs care about numbers, costs and profits. Hit them here, and not by showing off your knowledge of technical SEO, and you will have their ear.

Put Yourself in Your CEOs Shows When Talking about SEO

CEOs are busy. You have to understand that (unless they ask) they really only want to know a data-driven answer as to why you think your company should invest its marketing dollars somewhere else. CEOs care about results. Give them an answer as to how they will get them and you may win them over.

You need to be able to communicate to them quickly and efficiently:

 
  • Communicate in terms of business goals.
  • Communicate in terms of risk.
  • Remember, that executives have bosses too.
  • Be aware of your company’s budgeting and planning.
  • Think like a boss – know the most you can about how SEO can help the company.

CEOs are decision-makers, not problem-solvers. They are going to ask:

 
  • Why should we invest in SEO vs. [insert another strategy here]?
  • What profits can you estimate?
  • How long is it going to take?
  • What are the KPIs?
  • How many widgets do we have to sell to justify the costs?
  • Can we do this in-house?

Point Out the Competition’s Strategy

I once had a CEO tell me he wanted to “suffocate the competition” in the business sense. Showing a CEO that their competitors are having success with SEO — and assigning a revenue estimate to it — can make them move faster than a fiddler attracts a square dance. Show them the actual search results for the keywords you’d like to rank for. Next, explain that the reason the competition is showing up on the first page, and you’re not,  is because you don’t have SEO services.

Show Them Some Credible Stats that Back-up Your Results Claims

 
  • 72% of marketers say content creation is the most effective SEO tactic (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)
  • 71% of B2B research starts with generic searches. (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)
  • 57% of B2B marketers agree that SEO has the biggest impact on lead generation. (Searchmetrics)

Better yet, if you have some tracking in place, maybe you have some solid metrics that showcase previous successes with organic search.

Example: We had a big real estate development client with a CEO who was known as a ball-buster. SEO was never really on the table — he was more on board with PPC — until his marketing team showed him data that proved CPA with SEO was cheaper, and more effective, than display. He changed his tune and they are still enjoying success from it today.

Put the Emphasis on ROI

Estimating ROI is challenging but if you are somewhat savvy you should be able to get some estimates on this. For example, say your budget is $1000. Your average order is $50. This means you have to sell at least 20 items to break even (not including overhead).

If you can show that you expect to sell 40 items after 4 months of SEO, and make $2000, and up to 100 items after 8 months ($5000), and more, then you will have a strong case for generating the budget and green light.

Setting Expectations with CEOs

With all things marketing, you have to set proper expectations. The last thing you want to do is say SEO will take a few months to ramp up when you know it will take 10. If you are pressured to get more immediate results, consider bringing PPC into the mix alongside SEO.

Ranking for Your Brand Name When it is a Generic Phrase

Posted on by Daniel E. Lofaso

Ever wonder why you can’t rank first in Google for your brand’s name? This post will show you how.

As an SEO company that regularly helps clients build their brands, it’s been natural for us to get a few clients that want to rebrand under a different name. Naturally, they want to rank for Google searches for their new brand name, and sometimes this can require more effort than other times.

In fact, when Digital Elevator was started, the phrase “Digital Elevator” was associated with some LG (the TV-makers) ad that had some global reach. That meant that I had to do a bit more legwork to get my brand name to rank first for searches for the company.

But, as I would find out, and as I have come to find with others clients, my brand name was slightly generic and this brought out a very important consideration for how difficult it would be to rank number one:

My brand name was slightly generic and this brought out a very important consideration for how difficult it would be to rank number one:

That’s right, the context of your brand name has a lot to do with its difficulty ranking it first. For example, I once led an SEO campaign for a cosmetic dentistry website that featured a product called “Lumineers,” a type of dental veneer. At one point, we had the Lumineers page on our website ranking second, just under the brand’s website, until Google came along and made some context-related changes to the search engine results pages (SERPs).

As you may know, there is a band called “The Lumineers,” and these guys became very popular shortly after our dentistry website was created. Because Google figured that a search for “Lumineers” was more likely to be for the band than the dental product, the context of this search, at least in Google’s eyes, leaned more towards results for the band.

This remains true for this search to this day; Lumineers, the band, dominates the SERPs while the dental product only shows up once on the front page:

This is a perfect example of how context – for a brand trying to rank or for rankings generally – can present a challenge for ranking.

In the case of Digital Elevator, we were able to successfully rank number one for our brand as well as fill the first page of the SERPs with our social media profiles. This is the marking of a successful branding campaign. I’ll teach you how to do this below.

If your company is like Lumineers, the type of name that exists already and is associated with something else, the likelihood of you ranking first depends on a few things:

  1. How popular your company is compared to the other product/service/person
  2. The context of the phrase that comprises your brand name
  3. How much SEO you are willing to do

Now, I don’t want to get your hopes up if you just named your company Coca-Cola Paint and want to have it rank for “Coca-Cola.” You’ll never do this, no matter how much money you spend on SEO.

If Google feels a phrase is contextually related to something specific, it will always want to deliver that result to searchers in an attempt to match their perceived intent.

If Google feels a phrase is contextually related to something specific, it will always want to deliver that result to searchers in an attempt to match their perceived intent.

However, if there is not some megabrand, band, or phrase dominating the space, you may have a shot.

How to Rank for Your Brand Name

Ok, so you’ve made the decision to rank for your brand name. Here’s how to give it the ol’ “college try.”

1. Get the exact match domain

In my case, I bought the domain name thedigitalelevator.com. According to Moz’s Search Engine Ranking Factors 2015, Domain-Level Keyword Usage, or having “exact-match keyword domains, partial-keyword matches, etc.” is the seventh most highly correlated ranking signal.

How to Rank for Your Brand Name

Source: Moz

If this is already taken as a .com, you can always try to buy a different TLD: .tv, .co, .biz, etc. A dot com is always going to be your best bet, but in an effort to maintain branding consistency and play nice with ranking correlations, I’d advise this. Of course, you have to take a look at whether or not a brand that owns the dot com is ranking and if you want to compete with that.

2. Update all of Your Social Media Accounts

Slightly less tricky than getting the domain, but tricky nonetheless, getting all of your social media profiles to have your brand name in them is your next step.

Facebook

Facebook, being the nice guys that they are, will allow you to change your page name once, and only once. They will also allow you to change your business URL as well… but only once.

Obviously, with Facebook and all of your social media accounts, you want to change the name rather than create a new profile because you want to maintain your followers.

Twitter

Twitter has far less strict rules about name changes than Facebook, but this doesn’t always mean the @name you want will be available. If it is, you’re home free. If not, you have a couple of options:

  1. Contact the person who is using the handle you want and negotiate (you’ll have a better chance of getting this if they don’t use it and if they don’t have any followers)
  2. File a trademark issue with Twitter. You will, of course, have to prove all of this.

Instagram

Changing your name on Instagram is pretty easy as well. Here’s how.

However, if you’re username is already taken, Instagram is not much help. They recommend choosing an available version with “periods, numbers, underscores, or abbreviations.” Like Twitter, there is an option to allege an infringement of trademark rights though.

3. Build Brand-based Links

If you refer to the above Moz graphic, you’ll see the most highly correlated ranking signal is Domain-Level Link Features. This would include link metrics such as the quantity of links, the trust of those links, domain-level PageRank of those links, etc.

Build Brand-based Links

Source: Moz

Link building may be the single most important thing you do in your effort to rank for your brand, but you’ll still want to do the other items mentioned above.

Link building may be the single most important thing you do in your effort to rank for your brand

So, what is a brand-based link? For me, a link that used the anchor text “Digital Elevator” is what I’d be shooting for. If you were to take a look at my backlink profile and that of most brands, you’d see that most instances of links to our sites include the brand name as the link text. Ex. a link to the Yankees website would be Yankees.

If you wanted to increase the likelihood that you would rank for your brand name, building links with the anchor text of your brand name would be the most powerful way to do so.

If you don’t have the resources to build links (or simply don’t know how), you have another option. You could try to make changes to the instances of your brand around the web and see how that does. This assumes that your brand is preexisting though and has mentions on the web. To do this, you’d find all the sites on the internet that mention your brand but don’t link to it, and ask them to.

When you are building links for your website you got to be very precise on what you do. Every marketeer worth their salt knows what a backlink is. Building backlinks can quickly become a minefield of mistakes and mishaps for the uninformed SEO. Check out this step-by-step process on how to build backlinks the right way in 2018.

Rank for Your Brand Name: Next Steps

After reading this post you should have a good idea of whether or not the brand name you want to rank for will actually have a shot of ranking first on Google. If it is super-generic, your chances become much harder, but this doesn’t mean it is impossible.

Regardless, you should try and update your domain to have an exact match of your brand name or at least contain the main words. Secondly, update your social media profiles so that they are all consistent with your new brand name.

Finally, build links to your website using the exact words of your brand name. This will be the most powerful thing you can do but will also be the most time-consuming, depending on how competitive or contextually challenging that name is.

If you have any specific questions about how to do this, for help doing this, or to determine how viable this would be, feel free to reach out to me or comment below.

How to do Local SEO for Your Gym

Posted on by Daniel E. Lofaso

If you own a gym or some other type of fitness establishment (ex. CrossFit), there’s a good chance a bulk of your leads will come from your website. Thing is, you may not know how to optimize your gym’s website for SEO or how to get the most out of the traffic it currently generates.

As a whole, it seems there is continued interest in health and fitness as revealed by Google Trends data.

Gym SEO

As the above information clearly shows an upward interest in gym-related search engines queries, you’ll want to do all you can to get a piece of the pie.

Keep the below information handy when building out your gym website or if you are a web development agency building out gym websites for your clients.

A good gym website includes these five must-have elements

You ever go to a website for the first time and feel like you’ve been there before? That feeling creates a sense of trust in a brand and you’ll want to try to establish that right off the bat with your gym website. Here are some standard items that should be on your site:

1. Address and contact info

Gyms are highly localized businesses meaning your target audience will only travel so far to get to you. According to a poll conducted by BrightLocal, clients will drive a shorter distance to local businesses that offer leisure pursuits. The gym, in this poll, was a business that merited a 12-minute drive time.

It goes without saying that people will want to know where your gym is before they sign up so make this information easy to find. I recommend embedding a Google Map of your business on a clearly identified contact page.

2. Photos of interior and amenities

If someone is going to spend their hard-earned money on a monthly commitment like a gym, they are going to want to know what it looks like inside. Invest in a professional photographer for this one and leave the dark, foggy, cell phone images for social media.

3. Your offerings and membership packages

Like a restaurant should showcase their menu, your gym should showcase the services or classes it offers. Each service should get its own dedicated page as to provide it the best opportunity to rank in the search engines. Learn more about that in this gym SEO case study.

The membership packages are also huge items your potential clients will be looking for. Take it a step further by mentioning the membership packages on the site, everything that is included in them, and provide clients the ability to checkout right online.

4. Testimonials

Nothing says your gym is awesome like recommendations from your existing clients. Get testimonials, reviews, and before and after transformations and put them on a dedicated page on your site as well as a few on the homepage.

5. Way to get a free pass

A great way to get leads is to offer a free pass. Some gyms offer a free pass for a few days, others offer a free month if the member signs up with a credit card. The latter approach may work best as it gets them in the system, allows for more time to get acclimated to the gym, and provides the whole satisfaction guarantee thingy (if you have one).

On-page Elements Set the Tone for Your Ability to Rank

Going along with number three above, some of the best things a gym website can have to attract more search engine traffic are some solid on-page elements.

If you want to try to rank a spinning class for your gym in Chicago for example, you’d be advised to do something like the following for your spinning class page:

  • Create a title tag like “Spinning Classes Chicago- [gym name]”
  • Create a H1 like “Spinning Classes Chicago”
  • Create a URL like “example.com/spinning-classes-chicago”
  • Add “spinning classes Chicago” within the content of that page
  • Add an image and make the ALT attributes have the words “spinning class Chicago” in them

Schema.org is a Search Engine’s Best Friend

Schema.org is a vocabulary that is used to help webmasters and developers communicate what their pages are about in a search engine-friendly way. Google, Bing and Yahoo all sponsor Schema.org and these schema’s, called structured data, are a great way to get more interest from search engines to your local site.

Gym SEO
Examples of Schema markup. Source: WordStream

If you have a WordPress website, you can install a plugin to help you get this structured data on your pages. Check out LBC Local SEO or Local Search SEO Contact Page or, for a paid option, this option from Yoast.

If you don’t have WordPress, the quickest way to get this HTML is Schema Creator.

Business Directory Listings/Citations are a Must for Local SEO

According to data from Moz, external website signals like citations (a fancy way of saying directory listings but a citation can also mean simply a mention of your business online) are one of the most important ranking factors.

The most important of these by far is Google My Business, a free listing that allows you to take ownership of the way your business appears online. The idea with citations is to claim as many as possible, starting with the ones that already rank on the first page for searches related to your gym.

For example, a Google search for “gym Chicago” currently reveals Yelp at the first two spots. That would be a great place to list your gym since that is likely a highly popular page. Other important directory listings include Facebook, data aggregators like LocalEze, gym-specific directories like FitLink, or region-specific directories like http://www.denver.com/places.

There are some great services that offer citation building for you such as BrightLocal and WhiteSpark. Digital Elevator offers citation building as part of our local SEO packages and you can always just do it yourself (check this blog for a nice list of citations).

There are no hard and fast rules to how many citations you should build but generally we build our local SEO clients anywhere from 40 to 100.

A Review Strategy is Great for Social Proof and SEO

In addition to being a driver of social proof that your gym is the place to be, reviews also have been correlated with higher local rankings as well as a major factor in purchasing decisions.  Therefore, it makes sense to encourage your gym clients to leave reviews of your business on Google as well as the other popular directory sites (commonly Yelp, Facebook, Yellow Pages).

To get reviews, send out emails to existing clients you know love you and provide them with the links to your directory listings so they can leave their five-star reviews. You can also create links to your directory pages on your site so they are visible and can be navigated to easily.

Link Building is Tough but a Major Ranking Factor

Links are probably one of the hardest things to do for a local business. They are also one of the most important; the aforementioned Moz study we linked to early puts link signals as the second most important ranking factor for local SEO.

When you’re building links it’s important to have in mind that this work is time-consuming and sometimes very hard. To ease your work you can use this tool – Linkio.com which can be a huge time saver and also will automate your process and give you the exact link building game plan for any target website.

They also have a blog dedicated to local link building that is worth a read as is this local link building guide from ahrefs.

Final Word on SEO for Gyms

Gyms are really mini communities so it always helps to try and showcase what your community is like through your website. Still, before you can do that you’ll have to actually get people to come to your website.

Take the above advice and implement it into your website to help your gym rank for all of the classes, services and amenities it offers. These same principles can be applied to small gyms or CrossFit-like establishments.

If you have any questions or other input, please feel free to reach out to me or leave a comment below.

An SEO Perspective on how to Determine Domain Name Value

Posted on by Daniel E. Lofaso

We’ve all been there before. You logon to your favorite domain purchasing service only to find that the domain name you want is already taken. Head, meet wall.

Sometimes these domains are for sale and are simply “parked,” or other times you get contacted from a domain broker who realizes your business name may be similar to something he’s selling.

This always begs the question, how much is a domain name worth and how much should I offer/pay? This industry has always seemed liked the Wild West to me. Maybe we can end this once and for all?

Let’s address the costs and potential value of a domain name from an SEO perspective but also a marketing perspective (which is just really another way of saying SEO anyway).

Here’s What You Should Know about Choosing a Domain from a General Standpoint

Back in 2007, Moz, a SEO software company, published a post on the rules for choosing the right domain name (by Rand Fishkin). These rules still apply and will somewhat set the tone for the rest of this post.

I have condensed them here:

1. Brainstorm 5 Top Keywords

It can be good practice to have a domain that includes the keywords you’re trying to rank for. So, for example, if you are in the fitness business, something with “fitness, health, exercise, nutrition” could be a good part of the domain.

2. Make the Domain Unique

You don’t want to get in the situation where you can confuse your domain name with that of another brand. The example Rand uses is Flickr.com and an existing site that, at the time of his post, was not owned by Flickr – Flicker.com. It seems that Flickr heeded his advice and has since purchased Flicker.com which now 301 redirects back to the main site. Look out for situations like these or those that have plural, hyphenated or misspelled versions and, where possible, avoid these domains.

3. Choose a Dot-com

People still assume that websites end in .com so you should always seek to buy a domain with this TLD. While you can have a site that is .net or .org, you’ll still want to own the .com as well to take control of all the branded properties.

4. Make it Easy to Type

If you have to break down how to spell the domain when you’re talking to potential customers you’ve probably selected a bad one.

5. Make it Easy to Remember

This goes along with the above; make your domain easy to remember so that people can easily type it in from memory later on. Think how easy Amazon.com is to remember and spell.

6. Keep it as Short as Possible

In an effort to push a lot of keywords into domain names, a lot of people have purchased really long domain names. Long domains often break the above two rules.

7. Create and Fulfill Expectations

If possible, buy a domain that is associated with a word that accurately describes what you do. Amazon.com is an example of domain that doesn’t, WebMD.com is an example of a domain that does.

8. Avoid Copyright Infringement

Before buying a domain make sure to visit Copyright.gov to ensure you are not violating any copyright laws.

9. Set Yourself Apart with a Brand

A lot of times companies will buy a domain rich in keywords but that has nothing to do with their actual brand name. It is recommended that your domain also be your brand name, if possible.

10. Avoid Hyphens and Numbers

Hyphens are amateur-hour in domain names and should be avoided as much as possible. Numbers make it hard for people to know if it is the spelled out number or the numerical one.

11. Don’t Follow the Latest Trends

A lot of recent trends in domain names have been shifting to things like .co or purposeful misspellings. This is especially true in startup communities. Just because others are doing it doesn’t mean you should too.

12. Use an Ajax Domain Selection Tool

I’ve heard stories from people where they say they’d use a domain name search tool from a company that sells domains, didn’t buy it, then when they went back the price had either increased or was suddenly sold and was for sale for a ridiculous amount. Remember that you can search for domain names without doing it through a service with sites like Domjax.

The Value of a Domain from a Marketing Perspective

Ok, now that we have identified some points to consider for choosing a domain we can also use this information to determine what the value is of a domain name that is already registered by someone else who wants to sell it to you from a marketing perspective.

Taking points 3, 4, 5, 6 and 9 from above, pure marketing savvy would tell you that the first indicators of a site even being worth your consideration for purchase are:

 
  • It’s a dot-com
  • It’s easy to spell
  • It’s easy to remember
  • It’s short and sweet
  • It’s your brand name

Adding one more to this list that may or not be obvious is the following:

 
  • One-word domain names

Note: While all these points need not be met to justify a purchase, the more the better.

General Value of Dot-com’s

As mentioned above, if you get your hands on a good domain name and it’s a dot-com, you can expect to pay more. If you already own the dot-com and just want to get a hold of all the other TLDs to protect your brand (.net, .co, .biz, etc.), then that would be a good way to protect your brand name.

General Value of Domain’s that are Easy to Spell

A domain that is easy to spell means that you can say it and people will be able to find it without having to go through the process of going through half the phonetic alphabet each time you try to direct someone to your site. The more basic a word is as a domain, the more value it will likely have. This is especially true for easy-to-spell words that are four to six characters (ex. art.com or Amazon.com).

General Value of Memorable Domain Names

Domain’s that are really easy to remember will merit more value. Amazon.com is the easiest domain to remember that I can think of because it rhymes (this may or may not be influenced by the subconscious brand power this domain affords). If you are seeking to buy a domain that is really memorable expect to pay more for it than a domain that is weird, like Abstentious.com or something (hey, it’s available!).

General Value of Short Domains

If your domain name is short, this makes it more valuable as it is extremely rare to find a domain that is short and that is actually a correctly-spelled word. A short domain doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a one-word domain either, LendingTree.com is a fairly short domain – under 12 characters – and is two words.

General Value of a Domain that is Your Brand Name

If you find yourself in a position where someone owns the .com of your brand name, you’re in a pretty tough spot to negotiate and you likely didn’t do enough preliminary research before choosing your brand name.

That’s the harsh truth but should be understood if you are entering a negotiating position. Still, it doesn’t mean that you’ll end up spending a bunch on a domain name because someone else owns the brand name that you went with.

For example, a client of mine who owns a flight charter company (and who I’ve had this conversation with before regarding the value of domain names), had a brand name of “Great Flight.” Unfortunately, this domain, GreatFlight.com, was not available at that time so he settled for “GreatFlt.com.”

GreatFlt.com didn’t meet a lot of my general marketing criteria for a domain name:

 
  • It wasn’t easy to spell
  • It wasn’t easy to remember
  • It wasn’t technically his brand name

The client asked that I help him decide what the domain GreatFlight.com was worth as he knew it was important to his branding (even though he’d already bought a bunch of shirts with “GreatFlt.com” on them!). Taking the general marketing considerations in mind but also the SEO value of a domain is important, and you’ll learn more about that below.

The story actually ended pretty well as we found that the owner was willing to negotiate. The site had no SEO value and other than being a fairly generic and easy to spell and remember domain, really had no other inherent value. I think the original owner was asking $1,500 for this particular domain but my client ended up getting off him for like $300 or something that did not break the bank. Winning!

General Value of One-Word Domain Names

Back to the general marketing criteria after a nice little story of someone who didn’t get ripped off.

If you can find a one-word domain name that meets most of the above 12 criteria you can probably expect to pay an arm and a leg for it. It’s not that one-word domain names automatically rank in the search engines or anything like that, it’s just that from a marketing and branding point of view they make a lot of sense. I guess you could say they have a lot of practical value, especially if they are short, easy to spell and easy to remember.

But at the end of the day, it’s the SEO value of a domain name that would make me suggest to a client to get their checkbook out. If you can combine the above general marketing valuation factors with the proceeding SEO values, you’re on to something big.

The Value of a Domain from an SEO Perspective

If you have a terrible domain name that gets 100,000 visits to the associated website each month a lot of the above can be thrown out. At the end of the day Google ranks individual pages, not sites based on their domain name (although this is a correlation factor).

Let’s take another one of my clients and a current domain purchasing opportunity that has recently come his way to help you understand how an SEO would go about valuating a domain from a search engine perspective. My client’s site is FitnessMentors.com and he was recently approached with the potential sale of domain FitnessMentor.com (no plural). Where possible, I’ll look at the purchase of this site in SEO terms based on the advice I gave my client with the examples below.

These are not necessarily listed in order of most importance although they can be loosely interpreted in order of value.

Keywords in Domains and Rankings as Interpreted for Value

According to a recent study conducted by Moz on search engine ranking factors domain-level keyword usage has an influence of about five out of 10 (with 10 being highly influential).  The below graph also outlines some correlations between keyword usage within the domains:

As you can see, the correlation between a search and an exact match domain name is fairly high. If you are going to buy a domain that is an exact match keyword of a keyword that you’d like to rank for (ex. custom widgets/customwidgets.com) then that definitely sets the value at a high place.

Partial matches of a keyword in a domain name (ex. search for blue widgets and your domain is customwidgets.com) then that also is something that works in your favor and increases the value of that domain. Keep in mind that just because a domain has some or all of the keywords you are going after in it doesn’t necessarily mean it will rank, but rather it is likely that whoever owns or owned that domain probably dedicated a lot of their content to ranking for those keywords which would lend itself to algorithmic bias.

In the case of my client FitnessMentors.com and the potential purchase of site FitnessMentor.com, the above benefits of purchasing a domain with exact or partial match keywords doesn’t really apply. He is not actively trying to rank for “Fitness Mentor” (he already ranks #1 for this), the intent of someone searching for “Fitness Mentor” is not consistent with his site’s offerings (he sells educational materials to personal trainers), and furthermore there aren’t a lot of monthly searches (70) for this term according to Google Keyword Planner data anyway:

Keywords in Domains and Rankings as Interpreted for Value

We are getting a little ahead of ourselves here with the above keyword search volume data but the point is that other than from a general marketing standpoint, the name does not lend itself to the keywords in domain factor we mentioned above. But, since I mentioned it, let’s look at that as a factor.

Domain Keyword Monthly Search Volume

If the domain you are looking at buying does in fact have keywords –exact match or partial – you are trying to rank for, it makes sense to determine the search volume of these keywords to see how much potential value they have.

Simply go to Google Keyword Planner, sign in (you’ll need a free Gmail account), and do the following:

Under “Find new keywords” select “Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category”:

Domain Keyword Monthly Search Volume


You should see the following area where you’ll put in your keywords into the “Your product or service section” (we put in “Fitness Mentor” in this example). Then click “Get ideas”:

Domain Keyword Monthly Search Volume

Next, select the tab for “Keyword ideas” to see the search volume for the particular keyword:

Domain Keyword Monthly Search Volume

This information will show you the average number of times people have searched for that exact keyword, the competition based on a simple criteria of Low, Medium or High, as well as the suggested bid. If you’re not familiar with Google AdWords, the suggested bid amount may confuse you. These numbers could get pretty high, just check out this search for “defense attorney” and how much higher the suggested bid amount is than it is for “fitness mentor”:

Domain Keyword Monthly Search Volume

The takeaway is that the higher the search volume, the more competition and the higher the suggested bid, the more valuable the domain if it does in fact contain these exact words or most of them.

PageRank as a Domain Valuation Factor

Another thing I look at when determining the value of a preexisting domain is the PageRank. The higher a site’s PageRank, the more likely it is to appear at the top of Google search results. PageRank, a Google construct, works by counting the number and quality of links to a page and is indicated by a 0 through 10, with 10 being the most powerful. Google used to have a tool in Chrome where you could check this but have since disabled it. Just do a quick search for “PageRank plugin” and you’ll find something that helps you determine this number.

Not that you should hold me to this, but you could very easily apply another $1,000 for each numerical PageRank above one. For example, the site “FitnessMentor.com” that is for sale has a PageRank of two and my client’s site, as it is new, has a PageRank of zero. If we decide to buy it and do a 301 redirect of the site to my client’s, we would be confident that we would get a large portion, 90 to 99 percent, of the ranking power of that site, meaning we could likely jump to a PageRank 2 quickly based on the strength of the existing domain.

Before you go all crazy buying up domains and 301 redirecting them you should learn more about that process and involve an SEO and development team who is familiar with the process. Not to get too far off topic, but in many instances you want to do 301 redirects page by page rather than just the entire domain as individual pages/URLs (ex. customwidgets.com/blue) can have value too.

PageRank may be dead, so don’t say I didn’t warn you. Google has said that they wouldn’t be making any updates to the PageRank algorithm so it may not be the most accurate thing around to determine the authority of a domain or page. This leads us into a nice little segue of other tools that are updated regularly that were built to emulate Google’s PageRank.

Domain Authority as a Domain Valuation Factor

Domain Authority as a Domain Valuation Factor

Domain Authority is a lot like PageRank in that it is a calculated metric for how well a domain is likely to rank in the search engines. It was developed by Moz and is based on a scale from 1 to 100 (with 100 being highest), and is in fact, maintained regularly unlike Google’s PageRank.

It is made up of an aggregate of metrics like:

 
  • MozRank: a link popularity score
  • MozTrust: a link trust score
  • Link profile: a number of varying factors related to types of links on and point to a site

A site with low Domain Authority is in that 1 to 20 range, moderate Domain Authority in the 20 to 40 range, and pretty high Domain Authority in the 40+ range. This is not factual data, just the opinion of an SEO and my experience with websites.

In the case of my client’s prospective purchase, the site FitnessMentor.com has a Domain Authority of 27, which isn’t amazing, but it is not too bad either. Comparing it to the PageRank of two, this seems about right and you’ll find that they’re tends to be some correlation there as in, if one’s high, the other tends to be high too.

You can determine a domain’s Domain Authority quickly with the Moz Toolbar for Firefox or Chrome.

Backlink Profile as a Domain Valuation Factor

The above PageRank and Domain Authority metrics do take into account the backlink profile. While you could by all accounts take the marketing value, the PageRank and Domain Authority and make an estimate to how much a domain is worth this might not be where you want to stop your search.

The reason I say this is for the exact same issue we are going through upon trying to evaluate the FitnessMentor.com website. Before I dig in you’ll need to know that you’ll need to have some SEO software to do a backlink profile analysis. You can use something like Moz’s Open Site Explorer or Ahrefs to see what kind of links are pointing to the domain you are consider purchasing.

Some of the most important link metrics you’ll want to look at are:

 
  • Number of Root Domains linking to the domain: in general, more is better.
  • Total number of links: in general, more is better although if the ratio of referring Root Domains to the total number of links is low, it could signal a warning.
  • The anchor text of the links: anchor text is highly correlated with high-rankings and an inspection of this could reveal a lot.
  • The authority of the links: determining if the links that point to the site that you want to buy are from other high-quality, authoritative websites or spammy, low-quality sites.

When I analyzed the PageRank 2, Domain Authority 27 site of FitnessMentor.com for a potential purchase, my first impression was that this would be a good buy for my client if he could get it in that $1,000+/- price range. Then I looked at the backlink profile and scratched my head a bit.

What I found was that the site only had about 20 referring domains linking to it, which is by no means amazing (I build some of my clients more than 20 links a month). Then I looked at the number of total links which was over 22,300. This was a WTF moment. This means that there are a bunch of sites that probably have a link to this site either in their footer or on the sidebar of their site. In other words, they link to this domain on every page of their site which can be a red flag as a lot of sites that do that sort of thing are spammy or it could just mean that they are owned by the same person.

In the case of FitnessMentor.com, it appeared to be the latter; another one of their web properties or partner sites was linking to it in the footer. This is not a deal breaker, it just means that the total amount of links is not representative of the popularity of that domain as the amount of referring links to the domain would be.

When I looked at the anchor text of the links pointing to the site I found that most of them were just names of the developer of the site who commented on a lot of blog sites. These links were all useless from an anchor text perspective and are borderline damaging to the quality of the link profile. I even found one piece of anchor text to the site that was, no joke, “bent over the car free video chat slight bend nude and porn pictures.” This is not good.

Finally, the authority of the sites that linked to this site was low with the exception of one link from eHow that was unfortunately nofollow.

In all, the backlink profile sucked and had some serious red flags as I was not going to let some site that had a decent little PageRank and Domain Authority score ruin my client’s site because it had been penalized for having a shitty backlink profile. I told the client that I wanted to get access to the other guys Webmaster Tools before making a decision and to see if there were any violations of Google Webmaster Guidelines as noted in the Manual Actions section of the site’s Web Master Tools.

At the time of this writing I don’t yet have access to this. I told my client that if I he wants to buy the site there may be a fair amount of link cleanup to do, costing him more in SEO because “homie don’t play that.”

Existing Website Content as a Domain Valuation Factor

This is an important consideration for value that is often overlooked. It is also one of those things that when a domain is purchased, the new owner destroys a lot of the SEO value because they don’t take the time to determine the value of all of the pages (URLs) on the site.

For example, let’s take the FitnessMentor.com website for example. What we are really looking at here is an entire website, not just a domain. This may or may not be the case in your situation but if you are looking at buying a domain and the existing website, you’ll want to pay close attention.

Upon investigation of the site, I found some blogs and pages that I feel are of decent value and could potentially rank in the search engines or could be used as foundations to build better content off of. Not to go crazy here, but the idea would be to grab that content, put it on my client’s existing site, then 301 redirect those old, individual pages to the newly created pages on my client’s site.

Rather than grabbing a domain and saying let’s point A to B, you are going through it and finding the content that may be valuable to your end-users and determining if it is worth saving.

If you find that a domain you want to purchase has a lot of good, useful content that can be used on your existing site, it has more value to you. The owner of the other site doesn’t need to know this, but you will need to have your development team involved to perform the 301 redirects accordingly.

Other Associated Web Properties as a Domain Valuation Factor

Where there’s one there’s usually another. Website owners tend to have more than one property and often have taken their chances at multiple ventures. Before you pull the trigger on the purchase of a domain, make sure to ask the current owner if they have any other associated domains or web properties that are connected to it.

This also includes but is not limited to social media accounts, blogs (ex. blog.customwidget.com) or other digital properties that may have some value. If, for example, you find that the potential domain also a Facebook and Twitter following of 100,000 relevant people, maybe they can agree to give you ownership of those accounts as well.

Domain Age as a Domain Valuation Factor

Another thing that is of very small consideration but worth mentioning is domain age, something that Google has said is not super important but is relevant. You can usually find the age of a domain and how long the owner has owned it by using a service like Whois.net.

Perhaps more important, from an offering point of view, is determining how long someone has owned the domain. If you use the Whois.net service you’ll find a “Creation Date” and that will let you know how long someone has potentially owned a domain (barring the fact that they may also have purchased from someone else).

Still, if you find a domain that has been owned for 10 years and figure that most non-premium domains are about $10 a year to maintain, you can assume, all other factors mentioned above aside, that the owner will want to get his $100 back. This is on you whether you think they deserve it or not.

Domain Name Calculators. Are They Accurate?

Personally, I don’t think software can be quite as subjective as a human when determining the value of a domain name. While some objective analysis is important, a lot of the characteristics of a domain name’s value should be examined relative to your business and its goals.

For starters, a domain name calculator is going to provide very little SEO background into what a site is worth or what it ranks for. Some of the criteria one domain name calculator used to determine the value of a domain included PageRank, the number of pages in Google’s index, its social media visibility, the number of backlinks as well as the estimated traffic.

While these are important metrics, I found that they were completely inaccurate compared to the analysis I performed with my many SEO software tools. In fact, one of these domain calculator sites (whose name I’ll leave out) placed the value of the FitnessMentor.com site at over $7,000!

Keep in mind that this site only has a PageRank of 2, very few pages that are actually non-product specific (which would not be valuable to anyone else), no social visibility (according to their analysis), no backlinks (according to their analysis), and five daily visitors (according to their analysis). I’m not sure where they put all their weight but this site is clearly not worth over $7,000.

Maybe sites like these are why domain name sellers tend to be completely on a different planet when it comes to determining what their sites are actually worth.

Negotiating the Price of a Domain Name

If you do decide that you want to buy a domain name from a private owner or a brokerage, expect the typical “make me an offer” response. For some reason these people always want you to make the first move and for some reason they always seem to be insulted when you procure your bid.

Just make sure you try to understand how they valuate their domain and hope that they don’t say with a domain calculator site. If you know a little about what they are using to justify their cost, you can break that info down and likely prove them wrong (without insulting them).

Now that you have read this post and know how to value a website properly, you can come at them with an army of facts that justify your bid. Just because someone is an ass for buying a domain that has no inherent value doesn’t mean you are too.

However, if you find a domain that checks off a lot of general marketing valuation criteria as well as the SEO valuation criteria you may be prepared for a battle. Whenever possible, make it known that you know a lot about what really makes a domain valuable without letting them know how many of those things their domain has.

For example, if the domain has a high PageRank and Domain Authority but has a poor link profile, don’t tell them about the good things. Let them know that you’ll have to spend hours and $100s cleaning up the bad links they built and that greatly devalues their site. You’d probably be better off picking apart the general marketing valuation items where possible as many domain owners aren’t going to know what they hell you’re talking about when you tell them that the ratio of referring domains to total links makes the site less valuable anyway.

What are your experiences with trying to buy domains? I’m sure there are some good horror stories as well as success stories. Did I miss anything that you’d consider when buying a domain or that needs to be thrown into the mix?

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