Session 2

Offsite SEO &

Local SEO

Grant Ruxton

Make Google Love Your

Website & Deliver New

Customers

Understanding Offsite SEO

Your backlinks

Link diversity

Social signals

Link attraction

Penalties

Spammy links

Outreach

Offsite tools

Local SEO

Overview

SEO is very much a two prong process

You could invest all your time and money in

building arguably the most beautiful site in

the world, but that won’t help at all if you don’t

have a process of Offsite SEO in place which

helps people find the site

Offsite SEO is all about making your site fit in

it rightful place through a number of different

methods

The best place to start Offsite SEO is with

analysing your backlinks

Understanding

Offsite SEO

Backlinks are any links that point to your site

from somewhere else to create a link a

between the two

Having a good number of backlinks is helpful

in helping a site rank, but that doesn’t mean

that having thousands upon thousands of

links all pointing to your site will work

Sites like Google are more interested in

making sure your site has healthy links

pointing towards your site and prefers to see

a nice level of diversity in your links

Your Backlinks

Link Diversity

Links come in all shapes and sizes

A link can be a simple highlighted hyperlink

which encourages someone to click

It could be an image that has a link attributed

to it, a post someone has made on

Facebook, a news article mentioning your

brand or a link from a site banner.

The more diverse your range of links are, the

more people your site is going to reach

Social signals are a great example of a

diverse link type

Links on sites like Facebook, Twitter,

Instagram, Pinterest or LinkedIn all have their

place and can help site engagement

Measuring these types of links can help us

see which competitor sites are active in social

media without having to keep tabs on their

posts and profiles

Social Signals

Every site works within a niche

For example, if you had a site that sold

pizzas, it would seem odd to have links from

sites that sold printers

It’s a good idea for anyone in charge of a site

to spend some time doing a little research to

see if there are other sites out there who you

know would be valuable to try and get a link

from

Link Attraction

Link attraction involves a high level of

outreach to people and other sites who would

be interested in working together and being

associated with one another

This attraction doesn’t need to happen online,

just as long as it has a value for your site

For example, this image on the right seems

like it has nothing to with a website but

played a big part in a outreach campaign

Outreach

By making content in the real world, we’re

able to extend that content for outreach and

improve offsite SEO which links back to the

site

Outreach

Having outreach and link attraction be a well

thought out process is important, as having

lots and lots of links from bad sites can end

up penalising your site

If your site gets a penalty, it will drop off and

ultimately disappear from rankings, which in

turn means no one will find your site

This happens to sites of all sizes. Even

companies like the BBC and Halifax have

had organic traffic plummet because they

were using spammy links to link back to their

site

Penalties

So what is a spam link?

For example, if you ran a site for a hotel and

had a directory link from a site that looks like

the one pictured Google would consider it

(and in turn your site) spammy

Classic spam links include:

• Anything Automated

• Blog Comments

• Social Bookmarks

• Directories

• Forum Profiles

When a site gets a penalty, it is extremely

hard to recover. For many companies, it

becomes a case of slash and burn if they’ve

been hit with a penalty

It is possible to recover from a penalty, but it

involves a massive undertaking of

disavowing & removing existing links

Spam Links

There are some tools which can help show

you the backlink profile of your site:

• Back Link Analysis

https://ahrefs.com

• Social Signals

https://www.sharedcount.com

Offsite Tools

So now that we’ve looked at onsite & offsite

factors, let’s focus on Local SEO

So what is Local SEO?

When looking for a product or service online,

search engines can put a preference on

location over everything else

Because of this, it is extremely important that

sites which depend on a local customer base

can be seen and heard online

Local SEO

Let’s say you’ve just got off the train at

Glasgow Central and were looking to buy

new shoes

You get your phone out and search for “shoe

shops Glasgow”

Google will present you with a list of relevant

shoe shops because they’ve described their

business as having said product & more

importantly, have optimised their business’

listing in Google Maps

Local SEO

Google My Business is how those listings we

seen rank highly on that map result get listed

Every business should have a listing set up

on Google My Business

It doesn’t matter if you’re a site selling a

product across the UK or one of 20 brand

locations, making sure your business is

visible in these local results is highly

important

Local SEO

This is what the Google+ listing for Schuh

from our shoe search looks like

Notice the lack of branding to identify the

page on a visual level

Local SEO

Now let’s look at those results for

“shoe shop Glasgow” again

You can see how the top result has

something the others don’t: reviews, and lots

of them

Let’s see how their Google + page compares

with the Schuh example we just seen

Local SEO

This is what the Google+ listing for that top

location looks like

See how it is branded, and has been verified

as a real business.

Local SEO

The more information you can provide for

your Google My Business listing, the better

Google (and in turn a user) will be able to

understand a business, where it is, what it

does and how to reach it

And all this is done without having to visit the

site when searching for a company, saving a

person valuable time

Local SEO

So how do you improve your visibility for

Local SEO elsewhere?

Some of the main avenues include;

• Local directories

• Business relevant directories

• Citations

• Name, Address, Phone Number (NAP)

data

If you’re interested in how to track local

directory listings, you can sign up to Bright

Local, a service which helps keep tabs on

important directory listings, at:

http://bit.ly/1GfFHps

Local SEO

In this session we looked at:

What Offsite SEO is

Its necessity

Backlinks

Link Attraction

Penalties

Spam Links

Local SEO

Summary

Thank Youwww.boyddigital.co.uk

@boyddigital