Introductions Thread

What's up OP, we have similar life stories, except your sounds more interesting.

I'm not sure why you think PBNs are the way to go. Maybe they could be, you're only an employee after all, so it doesn't destroy when it gets wiped, but honestly I would learn some more all round skills except just buying links.
 
Ryuzaki said:
Some brand new guy came onto the scene and offered an absurd amount of money to teach him "almost everything."
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Another internet marketing/SEO industry dark secret is about to get revealed...

"If you are a pretender you will suffer." Dan Peña​
 
JasonSc said:
I’m not really sure what you are asking, but I’m also 8 deep into a 12 pack so I could be missing the point.

I have been working on attorney sites for almost 5 years, so I haven’t hit the golden 10,000 hours, but I have a good idea.

First off, its highly unlikely you are going to rank a site in 30-60 days for a major metro and a high value keyword. I should say rank it and keep it there. Step back and look at the CPC for most of these terms, $100+. Look at “Houston Truck accident attorney”, $330 CPC. I played in this space for the better part of a year and got to spot 8. That was with a $1K a month budget in links.

Yours bosses expectations are out of line with realty. Figure 6-12 months for any converting KW.

Attorney SEO is no different from any other local SEO. Make sure your onpage is really buttoned up. Do every onpage SEO trick you know then jump into backlinks and that means reading the content comparing it to the competitors.

Backlinks are going to move the needle the fastest. I personally don’t deal with PBN because most sellers are selling a crap service. Niche edits on relevant pages and sites are the best bang for the buck. After that, then guest posts on relevant sites.

Also, it really depends on what you are going after. A PI attorney in LA is going to be loads harder then a Immigration attorney in Minnesota.

Like everything else written here, SEO is just one part of the puzzle. We know require new clients to have a budget for Google Remarketing, because we can get 1-3% conversion on retargeting. Which while it doesn’t sound like a lot,1 PI case could be worth 6-7 figures.

Finally, there are a shit ton of vanity terms which don’t convert or produce traffic. Bike Accident, Premise Liability, B-1 Visia etc. These are super easy which you can go after if you need a quick “show me” win, but traffic to those is next to nothing.
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Yo. Thanks for the tip. Luckily, all my keywords are relatively easy to rank according to ahrefs and kwfinder. Maybe the field of law that I'm working for doesn't have too many law firms that have hired in-house SEO specialists or outsourced their work to agencies.

All my keywords with conversion intent are within the 20-40 difficulty range including long-tail keywords. I thought using PBNs would be a great way to rank high and quickly but the one PBN seller who seems credible won't sell their PBN service to law firms and I'm not sure why. (If someone can clarify this, this would be great!)

I might resort to the lengthy process of researching my competitor's backlink profile and targeting the same webmasters.

Ryuzaki said:
I have a buddy online that was one of the top guys period in the certain sector of the industry. Some brand new guy came onto the scene and offered an absurd amount of money to teach him "almost everything."

As soon as they wrapped that up, the new guy turned around and started a guru blog and started outting everything he learned in order to build himself up as a guru and sell e-books and all that.

This definitely happens and you can definitely learn more than even some of the most hardened veterans know by dropping a phat wad of cash on someone.

And if you're really stupid you turn around and remove your competitive edge by telling the world about what you learned while pretending to have developed it yourself.
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I'm willing to invest. Maybe not a fat wad but a little bit of wad (in the hundreds).
 
Hey what's up guys,

Just here to introduce myself and share my story before I continue onto this journey...

I stumbled onto this site from Reddit or something similar looking for ways to learn affiliate marketing just yesterday. As I read through the forums and discussions someone pointed me towards the Digital Strategy Crash Course. Reading through the Day One thread, I quickly realized what special opportunity lies before me on this website. The first 3 lessons sold me, the dream that if I work hard enough, study enough, and put the work in, I can make myself successful. I quickly read through the lessons and realized that if I am to be successful, I must have the strive to learn and discipline myself, to want it more than anyone else. The messages they put into Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3 ring clear in my head. I've always had the drive and the passion to be creative, but nowhere to put all of my energies and effort into.

But this time it's different.

This is somewhere I can learn. Somewhere I know if I put in the work, I can make it happen. Where the amount of work I put in will actually equate to the rewards I can gain.

Or maybe not. Maybe I'll work so hard yet go nowhere. Maybe it'll be too much for me to handle. Maybe I'll just give up.

But the Crash Course gives me purpose, want, and optimism. It gives me motivation to succeed and drive. But I can say all of this, and not end up doing anything. So the best thing for me is to start trying. Please, please, give me any insight and guidance you feel that I, as a beginner, may need. I'm open to learning new things, trying, succeeding, failing, and more. Whether it be a motivational quote, a guide, a reddit forum, anything.

And with that I end with a quote from the Day 1 crash course:

"It's easy to whine. That's why losers like it. It requires more effort to take it upon one's self to turn all that negative bullshit off, and instead be part of the solution."

- Stevo
 
Welcome aboard. We are 100% ready to answer questions and support you in your journey. All you have to do is speak up and we'll be there. I'd recommend starting a journey thread in the Laboratory section to catalog your adventure and to house all of your questions so you can always return to reference the answers later. I'm glad you're finding the value in the Crash Course! It's everything you need to win.
 
After signing up I just wanted to say a quick hello to everyone on the forum and introduce myself. I'm Authentic and up until a couple of weeks ago, I was an in-house paid search executive for an e-commerce company. With all the recent goings-on I was let go and find myself starting to dip into my savings which I'll be honest - ain't going to last long! I'm trying to find a job but I've decided that jobs just aren't secure any more so it's all on me to change my stars.
 
Sounds like you might have the chops to do a Shopify / PPC combo and start making money pretty quickly. Sorry to hear about the job situation. We've got a few PPC masters you could have some back and forth with, I'm sure. Best of luck with it. I hope you keep posting and let us know how it's going.
 
@Ryuzaki cheers man, excuse the drunk ramblings from the other night things kinds of hit home it was sort of the end of my self-pity week.
 
My name says everything. A local business that's been struggling since inception(5 years ago). COVID has hit us hard but we are still functioning which tells me that may be there is a core of resilience in the business.
Have used the period to introspect about the business and have come to the conclusion that content marketing is the only way forward. Towards that end plan to increase the number of pages from 5 to 300 over 2 years.

I have two aims for the website :
1. Dominate local serps for bottom of the funnel queries
2. Feature nationally for top of the funnel queries (informational long tail keywords)

I'm finding it difficult to figure out how to structure my website to achieve the above aims. Please give your advice.

The question I have is : how good is the ubersuggest keyword difficulty tool? What score should a new website target?
Thank you all!
 
Welcome to the forums, @thelocalstruggl

I'm sure there wil be plenty of other local and business experts along to chime in here. But I would offer a few things for you to think about first before you get too wrapped up in 'targeting' keywords and using tools.

1) You are a local business that has been running, even if struggling, for five years. That means - unless you are completely dumb - you have built up an idea of what needs you fulfil for your local customers and what barriers they experience before they use your services. Your website should first of all address those needs and help remove those barriers. YOU are the expert here, not any kw tool, and nothing is going to take away your own experience. If you have any problems visualising the answers to the above (or even if you don't have problems) sit down and talk to your staff and find out what their views are. Or offer a customer discount if they are willing to sit down with you for 10 minutes and answer some questions. Then go and visit your five biggest local competitors and see what they are doing in real life and online.
2) I'm a bit confused about your website - do you not have one at the moment? If that's the case, then you need to concentrate on getting the basics right first of all (rather than thinking about targeting national kws). That means Google and business directory listings, linkbuilding on a local basis, online awareness and social media build-out, etc. Then you start building out and watch what gets traction with your viewers (is it how-tos? is it quirky blog posts? is it local engagement? is it technical FAQs?) and what works for your website traffic (links? social media? traffic leaks? parasiting?).
3) I know it sounds a real white-hat thing to say, but *really* helping the website visitor and real-life customer achieve what they set out to do is a basic necessity for a successful online business. And yet the fact that so many businesses ignore this offers a real opportunity. Why did the visitor land on your site? Why did the potential customer walk in the door? What did they want? Did you help them achieve it? Were they happy when they left? Would they recommend your services to a friend?

Tbh, most people in SEO will use a kw tool to help work out a niche they don't have much knowledge in. If I've been working in a niche for a while, I know what kind of kws work from my business experience and visitor reactions. You have local industry knowledge which should be more valuable what some tool will say about 'red widgets in little rock'.
 
ToffeeLa said:
Welcome to the forums, @thelocalstruggl

I'm sure there wil be plenty of other local and business experts along to chime in here. But I would offer a few things for you to think about first before you get too wrapped up in 'targeting' keywords and using tools.

1) You are a local business that has been running, even if struggling, for five years. That means - unless you are completely dumb - you have built up an idea of what needs you fulfil for your local customers and what barriers they experience before they use your services. Your website should first of all address those needs and help remove those barriers. YOU are the expert here, not any kw tool, and nothing is going to take away your own experience. If you have any problems visualising the answers to the above (or even if you don't have problems) sit down and talk to your staff and find out what their views are. Or offer a customer discount if they are willing to sit down with you for 10 minutes and answer some questions. Then go and visit your five biggest local competitors and see what they are doing in real life and online.
2) I'm a bit confused about your website - do you not have one at the moment? If that's the case, then you need to concentrate on getting the basics right first of all (rather than thinking about targeting national kws). That means Google and business directory listings, linkbuilding on a local basis, online awareness and social media build-out, etc. Then you start building out and watch what gets traction with your viewers (is it how-tos? is it quirky blog posts? is it local engagement? is it technical FAQs?) and what works for your website traffic (links? social media? traffic leaks? parasiting?).
3) I know it sounds a real white-hat thing to say, but *really* helping the website visitor and real-life customer achieve what they set out to do is a basic necessity for a successful online business. And yet the fact that so many businesses ignore this offers a real opportunity. Why did the visitor land on your site? Why did the potential customer walk in the door? What did they want? Did you help them achieve it? Were they happy when they left? Would they recommend your services to a friend?

Tbh, most people in SEO will use a kw tool to help work out a niche they don't have much knowledge in. If I've been working in a niche for a while, I know what kind of kws work from my business experience and visitor reactions. You have local industry knowledge which should be more valuable what some tool will say about 'red widgets in little rock'.
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Thanks so much for the warm welcome.
The business is pretty much sorted out as far as customer experience is concerned once they walk into it. In 5 years, I can count the number of dissatisfied customers on the fingers of one hand.
The problem is that it's a very small niche and word of mouth is how it runs generally.
The website is old but only the homepage ranks on and off and the map back generally features us for a few miles around the business. When it was created I didn't know anything about SEO and it shows. The homepage was optimized for a word that isn't used to find businesses like ours! So this time I want to avoid making the same mistake.
The "money keywords" are probably 3 or 4. Which ones I should target on my homepage? How to build relevance for the location without sounding spammy? How to structure the site without having the URLs cannibalize each other? These are some of the questions I'm trying to find answers for.
 
Hi all,

Been involved with IM for a few years now and active on another IM forum, got pointed to this one today and looking to get involved. I'm heavily involved in keyword research and last year moved away from Amazon Affiliate sites of my own to local lead generation/rank and rent. Competition is much lower and pay is much higher.
 
Hi, @holzr, I used to do lead gen through pay-per-call. It was straight cash, but to get the big money I had to work in extremely competitive niches in terms of SEO or PPC costs. I got out of that and into easier niches where I could make up the difference in volume.

I had a buddy that got into local lead generation like you're talking about. He would port the same landing page across cities and niches and run Adwords campaigns at them with tons of negative keywords. I can't say more, but he had an amazing method for trimming out keywords and keeping his costs low and earnings high. But even with that, he ultimately got sick of rolling out landers and running campaigns. The money wasn't there for him.

We had a guy doing a massive local lead gen network clearing like $50k a month but he stopped posting after a while. He wanted to sell his optimization as a service here which made me pretty suspect of the claim of making that much per month. He disappeared soon after.

Anyways, I'm just rambling. Glad to have you aboard and hope to learn more from you regarding local SEO.
 
It really depends how your business is. What would you say if we were riding in a lift (elevator) and you were trying to tell me what you did before I got off at the next floor?

"I repair widgets in Nowheresville, Illinois"
"I do wedding photography in Grimespond in the UK"
"I produce snowboards in Australia for one-legged surfers"

That would usually be the main focus for your site's home page.

Of course, you might repair a whole range of widgets and particular ones are your speciality. Or you might do wedding videos and drone footage as a supplementary service. And you also have pet-friendly snowboards. But that can all come as related parts of your website.

The only real problem comes if you are a wedding photographer who repairs widgets when there are no weddings going on and snowboards in the winter (in which case it might be suitable to have three different websites).

You mention that it is a very small (local?) niche? When you act as if you were a potential customer do your competitors appear for all of the search queries? Who does? Who doesn't? Who is most prominent? What kind of results is Google showing? (Normal? Shopping? FAQs? Images? Videos?) Are your competitors featuring in all of those? When you look at their websites, how are they organised? What keywords are they ranking for? Do they make sense to you as an experienced person in that industry that these kws are what people would use to find a satisfactory result for their search?

What are people in the same niche doing in the biggest town in the neighbouring state/province? Is there anything to learn from their sites/structure/kws?

How do your customers get to you at the moment? (You say word of mouth but it has to start somewhere.) Forums, social media, other web mentions, online or offline advertising?
 
Hi Holzr

Welcome to BuSo. I'm also looking to diversify from amazon since the affiliate cuts. It seems that you were more visionary than many of us and definitely did the right thing. Could you explain a bit more about how you approach leadg/rank and rent?

Looking forward to reading your posts on this awesome forum. Cheers!
 
Local lead gen plus keyword research = happy happy life. Welcome.
 
Hello all. I found BuilderSociety a couple of weeks ago and have been reading and searching the forum a lot. It's so much better than every other internet marketing forum. You guys are also smarter and further along than all of the blogs and forums and social media posters too. I'm afraid I'll be a question asker more than anything else, but maybe my questions will help other beginner lurkers that don't really understand a lot of what's being talked about yet.

I'm mainly interested in SEO. I know there's a bigger world out there and more tactics, but I have to start somewhere and this is what dragged me into this universe.

My story so far is that I've studied for a few months (I read the BuilderSociety Crash Course last week). A lot of that time was wasted, looking at bottom of the barrel stuff like link spam. Then I shook that off and focused more on general site building and on-page SEO. I've bought five domains, installed Wordpress on a few of them, realized a couple were stupid "chasing a squirrel" moves, and installed a theme on one and started customizing it. I wrote a couple of posts too but I think its way too tiny of a niche to spend a lot of effort on.

I'm itching to put this stuff into action, and I'm glad I found a place that is welcoming and answers questions in depth. I'd bet that you guys get a lot of newbies asking really stupid questions. I'm a newbie but I'm not dumb. I need some professional opinions on a few things and I'll be getting started on a brand new project with a case study too.

Right now I've seen the seedy underbelly of SEO in the form of black hat link spam. I've also seen the pristine and angelic purity of the white hat authority site people. There's a part of me that thinks the truth is somewhere in between. My questions will be me trying to navigate between those ideologies and getting feedback so I'm not wasting my short time on this planet (I have to go back to Mars soon).

Thanks for all the typing you all have done on this forum so far. There's a lot to go through and I'll try to search before I ask repeat questions.
 
Thoth said:
My story so far is that I've studied for a few months...

....Right now I've seen the seedy underbelly of SEO in the form of black hat link spam. I've also seen the pristine and angelic purity of the white hat authority site people.
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Hello,

You've made the right choice to choose BuSo. You won't find a better place to learn anywhere on the internet, guaranteed.

One advice I want to give you is to forget about black hat, white hat, do not even use that terminology, forget about it entirely. It's a wrong road to go down and link spamming or even PBNs is definitely not something most people should learn. It's an expensive, capital intensive, way to learn SEO and earn, and it will not teach you other marketable skills.

I would recommend on content creation, webdesign and UX design. Then focus your linkbuilding on creating shareable content and doing outreach.

I would also recommend Income School on Youtube to get into a good mindset of what you want to learn as the basics: keyword research, content production and conversion optimization (UX).

You might begin to consider the benefits of PBNs vs outreach vs other linkbuilding methods, but only once you've actually learned how to do keyword research and ranking for long tail keywords.

Good luck!
 
Greetings.

I completed the Digital Strategy crash course, made notes after re-reading each chapter, and it's time to put it into action. I'm starting a project that will be 1) a practical application of my learnings from the course, and 2) a launchpad for another project I have in mind for late 2021.

I figure my posts will become more verbose as time passes. My challenge for this week was to hit 'Post thread', and if you're reading it, I've nailed the challenge. Baby steps.

Great to meet everyone, and many thanks to the creators of the guide.
 
Welcome. I'm glad you found value in the Crash Course.

What's the deal with this 1st project being a launchpad for another one? Is it legitimately somehow going to catapult the 2nd project, or is it serving as a learning project, or is it some kind of procrastination? If it's the latter I'd go straight for the kill and start the more important project, if that's what it is.

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Hi, @Thoth. I've gone down every SEO rabbit hole there is, from trashy bulk spam to giant PBNs to smaller luxury PBNs to 100% white hat projects.

I'm going to agree with you that the truth does lie somewhere in-between, but not in the way you may think. If 0% is pure black hat and 100% is pure white hat, I'd say the most effective and reality based approach lies around 85%.

Projects should start at the 100% mark and stay there until they're mature and solidified. Once you get a certain amount of trust and age, you can start to get away with some gray tactics that are closer to the white side of things. It's not that you should, but that you will. You'll start becoming the site that PBN users link to to hide the fact that they're also linking to their own sites. You'll get tons of automated trash links over time. You may even get a ton of spam from negative SEO campaigns. And you'll survive them all and benefit from them. And then you'll start to see what you can get away with and possibly exploit some of that strategically.

Not to mention that every link that you build for your own site is against "the rules," so when you start doing real marketing, which requires dropping links around at times to start the snowball, you just did some things against the Google guidelines.

Anyways, the real move is to do like @bernard says: build good sites and good content and attract good links. Those links will be better than anything else you can get ahold of (but you'll use some of these too strategically and minimally).
 
Yes, I strongly believe so and a couple of other players in the (crowded) space use a similar as a form of lead generation.

Not procrastination — an equivalent would be a project about taxes for eCommerce while working towards a CPA designation. Can't sell tax services until late 2021, but could send leads from the project to a licensed accountant and then replace their ad with my firm's when I get my designation.
 
@bernard - Thanks. I won't be building PBNs. I don't have the budget to focus on that. Any extra money I'd use on paying writers for more content. One thing I'm not doing is trying to design a site either or even heavily customize a theme. I'm going to use a widely adopted theme that gets updated constantly that's fast and not flashy. Flashy can come from the photos I use. It doesn't have to reinvent the web. Simple is better so I can focus on what matters: content and getting links. Hopefully the technical SEO will be fine from day one and stay that way.

@FrankCertain - I'm not that same person. I've never heard of IMGlory.

@Ryuzaki - That makes sense that we all end up somewhere below the 100% mark, not by our own choice. It also makes sense to buy a link here or there when you need one, especially after you've done a million guest posts and gotten other real links. Once you're safe, you're safe, it seems.
 
It could be a good idea to start with an expired domain with backlinks. That would help a lot in seeing some returns. There are lots of discussion on how to do that here.
 
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