$1k - $3k a month for SEO...Thoughts Please

MrMedia

MrMedia

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So after spending forever building out a good quality site with tons of content and getting traffic the time has now come to invest in link building.

This is something I haven't done before so I would be interested in hearing what way you guys would spend a budget between $1-3k p/month on SEO services.

I have a sub to SEMRush already and I will be ordering some editorial links from @daseoman soon too.

As context, I have so many kws hovering around positions 5-20 and getting some of these into the top 3 would be a major win.

Excluding these things what would you do?
 
If you want to do white hat link building, I would hire someone full time to do link prospecting and outreach. Especially if the content is good on your site. You can acquire a lot of relevant resource page links, few links from relevant article, guest post if you are into them etc.
 
yes that was a thought. Was looking at GotchSEO to outsource this to as a possibility.
 
Here's what I'd do:
  1. Spend a few months building links that will build trust / authority. Press releases, social links, forum links (not profiles...actual links in threads), ifttt DA stacks, and any other link that will help paint your site as trustworthy in the eyes of Google.
  2. Beef out your referring domain numbers with some generic links with generic anchors. (I like to use these: https://www.invalley.com/services)
  3. Editorials
  4. Hire an outreach guy from there on out to blow through your monthly budget.
There are also a few one-time link campaigns you can do on top of all this:
  • Create a scholarship and get links on .edu domains
  • Create a master list of all the links that spots #1-#5 have on a page level for your main keyword, go through it one by one, and try to grab the ones you can.
  • Reddit. http://www.nichepursuits.com/reddit-marketing/
  • Donor / Sponsor pages
  • Send traffic to your site with crowdsearch.me after each link building campaign to emulate a rush to your site after a big link drop
 
This: https://www.buildersociety.com/thre...top-powerful-ifttt-syndication-networks.1472/

Plus this:

http://diggitymarketing.com/trust-tiering-stacking-da-to-increase-site-trust/

My man @ddasilva is still clearing this up for me.... but the basic idea is that you interlink all of your social properties to all of your other social properties and syndicate your content to all of them using IFTTT. Then you can do a little link building to your DA stack, and then have all that link juice bounce around the network of social sites. Since each social site is linking to your website, you'll get a ton of positive trust signals.

In my experience so far, this isn't something that will skyrocket your rankings. However, it does seem to create a good baseline of trust / authority before you start hitting the site with powerful editorials / guest posts...and ends up making everything more potent.
 
Excellent thread. I'm in the same boat right now. So will be watching this.

@Klayne and @stackcash Do you happen to know what it typically costs to have someone do link prospecting and outreach for a site?
 
Trankuility said:
Excellent thread. I'm in the same boat right now. So will be watching this.

@Klayne and @stackcash Do you happen to know what it typically costs to have someone do link prospecting and outreach for a site?
Click to expand...

We're using a few providers and pay $100 - $125 on average for contextual links on real sites with DA25+.
 
@Trankuility Link prospector would be around 5$ - 10$ per hour, depending on how much instruction you are willing to give, the cheaper ones will need some babysitting. The outreach guy will be more expensive, 10$ - 20$, as it requires good English and harder to systemize, if you want to outreach with custom e-mails and replys. But outreach can also be done very fast and cheaply if you send out generic templates,and the prospecting guy finds the e-mails.
 
@Klayne Perfect, thank you. Exactly what I needed to know. I just hired a guy to do prospecting and outreach and was thinking I might have have overpaid, haha. But looks like what I'm paying is about standard.
 
Excellent thread homies. Looks like bunch of us are on the same stage of progression.

Señor @Trankuility, will you be kind enough and post a quick outline of the standard operation procedure you handed to your new hire to perform prospecting? I just need something quick and dirty to hand her to start this process from my end...
 
@The Kloser If I had one I would gladly send it to ya. But I actually hired someone who is already familiar with prospecting/outreach through taking Brian Dean's STW course. So I just gave him the niche info, my goals, and he's off to the races. I'll be monitoring his prospecting/outreach but overall he already knows what to do.
 
Does anyone have any good providers of outreach and/or prospecting services that they would share? I've tried hiring through Freelancer, UpWork, etc but they always disappoint. Wasted so much time, money and effort just trying to find someone!
 
Darth said:
Does anyone have any good providers of outreach and/or prospecting services that they would share? I've tried hiring through Freelancer, UpWork, etc but they always disappoint. Wasted so much time, money and effort just trying to find someone!
Click to expand...
Never understood this, I hire almost exclusively through Upwork and have only had good experiences really.

If you're hiring an Indian for $2 / hour don't expect them to understand complex instructions. Literally, walk them through everything. EVERYTHING.

What I usually do is split the job into multiple tasks. Let's say we are going to scrape blogs for outreach and then send them an email asking them to post our infographic, then follow up if they don't reply, then if they do reply we will offer a unique introduction from our writer.

BREAK IT UP INTO INDIVIDUAL JOBS THE FIRST TIME AND PAY FOR EACH.

Job 1. Find 100 prospects
Job 2. Send ALL prospects a template email just customized for the name if they have it
Job 3. Follow up to non-responders with another TEMPLATE email
Job 4. Create a video to show them exactly how to respond to those asking for the infographic and unique introduction (have your writer create a batch and they can pick one and send it, along with the infographic).

Then finally you can create a job just saying "Repeat the whole process".

It will take some time to train them, yes. But if you're not willing to put up the cash for a competent and english speaking VA, then you need to put up the time. Hope that helps
 
stackcash said:
My man @ddasilva is still clearing this up for me.... but the basic idea is that you interlink all of your social properties to all of your other social properties and syndicate your content to all of them using IFTTT. Then you can do a little link building to your DA stack, and then have all that link juice bounce around the network of social sites. Since each social site is linking to your website, you'll get a ton of positive trust signals.

In my experience so far, this isn't something that will skyrocket your rankings. However, it does seem to create a good baseline of trust / authority before you start hitting the site with powerful editorials / guest posts...and ends up making everything more potent.
Click to expand...

Yep, you got the right idea Mr. Stackcash. IFTTT networks and DAS are two separate things, but can be combined together for a synergistic effect. With IFTTT, you can create a syndication network of high DA properties surrounding your money site, where each new post you make gets syndicated to this network (as well as an attribution link back to the original post on your site). DAS is just a way to make the network stronger by interlinking all of the social properties together.

It's a foundation block that I use for all my sites. It's not going to rank you for anything competitive with just that alone - just a piece of the puzzle.
 
I'd do two things:

1) For the immediate wins of ranking those pages that are oh-so-close, I'd hire someone to do guest post outreach to hyper-target those pages.

2) I'd prefer to do it myself, although it sucks, or you can hire someone to get you tons of links to your homepage. This is mainly profiles of all kinds, forum signature links, a billion blog comments, video links, etc. I find this monstrous base of links boosts the entire domain and makes everything else a walk in the park.

All of it will help incredibly and can be done as white as a rice.
 
If I had $1-3k a month budget with many keywords in positions 5-20, I would rather hire an agency that already has an outreach system in place rather than try and hire and manage your own system. You can find outreach links for 80-120 on average, which would equate to 10-30 solid links a month. You should see pretty significant results from just that alone and would probably have majority of your KWs on page one after 1 month.

It only makes sense to build out your own outreach infrastructure if you need volume or have many sites to rank.

Just my two cents.

If it were my money, I'd focus on editorial links (high DA) AND outreach links (niche relevancy). Save a few hundred bucks for tier 2.
 
All this domain authority stacking and PR bs wouldn't actually help you rank . Invest in a niche PBN , get editorials and use established agencies whose outreach method is in place like ddasilva said

That being said , I have always seen a positive trend when I do citations for sites . Local / aff whatever. Still works well.

Since someone asked , bunch of services which I use on a regular basis :

Tier one stuff :

Diversity stuff :
 
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JT1 said:
All this domain authority stacking and PR bs wouldn't actually help you rank . Invest in a niche PBN , get editorials and use established agencies whose outreach method is in place like ddasilva said

That being said , I have always seen a positive trend when I do citations for sites . Local / aff whatever. Still works well.

Since someone asked , bunch of services which I use on a regular basis :

Tier one stuff :

Diversity stuff :
Click to expand...

Saying something that is half true is worse than being completely ignorant on the topic. Your goals and intent may be completely different than OP's - which is important for OP to realize.

You're right, a press release or DA stack won't help you rank on their own..... which I stated already.

Most large or "legitimate" sites will be sending out press releases like gangbusters when they launch. Since we don't want to stick out like a sore thumb as an SEO site, we also use press releases when we launch sites. It also helps with referring domain diversity for the few news sites that stick.

The benefit of DA stacks have already been discussed. They increase trust and authority.

These things matter if you're concerned about keeping your site around (and receiving organic traffic) for a very long time.

Yes, the more aggressive tactics that you mentioned will help you rank faster. But, will they pass a manual review? Will sending local citations to a site that's not a local business look natural? Do you have any idea when Penguin is going to refresh...and do you know what type of off site manipulation tactics it will be targeting this time?

Not saying your suggestions won't work. Just saying that making blanket statements like "domain authority stacking and PR bs wouldn't actually help you rank" may confuse people that have different intent / goals than you.
 
stackcash said:
Saying something that is half true is worse than being completely ignorant on the topic. Your goals and intent may be completely different than OP's - which is important for OP to realize.

You're right, a press release or DA stack won't help you rank on their own..... which I stated already.

Most large or "legitimate" sites will be sending out press releases like gangbusters when they launch. Since we don't want to stick out like a sore thumb as an SEO site, we also use press releases when we launch sites. It also helps with referring domain diversity for the few news sites that stick.

The benefit of DA stacks have already been discussed. They increase trust and authority.

These things matter if you're concerned about keeping your site around (and receiving organic traffic) for a very long time.

Yes, the more aggressive tactics that you mentioned will help you rank faster. But, will they pass a manual review? Will sending local citations to a site that's not a local business look natural? Do you have any idea when Penguin is going to refresh...and do you know what type of off site manipulation tactics it will be targeting this time?

Not saying your suggestions won't work. Just saying that making blanket statements like "domain authority stacking and PR bs wouldn't actually help you rank" may confuse people that have different intent / goals than you.
Click to expand...
I think i came off sounding a bit too strong with my opinions. Yes, I completely agree to what you have just said. My apologies.
 
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