New Views On Emotive SEO: Part 2 (Off-Page)

This is the second article in a two-part series on the changing face of SEO. I believe that today we can utilise many of the aspects of emotive marketing within our SEO too. The last article looked at on-page SEO. This article will look at off-page SEO. The world of off-page SEO, or “backlinking”, has changed dramatically and this article looks at how a more emotive SEO strategy can help us gain higher organic rankings.

If we go back three or four years, pre the big Panda and Penguin updates by Google, the main focus within web marketing was always page one organic rankings. Attaining high rankings for chosen keywords was often celebrated as if those rankings had already turned into qualified customers! The practice of web marketing focused almost exclusively around whatever tactics could be utilised to gain high rankings for the “golden keywords” within our industry. A huge part of those tactics involved uncovering methods by which a backlink could be gained on a site that had “authority”, back then this meant high PageRank. The result? In a very simplified way, people with high PR domains began selling links from their powerful sites to people who wanted to rank their site higher in Google. This meant, you could literally buy your way to a high ranking.

Since those days a lot has changed, as mentioned in the last blogpost mostly for the better. There’s a very simple rule we can now apply to our SEO strategy that comes courtesy of Google themselves. Google now tells us that any link we seek to obtain for the pure purpose of SEO is a link that they will seek to downgrade in value – if they have not downgraded that link already. A lot of well-known companies in the past 6 to 12 months have seen their rankings drop due to links that they obtained (often some time ago) which Google has now devalued. Earlier this year, even the mighty BBC received one of the infamous Google warning emails within their Webmaster tools account. Now, whilst I think it is perhaps a little too much for Google to penalise websites that have been around a long time for previously pursuing link building tactic which we’re (back then) effective, it is good to see the positive impact that these changes inspire us to have within our outlook on SEO and web marketing overall.

Earn, Not Buy, Our Success

Because no-one can now buy their high ranking, we instead have to earn it. Who do we earn it from? Quite simply, the people. Previously, high PR domains had ranking power and placing content on such domains would, in turn, help your ranking too. Now, ranking power comes from the people. The more they “like” your content, the higher you’re going to rank. Much more importantly, the more real people “like” what you do, the better your actual business is going to do too.

This is a great change of focus for the customer. They have the power to not only “like” but also to review and recommend what you do for them. Across the web marketing world, new philosophies and techniques that focus attention on delivering great things to the customer are appearing. Perhaps the most well-known of these is inbound marketing, a concept created and inspired originally by Seth Godin and now by taken forward by hubspot.com. It all leads to a much better Internet, now that we are rewarded for focusing our efforts on customers, instead of keywords and domains.