 Diolch yn ddifach. Fel Gwylodraeth, ac ydych i'n gallu'n ffordd ar y cyhoedd. Yna, fel Gwylodraeth wedi ddod, dyma'n pan yw'r CEO yr Eire. Oes bydda'n gyfnod o'ch bod yr ffordd i'r llunio ar y Lleidwyr. Ond ystodd, mae'n gweithio'n llunio y ddweud a'r gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Diolch yn ddod, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Mor Oscon fydd yn llwys 12 oes. Fyddóa wneud o'n gwaith o dystildair yng nghymhwyl Cysyllt yn ymddangos, ac mae ddod o phos i ddechrau mewn agenysig, fel yma dd suggest, a ddod o'n holl ni, a dyna mae'n cael ei wneud o'ch gymryd ac oherwydd wedi'u gael bod Ioedd Toms sailor yw Ymddangos yn ymgynghwyl Cysyllt. Mae'r Mor Oscon yr 2012, yn meddwl am hollach eich briffallwn 35 oes, 35 nes snake.wr i fy mod i'w gwych yn rhoi'r iawn, fel yn o fwrdd ychydig i'w hanes i'w gwybod y tactin i'w ddechrau 10 ym 5 ysgrifennu. Farae, eu gynllun o'r tuwwch, yw yw ysgrifennu'r ei gwaith mylion i'w hoffa, a gwybod yw'r hoffa'i gwyddo. Oni'r hoffa, yn och chi'n i'n moffa, ond mae'r hoffa'i gyda chi. Ond nowai, Ond o'r hoffa'i ngryf ddweud, 25, 21, ond weithio'r cymdeithas. Mae'n gweithio'r cymdeithas, 10 ym fydd yw, 21 o 35, ond weithio'r cymdeithas. 9, tu'n gwybod yn fwy o gydau. Rwy'n gwybod nesaf, ond mae'n gwybod yn gwneud o'r gydag. Maen nhw'n fwy o gydag. Oedda 5, ond felly nid oedd yn fwy o'r cymdeithas. Nid yw'r cymdeithas ymateb yma yma, 10 yw'r cymdeithas ac Maithcon 2012. One of them, tip number 21, was to pay your freelance writers to guest post for you on other websites and link back to you. I may as well have stood there and just said buy links. I've got no idea how I got away with that 10 years ago at Moscom. One of the ideas, I even removed it on the public version of the deck because it was so bad I couldn't even put it online. And I cannot remember what that tip was, but it must have been pretty bad if one of the tips was to buy links, and I've removed the tip later on, so I've got no idea what that one was. The reason I'm sharing this, though, is because 21 out of 35 tips are still relevant today. Quite happy with that, it's quite good. But it's not because I could see into the future or I'm terribly smart or an expert or anything like that. It's actually because the fundamentals of our industry don't really change that often. And back at this point in 2012, this was in July of 2012, a big, big change in the industry had just happened. And it was in April 2012. Anyone remember what that change was? Penguin, you're just as old as I am. Like some people will remember this. And this was painful. So those of you younger than myself and Hannah, the update in 2012 that Google rolled out was explicitly targeted at spammy SEO techniques, in particular link building techniques. So things like mass directory submissions, article syndication, press releases, all that kind of stuff. Google explicitly targeted all of those techniques and said, no. Not only do they not work anymore, we're going to actively penalise websites who use these techniques. And this was a big change, a huge, huge change. And it changed fundamentally the way that link building was carried out by the industry. But these changes are actually quite rare. Of course, hundreds of times a year, Google roll out small updates. A few times a year, they roll out algorithm updates that are core to the algorithm. Those are quite big. They do shake things up. But it's quite rare for them to fundamentally change how we actually carry out SEO, in this case, link building. And the Penguin update forced the industry to become what it is today. And it forced us to grow up because all of a sudden, essentially, Google did this to the industry. And was like, we're not going to let you get away with this anymore. It was just too much. Just once more. There we go. I actually discovered this gift 10 years ago at Moscon 2012 as well, because Will Reynolds put it in his slide deck. And I've used it hundreds of times since then. So thanks, Will, if you're out there. But it was a good change. It had to happen. Deep down, SEOs knew these techniques. They weren't high quality, but they worked. They were effective. So we used them. That's what SEOs do. We optimise. And ultimately, it was something that had to happen, and it was a good change. But this brings me on to part of the title of this talk, which is, what got us here won't get us there. Because those techniques up until 2012 had been very effective, had worked really well. They weren't going to keep working. And what got us to that point wasn't going to get us for the next 10 years up until today. So what's the last 10 years look like? Well, what's got us to this point? There's a few key trends that we've seen. Firstly, the rise of content marketing. This is a Google Trends graph for content marketing as a topic. Now, of course, not all of this is just the link building. Content marketing is a big area. But a lot of this was driven by Google taking away all those tactics and content becoming something we could use and leverage to get links. And it led to some really great content pieces. This is one of my favourites that we did back at Distilled. Hunars, who is speaking tomorrow, actually played a big part in this piece as well. The team at Neumann did this gift which I actually love and a series of these gifts for Expedia. The team at Aera did this piece which is scary, but called at the same time, which showed Jeff Bezos' net worth as GDP. Turns out he was worth about four years ago, 193 of the GDP of the United States, which was pretty scary and pretty amazing at the same time. Content marketing has led to some really cool campaigns and led to lots of links for lots of different websites. Other tactics are still popular. It's not just content marketing. We ran the state of link building survey a few months ago and lots of tactics are still very popular with SEOs. This was three out of about 20 or so that people still use. We've got this combination of the rise of content marketing, but other tactics are still being used, still popular and still getting results. Where's the problem? A few of you are probably thinking right now, that's fine. We're producing content, we're getting links. We've got other tactics as well. Why change? Why try something different? I want to talk about why change is needed and why those things that we've seen in the last 10 years won't get us to where we need to be. I think that we may be sleepwalking into a few problems as an industry if we don't evolve and we don't address these issues. I'm going to share four trends that I've seen over the last 10 years or so that to me mean that we may be sleepwalking into a few issues if we don't evolve what we do. Let's start with the first one, which is probably the one that I wasn't sure about including today, but screw it, it's an uncomfortable truth that we need to talk about as an industry. Asking for links of what is known as outreach, it's not really sustainable. It's not really something that we need to keep relying upon as a way of getting links. I want to explain some of the thinking here. Most tactics that we all use, including content marketing, require us to ask for every single link that we get. But the return on investment of asking for every single link that you get for a domain, it just isn't viable. Again, the State of Link boiling report we ran a few months ago showed us that over half of SEOs took between one and five hours to build a single link. Now, even if you go down in the middle and say, let's call it three hours, imagine that your competitor has got 10,000 more links than you. That's 30,000 hours of time just to catch up with them. That's assuming they don't keep accelerating and keep building links. That's just to catch up with them. 100 dollars an hour, in terms of what you may charge for that, $3 million worth of time just to catch up with your competitor on link building. I know it's very simplistic, but that's essentially what we're looking at. Even if you do that, it doesn't mean that you're going to outrank those competitors because SERPs, at the moment, they're all over the place. There's a website here ranking fourth with nine linking domains. With a website two positions above, with over 600. It's not just a case of catching up, and that means you're going to get to number one. SERPs do not work like that anymore, as Andy talked about this morning. Not to mention, if you stop the outreach, the link stop, it's a bit like paid media. If you turn the budget off, your traffic's going to dry up. If you stop sending the outreach in your mouse, you're going to stop getting links. This is the big one for me. The results are limited by the amount of time that we can invest. The more time you've got, the more outreach you can do, the more links you're going to get. The less time you've got, the less outreach you can do, the fewer links you're going to get. It's not really good enough. That's not really what we want from SEO. We want the results to go beyond that. Because over time, link building should become easier, not harder, and at the moment, at best, it probably stays about the same in terms of how hard it is, and I think we can do better. The second trend I've seen over the last 10 years is a topic that SEO has loved to debate, and that's relevance. I think that a focus on link volume, so building as many links as we can, has led to activities and actions where we push relevance to one side. It makes it very easy to forget about relevance if you're under pressure to deliver hundreds of links. I think it's a balance between relevance and volume. Do you want more links, or do you want fewer links? Because if you go wild with your topics and themes, compared to your product or service, you'll get more links, but you have to go wider with those topics. If you want to stay really focused on what you do in your service in terms of the content you create, that's absolutely fine. In reality, you're probably going to get fewer links. Most agencies and in-house teams sit here at the moment. I believe Google wants us a bit more over here. I don't think they want us to be creating content that is on a massive tangent to what the website is about, just to get more links. It really comes down to this for me. Does Google really want to reward irrelevant campaigns just for the purpose of getting links? My first boss in SEO over 15 years ago now once said to me, what would you do if you were Google? That's what he stuck with me in terms of thinking about SEO. Because if I was Google, no, I wouldn't want to reward irrelevant campaigns that have clearly been done just for links, but this is something that keeps happening in our industry. Speaking of campaigns, I think we've started to rely upon them a little bit too much when it comes to link building. Now, don't get me wrong, we've built hundreds of campaigns over the years at error. They're a great way to drive links. We talk about them on stages like this. We talk about these big, shiny, interactive core campaigns. They get talked about a lot at conferences, in blog posts, and on Twitter. It's led to a focus on delivering virality, volume of links over delivering business impact. It's always about, oh, we've got 100 links, we've got 200 links. You've got into this newspaper, that publication. It's never about the impact on the business. Not to mention, nearly a third of SEOs admitted they've launched campaigns that have got zero links. That's about 200 of you have launched campaigns that have got zero links. That's a lot of us. That's a lot of campaigns. And we've done it. We're not a mean for me, either. But despite that and despite the risks, we want to show anything. We want these big, glitzy, glamorous campaigns. No, not champagne campaigns. We want champagne as well. This is a piece of feedback we got from a client where we pitched them a few months ago. There's five agencies. We came second. Fine. But this is the feedback. We pitched them a strategy that had campaigns as one strand of it and then three other strands of activity to help get links and get them traffic and results. The agency that won pitched them just campaigns. And this is the feedback we got from them. They're like, we just want campaigns. They locked our strategy. They said, yeah, we get it. It makes sense. But they just wanted campaigns. And I was like, I get it. Don't agree, but I get it. See you in six months. It's fine. So if you stop launching campaigns, you stop getting links, which is our point. So you want other levels of activity active. So you're not putting all your eggs in one basket for campaigns. So if you stop launching them, you're not going to get links. Because only 25% of SEOs said that they continue to average campaigns over and over again. So 75% launch a campaign, they're outreach, get links and then move on to the next one. They get forgotten about. Not to mention, a hero style campaigns are harder than ever to execute. Part of the reason for that is because of the news cycle and how it's changed over the last few years. Probably the last five or six years, really, because we've got all of these topics that are hugely important and things that need to be talked about in the news. It feels like it's happening all the time. There's always news, there's always a cycle of news coming out that make it very, very, very hard to insert our pre-planned complex detailed campaigns. Because, of course, if there's real stuff going on in the world that's really, really important, of course our campaign is going to get pushed to one side. Of course we get feedback like this from journalists where they like the campaign. But as of that moment, they're not going to publish it or talk about it because other stuff is going on in the world and that's completely fair. And this means that results are far less predictable than they used to be. Which means that these campaigns can't be the bedrock of our strategy because they're far riskier. Who wants to bet on things that are really risky? Fourth trend and I hate to study this one because we think we're getting better. But 10 years later, I'm still not seeing link building being as integrated with the rest of the business as it should be. And that integration is becoming more and more important. I've even seen SEO teams sat inside client businesses separate to the link building of this shop PR team. And that just doesn't make sense, but it still happens. Those teams still develop separately. And right now, businesses are being squeezed. They've come out of a rough couple of years thanks to COVID. We're now looking at a possible recession, particularly in the UK, maybe in the US as well. What happens when they get squeezed? SEO gets cut and you haven't got the integration. You haven't got that value being added across the company. Of course, it's easy to cut. I don't see the value. So that's the first thing that goes. And it makes our job far, far easier, sorry, far, far harder to get done when it's a lack of integration. So the four things I've seen over the last 10 years or so that I think will continue to happen and the things we need to adapt to and evolve from. So the question becomes, where are we trying to get to? We've talked about what got us to this point. Where is there? Where is it we're trying to get to next? Well, firstly, it's a sustainable link building strategy that outlasts us. That means that when you execute, maybe for a couple of years, you then move away from that client, move on to another one. Your work still lasts. You still keep getting links. No question of relevance, where you can launch campaigns, put content live. No one will question the relevance of that content. That's where you want to get to. And true integration that makes our job not just easier, but far more effective. That's where we need to get to. So, how to get there? It's a transition. I've used the word transition there very, very deliberately because we're on this journey ourselves at the moment at error. We have been for a little while now. This won't happen overnight. These are things that have been around for a long time, formed the culture of our industry a little bit. So you can't just flick a switch and fix this stuff overnight. However, I am going to talk through four concrete changes that you can start making today to start making this transition. Thursday after mosque on. Don't do it today. It's fine. I'll forgive you. But four things you can do from Thursday. So, number one, use the customer journey to generate link building ideas. And I believe we need to reframe links as being a consequence of an effective content strategy. And this is the question that I don't think we asked ourselves enough, which is, why do we even create content? The usual answer to clean one's SEOs is one of these four outputs or several of these in one go. So, traffic, of course you want to rank more, want to get more traffic to the website, maybe conversions through case delays, prologue pages, testimonials, that kind of stuff, of course links as we all know, or building the brand, building credibility, building authority, that kind of stuff. I don't think, though, you need content. Yes, you need a base level of content, of course, but you don't need an all singing or dancing content strategy to achieve those. Look at them again. I'm an SEO, so I hate saying this, but throwing a paid media spend and above the line spent business, you'll get those. That will happen. Be expensive, and I'm not saying you should do it, but you could do it without a big level of content. So, what do we really create content? Well, it's to connect with the customer on their journey. There's different methods of showing that journey, an error we use, awareness, consideration, and decision, but you create content to try and touch people on this journey, and that journey could be quite complex. It's normally not linear. People go forward, they go backwards, they go around in loops, but you're trying to find them on that journey and put your brand in front of them. Google calls this the messy middle, where someone starts their journey and finishes it, in the middle, stuff happens, people go around in loops and take their time to actually convert into a customer. I just call it messy. I think that's what most people do when they're trying to make a decision on something that's certainly what I do. But as SEOs and marketers, we're trying to put content in front of them during this journey. We'll get to this in a sec. The content strategy, it focuses on real customers. Link building strategy focuses on who can link to you, and they're very different things. Your target customers and your link prospects, yes, they may cross over. If you're a travel website, you can convince yourself that if you work for a travel journalist, who then publishes your content to their travel audience, that that's the same audience as your target customers. I mean, yeah, it might. It's not going to cross over anywhere near as much as you may think, yet we convince ourselves that that's how we get in front of our target customers. Because we've been trained to think about bloggers and journalists, I've stood on stages like this and said to do that when you've come up with link building ideas, think about who's going to link to you. Not to mention, as we've discussed earlier, we've started to believe that success means going viral. Genghisme links as you can to a piece of content. So what you do, that's the goal. You create a big pool of link targets to average to, because you want more links, you've got to send more average emails and find as many people as possible. This is a root cause of irrelevant campaigns. We move too far away from the customer, and we move too far towards bloggers and journalists coming up with link building and campaign ideas. That creates that irrelevant. So I'm going to share one of the ways we try on other companies at error. It's the framework that we use when coming up with content ideas. It's got four pillars to it. The first one is the audience. So who is it that the client is actually targeting with their products and their services? What are their pain points as I relate to the product or the service? What are the triggers that make them think, oh yeah, I'm going to go and search for whatever the client does. What does the client do to solve those problems and pain points for that audience? Their products, their services, also content? Do they have a blog? Do they have an email newsletter? Do they have a white paper? Do they have case studies? Do they have an email download? Whatever it is, what do they have that solves those pain points for the audience? Finally, what are the keywords that tie all these together? What are the things that we try and influence in the first place? We go through all these at error and we list them out. This is actually the example that that pitch that I told you we lost earlier, so we came second to that. So if anyone in this industry wants to take a close look at this, give me a shout. But the point is that we string these together. We string together all four columns and use these to come up with ideas that are very relevant to what the client does. And also we put together what format those ideas may take. It's not just hero campaigns. We're active PR. It could be a guide. It could be a number of things. But this forces that content relevance. It's hard, but it forces that relevance by sticking to those four pillars and not even worrying about bloggers, journalists and people who can link to us. And we did this for a pension company in the UK called Pension Bee, where we produced a piece of content targeted just a people looking to retire, given information about the future, what they could get in their retirement. My pharmacy, where we talked about the medicines that that pharmacy sold online, so perfectly connected to the products that they sold. Both of them often got links. It's harder, but that's kind of the point. We're trying to strike that balance far, far better between relevance and virality. Now, I'll be honest, those two examples I just gave, probably could have got a lot more links if we'd gone wider with the topics. But we didn't want to. We wanted to create content that was clearly relevant to the customer and goes beyond link building. Second thing we can do, second change we can start to make, is to move beyond campaigns. So we talked earlier about as an industry of fun in love with these big, glamorous, viral campaigns I've stood here and actually talked about them in the past, so I'm not guilt-free here. But content isn't just about one-off campaigns. It goes beyond that and there's far more ways to produce content to get links than just big, shiny campaigns. One way we can do that is to try and focus on ideas that are reusable and evergreen. Because when we come and go with campaign ideas, our instinct is to create something new, right? You want to create a campaign for a client or your brand, you try and think of something brand new. Whereas actually if you can do stuff that's reusable and evergreen, like this piece that Rover did, I know Rover here in Seattle, if you happen to be here, please update his content. I love this content, I go to it all the time. Kind of annoying green 2022. But they update it every single year and they can outreach this and get links to it all the time. It's always relevant. It's evergreen. It's always interesting to this kind of audience. We can also look for existing link-worthy content. So as we said, the temptation is to try and create brand new ideas every single time. Look at the website itself that you're working on. Is there any link-worthy content already on that website? The farmers I mentioned earlier, this was a piece that existed when we started working with them that the previous agency that actually created. We picked it up and just got some links to it just while doing some outreach. So whilst we were creating new campaigns as well, we were picking up their existing content and getting links to this. The nice thing about this, if you're an agency, is it removes the pressure because you're getting links whilst the new campaign is being created. You're not having to wait for this big splash and campaign to launch before you can get links. Simplify your execution again. Things don't have to be big, shiny, interactive, four-page takeovers. This is a blog posted for a client who do electric car leasing in the UK. Just a few tips around driving in the summer if you have an electric car. This got about six or seven links. Took a couple of hours to create. It's not a bad return. Six or seven links for a couple of hours' work is actually pretty good compared to these big, shiny, interactive campaigns, which we're also doing, but we're not gambling on just those alone. Number three, aim for the links that you didn't ask for. This comes back to the point around reducing our reliance upon outreach and having to use outreach for every single link that you get. Because where you want to get to is links that you didn't ask for. It feels weird saying it's in the room full of SEOs, but the way you do that is to create content that ranks. Because content that ranks for the right kinds of keywords will get links. For example, this piece from HubSpot that ultimately is the marketing statistics ranks for hundreds of keywords related to marketing statistics. They've got another 10,000 links to this page. I know for a fact that I did not ask for all of those 10,000 links. So I did for some of them, I did outreach, but most of those links have come because it ranks. This isn't just about marketing. This is a piece we did for a client a few years ago around one of the most dry topics you can think of, crack your cables. You're probably all using it at some point in the back of your TVs or your monitors. This piece will often have 80 links on its own that we did not ask for. And all it was was a long-form guide that is very techy, very informational, but there's a lot of people that talk about the technicalities of this product. And because it ranks, it gets links on its own. Which is kind of annoying when we were launching campaigns separately and they were struggling. We were like this thing when I often got 80 links and it's one of the driest topics we've ever read about. And it's still getting links today because it ranks really well. I love this one because it's quite meta. Our own state of link-bun report. It's got 200 links. I asked for a couple of them, but it ranks with statistics, with numbers, with faxing information that people are looking to reference when they're writing their own content. So the journalist or blogger is writing about link building in 2022. This is what they're going to find and what they're going to reference. It works in most industries, the state of women in construction in 2022. This is a piece that Siege did and it gets links on its own because of the nature of the content. Fourth area, star integration sooner. So we talked about how integration needs to improve. Now a lot of us, when we talk about integration, all we get asked about it, the answer is normally, oh, we have a meeting with the PR team or we have a meeting with the brand team. Or we have an SEO checklist. We need to get better than that. So let's take the standard process for content-led link building. You're coming with ideas, deproduction, then you do your outreach. So at the start, you may get some brand approval on the ideas themselves. You may then get some copywriters to help you with the copy and editing and grammar and typos and stuff like that. You may get the SEO team to do a checklist before you go live to make sure you've got meta tags, schemers, stuff like that in place. And finally, if they've gotten in-house digital PR team or agency, you sync up your contacts right before you go live. All of these things happen far too late. And these are problems like this where we've no SEO integration. This is your website or your nice layered structures and tiers of pages. Guess where our content goes? It's kind of tagged on, kind of on the end somewhere where someone is never ever going to find it. That's what happens with no SEO input. Whereas, ideally, you want it to actually be integrated with the rest of the website. When you leave integration in the PR team so late, your outreach list goes from 200 prospects down to 25. But guess what? The KPR remains the same. So if you've got to build 20 links and you've only got 25 prospects, you're probably going to struggle. So that alignment needs to start from before the time the project's even kicked off during the sales process. So, actually, there's another step here that's really, really important, which is that sales flies when you're speaking to a potential client. Because, actually, at least these ones should live during that process, where you ask a bit to the brand team, you ask a bit to the digital PR team, and start to understand, are they going to be blockers to you getting things done? If they are, you need to figure that out now rather than getting free to six months into the process and stressing out your team and not being able to deliver results. If you start this earlier, you will understand what's going to happen later on far, far better rather than being blindsided further down the line. And we're in a fortunate position where you've been able to say, no to certain clients, because we can foresee the problems we're going to have. If we can't even speak to the brand team at this point or at least know how they work, we're going to struggle later on. So, it's a wrap-up, and Debbie's going to be up next talking about link building as well. So, don't want to get off that fast, do you? So, we got here today with an approach that focused on outreach and content-led link building. Now, I'm not saying we should forget that completely. I do not want to go on Twitter in a few minutes and say that someone said, Pally Moogan says, don't do outreach. I'm not saying that. I'm definitely not saying that. However, we shouldn't be sleepwalking into another penguin because next time, Google won't make it as obvious that they've done this. Don't shout about it. Google doesn't do that anymore. They don't tell us exactly what they've done. So, it will happen and we won't know about it. We need to make links a consequence of an effective content strategy by putting customers at the heart of our Rodea generation. Yes, it's harder. Yes, you won't get as many links, but that's that balance when you just write far, far better. Reduce your reliance on outreach again. Don't stop it. Don't turn it off completely, but reduce your reliance upon it so that every single link you get isn't being driven just by having an email that you can send. In Bracer integration, start from day minus one when you're speaking to a new client during the sales process, ask those questions up front and get the information you need and be prepared to ask those questions and potentially walk away if you're able to do so. And if we can do all of those things and bring them all together, eventually we'll get there and I might come back in ten years, Tom, and talk about it all over again. But that's me done on Pally Moogan. I'll be around for the next couple of days. You want to chat about link building and thank you so much for listening. Cheers.