Why You Need to Be Doing Secondary SEO

We all know SEO is great. But there’s no arguing with the fact that it can take forever to see results.

When you’re first starting out, you can bet it’s going to take at least a year or two to see any significant progress in the rankings – and it’s going to cost you a fortune while you’re waiting. SEO itself may be free, but these days, doing SEO is pretty much like running a fully-fledged marketing campaign, given the way you have to invest in publishing content and building your brand.

All of these things are important, and they get results. On-page SEO works, but the delays aren’t just frustrating. If you’re a new business, you may not have the runway to last until all of your optimization efforts pay off.

Don’t give up on SEO, SEO takes time, but don’t think it’s the only thing you can do to boost your organic rankings and traffic. While you’re waiting, add secondary SEO to the mix to turbocharge your results.

What is Secondary SEO?

Essentially, secondary SEO is where you optimize external sites that are already ranking in order to maximize their potential to drive traffic to you.

Let me give you an example. We do a lot of secondary SEO at my companies Voila Norbert and Mailshake. One of the SEO strategy we use is to go out and try to find tools-related articles that are already ranking for keywords like “sales tools,” “sales prospecting tools,” or similar phrases.

Once we find them, we’ll see if we can get our companies added to the list. Then, we can redirect some of our internal SEO resources to these external websites to increase the odds that they’ll rank higher and send us more traffic.

Make sense? Here’s how you can do it on your own:

Step #1: Find URLs that are ranking well

Let’s be clear. Not every tools-related article you come across is worth your secondary SEO efforts. And there may be other types of articles you can get your company listed in that’ll serve the same purpose, even if they aren’t lists of tools.

In any case, the first thing you need is a set of target keywords. The fastest way to do this, of course, is to grab them from Google’s suggested results for your primary keywords.

Here are the results for “sales tools”:

And here are some keywords that are related to “sales prospecting tools”:

Now, I can go through the results for each of these keywords to find articles that I might be able to get listed in or to contribute to in some other way.

On the results page for “sales prospecting tools” alone, literally all of the organic results are lists of tools or other subject matter resources I could be a part of:

Make a spreadsheet with possible targets, and qualify any articles you find against a number of different factors:

• • Is the list published to a reputable site? Make sure you actually want to be associated with the content.

• • How recently was it updated? You’ll probably have better luck getting added to a newer resource than one that’s been lying dormant for years.

• Where does the article rank? In my experience, some of my best results come from targeting articles that are ranking near the bottom of page one or the top of page two. In these cases, it can take just a few links or a little effort to quickly boost the article’s rank and get it to start sending you traffic.

Step #2: Get listed on these URLs

Once you’ve picked out a few target articles, your next goal is to get yourself included in them. There are several different ways you can do this.

Influencer outreach

One of the most straightforward ways to get your company included on a list of tools is to reach out and ask. A cold email template like the one below from Mailshake’s guide to “16 Email Outreach Templates for Every Situation” can help get you started:

“Hey, [their name]!

I was digging around for information on [topic] today and came across your resource page: (link to resource page)

This is a fantastic list of resources. I didn’t even know about some of them.

If you’re interested, I actually just wrote a guide on [topic]: [your URL]

It might make a great addition to your page.

Either way, keep up the great work! Thanks for your time.

Cheers,

[Your Name]”

Just replace “I actually just wrote a guide on [topic]” with something like, “I have another suggestion for your list.”

Offer an incentive

The email template above might be enough to get your tool or product listed, but be aware that websites are getting loads of requests like these each day.

To stand out, you might need to sweeten the deal with something like a free trial to your tool or a free piece of epic content that’s gated on your website. Don’t go out and buy their products just to get a link, but do give them the opportunity to see what makes yours so special.

Expand the content

If the content you’re looking to get added to isn’t a list (like, for example, Hubspot’s Ultimate Guide to Sales Prospecting in the search results snapshot above), you may have better luck offering to expand the content than simply asking to be included.

There are a few different ways to make this request:

• • If you see a link to a tool that’s been taken off the market, you can offer yours as a replacement.

• • If the article you find is outdated, you can offer to make changes for free.

• If the article you find has knowledge gaps or is missing key pieces of information, you can offer to expand the content.

Content submission

Finally, keep in mind that you may be able to submit content to some of the sites you encounter in the search results on your own. Quora is one such site that’s worked well for me in the past, but Reddit, Inbound.org and GrowthHackers.com are other great sites to explore. For those of you looking to learn more about how to market yourself or your business on Quora, the folks at RankPay wrote an in-depth guide that should do the trick.

As an example, when I first launched my growth hacking ebook, 100 Days of Growth, I noticed that a lot of Quora questions were showing up in the search results for keywords around “growth hacking.”

Whenever I found these, I wrote in lengthy answers that I thought would really provide helpful information for readers.

Then, I got my friends out voting my answers up. I got my community promoting my responses. For a while, I was able to get #1 and #2 rankings in the search results, which drove a few thousand visitors over a few months and resulted in about a thousand ebook sales.

Step #3: Optimize your external URLs

So now, let’s say you’ve been able to get listed on some new articles or you’ve been able to contribute content to them. Now, it’s time to optimize those URLs.

Optimizing an external URL is pretty much the same as doing off-site SEO for your own website. You can’t control things like metadata or alt tags on an external site, but you can build links pointing at them or send paid ad traffic to them.

At Voila Norbert, for example, we’ve been doing traditional SEO for about nine months, and we haven’t seen any results from it yet. But in that same time, we’ve just about doubled the traffic we get from our top referrers, because we’ve been doing secondary SEO on them.

To start, we:

• • Looked in Google Analytics to see which URLs were sending us traffic

• • Found 4-5 blog posts that were generating a few hundred visitors per month

• Researched where they get their traffic from, as well as a few keywords they were ranking on (looking particularly for those where they had some traction, but could be ranking better).

Once that was done, we:

• • Offered to help expand their content to improve its SEO potential

• • Landed guest post spots that we could use to point links back to the articles

• Spent about $50-75 on paid Facebook Ads to send traffic to the articles

Our total investment was maybe $150 per article, but in about two months, we were able to 4-5X the traffic coming from those particular URLs, which resulted in a measurable improvement in revenue.

We’re doing the same thing now to Mailshake, and I can say with certainty, it’s definitely worth a try. Are you doing secondary SEO? If not, do you plan to add it to your arsenal now? Leave me a note below sharing your thoughts:

Image: Pixabay