Enterprise SaaS SEO is the practice of improving the visibility and rankings of an enterprise SaaS website in search engines. The goal is to attract people who are looking for solutions that your product can provide.

It works like this:

Let’s dive in.

There are many reasons SaaS companies should focus on SEO. These include:

• Credibility. With every new touchpoint, you have the opportunity to be seen as the expert and dominant offering. This helps with the perception of your brand and makes your product an easier choice.
• Growth. SEO brings you increased visibility and brand awareness.
• Revenue. Every touchpoint is a chance at a conversion or sale. You’ll increase customer lifetime value and reduce customer acquisition costs.
• Supports other marketing channels. For instance, you can use paid advertising to retarget an audience based on the content they consumed on your website.

Some common SEO challenges include:

• Long sales cycles. Enterprise SaaS products often have longer and more complex sales cycles. You need content to support users at each stage of their journey.
• Stiff competition. There’s a lot of money at stake, and your competitors are also making investments to improve their results.
• Complexity. Everything is more complex. The organization, the website, coordination between teams, globalization, etc.
• Getting buy-in for SEO. If the company you’re working with doesn’t see the value of SEO, you’ll lose resources and prioritization to whatever the company considers more important.

Here are a few examples of enterprise SaaS companies doing SEO well.

Ahrefs

We are usually the example people use for product-led SEO. We combine top-of-funnel informational content with middle-of-funnel solution-aware content. Every blog and video teaches people what something is and shows how Ahrefs can help them with their tasks or fix their problems.

Here’s an example of how we incorporate this naturally into our content.

We also have free tools, data studies, programmatic plays that incorporate our data, content targeting specific verticals, and more.

Notion

Their templates section is a perfect example of showcasing how to use the product for different purposes.

Atlassian

This is another company whose content is well-aligned with user needs and showcases the product.

Enterprise content marketing involves creating and sharing relevant content to attract, engage, and retain an organization’s target audience.

The highest ROI will be creating product-led content that helps the reader solve their problems using your product. This creates a natural path for new subscriptions and is the basis of our strategy at Ahrefs.

For every article we’re planning to write about on the blog, we give it a business potential score. This score is our estimation of how valuable it is to pitch our product for a given topic.

Making your content marketing successful takes a lot of work. Here are some things you can do.

Create new content

There are many different types of content you can create, but with limited resources, it’s usually best to start out with bottom-of-funnel transactional content and then move to informational content and videos. After you’ve got more resources, you can create things like virtual events, courses, e-books, case studies, white papers, podcasts, or even magazines or books.

The sales process for enterprise companies is typically longer. Many companies want to skip top-of-the-funnel and informational content and focus more on the end-of-funnel traffic that converts. In doing so, they narrow their pipeline and give their competitors opportunities to be seen as experts instead of them.

Starting with bottom-of-the-funnel content makes sense, but eventually, you’ll want to create that top-of-the-funnel content and expand your pipeline.

When creating content, you have to find a process that works best for your company and content creators. That will change depending on who is creating your content.

What content should you create?

I like to start with my competitors’ top pages rather than starting research with a list of keywords. If you export and combine this data, you end up with a list of your competitors’ most successful content, and you can start with the content you know already works and is likely driving value to a competitor. I talk about my process for this in our article on how to create great content.

Every team I ever worked with, whether product-focused or marketing-focused, loved to see this data. You may want to keep track of your content creation in Google Sheets or Airtable.

Alternatively, you can use the Content Gap tool to find these opportunities, but you may see some repeated opportunities because of similar keywords. We will soon update this to add clustering and help reduce this extra noise.

For now, you may want to export the keywords from the Content Gap tool, paste them into Keywords Explorer, and go to the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab. This should give you actual content opportunities you may not be covering.

SEOs creating content

For SEOs writing the content, I recommend you talk to the experts or interview them to get their insights. They may have papers, presentations, podcasts, or webinars you can repurpose. The sales team is another great source of information. I’ll also look at what people search around a topic and what other pages cover.

A lot of organizations create copycat content, but that’s just more content that’s the same as what is already out there. This isn’t future-proof. I encourage you to do better. If you can put in a bit more work and add to the information that already exists, your content will be more successful.

Writers creating content

You likely have a team of people who create the content, and you may be able to empower them to do this process themselves.

One of the things that I liked to use with content teams was a card-sorting exercise. Take the data you’re looking at around what people search and what the top pages talk about, and put them on index cards.

Have your content writers organize this in a way that makes sense to them. They’re going to be grouping your data into topics and subtopics and coming up with the content sections or pages they should write.

This helps train people to do this task themselves, and there’s no right or wrong answer as to how it should be organized. You can also show how top pages cover this information as confirmation that it works. As long as you’re writing about what people are looking for, you’re likely to be successful.

Alternatively, your SEOs can provide writers with easy-to-digest outlines or content briefs that cover what should be talked about in the articles.

To see how each author or team is doing, you can create Portfolios. This will help identify star performers or writers or teams that might need some additional help.

Experts creating content

If your employees want to write content, you need to find a way to empower them to do so. These are your experts, and while the content they create may require some editing, the insights from these employees are valuable and may not be anywhere else.

If your experts don’t have the time to write content, another option is to interview them or have them review the content you create. Most people are usually happy to give quick insights verbally, which you can then use in your content.

Improve existing content

Making your existing content better can lead to quick wins. Here are some things you can look for.

Content with declining traffic

Apply a filter for “Traffic: Declined” in the Top pages report in Site Explorer and set your time period for the last six months or a year. Take a look at pages that lost traffic to see which ones are important to you and that you think you can improve.

Low-hanging fruit

One common way to prioritize content improvements is to check for low-hanging opportunities, like pages ranking in positions 4-15 for their main keyword. You might be able to quickly improve these pages’ content to rank higher and get more traffic. Use Google Search Console or the Organic Keywords report in Site Explorer to find pages that fit the bill.

Optimize for featured snippets

For informational content, targeting featured snippets can skyrocket you to the top of the SERPs.

Here’s how to find the easiest opportunities:

• Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
• Enter your domain
• Go to the Organic keywords report
• Filter for keywords in positions #1–5
• Filter for keywords that trigger featured snippets “where target doesn’t rank”
• Look for keywords where your page is missing the answer, then add it

This is arguably the most important section that you can write if you want to rank for informational queries. You can see what is already eligible for a snippet and the kind of things that these snippets mention, along with why one may be better than another. Now you just have to make something that’s better.

Here’s an example: For “how to create content,” the main snippet is from inc.com:

If you append “-inc.com” to your search, you’re removing this site from the results and can see the second eligible featured snippet from hubspot.com:

You can repeat this process, removing more sites from the results to see more eligible featured snippets. Also, you can glean insights into what it takes to get featured snippets and figure out why one may be considered better than another.

For some head terms that are more informational in nature, you may have to refine the query as “what is [head term]” for this to work.

Translate successful content

Most enterprise companies operate in many countries and in many different languages, and their enterprise SEO teams will have to work on international SEO. If you have content that’s working well in one language, it’s likely going to work well in another language as well. You should translate successful content for those other languages.

We’ve had success with this at Ahrefs despite allocating minimal resources to this process. It’s one of the areas where I expect massive growth as we start to focus on it more.

One new feature in Keywords Explorer that can help with this is the ability to translate and see metrics for keywords on a saved keyword list.

For example, we have a saved list of SEO keywords. In one click, I can translate those keywords into German and see metrics like search volume and Keyword Difficulty (KD) for their translations in Germany. This helps me to understand which topics have the highest search demand in other languages and markets.

Create branded content – sometimes

You’re probably going to run into content that is too brand-focused, too product-focused, or even too keyword-focused. People will ask you to rank for terms with pages they control that don’t align with search intent. A good example is someone wanting to “sprinkle some keywords” into their product page to rank for an informational term.

You can use the “Identify intents” feature in Keywords Explorer to show the main intent of each term and the percentage of traffic to each result type. A product page for “enterprise content management” isn’t likely to rank for this query as the main pages ranking are informational intent.

Sometimes, there may be one product page ranking for terms like this where you have a shot at ranking, but it’s usually the most popular product in that position.

There are times you may want to optimize and even create content for branded terms, but this shouldn’t be your usual strategy. Nor should you “sprinkle some keywords” into brand-or-product-focused pages to try to rank for informational terms. These pages may be full of marketing or sales jargon and not have the content you actually need to rank.

Many enterprise websites get a lot of their overall traffic from branded searches, and they may not rank well for unbranded terms. Branded traffic is a good thing. It’s high-quality and converts well, but you should be getting it even without SEO help.

The exceptions to that may be for terms related to companies that were acquired or products that were renamed. You may still need content or documentation to help you keep traffic for those terms and direct people to new versions of the product.

Syndicate content

Content syndication is when one or more third-party sites republish a copy of content that originally appeared elsewhere. It frequently happens with news content, although, to be honest, any popular site is going to have scrapers, and enterprise sites may have a paid syndication strategy.

There are a lot of benefits to syndication, including increased reach. Check out our article on content syndication to learn more about it and how to follow best practices.

Redirect relevant old content

In many cases, your old URLs have links from other websites. If they’re not redirected to the current pages, then those links are lost and no longer count for your pages. It’s not too late to do these redirects, and you can quickly reclaim any lost value and help your content rank better.

Here’s how to find those opportunities:

1. Paste your domain into Site Explorer (also accessible for free in Ahrefs Webmaster Tools)
2. Go to the Best by links report
3. Add a “404 not found” HTTP response filter

I usually sort this by “Referring domains.”

Create “vs” pages

Creating content that compares you against competitors can be difficult to create in an enterprise environment because of all the legal hurdles. I still think it’s useful to push for these kinds of pages so that you can control the narrative.

There are ways you can do this without having giant tables comparing each feature. Those are always biased anyway. For instance, on our vs. page, we show what users think of us and talk about the quality of our data and unique features.

This page has done well for us, and I believe we will create more pages like it in the future.

Create free tools

If you can create free tools around your product or data, you can use it as a lead-gen tactic for your main products.

We use this strategy at Ahrefs, and some of our most trafficked pages are free tools. We even created a bunch of free writing tools, which we are starting to monetize.

Create programmatic content

If you have the ability to create good pages programmatically using your data, it can be a great way to scale quickly.

We had some success with a small amount of effort by re-using components to create “SEO for x” pages, where x is different types of business. Most of these are ranking well already, but at some point I believe we will put in more effort and pull more data to make these pages even better.

We’re working on some additional programmatic plays that showcase our data even more, and I expect will drive a lot of leads.

Create video content

Video content can work extremely well for businesses. Sam Oh drives tons of leads for Ahrefs.

Ahrefs’ YouTube has over 500k subscribers with less than 300 published videos. Many of those videos have over 1 million views!

In my past jobs, I’ve always treated videos the same way I would blog content and structured the talking points around the things people are searching for and want to know. This worked extremely well, even for industries where people were convinced that folks in the industry didn’t watch videos.

Enterprise link building is the process of acquiring links to an enterprise website with the goal of improving visibility and rankings in search engines.

Enterprise companies get a lot of links naturally. While they may have some challenges with link building, these companies also have a ton of opportunities because of who they are and how much money is at stake.

You have a lot of different options for link building in an enterprise environment. If you’re not sure where to start, I’d check out the Links section in Opportunities report in Site Explorer. This report has shortcuts to other reports with filters applied, that help you with some common tasks.

Here are some of the things you might want to try.

Create linkable assets

In SEO, we use the terms “linkable asset” or “link bait” to refer to content that is strategically crafted to attract links. Such linkable assets can take on many different forms:

• Industry surveys
• Studies and research
• Online tools and calculators
• Awards and rankings
• How-to guides and tutorials
• Definitions and coined terms
• Infographics, GIFographics, and “Map-o-graphics”

You can also use any industry-famous employees or thought leaders you have to create interesting quotes that might be linked.

There’s also a phenomenon where high-ranking pages get linked to more over time. If your content is good enough to get you near the top, you’re more likely to get more links. Tim Soulo calls this the vicious circle of SEO.

For more ideas, check out our guide to enterprise content marketing.

Combine similar content to create a stronger page

Keyword cannibalization is when a search engine consistently swaps rankings between multiple pages or when multiple pages rank simultaneously for the same keyword but are similar enough to be consolidated. Consolidating similar content into comprehensive guides or pillar pages can improve your chances of ranking and earning links.

Promote your content

The more visibility your content gets, the more links you are likely to get naturally. Leverage those other teams I talked about earlier to promote your content on social and maybe paid media. Use influencer relationships to amplify your reach. Use your PR teams for potential media coverage.

Keep in mind that these other teams are busy and have their own priorities as well. Be selective on what you ask them to promote. If you ask for them to promote everything, they’re likely to promote nothing.

Go after unlinked brand mentions

Unlinked brand mentions are online mentions (citations) of your brand—or anything directly related to your brand—that do not link back to your site.

Enterprise companies tend to get talked about a fair bit, and each one of those mentions offers a chance to get a link. Even if there’s not initially a link, it doesn’t hurt to ask for one. You can use Content Explorer to find these mentions on the web and the built-in filter to highlight unlinked domains and hone in on unlinked mentions.

You can also look for unlinked brand mentions of key employees, famous quotes of theirs, or statistics from your studies.

Recover links with link reclamation

Sites, and the web in general, are always changing. We ran a study that found that ~two-thirds of links to pages on the web disappeared in the nine-year period we looked at.

In many cases, your old URLs have links from other websites. If they’re not redirected to the current pages, then those links are lost and may no longer count for your pages.

It’s not too late to do these redirects, and you can quickly reclaim any lost value and help your content rank better.

Here’s how to find those opportunities:

1. Paste your domain into Site Explorer
2. Go to the Best by links report
3. Add a “404 not found” HTTP response filter

I usually sort this by “Referring domains.”

I even created a script to help you match redirects. Don’t be scared away; you just have to download a couple of files and upload them. The Colab notebook walks you through it and takes care of the heavy lifting for you.

While this script could be run periodically, if you’re constantly having to do redirects, I would recommend that you automate the implementation. You could pull data from the Ahrefs API and visits from your analytics into a system. Then, create logic like >3 RDs, >5 hits in a month, etc., and flag these to be redirected, suggest redirects, or even automatically redirect them.

If you had redirects in place for a year or more already, the value is likely already consolidated to the new pages. That’s what Google recommends, and it seemed to be true when we tested it. You could also add a flag for “was redirected” into the automation logic that checks if the page was previously redirected for a year to account for this.

Copy competitors’ links and strategies

There are a few different ways to do this. The usual recommendation for SEOs would be a link intersect report, which we have, but it’s pretty noisy for large sites.

What I would recommend instead is the Best by links report in Site Explorer.

This is going to show you the most linked pages on a website. For us, that’s our homepage, some of our free tools, and our blog and data studies.

Another option is the Site Structure report in Site Explorer sorted by Referring domains or Referring pages.

This lets me quickly see that things like our blog, free tools, glossary, and training academy videos are all well-linked.

Build internal links

I’ve always found internal links to be a powerful way to help pages rank higher.

Even these links may be difficult to get in an enterprise environment. Sometimes different people are responsible for different sections of the website, which can make internal linking time-consuming and may require meetings and a lot of follow up to get internal linking done.

On top of the political hurdles, the process for internal linking can be a bit convoluted. You either have to know the site well and read through various pages looking for link opportunities, or you can follow a process that involves a lot of scraping and crawling to find opportunities.

At Ahrefs, we’ve made this simple, scalable, and accessible so anyone can find these opportunities. The easiest way to see internal link opportunities is with the Internal Link Opportunities report in Site Audit. We look at what your pages are ranking for and suggest links from other pages on your site that talk about those things.

I’d also recommend watching out for opportunities to use better link anchor text. It’s common for page creators to overuse generic link anchor text such as ‘learn more,’ ‘read more,’ or ‘click here.’ You can look for usage of this kind of generic copy in the Internal anchors report in Site Explorer.

Build links from other websites you own

If your company owns multiple websites, you’ll want to add links between them where it makes sense. Ultimately, you may want to consolidate the content into one site, but that’s not always feasible. Even if it is, it may not happen within a reasonable timeframe, so you may want to add links between the sites in the meantime.

This can be abused and goes into a gray area, but for the most part, if you’re linking naturally to relevant pages, you’ll be fine.

Buy other companies’ websites

I wrote all about SEO for mergers and acquisitions. When you buy another company, you inherit their content and their links. This opens some nice options for consolidating content and links to stronger pages.

Enterprise technical SEO is the practice of optimizing an enterprise website to help search engines find, crawl, understand, and index your pages. It helps increase visibility and rankings in search engines.

Enterprise websites are where technical SEO shines. There’s so much money at stake. One mistake can keep millions of pages out of the index or remove an entire site from search results. One fix can potentially be worth millions in revenue.

Check out our guide to enterprise technical SEO where I talk about different types of crawl strategies, prioritization, submitting tickets, and some of the technical SEO projects below.

Check indexing

Priority – high

You probably have some pages indexed that shouldn’t be, and many pages noindexed that should be indexed. Canonicalization is another issue to check to make sure the version of a page you want indexed is the one that is indexed.

First, check the Indexability report in Site Audit for “Noindex page” warnings.

Google can’t index pages with this warning, so it’s worth checking they’re not pages you want indexed.

You can also check the Site Structure report in Site Explorer for any pages with organic traffic that shouldn’t have traffic.

Add schema markup

Priority – high

I’m a fan of schema markup as long as it gets you a search feature. Check out our guide to schema markup to see which ones you should be implementing. There are some cool tools now that can even suggest schema markup based on what is seen on the page.

Fix Page Experience

Priority – medium

While many of these aren’t necessarily going to move the needle for SEO, they are good for users and how they experience your website, so they’re worth working on.

• Core web vitals. This is how fast your pages load.
• HTTPS. You want your pages to be secure. A surprising number of sites, >6%, redirect HTTPS to HTTP.
• Mobile-friendliness. Are your pages usable on mobile?
• Interstitials. You don’t want intrusive interstitials or those that take up a good chunk of the screen.

We cover most of these in Site Audit. For example, we pull PageSpeed Insights data so you get actual Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) metrics for Core Web Vitals as well as Lighthouse metrics in Site Audit.

We also flag mobile SEO issues.

General website health and maintenance

Priority – low

These may not have much impact on SEO, but they can be an important consideration for user experience.

• Broken links. Find them and fix them.
• Redirect Chains. Google will follow up to 10 hops. I don’t worry until after five hops.
• Add sitemaps. I would make sure this is automated. If you are asked to manually create them, you can do it, but just know that if it’s manual, these will rarely be kept up-to-date. If you’re creating them based on crawled pages, then it’s likely all search engines can crawl them anyway.

You may want to check if any of the chains are too long. Look for this in the “Issues” tab in the Redirects report.

Hreflang

Priority depends on the site

Hreflang helps show the right page to the right user in search. This can be crucial for enterprise companies to get right as the dropoff from bad pathing or annoying users can cost you a lot of money.

We flag a number of different hreflang issues in Site Audit.

There are also some nice visualizations to help you explain issues like this first-if-its-kind hreflang cluster visualization. It shows and tells you what is broken, making it much easier to explain to stakeholders than the typical spreadsheet.

Crawl budget

Priority depends on the site

Crawl budget can be a concern for larger sites with millions of pages or sites that are frequently updated. In general, if you have lots of pages not being crawled or updated as often as you’d like, then you may want to look into speeding up crawling.

E-commerce

Specialized task

Ecommerce SEO would be important for any site selling products.

For enterprise sites, faceted navigation can be particularly tricky. Luckily we have a great guide on faceted navigation.

Javascript

Specialized task

The bigger the site, the more likely you are to run into multiple tech stacks. Some of those may be JavaScript frameworks. These are relatively newer than CMSs and less understood by SEOs, so we have a guide on JavaScript SEO that covers many of the issues you’ll face, how to troubleshoot them, and how the rendering process works for Google.

Migrations

Specialized task

A website migration is any significant change to a website’s domain, URLs, hosting, platform, or design. Big companies like to change these things and it creates havoc. Try to write any standards to keep things consistent and minimize the impact of changes.

Mergers and acquisitions

Specialized task

Enterprise companies buy other companies all the time. When I worked in enterprise SEO, I felt like I was constantly doing one website merger project or another. There’s a lot that can go wrong and a lot of money on the line. Check out our guide on SEO for mergers and acquisitions for more info.

Log file analysis

Specialized task

I would typically consider this task firmly in the developer department, but it is something that technical SEOs may be asked to do at times. Logs can be expensive to store and analyze and they contain private information (PII) with IP addresses. Many companies won’t give SEOs log file access. I’d say in 99.9% of cases, the crawl stats report in Google Search Console will meet your needs instead of logs.

Enterprise SEO metrics are key performance indicators (KPIs) used to measure the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. Monitoring these metrics helps you prove value and shows the success of your SEO program.

You’ll create a lot of different SEO reports for a lot of different people in an enterprise environment. Check out our guide on enterprise SEO reporting to see some of the reports you’ll want to create and the metrics to include in them for different people. It includes things like:

1. How to equate SEO metrics to money
2. Selling SEO by comparing against competitors
3. Different SEO metrics to include
4. Creating status or project reports
5. Reporting on opportunities

Some popular enterprise SEO tools include:

I’m obviously biased towards Ahrefs, but we’re really in a league of our own with 44% of the S&P 500 choosing us. Look how we compare to other enterprise SEO tools in the market.

And our organic search share of voice (SoV).

Check out our article on enterprise SEO tools to learn why you should choose us.

Final thoughts

There’s so much at stake in enterprise SEO and so many opportunities. When a company and its people finally get behind SEO, they can dominate an industry.

If you have any tips, enterprise SEO experiences you’d like to share, or questions, let me know on X or LinkedIn.

Google’s Gary Illyes answered a question about negative SEO provides useful insights into the technical details of how Google prevents low quality spam links from affecting normal websites.

The answer about negative SEO was given in an interview in May and has gone unnoticed until now.

Negative SEO

Negative SEO is the practice of sabotaging a competitor with an avalanche of low quality links. The idea is that Google will assume that the competitor is spamming and knock them out of the search engine results pages (SERPs).

The practice of negative SEO originated in the online gambling space where the rewards for top ranking are high and the competition is fierce. I first heard of it around the mid-2000s (probably before 2010) when someone involved in the gambling space told me about it.

Virtually all websites that rank for meaningful search queries attract low quality links and there is nothing unusual about, it’s always been this way. The concept of negative SEO became more prominent after the Penguin link spam update caused site owners to become more aware of the state of their inbound links.

Does Negative SEO Cause Harm?

The person interviewing Gary Illyes was taking questions from the audience.

She asked:

“Does negative SEO via spammy link building, a competitor throwing tens of thousands of links at another competitor, does that kind of thing still harm people or has Google kind of pushed that off to the side?

Google’s Gary Illyes answered the question by first asking the interviewer if she remembered the Penguin update to which she answered yes.

He then explained his experience reviewing examples of negative SEO that site owners and SEOs had sent him. He said that out of hundreds of cases he reviewed there was only one case that might have actually been negative SEO but that the web spam team wasn’t 100% sure.

Gary explained:

“Around the time we released Penguin, there was tons and tons of tons of complaints about negative SEO, specifically link based negative SEO and then very un-smartly, I requested examples like show me examples, like show me how it works and show me that it worked.

And then I got hundreds, literally hundreds of examples of alleged negative SEO and all of them were not negative SEO. It was always something that was so far away from negative SEO that I didn’t even bother looking further, except one that I sent to the web spam team for double checking and that we haven’t made up our mind about it, but it could have been negative SEO.

With this, I want to say that the fear about negative SEO is much bigger than or much larger than it needs to be, we disable insane numbers of links…”

The above is Gary’s experience of negative SEO. Next he explains the exact reason why “negative SEO links” have no effect.

Links From Irrelevant Topics Are Not Counted

At about the 30 minute mark of the interview, Gary confirmed something interesting about how links evaluated that is important to understand. Google has, for a very long time, examined the context of the site that’s linking out to match it to the site that’s being linked to, and if they don’t match up then Google wouldn’t pass the PageRank signal.

Gary continued his answer:

“If you see links from completely irrelevant sites, be that p–n sites or or pure spam sites or whatever, you can safely assume that we disabled the links from those sites because, one of the things is that we try to match the the topic of the target page plus whoever is linking out, and if they don’t match then why on Earth would we use those links?

Like for example if someone is linking to your flower page from a Canadian casino that sells Viagra without prescription, then why would we trust that link?

I would say that I would not worry about it. Like, find something else to worry about.”

Google Matches Topics From Page To Page

There was a time, in the early days of SEO, when thousands of links from non-matching topics could boost a site to the top of Google’s search results.  Some link builders used to offer “free” traffic counter widgets to universities that when placed in the footer would contain a link back to their client sites and they used to work. But Google tightened up on those kinds of links.

What Gary said about links having to be relevant matches up with what link builders have known for at least twenty years. The concept of off topic links not being counted by Google was understood way in the days when people did reciprocal links.

Although I can’t remember everything every Googler has ever said about negative SEO, this seems to be one of the rare occasions that a Googler offered a detailed reason why negative SEO doesn’t work.

Watch Gary Illyes answer the question at the 26 minute mark:

Featured Image by Shutterstock/MDV Edwards

This week’s Ask An SEO question comes from Nicolò, who asks:

“What are the best resources to learn SEO and who are the best people to follow online for good advice?”

This is a great question that goes to the heart of what a lot of people struggle with when learning SEO. There is a lot of information online.

There are a lot of SEO “experts.”

Often, there is a lot of contradictory advice.

So, how do you sort the truth from the fiction – the opinionated from the experienced?

People To Follow

The issue in the SEO industry is that we are often left in the dark. Google and the other search engines offer us morsels of information, and we run wild with speculation.

Unfortunately, this can then become “fact.”

The rumor spreads. Pretty soon, you’ll hear it discussed in agency pitches and incorporated into brand strategies, all without it being properly questioned.

Finding the truth amid all of this noise can be tricky. Essentially, you are asking me, “Who and what can I trust?”

Really, the answer is to find SEO pros to learn from who are constantly testing their own assumptions.

I’m not going to list names here. I don’t want to risk putting you off following an SEO on social media purely because I haven’t included them in my list.

There are a lot of highly accomplished SEO pros who I don’t know.

Instead, I’ll suggest some ways of identifying those people who are digging into SEO and drawing conclusions from data.

Conferences And Publications

Start by attending SEO conferences and taking note of the speakers who are bringing something new to the table.

These are the people who are conducting experiments or backing up their claims with their own case studies.

Similarly, look for authors writing in reputable SEO publications – like Search Engine Journal – read their work and follow those constantly looking to question conventional wisdom and prove or disprove it with data.

Conference organizers and publication owners perform a certain level of due diligence, which means you are a little bit safer following the people they have chosen to showcase than following strangers on the internet.

Follow Who They Follow

A good next step to expand your list is to look at who the people you identified above follow.

If the same names pop up on the social media profiles of these conference speakers and article writers, you can be reassured that they are bringing useful insight to the platform.

Try to identify who they are discussing SEO with on social media. Snoop on those conversations and see who your trusted list of people to follow are also having informed discourse with.

It’s okay, too, if the SEO professionals you follow do not necessarily agree with what’s being said by the other people, as long as those other people are bringing rational, data-backed opinions. Sometimes, we learn best through hearing both sides of an argument!

Ask For Recommendations

It’s also perfectly acceptable to ask for recommendations of who to follow online like this Reddit user did.

To avoid getting back the same small list of famous SEO professionals each time, consider reaching out to some of your “trusted” SEO pros from the list above and ask them who they would recommend for specific areas of SEO.

For example, are you looking to learn more about local SEO or ecommerce SEO?

Ask for recommendations of who they would turn to if they had a question in that field.

Be Part Of The Discussion

SEO is constantly evolving, and no single SEO expert has all the answers. We learn from each other and from discussing ideas and opinions.

It’s never too early in your career to take part in those discussions.

Join In The Conversation

Look for conversations that are happening on SEO topics and join in the discussions. For example, @MordyOberstein’s #SEOChat over on X or the Google Search Central Help Community 

Try some of the Reddit subreddits about SEO, like r/TechSEO and r/bigseo. There will be a lot of discussions (I mean arguments, really) that will give you some quick insight into what practicing SEO pros make of particular ideas or approaches.

You can simply read through questions and replies, or you can take part. Give your own thoughts and ask for critiques and opinions. Engaging in discourse and learning from others can help you to sharpen your knowledge.

Start A Conversation

Perhaps, if you’re feeling brave, you can start your own conversations in these forums.

There is always the risk that you might be met with answers by people who haven’t really practiced SEO that much. The great/awful thing about the internet, however, is there are always people waiting in the wings to argue and say an opinion isn’t valid!

Ask a specific question and crowd-source the answer. Wait for the arguments to be presented and countered, then use it as an opportunity to learn how to validate others’ SEO opinions.

Conferences And Meet-ups

As already mentioned above, seeing who is speaking at events can give you an idea of some reputable people to follow, but let’s explore that a bit more.

Learn Something New

Something I recommend to SEO pros, both experienced and new, is to attend SEO talks that don’t interest them. That might seem counterintuitive, but it can actually be extremely eye-opening.

The chances are that the aspects of SEO you find exciting are the ones you will actively seek to learn more about.

If you are interested in the technical side of SEO, you will likely look for talks on cutting-edge experiments, advances in load speed and rendering, or case studies about complicated migrations.

But you possibly already know a lot about that as you are already interested in it. Every once in a while, set out to attend the talk you are least interested in.

If you are a digital PR at heart, attend a tech talk or two. If you are an in-house SEO, attend a talk about client management.

By doing this, you have a high chance of learning something completely new that will enhance or complement your existing skill set. For example, the in-house SEO will be able to apply skills discussed in the agency talk to their own stakeholder management issues.

Some good conferences to start with include BrightonSEO (Brighton, UK, and San Diego), WTSFest (Philadelphia, London, Berlin), MnSearch Summit.

Read more: The Best SEO Conferences For 2024-2025

Look Outside Of SEO

A good way to expand your knowledge of SEO is to not just attend SEO conferences. Go to events where a more holistic digital marketing approach is spoken about.

Or, if you are feeling really inclined, go to one that discusses adjacent disciplines like PPC and email marketing. This way, you may well learn more about the context of SEO in the digital landscape and how to better implement it within a complicated marketing system.

There are several specialist conferences that cover marketing subjects like paid media, social media and content marketing available, including ADWorld Experience, Hero Conf, and Content Marketing World.

There are also large multi-discipline conferences that cover a wide range of digital marketing topics, including Moz Con, State of Search, INBOUND, and the Growth Marketing Summit.

Go To Panels

A conference talk is, by design, very one-sided (heckling aside!). The speaker presents the material how they want to and goes into as much depth as they feel appropriate.

Due to this, you don’t have any opportunity to hear other peoples’ views on the subject or even their challenges to the assertions made.

Panels, however, are more collaborative and discussion-focused. Many events that have traditional workshop or presentation formats will also have the occasional panel or fireside chat.

These are your opportunities to hear the views of multiple SEO pros, perhaps even disagreements on a subject.

Listening to more than one view of a topic will help you discern what you agree or disagree with and ultimately form your own opinion. It is a good way of preventing yourself from just agreeing with whoever you have heard speak on the subject most recently.

Participate In Webinar Q&As

Webinar question and answer sessions are another way to hear multiple SEO pros give their opinions on a topic. They will also allow you to ask your own questions to the participants.

For example, the Good Signals “SEO Office Hours” webinar hosted by Michael Chidzey and Jo Juliana Turnbull is a weekly webinar that allows viewers to submit their questions in advance or ask questions during the event itself.

Then, a panel of SEO practitioners will discuss their thoughts on the questions.

Similarly, if you want to hear directly from the horse’s mouth, you can participate in Google’s “SEO Office Hours” asking your questions directly to Googlers from the Search Quality team.

Read more: Top 17 SEO Podcasts For 2024

Communities

Many communities have been set up to help with learning SEO. Some are region – or demographic-specific to help with more nuanced questions or support those traditionally less supported in the industry.

These communities are designed to facilitate a safe space to ask questions and get answers from others in the industry.

This sort of networking isn’t just useful for increasing your practical knowledge of SEO, they can also help with job opportunities. There are a lot available but here is a selection:

Location-specific Meetups include:

Create Your Own

If there isn’t a community that serves your specific need, or you’d prefer something smaller, consider creating your own.

It could start off as regular meet-ups at local cafés where you get to know other SEO pros in your area.

Or perhaps, an online call once a month where you can just bring questions to each other.

Maybe you have met some other SEO pros you feel you could learn from. You might be able to invite them to participate in a Slack or WhatsApp group.

Create A Forum

Another way to create a community that uses existing infrastructure and is, therefore, much easier to create is through Reddit or other forums.

You could set up a “subreddit” for a particular aspect of SEO and share it on other SEO subreddits. That way, you can encourage a much wider range of people to participate without you needing to know and invite them all personally.

Resources

To finish, let’s return to the question I discerned at the beginning: “Who and what can I trust?” There are already a lot of resources online about SEO, some less helpful than others!

Newsletters

Other than online blogs like Search Engine Journal, there are newsletters that can round up breaking industry news and case studies.

For example, Aleyda Solis’s “SEOFOMO Newsletter” sends a weekly summary of interesting articles and webinars from the SEO industry.

Nikki Halliwell’s “Tech SEO Tips newsletter” offers news and tips designed to help solidify your tech SEO knowledge.

Tom Critchlow’s “SEO MBA” newsletter focuses on the career and management side of SEO.

Women in Tech SEO also has a newsletter for everyone in the industry to learn SEO from, summarising interesting articles that have been recently released.

Training Courses

There are a lot of SEO training courses out there, paid and free.

Some that have been highly recommended to me in the past are the Hubspot Academy, Semrush Academy, BrightLocal Academy, Blue Array Academy, and the BrightonSEO short courses.

Sometimes, though, you may want to go more in-depth into new areas of SEO. Perhaps you don’t really know where your skills gaps lie. For this, I would strongly recommend looking at Aleyda Solis’s LearningSEO.io.

It is a free and highly comprehensive roadmap of SEO concepts. It runs from beginner to advanced, with reliable free resources accompanying each.

Summary

There is a lot of information about SEO online. It’s an ever-evolving subject and that means more content will be produced on it all the time.

With that amount of information available, it can be overwhelming to know who or what to trust.

Use the suggestions and resources above to start to curate your own list of trustworthy material and people to learn from. That way, you can keep expanding your knowledge in a safe and helpful way.

More resources: 

---

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal