SEO

Grow Your Social Media Presence in 12 Steps

Published

2 years ago

February 2, 2022

Grow Your Social Media Presence in 12 Steps

Now more than ever, small and big businesses place a huge amount of effort into their social media presence.

Out of 17 social media platforms, 6 of them claim more than a billion active users per month. Facebook takes the top spot with its 2.8 billion users worldwide.

Next to Facebook comes YouTube with 2.56 billion users, Instagram with 1.78 billion, and TikTok with 1 billion monthly active users (MAU).

With 300 million active social media platform users in January 2022, it’s hard to pass up the opportunity to be seen and to market your business there.

To prove our point, let’s take into account how Facebook has become an excellent social media platform for many businesses.

Have you asked yourself what the majority of Facebook users do on the platform? On top of clicking likes on posts, Oberlo states Facebook users click on an average of 12 ads per month.

In addition, 90 million small businesses use Facebook Groups, Pages, and Messenger. A whopping 66 percent of small businesses said they advertise on Facebook.

But here’s the dilemma: 93 percent of small businesses struggle with their social media presence.

According to Visual Objects, almost all small businesses struggle to generate more leads and get more followers with their social media accounts.

Other notable social media challenges faced by small businesses include increasing engagement, especially among their new followers. Many businesses find it hard to be consistent in creating and posting their content as well.

If businesses struggle (and some fail) in their social media efforts, what are the odds that you can still build your social media presence? Do you still have the chance to put in the time and effort so you can grow your presence?

The answer is a resounding yes!

Go through and apply these 12 steps to build up your social media visibility:

Note: This post was originally published in January 2017, and updated in February 2022 to include new tips and data.

1. Make SMART, doable goals

It all boils down to the question of why.

Why does your business need to grow its social media presence?

If you want to be visible on social media simply because most businesses are already there, you might exhaust yourself from maintaining your presence in the process.

Write down specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals so you can avoid burnout from aimless content posts and creation.

Some goals you might want to accomplish include growing your community or audience, generating more leads, providing real-time customer service, increasing your website traffic, or getting valuable insights from your customers.

Once you’ve identified your goal, work on creating your social media strategy next.

2. Create your social media strategy

Any successful brand knows the value of structure in businesses. Once you’ve set up your SMART goals, creating steps or a strategy will get you to the finish line.

Don’t throw your lot in luck wishing your random posts will get you likes and engagement from your target audience. Know that setting up a social media strategy can overwhelm anyone, so it’s best that you designate a team that will help you outline a strategy suited to your business goals.

A social media content calendar is your lifesaver. This is where you put and plan all your posts. If you’re unsure what to include in your content calendar, you can check out Hubspot’s social media calendar templates and tools here.

If you want to know and be effective in developing a social media strategy, there are social media and marketing courses out there you can sign up for. Skillshare and Hubspot offer free social media marketing courses you can take any time of the day.

If you don’t have a team who can do the social media management for you yet, SEO Hacker offers social media marketing services. SEO Hacker’s comprehensive approach to social media marketing entails having a presence in major social media platforms, paying close attention to important metrics, and analyzing gathered data to improve social media strategies that were already employed.

3. Know who your target audience is

Once you have your goals and strategy in place, know and outline who your audience is.

Take note: not everyone is your audience. Find out who your target audience is from the get-go so you won’t have a hard time figuring out what kind of content you will create when you post on any social media platforms.

Take the time to look at your audiences’ personas by answering these questions:

What keeps them awake at night?

What are their dreams and their aspirations?

Which brands do they love and support?

4. Build relationships with your audience

Social media exists to digitally connect with friends, families, and like-minded people who couldn’t meet in person. With that in mind, your brand has to reach your audience on a personal level.

With huge social media noise dealt with by marketers and businesses these days, it’s important that you know how to rise above it.

Curate exciting and entertaining content to grow engagement among your audience. Build and foster relationships with your audience by answering their concerns and helping them solve their challenges.

Share tips relevant to your product or offer. A little bit of humorous content won’t hurt as well.

Share or retweet a positive review of your product from your audience. This lets them know that you appreciate their loyalty and support.

If you received a complaint or criticism from your customers, appreciate them for taking the time to let you know about the issue. Address it in a constructive and respectful manner. Put your efforts to get the issue resolved as soon as possible.

Don’t be afraid to show your human side. Nurture your relationship with your audience.

5. Use the right tools to schedule and automate your posts

Staying active and online on social media platforms is no easy feat. That said, your content calendar is an ideal brain dump tool. Ideas come when we least expect them so a content calendar will always come in handy.

Now that you have all your ideas tucked away, how and when should you post them? This is where scheduling and automating your posts come into play.

Fortunately, there are tons of scheduling and automating tools out there to choose from. Social Media Examiner lists down these 5 social media management tools to help you save time.

Over time, our social media managers significantly improved their productivity. Hootsuite did a great job in helping us schedule our social posts, giving us more time to interact with our audience. Hootsuite also helped us manage and monitor whether our strategy is good or requires changes.

Another tool that helped me get a lot of retweets is SocialOomph. If you have time to read about how SocialOomph helps me bring more traffic to my website, read it here.

6. Connect with influencers

Another way to build your social media presence is to connect with influencers.

Sujan Patel believes in the power of connecting with influencers. According to Patel, “connecting with influencers has been key with increasing my personal and company’s social media presence. The main tool I use for connecting with influencers is the Voila Norbert email finding tool. The chrome extension can find just about any influencer’s email you’re trying to connect with on social.”

Here are simple steps you can make to connect with influencers:

Build a spreadsheet

Start with names you have in mind and expand it from there. Include the following details in your spreadsheet:

Name
Email address
Website/blog
Twitter handle
Last contacted time

Search for entrepreneurs, bloggers, or marketers that are one step ahead of you on the following platforms:

On Reddit
Local meetups
Startup directories
Youtube tutorials video creators
Google search (last but effective resort)

Include them in your guest blog

It’s good to include influencers relevant to your guest blog content by mentioning their name or business. Let them know they’re at the top of your mind.

Leave helpful comments on the influencer’s content

Refrain from making worthless comments like “awesome post”. When someone creates content, they usually put their heart and soul into it. They’ll appreciate it more if you mention which part of their content you liked the most. Leave relevant comments that will get meaningful discussions from other audiences.

Offer value

Once you’ve engaged with influencers via tweets and messages, work the extra mile and give value. If you are a web designer, offer a free consultation on their website’s/blog’s design. Facilitate worthwhile connections among like-minded influencers. Introduce them to influencers you know who can be of value to them.

7. Find the sweet spot between storytelling and selling

People hate being sold to, especially on any social media channels.

If you want to make the most of your social media presence, put your efforts into promoting your product without sounding (or reading) like one.

Take a look at some popular social media posts from brands. More often than not, these posts trigger an emotional response to their audience, making their campaigns effective.

You can promote your brand and at the same time connect with your audience with storytelling. Create content that knows how to tug at your audience’s heartstrings.

8. Create eye-catching visuals

Instagram. Twitter. Facebook. TikTok. These social media channels showed us the power of high-quality image and video content in driving social media engagement.

In a 2021 visual content marketing statistics done by Venngage, the report showed that 32.5% of businesses use original infographics and illustrations, 29.5% use stock photos, 15.1% use charts and data visualizations, and 12.7% use videos and presentations.

Facebook lives get six times the engagement versus other types of content, while graphics and video content on Twitter gets more shares than text-based content.

If you’re serious about growing your presence on Facebook or Twitter but clueless on where to begin creating eye-catching visuals, don’t fret. Piktochart and Canva are the best tools to start creating your social media visuals.

9. Keep your content fresh and consistent

If you want your business to stand strong, don’t let social media forget you. In any social media platform, the proverb “out of sight, out of mind” holds true.

One foolproof way to build customer loyalty is to keep your brand consistent and your content fresh. Experiment and analyze which among your content gets the most engagement, likes, and comments.

You can jump in on what’s trending, or incorporate breaking news into your content to give your brand a personality. Never stop experimenting and testing until you get the right strategy that will build and connect with your audience.

10. Focus on the right social media platform

When you look back at the statistics I showed earlier, the urge to be visible on every social media platform with a huge number of users is strong. I can’t blame you for that.

Here’s the thing: being visible on every social media platform will overwhelm you through time. Not only it is daunting, but it’s also pointless. Why?

Not all of your audiences live on every platform. This is why before you start working on your content, it’s best that you know who your target audience is.

This way, you won’t have a hard time creating accounts on several social media platforms and efficiently monitor and listen to your audience.

11. Monitor and listen to your audience

Growing your visibility on social media entails more than just posting content and keeping up with the trends. If you want to grow your brand and increase loyal customers, you need to be customer-centric.

You need to look at the lens and see what your customers say about your brand. Because social media provides real-time interaction, your brand should do the same.

Furthermore, your brand should make the most of every interaction with your audience. This includes every feedback, commonly asked questions, or comments your audience has about your brand. Gather every helpful data on hand so you can map out the right social media strategy for your business. Social media strategies like social monitoring and social listening will help you gain a better understanding of your audience.

12. Focus on building sustainable presence

Just because social media platforms provide real-time interactions it doesn’t mean it will generate quick results for your business, too.

Growth takes time. As with any business, you need patience and perseverance to sustain your presence on social media organically.

Try not to give in to the temptation of paying views or buying more followers. These shady tactics might give you quick results, but it will hurt your social media engagement, your conversion rates and reputation at the same time.

Focus on building sustainable online presence to help you find the right approach to serve your audience better.

Key Takeaway

There’s no one size fits all approach to growing your presence on social media. Businesses have different sizes and different needs. As most of the steps we shared here are practical and relevant to every business, the only way to grow and sustain your presence is to keep in tune with your target audience.

Thank you to Anupam Rajey of Air Solutions and Get Me Rank for inspiring this post.

Related Topics:grow Media Presence Social Steps

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SEO

An In-Depth Guide And Best Practices For Mobile SEO

Published

12 hours ago

April 18, 2024

Max

Mobile SEO: An In-Depth Guide And Best Practices

Over the years, search engines have encouraged businesses to improve mobile experience on their websites. More than 60% of web traffic comes from mobile, and in some cases based on the industry, mobile traffic can reach up to 90%.

Since Google has completed its switch to mobile-first indexing, the question is no longer “if” your website should be optimized for mobile, but how well it is adapted to meet these criteria. A new challenge has emerged for SEO professionals with the introduction of Interaction to Next Paint (INP), which replaced First Input Delay (FID) starting March, 12 2024.

Thus, understanding mobile SEO’s latest advancements, especially with the shift to INP, is crucial. This guide offers practical steps to optimize your site effectively for today’s mobile-focused SEO requirements.

What Is Mobile SEO And Why Is It Important?

The goal of mobile SEO is to optimize your website to attain better visibility in search engine results specifically tailored for mobile devices.

This form of SEO not only aims to boost search engine rankings, but also prioritizes enhancing mobile user experience through both content and technology.

While, in many ways, mobile SEO and traditional SEO share similar practices, additional steps related to site rendering and content are required to meet the needs of mobile users and the speed requirements of mobile devices.

Does this need to be a priority for your website? How urgent is it?

Consider this: 58% of the world’s web traffic comes from mobile devices.

If you aren’t focused on mobile users, there is a good chance you’re missing out on a tremendous amount of traffic.

Mobile-First Indexing

Additionally, as of 2023, Google has switched its crawlers to a mobile-first indexing priority.

This means that the mobile experience of your site is critical to maintaining efficient indexing, which is the step before ranking algorithms come into play.

How Much Of Your Traffic Is From Mobile?

How much traffic potential you have with mobile users can depend on various factors, including your industry (B2B sites might attract primarily desktop users, for example) and the search intent your content addresses (users might prefer desktop for larger purchases, for example).

Regardless of where your industry and the search intent of your users might be, the future will demand that you optimize your site experience for mobile devices.

How can you assess your current mix of mobile vs. desktop users?

An easy way to see what percentage of your users is on mobile is to go into Google Analytics 4.

Click Reports in the left column.
Click on the Insights icon on the right side of the screen.
Scroll down to Suggested Questions and click on it.
Click on Technology.
Click on Top Device model by Users.
Then click on Top Device category by Users under Related Results.
The breakdown of Top Device category will match the date range selected at the top of GA4.

Screenshot from GA4, March 2024

You can also set up a report in Looker Studio.

Add your site to the Data source.
Add Device category to the Dimension field.
Add 30-day active users to the Metric field.
Click on Chart to select the view that works best for you.

A screen capture from Looker Studio showing a pie chart with a breakdown of mobile, desktop, tablet, and Smart TV users for a site

Screenshot from Looker Studio, March 2024

You can add more Dimensions to really dig into the data to see which pages attract which type of users, what the mobile-to-desktop mix is by country, which search engines send the most mobile users, and so much more.

How To Check If Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly

Now that you know how to build a report on mobile and desktop usage, you need to figure out if your site is optimized for mobile traffic.

While Google removed the mobile-friendly testing tool from Google Search Console in December 2023, there are still a number of useful tools for evaluating your site for mobile users.

Bing still has a mobile-friendly testing tool that will tell you the following:

Viewport is configured correctly.
Page content fits device width.
Text on the page is readable.
Links and tap targets are sufficiently large and touch-friendly.
Any other issues detected.

Google’s Lighthouse Chrome extension provides you with an evaluation of your site’s performance across several factors, including load times, accessibility, and SEO.

To use, install the Lighthouse Chrome extension.

Go to your website in your browser.
Click on the orange lighthouse icon in your browser’s address bar.
Click Generate Report.
A new tab will open and display your scores once the evaluation is complete.

An image showing the Lighthouse Scores for a website.

Screenshot from Lighthouse, March 2024

You can also use the Lighthouse report in Developer Tools in Chrome.

Simply click on the three dots next to the address bar.
Select “More Tools.”
Select Developer Tools.
Click on the Lighthouse tab.
Choose “Mobile” and click the “Analyze page load” button.

An image showing how to get to Lighthouse within Google Chrome Developer Tools.

Screenshot from Lighthouse, March 2024

Another option that Google offers is the PageSpeed Insights (PSI) tool. Simply add your URL into the field and click Analyze.

PSI will integrate any Core Web Vitals scores into the resulting view so you can see what your users are experiencing when they come to your site.

An image showing the PageSpeed Insights scores for a website.

Screenshot from PageSpeed Insights, March 2024

Other tools, like WebPageTest.org, will graphically display the processes and load times for everything it takes to display your webpages.

With this information, you can see which processes block the loading of your pages, which ones take the longest to load, and how this affects your overall page load times.

You can also emulate the mobile experience by using Developer Tools in Chrome, which allows you to switch back and forth between a desktop and mobile experience.

An image showing how to change the device emulation for a site within Google Chrome Developer Tools

Screenshot from Google Chrome Developer Tools, March 2024

Lastly, use your own mobile device to load and navigate your website:

Does it take forever to load?
Are you able to navigate your site to find the most important information?
Is it easy to add something to cart?
Can you read the text?

How To Optimize Your Site Mobile-First

With all these tools, keep an eye on the Performance and Accessibility scores, as these directly affect mobile users.

Expand each section within the PageSpeed Insights report to see what elements are affecting your score.

These sections can give your developers their marching orders for optimizing the mobile experience.

While mobile speeds for cellular networks have steadily improved around the world (the average speed in the U.S. has jumped to 27.06 Mbps from 11.14 Mbps in just eight years), speed and usability for mobile users are at a premium.

Best Practices For Mobile Optimization

Unlike traditional SEO, which can focus heavily on ensuring that you are using the language of your users as it relates to the intersection of your products/services and their needs, optimizing for mobile SEO can seem very technical SEO-heavy.

While you still need to be focused on matching your content with the needs of the user, mobile search optimization will require the aid of your developers and designers to be fully effective.

Below are several key factors in mobile SEO to keep in mind as you’re optimizing your site.

Site Rendering

How your site responds to different devices is one of the most important elements in mobile SEO.

The two most common approaches to this are responsive design and dynamic serving.

Responsive design is the most common of the two options.

Using your site’s cascading style sheets (CSS) and flexible layouts, as well as responsive content delivery networks (CDN) and modern image file types, responsive design allows your site to adjust to a variety of screen sizes, orientations, and resolutions.

With the responsive design, elements on the page adjust in size and location based on the size of the screen.

You can simply resize the window of your desktop browser and see how this works.

An image showing the difference between Web.dev in a full desktop display vs. a mobile display using responsive design.

Screenshot from web.dev, March 2024

This is the approach that Google recommends.

Adaptive design, also known as dynamic serving, consists of multiple fixed layouts that are dynamically served to the user based on their device.

Sites can have a separate layout for desktop, smartphone, and tablet users. Each design can be modified to remove functionality that may not make sense for certain device types.

This is a less efficient approach, but it does give sites more control over what each device sees.

While these will not be covered here, two other options:

Progressive Web Apps (PWA), which can seamlessly integrate into a mobile app.
Separate mobile site/URL (which is no longer recommended).

Interaction to Next Paint (INP)

Google has introduced Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as a more comprehensive measure of user experience, succeeding First Input Delay. While FID measures the time from when a user first interacts with your page (e.g., clicking a link, tapping a button) to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing event handlers in response to that interaction. INP, on the other hand, broadens the scope by measuring the responsiveness of a website throughout the entire lifespan of a page, not just first interaction.

Note that actions such as hovering and scrolling do not influence INP, however, keyboard-driven scrolling or navigational actions are considered keystrokes that may activate events measured by INP but not scrolling which is happeing due to interaction.

Scrolling may indirectly affect INP, for example in scenarios where users scroll through content, and additional content is lazy-loaded from the API. While the act of scrolling itself isn’t included in the INP calculation, the processing, necessary for loading additional content, can create contention on the main thread, thereby increasing interaction latency and adversely affecting the INP score.

What qualifies as an optimal INP score?

An INP under 200ms indicates good responsiveness.
Between 200ms and 500ms needs improvement.
Over 500ms means page has poor responsiveness.

and these are common issues causing poor INP scores:

Long JavaScript Tasks: Heavy JavaScript execution can block the main thread, delaying the browser’s ability to respond to user interactions. Thus break long JS tasks into smaller chunks by using scheduler API.
Large DOM (HTML) Size: A large DOM ( starting from 1500 elements) can severely impact a website’s interactive performance. Every additional DOM element increases the work required to render pages and respond to user interactions.
Inefficient Event Callbacks: Event handlers that execute lengthy or complex operations can significantly affect INP scores. Poorly optimized callbacks attached to user interactions, like clicks, keypress or taps, can block the main thread, delaying the browser’s ability to render visual feedback promptly. For example when handlers perform heavy computations or initiate synchronous network requests such on clicks.

and you can troubleshoot INP issues using free and paid tools.

As a good starting point I would recommend to check your INP scores by geos via treo.sh which will give you a great high level insights where you struggle with most.

INP scores by Geos

Image Optimization

Images add a lot of value to the content on your site and can greatly affect the user experience.

From page speeds to image quality, you could adversely affect the user experience if you haven’t optimized your images.

This is especially true for the mobile experience. Images need to adjust to smaller screens, varying resolutions, and screen orientation.

Use responsive images
Implement lazy loading
Compress your images (use WebP)
Add your images into sitemap

Optimizing images is an entire science, and I advise you to read our comprehensive guide on image SEO how to implement the mentioned recommendations.

Avoid Intrusive Interstitials

Google rarely uses concrete language to state that something is a ranking factor or will result in a penalty, so you know it means business about intrusive interstitials in the mobile experience.

Intrusive interstitials are basically pop-ups on a page that prevent the user from seeing content on the page.

John Mueller, Google’s Senior Search Analyst, stated that they are specifically interested in the first interaction a user has after clicking on a search result.

Examples of intrusive interstitial pop-ups on a mobile site according to Google.

Not all pop-ups are considered bad. Interstitial types that are considered “intrusive” by Google include:

Pop-ups that cover most or all of the page content.
Non-responsive interstitials or pop-ups that are impossible for mobile users to close.
Pop-ups that are not triggered by a user action, such as a scroll or a click.

Structured Data

Most of the tips provided in this guide so far are focused on usability and speed and have an additive effect, but there are changes that can directly influence how your site appears in mobile search results.

Search engine results pages (SERPs) haven’t been the “10 blue links” in a very long time.

They now reflect the diversity of search intent, showing a variety of different sections to meet the needs of users. Local Pack, shopping listing ads, video content, and more dominate the mobile search experience.

As a result, it’s more important than ever to provide structured data markup to the search engines, so they can display rich results for users.

In this example, you can see that both Zojirushi and Amazon have included structured data for their rice cookers, and Google is displaying rich results for both.

An image of a search result for Japanese rice cookers that shows rich results for Zojirushi and Amazon.

Screenshot from search for [Japanese rice cookers], Google, March 2024

Adding structured data markup to your site can influence how well your site shows up for local searches and product-related searches.

Using JSON-LD, you can mark up the business, product, and services data on your pages in Schema markup.

If you use WordPress as the content management system for your site, there are several plugins available that will automatically mark up your content with structured data.

Content Style

When you think about your mobile users and the screens on their devices, this can greatly influence how you write your content.

Rather than long, detailed paragraphs, mobile users prefer concise writing styles for mobile reading.

Each key point in your content should be a single line of text that easily fits on a mobile screen.

Your font sizes should adjust to the screen’s resolution to avoid eye strain for your users.

If possible, allow for a dark or dim mode for your site to further reduce eye strain.

Headers should be concise and address the searcher’s intent. Rather than lengthy section headers, keep it simple.

Finally, make sure that your text renders in a font size that’s readable.

Tap Targets

As important as text size, the tap targets on your pages should be sized and laid out appropriately.

Tap targets include navigation elements, links, form fields, and buttons like “Add to Cart” buttons.

Targets smaller than 48 pixels by 48 pixels and targets that overlap or are overlapped by other page elements will be called out in the Lighthouse report.

Tap targets are essential to the mobile user experience, especially for ecommerce websites, so optimizing them is vital to the health of your online business.

Prioritizing These Tips

If you have delayed making your site mobile-friendly until now, this guide may feel overwhelming. As a result, you may not know what to prioritize first.

As with so many other optimizations in SEO, it’s important to understand which changes will have the greatest impact, and this is just as true for mobile SEO.

Think of SEO as a framework in which your site’s technical aspects are the foundation of your content. Without a solid foundation, even the best content may struggle to rank.

Responsive or Dynamic Rendering: If your site requires the user to zoom and scroll right or left to read the content on your pages, no number of other optimizations can help you. This should be first on your list.
Content Style: Rethink how your users will consume your content online. Avoid very long paragraphs. “Brevity is the soul of wit,” to quote Shakespeare.
Image Optimization: Begin migrating your images to next-gen image formats and optimize your content display network for speed and responsiveness.
Tap Targets: A site that prevents users from navigating or converting into sales won’t be in business long. Make navigation, links, and buttons usable for them.
Structured Data: While this element ranks last in priority on this list, rich results can improve your chances of receiving traffic from a search engine, so add this to your to-do list once you’ve completed the other optimizations.

Summary

From How Search Works, “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

If Google’s primary mission is focused on making all the world’s information accessible and useful, then you know they will prefer surfacing sites that align with that vision.

Since a growing percentage of users are on mobile devices, you may want to infer the word “everywhere” added to the end of the mission statement.

Are you missing out on traffic from mobile devices because of a poor mobile experience?

If you hope to remain relevant, make mobile SEO a priority now.

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

SEO

HARO Has Been Dead for a While

Published

17 hours ago

April 17, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

Every SEO’s favorite ~~link-building~~ collaboration tool, HARO, was officially killed off for good last week by Cision. It’s now been wrapped into a new product: Connectively.

I know nothing about the new tool. I haven’t tried it. But after trying to use HARO recently, I can’t say I’m surprised or saddened by its death. It’s been a walking corpse for a while.

I used HARO way back in the day to build links. It worked. But a couple of months ago, I experienced the platform from the other side when I decided to try to source some “expert” insights for our posts.

After just a few minutes of work, I got hundreds of pitches:

So, I grabbed a cup of coffee and began to work through them. It didn’t take long before I lost the will to live. Every other pitch seemed like nothing more than lazy AI-generated nonsense from someone who definitely wasn’t an expert.

Here’s one of them:

Example of an AI-generated pitch in HARO

Seriously. Who writes like that? I’m a self-confessed dullard (any fellow Dull Men’s Club members here?), and even I’m not that dull…

I don’t think I looked through more than 30-40 of the responses. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. It felt like having a conversation with ChatGPT… and not a very good one!

Despite only reviewing a few dozen of the many pitches I received, one stood out to me:

Example HARO pitch that caught my attention

Believe it or not, this response came from a past client of mine who runs an SEO agency in the UK. Given how knowledgeable and experienced he is (he actually taught me a lot about SEO back in the day when I used to hassle him with questions on Skype), this pitch rang alarm bells for two reasons:

I truly doubt he spends his time replying to HARO queries
I know for a fact he’s no fan of Neil Patel (sorry, Neil, but I’m sure you’re aware of your reputation at this point!)

So… I decided to confront him 😉

Here’s what he said:

Shocker.

I pressed him for more details:

I’m getting a really good deal and paying per link rather than the typical £xxxx per month for X number of pitches. […] The responses as you’ve seen are not ideal but that’s a risk I’m prepared to take as realistically I dont have the time to do it myself. He’s not native english, but I have had to have a word with him a few times about clearly using AI. On the low cost ones I don’t care but on authority sites it needs to be more refined.

I think this pretty much sums up the state of HARO before its death. Most “pitches” were just AI answers from SEOs trying to build links for their clients.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not throwing shade here. I know that good links are hard to come by, so you have to do what works. And the reality is that HARO did work. Just look at the example below. You can tell from the anchor and surrounding text in Ahrefs that these links were almost certainly built with HARO:

Example of links build with HARO, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

But this was the problem. HARO worked so well back in the day that it was only a matter of time before spammers and the #scale crew ruined it for everyone. That’s what happened, and now HARO is no more. So…

If you’re a link builder, I think it’s time to admit that HARO link building is dead and move on.

No tactic works well forever. It’s the law of sh**ty clickthroughs. This is why you don’t see SEOs having huge success with tactics like broken link building anymore. They’ve moved on to more innovative tactics or, dare I say it, are just buying links.

Sidenote.

Talking of buying links, here’s something to ponder: if Connectively charges for pitches, are links built through those pitches technically paid? If so, do they violate Google’s spam policies? It’s a murky old world this SEO lark, eh?

If you’re a journalist, Connectively might be worth a shot. But with experts being charged for pitches, you probably won’t get as many responses. That might be a good thing. You might get less spam. Or you might just get spammed by SEOs with deep pockets. The jury’s out for now.

My advice? Look for alternative methods like finding and reaching out to experts directly. You can easily use tools like Content Explorer to find folks who’ve written lots of content about the topic and are likely to be experts.

For example, if you look for content with “backlinks” in the title and go to the Authors tab, you might see a familiar name. 😉

Finding people to request insights from in Ahrefs' Content Explorer

I don’t know if I’d call myself an expert, but I’d be happy to give you a quote if you reached out on social media or emailed me (here’s how to find my email address).

Alternatively, you can bait your audience into giving you their insights on social media. I did this recently with a poll on X and included many of the responses in my guide to toxic backlinks.

Me, indirectly sourcing insights on social media

Either of these options is quicker than using HARO because you don’t have to sift through hundreds of responses looking for a needle in a haystack. If you disagree with me and still love HARO, feel free to tell me why on X 😉

SEO

Google Clarifies Vacation Rental Structured Data

Published

1 day ago

April 17, 2024

Max

Google updates their vacation rental structured data documentation

Google’s structured data documentation for vacation rentals was recently updated to require more specific data in a change that is more of a clarification than it is a change in requirements. This change was made without any formal announcement or notation in the developer pages changelog.

Vacation Rentals Structured Data

These specific structured data types makes vacation rental information eligible for rich results that are specific to these kinds of rentals. However it’s not available to all websites. Vacation rental owners are required to be connected to a Google Technical Account Manager and have access to the Google Hotel Center platform.

VacationRental Structured Data Type Definitions

The primary changes were made to the structured data property type definitions where Google defines what the required and recommended property types are.

The changes to the documentation is in the section governing the Recommended properties and represents a clarification of the recommendations rather than a change in what Google requires.

The primary changes were made to the structured data type definitions where Google defines what the required and recommended property types are.

The changes to the documentation is in the section governing the Recommended properties and represents a clarification of the recommendations rather than a change in what Google requires.

Address Schema.org property

This is a subtle change but it’s important because it now represents a recommendation that requires more precise data.

This is what was recommended before:

“streetAddress”: “1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy.”

This is what it now recommends:

“streetAddress”: “1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Unit 6E”

Address Property Change Description

The most substantial change is to the description of what the “address” property is, becoming more descriptive and precise about what is recommended.

The description before the change:

PostalAddress
Information about the street address of the listing. Include all properties that apply to your country.

The description after the change:

PostalAddress
The full, physical location of the vacation rental.
Provide the street address, city, state or region, and postal code for the vacation rental. If applicable, provide the unit or apartment number.
Note that P.O. boxes or other mailing-only addresses are not considered full, physical addresses.

This is repeated in the section for address.streetAddress property

This is what it recommended before:

address.streetAddress Text
The full street address of your vacation listing.

And this is what it recommends now:

address.streetAddress Text
The full street address of your vacation listing, including the unit or apartment number if applicable.

Clarification And Not A Change

Although these updates don’t represent a change in Google’s guidance they are nonetheless important because they offer clearer guidance with less ambiguity as to what is recommended.

Read the updated structured data guidance:

Vacation rental (VacationRental) structured data

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