Hi, it's Ed here. Just a quick note to this is all ten episodes from our Link Building series, all in one podcast. Also you can just listen to it all in one go without having to download them individually. So yeah, I hope you enjoyed. Hi, it's Ed Dawson here. Now Link Building has always been and continues to be a crucial part of the SEO jigsaw that you need to build authority and drive rankings in Google. And with the emergence of AI-based search like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, the importance of links in getting your site cited in responses means that link building becomes of even greater importance. So I've grouped together all the best episodes of the podcast that touch on link building into a series dedicated to all the money strategies and tactics you can use to get more links to your content. So let's get on to the podcast.com, the solution to finding the questions people ask online. I'm an affiliate marketer, STO, and I've been building and monetizing websites for over 20 years. I've built sites from the ground up, bought sites and sold sites in large exits. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Today I'm going to talk about backlinks the good, the bad, and the ugly. If you're a regular listener to the podcast, you'll probably have noticed that I haven't talked much about backlinks previously. Now backlinks, just brief definition for those that aren't sure what I'm talking about. Anytime that another website links to your website, that's called an external backlink, and that's the back the type of backlink I'm going to talk talk about now. So that's links from other websites to your website. Now, in terms of SEO, these links actually help your SEO. Um, it's part of Google's ranking algorithm, part of the page rank algorithm is taking takes into account how many links and what sort of links come from external sites to your site. In general, the more links you've got, the better. There are nuances, some links are better than others. Some websites give more power when they're linked to you than smaller websites. There's things like relevance and the anchor text, um, all matter. The more relevant an anchor text is, the more it'll help you rank for that similar terms to that. Um but I'm not going to go into huge details on those this time around. Um, but just wanted to say, yeah, backlinks from external websites to your website do count for SEO, and it is an important thing. Now, taking this on board, knowing that backlinks are quite important for SEO, you could be tempted to say, Well, let's forget about everything else, let's just go and get as many backlinks as we can possibly get and get them linking to our website, and that will help us rank, and we won't need to do anything else. Now, again, that is generally 15 years ago, that was quite accepted. That's what most people did, and I did it myself. If you've listened to um some of the podcasts where I talk about the story of broadband.co and how we got hit by penalties. I talk about then when yep, we just went nuts. We would buy, we paid people to link to us, we did um link spam from um uh forums where we just get people to put forum posts in for us and photo posts and comment posts and and all sorts of links, and there's all sorts of really low-quality links. And back then, it didn't harm you to do that. Google made noises that didn't want people to do this because they realized that people just gaining backlinks by any means possible was potentially polluting their algorithm and getting people to rank where they weren't necessarily the best site, they just had the most links, and everybody did it. But then along came Penguin, the Penguin algorithm, and that penalised lots of sites that were buying uh and creating poor quality links. And ever since um we got hit by Penguin really badly, and I've talked about this in other podcast episodes. So I'd say go and listen to them for the full story. I made a conscious decision that I wasn't doing that again because we got hit so hard and the recovery took so long and such a risk. For me, the risk-reward ratio wasn't there. Now, before we go any further, I just wanted to say that I'm not puritanical about how people run their websites and the choices that they they make. I've got no problem if people want to buy and sell links. I don't judge people for buying and selling links, that's completely up to them. It's not illegal, Google's terms of services are not the law. If you break them, then you know there is no, as far as I'm concerned, there's no moral or legal legal issue with that. Um, and some people quite happily do it, and I think it's fair enough as long as everybody on both sides of the equation understands the risks and possible potential rewards from it. So I'm not going to be sitting here from a judgy point of view, I'm literally just saying what my point of view is and the reasons why I make the choices that I do now when it comes to link building. Okay, so now let's start with the good. So the good backlinks are the ones which you naturally receive. These are ones where you don't make any solicitation, you don't make any payment, no persuasion. These are just the kind of backlinks that people find your site, discover your site, and find it valuable enough that they will link to it from their website. It may be because you are sharing some data or providing a tool or something that's useful for that person and for their audience. Now, these links are great because a it's not against Google's terms of service, b, they don't cost anything, c they tend to stand there for a long time. The longevity of those links is good. There's there's no reason for people to go and take them away. So these are the gold standard, and that's what I now aim for with any site I produce. Um, if you go and look at say the bat link profile of keywords people use, um you know we've done no link building at all for that site. We just built a good product and a good site, and it's naturally received links. So if you want to see an org a truly organic um backlink profile, go and look at keywords people use is batlink profile in a tool like AHRFs or something like that, and that's what to aim for. And there's no risk in that backlink profile. I don't lose sleep worrying. Am I ever going to get caught out for that or is there any are they gonna cause me any issues? Because it's just all completely natural. So that's that's that's the good links, that's the gold standard, they're the very best. That's what I call good, and that's what I always aim for myself. Okay, so moving on, what's the bad? Well, maybe bad's a bit too strong because they maybe the more dodgy, the iffy links. Now, these are the ones where they look like they are a natural link, um, but you have made a deal with someone, you've paid them to link to you. If we look at Google's spam guidelines, which I'll link to um in the show notes, these are the ones within those guidelines where you know it's going to be hard when you're just looking at the page to determine that that those links have been put there um by being paid for. So things like exchanging money for links or posts that contain links, exchanging goods or services for links, sending someone a product in exchange for them, writing about it and including a link. Um now, yeah, so that these are these are the kind of the dodgy ones. Now, okay, it's hard to tell necessarily that they've been placed um with payment, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google um can sort of compare bat link profiles between sites which where it doesn't think this is happening and ones where it is happening, and it's it's a thing like the type of the number and type of links that a site attracts. If if it's lumpy, if you're all of a sudden um getting links from particular types of sites that you weren't before and it's just coming in little chunks regularly, then there's little patterns that where AI in the future, if it's not doing it now, might be able to determine that uh sort of the growth of a link profile is not necessarily natural. So whether they can do that at the moment or not is a different matter. That's maybe a future risk. Um, but it's those are the kind of the links where you have to tread carefully, I'd say, if you're going to do it. Um, and you know that they are the risk is lower, but I think there's always going to be a risk. So then on to the ugly. What are the ugly backlinks? Now, these are the ones that you know you could look at a page, see a backlink on it, and go, hang on, that's not there naturally. Um, these are things like um footer links, um, sort of so bulk footer links in the in the bottom of a page where it's linking off to unrelated sites with unrelated anchor texts. You can see that someone who's controlling this site is just selling that that footer text. Um, it can be things like putting spam into comments, spam into forums, um, with links in, um, and it can be, I think, things niche edits is one that I always worry about. That's where people pay to have a bat link inserted in an older article. Um, and things like that can possibly done badly, can look unnatural. Another one would be um private blog networks. Um, now private blog network done well and controlled could potentially drop into the bad rather than ugly category. Um, but a lot of them that I've seen are not done like that, they're just you know expired domains with pages full of unrelated posts, stuffed full of um bat links, um, and it's just people who are controlling those um those networks, trying to make as much money as possible by selling links on them. Um and it's those where you know in the short run they might work for you, but in the longer run, there's the ones that could couldn't come back to bite you in the long run. Um, and trust me, it is so much harder clearing up a link spam mess than just never doing it in the first place. Um, so yeah, see those these ugly ones are the ones that are really going to cause you issues, and Google do from time to time run link spam updates where they will actually go around and penalize sites that they think are doing um sort of engaging in dodgy link practices. So that's the three types: the good, the bad, the ugly. Now, just to go back to my previous point, I do not judge people who use any of these different tactics. It is open for everyone to do what they want, there's no laws broken, I'm not the moral police, it's fine. As I say, I've done these some of these things in the past, and they worked until they didn't. And again, I think if you went and did it now, if you if you did some of the uh more uh bad and ugly ones, then yeah, they they may work for a period, and how long that period is, it could be a short time, could be a long time. But are they likely to work forever? Probably not. And when the time comes, you've got to you've got to clear it up, you've just got to be accept that risk. And if you're willing to upset that accept that risk and and take it as take it for what it is for as long as you can, then fine. But if you um I subscribe to a different philosophy now because of the being you know once bit and twice shy. My philosophy now is very much create something great and make sure that then you concentrate on on people linking to you naturally as your as your linking strategy. I will do further episodes about the kind of content uh that actually will attract links naturally. Um it's it's harder to do, it's that easy to put up a website and just put anything on it. It's harder to make a website which is actually linkable um by people naturally. Um, but there are there are patterns there and there's things that you can do, and I'll talk about that in a future episode. Before I start, this episode comes with a disclaimer. I'm going to be talking about black cat strategies that are against Google's terms of service. This means that if you choose to use any of the methods I discussed today, then you're at risk of getting your sites penalized. Now, while I don't condemn those that use black cat techniques, I personally don't choose to exploit them as I prefer to build sites for the long term. Whereas the inherent risk in black cat is that while they may work in the short term, the risk of penalization makes them far less likely to would be a long-term bet. I do think it's important to share black cat techniques, though, so that those who wish to avoid them can know what to look out for. With that said, let's look at today's topic: private blog networks. So, what is a private blog network? A PBN is a group of websites that really only exists to provide backlinks to other websites to improve their Google search rankings. So a Black Cat SEA would create this network of websites by either creating new websites or by um buying expired domains which um already have um backlinks themselves and then creating new websites on those expired domains. Obviously, it works better if the um the websites in a private blog network have links of their own, otherwise the links they're going to provide to other websites aren't going to be that great. Now, the reason people go to the effort of doing this is because it gives them full control of linking. Um, they can build backlinks to their websites and other websites without having to actually earn them, um, which is obviously the white hat way of doing it, and the more difficult way of doing it. We know that earning links organically is quite difficult. Um, but obviously, if you earn links organically, then you don't pay for them, they last forever, and they're not against terms of service. Now, if you're using a PBN, then obviously you can control the anchor text, you can control exactly where uh on the website which pages get linked to, you can determine the link velocity, all these things. And yes, they can work over the short term. Um, so it's not to say that these won't work, but obviously, as we mentioned before, it's the risk that is the big factor, and also the cost. The cost to maintain a um private blog network can soon stack up. Every website needs hosting, every website needs content, every website uh needs domain renewals. All those costs can actually soon significantly add up. Now that's why lots of um private blog networks don't just get used by the uh owner of the network for their own purpose. Most of these networks they'll actually start selling um links on their on their blogs to other people, um, and this is where it increases the risk of these um networks being discovered. Google spends a lot of time trying to discover these networks, and it has many automated systems to look for the patterns of interlinking which can help identify these links, and when it does find the links, it will devalue them. That's the least worst thing that happens if these links just get devalued. It might go a step further and they can actually penalize people who are being linked to on the network. So you can find that if you've got links that you've purchased on uh and they turn out to be on a PBN, then you could end up with a manual action against your site where if you go to Google Search Console and look for uh manual elections, you'll find out that's happened, or you might get a um an algorithmic penalty, um and with all of these, they can be really really difficult to get rid of. You'll end up having to go back trying to get rid of the links, um, disavow the links, um, and just yeah, it just causes a real pain. So that's why I'd say that if you're looking for longevity, PBNs are not necessarily the way to go. Now, if you want to avoid PBNs, how do you do it? Well, obviously, if you're buying links, then don't buy any links where they say you're buying links on a PBN. Some PBN link sellers are totally upfront and say this is a PBN, buy the buy the buy links from us and it's at your own risk, and that's fair enough. So, first of all, yeah, it don't buy on anything when it says they're a PBN. Secondly, if you do decide to buy from a seller and they don't say it's a PBN, when you get a link, do a test by and see what kind of website your um link actually ends up on. If it looks like it's a website where there's lots and lots of posts on that website, full of lots and lots of links, and those posts are from all sorts of different topics that tend to be completely unrelated. You look at the domain, you see that it was an expired domain that used to be something else, that's probably been bought by someone to put completely new content on just for the purposes of SEO, then that's probably another flag that you are on a you know that's a PBN network, and I probably wouldn't buy any other links from then. And you know, if you want to be totally safe, just you know ask them to remove those links you put on this because that's not the kind of links you want to be buying. I'll say I don't actually say to people you should buy links, but I know people do it, and there's buying links and there's buying links, so you just need to be careful. I hope that's given you a good overview of what a PBN is and what the risks of using them are, and we'll cover more black hat topics in future episodes. Okay, I'm gonna start with quite a controversial statement for some people, and that is that people link to great content. Now, you'll see lots of people in SEO disagreeing with this because they think people don't link to great content, and the only way to get links is to proactively go out and get and build them, whether that's buying them or trying to persuade people to link to you or doing any other um type of link building. But the actual truth of the matter is if you do actually produce great content, people will actually link to you because and I've got experience from that, and I'm going to show examples today of some of the type of content that people will actually link to off their own back without being asked without being approached, they'll just link to it. Now, people don't just link to any content, they only link to content that they can't replicate themselves. That's the kind of content that will naturally, organically get links because if someone can't produce it themselves, can't replicate it themselves, then they're much, much more likely to link to it. So this means you've got to produce something that's actually essentially hard to replicate. Now, what do I do I mean by tool? A tool is it's not just written content, it's not just graphical content. What it is is basically something that you interact with on a web page, on a website, um, get a job done or to find something out. So some very advanced types of tools are Google Docs, that's like a web-based tool, and it's incredibly advanced. Um, not the kind of cont the kind of tool I'm necessarily talking about here, but that is like the pinnacle of a web-based tool. A very simple one might be a tool that just lets you say calculate Pythagoras' theorem for a given right angle triangle, the kind of thing that uh someone doing their math samework might use to um double check they've got things right, that kind of tool. But essentially, yeah, it's a piece of content that you will interact with to get answers, results, or produce something with. Now, tools, because they're quite common to produce, that is what gives you the um that unique ability that people will link to it because they can't replicate it easily or quickly. So they will do the next best thing, which is they will share. Now, if you've got an audience and you're trying to bring them new content all the time, you're trying to keep them engaged. If you find a tool that your audience would be interested in, then you are very likely to want to share that tool with your audience because it raises your position with your audience because you're bringing new things to them. Now, if you listen to this thinking, I have no idea how to produce tools, I've got no programming programming experience, anything like that. Don't worry, I will share later how you can get over that barrier quite easily. Now, so we know that people will link to tools and why people will link to tools, but let's give you some more examples of tools. So I can give you examples of ones that I've actually created myself, and these have generated thousands of links over time, all organic, all for free, and all from highly relevant other websites, because people are obviously going to be linking to tools from uh sites where they're adjacent to your topic, it might not be exact, so it might be someone who's linking to a broadband checker tool because they've got say a community website and they want to give people a link to a place where the people in that community can find the best broadband deals available in that area. So they would link to a tool. So here are the examples I've got. So, first of all, is the broadband postcode checker that we built for broadband.co.uk, and it's still there, it's still live. You can still go and see it now. If you go to broadband.co.uk, you'll see on the home page there is a big form saying find the cheapest, fastest, best broadband for your postcode, and it asks you to put in a postcode. If you put a postcode in there, it will then search a database of all the deals that are available in your area, only bring you the deals that are available in your area and provide you links to sign up for those broadband providers. Now, obviously, you can see that that tool it's quite a few moving parts to it. It's got to know what different broadband suppliers are available in what areas, it's got to have a know what the deals are for those suppliers, and it's got to be able to sort them and organise them based on a postcode that someone puts in. So that's not a trivial piece of work to do, it's not a trivial piece of work to keep up to date. So it's the kind of thing that people will link to because they can't replicate it, but their audience would find it useful. The second one to share is on it's on the same site, and that is the broadband speed test. So if you went to broadband. So it will do an upload and download test, it will give you um details of how fast your connection is, but it will also give you comparisons to how um fast you are for the supplier you've got and compare to people other people on the supplier and other people in your area. Um so, again, this is something that is not easy to produce, and with it collecting all the data on the back end as well and being able to compare to other places, again, that it sort of builds up a sort of a core database that again is very hard for other people to replicate, and again, it's the kind of thing that people will share because if someone's having trouble with their broadband, they might they would say do a speed test. So, again, it's where something that's hard to replicate generates links. You can go and check on say a hrefs, backlink check or anything like that. You can go and see the kind of backlinks these pages are getting, and you'll see how there's a there's a huge organic um backlink profile that's been built up over time just by the fact that these tools exist. If these tools weren't on broadband code uk, then it never would have generated the same number of links as it does that these tools uh suck in. The third example I want to show is from keywordspeopleuse.com. Now, if you go to keywordspeopleuse.com and just go to the home page, the first thing it's going to show you is the form, which is a people also ask crawler. And this is a tool that will go to people also ask and it will crawl all the people also ask for an initial seed term, and then it will click through and click through all those different um people also ask results and find the results that then further go on. Because if you go there and do it manually, you'll see that as you click um people also ask more and more questions appear, and they kind of cluster together. So we built a tool that goes and does that for you automatically, does it in a process that takes sort of 10 to 20 seconds and collates all the data for you and puts it in a nice graph, and that's something that if you were to do manually would take you a good chunk of time, and this allows you to do it and visualize it very quickly. Um, and this tool is really obviously useful for search engine optimized optimization and for anyone in online marketing and brands and all sorts of people trying to find the questions people are asking for certain terms. Um, and this again has generated when you launched it in October 2022. And if you go and look at the background profile, you'll see how it picks it's picked up thousands of links, people linking to that piece of content, and all organic, no outreach, it just you know happened. It's like a snowball. People, as people discover it's not linking to it, more people discover it and link and link and link it, and it builds up. And again, that's a really great example of a tool that we've produced that actually has built organic links just by being useful and hard to replicate. And I'll give you a fourth, which is a teaser, which is one that isn't actually live yet, but that we're working on at the moment, and that's we're building a tool that allows you to cluster keywords, and this way you can provide any set of um keywords, and the tool will then go to Google, crawl the SERPs, the live SERPs for all of those keyword terms, and find the link intersects, and that's where um same similar keywords share similar um Google search results by doing that and then mapping out those intersects actually clusters keywords really, really well. Much, much better than any other method that we've tried, and any other method that we've experimented with. And the prototypes we've built have produced results that are so out of standing. We're like, we're gonna have to build a tool for this. And I know that when that goes out live, that again is another piece of content that will produce loads of organic links because people will start linking to it because it'll be a useful tool and free for people to try. Now, at this point, some of you will probably be thinking this sounds really hard and really expensive. Let's compare it to the alternative, which is not producing this kind of content and producing sort of more easily replicable content, and then trying to build links in any other way, sort of doing outreach or buying links or any of the other ways of doing links, those in themselves are also expensive and complicated because you've still got to produce some content, and then you've got to go out and do the outreach and try and persuade people to link to it. And it isn't an ongoing process, you tend to do those promotions once, and then yeah, the links will die off to that content. So, this method, these tools will keep building links over and over the years, as more and more and people discover them newly. There's always new people discovering them, and they're always going to be linking to them, and it does it on autopilot once it's set up. Yes, producing the tools itself, there is a cost, you're no denying that. Um, but it isn't necessarily going to be as expensive as you think. Okay, so if you want to get a tool set up and published onto your site, but you have don't have the technical skills to do it, then don't worry, there are loads of people out there that can help you. I think the one place I would say go and look at is Upwork.com. Now that is a marketplace of developers and all sorts of people who can provide services online, but there's a lot of developers on there, and as long as you have the idea and you can articulate that idea, then you will be able to find someone on Upwork.com to produce it for you. Um, there's loads of people out there that know how to how to produce these kind of tools, how to integrate them with things like WordPress or any other kind of website. Um, so the having it produced is not a difficult thing, yeah. You might see need some budget to get it produced, depending on the tool is going to depend on how big a budget you need. So a tool, for example, like I mentioned very earlier, like just to calculate you know uh Pythagorex's theorem for right angle triangles, that's not going to be a huge tool to produce. I'm not saying it's a great example to do right now because I'm sure there's plenty plenty of places that have already done that, but that's a very simple tool now. To do something like the um keyword clustering tool that we're working on. Now that is a lot more sophisticated, and that needs a lot more specialist development, so yeah, you will be talking a lot bigger budget for that. But the key thing is you need to have that first idea of what your tool is going to be, so you really need to think about what in your niche is uh something that you could build that would answer people's questions or help them research something, or can bring together data and make it searchable for them in a way that would help them out. So think about the um broadband postcode checker. That's not overly complicated as a comp as an idea. People can get it. I put my postcode in and then I find what's available in my area and then show them those deals. So it's not necessarily complex. There's a lot of data you've got to build up in the background with that one, but the actual process itself isn't complex. So what you need to do is just sort of brainstorm ideas of what tools could work in your niche, and then just write it down, write a video, create a video of you talking about what you want. Go to somewhere like opt.com and see if you can find someone who can understand what you're asking for and find out how much it would cost to build. Now I know we've only talked about the cost of doing this so far, but the second part of this is a really good tool will actually pay for itself over time because you'll monetize it. So the examples I've used so far, um, the postcode checker for broadband that monetizes with affiliate links to the providers that it searches for. The broadband speed test that also monetizes because it will also show you after it's shown you a um the speed test and the results you get in your area, it will then show you lists of suppliers that can provide you faster deals that are monetized with affiliate links. The People also Ask Crawler, it's a free tool, but if you want to um have unlimited search on it, then you have to subscribe to even the very simple example of um say a you know maths calculator for triangles. You know, that sounds unmonetizable, but actually, you can easily monetize a tool like that using display ads. So rather than just being an expense to generate links, it actually is an investment because a good tool will pay for itself over and over again. So, this is why tools are really the ultimate kind of content because they will generate you links, they will engage your audience, and they will monetize, and they're an investment that will, as I said, keep paying for themselves over and over again. So, if you can find any way to fit At all into your site, into your niche, then I would highly recommend you go for it. Okay, I'm gonna start with quite a controversial statement for some people, and that is that people link to great content. Now you'll see lots of people in SEO disagreeing with this because they think people don't link to great content, and the only way to get links is to proactively go out and get and build them, whether that's buying them or trying to persuade people to link to you or doing any other um type of link building. But the actual truth of the matter is if you do actually produce great content, people will actually link to you because and I've got experience from that, and I'm going to show examples today of some of the type of content that people will actually link to off their own back without being asked, without being approached, they'll just link to it. Now, people don't just link to any content, they only link to content that they can't replicate themselves. That's the kind of content that will naturally, organically get links because if someone can't produce it themselves, can't replicate it themselves, then they're much, much more likely to link to it. So this means you've got to produce something that's actually essentially hard to replicate. Now, what do I do I mean by tool? A tool is it's not just written content, it's not just graphical content. What it is is basically something that you interact with on a web page, on a website, um get a job done or to find something out. So some very advanced types of tools are Google Docs, that's like a web-based tool, and it's incredibly advanced. Um, not the kind of content the kind of tool I'm necessarily talking about here, but that is like the pinnacle of a web-based tool. A very simple one might be a tool that just lets you say calculate Pythagoras' theorem for a given right angle triangle, the kind of thing that uh someone doing their math samework might use to um double check they've got things right, that kind of tool. But essentially, yeah, it's a piece of content that you will interact with to get answers, results, or produce something with. Now, tools, because they're quite common to produce, that is what gives you the um that unique ability that people will link to it because they can't replicate it easily or quickly. So they will do the next best thing, which is they will share. Now, if you've got an audience and you're trying to bring them new content all the time, you're trying to keep them engaged. If you find a tool that your audience would be interested in, then you are very likely to want to share that tool with your audience because it raises your position with your audience because you're bringing new things to them. Now, if you listen to this thinking, I have no idea how to produce tools, I've got no programming programming experience, anything like that. Don't worry, I will share later how you can get over that barrier quite easily. Now, so we know that people will link to tools and why people will link to tools, but let's give you some more examples of tools. So I can give you examples of ones that I've actually created myself, and these have generated thousands of links over time, all organic, all for free, and all from highly relevant um other websites, because people are obviously going to be linking to tools from uh sites where they're adjacent to your topic, it might not be exact, so it might be someone who's linking to a broadband checker tool because they've got say a community website and they want to give people a link to a place where the people in that community can find the best broadband deals available in that area, so they would link to a tool. So here are the examples I've got. So, first of all, is the broadband postcode checker that we built for broadband.co.uk, and it's still there, it's still live. You can still go and see it now. If you go to broadband.co.uk, you'll see on the home page there is a big form saying find the cheapest, fastest, best broadband for your postcode, and it asks you to put in a postcode. If you put a postcode in there, it will then search a database of all the deals that are available in your area, only bring you the deals that are available in your area and provide you links to sign up for those broadband providers. Now, obviously, you can see that that tool it's quite a few moving parts to it, it's got to know what different broadband suppliers are available in what areas, it's got to have a know what the deals are for those suppliers, and it's got to be able to sort them and organise them based on a postcode that someone puts in. So that's not a trivial piece of work to do, it's not a trivial piece of work to keep up to date. So it's the kind of thing that people will link to because they can't replicate it, but their audience would find it useful. The second one to share is on it's on the same site, and that is the broadband speed test. So if you went to broadband. So it will do an upload and download test, it will give you um details of how fast your connection is, but it will also give you comparisons to how um fast you are for the supplier you've got and compare to people other people on the supplier and other people in your area. Um, so again, this is something that is not easy to produce, and with it collecting all the data on the back end as well and being able to compare to other places, again, that it sort of builds up a sort of a core database that again is very hard for other people to replicate, and again, it's the kind of thing that people will share because if someone's having trouble with their broadband, they might they would say do a speed test. So, again, it's where something that's hard to replicate generates links. You can go and check on say Ahrefs, backlink check or anything like that. You can go and see the kind of backlinks these pages are getting, and you'll see how there's a there's a huge organic um backlink profile that's been built up over time just by the fact that these tools exist. If these tools weren't on Broadband Code UK, then it never would have generated the same number of links as it does that these tools uh suck in. The third example I want to show is from keywords peopleuse.com. Now, if you go to keywords peopleuse.com and just go to the home page, the first thing it's going to show you is the form, which is a people also ask crawler. And this is a tool that will go to people also ask and it will crawl all the people also asks for a initial seed term, and then it will click through and click through all those different um people also ask results and find the results that then further go on. Because if you go there and do it manually, you'll see that as you click, um, people also ask more and more questions appear, and they kind of cluster together. So we built a tool that goes and does that for you automatically, does it in a process that takes sort of 10 to 20 seconds and collates all the data for you and puts it in a nice graph, and that's something that if you were to do manually would take you a good chunk of time, and this allows you to do it and visualize it very quickly. Um, and this tool is really obviously useful for search engine optimizer optimization and for anyone in online marketing and brands and all sorts of people trying to find the questions people asking for certain terms. Um, and this again has generated when you launched it in October 2022. And if you go and look at the background profile, you'll see how it picks it's picked up thousands of links, people linking to that piece of content, and all organic, no outreach, it just you know happened. It's like a snowball. People, as people discover and start linking to it, more people discover it and link and link and link it, and it builds up. And again, that's a really great example of a tool that we've produced that actually has built organic links just by being useful and hard to replicate. And I'll give you a fourth, which is a teaser, which is one that isn't actually live yet, but that we're working on at the moment, and that's we're building a tool that allows you to cluster keywords, and this way you can provide any set of um keywords, and the tool will then go to Google, crawl the SERPs, the live SERPs for all of those keyword terms, and find the link intersects, and that's where um same similar keywords share similar um Google search results by doing that and then mapping out those intersects actually clusters keywords really, really well. Much, much better than any other method that we've tried, and any other method that we've experimented with. And the prototypes we've built have produced results that are so outstanding. We're like, we're gonna have to build a tool for this. And I know that when that goes out live, that again is another piece of content that will produce loads of organic links because people will start linking to it because it'll be a useful tool and free for people to try. Now, at this point, some of you will probably be thinking this sounds really hard and really expensive. Let's compare it to the alternative, which is not producing this kind of content and producing sort of more easily replicable content, and then trying to build links in any other way, sort of doing outreach or buying links, or any of the other ways of doing links, those in themselves are also expensive and complicated because you've still got to produce some content, and then you've got to go out and do the outreach and try and persuade people to link to it. And it isn't an ongoing process, you tend to do those promotions once, and then yeah, the links will die off to that content. So, this method, these tools will keep building links over and over the years, as more and more and people discover them newly. There's always new people discovering them, and they're always going to be linking to them, and it does it on autopilot once it's set up. Yes, producing the tools itself, there is a cost, you know, no denying that. Um, but it isn't necessarily going to be as expensive as you think. Okay, so if you want to get a tool set up and published onto your site, but you have don't have the technical skills to do it, then don't worry, there are loads of people out there that can help you. I think the one place I would say go and look at is Upwork.com. Now that is a marketplace of developers and all sorts of people who can provide services online, but there's a lot of developers on there, and as long as you have the idea and you can articulate that idea, then you will be able to find someone on Upwork.com to produce it for you. Um, there's loads of people out there that know how to how to produce these kind of tools, how to integrate them with things like WordPress or any other kind of website. Um, so the having it produced is not a difficult thing, yet you might see need some budget to get it produced, depending on the tool is going to depend on how big a budget you need. So a tool, for example, like I mentioned very earlier, like just to calculate you know uh Pythagoras's theorem for right angle triangles, that's not going to be a huge tool to produce. I'm not saying it's a great example to do right now because I'm sure there's plenty plenty of places that already done that, but that's a very simple tool now. To do something like the um keyword clustering tool that we're working on, now that is a lot more sophisticated, and that needs a lot more specialist development, so yeah, you will be talking a lot bigger budget for that. But the key thing is you need to have that first idea of what your tool is going to be. So you really need to think about what in your niche is uh something that you could build that would answer people's questions or help them research something, or can bring together data and make it searchable for them in a way that would help them out. So think about the um broadband postcode checker. That's not overly complicated as a comp as an idea. People can get it. I put my postcode in and then I find what's available in my area and then show them those deals. So it's not necessarily complex. There's a lot of data you've got to build up in the background with that one, but the actual process itself isn't complex. So what you need to do is just sort of brainstorm ideas of what tools could work in your niche, and then just write it down, write a video, create a video of you talking about what you want. Go to somewhere like outbook.com and see if you can find someone who can understand what you're asking for and find out how much it would cost to build. Now I know we've only talked about the doing this so far, but the second part of this is a really good tool will actually pay for itself over time because you'll monetize it. So the examples I've used so far, um, the postcode checker for broadband that monetizes with affiliate links to the providers that it searches for. The broadband speed test that also monetizes because it will also show you after it's shown you a um the speed test and the results you get in your area, it will then show you lists of suppliers that can provide you faster deals that are monetized with affiliate links. The People also Ask Crawler, it's a free tool, but if you want to um have unlimited search on it, then you have to subscribe to even the very simple example of um say a you know maths calculator for triangles. You know, that sounds unmonetizable, but actually, you can easily monetize a tool like that using display ads. So rather than just being an expense to generate links, it actually is an investment because a good tool will pay for itself over and over again. So, this is why tools are really the ultimate kind of content because they will generate you links, they will engage your audience, and they will monetize, and they're an investment that will, as I said, keep paying for themselves over and over again. So, if you can find any way to fit a tool into your site, into your niche, then I would highly recommend you go for it. Okay, I'm gonna start with quite a controversial statement for some people, and that is that people link to great content. Now, you'll see lots of people in SEO disagreeing with this because they think people don't link to great content, and the only way to get links is to proactively go out and get and build them, whether that's buying them or trying to persuade people to link to you or doing any other um type of link building. But the actual truth of the matter is if you do actually produce great content, people will actually link to you because and I've got experience from that, and I'm going to show examples today of some of the type of content that people will actually link to off their own back without being asked, without being approached, they'll just link to it. Now, people don't just link to any content, they only link to content that they can't replicate themselves. That's the kind of content that will naturally, organically get links because if someone can't produce it themselves, can't replicate it themselves, then they're much, much more likely to link to it. So this means you've got to produce something that's actually essentially hard to replicate. Now, what do I do I mean by tool? A tool is it's not just written content, it's not just graphical content. What it is is basically something that you interact with on a web page, on a website, to um get a job done or to find something out. So some very advanced types of tools are Google Docs, that's like a web-based tool, and it's incredibly advanced. Um, not the kind of content the top kind of tool I'm necessarily talking about here, but that is like the pinnacle of a web-based tool. A very simple one might be a tool that just lets you say calculate Pythagoras' theorem for a given right angle triangle, the kind of thing that uh someone doing their math same work might use to um double check they've got things right, that kind of tool. But essentially, yeah, it's a piece of content that you will interact with to get answers, results, or produce something with. Now, tools, because they're quite common to produce, that is what gives you the um that unique ability that people will link to it because they can't replicate it easily or quickly. So they will do the next best thing, which is they will share. Now, if you've got an audience and you're trying to bring them new content all the time, you're trying to keep them engaged. If you find a tool that your audience would be interested in, then you are very likely to want to share that tool with your audience because it raises your position with your audience because you're bringing new things to them. Now, if you listen to this thinking, I have no idea how to produce tools, I've got no programming experience, anything like that. Don't worry, I will share later how you can get over that barrier quite easily. Now, so we know that people will link to tools and why people will link to tools, but let's give you some more examples of tools. So I can give you examples of ones that I've actually created myself, and these have generated thousands of links over time, all organic, all for free, and all from highly relevant other websites, because people are obviously going to be linking to tools from uh sites where they're adjacent to your topic, it might not be exact, so it might be someone who's linking to a broadband checker tool because they've got say a community website and they want to give people a link to a place where the people in that community can find the best broadband deals available in that area, so they would link to a tool. So here are the examples I've got. So, first of all, is the broadband postcode checker that we built for broadband.co.uk, and it's still there, it's still live. You can still go and see it now. If you go to broadband.co.uk, you'll see on the home page there is a big form saying find the cheapest, fastest, best broadband for your postcode, and it asks you to put in a postcode. If you put a postcode in there, it will then search a database of all the deals that are available in your area, only bring you the deals that are available in your area and provide you links to sign up for those broadband providers. Now, obviously, you can see that that tool it's quite a few moving parts to it. It's got to know what different broadband suppliers are available in what areas, it's got to have a know what the deals are for those suppliers, and it's got to be able to sort them and organise them based on a postcode that someone puts in. So that's not a trivial piece of work to do, it's not a trivial piece of work to keep up to date. So it's the kind of thing that people will link to because they can't replicate it, but their audience would find it useful. The second one to share is on it's on the same site, and that is the broadband speed test. So if you went to broadband. So it will do an upload and download test, it will give you um details of how fast your connection is, but it will also give you comparisons to how um fast you are for the supplier you've got and compare to people other people on the supplier and other people in your area. Um, so again, this is something that is not easy to produce, and with it collecting all the data on the back end as well and being able to compare to other places, again, that it sort of builds up a sort of a core database that again is very hard for other people to replicate, and again, it's the kind of thing that people will share because if someone's having trouble with their broadband, they might they would say do a speed test. So, again, it's where something that's hard to replicate generates links. You can go and check on say a hrefs, backlink check or anything like that. You can go and see the kind of backlinks these pages are getting, and you'll see how there's a there's a huge organic um backlink profile that's been built up over time just by the fact that these tools exist. If these tools weren't on Broadband Code UK, then it never would have generated the same number of links as it does that these tools uh suck in. The third example I want to show is from keywordspeopleuse.com. Now, if you go to keywordspeopleuse.com and just go to the home page, the first thing it's going to show you is the form, which is a people also ask crawler. And this is a tool that will go to people also ask and it will crawl all the people also asks for a initial seed term, and then it will click through and click through all those different um people also ask results and find the results that then further go on. Because if you go there and do it manually, you'll see that as you click, um, people also ask more and more questions appear, and they kind of cluster together. So we built a tool that goes and does that for you automatically, does it in a process that takes sort of 10 to 20 seconds and collates all the data for you and puts it in a nice graph, and that's something that if you were to do manually would take you a good chunk of time, and this allows you to do it and visualize it very quickly. Um, and this tool is really obviously useful for search engine optimizer optimization and for anyone in online marketing and brands and all sorts of people trying to find the questions people are asking for certain terms. Um, and this again has generated when you launched it in October 2022. And if you go and look at the background profile, you'll see how it picks it's picked up thousands of links, people linking to that piece of content, and all organic, no outreach. It just you know happened, it's like a snowball. People, as people discover and start linking to it, more people discover it and link and link and link and it and it builds up. And again, that's a really great example of a tool that we've produced that actually has built organic links just by being useful and hard to replicate. And I'll give you a fourth, which is a teaser, which is one that isn't actually live yet, but that we're working on at the moment, and that's where building a tool that allows you to cluster keywords, and this way you can provide any set of um keywords, and the tool will then go to Google, crawl the SERPs, the live SERPs for all of those keyword terms, and find the link intersects, and that's where um same similar keywords share similar um Google search results by doing that and then mapping out those intersects actually clusters keywords really, really well. Much, much better than any other method that we've tried, and any other method that we've experimented with. And the prototypes we've built have produced results that are sort of standing. We're like we're gonna have to build a tool for this. And I know that when that goes out live, that again is another piece of content that will produce loads of organic links because people will start linking to it because it'll be a useful tool and free for people to try. Now, at this point, some of you will probably be thinking this sounds really hard and really expensive. Let's compare it to the alternative, which is not producing this kind of content and producing sort of more easily replicable content, and then trying to build links in any other way, sort of doing outreach or buying links, or any of the other ways of doing links, those in themselves are also expensive and complicated because you've still got to produce some content, and then you've got to go out and do the outreach and try and persuade people to link to it. And it isn't an ongoing process, you tend to do those promotions once, and then yeah, the links will die off to that content. So, this method, these tools will keep building links over and over the years as more and more and people discover them newly. There's always new people discovering them, and they're always going to be linking to them, and it does it on autopilot once it's set up. Yes, producing the tools itself, there is a cost, you're no denying that. Um, but it isn't necessarily going to be as expensive as you think. Okay, so if you want to get a tool set up and published onto your site, but you have don't have the technical skills to do it, then don't worry, there are loads of people out there that can help you. I think the one place I would say go and look at is Upwork.com. Now that is a marketplace of developers and all sorts of people who can provide services online, but there's a lot of developers on there, and as long as you have the idea and you can articulate that idea, then you will be able to find someone on Upwork.com to produce it for you. Um, there's loads of people out there that know how to how to produce these kind of tools, how to integrate them with things like WordPress or any other kind of website. Um, so the having it produced is not a difficult thing, yet you might need some budget to get it produced, depending on the tool is going to depend on how big a budget you need. So, a tool, for example, like I mentioned very earlier, like just to calculate you know uh Pythagoras's theorem for right angle triangles, that's not going to be a huge tool to produce. I'm not saying it's a great example to do right now because I'm sure there's plenty plenty of places that have already done that, but that's a very simple tool now. To do something like the um keyword clustering tool that we're working on, now that is a lot more sophisticated, and that needs a lot more specialist development, so yeah, you will be talking a lot bigger budget for that. But the key thing is you need to have that first idea of what your tool is going to be, so you really need to think about what in your niche is uh something that you could build that would answer people's questions or help them research something, or can bring together data and make it searchable for them in a way that would help them out. So, think about the um broadband postcode checker. That's not overly complicated as a comp as an idea. People can get it. I put my postcode in and then I find what's available in my area and then show them those deals. So it's not necessarily complex. There's a lot of data you've got to build up in the background with that one, but the actual process itself isn't complex. So what you need to do is just sort of brainstorm ideas of what tools could work in your niche, and then just write it down, write a video, create a video of you talking about what you want. Go to somewhere like gotbook.com and see if you can find someone who can understand what you're asking for and find out how much it would cost to build. Now I know we've only talked about the doing this so far, but the second part of this is a really good tool will actually pay for itself over time because you will monetize it. So the examples I've used so far, um, the postcode checker for broadband that monetizes with affiliate links to the providers that it searches for. The broadband speed test that also monetizes because it will also show you after it's shown you a um the speed test and the results you get in your area, it will then show you lists of suppliers that can provide you faster deals that are monetized with affiliate links. The People also Ask Crawler, it's a free tool, but if you want to um have unlimited search on it, then you have to subscribe to even the very simple example of um say a you know maths calculator for triangles. You know, that sounds unmonetizable, but actually, you can easily monetize a tool like that using display ads. So rather than just being an expense to generate links, it actually is an investment because a good tool will pay for itself over and over again. So, this is why tools are really the ultimate kind of content because they will generate you links, they will engage your audience, and they will monetize, and they're an investment that will, as I said, keep paying for themselves over and over again. So, if you can find any way to fit a tool into your site, into your niche, then I would highly recommend you go for it. Now I know there's lots of people out there who are really into ways of looking for ways of how to get links to their websites, and links are important, we've covered this before. But obviously, with links, you know, we know that there's issues around going out and buying links or doing things like guest posting in return for payment and backlinks and things like that, where Google don't want people to sort of manipulate the link graph in a way where they're exchanging goods and services for links. So you've got to be a bit more creative around um building links in a proactive way, and one of the ways you can do it that I don't see many people using, um surprisingly, is using awards to build backlinks. Now, there's two ways of doing this. The more common way I've seen people discuss is where they actually enter awards like business awards to try and win an award, and then the awarding company will link to them. Um so this is like you know, the the the search marketing awards. If you enter the search marketing awards, if you're a SEO company, and if you win an award for a campaign that you put forward, then you know you go to an award dinner, you pay a lot of money, you might win the award, you might get a bit of plastic and your pitch taken, and you can then put that on your site, which is okay, it's good for EAT because expertise, expertise, experience, authority, and trust Google. Um, it's not a bad thing for Google to see you winning awards like that, and you might get a backlink from the award supplier, and then you might find that other people reporting on those awards might link to you. Um, and that's one way of doing it. Not one I'm a particular fan of for a couple of reasons. One, um, you know, you're almost buying those awards because the only people that win awards are the people that pay to enter. Um you're only going to get links from the from the awards website itself, which may not be the most relevant depending on what you're trying to get links for. Um, and you might get a few links from people you know reporting on those awards, but but it's not necessarily going to be hugely relevant to what you do, and it's only really relevant to um sort of on a business side, you know, it's it's hard to get get links uh into other areas. Now, the second way of doing it is where you, your website, your brand actually becomes the awarding body, so you actually decide we're gonna give out awards. Now, there's some great examples online of people doing this, and one is uswitch.com. Now, if you don't heard of USwitch, they're a big comparison website in the UK, and they compare things like broadband, um, mobile phones, electricity, I think they do car insurance, all those kind of things are all the big sort of um comparison aggregators, and they're essentially they're an affiliate website. That's how they're making their money. They they have affiliate deals with all the people that they list. Now, obviously, what they want, ideally, if you're if you're an affiliate, the very best link is a link back from the merchants you're promoting because that really um gives you excellent quality, relevant links from the actual industry that you're trying to promote, and and those merchants tend to be big merchants, and links from them are really really good, but really hard to get. Why should they link to you? Well, what USwitch do is they have whole categories of awards that they give out every year. So, for example, in the broadband sector, they will have a best broadband provider award, they will have a fastest broadband provider award, they'll have a best value broadband provider award, and a whole bunch of awards for all the different sectors that they're in that they will then award to the merchants that they promote. And with these awards, they will give um a logo, special logo that they can give to these providers. And these providers will actually, in many cases, put these logos on their websites. They will do press releases saying they've won these awards, and they'll link to USwitch's pages on their site. USwitch will have a page on their site all about the awards they've awarded this year, probably one for each category of award they've they've promoted and given away, and they'll find all the different merchants will start linking back to them with these logos and onto their awards pages. So they're essentially getting all the merchants to link back to them for free just by giving them an award, and it's genius, really. It's good for the merchants on the other side because they're obviously getting an award, which is good for their EEAT, and it's good for their social proof because they'll put those awards on their websites where uh they can say to people, USwitch have voted us the best um broadband provider for fibre. Look at us, we're great. And they'll link because USwitch is a well known, well enough known site that they'll that that actually adds even more credibility to them. So by doing this, by giving out these awards, they're actually getting this whole layer of links coming back to them. Now you don't have to be an affiliate site to give out awards like this, you could be an e-commerce site where you you know you've got all the um you know um product manufacturers that you are um selling on your website. What you could do, say you're selling uh you're you sell uh lawn mowers, for example, you could do awards for the lawn mower category, so you could do the best ride-on lawn mower, you could do the best electric lawn mower, the best battery-powered lawnmower, the best lawnmower under£200, the best lawnmower under£500, the best lawnmower over a thousand pounds. You can create all sorts of categories and then award them to the um product and the manufacturer that best suits. And obviously, there's some caveats for this. Obviously, you know, you don't want to do it purely on who you want to link to, you should really make these awards objective so you actually are having a proper methodology by which you um give these awards out. You know, you want to make sure it is the best value one, if it's a law mower, is the best value law mower and state why it's the best value law mower. Um, you can't just give out give them out based on who you want to get the link from. Um, but that's not to say that you shouldn't, you know, if you is somebody trying to target for a link, create a category that they actually genuinely fit. Okay, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Um so then you can give these awards out, and the very minimum, you just need a logo and a page on your website about the award, and then you contact the manufacturer. You can also go to the next level, you could give them an actual award, like you can get awards made, like an engraved piece of plastic, a lot of them are, or some you know, have something made that's an actual award that they can display, and you can send that off to them. Um, I would also do a press release for your awards. Now, I know people have said before is press releases dodgy link building? No, it's not because you're putting a press release out. You're hoping people might link to you, but you're not telling them to link to you, you're just trying to raise the um awareness around the award that you've given out. Um, and if you went to the top level, you can actually have awards ceremonies. And I've seen this done in the broadband sector where affiliate websites have actually done um whole evenings where they've invited along all the merchants um and done a whole award ceremony with drinks and dinners and all those kind of things, and you know, uh you know, comedians who present the awards and things like that. They've made a full do out of it. I think the further along you go, the more impact you're gonna have and potentially the more um profile that you're gonna build for your awards. But you can do it at a very small scale, it doesn't have to be massive. So anyone can any site can do this, and you can do it in any category, you just have to think what it is that you can actually recognise people for and give them these awards, and you'll find you know it can be a fantastic way of link building back, and I said, and the ones that do it really well, the ones that get the most profile, actually get the press talking about them, and then when you can start getting press links of people talking about their awards, you can encourage the the merchants to um send out a press release that they've when they've won it so that they can get they they might get they'll get links themselves where people also link to your site because of the awards. So it's a really really creative way of building profile around your site. It sets you up, helps set you up as um an authority because you're giving out the awards. It means to be giving out awards in an area you've got to be an authority, so it helps with setting authority, it helps with getting backlinks from your actual merchants and the and the other companies that you're dealing with and promoting, and you know, it can help get press links in on the other side. So it's it's a really powerful tool done well. And say, you know, I I know there's people out there that spend£100,000 just on buying links. Imagine instead of spending£100,000 on potentially going against Google's terms of service where you know there's risk around there's risk around that, you could easily spend a portion of that budget on an awards and an awards ceremony, and you know, you potentially get a whole bunch of more relevant links, safer links, and ones that are going to endure longer. So if you're looking for a creative way to build new backlinks to your website, then I'd strongly recommend you at least consider the idea of awards. Engineering is marketing is a you might not have heard before, but it's definitely a strategy that you will have seen. So, what it is is essentially it's a strategy where you create free and useful tools for your target audience. Now, these tools will be complementary and will align really well with the product or service that you are trying to sell, and these tools will draw in potential customers. Now, the reason it's called engineering as marketing is because you're gonna mainly be using engineering resources, so essentially development, web developers, programmers to build something that is feature-rich, interactive, and not just written flat content. And the key thing with any engineering as marketing product that you create is you're gonna want to get people's contact details, you're essentially um generating leads for yourself. Now, an example and the most common example that people share is um the website grader by HubSpot. And you can just Google, you know, um HubSpot website grader and you'll find a link to it. Um, and what this does is it just asks you for a website address and an email address, and then it will perform some basic checks on your website for things like performance, SEO, how it works on mobile, security, those kind of things, and it will then make some suggestions on things you can fix. And what this is is it's essentially it's a way of for HubSpot to a get your contact details so they can obviously remark it to you, and then B also start making suggestions to you right now for things that you can do, and these things are things that their product can help you do if you choose to go down the that process with them. So, this is a great example of um a tool that that people will find useful just in its own right. It will also get people to link to it because people will share, it's very shareable because of um what it does and how quickly it does it. Um, and it starts to generate inbound leads for HubSpot. Another well-known example is uh Ahref's backlink checker, their free bank click backlink checker that anyone can use without having AHRF's account. And obviously, yeah, loads of people are going to link this because it's a great way of finding out what backlinks you've got to your or any other website without making any payment, but it obviously starts to weave in um details of further things that you can do if you actually sign up for an actual AHRF's account. Now, AHRFs and usually in this one don't ask for an email address, um, which is more common with many of these tools, but it still works great for them, gives them loads of publicity and loads of backlinks. So, if you look at why it's important um to consider engineering's marketing, is because you'll get a few benefits. So, you will obviously get your SEO boost by attracting backlinks because a good tool, people will actually um you know be the great link magnets, people will link to it. You'll generate leads, um, particularly if you're going to ask people for email addresses so you can follow up with them later. Um, that helps differentiate you from other sites doing the same thing as you. If you've got a great tool that's really useful for people, it really makes you stand out compared to other competitors you might have who are just doing traditional standard marketing and not trying to do anything like this. Um, and yeah, if you're just starting out, it it helps build traction, it helps people get eyeballs on your site. We did it with Q which people use with um the um product being free to use um for the first few instances, um, and that that in itself works in essentially like in this engineering marketing concept because um you know we built this great tool and allow people to use it for free. Um, obviously, if you want to keep you know use it past a certain amount, then then there are subscription options to choose from. But in the first instance, anyone can use it for free, and that generates loads of backlinks and traction for us. Now, if you're considering this as a tactic you want to try for yourself, um, then you need to consider a few things. Whatever you create, it's got to really be complementary to what your actual product is. There's no point doing a sort of a cake baking calculator if what you're trying to sell is car parts, you know. You you've got to have something that it is at least in the periphery of what you're actually trying to sell, so that you attract the right kind of people who are potential future customers. Um, it should do just one thing, really. You should and it should do it well. So rather than being a massive tool with lots of uh different functionality and ways of using it, it really should be dead simple to use, like the um example from Hubspot where all they need is a URL and an email address, and they can create a report from you just from that. So it's dead simple to use, dead quick to use, and gives you you know output really quickly. Um, yeah, and it's obviously got to add value to the users of the tool. So it's got to be something that actually is it provides some kind of valuable information or useful outcome for them. Um, and yeah, it has to be free to use, obviously. Um it's fine to ask for an email address, and that's quite normal. You know, there's there's a quid pro quo there, you know. If you want to use this, we obviously want to be able to get back in touch with you. That is quite normal. So those are the kind of the things you've got to consider when trying to come up with what your engineering was marketing tool is going to be. So, at what point do you target people with um engineering's marketing tools? Well, then in the next podcast episode, I'm gonna be talking about um search intents. Um, and this is one this kind of fits in quite neatly with that because basically, people who uh you're gonna attract here are gonna be people who don't know about your brand necessarily. Really, you're trying to get brand awareness with these tools. So you're gonna be sort of hitting people who are only just aware they've got a problem they need to solve and they're trying to find solutions to it, or people who don't know they've got this problem yet, but are just sort of you know researching around the top of a subject area to try and get an understanding of what their options are and what the problems are and how they can solve them. So we call this top of funnel, um, heading towards the middle of the funnel area. So this is the area where you're gonna try and target people. So you've got to imagine that these people aren't aware of you as a brand yet, so you're not gonna be able to rely on any kind of brand information to publicise this, you're not gonna be in a situation where these people that are looking to buy right now, you're you're pulling people in on a much further up the funnel, which means you've got a bigger audience to aim for and a and a wider audience to aim for, um, because you will pick up plenty of people that won't go on to become customers, but the idea is you'll pick up enough of those that come through will eventually turn into potential customers for you. Now, even when you've built your um tool and you've got some you've got this going and up and live, you're still gonna have to at least initially do some promotional push for it. So that is doing outreach to people to get those first few people to see it and to notice it. Um, so you might want to use um places like Twitter or LinkedIn, um, use your um personal network for any people, any people you know, and sort of just push it a little bit. Um, the great thing is once you get your first few links, your first few people using it, the the ball it will sort of become like uh a stone that rolls downhill, it will gather traction on its own in time. But you're gonna always are gonna have to give it that initial push, so do bear that in mind. And yeah, it's not easy to create these tools because you've A, you've got to have an idea in the first place, and then B, you've got to execute on it, but that very fact that it's not easy is what makes them work so well because, as I've said before in previous podcasts, people will link to content and tools that they can't replicate themselves. So, this is why if you take the time and effort to engineer one of these tools, then done right, it will sort of build a life of its own, and it will generate those links and it will generate those traction because it is you've put something unique out there that is very hard to replicate, and that will set you up as you know, your brand up as an expert in what you do, will get you those links, will get you those customers coming at the top of the funnel, and will set you on a path that is unique compared to all your other sites that are just doing written content, written content, written content to try and attract people. This is something that really, really sets you apart, and yeah, it's it's definitely a strategy. I mean, it's a strategy we've used, um, and it's one that we'll continue to use in the future, and it's probably really my favourite strategy of all the different available strategies for um getting links, getting customer arrivals, getting leads, and you know moving your flywheel forward. So that's my takeaway for you today. Start thinking about what tools you could start to be building to for your audience that will get your business moved to the next level. Hello, this is episode 92 of SEO is not that hard. And today I just wanted to talk about the difference really between building versus buying backlinks. Now, see when a lot of people talk about building backlinks, um some people just consider that to be going out and paying for backlinks, buying backlinks off to people who are selling backlinks on their sites or um selling backlink inserts on content they've already got, or creating new content to put those backlinks in and you pay them for it. Now, this is not what Google likes. This is the kind of link manipulation that Google's considered to be spammy, and it's purely because there's no actual merit to whether you deserve a link or not, it's just whether you've got the cash or not determines whether you get a link. You got the cash, you get a link. If you haven't got the cash, you don't get a link. So the link sellers do not care who they're linking to as long as your money is good. Now the reason Google doesn't like this is because it if you go back to the original page rank algorithm, which um Google um based a lot of their original success uh around was the fact that they discovered they could classify the popularity and the um how good a page was by and how relevant a page was by seeing how many people link to it. They consider these links as votes. So people um who are linking without being asked to link or without being enticed to link, without being paid, without it being transactional, um, those links are genuinely genuine. You know, people will only tend to link to something that they think is good if there's no other reason for doing it, you know, if they're just trying to find a resource that's useful for their audience, or just a resource they find useful, or a resource they want to say to people, look, this is really good over here, come and look at this. Then that's great. And it has worked really well. And if you go back to, like say, the early 2000s, late 90s, when basically the older first generation search engines, like the alter fisters and and search engines like that, where basically if you just spanned the keyword on a page, they just look for the number of on a basic level looked at how many times a keyword is mentioned on a page, the one which mentions it the most times would get to the top, which obviously people soon gamed because you just the keywords stuff the keyword in and you rank, which meant you know that the quality of the pages was soon dissipated to being absolutely rubbish. And also, it wasn't necessarily the best way of finding something. The best article on something might not mention the keyword anywhere near as many times as as another article, but it could be a better article. And Google discovered that if you just looked at how many pages were linking to individual pages and what the anchor text of those pages were, they could get a really a much better, clearer idea and create a much better index uh and produce surface much better results, basically. But obviously then as soon as people twigged onto this, SEOs were like, right, well we can just buy links. We don't have to we don't have to wait for people to link to us anymore, we can just buy links. And that will compel our um web pages, not clients web pages, or the rankings for the terms that we want. And that was all very well and good and it worked, and you know, I think for a good few years it worked fine, and I think at many times Google didn't can't remember when they made it against their terms of service for a good long time, it basically was not risky. And um people yeah, just did it willy-nelly. It got to a point though where it started to negatively affect lots of um niches. And this is where as soon as the Google results started looking spammy because people were just spammed the link graph, this is when Google started to take action, and this is when the whole um buying back links um became against the terms of service, and then we follow it down the route to Penguin, where they eventually got to the point of really heavily penalising people. They were obviously buying links because some some of the links that people were buying back then were just so obvious that they were bought that it became easy for Google to penalize you for them. So, yeah, so that's the reason Google don't like buying links, is because it essentially it pollutes the link graph and makes um the research engine results spammy. So, but is building backlinks as opposed to buying backlinks, is that also against terms of service? Well, let's think about it, okay? So if you're trying to build backlinks without paying for backlinks and without there being any kind of remuneration, not like giving away something, because if essentially paid backlinks, it's not just cash, it could be if you give away a product um to somebody, and as part of giving away that product is you expect them to link to you, that is transactional, it is a kind of link buying. So if we take a step back from that and say, right, we're not gonna pay anyone for links, we're not gonna make it transactional, but what we're gonna do is we're gonna go out there and essentially ask people for links or bring ourselves to their attention in the hope that they will link to us. Now, I think it's like perfectly okay to make an request for a link as long as that request is um not doesn't have to be met, there's no coercion for someone to make that that request, and that you also don't make any specification really on how they link to you. So you might not request what page they're linked to and what anchor text they're linked to. You essentially are in this this situation where you're you're it's a type of public relations really, and it's quite normal for any company or any organization, uh any pressure group, anyone to go out there and make a noise about something they care about. And if you're doing it in a way where what you really want is links, but you don't specifically ask for them, then that's perfectly fine. It's perfectly normal to go out there into the world and say to people, hey, look at us, look what we can do. Um and especially if you tie it up around a story or a narrative that might interest the person you're talking to. And that's how a lot of digital PR works. These digital PR companies they will go out, they will construct a story around your product or service or your website, they'll build a narrative, and then they'll then essentially try to um sell that narrative in to um their journalists or any other uh website that might potentially link to you. And here the key thing is then you're selling into them, you're not buying from them, you're not buying a link from them, really you're trying to sell in to these people, and you're what you're selling is free, you know, you're just trying to sell a story to them, and hopefully they'll pick that story up, run with it, which will it's good for them because they get a story that they can run, but it also hopefully if they link back to you, then that's positive for your link build. So this is a completely legitimate way of doing it, as long as, again, not transactional, no money's no money or services change hand. And you know, I've seen John Mueller and other people at Google say this is a completely fine and normal thing to do because you're not trying to have any kind of editorial control over what the third-party website says or does. Whether it does or doesn't link to you, use it what anchor text it does or doesn't use, whether it even links to you at all, whether it runs your story, you have you are not trying to exert any control. So that kind of link building method is completely legitimate. No problem at all with that. Completely white hat, you're not gonna get any issues with that. I have seen some people say, but surely if I pay a company to do link building for me to do digital PR for me, am I not buying links? Because I'm spending money to pay someone to try and build links for me. Well, this is really just very similar to having a web developer build your website for you. If you're paying a web developer or a graphic designer or anybody to do any kind of service in building your website, you know, you're paying them for their time to do the job. Now, if you're paying someone to do link building for you and they are using um PR techniques and you know link requests but not link payments, then that's fine. They're just doing a job for you, you're not paying for the links, you're paying for their time. And as long as their time and the number of links are decoupled, then that's perfectly fine. You know, um, you know, if you're doing that as a service, it's just a normal, it's just a completely normal thing to do. It is not against terms of service. So don't let people tell you that. You've got to be careful though that obviously that whoever you're employing is actually following you know a legitimate tech white hat technique. So if they're saying they're doing digital PR, then I would be wary of someone that says, Oh yeah, uh, we'll do digital PR and we will get you 500 links, and they deliver exactly 500 links, and then you look at it and it's like they haven't actually done PR, they're just told you they're doing PR, and then they've gone and bought links, and they're trying to fob you off. And that obviously is dangerous, and you've got to watch out for that because Google will come back and penalise you whether you knew they were doing that or not. You know, it's buyer beware, it really is buyer beware. But there's plenty of companies out there that do legitimate link building using digital PR and other methods similar to that, and you know, just I think the thing to be wary of, I will be more wary of if someone was doing something when they guaranteed me a certain number of links, or it was an exactly an exact specific number of links they were gonna provide. I would potentially expect them to talk about a range of links that you might get, and I would expect them to talk about how their their process of how they're gonna build a story and how they're gonna um then promote that story, and you know, might talk about all the successes they've had, and that's fine, but I think if it comes down to an exact number of links they're gonna build, and then when you look at them, it looks like link buying, it doesn't look like genuine editorial uh editorial produced links, then that's when that I'll be raising red flags and checking is that are they doing and providing what they said they were gonna do. Now, link building doesn't have to be digital PR, it doesn't have to be um employing a company to do it for you. I mean I'll give you an example of what we did with Q as people use when we launched. Um now obviously we started from scratch and we didn't want to buy any links because I as I I've talked before about getting penalised by Penguin in the past on Brubunic KDK and how I have not done any link building since 2012 time because to me it's just too much of a risk I build for the long term. Um so what I did with that was literally went out on Twitter and just started talking about the tools we launched, and what keywords people use was back in the first day when it was sort of our minimal viable product. I went and said to people and made a noise on Twitter, look, we've done this thing, found other people talking about people or Slask and said, Hey, this is our tool that we've built, look at this. And you know, just talk to people I knew in the industry and said, Hey, have a look at this, and then hoped that some of them might retweet it or whatever and go go forward with that. And we did start to pick up a lot of links very quickly just because we went out and made a bit of noise. It was very basic digital PR. It was just me on Twitter, but that's the kind of thing you need to do, you just need to get the ball rolling. And if you've got good enough content, good enough tool, good enough product, then it will start to um you know, like a rolling stone, it will hit like an avalanche or a snowball going down a hill is the what I'm trying to think of. You will start to pick up links more and more naturally. The more people link to you, then the more people see you written about, then more people will then in time start to write about you and link to you as well. And that's how it happens. So it's a very basic digital PLD for that. And that is the kind of link building that I'll do. Because everyone is genuinely linking to you because they think you've got something that's worth sharing, and you just have to get that ball rolling by going out there and making a bit of noise. But yeah, so that's building, which is very different from buying. Buying, I would not suggest people do building if that includes paying people to build for you, as long as they're not buying, then that's all good and nothing to worry about. Hello, this is episode 92 of SEO is not that hard. And today I just wanted to talk about the difference really between building versus buying backlinks. Now, see when a lot of people talk about building backlinks, um some people just consider that to be going out and paying for backlinks, buying backlinks off to people who are selling backlinks on their sites, or um selling backlink inserts on content they've already got, or creating new content to put those backlinks in and you pay them for it. Now, this is not what Google likes. This is the kind of link manipulation that Google's considered to be spammy. And it's pretty because there's no actual merit to whether you deserve a link or not, it's just whether you've got the cash or not determines whether you get a link. You got the cash, you get a link. If you haven't got the cash, you don't get a link. So the link sellers do not care who they're linking to as long as your money is good. Now the reason Google doesn't like this is because it if you go back to the original page rank algorithm, which um Google um based a lot of their original success uh around was the fact that they discovered they could classify the popularity and the um how good a page was by and how relevant a page was by seeing how many people link to it. They consider these links as votes. So people um who are linking without being asked to link or without being enticed to link, without being paid, without it being transactional, um those links are genuinely genuine. You know, people will only tend to link to something that they think is good if there's no other reason for doing it, you know, if they're just trying to find a resource that's useful for their audience, or just a resource they find useful, or a resource they want to say to people, look, this is really good over here, come and look at this, then that's great. And it is worked really well. And if you go back to, like say the early 2000s, late 90s, when basically the older first generation search engines, like the old fistas and and search engines like that, where basically if you just span the keyword on a page, they just look for the number of on a basic level looked at how many times a keyword was mentioned on a page, the one which mentioned it the most times would get to the top, which obviously people soon gamed because you just the keywords stuff the keyword in and you'll rank, which meant you know that the quality of the pages was soon dissipated to. To be an absolute rubbish. And also, it wasn't necessarily the best way of finding something. The best article on something might not mention the keyword anywhere near as many times as another article, but it could be a better article. And Google discovered that if you just looked at how many pages were linking to individual pages and what the anchor text of those pages were, they could get a really a much better, clearer idea and create a much better index and produce surface much better results, basically. But obviously, then as soon as people twigged onto this, SEOs were like, right, well, we can just buy links. We don't have to we don't have to wait for people to link to us anymore, we can just buy links. And that will propel our um web pages and our clients' web pages up the rankings for the terms that we want. And that was all very well and good, and it worked, and you know, I think for a good few years it worked fine, and I think at many times Google didn't can't remember when they made it against their terms of service for a good long time, it basically was not risky. And um people just did it willy-nilly. Got to a point though where it started to negatively affect lots of um niches, and this is where as soon as the Google results started looking spammy because people were just spammed the link graph, this is when Google started to take action, and this is when the whole um buying back links um became against the terms of service, and then we follow it down the route to Penguin, where they eventually got to the point of really heavily penalising people, they were obviously buying links because some of some of the links that people were buying back then were just so obvious that they were bought that it became easy for Google to penalise you for them. So, yeah, so that's the reason Google don't like buying links, because it essentially it pollutes the link graph and makes um the research engine results spammy. So, is building backlinks as opposed to buying backlinks, is that also against terms of service? Well, let's think about it, okay. So if you're trying to build backlinks without paying for backlinks and without there being any kind of remuneration, not like giving away something, because if essentially you paid backlinks, it's not just be cash, it could be if you give away a product um to somebody, and as part of giving away that product is you expect them to link to you. That is transactional, it is a kind of link buying. So if we take a step back from that and say, right, we're not gonna pay anyone for links, we're not gonna make it transactional, but what we're gonna do is we're gonna go out there and essentially ask people for links or bring ourselves to their attention in the hope that they will link to us. Now, I think it's perfectly okay to make an request for a link as long as that request is um not doesn't have to be met, there's no coercion for someone to make that that request, and that you also don't make any specification really on how they link to you. So you might not request what pays they're linked to and what anchor text they're linked to. You essentially are in this this situation where you're you're it's a type of public relations really, and it's quite normal for any company or any organization, uh any pressure group, anyone to go out there and make a noise about something they care about. And if you're doing it in a way where what you really want is links, but you don't specifically ask for them, then that's perfectly fine. It's perfectly normal to go out there into the world and say to people, hey, look at us, look what we can do. Um and especially if you tie it up around a story or a narrative that might interest the person you're talking to. And that's how a lot of digital PR works. These digital PR companies they will go out, they will construct a story around your product or service or your website, they'll build a narrative, and then they'll then essentially try to um sell that narrative in to um their journalists or any other uh website that might potentially link to you. And here the key thing is then you're selling into them, you're not buying from them, you're not buying a link from them. Really, you're trying to sell in to these people, and you're what you're selling is free, you know, you're just trying to sell a story to them, and hopefully they'll pick that story up, run with it, which will good for them because they get a story that they can run, but it also hopefully if they link back to you, then that's positive for your link bill. So this is a completely legitimate way of doing it, as long as again, not transactional, no money's no money or services change hand. And you know, I've seen the John Mueller and other people at Google say this is a completely fine and normal thing to do because you're not trying to have any kind of editorial control over what the third-party website says or does. Whether it does or doesn't link to you, use what anchor text it does or doesn't use, whether it even links to you at all, whether it runs your story, you have you are not trying to exert any control. So that kind of link building method is completely legitimate. No problem at all with that. Completely white hat, you're not going to get any issues with that. I have seen some people say, but surely if I pay a company to do link building for me, to do digital PR for me, am I not buying links? Because I'm spending money to pay someone to try and build links for me. Well, this is really just very similar to having a web developer build your website for you. If you're paying a web developer or a graphic designer or anybody to do any kind of service in building your website, you know, you're paying them for their time to do the job. Now, if you're paying someone to do link building for you and they are using um PR techniques and you know link requests but not link payments, then that's fine. They're just doing a job for you. You're not paying for the links, you're paying for their time. And as long as their time and the number of links are decoupled, then that's perfectly fine. You know, um, you know, if you're doing that as a service, it's just a normal, it's just a completely normal thing to do. It is not against terms of service. So don't let people tell you that. You've got to be careful though that obviously that whoever you're employing is actually following you know a legitimate tech white hat technique. So if they're saying they do digital PR, then I would be wary of someone that says, Oh yeah, uh we'll do digital PR and we will get you 500 links, and they deliver exactly 500 links, and you look at it and it's like they haven't actually done PR, they're just told you they're doing PR, and then they've gone and bought links, and they're trying to fob you off. And that obviously is dangerous, and you've got to watch out for that because Google will come back and penalise you whether you knew they were doing that or not. You know, it's buyer beware, it really is buyer beware. But there's plenty of companies out there that do legitimate link building using digital PR and other methods similar to that, and you know, just I think the thing to be wary of, I will be more wary of if someone was doing something when they guaranteed me a certain number of links, or it was an exactly an exact specific number of links they were going to provide. I would potentially expect them to talk about a range of links that you might get, and I would expect them to talk about how their their process of how they're gonna build a story and how they're gonna um then promote that story, and you know, might talk about all the successes they've had, and that's fine, but I think if it comes down to an exact number of links they're gonna build, and then when you look at them, it looks like link buying, it doesn't look like genuine editorial uh editorial produced links, then that's when that I'll be raising red flags and checking is that are they doing and providing what they said they were gonna do. Now, link building doesn't have to be digital PR, it doesn't have to be um employing a company to do it for you. I mean, I'll give you an example of what we did with keywords people use when we launched. Um now obviously we started from scratch and we didn't want to buy any links because I as I've talked before about getting penalised by Penguin in the past on Brubonnet Cody K and how I have not done any link building since 2012 time because to me it's just too much of a risk I build for the long term. Um so what I did with that was literally went out on Twitter and just started talking about the tools we'd launched, how what keywords people use was back in the first day when it was sort of our minimal viable product. I went and said to people and made a noise on Twitter, look, we've done this thing, found other people talking about people or Smask and said, Hey, this is our tool that we've built, look at this. And you know, just talk to people I knew in the industry and said, Hey, have a look at this, and then hoped that some of them might retweet it or whatever and go go forward with that. And we did start to pick up a lot of links very quickly just because we went out and made a bit of noise. It was very basic digital PR, it was just me on Twitter, but that's the kind of thing you need to do, you just need to get the ball rolling. And if you've got good enough content, good enough tool, good enough product, then it will start to um you know, like a rolling stone, it will it like an avalanche or a snowball going down a hill is the what I'm trying to think of. You will start to pick up links more and more naturally. The more people link to you, then the more people see you written about, then more people will then in time start to write about you and link to you as well. And that's how it happens. So it's a very basic bit of digital PR we did for that. And that is the kind of link building that I'll do. Because everyone is genuinely linking to you because they think you've got something that's worth sharing, and you just have to get that ball rolling by going out there and making a bit of noise. But yeah, so that's building, which is very different from buying. Buying, I would not suggest people do building if that includes paying people to build for you, as long as they're not buying, then that's all good and nothing to worry about. Hello, welcome to SEO, it's not that hard. It's me, Ed here, as usual. Um today I'm going to talk about promoting your content to get links. Now, this came about um from a conversation I had with a listener um in the US, Steve, and he was talking about how does he get people to start linking to him. He's not long launched his site, maybe a few months ago, and he started to create content, um, and he's now looking at where he can get links to his website, how he can persuade people to link to his website. Now, although I talk a lot about creating good content based on people's questions, and from that side of SEO, you know, I never deny the importance of links in the big overall scheme of how you rank. It is really important to get links. Um, but obviously there are risks with how you do and don't do it. We know Google wants organic links, doesn't want people paying for links, it doesn't want people manipulating the link graph. And by manipulating, that's incentivising people in any way whatsoever to link to your content and try to manipulate things like the anchor text they use to link all those kind of like um manipulations that you might do to improve your link profile um in ways that Google doesn't want. Now, I don't moralise over what people do or how they do it, it's completely true. If you want to buy links, all those things, knock yourself out, it's up to you. But just be aware that there are risks. If you get caught buying links, then Google at the very least will um just disavow them in terms of not use having to provide any um benefit to your site, which means you've just wasted your money. At worst, you might get a penalty, uh, either algorithmic or a manual penalty for um you know uh link spam. I prefer to um only do organic link building, and that is where I just wait essentially for people to link to my websites. I don't request links, I don't try and um do anything in terms of how people will link to me. But there's a catch 22 to that. If you are not going out trying to um persuade people to link to you, then how do they ever find your content to link to you? Now, once you've got ranking, it becomes a lot easier because one of the easiest link building techniques is to rank number one for your um keywords. That's the kind of situation where people will naturally start linking to you because say they're an author, they're writing about uh sort of a related topic on their website that's related to your um website. They will they will find you if you're a good enough resource, they will link to you um because it's useful for their audience to see the content that you've created. But obviously, you've got to get into that number one position in the first place to kind of attract those links on autopilot. So, what you have to do is promote your content, and this is what I do. So let's take QH people to use as an example. When we started that back in we launched, we probably launched in October 2022. So, but you know, it's over 18 months ago. Now, at that time, obviously, it was a brand new domain, and no one knew we were doing it. You know, we we we built it and then it was just made available. There it is online. How are people gonna find us? What I had to do was just go out and start making some noise about it. So I went out onto Twitter and made a lot of noise on Twitter. I went out to anyone I knew and just emailed them and said, hey, you might want to check this out, this new site I've launched. But at no point during this did I ever say, please link to my website. I was purely just putting it in people's faces. I found groups of people, um, you know, places like Reddit, Quora, where I could make people aware that this new tool, this new site, was available and what it could do. But again, at no point trying to get links, no point saying, I want you to link to me. It was just to make people aware it was there, to try and make some noise about it. We went to Brighton SEO, we sponsored Brighton SEO, um, bought a very cheap sponsor package which just allowed us to put leaflets in the um delegate bags, and we did a little competition on there to sort of to get people to to um interact with it, and there's a whole podcast episode on that. If you just search through all the the back history of the podcast, there's one where I talk about Brighton SEO. But again, that was basically also a piece just to get our name out there to say that to get our name in front of people who might potentially be the right kind of audience for linking to us. And lo and behold, this is what happened because we'd made an engaging tool, engaging content, people did start to link to us, and as they started to link to us, we started to rank better, especially I think those ki those kit those links were um important because at the time we were concentrating more on the tool than surrounding content around the tool. So we started to gain links, we started to gain users, and then from those users, every user becomes then someone who's on our email list for the for the um for the product, and we can then email those people every time we launch a new bit of content or a new tool. We then have got a bigger audience of our own that we can then start promoting our new content to, and those people we promote to, some of them will find whatever we've promoted useful enough and then will start to link to us. So, this promotion is what starts to build that sort of um that that flyerwheel of gaining links, and then obviously, as we start to gain more links, as we started to put more content on the site, we started to rank across more terms, and then we start picking up um bat links from people who find us through Google. But it's getting over that hump of you're not ranking in Google, so people aren't finding you. They can't find you in Google, if they're not finding you, they don't know about you, they're not going to link to you. So you cover part of the way there with good content, getting that long tail content. That is how you will start to pick up long tail rankings where links are less important. But as you get your site grows and gets bigger and bigger and bigger, links do become more important. Links do build um that link authority, that domain authority, sort of site authority that you need um to help push a getting more pages indexed on your site, um, and also then pushing those pages that are in deck further up um the rankings. So my tips are find where the audience that's going to be receptive to your content is living. That could be Facebook groups, it could be Reddit, it could be Quora, could be Twitter, could be LinkedIn, could be a whole bunch of places. Find where people are you know talking about your topic area. So, you know, with keywords people use, it's people who are into SEO, into online marketing, you know, and related subjects. And I go where those people are. And as you start to build an audience, strongly recommend you know getting an email list going, provide some content that people will sign up for. I've done episodes on lead magnets, so go and listen to them on how to do that because then you can start if you build an audience that you can promote content to again, that helps a getting traffic to it in the first place, and B those people are then hopefully the that's the target audience that might link to you, and start engaging with people in these areas. So you don't want if you just come up straight along and say, Hey, I've just done this piece of content, go and look at it, then if they don't know who you are, never heard of you, then it's not going to go as well as if you've engaged in some of these forums and some of these places where people are hanging out online and just get to be known by a few people, they're then much more likely to listen to you when you do have something to share, do have something to promote. You know, you've got to give before you can ask, essentially. That's that's how it's reciprocal. Everything's always reciprocal with people, and the more you give in the first instance, the more likely people are going to reciprocate in the longer term. So, yeah, go find where your audience is, go start interacting, and do that as soon as possible. As soon as you're even thinking of creating a site, then go there and interact with those people, and that's my top tip. So I hope that's been useful. You've got any questions, any comments, do get in touch. All the details on how to get in touch are in the outro to this podcast. And yeah, see you next time. Thanks for being a listener, I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share, it really helps. SGO is not that hard, it's brought to you by Keywordspeopleuse.com, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day, try it today for free at Keywordspeopleuse.com. To get an instant hit of more SGO tips, then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you, I'm at channel 5 on Twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleuse.com. Bye for now, see you in the next episode of SGO Is Not That Hard.