The “new” SEO That Only 7% Of Marketers Truly Understand (Part 1)
SEO has greatly evolved in the past few years. It’s a fast-moving industry, and if you don’t evolve as quickly as the search engines do, you’ll fall behind and lose your rankings.
It’s a harsh reality, and the same goes for every other marketing strategy. SEO is not the ultimate traffic source; it’s just as good as any other source. The leads are generally higher quality, but SEO involves a lot of hard work and emotions.
It can really screw with you when you lose half your rankings overnight. I know I’ve felt severely depressed in my early days of marketing online after losing 100+ rankings overnight; who wouldn’t? The point is that all traffic generation strategies are volatile.
You really never know what you’re going to get. Which is why you need to look into the future and make a highly educated guess about what’s going to happen.
Right now, it’s fairly obvious what’s going to happen to SEO. It’s going to become more challenging for little sites to rank. Google wants to see fresh content, lots of content, contextual backlinks, social backlinks, a community, and real authority.
Which is why it’s clear that little sites aren’t going to cut it anymore. As Google pushes out update after update, it’s affecting the little sites the most. Why? Well, small sites are generally less credible and authoritative than big sites.
If a site has been running and consistently publishing content for two years, it’s obvious that the people running it are serious about what they’re doing. It also shows that they probably know a thing or two about what they’re writing about.
And because bigger sites are more credible and therefore trustworthy, it justifies all the backlinks and traffic they receive. When a small, 10-page site pops up in the gardening niche and suddenly starts getting 500 backlinks per day, don’t you think it’s a little fishy?
It is fishy and stinks of blatant manipulation. That’s why these small “stagnant” sites rarely survive the waves of Google attacks. However, if these sites consistently pushed out content, kept improving their interfaces, and strived to have the best content, they wouldn’t be penalized.
In this article, I’m going to cover the three core components of the “new” SEO. The first core component is freshness.
Component One: Freshness
Freshness means consistently publishing new content. Most sites never publish new pages or blog posts; they remain stagnant. They are born, live, and die with X number of pages. However, during their early lifetimes, they get random waves of incoming backlinks, which result in—you guessed it—penalties.
Everyone in the SEO community knows that SEO should be natural, or at least appear that way. Do you think it would be natural for a stagnant website with 10 pages to consistently receive hundreds of new backlinks per week? Probably not. The most popular sites online are those which constantly get updated. Those are the sites that receive the most links naturally.
Component one means constantly publishing new content. If you’re not publishing new content, your site is not growing.
It’s become evident that dormant websites are not welcome by Google. It’s just a theory for now, but SEOs believe there’s a part of Google’s algorithm that looks for “freshness.” As long as you publish new content at least weekly, you remain under the radar, build authority, and rank higher.
Component Two: Popularity
This component is huge, and not in the most obvious way. For years, SEOs have been asking, “How can I get more backlinks?”
We need a complete mindset shift. Instead of asking how we can gain more links, we should be asking, “How can I make this more popular?”
Popularity is what rules the web. The more popular your content, the more it’ll get shared, linked to, and ranked higher in the search engines. I experienced a breakthrough when I realized this.
When you realize it’s about popularity and not backlinks or any other technicalities, you’ll open up way more traffic sources.
SEO shouldn’t just get you search engine rankings. A good SEO knows that SEO helps in many other ways. Good SEO should generate referral traffic, social media traffic, and SEO traffic.
For as long as I can remember, the SEO community has been 100% focused on gaining backlinks. Backlinks achieve short-term rankings. Any novice can build a few links and get some rankings.
But it takes a special kind of strategy to keep those rankings. Most go about link building in a completely unnatural fashion. It may work for 3 months, maybe even 6 months, but inevitably, the rankings will come crashing down unless you follow these principles.
Backlinks shouldn’t be artificially created for the sake of building backlinks. SEOs are way too analytical. They analyze their competitors’ link profiles, look for backlinks they don’t have, and find the quickest way to build them.
Links shouldn’t be built just for the purpose of being “links.” They should be bridges to your site. The links you build and receive should drive traffic to your site.
In order for them to drive traffic to your site, the content used for the link building needs to be of the highest quality and posted on high-traffic websites. That’s just a bit of education on contextual link building. We need contextual backlinks to rank well in the search engines, even with “new SEO.”
If you look at what Google has been doing, it’s pretty easy to see what they’re likely going to do in the future. The current algorithm is too easy to manipulate. Google has no control over what sites link to.
It makes it painfully easy to manipulate. Anyone can build a site and link it to their own. It’s really not difficult. However, what if Google could control which sites they pay attention to? What if they could figure out which sites are most helpful just by looking at how many links they’re getting from certain sites?
They’re already doing it.
Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn—social media has revolutionized the way people connect with each other and has changed SEO forever. Think about it—there are only a handful of websites that most Internet users regularly use, right?
It’s fair to say that 97% of Internet users use at least one of the top 10 social networks on a regular basis. Since so many Internet users, including webmasters, use such a small cluster of sites, it’s easy for Google to gauge how popular a site is by checking out their presence on the top sites.
The problem with the old system was that it was impossible to know if a link profile was artificial or real. Now, Google is incorporating social ranking factors into their algorithm. It’s a lot more difficult to manipulate social backlinks than regular backlinks.
Google looks at incoming links because it’s a clear indicator of popularity. The more people linking to your stuff, the better your stuff probably is. Clear logic, but it has many flaws.
Comments
Jane Doe
This article really breaks down what’s happening in SEO nowadays. It’s crazy how much things have changed. Keep up the great work!
Michael
I never realized how important popularity is in SEO. It really shifts my mindset from just focusing on backlinks. Thanks for sharing these insights!
Comments
Jane Doe
This article really breaks down what’s happening in SEO nowadays. It’s crazy how much things have changed. Keep up the great work!
Michael
I never realized how important popularity is in SEO. It really shifts my mindset from just focusing on backlinks. Thanks for sharing these insights!
Comments
Sarah Phillips
This is such a valuable post! I’ve been struggling to keep my rankings up, but after reading your insights on the new SEO components, I feel more confident about my approach. Thanks for this!
John Stevens
I find it hard to believe that small sites don’t stand a chance anymore. Are there any real-life examples or proof to support this claim? It’d be interesting to see some case studies!
Amanda Rodriguez
What do you think is the best way to stay on top of freshness? Is it necessary to publish content weekly, or can bi-weekly content be enough?
Mark Wilson
While I appreciate the points made in this article, I think it’s a bit too simplistic. There are so many other factors involved in SEO that weren’t addressed here. Still, a good read.
Emily Thompson
This post really resonated with me! It reminds me of when I was trying to grow my personal blog and struggled with getting enough traffic. Keep pushing great content, and thanks for sharing!
Henry Brooks
Great article! I’ve found a tool called Moz that offers similar insights into SEO trends and performance. I highly recommend checking it out if you haven’t already.
Laura Kim
I’m so grateful for this post. It has taught me how important it is to think about SEO beyond just backlinks. I’ll definitely focus more on building popularity. Thanks again!
Paul Martinez
I’ve been struggling to maintain rankings lately, and this post just highlighted what I’ve been missing. I need to start focusing more on freshness and popularity. Excellent advice!
One Comment