The Stack is a weekly podcast where we share and discuss the latest trends, news, and content from the world of marketing, sales, and tech. In each episode, Sean, Tim, and Ryan sit down to chat about the hard-hitting questions related to sales, marketing, and tech. You can subscribe on iTunes and Soundcloud.
In this episode, we share some tactics for your next link building strategy, Google’s guidance on lazy loading, yet another Facebook flaw.
We would love to hear your thoughts so make sure to comment or tweet us at @Sylvestrer1, @SeanHenri, and @Tendrecroppes or @PepperlandMKTG.
Link Building For Small Business: 7 Tactics That Really Work
Amelia Wilson – Search Engine Journal
If your small business is without a dedicated SEO, you might be wondering how you will build links. Amelia offers some guidance on how to organically grow your website’s links over time, which will help your overall website authority.
“Link building is not impossible. Like everything else that’s hard, it just takes time and effort. When you’re a small business with limited time and resources, you need to make sure that any time you devote to link building is spent on tactics that will actually work. Good news: all of the below link building ideas really work. I’ve personally tried all of them with my own clients, many of whom are small businesses. Let’s dig in.”
- Support Your Local Community
- Charitable and Nonprofit Sponsors
- Connect With Local Bloggers
- Follow these people and comment, share and engage with their content. Over time they will naturally link to your content.
- Run A Scholarship
- Earn some awesome “.edu” links by running a scholarship program
- Guest Posting
- Pretty straightforward
- Case Studies and Testimonials
- Offer to give a testimonial to a software your business uses
- Reclaim Unlinked Mentions
- Set up a Google alerts for your brand name and claim what is rightfully yours
- Promote Your Content Far and Wide
- Social Media…Duh
As you reach out for these links, remember one thing, make sure you have thoughtful outreach. This means that you need to do some preparation and homework. If you are reaching out to publications, networks, and businesses, make sure you are adding something of value. Find out what your angle is and really lean into it. Providing value is really the only way you are going to acquire links when you email someone out of the blue.
Google On Lazy Loading Scroll Events For Search – Very Interesting…
Barry Schwartz – Search Engine Roundtable
First of all, what is lazy loading? This is a technique used to load certain content when it’s needed rather than loading everything all at once. It’s used to help site speed but might have a negative impact on your site.
John Mueller and Martin Splitt did a Google Hangout to discuss the pros and cons of lazy loading. Google has very limited documentation to how GoogleBot handles lazy loading. If you do plan on implementing this, make sure you have a skilled developer to work with.
“Googlebot does not scroll but is doing something slightly different.” – What the heck does that mean?
Barry includes the transcript between the two in the article, in short, it’s very unclear the impact of lazy loading. Martin Splitt later tweeted:
Once the Google team comes out with the correct documentation we will hopefully know the right way to implement in a way that will benefit instead of hinder our websites speed and rankings.
Google CTR in 2018: Paid, Organic, & No-Click Searches
Rand Fishkin – SparkToro
We see more and more ads and feature snippets dominating search results. This is keeping Google rich and secondary searches minimal. But why does this matter? Well, Google is constantly updating how their ads appear so they can continue their impressive CTR.
“How many searches is Google answering right in the results, preventing anyone but the search giant themselves from benefiting? Thanks to new data from the team at Jumpshot (and a few hours in Excel), we’ve got the answers. It’s not pretty and it’s getting worse,”
“In the last two and a half years, mobile “no-click” (or “zero click”) searches have grown 11%. Desktop no-click searches have grown 9.5%. That’s less steep than it could be, especially considering how aggressive Google’s become with their rich results and attempts to answer queries prior to anyone leaving the search engine.”
Rand gives us some awesome tips to solve this problem:
- Focus more on “On-SERP SEO” – keeping your brand in the spotlight so people naturally click on your link.
- Prioritize high CTR keywords
- Get those featured snippets!
- Growing your branded search and overall brand awareness is key
- Target searches that require an in-depth answer so your searchers aren’t satisfied with a short answer feature snippet
We posed as 100 Senators to run ads on Facebook. Facebook approved all of them
William Turton – Vice News
Vice did a test where they applied to post political campaign advertising posing as political candidates. To be clear, they didn’t actually buy any advertising, but they did pose as a political candidate and got approval from Facebook which gave would have given them the ability to purchase.
“One of Facebook’s major efforts to add transparency to political advertisements is a required “Paid for by” disclosure at the top of each ad supposedly telling users who is paying for political ads that show up in their news feeds. But on the eve of the 2018 midterm elections, a VICE News investigation found the “Paid for by” feature is easily manipulated and appears to allow anyone to lie about who is paying for a political ad, or to pose as someone paying for the ad.”
Yet another let down from Facebooks security leaves us wondering how many of the political advertisements we see are actually genuine.
Lighting Round
In this section, we quickly run through some other updates that we didn’t have enough time to deep-dive on, but we still felt were noteworthy.
- Facebook exodus: Nearly half of young users have deleted the app from their phone in the last year, says study
- We posed as 100 Senators to run ads on Facebook. Facebook approved all of them
- Google’s Walk Out For Sexual Harassment
- LinkedIn Company Pages Can Now Publish Video Content Directly from Vimeo
- Snapchat Launches a Desktop App for Adding Filters to Streaming Videos
- Facebook to Let Users Add Songs to Their Profile
Listen or watch for new episodes each Friday, or check out the archives to watch past episodes on-demand. Like what you hear? Leave us a review or let us know in the comments!
