Welcome to another episode of Live SEO Support!

Live SEO Support is an hour-long Weekly Livestream where our founders, Nicholas Altimore and Chris Tzitzis, take questions from the audience on anything related to SEO.

It’s 100% free, and anyone can join us weekly in our Facebook Group or on Youtube.

But in case you missed us live this week, here’s the full episode:

This Week’s Archived Livestream:

[11:41] How would you do link-building for a local lead-gen site?

Exactly the same thing we would do for any site. The big difference is that local sites would use different citations, local directories, niche directories, have a bigger focus on GMB and location relevance, and put more importance on their primary socials. Now, with regards to a local campaign versus an international campaign, a local site has to have competitor research done thoroughly. You want to be comparable in the amount of referring domains and backlinks that you’re ordering to your asset. You don’t want to be over-optimized for a particular SERP. Other than all of that, the foundational principles are the same: Pillow-linking and having a diverse range of backlinks is key.

[18:07] A friend runs a gym directory site (he has a profile for each gym in Italy and makes a bunch of money through premium listings). He’s considering clusters of KWs about gym/fitness supplements like creatine, whey protein, etc. Do you think it might be challenging for Google to see the site as an authority in the supplements space versus its competitors because it’s not as concentrated on supplements, and because the main pages are about gyms? Or is the topic complementary enough?

You can definitely go ahead and do it, or at least try. Having a gym directory site justifies you talking about supplements because they go together. Google likes topical authority. Just plan on writing a good amount of articles. The more the better. Get some backlinks on the topic of supplements as well. Google sees you as an authority based on two things: the content on your site and how visitors feel about your site. If this doesn’t work, you can try migrating all the supplement articles onto its own site.

[28:29] How long does it take for backlinks to show up on Google?

It depends on the website that the backlink is on and how fast that website is getting crawled by Google’s bot—”reindexed”, you could say. If you got a backlink from a very big website like bodybuilding.com, Google would know about it pretty quickly. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the link will have an effect right away. Sometimes, you just have to keep building and building until a big snowball is formed that rolls down a mountain, getting even bigger and faster. That’s when your ranking starts going up fast. Now, if you have a backlink from a very low authority site—with around 50 referring domains. It will take longer, but Google will see it over time. If it’s a guest post or a PBN link, it might take a few days to a week to index. Don’t stress out about it, because a lot of links will never show up on Google Search Console. What you need to focus on more is getting those pages to index.

[36:35] When creating backlinks, does the email you use need to be a burner email, or can you use the Gmail account used for the website?

If you’re talking about citations where you have to input data, then it’s best to keep all the information that you always use. You can also set your display email differently to the one you used to create the links. Now, if you’re talking about outreach, you may want to use a burner.

[39:24] So backlinks that don’t show up in GSC aren’t a big issue although they are still effective?

We don’t ever check GSC for backlinks. We keep track of backlinks with Ahrefs. When it comes down to it, though, you don’t need to keep track of your backlinks. As long as your sites are doing well and you’re ranking, there is no real benefit to checking your links. The three main things to focus on are traffic, ranking, and money.

[42:22] Do citations have to have an address if it’s a service area business?

If you’re doing a local, service area business, GSC will be your biggest asset as far as converting calls. But it’s best practice to have an address.

[47:41] Are crappy links better than no links?

It depends. For new sites, you can really get crappy links popping pretty good. But you’re playing with fire. You’ll have to go back in and build good links to balance the scale. But I’d be lying if I say I haven’t seen it work during the “honeymoon phase” of the website. Now, using garbage spam that’s auto-generated across a bunch of useless websites is a bad idea unless you really know what you’re doing. Longevity is key, because if you drop off, it’s incredibly hard to build that trust back up with Google. But are “lower authority” links (i.e. directories, citations, forums, blog comments, etc.) better than no links? Absolutely, if you make things look natural and relevant (i.e. anchors). The best way to insulate a site is by diversifying these links. Just know that it’s dangerous to look for shortcuts when building backlinks. You can end up wasting a lot more time and money doing that, than if you just did it super slow and correctly.

[56:34] What is your approach to building semantic authority overall on a website? I have seen some SEO experts crashing it in this way without worrying about building links?

Semantic authority is about how content is read by crawlers. It’s about looking at content from a data perspective. This is just not the style of SEO that we do. We build content and we build backlinks. We use Yoast and Surfer SEO. Keyword research and writing good content is foundational for us. Why would you neglect link-building to focus only on content when you can do both?

[1:03:34] What is your approach to link-building when it comes to starting a new site? What types of links do you build in the first few months (pillow, citations, guest posts, niche edits, etc.), and at what velocity?

Check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSkSa62NdCs for a comprehensive answer to this question!

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