Video Transcript – A Buyer Persona Most Neglected

A Buyer Persona Most Neglected – original post here

Welcome back, Rankers. I’m coming to you today live from Honolulu on the way to ThinkGlobalRetail in Vegas. For all my Melbourne mates, it’s about 35 degrees here right now. It’s a bit hot. I don’t know what it’s like in Melbourne. Someone on Periscope over here just told me it was 8 degrees. Oh, well, what are you going to do? We’ve got the conference at ThinkGlobalRetail on Tuesday and Wednesday. No, Wednesday and Thursday. I’ll get it right sooner or later.

I was at a conference last week, the Problogger Conference. It’s a really good conference. If you are interested in creating great content, you’ve got to get along to that conference. Most of the people there, 99% of the people there, were women. The males, there were about five of us, I think, and some of them were staff. It is a really good conference for learning about creating content and different things that you can be doing to create content, different ways that you can reach out to other bloggers, different ways you get people involved in the blog. Certainly it’s something I learned a lot from, because I don’t do enough of it myself, reach out to bloggers and talk to other bloggers and all those sorts of things.

It’s just gold, the conference, for content creation. Get along to it when you can. I think it’s held every August on the Gold Coast at the moment. I’m not sure if he’s doing international ones. It’s Darren Rowse, Problogger. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook and you’ll keep up-to-date with all of that.

The reason I wanted to talk to you about the bloggers is because I want to talk a little bit about backlinks. This is a search I did about two years ago, I think, when the first Penguin came out and all the results got mixed up. The search is Limo Hire Perth. When I did this search initially, the number three result had six backlinks. Limo Hire Perth, you might not know, is a very competitive phrase because there’s a lot of money in Perth and people hire limos all the time. It’s really competitive.

When I first did that search, there were about two or three in the top five that had only about five or six backlinks. True story. Just picking this one at random at the moment. To get that high up on a page and only have … There you go. This one’s on the front page for Limo Hire Perth, and it has got six referring domains. It’s got a total of 21 backlinks which is divided up between those six different websites, and they’re on the front page.

When people talk about backlinks, they’re usually trying to work out I just need to get more and more backlinks then I’ll scam Google and we’ll get them up higher. It doesn’t work that way. You can have … I’ve seen sites with thousands of backlinks, and they’re not anywhere near the front page for their target key phrases.

Bloggers, on the other hand, they’re doing the hard part of SEO. They’re doing publishing all the content. They’ve got bucket loads of content. This site here, skinnymixers.com.au, I haven’t checked her backlinks yet. This is a blogger whose site we’re using to build our blogger’s product on. She wanted to rank for Thermomix recipes, healthy Thermomix recipes. If you’re wondering what that is, don’t get involved. It’s a cult. Seriously.

If you have a look here, she’s got 37 domains. This is the one. So I didn’t have her backlinks divided up between 37 different websites. I made one change to one page title a couple of weeks ago, and she’s now number 11, I think, for Thermomix recipes, 11th or 12th, something like that nationally. She’s got bucket loads of traffic. Half of it’s from Google. The other half is from Facebook. She wasn’t ranking for the things that she wanted to rank for. Simply by going in and doing some of the on page changes, these 37 domains all of a sudden just kicked in. They’re quality backlinks. If you have a look at some of the referring domains, they’re all blog sites.

If you’re looking to get some great backlinks, try to get them locally unless you’re going after a global market. Most people I speak to, they’re looking for local backlinks and/or local traffic. All of these ones here, they’re all because of the great content that Nikki is creating. You can see there are 37, but they’re all from different blogs. That sort of backlink is the ones that you want to go after. You can only do that if you’re creating great content.

We got some questions in the live chat. This user is asking what about using public relations to get backlinks? That’s a great idea, but sometimes it can be a lot cheaper and easier by going and approaching local football clubs, local sporting groups. What can you do for them? What can you do for them so they’re going to give you a backlink? Is it that you’re going to donate something to the club? Is it that you’re going to buy some equipment, whatever it might be?

You might say if you’re buying equipment for a sporting club and then they give you a backlink, that is a paid backlink essentially. Possibly, but Google won’t care. It’s as simple as that. They’re not going to find that out. I don’t have a problem with it ethically either, because you’re helping the local community. You’re getting involved. That’s great.

One of the things that we’ve been doing … Someone said how do you start a backlink campaign, what even is that. You’ve got to work out what is it that you want to rank for and where are those people hanging out?

It gets back to this idea of a buyer persona or an avatar. Who are the people you’re trying to target with your site? Where do they hang out online? Can you get backlinks from those places? It might be blogs. It might be forums. I’m not saying you go in and you spam the forum or anything like that. You go in and you help people in the forums and those sorts of things.

One of the other things that the bloggers aren’t doing very well with Google is … A lot of them have already gone through this process of working out buyer personas and avatars and all these sorts of things, but they’ve left one important one out and that is … By the way, people who are watching this as a recording, I’m talking to the people over here who are live on Periscope and Meerkat. That’s why I keep turning over there. Just a heads up.

One of the things that they’re not doing really well with the avatars and the buyer personas is they need to consider the Googlebot as a buyer persona. The Googlebot is a visitor to your site. You need to be looking at the Googlebot as that avatar. What does the Googlebot like? That’s where you need to start from. How do you get the Googlebot to keep coming back? One of the easiest ways is to publish lots of great content on a regular basis. The Googlebot will keep coming back providing, of course, that you’ve got all the housecleaning done, you’ve got all the housekeeping done, you’ve got rid of those duplications in Google. You’ve got rid of those 404s throughout your site, all those sorts of things.

Someone said go buy a burner. I don’t know that means. A burner phone, is that what you mean possibly? I don’t know. Anyway, apologies if the bandwidth for the live folks is a bit dodgy today. You wouldn’t believe what I’ve gone through to try to get the bandwidth working.

Oh, food, okay. I’m a vegetarian. I don’t know what that means.

Hopefully, that’s helpful. When you’re thinking about your backlinks, think about even local educational institutions. Can you offer some sort of scholarship to them? Yes, technically that would be a paid backlink. Google’s not going to care. You’re doing a good thing for the local community as well.

There’s heaps of ways that you can get great backlinks. Really, it’s not something you want to spend any time or energy on before you’ve got your site great and the index is clean and you’re publishing great content on a regular basis.

We’ll see you next week from I don’t know where, because the conference finishes in Vegas on Friday, and we don’t know what we’re doing after that. I’ll talk to you about the conference. It might be from the Grand Canyon. I don’t know. We’ll see. Thanks very much. Bye. Now, we shut off the recording.