The 80/20 of SEO For Software & Service Companies – What it Takes in 2019

Travis Jamison

Entrepreneur | Investor | Traveler | Yogi

Hack 1: ~Less is More~ Audit Your Existing Content!

Removing underperforming content will frequently produce better results than adding new content. Site health + improving topical relevance = winning.

How? First, identify the pages to remove by asking for each page:

• Is page older than 6 months?
• Generate a meaningful level of traffic? (organic, social, etc)
• About a core topic of your business?
• Have thin content?
• Good Backlinks?

If a page has zero backlinks, no traffic, and isn't topically relevant, get rid of it!

If a page has good backlinks but no traffic, try consolidating posts with 301 redirects.

Traffic from social media or ads, but no ranking/backlinks? a) No-index
or b) Optimize for rankings

For help - Ahrefs blog & Traffic Think Tank have good references.

Hack #2: borrowing brand names

Competitors

Synergistic brands a) Zapier

Brand vs Brand a) Competitor vs Competitor vs Me ex: Mailchimp vs Aweber vs Drip

Hack #3: focus on buyer intent for your product

Transactional keywords are a tiny sliver of total inbound traffic, but make up the vast majority of purchases.

For example, Jamison had a product called "amazon rank tracker." Google volume for "amazon keyword rank tracker" was super small, but converted incredibly well.

~ 150 visitors/m ~ 30 subscribers/m from that page (crazy conversion rate) *$50 avg = $1,500 MRR/m

Hack #4: SEO in 2019
 is more about "topics" and less about "keywords"

Backlink anchor-texts are less important

No Half-Assing Your Content - Cover the topic

More “complete” guides > Less one-off topics

Google eats structured shit all day long:

• Lists
• Table of contents
• Schema
• Tables

Ask and answer questions:

Q: What is the best food for unicorns you may ask? A: Well, the best food for unicorns is…

TF*IDF: Term Frequency
 times
 Inverse Document Frequency.

Hack #5: How to get 548% more backlinks

How? Incentivise your prospects.

Offer to promote the post on social media
. Offer to promote the post in your newsletter
. Offer free products. Offer to pay “administrative fee” for their time
 - Use dummy agency.