SEO Rocket Fuel | 4 Grassroots Ways To Improve Your Website's Ranking

one of the best ways to improve your website's rankings online is to increase your domain Authority yes domain authority is not out of date yet it's still a major ranking factor and you can fact check this on any of the big SEO thought leader websites like Moz these ranking factors domain Authority is so important to get your website ranked high we get calls all the time from people who have done everything they needed to do with their content right there on page content their blog posts the quality of their meta titles descriptions their on page SEO is set up perfectly their technical SEO is set up perfectly their websites loading fast and yet they call us and they go why is my Google Maps listing tanking or why is my organic SEO results just going like this all the time and one of the number-one factors when you pull audits I mean it's crazy whenever you're wondering like why is my competitor consistently out ranking me I was gonna say it's not usually a Content problem it's a domain Authority problem but content bleeds into domain Authority which I'll explain so what I want to go over is how do you increase this vital important factor called domain Authority to get your website ranked high on the search engines when you have already the right keywords set up and the right on page SEO set up on your website well the answer is backlinks right and I know you've probably heard this term before backlinks are essentially when third-party websites link back to your website that's why it's called a back link okay so a back link is someone else on the web mentioning your URL and then linking to your site so there's a lot of guerilla marketing tactics that you can follow you know street level marketing tactics that don't require a crazy budget but do require a little bit of

courage and one of the number one ways to get backlinks in my opinion is speaking and a lot of people think that speaking is just about like building your brand or maybe getting some clients if you're lucky but speaking is also an internet marketing tactic right because when you speak for a local Association or a National Association most times like third-party associations are very credible websites Google knows that they're not going to put out as much if the information right so they trust those websites and when a credible website links to your website that's way better than fifteen non credible websites linking to your website so everyone thinks that like you know getting directory listings to link back to you or this thing that's going to improve your rankings it's not as long as you have n ap consistency name address phone number consistency on your core directory channels that's really all you need and Google can tell the difference between a directory listing a paid directory listing and an authentic one way backlink from sites that don't you know openly offer paid opportunities to collaborate on them so the first tip here is public speaking and what that looks like let's just use a quick example for us for example we do a lot of marketing for lawyers it's one niche that we serve in our business it's one of our biggest niches and the funny thing is the same thing that lawyers can do to get backlinks is actually what we do and that's going to the local bar association in their state and speaking at these Bar Association events to newer lawyers who are just getting their practices started and giving them tips and advice on how they grew their practice this is something that every lawyer should be doing in their States Bar Association on a annual or a couple time of year basis but almost nobody does it because they don't know that the technical value the internet marketing value that comes from that not to mention referrals and relationships in their market when you speak here's how

you get a backlink most times when when there's an event at a local Association they'll include a list of all the speakers right and on that list you can request the event organizer to just highlight your name make it a hyperlink back to your website's homepage and there you go you got a backlink from a credible source from a dot org website which is usually slightly more authority than a.com or.net the highest being dot edu dot gov is the highest highest right if you get a dot gov mention that's very credible but regardless a dot org and an actual legit local Association in your market is gonna go way further than a spray-and-pray backlink approach where you're just shooting out your business's information on 40,000 websites so that is one of the benefits of public speaking now there's another grassroots approach that you can follow which is called local sponsorships so local sponsorships look like when you sponsor a local sports organization let's say a high school football team or something and on the high school's website there's going to be a page dedicated to the football team in this example and if your business sponsors that you can ask them for a link from their local sports website page on their high school website and that could be a dot edu URL which is higher quality and then you get a backlink from that website okay so so you can do local sponsorships you can do speaking at credible associations that then they post on their website who spoke and then you get a backlink to your website you can do news write news is one of the absolute best ways to get backlinks because you're on such credible platforms like for example if you're to get interview on let's say your local news channel which is a spin-off of you know a bigger news channel and they write a vert and well you could write the article but an article is written on your behalf summarizing what you talked about while you're on the news and then that gets put on their blog and then there's a link at the bottom of that blog to your main website that will boost up your domain authority through that grassroots backlink approach but the lightest lifting the least heavy lifting approach I believe is guest blogging because guest blogging doesn't require the travel the preparation for speaking the back-and-forth the schedule speaking events so the number one method in my opinion to increase domain Authority with scale is guest blogging where you write a very valuable piece of content as a guest contributor to someone and they then put that on their website so one way you can do this is you could actually find people this is a controversial topic you could find people who are in similar industries to you but not exactly the same and write them valuable content on their website go and email them and say hey I wrote this blog let's say you're a roofing contractor right and you want to rank on this HVAC company's website heating ventilation air conditioning company in your area well what you do is you reach out to the HVAC companies marketing director and say hey I just wrote this blog on how having a new roof on your house makes your HVAC work better because of the insulation in the new roof preserving the loss of heat and air conditioning from the roof of the house or whatever and say I'd love to post this on your website for free in exchange all I ask is that you put a little bio at the bottom of the guest post for the author and say this was the author and then a link to my website that people can click on and be brought right to the home page of my website very simple and sometimes authentic manual backlinks like this can go a very long way and you can also do backlinks through guest posts on just traditional like information based websites that aren't in your local area that have a high domain Authority of thirty five to fifty right it's a great range to be getting backlinks from it's a scale out of a hundred those are some thoughts on how you can increase your domain authority to increase your Google rankings if you feel like you already have the right keyword strategy on page strategy your website's loading good so I hope that's valuable if you did find this valuable please subscribe to our Channel I know we have a lot of people who watch our videos but don't subscribe we appreciate every subscriber it allows us to know that doing the right thing to know what videos people like the most and to offer you more quality content when you log into YouTube so that you can be notified when we're releasing high-value content like this so I hope you enjoyed this video and go to SMB team comm if you're looking for a free marketing consultation stay great [Music]