The $0 Link Building Playbook with Greg Heilers

[00:00:02] Intro & Outro: It's time for the SEO show, where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now, here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

[00:00:23] Michael: Hi, Greg. Welcome to the SEO Show. So I've got a big question for you straight off the bat. Do links still matter in 2025?

[00:00:31] Greg: Yeah, that's the question on all of our minds.

[00:00:34] Greg: Thanks for having me, Michael. Really appreciate it. Do links still matter? Look, we had the leak last year of the algorithm. We've got the rollout of the AIO reviews, we've got the adoption of LLMs like Chat GPT, Claude. So the answer I could give the classic it depends. Right. But kind of does depend on where your target audience is.

[00:01:01] Greg: I think all the evidence shows links still matter in the serps.

[00:01:06] Greg: I think you can look at who's.

[00:01:09] Greg: Ranking for what you want to rank for and see that they invest in.

[00:01:13] Greg: Links if they're at the top of the serps. I would say I don't. I haven't seen any consensus on ranking in ChatGPT, so to speak.

[00:01:23] Greg: I've seen people claim to know how.

[00:01:25] Greg: To do it, and every time I try to invite them on our show, no response. I get ghosted. So I. I don't think anybody yet.

[00:01:32] Greg: Knows what really matters for ranking in.

[00:01:36] Greg: What I think will be the next generation of search.

[00:01:40] Michael: Agreed. Yep. We've done a lot of looking into it on our side, and you think you're onto a winner with stuff that you optimize or could optimize for it, but then turns out that it's not a factor and it's potluck. It's like the early days of SEO at the moment, and it's probably because they're changing so much. Who knows where it's going to be in the next sort of six months, let alone year, two years, so. Agreed. But I think with links we always talk about on this show, link building is everyone's favorite topic in the SEO world. You know, it's been such a big thing for, for so long, it has outsized impacts on results. But in, in your world, you're all about not paying $1 or $0.01 for links, which is an interesting angle, the pure white hat angle. You know, a lot of SEOs fall somewhere in that spectrum of colors when it comes to this stuff. But how, how are you not paying money for links at the moment? How do you go about this?

[00:02:34] Greg: Totally, yeah. So two things. When we talk about links with fellow SEOs, fellow link builders who really know links.

[00:02:45] Greg: First of all, it takes a while.

[00:02:46] Greg: In the conversation for it to really sink in. And they're like, wait, did you, did.

[00:02:51] Greg: You just say you don't buy links?

[00:02:52] Greg: And I'm like, yeah, that's what I said, like three or four times. Like, you nodded your head. We all, we're all on the same page. But then you're like, wait, what, what did you say? And the second thing is very understandably, skepticism, like that's, we're just blowing smoke. Like, obviously we go to the same marketplaces as everybody and just buy the links. Everybody else does and we sell it. But the way we're doing it is it's very laborious, it's very painful.

[00:03:16] Greg: There's a conversion rate in our outreach, right?

[00:03:19] Greg: We have different types of outreach. We do. And the conversion rate isn't one out of one.

[00:03:24] Greg: It's very painful for us.

[00:03:27] Greg: So we're, we're a premium vendor. We charge quite a bit more than what clients or fellow SEOs pay for in a marketplace or from the lists that people are familiar with. And we can get into specific tactics. Happy to do that. But I just wanted to say at a high level, like, I think we all know it can be done.

[00:03:48] Greg: Like you said, there's a spectrum.

[00:03:50] Greg: And for various reasons, we just decided as a differentiator, like we're just going.

[00:03:54] Greg: To sit on this one end of.

[00:03:56] Greg: The spectrum and not go into the others. But it imposes limitations on who we can work with and what we can deliver to people, to be frank. So there's a lot of people we.

[00:04:06] Greg: We can't even serve that we'd love.

[00:04:08] Greg: To, but we just can't deliver.

[00:04:11] Michael: Yeah, well, that was going to be one of my questions. You know, it sort of sounds like you brute force it in a way. You know, a lot of outreach and then out of that outreach funnel, there'll be links that drop out the bottom of it, you know, those websites that don't know that they could sell links or they don't want to sell links or whatever the case may be. But likewise, I guess the topic of the content that you're promoting or the angle that you have is going to have a big cut through as well. So do you find your approach to link building is suitable for like a wide range of sites or, you know, your local plumber, Are they going to be able to use a service like this or are you more suited to certain types of businesses? And if you can answer that first and then after that we'll get into maybe Some tactics or overview of how you go about actually getting links for free. Because that is the holy grail in the world of link building and it'd be interesting to hear how you actually go about doing it.

[00:05:03] Greg: Yeah, absolutely. And I'll share how we do it. I mean we've built more than 25,000 links for people. So like if this is my only business, if it didn't work, like I wouldn't have a house to live in or a nice little mic or whatever. Right. So we'll definitely share the tactics.

[00:05:18] Greg: So it can work for almost any business.

[00:05:21] Greg: Having said that, we have found a couple niches we can't serve because you can probably guess casino, adult, these, you know, cannabis.

[00:05:30] Greg: These are very challenging for us to earn links for.

[00:05:34] Greg: And further, we do our best work when we're targeting either with a branded.

[00:05:42] Greg: Anchor text to the homepage or contextual.

[00:05:45] Greg: Anchor text to really high quality resource pages. We really struggle when it's a conversion page and we can target collections pages.

[00:05:56] Greg: For those of you in E comm.

[00:05:57] Greg: But even there, if it doesn't have some information on it, if it's not an information rich collections page, it. It's a challenge for us because it's more like a heavy conversion page. So at the end of the day almost anyone can make all the tactics.

[00:06:14] Greg: That we use work for yourself. It just depends on the targeting.

[00:06:18] Greg: And the last thing I'll say on what it depends on. You mentioned like a local plumber.

[00:06:24] Greg: It depends on your stance on relevancy.

[00:06:28] Greg: And what I mean by that is, as you know, there's this other spectrum in our space about how relevant is.

[00:06:35] Greg: Or related is the referring domain to your website.

[00:06:39] Greg: So how similar is the website you're.

[00:06:41] Greg: Getting a backlink from to your business?

[00:06:43] Greg: And so if that plumber says I.

[00:06:46] Greg: Only want backlinks from publications about plumbing.

[00:06:50] Greg: Well, we personally in our business model, we wouldn't be able to serve them. Like we need a certain volume to make sense as a service provider.

[00:06:56] Greg: Could they do it for themselves? Yeah, I think they could do the outreach if they have the time or.

[00:07:01] Greg: A VA or something like that. But we would advocate and we can get into specific places you can do outreach, broadening your mindset and I have some tips for that if we want to get into those or people want to consider those.

[00:07:17] Michael: Yeah, sounds awesome. Well, maybe that's a good segue to talk about. Let's talk about generally how you might go about this and then we can maybe talk tactically some of it and any questions that pop up around it because you mentioned contextual anchor text or branded anchor text. I'd be curious how much influence you have over it, that sort of stuff. But yeah, let's start at the top. It's very simple to go buy links, you know, reach out to websites and say, hey, I'll pay you 100 bucks for a guest post link to this page, please. That's scalable in the SEO world. It's a lot of agencies work that way. In your world, you're not doing that. So what is the overarching sort of approach that you take to try and get links for free?

[00:07:56] Greg: For sure, yeah. We have two main teams at our company right now. First of all, I'll address the like hot elephant in the room in our space is digital pr.

[00:08:08] Greg: Right?

[00:08:09] Greg: We're not specialists in digital pr.

[00:08:11] Greg: I don't consider ourselves.

[00:08:13] Greg: There are great companies out there in that space.

[00:08:16] Greg: We do a little bit of that. We're trying to get better.

[00:08:19] Greg: But the main two things we do, we do very similar to what you're talking about. It is guest posting. We don't like to use that term because of the association with buying it. And very understandably, people are like, well, why are we going to pay you what you charge if we can do that for a hundred bucks? Right. But it is the same principle. We're reaching out, offering an article and.

[00:08:39] Greg: The value exchange is that it's a.

[00:08:41] Greg: Very high quality article that that website would actually benefit from and then we get some links in there. Right.

[00:08:48] Greg: And the other thing we do is we use what are called journalism sourcing.

[00:08:51] Greg: Services, which is a mouthful to say. There are five or six really popular platforms on the Internet right now where journalists go, when they're writing an article.

[00:09:01] Greg: Put questions in, they're looking for experts.

[00:09:04] Greg: To contribute to that article. And what we do is writing on.

[00:09:07] Greg: Behalf of our clients, we submit their quotes.

[00:09:09] Greg: So it's a little bit like PR.

[00:09:12] Greg: For our SEO purposes.

[00:09:14] Greg: It's for the backlink, but there's a PR element there. So those two wings are our main strategies. All right.

[00:09:21] Michael: Well, I'm particularly interested in the second one there because I guess the concept of I guess pose people get. But that using journalists, you know, there was always Haro might help a reporter out, which was a big platform for doing that, that then disappeared. And I know now in our world we play around with quoted a little bit and I'm curious to pick your brain about how you go about it because, you know, the way I would imagine to do it right is to put a lot of effort into your pitch and write a really detailed response and then you need to do it at volume. People will be tempted to use AI And I'm curious, what do you find works on there? What gets the best cut through? What are some no nos? Let's talk about that as a tactic because yeah, it's really interesting and you can get some cracker links from those types of sites.

[00:10:05] Greg: Yeah, it's awesome. This is an awesome space for if.

[00:10:09] Greg: You'Re doing this yourself, like you don't.

[00:10:10] Greg: Need to hire a company like us.

[00:10:12] Greg: To do this for you. Frankly, the value we provide is what any agency provides.

[00:10:17] Greg: It's just that we, we have a little expertise and we provide labor. That's the, that's the value prop. Right. So if, if you can write at all or you have someone in your team that can write at all, you.

[00:10:30] Greg: You can leverage this stuff.

[00:10:31] Greg: So.

[00:10:31] Greg: Help a reporter out.

[00:10:33] Greg: H A R O Haro was how we got our start. That was how we, you know, it's a free newsletter and. And then it died. But actually really exciting today us time, we're recording an APAC they it's revived. The owner of featured.com bought the brand and the first newsletters went out today. So the relaunch just happened. I just interviewed the featured founder six hours ago and I was curious like.

[00:11:02] Greg: Why, why would you revive a competitor?

[00:11:03] Greg: All these things. But to, to get into our thing.

[00:11:06] Greg: In this space, there's Helper Reporter out source of sources, which is by the original Helper Reporter out founder, Peter Shankman.

[00:11:14] Greg: Those are both free.

[00:11:15] Greg: There's a third free one I highly recommend called help a B2B writer.

[00:11:19] Greg: So these are all email based newsletters.

[00:11:21] Greg: You literally just go to their website.

[00:11:23] Greg: Put your email in three times a day or two times a day. You'll get a digest of opportunities with an email address to click on and pitch them. Right. And then there's a couple other platforms.

[00:11:35] Greg: Quoted you mentioned that's kind of a premium.

[00:11:37] Greg: I've heard amazing things about it.

[00:11:39] Greg: We use it as well.

[00:11:41] Greg: But a slightly lesser known, cheaper and more successful is featured.com which I'm a big advocate of. We, we use that for all of our client accounts. So I think I should probably tell you like some, some tips how, how to use each. But that's the kind of overview of the landscape. And then there's. There's smaller players in it, but it's kind of a fragmented space right now, to be honest.

[00:12:09] Michael: Hmm. And you're right in that it is something people can do Themselves. It's just, it's a time consuming thing to do. You need to be consistent with it. You need to be on top of the releases coming through each day. Then when one comes through, that's good, you need to write a great response to it. So I'm very curious to hear your tips and tricks. Like what, how do you find success with these platforms at the moment and what sort of links are you getting? What volume of links are you getting? Let's dive into that sort of stuff.

[00:12:36] Greg: Totally. Yeah.

[00:12:37] Greg: So. So first of all, for serving clients.

[00:12:40] Greg: We'Re usually a minority of their link building efforts in terms of quantity. I personally if you're doing this yourself.

[00:12:46] Greg: Or let's look at it on a client account level, if you're doing it for clients, I would go for like 5ish like links a month. And this goes back to the relevancy discussion. If you're like it needs to be super tightly related to my website, dial that number down. If you're more open to broad stuff, you can get 10, 20 or more links a month with this tactic.

[00:13:07] Greg: Same thing with quality controls. We put a filter, we import everything.

[00:13:10] Greg: Into Airtable and we slap domain rating and organic traffic on it. And so then we have a filter because we have to provide a deliverable to clients who are paying us. Right.

[00:13:20] Greg: But you could do the same for yourself.

[00:13:22] Greg: That filters out a lot of noise for you. We have a third thing we tack on there. If you're going to do this long.

[00:13:27] Greg: Term, I'd suggest doing it is you.

[00:13:29] Greg: Track does this website give out backlinks or not? Because if you care about backlinks, why pitch a website that doesn't even give out backlinks? Right? And we have to because that's most what people pay us for. A few, a few pay for the pr. But anyway that's filtering.

[00:13:44] Greg: That's pretty huge. Fourth thing on filtering for you personally.

[00:13:47] Greg: Doing the pitching is first thing I.

[00:13:49] Greg: Look at is the deadline.

[00:13:51] Greg: Just take mental note, am I going to write this before the deadline? If you're not, you don't need to exert any more mental energy looking at the contents of the request and think about if you're qualified or not. Because if you're not going to get the pitch written once the deadline's over, there are no more opens of your emails there. There's no more reviewing your submission that just to explain how this works, these journalists, these marketers, they are either freelancers or in house pumping out articles for their employer or their clients, right? And all they're looking for is your quote to copy into their article draft and submit the draft and start writing the next draft. Cause that's their job. They just got to write articles all day. So that's the stuff I look for.

[00:14:39] Greg: In filtering out all the noise.

[00:14:42] Greg: And at risk of like monologuing you, you asked about AI, which I think is a really good question. And we have started using writing assistance.

[00:14:53] Greg: For certain levels of quality.

[00:14:57] Greg: The thing that everyone I've ever spoken with, I talked to an awesome founder of Relay App and anyone who used.

[00:15:05] Greg: These tools as well.

[00:15:07] Greg: You just need a human in the loop somewhere. Be, be very careful with your personal brand and your corporate brand that you're representing. There's a clip that I linked to in a course I did on this.

[00:15:19] Greg: A couple years ago where this guy.

[00:15:21] Greg: Was bragging about sending 200 pitches a day or, or something like his conversion rate was 200 to 1. He would send 200 pitches and get one win. He had his VA pitch every single opportunity, every day.

[00:15:35] Greg: He said. And he was laughing about.

[00:15:38] Greg: I'm sure I'm blacklisted at publications like this. This is the opposite of what you want to do because yeah, we care about the backlinks, but we care about your brand. Like you're, you're a real company that.

[00:15:48] Greg: Wants to live on.

[00:15:49] Greg: So just be mindful that these are humans on the other end that they keep a mental note of when they.

[00:15:56] Greg: See these egregious abuses.

[00:15:58] Greg: And I don't know if you've ever.

[00:16:00] Greg: Read any LLM generated content.

[00:16:02] Greg: It's very easy to identify when you have on the other end. These journalists are getting 100, 200 pitches per opportunity they put up. They can see, they can see the trend of that content.

[00:16:15] Michael: Yeah. Anecdotally, like we've done low levels of link building on sites like Featured and Quoted for ourselves. And I've done all the pitches myself and then I've done some testing with AI. The AI is just looks so obvious, it's just so generic. There's no sort of soul or human touch to it. And I find when I spend a bit of time myself and I try to make it creative or I think of an angle that might be interesting in an article that isn't just a generic response to what the question is, but it's a bit more thoughtful or maybe, maybe adjacent to it in terms of its thinking, I find they have a bit more cut through with these journalists. So yeah, it's kind of just that human point of view, which is the whole point of These platforms, isn't it?

[00:17:00] Greg: Absolutely.

[00:17:00] Greg: I mean, look, we know it's cheaper. Well, it, it drove our costs down. When we a B test this, it.

[00:17:08] Greg: Drove our costs down. It blew our conversions out, out of the water.

[00:17:11] Greg: Like it was, it was crazy. It like 3 or 4x as number of pitches we needed to send to get one win. Right.

[00:17:20] Greg: So our conversion rates were just horrible.

[00:17:22] Greg: Uh, but overall the cost went down. But again, I'd caution you to think about your brand or the clients you're representing because first of all, on any given day the number of opportunities are finite.

[00:17:34] Greg: But over a long enough horizon, these.

[00:17:36] Greg: Journalists, they're, they're also finite. The publications are also finite and they're the same publications and journalists that go through these platforms week after week. And if you think that they don't take names, that they do. That's how that industry works. It's, it's a relation based industry.

[00:17:55] Michael: Absolutely. So I guess on that note, how much influence do you have over where they link, what they say? Or is it just luck of the draw?

[00:18:07] Greg: Yeah, sorry for talking over Michael. That on the, on the guest post.

[00:18:12] Greg: Not in the journalist space.

[00:18:13] Greg: You know that first team that you were like, let's not really talk about that. So that's where we get into the contextual anchor text where we still don't have full control because we're not swiping a credit card on that site. So we, we can put the anchor.

[00:18:26] Greg: Text we want, the target page we.

[00:18:28] Greg: Want and cross our fingers and hope the editor does what we want. But we don't still don't have control.

[00:18:34] Greg: On the journalist outreach.

[00:18:37] Greg: I've seen other people do better than us and I, I use better intentionally because I know what clients want. They want that specific target page, that specific anchor text. We don't mess with our conversion rate actually we just do a hundred percent branded anchor text to homepage at maybe 99%. Occasionally if we have like an amazingly relevant live data piece on the client site, we'll be like, hey, you should check out their data study and consider.

[00:19:07] Greg: Link into that in the article instead.

[00:19:08] Greg: Right. But most clients, it's, it's part, part, part like this cycle, the client pays us to do that. So I think if you're experimenting yourself, you could do better like I said, and, and target different pages. But we actually, the way we set it up is we set the signature. So if I was doing it for myself, I'm Greg Heiler, CEO or co founder of Jolly SEO. And then under that I'd have both.

[00:19:35] Greg: The naked URL, so the HTTPs/, slash.

[00:19:38] Greg: Colon www.mybrand and then, then I'd have the branded anchor text linked to my homepage as well, just to make it.

[00:19:45] Greg: Super easy for them to copy paste.

[00:19:47] Greg: Into the article that, that's how we.

[00:19:50] Greg: Set up the signature.

[00:19:50] Greg: And just to finish that, in case you want a tip, you should link to your LinkedIn and your signature too, because as far as I'm aware, that's the best resource a journalist has to verify that you're a real person actually associated with that brand. LinkedIn has a problem with fake Personas. They're, they're still there, but it's, it's harder for a fake Persona to live.

[00:20:11] Greg: There than on an independent website.

[00:20:12] Greg: So I would put that in your signature too, but that, I know that's a lame answer for most SEOs and link builders in particular, but that's, that's our way of solving that pain. Point is we just give them the thing they actually want to link to, which is the homepage and the brand and, and even then back to the conversion rate doesn't mean they're going to link to it at all.

[00:20:39] Michael: I've had a bunch where they take my response, put it in the article, and they don't link at all. Or instead of linking to our domain, they just link to my LinkedIn. And at first I was a bit sort of, you know, annoyed, you know, the time that goes into it. But I think personally, in the day of, you know, helpful content update and Google seemingly favoring brands more and wanting to see brand signals, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Even an unlinked branded mention might not be a bad thing. It can be tough to get clients to see value in that, but from a pure SEO point of view, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

[00:21:17] Greg: Same here.

[00:21:18] Greg: We for years have struggled to communicate the value, the PR value, the brand.

[00:21:26] Greg: Value of our work to clients.

[00:21:28] Greg: And we noticed over time by allowing.

[00:21:31] Greg: Clients to say I only want to.

[00:21:32] Greg: Pay you guys for do follow backlinks.

[00:21:35] Greg: That our average metrics.

[00:21:37] Greg: Now I know metrics can be gamified, so I'm not, I, I'm not trying.

[00:21:39] Greg: To spend too much time on that.

[00:21:41] Greg: But the average metrics on our product were going down and it's because the.

[00:21:46] Greg: Highest tier publications were no longer giving do fall links.

[00:21:50] Greg: It's very hard to get a do fall unless you pay for it.

[00:21:52] Greg: From Business Insider, Forbes, Washington Post, USA.

[00:21:55] Greg: Today, Wall street, all these big ones.

[00:21:59] Greg: Are now doing only no follows.

[00:22:00] Greg: Occasionally Maybe a do follow most of the time I mentioned a brand mentioned with no link. And so just this year for existing clients, it's tough because they signed up for what they signed up for, but we tried to communicate to them the same value you did. And you know, we're not twisting their arm, but we're letting them know like the, the product isn't going to be what you wanted if you're not willing to evolve with the landscape. And, and by the way, I know you signed up for SEO, but it appears that this is part of SEO now is building a real brand.

[00:22:32] Michael: Absolutely. Well, on that note, do you find that a site in a competitive space, if they were just doing this sort of link building with you can have, you know, quite strong results or are they often supplementing it with your typical style, paid guest posts, link exchanges or all the other types of link building people do out there?

[00:22:53] Greg: You know, I'd love to sit here and say like work with us, we.

[00:22:57] Greg: Can guarantee your traffic increase.

[00:22:59] Greg: That's, that's cute for, for marketing to say we increase traffic. But almost all of our clients engage in at the minimum other marketing and SEO efforts outside of us and likely link building outside of us, even though that's what they engage us for exclusively. So I can think of examples, I can think of examples where we were their only link builder and it helped them. But I think if we were to do a deep dive through our client roster, our historical client roster, I do believe we're typically a minority, maybe a.

[00:23:41] Greg: Large minority, but a minority of the volume. We're typically higher quality, but we're typically.

[00:23:48] Greg: Lower quantity of what our clients are, are doing. Our current client is Beehive, like the big newsletter tool that's pretty hot right now. There's a, there's a campaign to their homepage, their homepage traffic, their, their domain.

[00:24:05] Greg: Wide traffic has increased by 60, 70%.

[00:24:07] Greg: Since we started 37 links ago. But can I claim responsibility for that? Like we built 37 links and they probably have hundreds if not thousands of new referring domains in that time. There's a specific page we built five.

[00:24:22] Greg: Links to, that's 2x its traffic.

[00:24:25] Greg: And I'm haven't, I don't have it in front of me obviously, but I think we're mostly the only contributor there. So it, it's kind of a mixed bag the answer to that question. But I, I don't, I don't think you should turn off what you're doing to adopt this tactic. I, I'd say even further when we Come across a client who wants to work with us and either they're new.

[00:24:48] Greg: To SEO or they're new to links entirely. We often are.

[00:24:52] Greg: Like, you probably want to start somewhere cheaper, somewhere smaller or do this yourself kind of thing. Unless you're, you've done this before and this is just a new site after.

[00:25:02] Greg: You sold your last one, like you.

[00:25:04] Greg: Got the whole roadmap of thing. I think it's a lower volume, longer term play.

[00:25:10] Michael: Yeah. And am I right? Like this sort of link building might buy you a bit of freedom to go out and be a bit more aggressive with exact match anchor text to internal pages because you've got these branded strong links, contextual anchor text, term type links coming through as well that sort of pat out the backlink profile and you know, keep your anchor text ratios in the realms of normality. Not sort of, you know, over the top obvious link building style. It's sort of, it's a piece of the puzzle, but it's not the whole piece.

[00:25:41] Greg: It's. It's like the same with the do.

[00:25:43] Greg: Follow to nofollow ratio.

[00:25:44] Greg: Right. People are like, I want do follow only. But there's actually some really good research out there that shows that a natural backlink profile and just logically like if these websites are all linking to you of their own accord, what. Why would a hundred percent of your backlink profile be default? So I completely agree.

[00:26:02] Greg: That's how we look at it and.

[00:26:03] Greg: That'S why we're comfortable with being the minority. You know, it's not an exclusive relationship kind of thing that we have with our clients.

[00:26:11] Michael: Yeah, awesome. So I guess you've got the guest posting, you do the Haro style or help a reporter style approach to link building. Do you do any passive link building at all? You know, where you create content and the journalists will find it of their own accord as a tactic.

[00:26:28] Greg: We, we used to do that.

[00:26:30] Greg: But I think what's more in vogue now is that digital pr. So I think a lot of people have different definitions of it, but the.

[00:26:39] Greg: Tactics I'm most comfortable under that term are what you mentioned.

[00:26:44] Greg: One, you go all the way, you know, do all the data, create a really beautiful piece of content on your site. If that sounds, and especially if you're doing it with a client, if, if.

[00:26:57] Greg: Sometimes there's just a literal barrier with.

[00:26:59] Greg: Their IT team or the client directly, where they're like, I'm not going to let you publish this on my site. What you could do is a lighter version of that, get all the data together and then do the outreach shopping that to journalists and say you know my, my client or if you can get an email address hosted on their domain, do it directly from them. Oh we got this great data and then they'll still cite you, they just won't point it to that specific page. So I guess the shorter answer would have been we don't do it that way.

[00:27:27] Greg: When we do engage in digital PR.

[00:27:29] Greg: We do the lighter version I just mentioned because frankly it's challenging sometimes to get client buy in to make it worth getting the whole piece together when we could just do the outreach and shop, shop the data like that.

[00:27:45] Michael: I guess one of the downsides of that passive approach is you're relying on it ranking in Google itself. And now in the world of LLMs journalists might find their data for their article just by querying AI. So that's maybe a segue into where do you see things headed in the link building world over the next, let's say year, five years do you think Google will still be looking at links the way it always has or is there maybe a change coming?

[00:28:12] Greg: Yeah, definitely not the same exact way. I think you know dozens of updates, I think there's literal hundreds of updates every year but there's like there's a few big ones that everyone feels acutely every year. So I, I, I'd hazard I guess on the one year that we are good in the link building space certainly on Google, on Bing, I, like I said in the beginning I'm not seeing consensus on rankings in chat, GPT or similar. I'm seeing people claim that there's consensus but then I don't get the data from them to I don't, I don't get the resources linked to me. I don't, I just don't see it. I do see assertions that in house studies found just to paint the other side that links are no longer valuable. And I'm, I mean I would want to know that because that would suck for us in our positioning. So I'm open to reading those if someone out there has that like you'd be doing me a favor sending that to me. Thanks a lot. But as far as five year that leaves me like weak ass answer but I don't know because I scared me.

[00:29:33] Greg: Says oh my God, what if links don't matter?

[00:29:35] Greg: We don't have a business model. Optimistic me says that even in that scenario like we were just talking about brands matters if we keep painting our.

[00:29:44] Greg: Clients brand in a positive light and powerful publications doesn't that matter?

[00:29:50] Greg: I, I think it does, but more.

[00:29:54] Greg: Pragmatically Middle of the Road says.

[00:29:58] Greg: It'S still one of the more easily evaluated. I, I, I like the like kind of waiting and levers metaphor to think about the, all the ranking factors and I, when I saw the leak I saw that it was like three, four out of like thousands of factors. And I get that.

[00:30:22] Greg: And I wouldn't even put it in.

[00:30:23] Greg: The top one three factors but I.

[00:30:27] Greg: Think they're in the top 10.

[00:30:28] Greg: And I think like I just don't see that, I don't see, I think the better way to say it for me succinctly is I don't see the replacement.

[00:30:38] Greg: That, that's all I don't see.

[00:30:39] Greg: I don't see what's replacing it right now.

[00:30:43] Michael: Yeah, well that's always been the thing with Google, right? Like they, they would probably love to move away from links because they know people can totally game it, but they just haven't been able to because it's such a good way of determining authority and relevancy outside of just looking at content on a site, which everyone can do. But even more so now with AI they can scale up the amount of content on a site and, and I think likewise with the LLMs brand really is massive. Like that will come from being found on these big strong publications. It will be being found in industry specific directories, another form of links having good reviews, having that good sort of all those little markers that it can look on to assess what your site's about compared to all the thousands of others that like say similar things, you know. So the SEO principles I think will be just the same for influencing LLMs in the long run. Now this is all just thinking I don't have any rock solid data but yeah, it stands to reason that that's sort of how it's going to work because what else are they going to look at really?

[00:31:48] Greg: Yeah.

[00:31:48] Greg: To back that up, I, I remember the site reputation abuse update in November I believe it was. I talked to Shane Dutka who I really admire for his technical knowledge and he had worked in the affiliate space very deep into it, specifically at a company called Three Ships and done a.

[00:32:08] Greg: Lot of these partnerships with the bigger.

[00:32:10] Greg: Sites and I didn't agree with him in an interview he did, he was saying, well there's like, it's like, like.

[00:32:19] Greg: Other people I saw like it's too much for Google to do algorithmically.

[00:32:22] Greg: These are just manual actions that are going on. And I was like I've been to the Google offices Like, they're pretty smart. I got.

[00:32:30] Greg: My older brother worked at Google.

[00:32:31] Greg: Like, I, I think, I think they can do it. But honestly now I think they, the people I read in that vein of.

[00:32:39] Greg: Thinking were correct and I was wrong.

[00:32:40] Greg: And I think to your point, I, I think some of these big sites that get hit, I, I now think they are manual because I don't think there's a way for Google to reset algorithmically right now, anyway, at five years, I, I don't really know. But in the next year, three years, I've, I've felt that our style of link building, our style of outreach, every algorithm update actually strengthens what the work that we do. Personally, that's what I felt. That's a cute thing for me to say in a podcast to an audience that I don't know.

[00:33:17] Michael: Well, look, I'm, I'm inclined to agree. Like the, Particularly when you're not really having a massive influence on anchor text and the page that it's linking to and it just comes across as a branded link from a good domain and a relevant article, that's sort of the gold standard of link building and, you know, chasing higher rankings, you can be tempted to go too far down the path of other types of link building. And if you do that without thinking about brand first, that's sort of where you will get yourself into trouble. So what I've seen over the years, I think definitely I would agree with what you're saying there. So, yeah, look, this has been a awesome chat, mate. If people want to go check you out after the show, find out a bit more about you, where can they go to connect with you?

[00:34:02] Greg: No, I appreciate that. And you know, you can Find me on LinkedIn.

[00:34:06] Greg: My name's Greg Heilers. A T I L E r s.

[00:34:08] Greg: Or jollyseo.com Michael, I should have ran this past you before the show. You'll have to cut it out if you don't like it. We could give away. I used to sell a course for 99 bucks.

[00:34:18] Greg: We could give it away for free.

[00:34:19] Greg: To your audience if you want to do that.

[00:34:21] Greg: No strings attached.

[00:34:22] Greg: Like, I'll just show you the file and you can distribute it. It's. It's just like a how to. I know we didn't get to a lot of tips, but it's a very accessible outreach tactic and obviously you can.

[00:34:33] Greg: Come ask me questions.

[00:34:34] Greg: I, I just wanted to encourage anyone out there who's like, I don't want.

[00:34:37] Greg: To be pitched a service.

[00:34:38] Greg: I know that's what's going to happen when I contact you to to just.

[00:34:41] Greg: Give it a try yourself and don't.

[00:34:43] Greg: The biggest thing is don't give up.

[00:34:45] Greg: When you do the outreach. There's a conversion rate, there's a turnaround time. On average 30 days between a successful.

[00:34:51] Greg: Pitch and it going live. And it's a numbers game. So don't just keep pitching and then.

[00:34:56] Greg: You'Ll see those live links.

[00:34:58] Greg: And the last thing I'll try to throw in, Michael, is people don't realize.

[00:35:02] Greg: You have to actually go look for.

[00:35:03] Greg: The wins on the Internet because you're not paying for them. You got to go search for them yourself. So I just appreciate the opportunity to speak with you and like share a little bit about it because I'm I'm just a fan of this outreach type.

[00:35:17] Michael: Yeah, me too. I love it. And thanks for joining us and sharing your knowledge. And for people that are interested in that PDF, you've got let's link it in the show notes. You can head to the seoshow co find this episode and the link will be there. So let's get it out there. People can enjoy it. Like link building is a tough game, but it's like, it's kind of like outbound sales, isn't it? Like when you get a win from it, it's rewarding and it can motivate you to keep going. So give it a go.

[00:35:44] Greg: Awesome.

[00:35:44] Greg: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:35:47] Michael: Thanks Greg.

[00:35:48] Intro & Outro: Thanks for listening to the SEO show. If you like what you heard, don't forget to subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. It will really help the show. We'll see you in the next episode.