In digital marketing, the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) cannot be understated.
One of the most powerful methods of climbing up the search engine rankings is the acquisition of backlinks.
But how does one get backlinks? And are the more links the merrier?
I believe that the SEO industry - or at least many companies offering SEO services - assume that the more the better, and they base the value of a link on the "domain authority" of the website. This is similar to valuing influencers just by the number of followers.
Are many companies flat out doing SEO wrong? Here's my take - would love to hear what you think.
Key Highlights
[02:11] My New Mission Statement
[05:20] Why SEO Is Important?
[06:05] How Does Library of Content Help Your Business?
[07:33] Off-page SEO
[08:49] Will Content Alone Get You Ranked?
[10:05] Critical Things to SEO
[11:36] How Does Google Know Authority On Sites?
[13:11] SEO Backlinks
[13:26] Ways to Build Backlinks
[18:48] Importance of Relevance
[20:07] Only Get Backlinks and Guest Blogs From Where You Have Authority
[24:24] My First Good Search Engine Ranking
[25:22] The Power of Relevant and Authoritative Links
[26:52] External Links VS Internal Links
[28:42] How to Know if A Site Is Relevant or Not to My Site?
Notable Quotes
Links Mentioned:
Learn More:
In digital marketing, the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) cannot be understated.
One of the most powerful methods of climbing up the search engine rankings is the acquisition of backlinks.
But how does one get backlinks? And are the more links the merrier?
I believe that the SEO industry - or at least many companies offering SEO services - assume that the more the better, and they base the value of a link on the "domain authority" of the website. This is similar to valuing influencers just by the number of followers.
Are many companies flat out doing SEO wrong? Here's my take - would love to hear what you think.
Key Highlights
[02:11] My New Mission Statement
[05:20] Why SEO Is Important?
[06:05] How Does Library of Content Help Your Business?
[07:33] Off-page SEO
[08:49] Will Content Alone Get You Ranked?
[10:05] Critical Things to SEO
[11:36] How Does Google Know Authority On Sites?
[13:11] SEO Backlinks
[13:26] Ways to Build Backlinks
[18:48] Importance of Relevance
[20:07] Only Get Backlinks and Guest Blogs From Where You Have Authority
[24:24] My First Good Search Engine Ranking
[25:22] The Power of Relevant and Authoritative Links
[26:52] External Links VS Internal Links
[28:42] How to Know if A Site Is Relevant or Not to My Site?
Notable Quotes
Links Mentioned:
Learn More:
backlinks. If you are heavy into Search Engine Optimization or SEO, you probably know what they are. If you're not, you should know what they are. But more importantly, I want to teach you why I think everybody is doing them the wrong way and how you can do them the right way to impact your website traffic on this next episode of The your digital marketing coach, podcast. Digital social media content influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, blogging, tick talking LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, email marketing, who there's a lot to cover, whether you're a marketing professional entrepreneur, or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got, Neil, on your side, because Neal Schaffer is your digital digital marketing marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital first marketing one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach, and this is Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody, Neal Schaffer here. Welcome to the your digital marketing coach podcast. I obviously am your digital marketing coach, Neal Schaffer, I think I sent my own name twice and my own podcast name twice. All right. Well, it's been a busy time here at the Schaffer household. Over the last week, I had the chance to actually see my niece, graduate from Johns Hopkins University. And if you haven't been to a university graduation recently, they really are inspiring in the speeches. And it almost gives you the ability to tap back into who you were, when you embarked on doing what you do. And as one of the speakers said, don't build a career or don't follow a career, follow a calling. And it helped me sort of put everything in perspective, my own life, my own career, and why I do what I do. It's, it's I'm passionate about educating, and I'm passionate about empowering. And I'm about to create my new mission statement, which I've never really heard from my business, believe it or not, but it's along the lines of, I want to educate and empower 1 million businesses with innovative digital content influence and social media marketing advice every year. Now, I've heard other people say these, I want to help a million businesses, I want to help a billion businesses, well, I get over a million people coming to my website every year. Right. So that's where I think, actually, if I think of a website visitor of them consuming my content, or sometimes my guest content, and it's gonna be an important concept to understand for this episode. But by doing that, I am educating and empowering right now I do it on a more one to one basis with some of my clients. With my fractional cmo work, obviously, I do it in a smaller group with my digital first membership. And I do it to larger groups whenever I speak, as I just did. Yesterday, I did a four and a half hour workshop to a small group of product marketers, that's going to be a subject of a future podcast episode, which I can't wait to give to you. But today, I want to talk about backlinks and SEO. Now, this podcast, I am your digital marketing coach. And there are a lot of different things that we can do in digital, and therefore I feel like I'm, I need to be responsible to cover a wide range. It's sort of like an unmatched niche because digital is a niche, but it's obviously very broad. But I want to equip you with what I can, especially when I find something that I think a lot of marketers are getting wrong. That's what drove me to write the age of influence that drives me to do a lot of things. And it's driving me to record this episode. So I've talked about SEO on this podcast, not very often. I'm just going back and looking at previous episodes, just you know in 2021 If I look at you know recent ones I look at SEO and social media, your one two punch with Stefan Spencer, absolute thought leader in the SEO world that's episode number 206. It was released about a year ago, April 17 2021. We had how to go from content ideas to SEO wrote results faster and easier bilking at phrase phrases, one of these SEO tools that I highly recommend, get a special deal, go to Neal schaffer.com/phrase, fr ASC I'll put that in the show notes as well. But that's a really, really great episode A to A team dropped August 2 2021. And then more recently, if you remember, I had Eli Swartz, the author of product, lead SEO, talking about product lead SEO and how you can reap real ROI from Search Engine Optimization. That was even more recently I dropped out in April of 2022. So over the last year I've talked or I've interviewed actually Three different people to talk about SEO in different perspectives today, this is going to be a solo episode with my unique perspective. So it's actually great that I'm reminding you of that episode with phrase, once again, up to 218. Because I talked about, or we talked about on page SEO. So well, why is SEO important? You know, I was in this presentation yesterday. And it's with a global enterprise, but they don't have a b2b company, they don't have a real blog, or they've had a blog. And they sort of want to jumpstart this project. Again, they haven't done it. And I just showed them, you know, my story of going from zero to getting pretty impressive results with this strategy that I employ, called the library of content. I've talked about it numerous times on this podcast, and how you can go from zero. And to show that I have, basically to x to 3x, my organic search traffic from Google, in a time where many think it's harder and harder to get increases in search engine traffic from Google. But, you know, the question was, well, how does it help your business? And absolutely, it is, you know, in, in digital, building a list, building a social media following, and getting more people to your website, those are the ways in which you acquire customers, right? It's part of this whole digital buying journey, and getting people to our website, SEO is obviously you need to have content that's worthy of being indexed, you need to have enough of it. And it has to be really, really good and relevant content to encourage people once they read your content to actually take action. But it is a critical skill. It's something that you know, we've been talking about for decades. And maybe that's why I don't see a lot of new thought on the subject. But I want to infuse some of that new thought into today's episode. Because these are some of the topics. And I know you're waiting for my next book announcement. Not yet. But these are some of the topics that I am brainstorming, and really trying to put into words, my own thoughts and experience on the subject. So SEO, we have the on page SEO, listen to episode 218, because that talks a lot about how you can optimize the content you create, in order to get better search engine rankings. And absolutely I do not publish a post unless it has gone through sem rush, unless it has gone through phrase Well, keyword research, sem rush, and then actual on page optimization phrase, like I said, we'll put the their affiliate links, but you know, they helped me to help you. We're gonna put those in the show notes. But I want to talk today about the off page SEO. So you can have the greatest content in the world. But from Google's perspective, yes, they are indexing, you know, every website that has the core technical SEO, the core functionality that allows them to index and find the content, if you use a WordPress website, like more than a third of the world does. It's already built in an architecture, I have some clients that have their own homemade content management system for their website, it gets a little bit more complex there. So there might be some things you need to do in order to get the search engines to actually index your content. But once your content is indexed, Google always wants to serve the best content, the most relevant content, the most relevant and best content to everybody's unique search query. That is what they're in the job of doing. They do a great job of it. And that's how they make money. And they want to help us rank better. They give us lots of advice, huge fan of Google, and how they actually help a lot of us with informing us when their algorithm changes or what they're looking for, to build into the algorithm, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So if you do a little bit of research, you can understand some of the overall things that you need. And it really comes down to great content once you have a lot of the technical things satisfied. But will great content alone, GET YOU RANKED and being your traffic? It may? It may not because guess what? Your content is always competing against other people. I had an episode I recorded many years ago, I don't even remember the number but it was like 130 or something. And I talked about SEO being like this never ending war. It's a never ending battle. Because you always have new competitors, you have old competitors. They are trying to, you know, revise the content or try to generate more backlinks. And that's exactly what I'm going to talk about here. But you have competition. So how does Google figure out and I do not work at Google? I do not claim to work at Google. I do not claim to understand how the Google algorithm works. And nobody does. I don't care what SEO expert you listen to. Everybody's just based or everybody is just given advice based on what they know what Google has announced and their own personal experiences. And that's the same with me, right? But based on these experiences, and, you know, analysis, it's clear to say that if I Have a search engine? Yes, I want to try to find the best content that meets that search query. I'm going to test a lot of content, right? I want to give a lot of impressions and see, for this search query, what content did people click on? Once they click on it? Do they stay on the website? Or do they leave the website? And if they stay on the website, how much time did it stay on the website? This is quality control. This lets the search engine know Oh, the next time we have this search, I should probably serve up this content, because it is performing the best. Make sense, right? It should make sense. And that's why all these things are really critical to SEO. Everything I talked about here is absolutely critical. That is like your on page SEO. But I think there's another factor, which is authority. So Google in the past has had something called PageRank. They say they don't have it anymore. There's also this concept of domain authority domain rating. This is put up by the wonderful folks. Well, Maza H refs, sem rush, they have their own unique ranking as well. But suffice to say, the SEO industry is fixated on this authority that a website has because probably one of the ways in which Google is trying to figure out what content to show is it's going to show what they believe to be authoritative content earlier on or higher up in the page, right? This is why Wikipedia appears so high in many search results. It's the same reason why things like in the social media marketing or digital marketing you have such as HubSpot, or sprout, social or Buffer. These are well respected companies that have a lot of authority. But how does Google know that these sites have a lot of authority? And if you're a veteran SEO, or you already know the answer to this, but one of the things I look for is how many people are linking to these sites, how many people are mentioning these sites. So there is a hard link, which we often call a backlink. And then there's like a soft backlink when your name was mentioned. So for instance, I was recently quoted in an entrepreneur article on fake accounts and bots is marketing on Twitter worth it. This is May 24 2022, written by my good friend, Mike Alton, who's one of the evangelizers over to Gore pulse, big fan of and this article mentions my name, it mentions Neal Schaffer, author of the age of influence, it does not link for various reasons, does not link back to Neal schaffer.com. But the fact that I have mentioned on the internet is a plus. And search engines know that, right? So that is part authority, but also websites that go out of their way to link to my website, or, you know, specifically to specific blog content. That is also showing that I have authority. And that is what over time, helps these larger companies that have been creating content for a while outrank a lot of us, because they have those backlinks, they have all these people that have linked to them over the years. And that's a very, very powerful thing to have. But what I want to talk about today is I think that a lot of SEO or is and I say this from experience, because obviously I am engaged in SEO as well. So what is SEO, when you try to create backlinks look like? Well, I have a free ebook and guest blogging that you should probably download. If you're interested in this, you can go to Neal schaffer.com/freebies, I will put the information in the show notes as well the link to that ebook. But guest blogging is a popular way of building backlinks. In fact, it might be just one of the most popular, there are other ways of doing it. But it's the easiest thing to do is, you know, go out to other websites in your industry that you think are relevant. See, if they're accepting guest blogging opportunities, guest blog, you often get to link to your name. Sometimes if you have content that's really relevant to the content in that blog post that your guest blogging, you can actually include a link in the content back to one of your own blog posts for further information, et cetera, et cetera. That's a powerful way of building a backlink. And Google, I mean, yeah, if they see in the author bio link, they probably assume that you're a guest blogger. But the fact that you are able to guest blog on a platform, especially if that platform has a lot of authority is a good thing. And you can see how search engines will reward you and that will help you over time, build up more authority. There's also SEO companies, and a lot of SEO companies you can imagine, reach out to me, hey, we'd like to get a link back to our clients, or here or there. And there's a whole sort of dark world of SEO that I didn't want to talk about in this episode. Maybe if we meet up for, you know, a beer some time, we can talk about it in more depth, but needless to say, I see a lot of different proposals, right. And what perplexes me is I see a lot of really irrelevant companies that are reaching out to me, or agencies that are reaching out to me just trying to build backlinks. And in fact, if you were to go to visit As SEO companies on the interwebs, and do a search for, you know, guest blog or backlinks, basically, what they've done is similar to how an influencer marketing, it's just based on follower count. It's just based on domain authority. And the most famous one is if you go to H refs, they actually have a free website, authority checker. And they will give you a domain authority or a domain rating. You know, Moz actually created the domain authority metrics. So it's a little bit different. But I'm going to put the link in the show notes as well, you go to H refs, ah, refs.com/website-authority does checker and quickly get the domain rating that a lot of people use, because h refs is a commonly used SEO tool. It's a number that a lot of people use to describe websites, in terms of SEO opportunities. So you can go to websites that will try to get you guest blogging opportunities with other websites that have, say, a domain rating of 50, or of 60, or 70, or 80, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I'm going to go into my own Neal schaffer.com, check my website authority here on h refs, and right now, the domain authority, or I'd say domain rating for Neal schaffer.com, is 75, which I'm quite happy about. But nevertheless, needless to say, that's a number, right? And it's almost like saying, you know, we'll get you engaged with an influencer, who has 10,000 followers or 25,000 followers. I think what a lot of people miss, and something that when I do guest blogging, these opportunities, I am looking for relevance. And I think a lot of people forget this, they're only looking for authority. Well, if I get a link from a high authority site, it's going to make my site look really good. But what if it's a high authority site, because they it's a fashion blog, right, and they link back to my digital and social media marketing blog. But the content is not even about, it might mention a fashion influencer. But really, it's a fashion blog, it's all about fashion. If I am a search engine, I'm really confused as to why a fashion blog would want to link to my blog. Because I think Google understands part of my own theories of SEO part of this library of content concept is that we build up authority on Google. But it's only in those areas that we have domain expertise, right. And we show we have domain expertise through volume. That's why my library of content concept is based around blog once a week, for a year, at the end of the year, you have 52 posts. There's a similar concept with YouTube, a lot of YouTubers say you need to have 100 videos, to be able to get to this mass, that this tipping point where you get to be introduced in more search results, you know, search engines trying to figure out what you're about, right? So let's say my site has authority and influence and marketing. And all of a sudden, I started to write a blog post about how to knit underwater, even though my site has general authority, I do not have any authority in that domain expertise. And therefore I don't think that content is going to perform well. And in fact, when I go into my own SEO, and you know, I look at past content, I realized that the content that is not directly relevant to what I normally talk about, just doesn't perform well. Now, if I was to create 52 pieces of content around how to knit underwater, everything knitting, then it might change over time, then Google may say, You know what, this business has shifted, or this is an additional area where they have expertise. LinkedIn used to be the only area I had expertise. Because I wrote two books on LinkedIn, my blog began as a LinkedIn blog. So needless to say, you can have multiple areas where you have domain authority. But the problem I have is the people that are trying to create backlinks, and they're trying to guest blog, what have you, and I get a lot of people that want to guest blog on Neal schaffer.com. And you're all welcome to to if you're interested in it, but it's it's irrelevant, right? It's like these affiliates that reach out to me saying, Hey, we're the latest and greatest skincare product, you should become our affiliates. Like, No, nobody's listening to me for skincare advice. That's not where I have my influence. So I think relevance is really, really important. And I think if you're going to go out of your way to guest blog, or somehow generate backlinks, there's many ways to do it, right. But if you're going to practically do it, and seek out relationships where you can gain a link, I'm convinced that if you're reaching out to other sites that are not related to your site, and you're generating a lot of links from them, I take that as a red flag. Why on earth would those sites want to link to you? Now the devil's advocate and he says, Well, we're so famous that they're linking to me, but I think I think search engines are really smart, especially to people Google. They're using AI and machine learning machine learning. And I think that any unnatural link or any collect unnatural links over time is not going to serve you well. So any old backlink is not good. You only want to try to get backlinks and guest blog, or perhaps accept guest bloggers, it's got to be related to where you are in authority, because if it is, and the other site also has authority in that subject, I believe that that link might be worth 10 200 times more valuable than just a backlink from some random website. So for instance, I believe in influencer marketing, the only website that has more domain authority than Neal schaffer.com right now is influencer marketing hub.com. I'm catching up to them, but I don't know if I'll ever catch him. They have incredible domain authority. But you know, a link from influence marketing hub.com to Neal schaffer.com, on something that is influencer marketing related with an anchor text. Linking to one of my blog posts, an influencer marketing that is gold, that is way more valuable, I believe, than a backlink from a random site with random anchor text that was just artificially generated by some SEO agency, because they work on just generating backlinks for clients. Because the client bought a package that said they need to generate five backlinks a month, and needs to be of a certain domain rating. And they don't really care where those things are coming from. And I believe that over time, more and more so as algorithms get even more sophisticated, they will, I don't know if they'll be penalized, but I don't think it's gonna have any value. I think those are just going to be ignored backlinks. I'm hoping this makes sense, I'm going really deep on this, it's something that I think a lot about, I'm really glad to have the opportunity to share it with you. But that is where I see the value of links of it's really about the relevance. And I want you to really stay fixated on creating relevant relationships with other websites, as a guest blogger inviting them to guest blog. It's all about the relevance, if they're an authority and something and they share a link back to your website that's going to give you applied and relevant authority for your website over time for that subject. And, you know, I don't have an incredible amount of data to back this up, I do know that my search engine rankings continue to grow. I use the keyword tracker, I have a video on YouTube that talks all about my SEO process, how I use sem rush for it, I'm gonna put a link to that in the show notes as well. But you can go over to youtube.com/neal Schaffer, and it goes through the entire process. But basically, I am tracking 574 keywords across like 11 different categories. So every category having 52 keywords, and then there's some others that are thrown in there. But you know, I hit a new high on I'm recording this on Friday, May 27. I hit a new high today, okay, all time high. In terms of of these 574 keywords, if all of them ranked number one, I would have 100% rating if they all ranked Zero out of a 0% rating. And I pretty much started out at 0% and this is they need to be at least in the top 100 to get any score in the way that the system works. But I am up to now a 9.48% and for these keywords. You know HubSpot is 15.1% HootSuite 11.1 Sprout Social is 10.8 I am now fourth. So a beat now buffer word stream Neil patel.com social media examiner.com optinmonster.com. And in terms of the number of keywords that I have in the top 100 I'm second only to HubSpot with 410 keywords HubSpot is 467. Neil Patel is 319. So I know that what I'm talking about, I don't have the exact data laid out in the way that you might like to see it. But I know with my own brand and with those of my clients that this notion of relevance is really important, and it really works. And my first aha moment, I'm gonna go back, man, I'm gonna go back a long time in history. My first really predominantly good search engine ranking was on a topic called LinkedIn lions. So I mentioned that my blog started as a LinkedIn blog. And LinkedIn Lions for those you that don't know stands for the linked in open network or open networker, very popular thing early on my first book, windmill networking, understanding, understanding of everything and maximizing LinkedIn. I talked a lot about it. This blog post was probably published back in, you know, 2008 or 2009. What's funny is actually I'm gonna I'm gonna go in here, you know, I still rank number three for LinkedIn lion, even though I haven't published anything on that subject for like a decade. Just goes to show you that the the equity that you build with blog posts, but more importantly, I noticed that one day when I did a search for LinkedIn lion, I was ranked really high and I noticed there's a guy named Jason album that was ranked higher than me now, Jason Alba, you may not know, but he is a legend in the LinkedIn world he came out with, I'm on LinkedIn. Now what he came out with that book, which was the best seller, before Lewis House came out with a book on LinkedIn for those of you that remember. And then I came out with a book, and then Wayne Breitbart, and so on, and so on. But Jason Alba had an article about LinkedIn Lyons, and he linked to my blog post on LinkedIn, Lyons, this was done just purely organically. And that is what drove I believe that one link from a really, really relevant authority on the subject is what drove by search engine rankings, and it still continues to track my search engine rankings to this day. That is what I believe the power of one relevant and authoritative Link can do. And I know when you look at some of these, for some of you that are really deep into this, you will look at an SEO tool. It'll say, you know, you need 50 to 100 backlinks to rank for this topic. I don't believe that, I believe you need a few really relevant, authoritative but but relevant authority on similar subjects that help you rank. Those are the links that are going to drive your website traffic forward, like Jason Alba did. For me. The beautiful thing about all this is once you jump up the search engine rankings, assuming your content is good, then obviously, you can continue there. And when people create content, like Jason Alba, did, they look for more information on that subject, they're doing research, and often they want to outward the link, because outwardly linking is an SEO best practices as well. You are, you know, for something you're not an authority in, you're letting people know where you got that information from. Right. And that's a good thing with the Internet. If none of us linked out, then Google would have no way of knowing who is an authority for a lot. Right. So So linking out is also a good thing. And for those of you that remember episode number 160. I talked with Cyrus Shepard, and I flat out asked him that question. And he said that, you know, he former Moz executive, that's indeed, you know, having outward links, posts or content that have a lot of our links tend to rank really well. There's some studies that say they rank better than those that don't have anything. So sharing links is a good thing, right? And part of this whole backlink strategy is if you link out to certain sites, why not let them know that you link to them? And you know, just like if you want to get a LinkedIn recommendation, write a LinkedIn recommendation for someone you might want to get one from, and you just might get it because it's human nature. There's something to be said in terms of creating backlinks as well. You know, I like to tell the story that Jason Alba's one story and other ones, Tim Tyrell Smith, who in the early days 2009 was one of the thought leaders in sort of job search and social media for job search, and, you know, job search mindset kid a website called Tim strategy. So when I was creating a blog post about LinkedIn for job search, of course, I was going to link to him I wanted to him as a friend, right. And this is where this influencer marketing approach to SEO becomes really important. And I talked about this specifically episode number 183, influencer marketing for search engine optimization, building backlinks for SEO. So I talk about some of that there. But we're going deeper now into getting the right backlinks from the right authority. And ladies and gentlemen, I'm convinced if you just spend a little bit of time on this, and you're very specific as to those sites that you collaborate with, I think it's really going to impact your SEO, because it's worked that way with me now, you might be wondering, and I want to give you this advice, very, very tactical advice. How do I know if a site is relevant or not to my site? Now, if you use SEMrush, or another ranking, keyword Rank Tracker, there's others out there, I understand. But you know, I have 576 keywords. And what I do is, if there's a website that I might want to collaborate with, or guest posts for, I will put them in as a competitor. Sem rush allows you to import 20 competitors that I was just going over some of my competitors. Well, I mean, they're not really competitors, but they rank higher than me in in search engines for keywords that I'm targeting. So in that way, they're competitors. And, you know, what I do is, I just input these potential places where I want to guest blog. And then I see of those 574 keywords, do they rank in the top 100 For any of those keywords, if they do not rank in the top 100 For any of those keywords, there is no relevance. There's no connection between that site in mind because if they ranked in the top 100 If they were an authority and content marketing, influencer marketing, any of these topics that I'm targeting as keywords, they would rank in the top 100 The first 10 pages of Google for one keyword or two keywords, I would expect five keywords. I rank for more than you know 400 As I mentioned, so I use that as a barometer. And my minimum threshold now is five if you rank for five of the same keywords and I'm targeting, it's a 1% relevance, right, which is fine. HubSpot being the highest, which is more like a 70% relevance, but I'll take a 1% relevance over a 0% relevance. So I really want you to think hard. If you want to go the guest blogging route, you want to build backlinks, maybe you're engaging in SEO agency, I really want you to think hard about the relevance because I think over time, search engines with AI and machine learning machine learning are just going to get better and better at finding irrelevant things which we know can lead to penalties for our site in search engines. And that is the nugget of information I want to leave you with. I know it's very, almost too detailed, but hopefully tactical, actionable, but also gave you this broader perspective of mine into this science, and art that is search engine optimization. But it is truly been a powerful, insightful journey for me seeing what is possible, and helping all my clients see what is possible, again, increasing website traffic, increasing search engine rankings. And really, it's all about building equity, building an asset, those stories disappear after 24 hours, those photos and videos you post on social media, with the exception of maybe you know, Pinterest, and YouTube and podcasting, that content has a very, very short shelf life. That's why every company should have a website. And every company should have content, their website, and everybody should use blogs as a way to rank for content that people are actually searching for, because they're probably not searching for your company name, or your product name. So that's how all of this fits in. Every piece of the digital marketing puzzle has its role. SEO has an important role. And within SEO backlinks have an important role as well. Don't think about numbers, don't think about too much about domain rating, domain authority. That process that I told you about. There is a minimum domain authority, right? So if I'm domain authority, 75, and it has a domain authority of or domain rating of like 20, or 30, they're not gonna have enough authority. But you know, if they have a domain authority of 50 6070, that might be good enough. And at the end of the day, if they're ranking, that's more important than anything. So if the ranking, they already have enough domain authority to rank, so I don't need to worry about that domain authority number, which is why don't I only look at the relevance? All right. I think the more I talk, the more I might confuse yourself, but I stopped here. You can listen to this again, feel free. If you have any questions after this about this SEO process, feel free to reach out to me. I mentioned a number of episodes that I really hope if you want to go deeper you'll listen to I always have new listeners. So go back into those specific episodes. To learn more. This is a critical skill that every digital marketer should have. As your digital marketing coach, I cannot have an episode where I don't talk about this because I think it's really, really important that you heed my advice. I'll stop there. As always, keep your eye on the goal is your digital marketing coach Neal Schaffer signing out. You've been listening to your digital marketing coach, questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast dot Neal schaffer.com. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes, and Neal schaffer.com to tap into the 400 Plus blog post that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's Digital First group coaching membership community if you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.