He got into SEO and affiliate marketing in 2013 after searching for ways to make money online. He started with affiliate websites and was eventually hired to help the same course creator Alan followed to learn SEO...

From there, he found his passion for link-building and started Growth Gorilla. He now works with 10-15 clients in the B2B, SaaS space and has ranking content down to a science.

In his interview, he breaks down his holistic approach.

Alan describes the 3 main reasons pages may end up in the "content graveyard" (bottom of page 1, page 2, etc.):

Not having backlinks
Targeting the wrong keywords
Not matching search intent or content type with the top 10 ranking results.

And he stresses that content quality is important and should be optimized before building backlinks.

To fix all these issues, he describes his content promotion roadmap. It's a quarterly process that helps prioritize target pages to build links to over the next 3 months.

First, there's the backlink analysis of competitors. He recommends analyzing two competitors, one realistically beatable and the other a North Star competitor that can represent an authority in the niche.

This backlink data will help show the difference in percentages of backlinks pointing to the homepage versus internal pages. If competitors are being more proactive with content promotion, they'll likely have more links to their internal pages. But if a website is not ranking, it could also be the site has a lower domain rating (DR), which can be improved by building more backlinks to the homepage.

From this data, he describes how you can put together a link analysis report. He uses a three-step process for this, including identifying the link gap, identifying the type of backlinks, and identifying the topical relevance of those backlinks.

One tip is to prioritize both page relevancy and domain relevancy for backlinks, but if you can't get both, prioritize page-level relevancy.

Plus, he shares that while no follow links may not have a direct impact on rankings, they can bring in a trust signal that is important for a website to have. Building nofollow links can help dilute the backlink profile and build trust for the site. Good places to get nofollow links include directories, social media links, forums, and Q&A sites like Quora.

He also shares how to spot and avoid bad links from link farms by looking at content quality, links that the content has, and the main business model of the site.

And he also has some great tips on anchor text which can be classified into four main buckets: exact match, partial match, URL, and generic. To improve anchor text, export the backlinks of the top 10 ranking pages for target keywords and classify them into the four buckets to determine the ideal distribution.

Throughout the episode, Alan has a lot of great tips and tactics to share and isn't afraid to get into the nitty-gritty details.

So be sure to check out the full episode below!

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And as always, this podcast episode is hosted by Jared Bauman, co-owner of 201 Creative SEO Agency - https://www.nichepursuits.com/201creative