I’m not talking about the latest instalment of the Halo franchise on the Xbox 360 nor am I writing about religious beliefs but an effect that happens on SEO campaigns that is often overlooked. You’ll sometimes hear this phrase being mentioned in pitches or discussions but it’s been a while since I’ve seen anyone comprehensively explain the process and results in actual detail – so here goes..
The best way of trying to understand the effect is to not think about SEO at all – recently a couple in the UK won £148 million pounds on the Euromillions lottery, lucky them. Now those people to date had earned a specific income, which they paid out to various people and businesses each month – this could include; utility bills, rent, phone bills, supermarkets, corner shops, local café, pubs and pocket money for their children. Now their income would generally dictate how much money they would spend on some of these areas (excluding utility bills), so imagine what that’s going to look like now they have more money than they can possibility imagine?
For a start I’m sure their children will get more pocket money which means they could afford better toys, drinkers in their local pub might get lucky with a couple of rounds of free drinks, the local shops will probably find themselves with an increase in sales with a couple of “big shops” and generally the people around the lucky winners will see themselves better off financially. Not only that but I’m sure they’re going to start spending at places they could previously not afford, like expensive car dealerships or luxury holiday agents.
So let’s start putting this into SEO perspective, imagine those lottery winners are in fact your target keywords that you’ve chosen for a link building campaign. So the keywords that you link to will pass some of their link value to keywords that are related to them and also to keywords that you hadn’t considered before.
The diagram above shows what happens when you see an increase in links/social signals to one particular product or keyword – other related keywords will also benefit, but at a much filtered lesser amount (the lottery winners give money to those around them, the more they give, the richer they will be – same rule applies to time for link building). For this this work properly you obviously need to make sure you have the right internal linking structure, be it in a content silo or contextually linking to related products (think category/sub-category).
What’s interesting about the Halo Effect is that it also works the other way round too;
So if you have many incoming links/social signals coming to the longer tailed keywords then as a Halo Effect (or side result) you will start seeing better rankings for the more important or “parent” keyword.
It’s important then, that you think about what areas of your website and which keyword to target when thinking about your link building strategy as the Halo Effect will help you more than you think.
- PR is key to everything - I can’t stress how important working well with a PR department is. It might require some education to bring them up to speed but once you have them on-board you’ll be able to coordinate large scale link baiting and content strategies that really deliver the highest quality links. You cannot underestimate the relationships and weight that PR people have with journalists and webmasters, these can make all the difference. Even if the bigger press locations don’t link back immediately you might get lucky and find a news hub like the BBC reference the brand and actually link.
- Good content still prevails – it might sound silly but there are a huge number of different car insurance products out there; for women, young people, old people, students, electric cars, fast cars, expensive cars – you absolutely should have a landing page for each of these types of product. It’s not just the immediate benefit to SEO for the top term car insurance you receive but conversion rates and revenue will obviously start increasing.
- When thinking of link bait don’t just think of text – this is quite an important point, even more so now with the various Panda updates. Anyone can write content, most actually quite well too so your strategy needs to include multimedia content assets to stand out from the competition. Creating widgets is one particular idea that is rarely used frequently by competitors, in fact if they work well (not necessarily quickly) if built with a good way of sharing the code (with links). One widget we built actually delivered up to 10k visits per quarter with a 3% conversion rate – not a bad return considering it cost about £4k to build.
- Competitors will adapt, quickly. An example of this is comparethemarket.com – for a long time they bought links, and it worked, well. However all good things must come to an end eventually they got penalised (although not a full penalty) for a number of highly valuable keywords, within a month or so all their paid links had been removed and they started ranking well again.
- When the playing field is pretty much level Google starts using CTR’s for rankings – Last month I blogged on how Google was putting websites in cycles i.e. promoting websites from page 2 to page 1 for a set period then pushing them back down – this happened about 4 times in a row to date, like clockwork. This just goes to show that when you have large complicated strategies in place that something as small as a Meta description or Title tag could mean the gain or loss of tens of thousands of visitors.
- No competitor is “untouchable” – there are certain websites in the UK, mainly Moneysupermarket.com who have such a vast investment in content and link building that their authority in most product areas is vast. You must pick you battles carefully and eat away at the market share bit by bit by choosing your keyword targets wisely. Although websites like MSM are authorities they do sometimes drop off, a few months ago a much smaller Car Insurance provider topped the UK at number 1 for a number of weeks.
- Don’t buy links – I know Google has hammered this message for the last few years but it’s only really been in 2012 where I’ve seen them enforce this more than the occasional one off or slap on the wrist. I’ve seen 3 big car insurance brands in the UK get penalised for buying links and moved from a strong market position for car insurance terms to page 4/5 – which must have cost them millions. As mentioned before the majority of those brands that were buying links have now stopped completely (although there are still a few, ehem..). Your link building strategy needs to be water tight, think big picture and social and you’ll be just fine.
- Vary your anchor text on a regular basis – in the wake of the Google Penguin update this might seem like a quite obvious statement to make and it’s something I did for a long time. Think of every product/landing page/keyword as a “mother” – each mother will have “children” that are related, some might look similar, some quite different i.e. car insurance; buy car insurance, motor insurance, car insurance from BRAND, good deal on car insurance etc – you get the idea. This will require more time and budget but the end result is simply better rankings, for more keywords = more visits.
- Don’t be obsessed with the one keyword “car insurance” – for a long time I was, while the keyword is one of the most valuable terms in the world for search volume and potential revenue it is only one piece of the pie. Roughly speaking the keyword “car insurance” accounts for 40% of the entire market, so important yes – however if you concentrate your efforts on the other 60% which is built up of medium to long tailed terms your strategy can be less reliant on a volatile landscape – it’s far easier to rank for that other 60% and the competition is much smaller.
So it was brought to my attention that price comparison site Moneysupermarket.com was showing up in some rather odd search results in Google. If you search in Google UK for compare credit cards, you will notice that besides ranking number 1 (kudos) the site also ranks for 12 other positions in the top 30 – meaning they are 43% of the top 30 search results for this highly competitive term!
Just look at what Google returns in their top 30 results:
I’ve abbreviated the domain when in fact a number of landing pages show up, including quite a few irrelevant ones, see below:
Surely this must be an error in Google’s algorithm as there is nothing I can see on-site or at first glance off site to warrant this scale of coverage. Perhaps Matt Cutt’s would like to give us an explanation?
If anyone else has seen similar results please let me know