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9 ways marketing experts position and promote their agencies
Inspiration from the Fuel Lines ad agency new business conference in Nashville
They say that plumbers don’t always fix their own leaky pipes and the same is often true for marketing companies.
A few years ago I hired Michael Gass of Fuel Lines to help us further refine our positioning as a digital marketing agency and to help us stop the leaks in our own marketing.
He flew up from Alabama and brought his Southern charm and buckets full of wisdom with him.
After a long successful career in business development, Michael started his own business specializing in helping advertising agencies get more leads and sales. He has worked with over 200 agencies worldwide and I just spoke at his insightful ad agency conference in Nashville.
If you have ever wondered if specializing in a niche or focusing on highly specific target markets could help your services business succeed, then you’re in for a real treat via the takeaways from this positioning and inbound marketing conference.
How to create a line out the door for your business
- Positioning and picking a niche and/or target market
If I had a dollar for every time I heard the words “Focus on a highly specific target market and you will have clients flocking to you and paying higher prices”, I could buy a 30 foot sport fishing boat.
Some people at the conference debated whether or not you should focus just on one target market versus having several segments but this was one of the main themes throughout the conference.
Advertising agencies certainly can have more than one target market but having more than three and/or not having specialized people to handle each of them can cause a problem for small to mid-size companies.
Mark Schneider of RSW/US at the recent HubSpot inbound marketing conference said that clients don’t expect you to work only in their industry but they do like to see about 30% or more of your team focusing on one vertical.
Lee McKnight Jr. of RSW/US at the Fuel Lines conference said that even if you don’t focus on a client’s target market, they say it’s critical you at least “own” something you are well known for.
Numerous speakers joked about how advertising agencies claim they are different by saying they are more creative, strategic and/or are better partners than their competition.
This was looked down upon as a weak value proposition across the board and is not enough to make you stand out in a very competitive field.
Owning your target market and/or niche has also been proven to consistently lead businesses and their “visible experts” to be called upon by the media for their specific expertise.
Everything gets easier when you narrow your focus.
- Blogging and developing consistent content for building authority
The other major high-level theme of the conference was that agencies should develop blogs either on their own website or on a separate very specific domain name, relating to just one industry or niche topic.
Michael’s philosophy is that its best if this blog is largely centered around one individual person as opposed to a brand or group effort.
Having a content driven website and blog focused on industry related keywords will help you quickly become the go to person in that category.
By putting the blog on a separate URL, you can experiment with this type of targeting without having to completely rebrand your main website.
One example is the Millennial Marketing blog by Jeff Fromm
Another niche blog example is the Sheconony, written by Stephani Holland
Jami Oetting from HubSpot, who writes The Agency Post, countered this in some ways because she likes to have all of the content on one website. Given HubSpot starts at $800 a month for the pro version, I only have it on my main agency site, so I have also felt the practical implications of this from a tracking and tool cost perspective.
Jami recently moved agencypost.com into the main HubSpot website and now has a better feel for tracking and leads coming from this content but it’s worth exploring both scenarios as you map out your strategy.
Just be careful not to have too many websites and blogs because I can tell you from experience it can be a real challenge to manage the process on numerous sites at once.
With that said, exploring, experimenting and even failing, is going to help you succeed in the long run. Doing nothing is definitely worse.
How often should I blog?
From a tactical perspective, Jami mentioned some recent HubSpot stats that show when companies blog 16+ times a month they get a significant increase in traffic.
In a 2015 post titled How Often Should Companies Blog?, Lindsay Kolowich of HubSpot explains the research in more detail:
“Companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got about 4.5X more leads than companies that published between 0 – 4 monthly posts.”
How long will it take for my blog to succeed?
Certainly starting with one blog post a month is better than nothing and it all depends on how quickly you want to see success.
One blog post a month will be enough to share this niche content with your target audience and can deeply improve your sales process but won’t be enough for a serious SEO effort.
400 blog posts was cited as a threshold where blogs reach a significant inflection point and several people discussed how it took one or two years for their blogs to take off.
In my presentation, I shared this analytics graphic from the wife of famous “SEO expert” Rand Fishkin, who only saw her blog have deep ranking success after two years of hard work.
Should I write shorter blog posts or longer more in depth posts?
Michael Gass likes short posts and has gotten over a million views on 500 words posts but Jami from HubSpot says they do far better with 2,500 word posts. Searchmetrics, in their 2015 ranking factors study, recently revealed that the length of content that ranks well continues to increase – to over 1,100 words on average.
Check out more from Ginny Soskey / HubSpot on Quality vs. Quantity: A 6-Month Analysis of the Age-Old Blogging Debate.
In the end it will depend on your audience and goals but the trend for SEO and sharing is longer posts. Ideally include lots of detailed research, bullet points, images and or video while at the same time making it easy to read.
With over 150 million blogs out there, blogging for the sake of just having one is completely dead.
- Email marketing still dominates
Lee McKnight of RSW says that 57% of marketers find agencies via email.
Prospecting to potential new customers via email can be more productive than you would think given people’s saturated inboxes.
Capturing emails by using top of the funnel calls to action such as e-books was one of the top ways mentioned to build a quality list.
Another person mentioned using Datanyze to capture emails of people you find on LinkedIn.
Michael Gass prefers that the agencies he worked with use as simple a strategy as possible when starting an email Campaign.
Rather than crafting new content for your email marketing every month, he recommends simply putting the four most recent blog posts as snippets into an email with links to the full posts. This way you can get your monthly emails out consistently.
Check out the post on Copyblogger that compares the effectiveness of a fully crafted monthly email newsletter to what they call content notifications.
- Cold calling is dead but warm calling is not
While having an amazing blog that generates an overabundance of leads is the ideal, you may need to do some calling while you are building up to being a 100% inbound lead driven agency.
Lee McKnight from RSW/US said that a call is never the first step in the process.
The first step is preferably to send some thought leadership content such as an e-book or link to a blog post that you have created to the client. You can email them or mail them survey results, an info-graphic or whatever you think will inspire them to want to talk to you when you follow up with a phone call.
Nobody likes to get cold calls and it’s not exactly the favorite tactic of marketers at this conference but in reality most people still use this tactic, including HubSpot and Google!
If you are going to put cold calling into your mix while ramping up your blog, make sure to connect it to helpful industry specific content, so you’re not just annoying people.
- Social media marketing for amplifying your message
Social media doesn’t usually convert into leads like other tactics but it can be a great way to spread your content, position yourself as a thought leader and engage customers.
Michael Gass has over 100,000 Twitter followers across 2 Twitter accounts (personal and business) and says that it drives a ton of traffic to his website.
Paul Roetzer from PR 20/20 showed a survey slide, where the number one thing marketers were focused on was social. He mused at it and said that, as you can see, clients basically don’t know what works and or exactly what they want.
Social media marketing should not be the very first thing that most customers of an agency focus on unless they are in a very specific industry where social is dominant.
With that said, given the fact that so many marketing directors fixate on social media, it doesn’t position you well if your own social media stinks.
And while search engine optimization does not directly improve because of social media, most top ranking websites according to Searchmetrics also have considerable social activity.
Promoting your blog and content is next to impossible without the use of social media, so this category stands in reasonably high regard with the agency crowd.
Numerous people also mentioned how journalists take your Twitter and social activity very seriously.
Everybody agrees that Facebook is the big dog in general and that it’s great to put somewhat touchy-feely stuff on there to show the charitable and soft side of your agency but if you want leads as a services firm, then go to LinkedIn.
LinkedIn promoted content and using an advanced tool like LinkedIn Navigator can be great ways to enhance your LinkedIn strategy.
Both Michael Gass and Jami from HubSpot went into some detail about publishing on LinkedIn Pulse as a way to greatly expand the reach of your blog. They both appeared to take the approach of not worrying about duplicating content as long as you link back to your blog post after copying and pasting it into LinkedIn Pulse.
I have heard some other SEO expert’s saying that the preferred method is to put a few hundred word synopsis of your blog post into LinkedIn Pulse, so the content is original. There is certainly some debate about this and I would love to hear other people’s experiences.
- Clear calls to action
A common theme that Michael Gass sees with many of his ad agency clients is a lack of clear and simple calls to action.
At McDougall Interactive we have been guilty of having too many calls to action at times and other agencies don’t even have a top of the funnel call to action yet.
I know the feeling, as I am still working on our first e-book for Authority Marketing.
Michael and other speakers discussed the idea of adjusting calls to action on a regular basis to improve conversions.
Having relevant e-books at the end of a blog post can help significantly for lead generation.
- Sales psychology
One of my favorite takeaways was the idea of playing a bit of a chess game in the sales process.
Peter Levitan, author of Buy This Book. Win More Advertising Pitches, made a very strong point around how agencies focus so much on solving the clients problem that they don’t bond around the problem itself. By doing this you might take down a pawn but lose the king.
Companies are much more focused on their own issue than they are on listening to you spout off ideas. It builds a better relationship to huddle around the problem first and empathize.
Bob Sanders of Sanders Consulting Group gave an amazing presentation which included his phenomenal system for creating chemistry through personality profiling.
Bob breaks human people types into four categories and helps you identify which type of people your prospects are. This helps you to mirror their activities and style, as well as create a better bond with them.
Which personality type are you?
Numerous people discussed the idea of building personas and understanding your customers in detail before going into a pitch. Private detective type of work to understand a prospect may sound creepy but it helps you bond with a prospect more quickly. LinkedIn is a great place to start this type of research.
Another consensus was around the idea of “stirring the hurt” or bringing the problem the customer is having to the forefront, in a way that creates a serious sense of urgency.
Customers can be so slow to get on board with getting things done that you need to make them painfully aware that their problem could get worse if they don’t work on the solution immediately.
- Improving your systems and processes along with deepening consistency
One thing that struck me very deeply after going to several conferences in the last month is just how smart so many marketers are and how organized they are about their systems.
Lee from RSW/US has an amazing template on their new business outreach system as well as sales email templates.
Paul from PR 2020 has incredible spreadsheets such as the following goal tracking worksheet.
Jeff Fromm the millennial marketing guy said to create a spreadsheet with 100% of all your prospects and give each of them a percentage score in terms of the likelihood of them signing up and a monetary value. And then he said to basically throw out anything with under a 50% score.
Michael Gass spoke in depth about creating a system of creating content and outlined the process for creating a blog posts, the different styles of posts you should create each month and systematic ways of promoting them.
HubSpot is famous for helping agencies to define the sales process and has numerous onboarding workflow charts and spreadsheets.
Another speaker mentioned having a one page brand strategy document or manifesto to keep all of your messaging consistent.
Michael Gass joked about how few agencies have a marketing plan for the own companies.
If you ever want to sell your company someday, having workflows and highly developed systems in place, not only makes your company function better but makes it more of a target to be purchased. In the meantime it helps you and your team to be happier and more successful.
Pier Levitan talked about creating a highly organized methodology for responding to RFPs and how you put your pitches together.
If you’re the kind of company that doesn’t spend the time to organize your systems, then it’s time to take a page out of these marketing experts playbook.
- Digital marketing tools and martech
Paul from PR 2020 mentioned the famous info-graphic by Scott Brickler on marketing technology tools and just how much software marketers need to work with these days.
He discussed how chief marketing officers are now spending more money on technology than chief information officers!
Marketing is getting more complicated and if you are not aware of the tools that can help you save time, you’re behind the curve. Here are just a few of the tools that were mentioned:
HubSpot
SocialOomph
HootSuite
Datanyze
Automated Insights
The List
Conclusion
Whether you’re an advertising agency or any type of services company, specialization in terms of the tactics you employ and/or the target markets that you focus on are essential in today’s competitive climate.
Michael Gass in his closing keynote said that “there’s one thing that is consistent with experts and that is experts write.”
By specializing in having a blog that you can turn into e-books and an eventual book, you will be positioning yourself in a way that will allow you to have a red velvet rope policy and to only work with clients that you enjoy working with.
Are you working with only your ideal clients?
How to win friends and influence people: Summary, quotes and 5 takeaways
I was so inspired listening to Dale Carnegie’s audio book How to win friends and influence people that I hardly know here to begin to make a summary of it.
I listened to it at between 1.5x and 2x speed, so I can still hear the sound of the reader, who was trying to sound like he was from the 1930’s but with an added chipmunk kind of tone.
I am going to focus on 5 immediately actionable takeaways, along with juicy quotes and share links to more lengthy recaps from others.
- Take an honest interest in others
As a salesperson, I come prepared. Perhaps too prepared. I have been answering the objections of prospects for over 20 years. I have PowerPoint presentations, a litany of credentials and plenty of energy to share how I can help companies with digital marketing.
Ironically, the secret weapon that Dale Carnegie shares has very little to do with us and our qualifications. It has more to do with how much we honestly care about and listen to others.
If you want to be influential, spend a lot more time talking about people’s likes and interests than merely selling them. Sure, you have to get down to business and show them your stuff but if that is all you do, you will soon be forgotten.
It may only take one small comment such as appreciating a photo on their desk of their family or fishing trip or perhaps the unique artwork on their walls, to start a conversation that builds a friendship. This can open the door for sales and influence opportunities far greater than hammering them with details.
My father, who owned a large advertising agency and sold numerous 100 million dollar accounts, told me a dozen times that I must show interest in a prospect or clients “baby pictures” more than my own. He is like a broken record about how important the relationship is and so is Dale Carnegie. The best influencers live by this and not only get more clients but make many friends along the way.
Just this morning, I heard Donald Trump on the news say that the relationship is key when negotiating. He said that just by looking at Obama and Vladimir Putin together and seeing the lack of chemistry, he can tell that good deals are just not going to happen.
Taking a good hard look at myself, I know I can do better now that I know how important this technique is.
One actionable way you can show interest in others on your website is to use the words “You” far more than “We”. Speaking as if in a conversation to your readers will make them feel welcome, while only hitting them with “We do this or our brand does that” can be a turn off.
- People respond better to sweetness than bitterness
Abraham Lincoln said that “A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall. So with men. If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey which catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the highroad to his reason.”
Dale Carnegie used extensive examples to illustrate how people successfully won the hearts of those they were trying to influence through kindness and not through arguments.
Dale Carnegie also says, “You can’t win an argument. You can’t because if you lose it, you lose it; and if you win it, you lose it.”
Criticizing others rarely adds value and even if you know someone is wrong, avoid directly saying it. Don’t push people to lose face, rather empathize with them sweetly and they will much more likely be on your side when asking them to do things or delegating to them.
- Give honest and sincere (specific) appreciation
Emphasize people’s positives rather than negatives and they will do more for you.
Charles Schwab put it this way: “I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement.
There is nothing else that so kills the ambitions of a person as criticism from superiors. I never criticize anyone. I believe in giving a person incentive to work. So I am anxious to praise but loath to find fault. If I like anything, I am hearty in my appreciation and lavish in my praise”
Just make sure your appreciation is heartfelt. Dale ads: “The difference between appreciation and flattery? That is simple. One is sincere and the other insincere. One comes from the heart out; the other from the teeth out. One is unselfish; the other selfish. One is universally admired; the other universally condemned.”
And he also says that “Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain but it takes character and self control to be understanding and forgiving.”
People also desire to have stature and a role. They often like the work itself more than the money and so giving them a clear title that helps them feel important, goes a long way in motivating them personally and for your company.
- Begin by emphasizing the things on which you agree (small yes’s help)
Carnegie says that you should “Begin by emphasizing and keep on emphasizing the things on which you agree”. This concept dates back to Socrates.
The Socratic Method relies on posing your point of view as questions, so that the person must ponder and answer. If you lead with very small questions which you know they will answer yes to, you can start them gently down the road to seeing things your way in a non-argumentative manner.
I recently went to the Michael Port Book Yourself Solid conference in Savanah Georgia. At the conference, we did a small group breakout session where we were asked to do the following exercise:
Tell each other what your upcoming goals are when you get back from the conference and the steps you are going to take to achieve them. Then, your peers, instead of giving you advice, will pose a series of questions aimed at helping you discover the answers on your own.
It dawned on me that this could be used in sales calls and meetings, when conversations are not going my way.
I have studied question-based selling a bit over the years but somehow this felt a little bit different and more like a psychology session.
I had a sales meeting shortly after the workshop, where my prospect was just not responding well to my answers regarding his objections. It was very clear what their problem was and I was 100% certain that my answers were not only accurate but I had over a decade of proof, solving exactly the same problem for other clients.
Regardless, this person just kept on questioning what I was saying and so instead of responding with statements or advice, I started posing a series of questions. Within minutes, the prospect had various revelations that prompted him to tell me he would be sending the signed contract shortly. An hour later I had a fax with a signature.
I may have been able to close the sale with my normal routines and sharing of knowledge, but I’ll never forget how quickly this one turned around when I started to get small yes’s from a series of simple questions. Thanks Dale, Michael Port and Socrates!
- Show respect for the other person’s opinions and see things from their perspective
“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from his angle as well as your own.” – Henry Ford
It’s easy to get wrapped up in our own needs during the sales process. I recently had a salesperson tell me that it would be great if I could get started today because it would help them meet their quota. Needless to say, that didn’t inspire me to sign up.
What they could have said instead was something along the lines of: “You mentioned that it was important for you to have a better email marketing program for your client in place before the holidays began. If we can get started today, we would be happy to do the training immediately and help you both meet your goals.”
It is important for you to try and imagine yourself in the shoes of the other person. If you can even remotely envision the position they are in and the obstacles that are important for them to overcome, you’re one step closer to being aligned.
Conclusion
The likes of Warren Buffet have not only studied but credit Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people to changing their lives. If you are looking to be an influential thought leader and persuasive authority, it needs to be on your reading list.
There are so many additional great things to learn from it, such as smiling more and using people’s name frequently (because it is the sweetest sound in any language) that this post could easily turn into a book.
Below are a couple links to more detailed summaries and a few more How to win friends and influence people quotes:
- “It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.”
- “Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.”
- “Don’t be afraid of enemies who attack you. Be afraid of the friends who flatter you.”
What are some of your favorite Dale Carnegie quotes?
Weekly favorite digital marketing tips: Repurposing Content, Twitter Chats, Public Speaking
During the last few weeks I went to the HubSpot Inbound marketing conference in Boston and then headed down to Savannah Georgia for the Michael Port Book Yourself Solid event. I also ran a Twitter chat for ProfNet. Here are a few cool things I learned or re-learned:
- Tips for Repurposing Content
Generating content consistently is one of the most common problems marketers face. Lee Odden of top rank blog gave a great talk at the Inbound conference about how you can make many pieces of content starting from one piece, such as an e-book. This post is essentially a summary of the talk about how to repurpose content and make your content marketing easier.
Lee also mentioned that his team does a quick Friday news post like the Friday fav’s John Jantsch does. Great way to keep active.
- Public speaking tips from Michael Port
Matthew Kimberley, who works with Michael, was preparing for giving a talk and so at the end of the day they let us watch the rehearsal. I was shocked how specific they were in organizing hand gestures, stage position, props, loudness and softness of voice, facial expressions and all kinds of fine details.
I wish I could share the coaching session but I don’t think they videotaped it, as it was spontaneous. The bottom line is, you don’t just want to think about your content and slides but you want to think about your entire presence and show, like an actor, comedian or a musician does.
More speaking tips from Michael Port on YouTube. And check out tips part 1 and part 2 from one of his clients.
- Combining sales and content marketing
Brian Halligan, one of the founders of HubSpot showed off their free CRM system and Sidekick sales tool, both of which I am now using. What really turned me on was when he said how important it is for salespeople to have a repository of blog posts and content that they can share with prospects. He emphasized the importance of showing off your thought leadership / authority.
He shared how the Sidekick for Business tool lets you keep folders of this type of content, which may have been created by the marketing team and that the salespeople can send to engage potential customers.
So don’t just create blog posts with the goal of getting them ranked in Google or sharing on social media, but use them very directly in your sales process.
- How to do a Twitter chat
Shannon Ramlochan from ProfNet asked me to host a live twitter chat with her. I hadn’t done one before, and the Buffer guide to Twitter chats was extremely helpful in getting up to speed.
During the chat, I used a few hashtags like #inbound2015 and it drew in a few people who follow HubSpot. I loved the interaction with people following the #ConnectChat hashtag. I am now a strong believer in hosting Twitter chats.
I was pleasantly surprised that ProfNet also featured me in Times Square!
- How to submit a journalist query using ProfNet
Shannon shared with me a link where you can post your queries in order to have experts share tips for your articles. Not only can you use a tool like ProfNet to get featured in media, but you can use it in reverse and become a journalist yourself.
- News tip: My next public speaking event:
I am honored to have been invited to speak by Michael Gass, with many top agency new business experts, at The NEW Drivers of NEW Business, October 8-9, Nashville, TN.
Check out my Fuel Lines speaker page for more details.
Conclusion
I love going to conferences. Being around so many marketers with such high energy and learning from the greats is so nice to do in person. You can certainly get plenty of information online but getting to know high-level experts by interacting with them live is priceless.
Weekly favorite online marketing tips August 22 2015
Lots of interesting stuff happening recently with search and social media marketing news. The following are the top five things that inspired me this week.
- MOZ ranking factors
Every year Moz does a survey of top Internet marketing experts to see what factors influence Google. Links are right up there at the top, so if you think that getting good links to your website is dead, think again.
Search Engine Watch recap of the ranking factor study
- 5 types of content to get the most links
Given that links are still critical for search engine optimization, check out the following piece from Neil Patel about how to present your content to get more links.
- Google penguin and the impending update to the Algorithm
Last week I wrote a blog post about Google Penguin and that has been taking up a lot of my research lately.
If you screw up your link profile, you’re in for a world of hurt. Check out my article but also make sure to keep up with all the news you can get about when Google is going to refresh the penguin algorithm.
- Searchmetrics ranking factors study
Searchmetrics ranking study is another favorite of mine. This year, one of the things it does is reinforce how important technical SEO is.
Also check out the recap on Search Engine Watch.
- Moz Industry survey
This online marketing industry survey helps illustrate some of the top things agencies are focused on and some of the tools that they use. I love these kinds of articles that show what the rest of the industry is up to so that we don’t work in a vacuum.
Conclusion
Heraclitus said that “The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change” and it sounds like he had the temperament to be a great digital marketing director.
What digital marketing trends are you seeing lately that get you excited or make you nervous?
7 Steps to a Profitable Recovery When Google Penguin is Crushing Your Authority
Since I was a kid I have been watching nature shows but penguins are now definitely on my no-fly list. I’d rather have to debate Donald Trump about real estate deals in front of 24 million people than have a truly awful Google Penguin (link penalty) come after me and my site.
For those of you who are unaware of what the Google Penguin update is all about, here is a nice blurb from Search Engine Land:
“What Is The Google Penguin Update?
Google launched the Penguin Update in April 2012 to better catch sites deemed to be spamming its search results, in particular those doing so by buying links or obtaining them through link networks designed primarily to boost Google rankings. When a new Penguin Update is released, sites that have taken action to remove bad links (such as through the Google disavow links tool or to remove spam may regain rankings. New sites not previously caught might get trapped by Penguin. “False positives,” sites that were caught by mistake, may escape.”
- Diagnose the situation and take responsibility
Saying “I had no idea!” Is the wrong answer.
Whether or not you intentionally got bad links pointed at your website, the consequences are the same. Google will never give you any significant traffic until you correct the problem. It may be that your previous SEO company did low quality article and directory link building, scraper sites have scooped up your content including your links and put them in bad places or it may even be that people are pointing negative links at you intentionally.
Don’t make the mistake of waiting to sort this out because it’s important that you do the repair work before the next Google Penguin refresh. More on that in a minute.
There are two main types of situations with Google Penguin penalties.
- Google sends you a manual penalty notification through the Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools).
- Google doesn’t tell you anything and uses its advanced algorithms to filter you out of the search results because they think you have a lot of bad links.
I am not going to go into great detail about how to do Penguin repair in this short post but will certainly cover it in more detail soon. Below are some of the basics to consider.
SEMrush is a great tool that allows you to quickly see how many keywords are driving traffic to your website. The picture below shows a site with few keywords driving traffic and almost no search value. While the traffic amounts are often wrong with these types of tools, a traffic value of 1 shows it’s unlikely there are many unique visitors either.
This can be VERY frustrating when you used to have traffic and see something like this happen.
You will also want to look at Google Analytics to review your organic search traffic (even a glance at overall traffic can sometimes show obvious issues). Look for dips in traffic aligned with Google Penguin release dates.
The following chart may not be as dramatic as many as you have seen but is excellent to review for smaller sites with confusing penalties.
If you see drops in traffic aligned with Penguin Release dates, you have likely been hit.
Google Penguin release dates
- Penguin 1.0 on April 24, 2012 (impacting ~3.1% of queries)
- Penguin 1.1 on May 26, 2012 (impacting less than 0.1%)
- Penguin 1.2 on October 5, 2012 (impacting ~0.3% of queries)
- Penguin 2.0 on May 22, 2013 (impacting 2.3% of queries)
- Penguin 2.1 on Oct. 4, 2013 (impacting around 1% of queries)
- Penguin 3.0 on October 17, 2014 (impacting around 1% of queries)
- Use a tool like Link Detox and your brain to decide what links are good and which should be disavowed
Tools like Link Detox, can give you a quick breakdown of the worst quality and best quality links in your profile.
Don’t rely solely on tools
None of these tools are even close to perfect, so unfortunately you are going to have to look at every one of the links that point at you by clicking on them to see if they look legitimate.
You can also use SEMrush to see if they have any keywords driving traffic and what the traffic value to their site is. If they only have a handful of keywords driving traffic and little to no traffic value, then you may not want them linking to you until they correct their own problems.
This chart shows keyword traffic history:
- Submit your list of bad links to Google using the disavow tool
Now it’s time to submit your spreadsheet to Google, using the disavow tool to let them know which links you admit are bad.
Check out some of my team members at McDougall Interactive discussing “What is the Google Disavow tool?”.
- Manual penalty removal
If you have a manual penalty notification in the Google Search Console, write a letter to Google explaining how the bad links happened, how you have rectified it and asked them to remove the penalty.
- Get more good quality links to your site before the next Penguin refresh
The next step is to make sure that you get good quality links to your site to balance out the ratio of good to bad links. Removing the bad links will only make it so Google will not use those against you. This might help your ranks come back to some degree but it’s only by getting new good links and by writing regular good content that you will improve your authority and rankings.
- Don’t put all your eggs in one basket while you’re waiting
If your website has had a significantly bad link problem, which may include a manual penalty and possibly algorithmic filtering at the same time, it may take literally years to recover.
We have seen some people recover very quickly. Like right after doing a disavow and when we are doing good content, link outreach and SEO at the same time.
We have also seen some people take years to recover and it may be that Google decides to simply spank you with a penalty like a father grounds his child. It is entirely possible that they set a date for you to recover – a couple years out – depending on how bad they think you broke their guidelines.
Sometimes it feels like there is no rhyme or reason to getting a site out of its authority injury, no matter how much content or good links to add.
This shows a site that did a lot of things right – disavow, manual penalty removal, new super high quality links and awesome content – yet having no results:
The truth is that you may have to wait through a couple of Penguin refresh cycles, which historically have been either six months or one year apart. Ouch.
Marie Haynes, writing for Search Engine Watch says: “You won’t see the benefits of your hard work until a Penguin refresh happens.”
- Watch the news for refresh dates like a hawk
Sadly, you may have to wait a few more months for Google to rerun its algorithms for the changes you have been making to take full effect. Check out some of the latest news on when the next refresh will be and keep a close watch on when updates will be released:
Next Google Penguin Update? Jim and Ann Show
Google Says Penguin Refresh Months Away From Happening
In conclusion
If you have a lead weight dragging you down, you won’t succeed no matter what you do. Having an authoritative site that has lots of keywords driving traffic and leads is essential for any company and or thought leader.
Therefore you must make sure to try your best to fix Google penalty issues as fast as possible while potentially also blogging on other domains while you are waiting for your main site to be fixed.
Believe it or not even Google sometimes recommends getting a new domain name when you have a very bad penalty. How bad does that stink for your brand to have to change its online name?
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