Tommy McDonald is not your usual SEO expert. He’s known as the guy who offers no-bullshit, straight-to-the-point advice and gives brutally honest opinions to companies struggling to make their search marketing strategies.
Though being a self-starter, McDonald has quickly grown into an opinion leader and power user at one of the popular niche forums. His first SEO service launched back in 2012 on this forum went massively viral and netted him seven-figures in revenue during the first year.
He has later founded another service-based business to successfully sell it for 6 figures in November last year. McDonald is now running a new venture – Sep Logic – a popular SEO hub with loads of practical advice and services for businesses struggling to understand and implement the right SEO strategy type.
Today, McDonald shares his top 3 SEO tips on playing the online marketing game in 2016 if you want to reach scalable results.
Do Your Due Diligence Basics When It Comes to Choosing an Agency
The world wide web is full of self-proclaimed SEO gurus, promising you to achieve first page rankings in Google within as little as seven days.
The similar wording indicates that a company has little to no idea what the search marketing landscape really is in 2016. They are unqualified and are still stuck in the early 00s when all you had to do is publish keyword-optimized content, add a few shady links in tow and get those rankings.
However, things change fast in search marketing with Google rolling algorithm updates at least a few times per year, thus changing the rule set for marketers.
Links are still one of the key ranking elements these days. Yet, it’s not the quantity but the quality that matters. Rather than choosing to buy a package, look for companies offering custom outreach services, detailed niche research, and various link building options that come in tow.
In fact, according to McDonald, you can create a good chunk of quality, natural links in 24 hours or less. The options include: creating local business listing pages and getting listed in business directories (Yelp, BBB, etc.), sponsoring an event or getting listed as a donor, press releases, and more. The opportunities are out there. You just need to know how to find them.
You Don’t Need Links to Get Massive Traffic.
Another bold statement that you won’t hear from an average SEO expert. Yet, Tommy McDonald proves that you don’t need to build thousands of links to register a massive traffic spike at your website.
McDonald highlights infographics, long-form expert roundup list posts, and interviews with influencers as the best performing content types. In each case, the blueprint boils down to:
- finding an interesting subject that is trendy yet not covered well enough;
- crafting a valuable, well-researched piece of content
- promoting the heck out of it with strategic outreach campaigns and social media marketing.
If talking about infographics, a single placement on a popular niche blog can land you at least 50 unique daily visitors, an evergreen revenue stream, plus some good branding on top.