Negative Results Course: Leapfrogging With Results You Partially Control
Script from the lesson The Negative Results Course
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Drowning negative and imperfect results using content you partially control. What’s the situation? Here’s a bad result you want to drown and in your list of leapfrogger content to work on, there’s a page you partially control. What can you do to push that content up your Brand SERP, leapfrog the negative content, and push that down the SERP?
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Results you partially control are great for leapfrogging. Some of the techniques you learned for content you control will be useful, but many techniques are different, so keep watching. Firstly, social media. Here, it’s all about activity and engagement. Typical candidates are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â These will rank relatively easily because they’re the big players in the space. Other platforms can rank, even smaller ones, if they’re super relevant to your audience. Whichever one is in your leapfrogger list, the key to pushing social media up the SERP is sustained activity on the account with special emphasis on engagement from your audience.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â And there’s a great bonus here because this can easily tie into your wider content strategy as we’ll see later. One major factor to bear in mind that people often forget is not to talk only about themselves. If you do that, it’s highly unlikely you’ll get a good engagement from your audience. They’ll engage with content that brings value to them and you can’t do that 24/7 with just content about you. They really aren’t interested in you 24/7. For content you post, a good rule of thumb is three thirds. One third content you produce, one third content from third parties that your audience will find valuable, and one third just for fun. Make sure all the content you’re sharing is interesting and useful to your audience.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Valuable content triggers their engagement and that is what we are looking for here. Also, try to get images and videos into the mix as much as possible. That will help with engagement and it will help to rank these social platforms higher. And they also help getting Rich Elements, such as Video Boxes, Image Boxes, and Twitter Boxes for your Brand SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â If you don’t have many images, use the resources the platform provides. Animated, GIFs, emojis, and so on. And if creating videos seems too ambitious for your time and budget, have a look at videos your company already has produced and see if you can make a few short clips from those. You can also look at stock videos. There are a lot of sites out there offering a vast choice of very good quality video. This is a cheap, simple option that looks very professional. And there are lots of free video editing software options out there, and most of them are very intuitive to use. So, don’t let the editing part hold you back either.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â The rule of thirds also applies to links. Only one post in three should have a link. This is because the social platforms tend to give less visibility to content with external links and they push content from accounts that have good record of engagement. Hopefully you see the trick. If you post external links, you don’t get as much visibility.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â And with less visibility, you get less engagement and vice versa. Less links means the algorithms will give you more visibility. And assuming the content is quality and relevant and attractive, that will tend to get you engagement, which will help the next post get more natural visibility from their algorithms.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Make sure you use lots of hashtags. That helps widen your audience and generate relevant engagement. And it also helps to tag in people and brands that you cite, who will be interested by what you’re saying. An active, engaging, and balanced social profile will create community and community will push that profile up your Brand SERP. Having a community on social media will also help your business, of course.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â If you’ve used Medium, that can also be a great candidate. Medium ranks very quickly and very easily if you write regularly and you can create an audience on Medium in just the same way as other social platforms. With all of these, you’re forced to think about and create content. And that’s great, but don’t do that in isolation.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Look at how you can integrate this content into your wider content strategy, blog, writing, video, making podcasts, recording, and so on, and even vice versa. You can see what content you are creating for your site that you can repurpose for social. Short clips from your videos, quotes from articles as text or in the form of images, soundbites from your podcasts, these are all great options.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Next, review platforms. Some review platforms will be easier to push up because they’re all authoritative Trustpilot, Better Business Bureau, Yellow Pages, these are all great examples. Others are great because they’re niche, bright, local, have a great list of those niche review platforms and others are good choices because Google trusts them.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â And here, what I mean is that some platforms have a partnership with Google for Google Ads, although that shouldn’t affect ranking. This list is a good indication of whom Google trusts. Any of these will be easier to rank than an outlier review platform. But if your leapfrogger platform doesn’t come from one of my lists, authoritative, relevant, niche or trusted, that doesn’t mean you cannot push it up the SERP, just be aware that it might be a little bit more difficult. The trick to leapfrogging with these is fourfold.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Number one, update the profile page on the platform. Optimize every piece of information they allow you to edit. Address, description, title, images, links to your homepage or customer support site page, and so on. Number two, get lots of positive reviews. The more you get, the stronger the signal is to Google. Number three, reply to every review, good or bad. Number four, add the rating with a link to the platform on your site, perhaps in the header, if you think your audience will be impressed or in the footer or on a dedicated page.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Do all of that and the platform will almost certainly push up the rankings on your Brand SERP possibly quite quickly, say a couple of weeks. Like social platforms, you can very usefully make this part of a wider business strategy. The activity of encouraging more reviews and interacting with your customers publicly will help your wider SEO strategy build trust in your audience and increase your reach.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â And a word of warning, if the platform doesn’t have many reviews or has a low rating, don’t use it as a leapfrogger, unless you’re sure you can get lots and lots of positive reviews. A review platform with a low volume of ratings will be volatile and can easily flip on you. For example, if you have a four star rating, but only three reviews than just one single one-star review will send your average score down a long way. It will show three stars on your Brand SERP, and that looks bad. There’s a whole lesson about review platforms in this case.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â App platforms. If you have an app, then you might have an app platform ranking. iTunes, Google Play, and other app platforms are very relevant and useful to your audience, and those are powerful sites. Just make sure your app description is accurate and relevant. Then like the review platforms, encourage your users to give positive reviews. The volume of reviews will push your app page up the SERP.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Next, industry specific websites and directories. Profile and directory listing pages from legitimate niche industry sites are great because they’re highly relevant. If the platform is either popular with your target audience or has authority within your industry, Google will perceive it as useful and valuable to people searching your brand name. Here, you need to claim and update the profile page on the platform.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Optimize every piece of information they allow you to edit. Address, description, title, images, links to your homepage or customer support page and so on. Two, if the platform allows it, generate audience engagement, perhaps with ratings or comments. Three, link to it from somewhere appropriate on your site. For this type of site, you might consider creating leapfroggers. Look on your direct competitors’ brand SERPs and see which industry-specific informational sites appear for them.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Use your common sense and good judgment and create profiles on those that are truly relevant to your industry and your audience. If they’re highly relevant, they should be quite easy to push up your Brand SERP even though they didn’t exist before.
Next, guest articles. If you have an article you wrote for another platform that’s a great leapfrogger candidate, then do some content SEO on the article to push it up. Watch the SEO strategies lesson in the fundamentals course for more on that. Pay particular attention to the metas and the heading. If you want it to rank for your brand name, you need to make your brand as much the focus as it’s reasonable. If the platform allows it, genuine user activity on the article such as ratings, comments and shares are a great way for you to push the article up the rankings.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â So, encourage your audience to contribute. The profile page on the site you guest blog for is more likely to be a candidate than a specific article. To leapfrog with these, you need to optimize the profile page, title, description, images, biography, outbound links, and so on, but also contribute more to the blog.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Writing about your subject around the subject, on the platform as a guest writer is a strong signal to Google that the site and more specifically, the profile page is relevant and important to your brand. Next, informational sites. This could be any site that provides factual information about brands. I frequently see generalist sites such as Wikipedia, Wikidata, Crunchbase, but there are lots of others depending on your industry.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â With Wikipedia, if you have a page, this will rank page one very easily, and it’s probably very near the top already. You can push it a little further by editing it. Here are the rules. Number one, don’t make it obvious you work for the brand, either do it anonymously or better still through an account that has already contributed. Don’t use paid services though that unlikely to be any better than you. Number two, only edit it once. Prepare the text carefully beforehand and make sure you get it right first time. Number three, change only the first two sentences. Small tweaks are less likely to attract attention. Number four, stick to the facts.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Those first two sentences should focus on your brand and a factual global overview of what you do, nothing more. Pay particular attention to the way you write it, make sure you are 100% neutral. Don’t write anything that could possibly be construed as biased advertising or bigging yourself up. So, avoid adjectives as far as possible and particularly words like leading, best, innovative, great. That means you avoid any words that are associated with a point of view rather than a fact. Biased wording is a big red flag for editors. And Wikipedia have bots that crawl updates for additions. These machines analyze the changes and automatically inform editors of anything suspicious. So, don’t think your tiny change will not be noticed because there are so many changes everyday on Wikipedia.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â If there’s anything suspicious about what you’ve done, it will get flagged and brought to the attention of a human editor who will not hesitate to hit you hard for self promotion. They really hate self-promotion. If Wikipedia editors do pick up on you, then they will add a big warning to the page or worse.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â They’ll tag the article for deletion. So, be very, very, very cautious. If you aren’t sure about what you’re doing, don’t take the risk. Find another leapfrogger candidate instead. If you’re interested to learn more, I go into quite a lot of detail about Wikipedia, why it’s important, how to avoid messing it up, and how best to leave [] in the knowledge graph course.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Next, Crunchbase. That sometimes ranks on page one, but most often ranks pages two, three, and downwards. Things that can help you Crunchbase profile rank. Number one, there’s a lot of information on it. Number two, that information is linked to other pages on Crunchbase. Number three, the references on the page to other pages are highly relevant. Number four, the latest information is completely and absolutely accurate and up-to-date.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â But these sites allow you to link out to your social accounts and profile pages, which helps those to rank as well. So, you have every interest to update these informational sites with up-to-date information about your social profiles, social accounts, your profile pages, and even your profile pages on sites that you guest blog for. For all this work, there are bonuses for your wider SEO and marketing strategies.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Here are some. With social you’re creating community, widening your audience, and improving your content strategy especially if you integrate it into your global content strategy.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â With review sites, you’re boosting your online reputation in the eyes of both Google and users. With guest blogging, you’re widening your audience, improving your content strategy, creating quality inbound links, and increasing your own authority.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Your work on profile pages will help Google better understand who you are and what you do, and that helps with your knowledge graph presence. Adding and correcting facts about your own informational sites also helps with your knowledge graph presence. And lastly, for all these leapfrogger candidates that you partially control, don’t hesitate to use appropriate techniques that I’ve described in lessons about leapfrogger candidates, but also in the Fundamentals course.
Jason Barnard speaking:Â Thank you.
