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Two SEO strategies that killed it for us in last 365 days

Over the past 365 days we've been on a growth trip. Earlier this year, I wrote about how we grew a key section of MRR by 800%.

But because of the global pandemic, we've put a bunch of that work on ice for the time being. On the other hand, we've doubled down on content and SEO.

Luckily for us, we actually started working on content back in October and so we're now 6 months on, seeing the results of the work we put in back then.

There are loads of tactics we used, but I wanted to share the two key strategies we used to achieve results in SEO.

Generate backlinks by providing embeds to key publishers

doopoll's a survey tool with a poll like feel to it. So it is easy for us to get publishers of blogs, news sites and loads of other kinds of online publication to share their surveys as embeds.

Our embeds are fairly basic. They look like this:

doopoll embed

But crucially, outside of every iframe embed of a survey, there's a backlink that includes Create your own survey at doopoll.co which gives us a backlink from high authority domains.

And here's what this strategy has done for our backlink profile:

doopoll Backlinks

We started actively pursuing embeds in about January of this year. You can notice this had an impact on the trend of backlink growth right away.

A side benefit of this is that we rank much quicker for top of funnel terms now. Our backlink profile is pretty strong and getting backlinks from these sites helps.

Key Takeaway
Think about what useful resource you can provide as an embed to build backlinks easily. Other ideas that could work: ROI calculators, interactive infographics, quizzes. Key thing as always is to provide value for the people you're asking to embed. Publishers in particular are looking to make people spend more time on their pages – it's literally the thing that enables them to have an ad business. Give them things to help them to that.

Edit: As @andreboso rightly points out, Google did this in 2016. Weirdly, they then did this in 2020. As a result we're going to nofollow the links on our embed. I'll post again in a couple of months to say whether this had an impact or not. Google's so crazy.

Capture valuable searches by writing pain point posts

In tandem with the strategy of building backlinks, we decided to try to rank for Bottom of Funnel (BOFU) terms in line with what Grow&Convert recommend.

The search traffic on a lot of these terms is not really even picked up by tools like Ahrefs – but we know that people are searching these things from doing research with customers (both at scale with surveys and also 1-to-1 research).

We then grouped together these low traffic, super-high intent search terms into collections and wrote posts that addressed them.

As you can see from the graph below, where the Pain Point pages are highlighted with a red box, they convert at a significantly higher rate than the average.

Conversion rates from GA

In fact, some of those pages convert at 14% higher than the average blog post on our site.

That top result took around 20 minutes to create. It is our highest converting 'landing page'.

This is the benefit of BOFU content.

Key Takeaway
It's not a sexy approach and you'll probably not see huge amounts of traffic from it, but the high converting blog posts and marketing pages on your site are ultimately a great, and not difficult, way to increase the growth of your user base.

And that's it. I hope that's helpful and has given you something to think about while the other marketing strategies in your broader strategy are paying off less.

Bonus
We liked the Grow&Convert Pain Point SEO questions so much that we made a survey template people can use to ask them to their audience. Here's a link if you're into it.

  1. 7

    Be careful, your backlink strategy could get you a penalty.

    On a brighter note, your content strategy is spot on!

    1. 3

      Your links would be classed by Google (at least a human Googler) as widget links. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-widget-links-penalty-22666.html

      However, that doesn't mean they don't work, but it does mean one day they could just be ignored. That's more likely than a punitive penalty, but it would feel the same.

      You can mitigate some of that risk by mixing up the text:

      ( [] = link)

      "Create your own survey at [doopoll.co]"
      "Create a survey like this at [doopoll.co]"
      "This was created with [doopoll]"

      I'd stick to linking with the brand name as the anchor text and don't be tempted to use "free survey tool" or anything else commercial. Good luck!

    2. 1

      This is so interesting.

      Someone else pointed this out to us and having researched it I'm really in two minds about it because of newer updates like this.

      What do you think about that?

      We're likely to add nofollows into these embeds and let Google do what it wants with them.

      1. 2

        Your links aren't UGC or sponsored so I'd nofollow them as soon as possible 🙂

        1. 2

          Top stuff. Thanks for pointing it out again. Always good to get a reminder. Edited the original post to give you a shout out on this.

  2. 1

    Hi, thanks for these insights @iammarcthomas

    You mentioned that you'd share an update after adding the 'nofollow' to the links. Did you see any impact? Appreciate it!

  3. 1

    Many huge internet companies that relied on your SEO embedding trick received penalties and died a silent death a couple of years ago. So be very careful. Otherwise thanks for the nice post.

    1. 2

      Until today, I had no idea this was a thing. I updated the post earlier to outline changes I made based on replies to this.

      Every day’s a school day huh?!

      1. 1

        Good stuff. When you no-follow them you are basically telling Google we don't rely on this for SEO. We just want referral clicks. Which is a much better use of the trick. I think you will be fine now and still get clicks from prospective users.

  4. 1

    This is a really helpful post. Congratulations on your success.

  5. 1

    I really like the embed idea. I'm wondering if people could benefit from being able to embed a kanban (read only) on their Wordpress sites.

  6. 1

    Embedded links are great, but be very careful with them! @andreboso already pointed this out, but there is another catch as well.

    I once worked with a client that created a free Wordpress theme, but the whole site had nothing to do with Wordpress or website themes (it was an amazon affiliate based website).

    Long story short, the theme got very popular and attracted a lot of toxic backlinks, with a hundred thousand links from one referring domain. That caused a lot of issues with the traffic.

    Of course, that doesn't directly apply to your situation, but keep a close eye on this. Someone may decide (not with bad intentions) to implement a survey on every single page, creating thousands of them, from a fresh domain.

    1. 1

      That's a pretty wild story but also I can totally see how it might happen. I'll keep an eye on it.

  7. 1

    Bonus bonus: can someone tell me why this doesn't display my inline image:

    ![Some image](https://pasteboard.co/J4OvZiI.png)

    1. 1

      Pasteboard: Some image
      Imgur: Some image

    2. 1

      Probably because that image link is not embeddable, try a different image host, such as Imgur.

      1. 2

        Thank you. It's lucky I don't run like... you know... an internet business or anything 🤡

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