How I Nailed the #1 Ranking on Google with One LinkedIn Post
I’m going to show you a step-by-step guide on how I achieved the #1 ranking on Google with just one LinkedIn post. This strategy can be duplicated by anyone, and you’ll be able to practice this strategy for your organization.
The Results
Reference: https://moz.com/
Before diving into the “how” part, here are the results I generated from my LinkedIn post. As of now (May 23, 2017), the post ranks as follows:
- marketing agencies vancouver #1
- marketing vancouver #5
- digital marketing agencies vancouver #4
- advertising agencies vancouver #4
As a cherry on top, the post started getting covered by other LinkedIn pages, such as Digital & Traditional Topic Page, as it gained more clicks.
The accumulative post clicks on LinkedIn have surpassed 4,000 and it’s generated around 20 leads (inquiries) so far. It’s hard to know precisely how many leads are coming in when monitoring traffic from LinkedIn through Google Analytics.
Not too bad, is it? I’ll let you know exactly what I did so you will be able to do the same thing.
UPDATE:
As of June 12, 2017, the Top 74 Digital & Traditional Marketing Agencies in Vancouver, Canada 2016 has gotten noindex tag on the source code by LinkedIn for some reason. And because of that, the LinkedIn post has lost its ranking, whereas the similar post (not same) posted on our own domain hasn’t. I’m asking LinkedIn what’s happening.
There’s something going on, stay tuned.
Background
Why Did I Choose LinkedIn As the Platform?
Simply because it’s replicable by anyone and any business.
Almost a year ago, I began an SEO experiment. I asked myself “Is there any strategy that can be duplicated by anyone that will get them better SEO results, regardless of the strength of their domain or whether they have a website?”
That’s when I decided to choose a LinkedIn post as the main platform. It could work for anyone who has an account and anyone else can create a new account for free.
PRO TIP: Does LinkedIn Publishing Have Strong SEO Presence?
Does LinkedIn Publishing have a strong SEO presence? My short answer is “No”, whereas LinkedIn itself has a strong SEO presence.
I did a similar experiment using our own domain, www.myloudspeaker.ca: Top 50 Branding Companies & Agencies in Vancouver, Canada 2017. It ranked 3rd place on the same day we published it.
I could argue that it didn’t happen because of the domain, given that we had better copy and there weren’t similar pages offering a list of agencies. I strongly believe it wouldn’t rank 3rd place immediately if we had published it through LinkedIn Publishing, knowing it took almost 6 months for the marketing LinkedIn post to show up on the first page. I would recommend you use your own domain if you have one.
What is the LinkedIn Post About?
Back to the point. I created a LinkedIn post, Top 74 Digital & Traditional Marketing Agencies in Vancouver, Canada 2016 where I listed marketing agencies based in Vancouver and sorted them by the search volume of each brand term, such as My Loud Speaker Marketing, 6s Marketing and so on. I knew the search volume may be an indicator of how good the agencies were at gaining exposure or whether they’ve simply been in business a long time.
Why Did I Create A Marketing Agencies Listing?
I noticed there were 2 similar pages showing up on the first and second page of Google, when searching “marketing agencies Vancouver” when I created the post.
1. Digital Agency Network – https://digitalagencynetwork.com/agencies/vancouver/
2. Business In Vancouver – https://www.biv.com/datatables/biggest-ad-agencies-in-metro-vancouver-in-2016/
This meant two things:
1. There was search intent, looking for a list of marketing agencies when searching “marketing agencies vancouver” – in fact, there were two of the search results showing on the first and second page of Google – the search results A & B above.
2. Those two pages had some room for improvements – I could provide better information and value.
What I mean is originality, specification, comprehensiveness and objectivity.
Originality: Both of these websites didn’t offer unique or original information. I could create original descriptions based off the agency websites.
Specification: Digital Agency Network only provided the name of agencies, their URLs, and short descriptions. Business In Vancouver only provided the name of agencies, the URLs, the head office locations, the top local executives, and the number of BC staff. I could provide more specific information on each agency such as a testimonial, their major clients, social media accounts, and so on.
Comprehensiveness: Digital Agency Network listed only 10 – 20 agencies when I originally created my post and Business In Vancouver listed 5. It was easy for me to surpass their numbers.
Objectivity: Digital Agency Network doesn’t have any objective indicator for the order of agencies listed (probably alphabetical order, which might not be helpful for visitors). Business in Vancouver sorted agencies by the number of BC employees. In terms of helpful and objective indicators for visitors, I could figure out something better.
I was sure that I could provide better content than both Digital Agency Network and Business in Vancouver. The better the content is, the higher the ranking should be, right? I was positive my post could rank on the first page with this strategy.
Why Did I Target To The Keyword “marketing agencies vancouver”?
First off, it’s a pretty competitive keyword to test out. It has 1,030,000 search results as of February 17th 2017 – there are over 500 marketing and advertising agencies in Vancouver but the search volume isn’t super high. Secondly, it’s a good keyword to generate leads for the marketing agency where I work. I knew “marketing agencies vancouver” were the keywords which would generate leads in my experience running Google search ads. If I could get the post to the first page, it would bring us leads as a bonus.
A Step-by-Step Guide
It breaks down into 5 parts:
- Research & Determine What Type Of Content You Will Create
- Collecting All Information Related to Your Topic
- Writing Extensively Comprehensive Content
- Adjusting for Better Search Results
- Generating Leads from There (Bonus)
1. Research & Determine What Type Of Content You Will Create
Research starts with Googling. Just make sure you are doing the research through private browsing, incognito mode on Google Chrome, private mode on Safari. You’ll avoid seeing search results customized to your own search history.
I would suggest you start with something simple, like a list post. Examples would be, 5 marketing tools of ____, 10 organizations of ____. That way, you don’t have to think too much about content structure and it’s easier to know if you surpass your competitors in the search results.
Keywords specifying organizations, such as “companies”, “agencies”, “lawyers” or “realtors” and specifying area/location relatively hold high conversion rates. You might want to aim for those keywords.
Keep in mind whether your content hits the following four points: originality, specification, comprehensiveness and objectivity and surpasses the other search results.
2. Collecting All Information Related to Your Topic
Before you start collecting data, you might need to figure out what unique information you need to grab to create content. In the Top 74 Digital & Traditional Marketing Agencies in Vancouver, Canada 2016 post, I collected the information below for each agency.
- Basic Info
- Company Name
- Website URL
- Address
- Phone
- Employees
- Services
- Social
- Google Plus
- Other Info
- Testimonial
- Services
- Search Term
- Monthly Searches
One thing to note: if you don’t have a Google Adwords account to run a PPC campaign, you might not be able to get the monthly search volume. If that’s the case, you need to find another object indicator to sort out your list.
Here’s the bad news.
Back in 2016, before LinkedIn updated their services, users were able to easily find the basic info I listed above on LinkedIn Advanced Search by company category. Now, they’ve made it a premium functionality only LinkedIn Sales Navigator Subscribers can use. This means you need to search Google, Yelp or Yellow Pages for the information one company at a time, unless you pay for LinkedIn Sales Navigator or your industry has some other comprehensive online directory.
Let me recommend a helpful tool you can use to expedite this listing process:
Linkclump:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/linkclump/lfpjkncokllnfokkgpkobnkbkmelfefj
This tool allows you to copy and paste all hyperlinks you’ve selected. It might be easier for you to see how it works on video – see the instructional video below:
Once you collect all of the necessary URLs, you need to manually fetch other information, like the organization’s name, phone number, address, social media accounts, and others.
Just so you know, I listed over 800 results to put together my list of 74 agencies because of duplications, bad results, and some which lacked monthly search volumes (only the case when you’re sorting agencies by monthly search volume).
3. Writing Extensively Comprehensive Content
Just keep in mind, how comprehensive the content needs to be depends on the competitors you’re competing with in the search results. You might not need to list their social media accounts, testimonials or go as big as 74 organizations. I, however, recommend you go the extra mile so your content won’t be easily beaten by others in the near future.
One thing to note, you must push for original content more than refurbished content pulled off other websites. My post hadn’t been ranking well until I started adding original content to the post.
For content direction, think of what would be useful for searchers first. In my case, I ended up putting the focus on the major clients of each agency, knowing that it’s important to searchers in the midst of agency hunting and it’s information nobody else seems to mention.
4. Adjusting for Better Search Results
After you publish the post, that’s the true beginning of your improvements. You need to keep track of search rankings using rank tracking tools like Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush and others. If you use your own domain for the post, you can take advantage of Google Search Console and Google Analytics too.
To give you a better idea, my LinkedIn post took 3 months to rank within the top 30. You need to be patient and keep adjusting in order to rank first.
Here’s what I did to adjust:
May 25, 2016: Published the article, there wasn’t any original content other than the introduction part at that time.
June 26, 2016: Started adding original content, 500 words.
June 28, 2016: Shared content on Facebook, Twitter & Quora (Q&A site).
July 4, 2016: Added more original content to the article – 500 more words could do the trick!
August 6, 2016: Added a backlink from https://www.myloudspeaker.ca
September 3, 2016: Got ranked within the top 30 results for the first time on Google searching “marketing agencies vancouver”
October 15, 2016: Added even MORE original content, 1,000 words to the article.
November 10, 2016: Got ranked on the first page of Google searching “marketing agencies vancouver”
Key adjustments which contributed to a higher ranking were:
- Adding original content
- Backlinking from the Canadian site – this target search engine is Google.ca not Google.com
#2 contributes to this post getting up within top 30 results. #1 contributes to this post getting up on the first page. While backlinking is important to getting listed within the top 50, you don’t need a massive amount of links to get on the first page. As long as you add valuable content to improve the post, your content will be placed on the first page.
5. Generating Leads from there (Bonus)
Here comes the fun part. Once your post ranks on the first page, you want to transform the post into a lead generation machine.
When it comes to generating more leads, it totally depends on what keyword and industry you’re targeting. It should be fully customized and you need to think deeply about your visitors.
Having said that, I will give you a quick roundup of what I did.
The target keyword in the post was “marketing agencies vancouver”. I’d assume that visitors would still be wondering what kind of marketing agency and/or service they were looking for, knowing they could have searched more specific or tactical terms such “social media marketing”, “search engine optimization”, “content marketing” etc. With this in mind, I knew the general direction of what they should do by indicating pros and cons of both options and lead them to our website to contact us.
Wrap It Up!
SEO is a tough and long-term game to play, especially if your website is not as strong as your competitors. At the same time, you and your organization might be craving a quick win. It depends on what your service/product and budget is, if you just need a quick win, I’d suggest that you go hire a sales pro or start advertising.
However, the strategy I introduced today might be a good starting point for organizations who intend to build up a stronger online presence by acquiring organic traffic and leads.
Let me know if you have any question about my method. I’d be happy to help. If you are a newbie to SEM/SEO, you should check out my best practices for SEO keywords targeting as well.
If you want to learn more about specific key elements of an effective marketing plan, read our 50+ page booklet on How to Write A Strategic Marketing Plan That Yields ROI – complete with explanations
