Mastering SEO: Insights on Link Building and Authority Building

Hey, hi, everyone. Welcome to your show, E-Coffee with Experts. This is your host Ranmay here, and today we have Aaron Thomas, who is the Managing Director and Co Founder at Hive 19 with us. Hey, Aaron, how’s it going?

Yeah, good. Nice to speak with you Ranmay. Thanks for having me.

Lovely. And before we move any forward and pick your brains on link building, which is one of the hot topics in our SEO industry let’s get to know the human behind the mic.

Why don’t you talk us through your journey a bit and how were you growing up as a child and how did you land up in the SEO digital marketing space? And also a bit about Hive 19, what do you guys specialize in, what are your core competencies? And we take it up from there.

Yeah, perfect. Sounds good.

How did I get into SEO? I guess from the child perspective, I was always interested in computers, my brother is a bit older than me was always teaching me how to use Photoshop as a young boy. So I was always messing around with. With that, and then I think, yeah, I was always the kid that was making CDs for everyone, downloading music and all that sort of stuff.

So it was a bit of a computer geek. And then from university, I did marketing at university and one of my, one of my modules was to put an event on and I I did all the flyer design and the logos and stuff like that and realized that I think, yeah, I actually really the more digital side of it.

And so I had to go do a placement year. as part of the course, and I went to a startup that was it was a gift voucher company for like things like bungee jumps and spa days and Ferrari drives and all that sort of stuff. So I joined them. They were a franchise of the extreme sports brand. So I went there and learned all about digital marketing, if you’d cause they were quite a small startup that was just getting off the ground.

So we were trying to compete against Red Lesser Days and buy a gift and that sort of stuff. And yeah, I managed to really get my hands dirty with creating product pages and learning all about what helped them to write. Cause obviously as an internet business, it was solely reliant on traffic online.

So I really liked the organic side. Yeah, I spent six years there in total because I went back after university and then moved to an SEO company where I started off just managing the links for all the clients they had. And then as that company grew, we took in more people and I ended up managing the team of the link building team, essentially, which was researchers and content writers.

And that was all the way up until. The pandemic. So 2020, and that was when I moved and decided to make the move and set up hive 19.

And how was it starting a business during the pandemic? It must have presented its own unique challenges. How do you navigate through those?

Yeah. It was time

to start your business for sure.

Yeah, I think it seems crazy looking back, but I think also at the same time, it’s actually, it’s quite, quite a good opportunity because obviously all the shops were closed. Yeah, a lot of people went online. Everyone was actually was going online. I’d had a great six, seven years at that SEO agency that I worked at.

And then, yeah, it was, I had to leave then at that point, really. It was sad for me to leave, but I had decided, yeah, I had to. So then moved on to create Hive 19 and saw it as an opportunity to. Do what I’d always really wanted to do, which was manage the company. I’ve been doing, I’ve been doing content marketing, link building for so long.

I was considering my options, like what should I do? But obviously having that much experience in a building, it was obvious that I should set up a link building company really. And so it was just exciting really, cause I bootstrapped it. So there was no no, say no risk, but at the same time there was, it was all upside, should we say for a while, although it was challenging because of starting, like learning how to run a business.

But then also every sort of new bit of business that came in helped grow the company each and every time, so from the first few sales to creating a website to then growing and actually partnering with other agencies who were outsourcing to us and then growing into getting bigger clients.

And, Yeah, it’s gone really quick. I mean everyone says it’s a roller coaster which obviously it is. It’s not a straight line the growth but yeah, really fond memories of of that time actually lovely

now coming to backlinks, I mean Which is quite a, topic in a space, right?

Everyone has their own way of looking at it. A few says, a few agency owners have heard thing that, backlinks doesn’t work and, stuff like that. But let’s start with your thought process around it. How do you define authority? And relevance in the context of link building.

Yeah. Funnily enough that’s, that’s what we say, that’s how we’ve always, that’s how I’ve always done things from when I was at the experience based company and we had an agency that was doing the links for us, they were coming in and showing us the links they built.

And it just, they said wild, like they were so out of context with what we’re thinking, but we were told no, this is going to make a difference. And it just didn’t ever make sense to me that just a link for link’s Okay, it might work now, but in a year or two years or three years, is it going to be a good thing?

I can’t see it is, if it’s tricking the system, which I think building is to a degree, tricking the system, but There’s levels to that. And I always just think we should always try and build links that, that, that would, that the website would have built anyway, if you like, we’re just encouraging that, we’re not forcing things in.

We’re not taking traffic away for traffic sake, we’re knitting up relevant websites. So the way that we would define authority, so a client. Client would say to us, I really want to get this page on my website ranking. These are the keywords that I want them to rank for. So we start off, that’s our sort of discovery phase, if you like, where we would do lots and lots of research into those key terms.

We would build out our own keyword maps from those terms. So trying to build out the intent so that we can identify new websites really. And we look at all the content on the client’s page, look at what the page is for who, who’s it targeting, what’s the use of it. And then we can just get lots and lots of search terms.

Which we can run and then we will identify, thousands of websites that rank for those terms, some will be really close and some will be a bit out there. Then assess those websites. So using our high rank system, which we built we’ve spoken about it before, but the, if you’re going to try and assess the link, obviously the very basics are domain authority, domain rating.

Yeah. Okay. Traffic keywords, et cetera. But if you’re going to be looking at thousands and thousands of thousands, you really can’t do that manually. So we created a system that brings in the API data from excuse me, Ahrefs, Majestic, Moz, Improv, SEMrush. And then we give weighted averages to those scores.

So we’re looking for 45 different measures, but my personal preferences, apart from. Keywords and traffic and relevance is the number one, but I’ve always thought if you’re looking at the website, if the first and foremost, is it real, is it a real website? Is it the look and feel of it? Yeah. Does it serve a purpose other than posting links to people, which obviously you don’t want anything to do.

With that is it, yeah, is it a business, that’s what my ideal links far from is a business that’s in the same industry. So if your, if your product or service sits in a similar sphere to the website that has been identified, they’re not competing with you. There’s a very natural link between the two providing the content that very naturally links them up together.

The relevance there is brilliant. So that’s going to stand the test of any algorithm changes or anything like that, because that’s a very natural link. And then from there. What’s on top of that? Can we look at that? There’s going to be providing the authority, so yeah, obviously, domain rating, domain authority, traffic, spikes in the traffic, how many times they, they link out is a big one for me, if the website links out hundreds of thousands of times, that’s been diluted.

Yeah. And if they’ve got Links from dojo place anything like that. So there’s no one Silver bullet what is authority? It’s very much a measure but first and foremost if you can look at it in your eyes and you don’t feel right about it, then

Yeah outgoing versus incoming links, you know a lot of parameters being there just you know apart from da dr that You know, the industry kind of talks about, there’s so many ways to look into it.

Yeah, there are enough things, things even today, things work. That you think really but then it’s not going to work forever because Google is forever catching up and forever changing, getting better. I should say rather than catching up.

Yeah, forever improving. So yeah, I was just thinking, would that link have happened naturally? Is that a website that gets his own traffic for any reason? Would you read that website? Can you imagine humans reading that website? I like, like I said, to touch on, I like it where a website sells a product or service online gets a lot of traffic for that.

That product or service is in the same industry as the client that you’re trying to get a link. So there is a very natural link between the two websites and ideally that website’s very powerful, gets lots of traffic from the country that your client is based in. That’s, yeah,

absolutely, Aaron. You must be speaking with quite a few business owners.

What are some of the common mistakes that you see businesses, make while, trying to build their online presence through link building?

Yeah, I think underestimating the amount of time it takes, I think it’s probably a big one because it’s, say it’s, Yeah, and you can spend hundreds of hours and achieve nothing really, that’s the real.

But then also probably having a little bit of knowledge is dangerous, I think, in some instances. So you could think oh, wow, this is a DR 75 website. This must be a powerful link, but it hasn’t been fully assessed, so you, I always think if you look at one metric, you’ve got to look at all of them because. Like looking at the link graph on majestic, the trust flow, what it’s categorized for, you can see a DR 75 website is actually part of a PBN and it’s got, very high density score. So you don’t want to, say, I just think if you, unless you said that, yeah, there’s potential there to waste a lot of time there’s potential to be misguided by metrics and yeah, potentially just making those kind of. Mistakes really. Things can be disavowed and I think Google’s probably clever enough. What is definitely clever enough to ignore some of the general spammy stuff I just think, and it’s really toxic because yeah, we don’t generally advise clients disavow much, especially if they haven’t done it before, we try and think things will leak out, but yeah, I would say on the whole being, and also.

Probably another one is actually being swayed by the price. Our industry is rife with abuse for prices and DR related things. So I can get you 10, 10 back links for like they said, a hundred dollars or something. And people will think what’s the difference between paying that with you to get a link?

Whereas this guy can do five of them for that price. And I think that’s probably a mistake is basing it on the price rather than the, obviously everyone’s got a budget and a price in mind, but going for quantity over quality. Quality. Is a, yeah, is a potential issue for people trying to either do it themselves or trying to outsource it without all the knowledge, I think.

Yeah, absolutely. Like you mentioned, using the metrics it’s quite a common thing, right? Business owners who do not really understand, let’s say marketing, right? Like you and me do and are. Here’s two. So they would just go by the D. A. D. R. Metrics and the overall traffic. And, I’ve had use cases where and, businesses of clients talking about.

Yeah, I got a D. R. 60 65 70 metrics for X. Y. Z. And you’re giving a D. R. 30 D. R. 40. site for whatever amount, which is twice or thrice. But if you go to that DR67 pre metric website, there’s nothing there. So unfortunately, our industry is such where in these metrics can be really manipulated, unfortunately.

So that’s that. Absolutely.

Flip domains is another one, I very often, if I’m not sure about, if I’ve got a gut feel about a website, just put it through the internet archive and see what it used to be. And very often a website that you just, something doesn’t feel right, but the metrics are really high.

Or if it’s got really high DRDA, but really low traffic, I always think what’s going on as well, so yeah, just looking back through the websites, you can buy a website and sell it for guest posts and make a few pounds until it loses its value. And yeah, I think paying for links is a, obviously massively frowned upon but then there are instances where you’re doing advertising.

So some of our clients want to be on, really big household name websites, big publishers and with the relevant tags that would come with it, sponsored and no follow, et cetera. And so paying and paying in that end of it, where it’s, it’s very clearly. Advertise thing.

There’s then a grey line between providing excellent content to a website that just wants the brilliant content that you’re able to provide, and then there’s the ones that think I could do both of this, I could charge for the pleasure, for the for publishing on it. So then, There’s a real gray line between blatant advertising, which is, it’s fine.

And then the actual decent sharing of content, saying, trying to keep not trying to keep quantity out of the mind and quality always is yeah, is a big challenge with those metrics in mind for sure.

Absolutely. And you also touched upon a very important thing, Google always catching up, right?

So with a continuous algorithm, Updates, and the country is redefining it, right? So how do you stay ahead of the curve in terms of, best link building practices? And what tactics are you using that if you can give a few tricks up your sleeve?

Yeah. So I always think like I touched on at the start, really like should, would that link exist without it being, or could that link exist without it being encouraged by us, for instance?

What you don’t want is for, if anyone was to do a manual review of a client’s backlinks and see they’re, they’re obviously all really forced and paid. That would be a worse nightmare. It’s very much looking at the client’s website. So they’ve got a service page where.

They’re providing something that’s very useful statistics, some form of calculators and form of useful thing that read that readers of that page are going to get value from. So then you create another piece of content for a, for the website that we’d like to get the link from. And that very naturally references this very useful feature of the client’s page.

And so we’re not just linking to a local. Law firm or whatever, because you wouldn’t do that. You would link to a national law firm in the face of this. So very much keeping it completely realistic that this link would exist from this amazing website, hopefully to our, to the client’s website. Although.

We’re encouraging the links, if you like. We’re providing amazing content. So when we’re reaching out to the websites, we’re able to show them a portfolio of content that we’ve written in a similar industry before, we’re able to say, this is the content that we’d like to write for you.

Here’s an overview of it. So essentially we’re giving them very optimized content for their websites, but because they’ve been identified via our research, they’re relevant for the client. There’s then just a very natural link obviously, but a connection of the two websites via the link.

And so we’re not taking people away from that website for any bad reason. It is in support of in support of the content that has been provided to the third party website. So staying ahead of Google, I just, I think that sounds I totally understand what you mean, but I think it sounds devious.

What we’re trying to do is provide. Really excellent content that very naturally references our clients websites. And yes, obviously the link is in there to positively impact the client’s organic rankings. That’s obviously the aim, but. I think hopefully the quality of the content the reputation and authority and trust of the website that’s being published there.

We’re this is where the, this is where the name hive came from, is that we’re like pollinating the the two websites, if you like, we’re being in the middle, we’re not tricking things, no, there’s no losers in this website’s getting brilliant content, this website’s getting the link, we’re just being the bits in the middle that that knit it all up together.

Lovely. Lovely. And finally, artificial intelligence, Aaron, we cannot let you go without taking understanding your thought around it. How are you leveraging AI machine learning tools to improve your link building processes and identify new opportunities at Hive 19?

Absolutely. So from the very basics up to the very top of what we’re doing we do a lot of integration stuff. We’re, we are a small team. And my business partner is very operational focused. So we try to run as lean as possible. So everything has got a zap to it. Everything is not everything’s automated, but as much as can be automated is.

And so we know a lot of processes are. running on some form of some form of AI and obviously doing outreach, doing pitching constantly. If you think we’re outreaching to thousands of websites all the time, trying to come up with relevant titles. That don’t cross over. There is a very nice usage of AI in there where you can get content from the client, from the website that we’re approaching content from our client’s website and speed up the ideation process.

For instance, it can suggest a load of titles. We can then pick the best of it. And what would have taken a couple of hours can take a couple of minutes. And then also the briefing. When we’re reaching out to our website, they may say, great, I’d love to see an overview of title number three.

And so we say, okay, yeah, we then put an overview of that together, what we’d like to cover in it, and so it’s very useful from that aspect of speeding. Speeding things up for us, what we don’t, and what we’ll never do is have it write articles for us because I can’t say never, but right now at this particular juncture, it’s just not what we’d want to do at all.

And websites that we speak to are very hot on it. They’re very often reply with, I don’t accept. They’d make it very clear that AI content is not for them. And actually to reference the talk I went to where Ahrefs put on a talk in London a couple of months ago, and Brian and Josh spoke very well about the use of AI content and how they described it as like an ice, an iceberg.

In the water. So the bit that you see is the sort of written content, but all of the deep thinking underneath it, all of the research and the your expertise, your input that you can put into it is what’s sadly lacking from AI written content. So it can regurgitate what it finds online, but it can’t necessarily add its own.

Your expertise in it. Yeah, so we don’t, yeah, we don’t, we check at the other way around. We check. Being a small team, we don’t have any writers in house. We work with a lots of different freelance writers that specialize in different subjects. So our clients are mixed in FinTech, SAS, medical and interior.

Slightly interior design products. So yeah, we don’t we don’t actually employ any writers in house because they couldn’t be a specialist in all those things. So we have. Lots of different writers that we use for each different thing. And on the, when they’re submitting their work, we put them through copy leaks, we put them through plagiarism, lots of different checkers to make sure that what we’re submitting to be published at the other end of the chain is not AI generated.

Yeah. Lovely. Great. Yeah. And thank you so much for the insights, but before we let you go a quick rapid fire. I hope you’re game for it.

Please. Yeah. Fire away.

All right. Your last Google search.

I don’t actually know. Let me check. Probably something football related. Yeah.

Yeah.

I’m a Liverpool fan. So it’s probably something to do with football.

All right. All right. Great. You’ll never walk alone. Yeah. It’s a great. Lovely. Okay. Moving on. Your last vacation.

Mauritius. My wife’s on holiday at the minute.

She’s in Florida. Gone to Disney world with our friends, left the kids with me, but I’m at home. But my last holiday was Mauritius. Yeah. It was lovely.

Okay. Great. What did you do with your first paycheck, Aaron? First paycheck of your life?

I started work very young, I used to work in a butcher’s cleaning all the pots and pans and blood blood buckets and stuff like that. So first pay packet, what did I do? Football related again. That was, I’ve always been very football focused. So it was a long time ago now though.

All right. So talking about football, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi.

Messi every day of the week.

Okay. All right. Okay. The last one will not get any further. Your celebrity crush.

So she was trending on Twitter today. So she’s top of my mind. Ana de Armas. Is that how you say it? Ana de Armas.

Yeah. Lovely. Yeah.

All right. Great, Aaron. Thank you so much. You have been a sport and, thank you for taking your time to do this with us. I’m sure audiences would have loved the insights you’ve shared today. Yeah. So cheers, mate. Thank you once again.

That’s my pleasure. Thanks very much for having me.

I’ve enjoyed being on your podcast.