Local SEO, Building SEO Business, & Topical Link Relevance Insights from Bradley Benner

The Unscripted SEO Interview Podcast

My mind was definitely blown away during this conversation with Bradley Benner of Semantic Links & Semantic Mastery. We went through his extensive history in SEO, creating rank and rent sites, developing agencies. teaching courses and ultimately doing white-label agencies for services provided to other agencies.
Resources Referenced By Bradley Benner:
Semantic Mastery Youtube Channel

Here's some great take aways from the interview:

• Transparency in processes leads to higher conversion rates. SEO has evolved from a two-dimensional to a three-dimensional system.
• Site-wide quality scores now influence individual page rankings.
• Topical relevance is crucial for effective link building.
• Geographic relevance significantly impacts local SEO performance.
• Competitive link analysis is essential for successful link building campaigns.
• Brand authority plays a critical role in SEO success.
• Links with topical relevance yield better results than those based solely on third-party metrics.
• Building a diverse link profile is important for natural-looking backlinks.
• Owning part of the information ecosystem can enhance SEO efforts.
• Focus on relevance and quality over quantity in link building.
  Practical Example:
  Take a look at this article exploring the benefits of Collagen, you can see they utilize expert quotes as a strategy. They would benefit greatly by finding other sites in the health and wellness space that would display and include their expert quotes in them.
  Killer Quotes:
  
• "Sometimes they'll say, well, what is the average DA or DR of your links? And I tell them like, I don't know, because I don't even track that. But let me ask you a question. Why is that important to you? And I swear to God, I never get a clear answer out of that." - Don't use DR/DA 3rd party metrics for links.
• "When Google kind of shifted away from a keyword based algorithm to an entity based algorithm, the way that I envisioned this is it went from a two dimensional document retrieval system to a three dimensional document retrieval algorithm."
• SEO as a business is HARD: "Just because you know SEO doesn't mean you know anything about marketing. And so you can be a really good technical SEO and suck at marketing, and you're gonna have a really hard time monetizing that skill."