An Open Heart Interview With Master of Link Building – Julie Joyce

Hello to all SEO experts, search marketer, and link builders!

Are you a start-up company and worried about your rankings? What strategies and techniques you should apply for the best SEO? What would you prefer link building of link earning? Now, what to do next? How to proceed?

There might be millions of questions haunting your minds every day. Well, if you are seriously worried and in need of an answer, then what are you waiting for?

Here, we have an extraordinary interview one of the most skilled SEO and link building expert Julie Joyce who can clear all your doubts. Well, Julie is the owner of Link Fish Media, a link building and SEO company based in NC. She writes a monthly column for Search Engine Land and is the co-founder of the SEO Chicks.

Let’s not miss this golden opportunity with Julie and grab important and valuable techniques from this interview.

Shubham: What do you think about Link Building Vs Link Earning? Should we build links or only earn links (it’s very hard & time consuming to earn links)?

Julie: I think we should build links. I think it’s an idealistic view to think you can only earn links and that will be enough. It might be easy for a few big brands but for the majority of sites, I truly don’t think it’s enough. There are too many great opportunities for links with sites where they have never seen your work, for example, so why not point that out and try and get a link?

Shubham: What are your ways/strategies of building links? Please share.

Julie: We seek out sites that look like a good fit for our clients and analyse the sites before reaching out. If the site looks good, we’ll send an outreach email and ask for a link. It’s a very simple method. Many webmasters want payment and if our clients are ok with that and understand the risk, we’ll buy links. We find good sites through discovery on Google for the most part so my team is all just searching with relevant keywords for the most part, but we do use social media to find good sites too.

Shubham: Marketer says, create a beautiful content, write unique & quality content then share with the audience that will boost traffic and rank too. So how much value link adds in ranking these days and beyond that?

Julie: I have definitely seen social sharing boost traffic but I have not seen it improving rankings. That’s not saying there aren’t cases where it might but I’ve never seen it myself. I think you need links as they are a very important signal.

Shubham: We have noticed that so many websites rank on the top in Google with bad/spam links or even no links. Can you predict what exactly that kind of sites does to rank? Because it’s strange to see people putting so much effort behind writing contents, building quality links, but still that kind of low-quality website get ranks quickly and stay there for a long time… Please help with this.

Julie: You have really hit on something that my clients ask me about so often, and I confess that at times I really have no clue why a certain site is ranking well with no links or just spam ones. Freshness maybe? Maybe their overall SEO is fantastic. I think it used to be much easier to compare a few top sites and see why one outranked the other one but now I do see new sites with poor link profiles outranking much better than older websites. I wish I could figure this out but then that might take the fun out of trying to nail it down each time I see it!

Shubham:  A personal and very important Question – Nowadays, SEO marketers are changing their field frequently (Not all, but many) & moving into development/designing, etc. So, what message you would pass to all those who thinks SEO is dead and they should switch to development or design?

Julie: More work for me I guess! I think there’s a room and need for all of us in various parts of the marketing industry. People have been saying SEO is dead and links are dead for years now and my inbox is still full of people wanting that sort of work done. I do think it’s a good idea to supplement your knowledge, though, so I’d definitely encourage any SEO to learn programming or design.

Shubham: If anybody wants to open their own agency of SEO service only, what advice you will give? And according to you, what key things to keep in mind for a start-up based SEO company? Very important question for all SEO’s & start up’s.

Julie: We kind of started Link Fish Media as a necessity when my husband and I worked as contractors for a company and they needed links. Word got around that we did a good job with links so we started getting referrals and it just kind of happened! That’s not to say it hasn’t been hard work but our start was definitely much easier since we already had good contacts. I think the worst mistake I made was in relying on one major client. I was never able to figure out a good way to get around that so when they did leave it crippled the company and we had to lay off many employees.  I would advise anyone to start out small, not try and grow too fast, and never lose sight of the work being done because, in the end, it’s your name on it. We never took out any loans or took anyone’s money to help us get started but again that was us being very lucky I think. I have seen how that sort of thing can ruin a company so I’m glad we never did it.

Shubham: Is there any one or more than one to whom you want to give credit of your success? Who is your role model?

Julie: Debra Mastaler, without a doubt. She gave me advice when I first started writing for Search Engine Land and I still turn to her for advice. I feel like some SEOs are very unwilling to even consider talking to anyone new but she reached out to me and has always supported me. She’s given me some invaluable advice throughout the last few years and has never been afraid to point out that I’m wrong in what I’m thinking. I have enough yes men in my life so it’s always been important to me to have someone who isn’t afraid to speak the truth

Shubham: Final question – What is that one thing nobody knows about Julie Joyce?

Julie: Hmm…I use both feet when I’m driving an automatic vehicle. I know it’s wrong but my mother drove that way and it’s how I learned so because of that I can’t drive a manual. Don’t tell the cops!

We are thankful and grateful to Julie Joyce for spending her valuable time with us and for being a role model, an inspiration, and a guiding light to all SEO experts across the globe.

We hope that your doubts and questions are resolved and found out the solution regarding the same. Feel free to shoot your queries, questions below in the commenting area. Your comments are welcomed.