[Fully Managed] Gordon Meagher from uSerp – Ep 114

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Quick Fire Questions

Daniela: Okay. Gordon Coffee or tea?

Gordon: Oh, I think tea now. I used to be pretty into coffee, but now I’m a herbal tea guy, so I’m gonna go with herbal tea.

Daniela: A coffee sober. I see. Morning person or night owl?

Gordon: Night owl. 100%.

Daniela: Yeah, me too. Books or movies?

Gordon: Books. Books. Books. Books. Books. Books are the best. It is the only way you could just have total downtime.

Daniela: Beach vacation or mountain retreat?

Gordon: I love beaches. I don’t like sitting on a beach. I think mountain retreat. I’m gonna go mountain retreat.

Daniela: Cats or dogs?

Gordon: Cats.

Daniela: Okay. You’re a cat person. And last question, what would you have as a superpower if you could have one?

Gordon: I’d be able to put a bubble around me where I couldn’t hear anybody.

Daniela: Ah, that’s nice. Yeah. So like silence. Total silence.

Gordon: Yeah. That would be my superpower. Leave me alone superpower.

Daniela: Mine would be teleportation. I always say that like I have that so ready.

Gordon: I get with that. I hit airports. I could get with that. 100%.

Daniela: Yeah. No commuting ever. No airplanes, no cars. You just think and then you’re there. That sounds like magic to me.

Gordon: Yeah, I’m 100% down with that as long as they put all my additives back together the right way.

Introduction to the Show

Daniela: Well guys, welcome to Fully Managed Gordon. Welcome to Fully Managed. This is where we discuss marketing and business tips. We assist you guys in your business journeys. You know me, I’m the host. Penji’s partnership coordinator, Daniela and our guest today, Gordon Meagher from uSERP is who we’re talking to. Hi Gordon. How are you?

I’m delighted to have you here as well. We have a great show planned. We’re gonna talk about some really cool stuff, but before we get into the actual topics, why don’t you introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about yourself to everybody who’s listening or watching that is not familiar with you and what you guys do.

Gordon’s Background in SEO

Gordon: Okay. So I suppose I’ll start by myself first. I’ve been working in SEO for around 13 years. I originally started my journey with the notion to make money online. This was my goal. I had moved country and I didn’t have a visa to work yet, so I said make money online and I didn’t know anything about the space, didn’t know anything about websites.

The goal was money. But then I really got into SEO as a process and marketing as a process. Now, before this, my whole history is in music. I love music. I’m a very creative person. So I really got into SEO and I love marketing from the creative perspective. So for me then, basically I built my own affiliate websites, had some success there.

I was still pretty much a junior, but I got the chance to work at a company, a brand. This is about 12 years ago. So I started from there and mainly lean into my strengths, which are around content. And then from there I had a great mentor, whose name is Noah, who really taught me how to think about SEO and about marketing.

And then from there, I worked with Noah for a long time. Really helped understand really what SEO means. And it’s not just about links, it’s not just about content. It’s really just like, for me, SEO is about what jigsaw puzzle for a business. So I really got into that.

Then my mentor left our company. He went to be head of SEO for another company. I went there, I became the head of SEO for that company. Helped drive them from like a startup with maybe a hundred thousand traffic per month to millions of traffic per month. Funny thing, so from there I actually hired uSERP, the company I work for as I was head of SEO there.

uSERP still worked for that company. But then I moved into the agency side, which is uSERP. So I worked at the brand side my whole life and I really wanted to have that agency discipline and knowledge. So for me, really like SEO, not to sound kind of boring, it’s something I love. It’s something that even if I wasn’t working for a company, I would still be doing my own things. I’m always doing my own projects.

For me, I love the learning and I love that it never changes. And I also love that for me, I suppose you can do SEO by numbers, and I think some SEOs do this, but really where the magic comes in is when you think outside the box, when you look at data from a different perspective than others. And this is kind of where I am. So in that 13 years, I went from working on my balcony, learning about WordPress to being the VP of uSERP today.

Daniela: Amazing. I think that’s really cool. Being passionate about something is always going to be the secret to a lot of success.

What is Link Building?

Daniela: But to talk about today’s topic, guys, we are talking about link building. As you see, Gordon knows a lot about SEO, he knows a lot about all of this. So we have a great topic planned with the do’s and don’ts of link building in 2025. I think it’s such a daunting topic to just even begin to approach it for a lot of people in general.

Marketing like this when it comes to a lot of these type of terminologies and things can be scary for people who are not familiar with it, who only think of traditional marketing methods for people who are not very tech savvy. So my first question to you is, what exactly is link building? How can you explain that to someone who is so new to this and is trying to kind of understand it?

Gordon: Yeah. So basically, if we’re talking about link building, we are talking about Google and how Google originally set up. Google was around links, their algorithm was links and basically the whole idea of links was that if somebody, you’ve got a blog where you write about cats. We both love cats. We write about cats all day long, right?

So, and we’re writing a lot of good content and I’ve got an e-commerce store that sells pet food or pet products. Google sees a link from your blog that’s about pets to my blog as a vote of confidence. The idea is that no one in reality, without spamming the algorithm would link to another site unless that site was worthy to link to.

And then basically, Google uses links to validate the authority of a site, but also on a deeper level. Links make the internet go around. So this is how Google crawls everything. This is how Google understands relationships between content. So basically it’s like, I always see it as like you can have a store in the middle of the desert, great. Well, if you’re not building roads to that store, no one’s ever going to see it. And that’s what links are.

And basically they are votes of confidence. And even though Google has made massive changes in the algorithm update, links are still as important today as they were when I first started. It’s just that Google has learned better in its SEO’s fault. How to understand when you are building crap links, or links are being manipulated, but they are basically a vote of confidence. This is how Google sees links.

The more links you have to a page that are within certain criterion, will help your page versus a competitor page that doesn’t have that.

Do All Businesses Need Link Building?

Daniela: Do you think that link building strategies are something that every business needs to have in their marketing or SEO or do you think that this is something that can be sort of skipped depending on the industry and whatnot and all of those different intricacies?

Gordon: I think that if you want to rank in Google, you have to have backlinks. This is, you know, you can create all the best content, you can have the best UX, you can have all of the best technical, best speed. You can have all of these things. But if you want to move the needle for competitive terms, you need links.

And I hate to say that because, you know, I really want, like, SEO is way more than links. But they are so important because basically, some businesses or some content may not need them. But generally speaking, with competitive terms, links are important, but also for brand terms.

So say I’m a new business start, I have no link equity. I just have a brand. I can have content, I can have product pages, but links help Google understand what you are as an entity. So basically even if you are building links back to your homepage without the goal of ranking, without the goal of driving keyword positions, they help Google understand, “ah, this is what your business is about.”

So I think that links are helpful for any business. But there depends on the business. We’ll probably get into this later, how much you should invest in this because not everything is equal.

Outdated Link Building Tactics

Daniela: Yeah, I think a lot of people’s biggest thing when it comes to SEO investment is how much to invest and how much they’re gonna see in return. I think people don’t realize how expensive it actually is to begin to put money into a lot of this, right. For stuff like pay-per-click ads and then SEO there is a budget that needs to come in, and you need to sort of work that out.

But I am curious to know since like building, like you said, it kind of was started by Google, but it’s been such a long time. You know, how much it has been developed, how much it has changed, how much it has evolved from how the internet has been evolving. Do you think that people who are currently working with this have any outdated tactics that they are still trying to use, but they’re probably maybe outdated, they’re ineffective, they’re harmful now, that people are still thinking that will work?

Gordon: Yeah, so I don’t feel that the tactics that are outdated today have been outdated for a long time. So back when I started you could build links on forums, comment links. These don’t work anymore. These are super outdated tactics.

Also building links, you know, guest posting is still a great tactic if you are starting out with a business. It’s still a great tactic, but again, it depends on, before you could buy, you know, from Fiverr, 30 links for 50 euros and they’re posted on these crappy websites or crappy pages. Google has got very good understanding of bad neighborhoods, bad websites.

And before, Google would actually give you a penalty based on that, but they stopped doing that. So basically they don’t look at, they will give you a penalty if it’s like at scale. But Google, the worst thing is that if you’re investing in these type of links, you are actually paying money for links that Google doesn’t even look at, and this is what a lot of people do.

They invest in links at the start. They’re from crappy websites, but they might move DR metrics. They might move metrics like DA DR, but they’re not actually gonna move rankings on your page. So I think that when it comes to investment and tactics, crappy websites that are obviously selling links, forum posts? Not working. Comment posts? Not working.

But then the other things that do work, like, or even tactics, like trying to have lots of anchor text or like, anything that you can think of that’s gonna be manipulative to Google, Google probably knows that.

Now, in saying that, if I’m in the casino niche, it’s very different. So in the casino niche, everyone is doing crappy links from crappy sites, but everybody is doing it. So in that context, practices that don’t work for one niche, might work for another niche. Because if Google was to go, “All the casino sites, I’m not ranking any of these because they come from crappy websites. We know these websites are selling links,” if Google was to do that, they would surface no casinos links within the server. So it really depends on your niche about the tactics you could use.

So I think it’s like, as you said, the same stuff that didn’t work three years ago is the same stuff that doesn’t work today. Like nothing has changed around that. If you are obviously spamming the internet, if you are buying, if you are putting guest posts on crappy sites that have nothing got to do with your industry or sites that are basically, we see them a lot, a lot of these news sites where it’s like you got articles about news, then you got “best truck insurance for SUVs” or “how to buy the best cat brush.”

Links on these sites don’t work on it anymore. So this is really, you wanna invest in the places that actually going to drive results. But this has been the case for a long time.

Link Building with Limited Budgets

Daniela: So, I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but I’m curious. Budgeting is really big when it comes to actually having good links. There’s a budget that comes to any kind of digital marketing strategy that is not just social media, right? But for small businesses, startups, you know, people who are in those beginning stages, what would you suggest that they do when it comes to having effective link building strategies, good links, etcetera, with restricted budgets?

Gordon: Yeah, that’s a good question. And also, like a very old friend of mine said, you’ve got two things that you can do when you’re starting a business. You have money or you have time. If you don’t have money, then you will need to spend your time.

So if I’m a bootstrapped startup business, I’ve just got a great idea, maybe me and my best friend working on this site that we’ve set up, it’s a good product, something like that, I would say, I would be leaning more into putting your energy into guest posting. Guest posting is still super valid today when it’s done right.

With guest posting, you are trying to build your authority around at the early stage of who you are as an entity. So Google looks at businesses as an entity. This is why we have the knowledge graph. Google needs to see this first.

So I think as a small business starting out and when I’m really thinking about, I just launched a product, just launched a website. No one knows who I am. What can I do in regard to link building? You should be doing social media marketing, you should be doing all of these things. But in link specific, guest posting is great to get you out there.

Networking is great. Like this is something that we use a lot in the SEO world. So it’s like if you are a Neil Patel of the world, you know, SEO, you’ve got lots of network. You go, “Hey, I released this great post today on my site.” People will link to it if it makes sense. So building networks is good like that.

And then I think when it comes to budget, if you are really, really, really starting out, you could do a lot with a 5K budget. You could really do a lot with a 5K per month budget, you can drive DR growth. Now DR is an AHREFS metric, not Google metrics. So we’re all alignment is, but we do see a correlation between higher DRs and rankings and basically the higher DR the easier it is for all the pages on your website to rank. So it’s like a rising ship.

So it’s like, you could do a 5K budget that actually builds that DR, grows your site as a whole. So I think this is the best use of your money, but also if you’re going to spend money being super clear on what you’re trying to achieve with the money you’re spending, this is the most important thing.

If you are a small business and you go, I’ve got three grand, five grand a month that I can spend for three months, what are my goals? What can this actually produce for us? And then you can speak to a company like ours, we will talk with clients and we’ll go, you can’t achieve that with this. And maybe there’s another way for you to do it.

So to go back, new company, do you have time? Start writing some great posts. Start building your network, reaching out to people. Because then when you create content on your site, you can go, “Hey, I created this great piece of content.”

Also, leaning to data you might have. So for example, if you’re a SaaS startup, you might have data that you have got from surveys. This is great content to post because it will naturally generate links or you can post it on LinkedIn and people will refer to it in their posts. So, unique data, and this is also something that is going to come more and more to the front in AI reviews and where the internet is going now.

So data – and data doesn’t have to be hard numbers. Data can be stories, something that surveys that you have done that are different for you can reach out. And this is basically it. It’s like there are no shortcuts to growing a business. Like SEO takes time and there are no shortcuts to it.

But the beauty of SEO is that Google algorithms is that, you know, if I pay for ads for a keyword or a page, once I stop paying for the ads, that’s gone. But once you build up equity, link equity and that is about authority and these things into your site, your rankings pretty much stay the same. Not stay the same – there will be ups and downs, but it’s not just, if I stop tomorrow, they’re gone.

So I think, if you got money, then investing in links with a good brand strategy, looking at some good blog posts where you can surface user intent. That’s why I’ll go with it.

Attracting High Authority Backlinks

Daniela: So I am also curious to ask, obviously brands always want to attract high authority backlinks. A lot of that is very big. But how can a business or a brand actually attract it without directly asking for them or, you know, having to throw in these type of pitches that are going to feel annoying, not yet out there.

Gordon: Yeah. If you have to ask for it, this is basic sales. I worked in a phone shop when I was young. Right. I remember, you know, our whole thing was, we had this consultants that came in to see how we could sell more, and the one thing that they realized was that we’re actually not asking for the sale. We’re given all this advice and not going, “Hey, would you like to buy this” at the end.

So you can do two things, three things in my mind. If you don’t want to ask for it, which should never be how you go into business, what you can do is you gotta create awesome content for low difficulty keywords where a great piece of content could rank in the SERP without links.

Then what you want to do is, before you even build that content, you want to look at here’s other sites that have gained 14 links, 15 links to this piece of content. So you can create great content that attracts links naturally. And this will be other people writing about adjacent topics that link to your post.

After that, you’ve gotta ask for it. You could do the content thing where you’re ranking in the SERPs. You can use social media where you’re posting content you’ve driven, but again, you’re not asking anyone to link to.

So for links, basically you need to have content that’s ranking in the top pages. If not, what you can do is go old school, look at maybe good business directories, that depends if you’re local or not, and put your business there. This is a good way without asking for the actual link.

Other than that, I think that anyone that needs to build links, they have to have some intentionality to it. I’d love being able to go to businesses and say, “You don’t have to ask for it.” But other than that, you’re leaving your whole strategy to the gods.

AI and Link Building

Daniela: I think that’s a lot of times that’s probably what’s the biggest thing with stuff like this, is that it’s not just chance, right? There’s a lot of strategizing that comes into it. A lot of planning.

Something else that I actually am curious to hear about is what you think about AI in all of this, because I know that AI generated backlinks are becoming a thing. Lots of different businesses are thinking about using them. Do you think that this is going to be a viable strategy, automated link building in general? No, I know it has been introduced.

Gordon: Never, ever. I think that anything you can automate like that is going to be crap. Like you can have AI is great with link building workflows, things like that. But actually creating links to, like, even without AI, we’ve had tools for years that help us build a pyramid link building schemes where they build out web 2.0 platforms and you link back to a thing. I can’t think of the tool, but like we were using it seven years ago.

So you can’t build automatic backlinks because where they’ve been published… Like no reputable website is having a backlink produced on their site that is AI generated. So I would say no to that 100% because basically now we’re actually going back to 2010.

Daniela: So it’s like a long time coming. This whole thing. I think that’s like a huge thing with AI is that people think that it’s a new thing. It’s been happening.

Gordon: Well, AI is a new thing. Like I love AI. I’m working with Chat GPT every day and I’m trying to learn more about it. It is a thing and it has purpose, but for building backlinks, if it’s like generating backlinks, AI, I haven’t seen any kind of real case studies about anything like that.

If there, if you can build, I suppose it’s like buying Instagram followers or Instagram likes or any of these things. It’s like these are obvious signals. It’s a tactic that might show some growth at the end. But you were basically betting against Google, a multi-billion dollar company to say that I can build links through AI, that you are going to actually fool them – you’re not. Absolutely you’re not.

And the time you invest in that, you could have written a guest post, you could have written a great piece of content on your site that gets you links naturally. You could have used that time to go, “You know what? I’m going to have a good link building service, whether it’s uSERP or something else. Here’s a good link building service that have proper checks in place and I’m going to invest two grand in this.”

That will do you more value than anything else but the idea of AI building links? Nah, we wouldn’t. It’s never going to be a thing.

Closing Thoughts

Daniela: Well that’s very interesting. Very valuable information, I think. Thank you so much for telling us all of this. It’s a great way to end the podcast on, but before we finish it, I do wanna give you the space to promote anything that you wanna promote. If anything that we spoke about resonated with our audience, the floor is yours to tell them all about it.

Gordon: Yeah. So I suppose let’s look at it for a business start. For a business start. First thing you wanna work on is build your social profiles. Depending on your business, some social profiles or some platforms will be better than others. Do that. Start there.

Then look to building content on your site that is good, that actually provides value to your audience. Don’t build content for the sake of it. Build content with intention. I would say that.

Then when you get to a stage where you want to scale stuff up, where you want, where you go, “I feel comfortable with investing some money,” invest it right. And for me, links is a great investment at this stage.

If you’ve done the content, if not, build your content first. Build out that top of funnel, submit funnel content because content at the end of the day is what links are good for. Content is what makes you an expert in the eyes of Google. It’s also what makes you an expert in the eyes of your audience.

I always go back to Mark Sheridan, he had pools or us, people probably know him, but basically this guy, he had a pool business. He basically built indoor pools, or outdoor pools. And he had like about 50,000 in sales per month, but it wasn’t really good enough to him.

So he created a website and he answered every question that his audience might have around fiberglass pools. That was it. He went from 50,000 to a million sales a month. Simply it’s the concept in SEO of people ask, you answer, this is where that came from.

So look at that content then. When you want to kind of scale up, work with a reputable link building agency like uSERP, shameless plug. They’re actually going to work with you, enter budget, and give you the best ways to move forward because lots of link building companies will go, “We’ll build you X links. That’s it.”

There’s no ROI on the other side of that for them. Don’t work with a company that is not going to understand your needs as a business. Understand, “Okay, build your DR, we can do this. You got some good pages here. We could do this. This is your budget. This is what we can do.”

And work with someone that is going to have quarterly or half year terms deliverables. Like, “this is what we expect to see. This is what we can do.” And that’s it. Because when you get to spending money, whether it’s 20,000 or 2,000, the underlying goal for you should be to drive results.

But those results depend on where you are in the business and what you want to achieve. So this is kind of how we approach SEO here at uSERP.

Outro

Daniela: Awesome. I will be adding the links to uSERP and to your LinkedIn and everything to the description of this video so that people can access them easily and find you guys. Thank you so much for being in the podcast today, Gordon. It was so great to have you.

Gordon: Anytime. Anytime. I hope it all made sense. I know I can go off on tangents.

Daniela: No, I think it was very helpful. It’s such a difficult topic to understand. And I think you were very good at sort of putting it into words that are easy. So you did great. Thank you so much. I guys, I will see you on the next episode. Thank you very much for your time today, Daniela. Thank you.

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