{"id":3972,"date":"2021-11-26T11:14:39","date_gmt":"2021-11-26T11:14:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/seobuddy.com\/blog\/?p=3972"},"modified":"2021-11-26T11:44:05","modified_gmt":"2021-11-26T11:44:05","slug":"my-seo-journey-linkody","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seobuddy.com\/blog\/my-seo-journey-linkody\/","title":{"rendered":"My SEO Journey [Pro Edition]: Fran\u00e7ois Mommens from linkody.com – Nail the Search Intent and Build Links"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My SEO Journey [PRO Edition] is a series where professionals of the SEO Industry, Digital Marketing, or Web Design, share their honest SEO Journey filled with failure and success, and most importantly proven results.<\/em> Episode #47 features Fran\u00e7ois Mommens from Linkody<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Fran\u00e7ois<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Hello, my name is Fran\u00e7ois Mommens and I am the founder of several innovative SEO tools. I just moved to Spain after living 9 years in Amsterdam. I love the outdoor and building stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Linkody<\/a> is my flagship product. It offers a complete solution to webmasters and SEO agencies to manage entirely their link tracking and link building processes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Screenshot<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

LinkStorm<\/a> is a tool to optimize internal linking. Right now there is a free version that provides internal link opportunities. Enter your website URL, the tool will crawl it and quickly offers link suggestions you can add to your content right away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, I\u2019ve just launched IndexCheckr<\/a>, a tool to check if any page is indexed by Google. If some of your pages are not getting any organic traffic, checking if they are indexed should be the first step.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What’s your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

When I started Linkody I didn\u2019t know much about SEO. I didn\u2019t know anything about marketing. Or running a business. I didn\u2019t even know that what I was starting is called a SaaS :\u2019D<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I just needed a simple tool and it didn\u2019t exist, so I decided to develop it and make it available to anyone. It\u2019s only later, when the tool got some traction, that I saw a business opportunity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being a solo founder is hard. Bootstrapping is hard. The first few months, I worked on Linkody during evenings and weekends while keeping my 9-5 job. I originally have a technical background. Working on the dev and simultaneously learning and executing all the other parts of the business was tough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now that I\u2019m running and developing 3 different SEO tools, I can\u2019t say things got simpler \ud83d\ude00 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, I am adamant about maintaining a good work-life balance. I sleep an average of 8h a night. I spend one or two days a week rock climbing with my girlfriend. I practice 1h of yoga every day. I don\u2019t consider myself that well organized, but I do have sessions of intense focus with bursts of productivity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since launch, what has worked to attract more organic traffic?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"linkody.com<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I spent a lot of time trying stuff that didn\u2019t work out, like FB ads, cold outreach, social networks… The only thing that has been working for me is SEO. 100% of my customers are coming through organic traffic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This traffic is coming mainly via two avenues. The blog, and a few free SEO tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two of them are very popular and have several money keywords on the first page of Google.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"linkody.com<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The blog has reached a critical mass and my domain authority is high enough that I don\u2019t need to write the content myself anymore. I just curate and publish guest posts. I receive a lot of offers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over time I refined a process to spend the minimum amount of time. I have a list of criteria to quickly decide if I will discard a cold outreach or follow up, and a process to decide if I will publish or not the draft. No back and forth, it\u2019s either good and follows the guidelines or it\u2019s rejected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The blog does not convert into paid customers. But I keep working on it because it gets backlinks and gives notoriety. That\u2019s always been my long-term strategy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"linkody.com<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n
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Do you want hundreds of easy-to-get backlinks?<\/div>\r\n\t\t\t\t

The Link Chest is a collection of high-quality, easy-to-win backlink opportunities. It\u2019s the smart way to kickstart your SEO mission and improve the rank of your website in Google.<\/p>\n<\/div>\r\n\t\t Reveal The Link Chest<\/a>\r\n \t

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Jerome Berman | Link Chest customer<\/div>\r\n\t\t\t\t

\u201cThis is such a simple idea but very well executed. I\u2019ve been powering through this giant list of backlinks for a few hours and already have loads pointing to my site. Link Chest is an essential tool for early stage link building.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\r\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

3<\/div>\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n\t\t <\/div>\r\n <\/div>\r\n\n\n\n

Have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t consider myself an expert in SEO. There are things that work and I don\u2019t understand why. There are things that don\u2019t work, and I don\u2019t understand why either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the free tools I created was ranking very well for a long time then went progressively down to the 5th page. A lot of the pages that are ranking in front of me are complete garbage and irrelevant. It really puzzles me. Everything I\u2019ve tried has failed. This remains a mystery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I\u2019m very cautious about giving any SEO advice. It\u2019s not an exact science. You can read everything and the opposite. A lot of people claim to have the magic bullet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But with SEO you have to test for yourself what works and what does not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are for instance 3 things that everyone is touting as essential but turned out to be a pure waste of time:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Improving the page loading time<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

The loading time is part of the new Google Core Web Vitals. It\u2019s even now displayed within GSC. And it\u2019s a bad user experience. So it looks like it\u2019s a big deal. However, Google itself said that it\u2019s a very minimal ranking factor. It could play a role in case of a tiebreak between pages. Nevertheless, I spent the time and effort to optimize my content and bring it from the red zone to the green zone. This had zero impact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Killing non-ranking content<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Google says poor content impacts the entire site. SEOs say there is the crawl budget and you should kill any content that is not ranking. I went through all the content that was still not ranking after one year and set it to no index. This had zero impact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Correcting broken outbound links<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Over time, resources are removed and links get broken. I had accumulated hundreds of broken links I didn\u2019t notice at first. Broken links provide a bad user experience. You can read everywhere it\u2019s a good SEO practice to keep them in check. So I set myself to replace them with new similar resources. Again, this had zero impact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my experience, the 2 things you need to rank a page are: nail the search intent and build links<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n

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There\u2019s more\u2026<\/div>\r\n

Now it\u2019s time to discover the other 102 steps that will get more organic traffic flowing to your website. Get the SEO Checklist here.<\/a><\/p>\n

Want to get a sneak peek of what it looks like?<\/strong>
\nEnter your email and get a free demo version of the SEO Checklist.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\r\n

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