Welcome back to the simple SEO content podcast today. We're going to dig into a burning question that I've gotten from several of you. Is link tree bad for SEO. I am your host, Rachel Lindteigen president and founder of Etched marketing and etched marketing academy. And I'm here to help you learn. All about SEO, content, marketing, blogging, all the ways to grow your business through organic marketing. So let's dive right in. If you're not yet familiar with link tree. It's used by a lot of people. I used it myself at one point. For social media. That's kind of the main place that it's used is for that link in bio, because remember until recently Instagram only gave you one link in your bio. Now they give you, I believe it's five, but you only have one in your bio up until just very recently. So you were kind of limited. To how you could use that Lincoln bio to drive people to your website, or to get them, to follow you, to get them onto your email list, et cetera. So link tree was a very viable solution. However, a lot of people are talking about link tree and how it relates to SEO. Now that more people are getting interested in SEO, it's suddenly become a little more popular. In part because our social media channels are becoming search engines. And also because of so many of the privacy changes with things like Facebook ads are a little more challenging today. So a lot of people are coming. Over to the SEO side. They're trying to learn more about organic marketing, which is fantastic, but we get a lot of questions and a lot of confusion because of that. So. Let's talk about this today and is link tree bad? Is it good? Is there a better alternative? So link tree is popular for several reasons. First off it's free or it has a free version that works fine. And it's easy to set up. All you do is open a link tree account, put in your link information there, and it creates a little landing page for you. So when people click on that link in your bio, It brings up your options for your landing page. And so it shows them. All the different opt-ins that you have. And the reason you want opt-ins is you want to grow your email list. So maybe you have a freebie or a webinar or a free training, or you want to tell them about your podcast. You put all that information on your link tree. So it's great in that respect. However, it's not so great. Because it's not driving traffic to your website. You're unnecessarily giving your traffic to a third party. In exchange for ease of use and a free tool. So it's not hurting your SEO, but it's also not helping your SEO because. Your going to lose. You're missing out on those social signals in those engagement metrics. That Google would be getting for your website. You're also missing out on the traffic because the traffic coming from a Lincoln bio to your website is going to be more engaged. They're more interested in what you have. They're likely to click to get your freebies. They're likely to join your email list, but they're also likely to check out additional content. Spend more time on your site. If you're sending them somewhere like link tree. They can't do that because they're not on your site. So that's really the biggest concern is why would you send traffic to someone else when you could bring them to your website? When you are working on search engine optimization, you're working on growing your business. You're working on growing your marketing. You really want to focus on bringing people to your website, not sending them somewhere else because bringing them to your website helps you. I get them used to coming to your site, which is really important. It gets them used to looking to you as an expert or a resource that they want to talk to. They want to hear from it also shows Google that people trust your site and that they engage with your site. They spend time on it, they get your downloads, they request more information. These are all really good engagement signal signals. For Google that will potentially help with your keyword rankings that will potentially help drive additional traffic to your website. So it's really important that you bring them to your site, not hand them off to someone else's site. So how do you do this? You can create a freebies landing page on your own website. It's actually pretty easy to do if you're not sure what this looks like or how to do it. I have one. It's pattern very much after what I had on link tree initially. But it's just edge to marketing.com forward slash freebies. Or if you go to the website edge marketing.com, you'll see it in the navigation at the right. Just click on my freebies. Tap, get a look at it, take a look, get a feel for it. You'll see that I have my free classes on there and I have my opt-ins all my SEO content, quick start guides and my traffic plans and anything like that. That's a resource for you. It's there on my website. So rather than sending somebody away to link tree, I now direct them to my website and say, Hey, grab whatever you need on my freebies page. It's all right there for you. It makes it really easy. All they have to do is click that link and it takes them to the registration page for the free courses, or it takes them. To the landing page where they can sign up for the SEO content, quick start guide or the 90 day traffic plan, whatever it is that they're looking for. It's right there. So it makes it really easy. And I want you to do the same type thing. Go ahead and look at my, and use it as an example. It doesn't matter. You're going to customize it to your business and your colors and your brands and your fonts and your opt-ins. So unless you're going to try and. You know, Copy mine verbatim, including my opt-ins. I don't really care. Please. Don't copy my opt-ins. Those are specific to me. I've created them for you. But use that as a guide to help you create one for your business. As you're going to take your page, you're going to create a page, give it a super easy name, like freebies. Then you're going to want to add in, if you have a webinar or you have a free training, anything like that, add that in. If you have any opt-ins meaning you've created an opt-in to help build your email list, add those on there. Put whatever information you want. If you want to tell them they can follow you on social, you can add that at the bottom and the link to your social media. Channels so that they know how to find you on social. These are people who are here, they're warm. They're very interested in who you are and what you teach, and they want to learn more from you. So make it easy for them, help them learn more from you. So the benefit here, the benefit of having it on your site. Versus using link tree. So it's still free. It's still easy. The benefit is now the traffic is coming to your website. You're no longer giving your traffic away. To link tree. They're coming to you. They're going to be engaged. They're going to read through your content on your opt-in page. They're going to opt into some of it. Google's going to see some of those really good. Um, engagement metrics and some of those signals to help them understand. That people like your site. Also. If other sites find that you're a really good resource for these type things. It's possible. They could link back to your freebies page. Which would help build your domain authority? Which makes it easier for you to rank for additional keywords? Generally the higher the domain authority, the more likely. The website is to rank for any given keyword. So that's another little benefit. The other thing is it just helps you to really showcase your authority on a given subject and your authority, your expertise, all of that is important to Google. With some of the latest algorithm updates, the really, truly looking for people who are experts, who have experienced this has been updated and changed. Even since chat GPT became such a big focus within the community in the last couple of months. Google really wants to make sure that they are showing information from people who are experts in their field. They have background, they have information. So this helps to showcase your authority, which could help you as well. So it's really important. That you do this. It's not. Hurting you, if you're in a place right now where you have a link tree and you're listening to this episode and you're thinking. Oh, my gosh, I have to change this immediately. And I don't know how I'm gonna fit this in. Because I've got 900 other things to do, and the kids are getting out of school next week, where the kids are out on out of school now, and camp doesn't start and you're just trying to juggle and you're in survival mode. Don't panic. Okay. This is not something that you have to change today. You're not hurting yourself. By using link tree. You're not damaging your SEO. You are however, limiting your SEO by using it. So just add it to your priority list. Go ahead and plan on it. Make some changes, work on moving and migrating away from link tree and over to a freebies page on your own site, but you don't have to panic and do it today. Okay. So deep breath. It's going to be okay. All right. If you have any questions about this, you know how to find me, you can DM me on Instagram at etched marketing academy. If you're curious and you want to lose more check, learn more, lose more. Holy cow, learn more. Check out my freebies page and join me in the brand new three day website, traffic booster class. I'm going to be teaching. Once a month for the next couple of months, so that you have a chance to join me. I work live with me, get it a little taste and feel for how to use SEO and content marketing. To really grow your business. And then I am opening up enrollment in simple SEO content as well, to give you a chance to join me once a month for the next couple months, we're going to test it out and see how that works for everybody. But I'd love to have you join me in the three-day traffic booster. Find out about it on the freebies page, edge to marketing.com forward slash freebies. All right, that's it for today's episode, I will see you right back here next week. Thanks so much. Bye for now.