Had the chance to interview the founder of Semantic Links, and the Semantic Mastery learning course, Bradley Benner. I’d interviewed Keith Bresee who also created an SEO learning course, so it was interesting to follow Bradleys journey from doing rank-and-rent, and building several agencies into his current white-label SEO agency approach.
Short Teaser Quotes
- “I developed SOPs to scale my business.”
- “Selling links to SEOs is an easy sale.”
- “Cold email outreach crushes it still.”
- “It’s harder now to rank individual pages.”
- “Topical relevance is critical for links…I don’t care about third party metrics.”
Listen To The Podcast
Watch The Video-Podcast
Interview Chapters
- Chapters
- 00:00The Journey into SEO
- 04:42Building a Local SEO Agency
- 10:00Productization and Scalability in SEO
- 20:00Link Building Strategies and White Labeling
- 30:02The Evolution of SEO: From 2D to 3D
- 32:15Link Building Strategies: Relevance is Key
- 34:01Geographic Relevance in Link Building
- 38:55The Shift to Relevance-Based Link Building
- 41:36Testing and Validating Link Building Methods
- 45:03Competitive Link Analysis: A Case Study
- 51:34Building Brand Authority Through Links
- 56:59The Future of Link Building: Owning Your Assets
What is the one action item that listeners should do after they listen to this today?
It always starts with competitive link analysis. Now we have to do full on page analysis and everything too, but specifically because we’ve been talking about links, I think competitive link analysis is critically important. And I have a free training, a hundred percent free that shows exactly how to do competitive link analysis.
The way that I just described and showed you on those spreadsheets and everything, including that workbook template, that’s a downloadable template so that you can just plug the data in and the pie charts will automatically create all of that. And I’d be happy to share that with you guys.
Where Can I Connect With Bradley?
Sure. Well, we’ve got a couple things. Just go to our YouTube channel is probably the best place. So youtube.com at slash at semantic mastery. Semantic mastery is again my coaching and information product. And that’s all we teach is local SEO. We’ve been doing it for over 10 years. Like you said, we’ve got over 4,000 videos on our channel, which are all local SEO related videos. A lot of Q and A we do a month, a weekly Q and A webinar called hump day hangouts. So you guys are free to attend that and join and ask questions. It’s a no pitch, just training webinar for one hour per week. We’ve been doing that for over 10 years. No kidding.
So go check out our YouTube channel or you can go to semanticmastery.com and check, you know, go get on our email list or whatever, but that’s pretty much the best way. Last thing is if anybody was interested in any of our white label link building services, you can check out semanticlinks.io, semanticlinks.io. That is my white label link building service. And we provide competitive link analysis reports. You can purchase them or we’ll do them for you and all of that. But again, anybody that’s running their own kind of SEO freelancing consultancy or agency.
You hould really have somebody in-house that can do competitive link analysis for you and your clients so that you know exactly what types of links you need, the anchor text, the quantity, all of that stuff. It makes your link building, the job of link building so much easier when you have that data in front of you.
An Annotated Timeline Of Bradley’s SEO Journey
THE ELECTRICAL CONTRACTOR YEARS
“I got started actually as an electrical contractor and learning how to do local SEO to generate leads for my own electrical contracting business. That was back in 2009… I could barely turn on a computer when I started learning how to do SEO, no kidding.”
“I started talking to the other contracting companies and the other trades, plumbers, HVAC guys and stuff like that and asking them, so how are you guys generating leads? And the more successful companies that were growing and their employees were paid better and all that, they were telling me at that time in 2009 that they were getting leads from what they called search engine optimization. And I was like, what is that?”
THE EXPERIMENTAL PHASE
“For the first probably almost a year, I really focused in on trying to learn how to rank a Google Places listing and a WordPress site. And I did it for my own contracting company, but then also some of the other trades that I worked with. I just started setting up some test campaigns or test projects that I could then test different methods with.”
“I had a site that I ranked for carpet cleaners in Alexandria, Virginia. I was using exact match domains at the time… I heard about somebody talk about rank and rent, right? Which was like a lead gen method.”
THE TRANSITION
“From really about 2010 until 2012, I was just doing lead gen and my contracting company… In 2012, because I live in Virginia, and so most all of the leads that I was generating was here in Virginia. And the winters are bad enough in Virginia that the construction work slows way down during the winter.”
“After about a year, I generated enough revenue that I was able to quit doing contracting work and electrical work and went full time in SEO.”
THE EVOLUTION
“From that time about a year later in 2014, I started Semantic Mastery with a handful of partners… In 2019, I got smart because in my lead gen business, which I managed to keep the entire time, I had really built up a whole big portfolio of lead generation sites for tree contractors.”
THE BREAKTHROUGH
“What’s really crazy is because I niched down and I productized my business and I systematized it because now it’s like an assembly line… It really helped my agency to scale, like just really scale quickly.”
“Now, and my semantic links business, is my white label link building business for local SEO, I’ve got 28 full-time employees in that agency.”
THE METHODOLOGY
“We build links based purely on relevance. I don’t really care about third party metrics, so don’t care about DA/DR, none of that stuff. We look at relevance, we look at topical relevance and geographic relevance.”
“We do a competitive link analysis. And the first thing that we do for local SEO is we geolocate the browser to simulate a search from the particular location that the local business is physically located in. Then we search for the search queries that are the most important to that particular business so that we get true localized search results.”
THE PHILOSOPHY
“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.”
“The SEO business has been very good to me and I always try to give back when I can.”
Deep Dive Into Link Relevance – Summary From The Podcast
In a revealing discussion about modern SEO practices, industry expert Bradley Benner shared profound insights about the changing landscape of link building, particularly emphasizing the diminishing importance of traditional metrics in favor of relevance and geographic significance.
The Three Levels of Link Relevance
“We try to build mostly links that are relevance matched at three levels,” Benner explains. “Referring page, referring domain, and the backlink profile pointing to the referring domain.” This multi-layered approach to relevance has proven “incredibly effective” according to his experience.
Majestic’s Topical Trust Flow: A Different Perspective
While discussing backlink analysis tools, Benner notes his preference for Majestic, specifically for its topical trust flow metric. As he states, “It’s not the metric that matters. It’s the topical categories or the topical classification of the backlink profile.” He emphasizes that while Google doesn’t care about topical trust flow specifically, Majestic’s classification of topical relevance for external backlinks has proven “pretty damn accurate.”
The Geographic Relevance Factor
Perhaps one of the most compelling insights shared by Benner concerns geographic relevance in link building. “Links with geographic relevance or location relevance have a significant influence on Google business profile performance in Map Search and a slight influence on organic search performance,” he explains.
He provides a practical example: “If a tree care contractor joins their local chamber of commerce and they get into the member directory and they get a link back from that member directory, Google knows that that link is coming from a local association, organization, institution… in the same general area. So that link has geographic significance.”
Moving Beyond DA and DR
One of the most striking aspects of Benner’s approach is his dismissal of traditional third-party metrics like Domain Authority (DA) and Domain Rating (DR). “I don’t care about third party metrics… what I care about is relevance,” he states firmly. When clients ask about average DA or DR of links, he challenges them to explain why these metrics matter, noting that he rarely receives a clear answer.
The Market Reality
Benner shares a particularly telling anecdote about the sustainability of traditional link building approaches. Around 2021, he noticed that conventional outreach links were “having a waning effect” and “not producing the kind of results that they used to.” This observation led him to reassess his entire approach to link building, ultimately leading to his focus on relevance-based strategies.