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The 8-Step SEO Strategy

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Prioritize and Summarize - Final Step of the 8-Step SEO Strategy. My friends, you’ve made it. You’ve sat through over 10,000 words I’ve shoveled into these SEO Strategy posts (so far), and for that you deserve a serenade. This serenade calls for a nice glass of wine (preferably a good Tokaji to go with the music) and a comfortable seat while we wrap up our journey together. Got your wine? Ok, now let the exceptionally gifted Sandor Lakatos send some beautiful Hungarian gypsy music through your speakers and let’s begin the end. (PS - If you really like this music I suggest this album) There are two things you can potentially do here to wrap this up.

Well, hello go-getter. A) Prioritization Summary After you’ve created your magnum opus of specific recommendations in Step 6 that will make the next big internet sensation out of your client’s product, you may want to take all of those recommendations and wrap them up in a nice (short) summary that says, “this is the most important thing you can do, and these things are very important also”. This is it.

Must-Have SEO Recommendations: Step 7 of the 8-Step SEO Strategy. You know the client. The one that really needs your help. The one that gets pumped when you explain how keywords work. The one that has an image file for a site. Or maybe the one that insists that if they copy their competitor’s title tags word-for-word, they’ll do better in search results (I had a product manager make his team do that once. In Step 6 of the SEO Strategy document I noted that this strategy document we’ve been building isn’t a best practices document, and it’s more than a typical SEO audit.

But most of the time you’ll still need to call out some horizontal things that this client must have put in front of their faces, or else it will be missed completely. Here are some examples of things you could include if you felt your client needed this brought to their attention: If the client needs more than one thing called out, do it. The reason I recommend best practices as a separate document is because it is really a different project, often for an earlier phase.

Make sense? Customized SEO Strategy & Recommendations: Step 6 of the 8-Step SEO Strategy. Turn your computer up. Now go here and play this song. Ready, Creator? We’re going to create the heart and soul of your SEO Strategy masterpiece right here, right now. Large black coffee advised. If you’ve been following Steps 1-5 you’ve been taking notes on what you’ve found along the way, either in the Excel spreadsheets we’ve created or in a preliminary Strategy document for the customer or in a notebook or on your hand or wherever.

These notes are going to be the seeds for Step 6 – the Strategy & Recommendations piece. Like every other step of this 8-Step SEO Strategy you should do this in whatever style or format that feels best for you. We gathered some notes in previous steps, so let’s take a look back at what we might be able to throw into this document. Step 1: We defined target markets & their needs You either used target markets or personas available to you, or you defined them. Step 2: We did categorized keyword research. Step 3: We discovered Gaps & Opportunities From Step 1: Spying on (and Learning from) Your Competitors: Step 5 of the 8-Step SEO Research Strategy.

Let me start by asking you this. What makes your site: Different? Remarkable? In competitive landscapes these are very important – no – absolutely necessary questions to ask yourself. Now that we’ve gone through defining target audiences, doing categorized keyword research, finding Gaps & Opportunities and defining who the competition is, we’re going to take one more important step before dumping this all into a big juicy pile of strategy. We’re going to sniff out the competition and see what makes them different and remarkable, and we’re going to use those creative noggins to work on topping them.

We’re going beyond comparing title tags here; We’re looking at product features that would make people want to visit your site instead of your competitors, and not just visit once, but visit repeatedly, sign up, link to, email their friends, share on Facebook and Twitter, etc. Features Sentiment On-Page Inlinks Traffic Here’s here we ask ourselves, “Self? Define Competitors: Step 4 of the 8-Step SEO Strategy. Congratulations on making it halfway through building this SEO Strategy document with me! Do you feel your value as an SEO rising? If you’re jumping into the 8 Step SEO Strategy here in Step 4, or just need a recap, you can find the previous three steps here: Step 4 is a simple one where we’ll be defining our competitors in SERPs for use in dissection in the Step 5.

We’ll only be looking at search engine competitors here, and not comScore, Hitwise or other types of industry-defined competition by Uniques or Page Views, or any other metric. For the SEO Strategy we’re building here, we’re concerned with Search, therefore we’ll stick to competitors in search results only. I can already hear you saying – this is easy – just do a search for your keywords and see who shows up. We broke our keyword research out into categories in Step 2, so we’ll want to define competitors for each category (or pick just a few important categories – especially if you're working on large enterprise-sized sites).

The 8-Step SEO Strategy, Step 1: Define Your Target Audience and Their Needs. Categorized Keyword Research: Step 2 of the 8-Step SEO Research Strategy. Step 2 isn’t groundbreaking stuff, but it’s approached in a slightly different manner in order to use and abuse further in our strategy document. It’s your regular keyword research broken out into categories for segmentation and prioritization, and we’ll use that for prioritizing and determining gaps and opportunities in Step 3 and for competitive research in Step 4. Before we jump into keyword research, let’s not forget the audience targeting we did in Step 1. Now that we have a good idea of the specific needs and pain points of our target audience(s), we’re ready to dive into some specifically targeted keyword research. But don’t worry if you don’t have personas built out or a good idea of target audiences and their needs, you can still start with this step and categorize based on the products, services or topics you want to dig into.

First lets create an Excel template that will hold all of our keyword lists. Local senior health Prescription drug plans Keyword Search Volume. Finding Gaps and Opportunities: Step 3 of the 8-Step SEO Strategy. If you’ve labored through building out categorized keyword lists in Step 2, you’ve done a lot of the grueling work for your SEO strategy. Give yourself a pat on the back (or more realistically, go get yourself a beer. I’ll be right here when you get back). You should also have a good idea of what’s popular and what’s not (based on what people are searching for). In this step we’re going to look at two things: Highlighting initial prioritizations How to find Gaps and opportunities based on current performance (for existing sites only) Now that you know your keywords and their search volume well, highlight tabs/keyword groups (I usually give them a color) that have a lot of search volume, or tabs that you otherwise feel are important to pay attention to.

Within each of those tabs, you can also go through and highlight specific terms or sets of terms that you find important because they have high search volume or for any other reason. Here’s how we find this. Use your noggin.