A Noob's SEO Plan of attack... can you critique it for me?
-
I've been digging my teeth into SEO for a solid 1.5 weeks or so now and I've learned a tremendous amount. However, I realize I have only scratched the surface still.
One of the hardest things I've struggled with is the sheer amount of information and feeling overwhelmed. I finally think I've found a decent path. Please critique and offer input, it would be much appreciated.
Step One: Site Architecture
I run an online proofreading & editing service. That being said, there are lots of different segment we would eventually like to rank for other than the catch-all phrases like 'proofreading service'. For example, 'essay editing', 'resume editing', 'book editing', or even 'law school personal statement editing'.
I feel that my first step is to understand how my site is built to handle this plan now, and into the future. Right now we simply have the homepage and one segment: kibin.com/essay-editing. Eventually, we will have a services page that serves almost like a site-map, showing all of our different services and linking to them.
Step Two: Page Anatomy
I know it is important to have a well defined anatomy to these services pages. For example, we've done a decent job with 'above the fold' content, but now understand the importance of putting the same type of care in below the fold.
The plan here is to have a section for recent blog posts that pertain to that subject in a section titled "Essay Editing and Essay Writing Tips & Advice", or something to that effect. Also including some social sharing options, other resources, and an 'about us' section to assist with keyword optimization is in the plan.
Step Three: Page Optimization
Once we're done with Step Two, I feel that we'll finally be ready to truly optimize each of our pages. We've down some of this already, but probably less than 50%. You can see evidence of this on our essay editing page and proofreading rates page. So, the goal here is to find the most relevant keywords for each page and optimize for those to the point we have A grades on our on-page optimization reports.
Step Four: Content/Passive Link Building
The bones for our content strategy is in place. We have sharing links on blog posts already in place and a slight social media presence already. I admit, the blog needs some tightening up, and we can do a lot more on our social channels. However, I feel we need to start by creating content that our audience is interested in and interacting with them on a consistent basis.
I do not feel like I should be chasing link building strategies or guest blog posts at this time. PLEASE correct me if I'm off base here, but only after reading step five:
Step Five: Active Link Building
My bias is to get some solid months of creating content and building a good social media presence where people are obviously interacting with our posts and sharing our content.
My reasoning is that it will make it much easier for me to reach out to bloggers for guest posts as we'll be much more reputable after spending time doing step 4. Is this poor thinking? Should I try to get some guest blog posts in during step 4 instead?
Step Six: Test, Measure, Refine
I'll admit, I have yet to really dive into learning about the different ways to measure our SEO efforts. Besides being set up with our first campaign as an SEOPro Member and having 100 or so keywords and phrases we're tracking... I'm really not sure what else to do at this point. However, I feel we'll be able to measure the popularity of each blog post by number of comments, shares, new links, etc. once I reach step 6.
Is there something vital I'm missing or have forgotten here? I'm sorry for the long winded post, but I'm trying to get my thoughts straight before we start cranking on this plan.
Thank you so much!
-
Definitely worth setting up RSS news feeds from both Google Alerts and Google Blog Search for your keywords to keep an eye on what's happening in your niche. As well as lots of ideas for new content/articles you'll also see what's happening in your niche and what your competitors are up to.
You can also set up a twitter search for your main keywords too. I'm sure there must be opportunity there - lots of students tweeting about getting their assignments proof read etc.
-
You're welcome!
I love your idea about analyzing the popular blog posts from the top tech blogs - this is unique (at least I haven't seen it done this way), and you could generate interest through exposing the mistakes and the best practices - a bit entertaining and informative.
Try that out and keep looking for unique ideas like that, and improve them over time, and I'm sure you'll do very well.
-
Doug,
Thanks for the awesome, and thorough reply.
I do know a lot of this, but it's great to be reminded and definitely helps put things in perspective.
We went through the 500Startups accelerator program last summer and they really pushed us to understand our customers' needs, pain-points, etc. However, it was largely in terms of building a solution for those individuals and it's easy to forget this actually needs to apply to all aspects of your business.
Now that we are looking to be more hands on and generate awesome content, it's vital to revisit that research. For example, we need to remember that students want to improve their grades on their essays, but most likely not at the cost of their social life. When you think about the typical college student they are very busy, stressed during finals, and still figuring out how to budget their time. Realizing those things can really help guide is in our content strategy for this market segment.
Your reply definitely made me think and mentally put myself in the shoes of those students... what would I feel like if I had a ton of homework, pressure from my parents to get good grades, yet wanting to have a social life? How can we help them solve their problems, feel more at ease, and get better grades, etc.?
It's a great exercise and has already helped me brainstorm some awesome content ideas.
Thanks!
-
It's nice you have the resource in-house to generate content.
I would start with a few articles like 'How to create a killer intro for your CV', 'How to layout a CV like a professional editor', to me and im sure to others this is juice content.
Check out copy blogger, they create content about copy writing for blogs and get some good social sharing going on - http://www.copyblogger.com/how-to-write-headlines-that-work/
-
Good stuff! Before you leap into generating lots of great content - have you considered...
1. What are you business goals. (It's not getting hits to a website!) How is your website going to support these goals. Try and think a little longer term than just "selling our service." How are you going to build a relationship with your customers and retain them...
2. What are you customers needs/goals. What motivates them. Do you have a clear understanding of your customers. (Beyond the broad categories like "students" or "home based businesses". Can you break this down further to build personas?
3. What is a customer worth? How much is a customer likely to be worth? Not only in their first purchase, but during their whole life as a customer. How much is the business prepared to invest to get a customer? How many customers does the website need to deliver in order to make it a success.
Once you understand these, you can start to think about the content you need to do some research. You need to to work out how you can connect your services with your target market by developing suitable/compelling offerings. (How do you know there is a market out there?)
This is where keyword research comes in. But don't limit it to just using the google keywords tool. If you can, talk to your target audience then do! I know you've already done some keyword research, but I've often been surprised at how differently prospects search for solutions about their problems! It amazing what people will tell you if you're prepared to listen!
Look at Google Insights for some of your keywords to look for seasonality. Understand why this happens and how you might run different campaigns/need different content at different times of the year. Look at the geography can you identify specific target markets there? It'll also show you some top searches and rising searches.
Can you talk to your potential customers? If your can, don't talk about your service, but listen to what their problems are, what pain can your relieve? What are their concerns. Why wouldn't they use your service (what do you need to do to reassure them?) What are your competitors doing?
Undertake competitive research to fully understand your competitors. Take a look at their websites. What markets are they focusing on. How are they appealing to their customers.
Using Open Site Explorer, take a look at their Top Pages and the Anchor Text of inbound links to see if you can identify the search terms that they are optimising for. (You can tell how much SEO activity they are engaged in too!)
Once you've got all this info, think about: What makes you unique/remarkable. Why should people come to you rather than your competitors. What's the promise your going to make to the world. What are you going to stand for? How are you going to stand apart from the herd.
How do your services solve the problems your potential audience has? What are the benefits of your service (flip "features" into benefits by asking why is this important to your customers) What content do you need to target a specific market niche.
Once you know this, you can start to build your initial content. Instead of building a page hierarchy. Think about building your sales funnel. Think about your landing pages (your offers), The supporting content to address concerns/build credibility (Testimonials, guarantees, samples etc), And the Goal pages (sign-ups, contact pages and purchase pages)
Be wary of "Services" pages. Nobody sits down with the intent to find/browse some services. Always think about the "What's in it for me" angle from their perspective. Why should they be interested in your services. Instead of a Services section for instance, you might want to have different sections for your main market niches: "Small Businesses", "Students", "Legal" etc.. Try to keep an external perspective. This isn't about you. It's about THEM!
Think about the purpose/goal of each and every page, it's position in your sales funnel and how it's going to move people on to the next step. Why does the page exist. What does it have to do? If you know how your sales funnel is meant to work, you can measure the flow of customers through your funnel and identify content/pages that aren't working and fix the leaks. If you don't know how people are going to move through your site it makes it much harder to do this.
Once you've got your core up and running, then you can continue to add further offers (specific to different market niches). This widens your funnel, but you need to watch how these new leads convert and identify any content you need to support this process that's missing.
Clearly identifying your target audience and their needs will also help you write/target your blog content . You want to be investing in content that's relevant to your audience.
Hope this helps, and hope that it's not just telling you stuff that you're already aware of!
-
Stephen,
Thanks for the reply (and the typo fix).
Honestly, I planned on starting with some 'softball' content... stuff that I feel we can write about and our current users will appreciate and read. However, I understand this is not content that will probably garner a lot of links. The point of this would be to develop a discipline and a streamlined system while moving toward better in-depth content.
I understand that the better the content, the easier it is to get external links. But I do feel it's important to start showing some sort of presence on our blog and getting in the habit of writing.
For example, we can easily write about the pitfalls of people's personal statements. We see and edit a lot of them, however, to me this isn't really juicy and hugely linkable content.
On the other hand, I am planning a pretty interesting piece. I want to take 100 blog posts from each of the 5 top tech blogs and have them run through our editing network, analyze them to see how many error, typos, etc. they have and then publish our findings in an info graphic and even see if there's a correlation to the number of errors and their traffic numbers. To me, this is juicy, linkable, grand slam content. Obviously it isn't easy to create something like that every day or even every week.
-
Your fourth step: what content are you actually looking to create? Does it answer common questions, or provide rare 'insider' knowledge? Does it give a genuinely interesting, or entertaining perspective on subjects related to your field? Are you wanting to cover lots of bases with good information (e.g. daily blog posts), or are you wanting to 'dig deep' into one particular area, perhaps with multiple channels (e.g. ebook and related video)?
Link building is much easier, and worth a lot more to you, once you've actually gotten content that people actually want to read. And getting that type of content means making sure you understand exactly how you will add value to your audience, via your website.
On another note, still in the vein of being constructive, in the second paragraph, in the context in which you've written, you mean sheer, rather than shear.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Moved brand's shop to a new domain. will our organic traffic recuperate?
Hello, We are a healthcare company with a strong domain authority and several thousand pages of service related content at brand.com. We've been operating an ancillary ecommerce store that sells related 3rd party products at brand.com/shop for a little over a year. We recently invested in a platform upgrade and moved our site to a new domain, brandshop.com. We implemented page-level 301 redirects including all category pages, product detail pages, canonical and non-canonical URLs, etc.. which the understanding that there would not be any loss in page rank. What we're seeing over the last 2 months is an initial dive in organic traffic, followed by a ramp-up period of if impressions (but not position) in the following weeks, another drop and we've steady at this low for the last 2 weeks. Another area that might have hurt us, the 301 redirects were implemented correctly immediately post launch (on a wednesday), but it was discovered on the following Monday that our .htaccess file had reverted to an old version without the redirect rules. For 3-4 days, all traffic was being redirected from brand.com/shop/url to brandshop.com/badurl. Can we expect to recover our organic traffic giving the launch screw up with the .htaccess file, or is it more of an issue with us separating from the brand.com domain? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eugene_p
Eugene0 -
SEO'ing a sports advice website
Hi Team Moz, Despite being in tech/product development for 10+ years, I'm relatively new to SEO (and completely new to this forum) so was hoping for community advice before I dive in to see how Google likes (or perhaps doesn't) my soon to be built content. I'm building a site (BetSharper, an early-stage work in progress) that will deliver practical, data orientated predictive advice prior to sporting events commencing. The initial user personas I am targeting would need advice on specific games so, as an example, I would build a specific page for the upcoming Stanley Cup Game 1 between the Capitals and the Tampa Bay Lighting. I'm in the midst of keyword research and believe I have found some easier to achieve initial keywords (I'm realistic, building my DA will take time!) that include the team names but don't reference dates or state of the tournament. The question is, hypothetically if I ranked for this page for this sporting event this year, would it make sense to refresh the same page with 2019 matchup content when they meet again next year, or create a new page? I am assuming I would be targeting the same intended keywords but wondering if I get google credit for 2018 engagement post 2019 refresh. Or should I start fresh with a new page and specifically target keywords afresh each time? I read some background info on canonical tabs but wasn't sure if it was relevant in my case. I hope I've managed to articulate myself on what feels like an edge case within the wonderful world of SEO. Any advice the community delivers would be much appreciated...... Kind Regards James.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JB19770 -
When does it make sense to make a meta description longer than what's considered best practice?
I've seen all the length recommendations and understand the reasoning is that they will be cut off when you search the time but I've also noticed that Google will "move" the meta description if the search term that the user is using is in the cached version of the page. S I have a case where Google is indexing the pages but not caching the content (at least not yet). So we see the meta description just fine on the Google results but we can't see the content cache when checking the Google cached version. **My question is: **In this case, why would it be a bad idea to make a slightly lengthier (but still relevant) meta description with the intent that one of the terms in that description could match the user's search terms and the description would "move" to highlight that term in the results.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | navidash0 -
Will these 301's get me penalized?
Hey everyone, We're redesigning parts of our site and I have a tricky question that I was hoping to get some sound advice about. We have a blog (magazine) with subcategory pages that are quite thin. We are going to restructure the blog (magazine) and feature different concert and have new subcategories. So we are trying to decide where to redirect the existing subcategory pages, e.g. Entertainment, Music, Sports, etc. www.charged.fm/magazine Our new ticket category pages ( Concert Tickets, NY Yankees Tickets, OKC Thunder Tickets, etc) are going to feature a tab called 'Latest News' where we are thinking of 301 redirecting the old magazine subcategory pages. So Sports News from the blog would 301 to Sports Tickets (# Latest News tab). See screenshot below for example. So my question is: Will this look bad in the eyes of the GOOG? Are these closely related enough to redirect? Are there any blatant pitfalls that I'm not seeing? It seems like a win/win because we are making a rich Performer page with News, Bio, Tickets and Schedule and getting to reallocate the link juice that was being wasted in an pretty much useless page that was allowed to become to powerful. Gotta keep those pages in check! Thoughts appreciated. Luke Cn6HPpH.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | keL.A.xT.o0 -
Remove URLs that 301 Redirect from Google's Index
I'm working with a client who has 301 redirected thousands of URLs from their primary subdomain to a new subdomain (these are unimportant pages with regards to link equity). These URLs are still appearing in Google's results under the primary domain, rather than the new subdomain. This is problematic because it's creating an artificial index bloat issue. These URLs make up over 90% of the URLs indexed. My experience has been that URLs that have been 301 redirected are removed from the index over time and replaced by the new destination URL. But it has been several months, close to a year even, and they're still in the index. Any recommendations on how to speed up the process of removing the 301 redirected URLs from Google's index? Will Google, or any search engine for that matter, process a noindex meta tag if the URL's been redirected?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trung.ngo0 -
I'm Looking SEO Person for my project.
Hi Guys. I'm looking seo person who can help me in my project. I'm losing ranking day by day from last 2 months. For more detail and price please PM me. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KLLC0 -
Silo Architecture - need an expert's advice
I understand the concept of silo architecture. What I don't understand is how to build the site navigation. I see experts talking about silos, but their sites have pervasive top level navigation. In theory, your top level nav breaks your silos. If I have 20 pages of supporting content all linked to my silo page, and the top nav is on the supporting content pages, then those pages all link to the pages in the top nav - silo broken, and link juice diluted. it would seem to me that the only way to build a true silo is to strip out all of the navigation on a supporting page, and only have it link to: 1. The silo landing page 2. Other supporting pages in the silo. is this what Bruce Clay does? I've seen Rand's lectures on silos as well. Is this what he is doing? I recently saw a video by the Network Empire team, and they'd also have a pervasive nav. Can someone please explain this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CsmBill0 -
Best way to view Global Navigation bar from GoogleBot's perspective
Hi, Links in the global navigation bar of our website do not show up when we look at Google cache --> text only version of the page. These links use "style="<a class="attribute-value">display:none;</a>" when we looked at HTML source. But if I use "user agent switcher" add-on in Firefox and set it to Googlebot, the links in global nav are displayed. I am wondering what is the best way to find out if Google can/can not see the links. Thanks for the help! Supriya.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SShiyekar0