What am I doing wrong?

[CarolineLee]

Hi Moz Community !

I am a student and I started working for a startup. I'm really new to SEO and I've been reading tones of ressources and spent days and days learning the basics. I am currently in charge of the SEO (blog and homepage), and tried hard to optimize it. However, I don't see results. What am I doing wrong? And it's really frustrating because I am really passionate about SEO. I find it really challenging !

I have a few concerns:

• I try to provide high quality content but why don't I rank better for few keywords? (I don't see any improvement)
• I optimize the content, images etc so it's as SEO friendly as possible (keyword density, alt tags, titles, etc). But seems something is wrong.
• I did a log of blog commenting with High quality and genuine comments (useful to users of course). And now trying to get some articles out as guest posts for backlinks.

Fyi, I am using Moz and Yoast, the blog is in Wordpress. And we are moving to subfolder instead of subdomain for the blog.

I would appreciate your help and any tip. Thanks !

[CarolineLee]

Thanks a lot Chris !

There are lots of great learnings in your reply.
First, I will focus on the long tail keywords so I can understand if I am doing things right. And learn. Then, I might move to more competition but that's for later.

And thanks for the feedback on our blog. I will think again how I might provide more useful content to our users.

[Chris.Menke]

It is very easy to run out of steam before crossing a threshold of success if you aim for keywords that are too competitive.  My advice for those that are new: Start at the bottom of the long tail and work your way up.  The thing is, when you work way down at the end of the long tail, you are going to get the opportunity to see positive search results quickly if you're sticking to the aforementioned guide.  Now, you may find that those positive results don't yield much traffic, but at least you'll find that out quickly and you can then can move up to the next level of competition--having learned a few things in the process.

When you're new to SEO and you shoot for high competition keywords, it can be hard to understand if you're making progress or how long you need to wait before you should know if you are making progress.  That leads to frustration and burnout.

I think, however, that as a blogger, your focus should be less on which keywords you're writing about and much more on the intricacies of how what you are writing relates to your audience and their needs. When I look at your blog, I feel there might be a disconnect between the audience being written for and the target audience of the product.  I could be wrong in your case, but my experience is that the app environment is still pretty geeky, as a lot of programmers are doing what they can to promote their small app ventures.  When your audience recognizes that you feel their pain, keywords will become a lot less important to you and your traffic will increase.

[CarolineLee]

Thanks Chris for the complete answer and tips. I did not know the video, it's great !

I completely understand. And for sure, my competitors have more ressources than me.

In my situation, I identified 2 kind of keywords (both relevant to my business):

• High volume of search / High competition
• Low or very low volume (I am also counting long tail keywords) / Low competition

So my dilemma is; 
Strategy 1: Shall I focus on long tail keywords with low competition and try to drive traffic to slowly build up my audience and website. In that case, I would write lots of articles each time focusing on 1 specific long tail keyword.

Strategy 2: Or, shall I try to rank for more competitive keywords. What would take more time and effort for sure.

In the case of strategy 1, and you're right, there are only 10 spots on page-one, how feasible is it to rank in first page? From your experience, what would be the proportion of On-page optimization vs Backlinks and outbound efforts ?

For now I find myself kind of lost between those two. Doing somehow both. And I have the feeling that it might not be the best thing to do. Is there any specific best practice for starting blog/websites?  Thanks a lot

[CarolineLee]

Thanks for encouraging Dana,

I will keep you posted when I see great progress.

Cheers

[danatanseo]

Thanks Caroline,

You are most definitely on the right track. Don't be discouraged by traffic being low at first. Ask any blogger, regardless of how well-known they are now, and I am sure they will tell you that it seemed like an eternity before they started to get some traction. Like most worthwhile things, it takes time, patience and intelligent, consistent work.

Not that I'm a well-known blogger (I'm not) but I've been blogging since July 2008. Take a look at an overview of 6 years of my own blog:

Just keep at it. You'll get there.

Czc4h64

[Chris.Menke]

Caroline,

The questions to ask yourself when you set out to optimize for a keyword are "how strong are my competitors?", "Can I commit greater resources to this effort than they have/can?" and "Will committing those resources be worth it to my business?"

Remember, there are only 10 organic places on page-one and in order to you to reach one of them, Google will have to recognize that your site is more important and/or more relevant to the searcher's query than one of those are. Two more questions: Is it? and How do you know?

Passion is important because that helps get you through the long hard work of making a new site outrank an existing site.  It also takes a keen understanding of what makes you and your site/brand/company different than your competitors because that understanding is what you need to pull yourself up by the bootstraps in online (and bricks-and-mortar) business.

SEO also takes a competitive nature.  Passion may be fleeting but if you're competitive, SEO is a good place to sink your teeth.  The drive to move up to the next spot, and then the next one after that, and so on, will keep you reaching for more knowledge and a better understanding of this discipline.

Be sure to absorb Moz's guide to SEO and take this message to heart. If you do those two things, you'll have taken two big steps towards accomplishing your SEO goals.

[CarolineLee]

Thanks Dana,

I did a lot of keyword research, around 2 months ago with:

• Keyword planner
• Google auto suggest
• Reddit / Quora searches
• Some other online tools

I picked up the keywords that to me, appealed most attractive (regarding the volume in search, the competition, overall people's interest) and tried to identify good opportunities.

The main objective is to provide developers with valuable content and generate traffic.

[danatanseo]

Hi again Caroline,

Thanks for answering my initial questions.How much keywords research, what tools did you use and how long ago did you do it?

What is your main business objective with you blog?

[CarolineLee]

Hi Dana,

Thanks for your reply ! Actually yes, I'm quite excited about SEO. Hopefully I'll keep on improving and I completely understand it's a long term job.

Thanks for the link, I've checked it. That's something we are going to do asap, moving to /blog.

Regarding the way I monitor results, I am measuring:

• Domain authority and Page Authority
• My raking position for keywords that relate to our content
• Traffic (braked into Referral / Social / Direct / Organic)
• And more globally, how I rank for some long tail keywords related to the topics I write about.

For now traffic is really low. I was expecting the blog to help us get traffic. But for now it doesn't.

If you have tips on how to track, I'd be happy to hear too.
Thanks !

[danatanseo]

Hi Caroline,

You are awesome. I love that you are passionate about SEO, in all of the right ways and you are really going about this the right way. I'm impressed.

Ok, so let's get down to brass tacks, check out what Rand Fishkin's real life experiment revealed when he moved a blog from a subdomain to a subfolder:

http://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomain-vs-subfolder-does-it-need-updating

You also mentioned results? What are you measuring? Rankings? Traffic? Both?  How's traffic?

Dana