A Noob's SEO Plan of attack... can you critique it for me?

[TBiz]

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!

[DougRoberts]

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.

[StevieHamilton]

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.

[TBiz]

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!

[activitysuper]

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/

[DougRoberts]

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!

[TBiz]

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.

[StevieHamilton]

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.