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Hello Moz Community!

I'm really struggling trying to decide on an improved site architecture.

I run an online proofreading & editing website.  This leaves us targeting many different niche keywords.

For example: blog editing/proofreading, essay editing/proofreading, book editing/proofreading, resume... you get the point.  I feel like editing & proofreading are similar enough to target on the same page(s).

However, the issue is that I'm also having to deal with what I'm calling derivative keywords.

For example, when I try to optimize for 'essay editing/proofreading', I also have to think about:

paper editing, paper editor, paper correction, edit my paper, etc.

I would have no problem optimizing the page for 'essay editing' in the title, H1, etc. and then targeting these words as secondary keywords within the body text, etc., however, I keep thinking 'a large slice of a small pie is better than a small slice of a big one.'

You see, the keyword 'essay correction' has only about one-third the monthly searches as 'essay editing', but it is 50% less competitive.  The same is loosely true for the rest of the 'derivative' keywords.

I'd have no problem building specific pages for these derivative keyword groups, however, I'm very concerned how this would effect my site from a user experience perspective.  I don't want to have a master "services" page with links to book editing, resume editing, essay editing, etc. and then also show paper editing, essay correction, etc.  To me, this would be confusing... "What's the difference between essay editing and paper editing?".

Any guidance is much appreciated.  This has got my head spinning!

Thanks!

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!

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.

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!

????

Haha, I had to laugh at your last point, Marcus.

I had the same initial feeling, however, I think Rand makes a really awesome point right near the end.  It's not necessarily a moral issue, but rather what ELSE you could be doing with your time than spinning articles to these directories.

I would much rather use that time to start connecting with other bloggers in my space and start building those relationships for future guests posts and links that will last a life-time.

It's hard for me as a SEO noob... the low hanging fruit is tempting and deceptive.  I'm just glad the community is here to guide us.

Thanks!

Anjon,

Thanks for the link.  I've been working my way through the whiteboard Fridays but hadn't gotten to this one yet.

I just watched it and won't be submitting any articles to the site, thanks!

I'm digging my way through my competitors' link profiles on OSE and came across one that had been using a site called ArticleBase.com

Apparently you can publish articles for free and browse other published articles for usage on your own site (provided you follow their TOS).  It actually seems like a nifty idea.

I'm wondering if anyone has utilized this site for re-publishing content and building external links.

Worth the effort?

Thanks!

Thanks Marcin, that makes more sense.

For example, I noticed papercheck had a ton of links from verisign.  It appears they did some case-study for the company and the links were all over their other country specific domains, etc.

It makes sense that it would be more about increasing the number of linking root domains than the total number of links and I now understand how one link on a very large site can result in hundreds, if not thousands, of links.

I didn't really understand this and in the back of my mind I keep hearing Rand telling me that link building is valuable but hard work and time consuming.  I'm thinking... s*$t, it really is going to be a lot of work to get 100,000 links  

But it's nice to know I need to simply focus on high quality linking domains... easy enough

Thanks for the reply, that helps and makes sense!

I've been analyzing some of our competitors: essayedge.com and papercheck.com

Both sites have a large number of 'total links'... about 93,000 each.  The former has about 1,200 linking root domains while the latter only has 195.  Even for 1,200 linking root domains, 93k total links seems like a ton to me.

Our site has 101 linking root domains and only 299 'total links'.

I'm quite new to this whole SEO game and admittedly still learning a TON.  Am I missing something here?  How do sites generate so many links?  This seems nuts to me.

Thanks for any help!

AWC, Thanks for the response, however, I feel I've answered your questions in my last reply.

Bail & Doug,

I really appreciate your responses and getting this discussion going.

Ok, obviously I need to be more specific if we're going to get to the root of this.  My site is kibin.com and we're an online proofreading and editing service attempting to disrupt the crummy ones that have been around for far too long, lack any innovation, refuse to produce any great content, or have a social presence.  Granted, we haven't done much of that yet, but we're getting there.

We've chosen to start focusing mostly on students and essays.  You can see that at kibin.com/essay-editing.  Therefore, my keyword choices tend to be things like 'essay editing', 'essay editing service', 'paper editing', 'essay correction'.  I'm slightly torn as to whether I should start including things like 'MBA essay editing' or not yet.  I feel it's more unique and deserves a dedicated page.  The same goes for 'law school personal statements' etc.  But I feel that's a slightly different story (but perhaps still pertinent to this conversation).

I've also started noticing some people finding our site via keywords such as 'proofreading rates' and we're slowly starting to optimize our page kibin.com/proofreading-rates for that.

In the future we plan to expand in to other categories such as 'English editing' or 'ESL editing', etc. or 'resume editing'.  However, these are still quite low-volume search terms.  But again, we're focused on tackling one segment of this market for now, finding a general formula that works, and then applying that formula to the next segment.  So, essay editing is my main keyword focus.

Doug, I think there is definitely some validity to your comment regarding non-search traffic.  We haven't done a lot yet with grass roots type of promotion on college campuses yet and that's something we plan to start doing in the next week.  One of my advisors, who has previously experienced a lot of success in our space, is a strong believer that on-campus efforts are a waste.  For that reason, I've been a bit gun-shy about doing any of that.

I would love to hear both of your thoughts on this now that I've gotten much more specific.  My gut tells me that, yes... focus on conversion and don't worry how big your search volume is.  Let our customers fall in love with the product and service and make it easy, and incentivize them, to share and invite their friends.  But the other side of me looks at these keywords and thinks "really??? only a few hundred monthly searches? can I really grab a large amount of that traffic?".

Thanks again!

I've been pursuing an internet startup for over a year now.  We've figured a lot of things out along the way and even managed to start making some modest revenue ~$3,000/month.

We're just now starting to dig into SEO and I'm realizing that most of our keywords aren't very high volume.  The best have 1,000 local searches per month (exact match) with most being a couple hundred local searches.

I'm worried that I've picked a market that's too small, but I don't have the SEO experience to know if this is normal or not.  Most of my keywords are rated 'highly competitive' and also are stacked with CPC ads upon Google search.

I'd love to know what others' experience with keyword volume is and if I'm just overreacting on limited knowledge.

Thanks!