In order to be successful when starting your SEO campaign, you first need to consider all of the different factors that ultimately affect SEO. Much like the internet in general, SEO has gone through a massive change over the years so what may have worked in the past, won’t necessarily work in today’s internet marketing climate. If you aren’t keeping up with the latest changes in SEO, which you can monitor with our Sensor, you run the risk of dropping in ranking. The following steps will help you get the most out of your SEO campaign and get that important edge over your competition.
Tools to Use
- Site Audit
- Keyword Overview
- Keyword Magic Tool
- SEO Content Template
- On Page SEO Checker
- Social Tracker
- Backlink Audit
- Backlink Analytics
- Link Building Tool
Auditing Your Website
The first thing you are going to want to do when starting your new SEO campaign is to audit your own website to see exactly how you’re currently performing with your SEO. In order to understand where you need to improve, you need to know what parts of your website are currently underperforming and lowering your rankings.
Running a Site Audit will show you all of the issues that your domain currently faces. These issues can vary in severity but it's important to understand everything that’s happening on your site. Let’s say your site contains a high amount of broken links that are holding back your rankings. You’ll want to adjust for this by going into your website and fixing those links before starting your new SEO campaign.
By running an audit and crawling your site, you’ll know beforehand whether or not your site needs to go through some major changes before trying to optimize its SEO. Knowing this can set up expectations on when exactly you’re going to be able to roll out your new strategy.
Once you have gone through and audited your site, you can now start the real meat and potatoes of your SEO campaign which is the keyword research.
Keyword Research
Keywords still remain one of the cornerstones of SEO, however unlike in the past, the way you go about researching these keywords has changed. This is mainly due to the change in Google’s algorithms. You were once able to take advantage of keyword rankings by things like keyword stuffing but that is no longer the case as Google has gotten more intelligent in recognizing audience intent.
WIth these new changes it becomes important for you to look for the semantic relationships between keywords that are going to be relevant to the content of your site. With each semantic topic or keyword, you’re going to want to get the most information about how these keywords perform. This is where the Keyword Overview report can be your best friend.
When entering in your target keyword into the Keyword Overview report, you can get insight into all of the data that you’ll need when planning your SEO campaign.
The best keywords for your campaign aren’t going to be those keywords that have the highest total search volume. The best keywords are those that are actually driving traffic to your site. Not only do you want to find keywords that are driving traffic, but more importantly you want these keywords to lead to conversions for your site.
Getting more conversions is all about getting keywords that are specifically related to your audience’s intent. If your main focus for this new campaign is new basketball shoes, you want to make sure you are focusing on keywords for those who are solely focused on looking for new basketball shoes. If you’re having trouble coming up with more unique keywords, you can use the Keyword Magic Tool that will give you data on suggested related to your niche.
Once you have done the research for the keywords you’re going to want to target, the next step is going to be for you to create the perfect content for your site that relates back to these keywords.
Optimizing Website Content
As mentioned earlier, the old ways in which you would optimize your site’s SEO aren’t going to work in today’s Google. What Google now heavily emphasizes is how your target keywords are relating to the actual content on your site. The key to creating content that is optimized for your SEO is to ensure that the content on your site is directly related with the keywords you’re targeting.
When users click on a search results, they are clicking on them with the intention of finding information that directly relates to that keyword. If your content isn’t matching up with the keywords you are ranking for, your users are far more likely to leave your site without ever converting. This is not an ideal scenario when it comes to optimizing your website.
Creating optimized content can be a difficult task to handle but it can be made easier by seeing what your top competition is doing. The Content Template gives you optimized suggestions for your content based on what your top competitors are using.
You can use these suggestions as the building blocks of your content. You can even view specific examples of how your competitors are using your target keyword. If these competitors are outranking you, it can be a good idea to implement some of their strategies into your own.
Your On-Site content isn’t just things such as articles or blog posts. Content can also be technical. Technical SEO is your meta information like page titles, meta-descriptions and tags. Technical content has an equal part in affecting your SEO rankings as blog post or articles, so you want to maintain this just as you would your other content. You can see exactly what is missing on your site with On Page SEO Checker. Here you can analyze your site for technical issues that lower your status in the eyes of Google. The suggestions from this tool cover various aspects of SEO including Semantics, Readability, Technical SEO, Backlinks, and more.
After getting your On-Site content optimized and to where it needs to be to improve your rankings, you are naturally going to want to get your content seen. The more people seeing your content, the better the chance in building relationships and getting your site noticed.
Social Media
Sharing your content through all of the different social media channels may not seem like a direct factor to your SEO, but it can build your online brand to become the key difference that separates you from your competition. Social media will naturally help drive traffic to your domain, which can ultimately lead to your rankings increasing. However, how big of an effect this has is dependant on the size of your social presence. This is why it is so important in today’s world to be marketing through the various social media platforms.
If your content is being promoted by others, thats a good indication that what you’re doing is resonating with others. However, if you notice that your content isn’t really being promoted by others, you may need to increase your social presence.
You can use the Social Tracker to track all of your social media platforms and see exactly how well you’re engaging your content with your intended audience. The Social Media tool lets you see data for each individual post so you can really get an idea of what type of content your audience is most interested in.
By posting engaging content, you can increase your chances of building relationships with people at other companies, which could eventually support your link building efforts.
Link Building
While having thousands of backlinks on your site can lead you to higher Google rankings, SEO is more about the quality of backlinks to your site than quantity. This is why building relationships through social is so important. You want backlinks from sites that you know are reputable and not just spamming you for the purpose of increasing their own quantity of links.
Use our Backlink Audit to analyze all of your domain's backlinks to see which sites are giving you favorable backlinks and which ones could potentially be harmful. A Page Authority Score is given for each backlink to let you know which are the highest quality.
If you notice backlinks that aren’t high quality and you don’t want them linking to your site, you can disavow them which will tell Google to not count these when considering your rankings. A full audit of your backlinks will give you full control of your entire backlink profile.
Generating backlinks organically can more often than not be a difficult task. This is why it's so important to incorporate this process with your content and social media strategy. Pairing a high-quality backlink profile with the rest of your SEO strategies can be the key to finally getting you that desired Google ranking.
The best place to start is generally by looking at what your competitors have done. In our Backlinks reports, you can analyze all of the backlinks, referring domains, and top-level domains that contribute the most to your competitor’s SEO. If you offer a similar service or piece of content on your site, you should be able to acquire similar backlinks. Reach out to the webmasters of these referring domains and introduce your website to start the conversation towards eventually getting links from these domains.
Because managing an outreach campaign on your own is never easy, we offer our Link Building Tool to help you prospect the best opportunities for your website to build links and reach out with a courteous email to build a relationship with the website and gain links.
Understanding SEO can be difficult at times but by using these steps you can ensure that you are making the most out of your efforts.