This is a multi-part blog post series. If you have not yet read part 1, it’s worth reading it here.
If you are a client of ours, or following along at home (or at work), this part 2 article covers the following next stages of a Nation-wide SEO campaign:
- A tailored SEO Plan now that we know what your goals are
- Keyword Research (including Long-tail keyword research)
- Setting up a SEMRush Project for your SEO Campaign
- Benchmarking
A Tailored SEO Plan
First and foremost, now that we know what your goals are, we need to write a short SEO plan. This ensures you know that we have absorbed what your goals are and that we are going to do our very best to help you achieve them.
For this example, let’s assume you had your website created by us; which means it is an excellent website and ready for SEO. If however, you did not get your website created by us, this definitely is the time to get us to audit your website (as mentioned in part 1), to ensure it is good enough. If it is not good enough to yield results (aka: good volumes of enquiries, leads, and sales each month), now is the time to get professionals like us to create for you a new excellent website.
VERY IMPORTANT Side notes:
- If your website does not yet have a blogging system built into it, now is the time to get it professionally built. Speak to us first because there are important requirements that need to be addressed. We will be needing the blog system when we have to start creating and publishing content to target long-tails and to help Google to determine your website has some authority (which is not as simple as writing a few quick blog articles btw).
- If we tell you we are going to also need to use landing pages for your SEO campaign, a landing page template also needs to be strategically designed and built into your website at this time too. Speak to us about this because we will need to design it.
Keyword Research
Now that you have done the activities that were outlined in part 1 (and sent them to us, that is if you are a client of ours), we now have to determine which 30 or 50 (or more) keyword phrases we are going to target within this initial starting phase of SEO work (usually the first 6 months).
To do this we study the answers you provided. We then provide you with a list of ‘seed phrases’ based on your answers to the questions in part 1. The seed phrases are phrases we ‘believe’ people are searching in Google (and Bing) to find the products and services that:
- You enjoy providing the most (and are profitable)
- That are the most profitable for your business
- Are phrases related to products and services you believe could be ‘really good sellers’ in your business, if the market knew you provided them.
- Which will make you the most money
- Other considerations based on your answers to questions in part 1.
Once we have the list of ‘seed phrases’ we send them to you. We ask that you add any additional relevant seed phrases you can think of.
Once you return your list back to us, we then do the keyword research to validate that the ‘seed phrases’ are actually the search terms people use in Google (and Bing). If they are that is great, if they are not, we modify the list accordingly.
The reason we do this: There is no point guessing what keyword phrases people use when using Google (or any other search engine). If we optimize your site for phrases very few people search for, we are wasting your time and money. We MUST do keyword research (using data Google provides) to check that the ‘seed phrases’ are searched often by people. These types of people are going to become your future customers after all.
To make this even more clear I will provide 2 definitions below:
- Seed Phrase: These are phrases we ‘guess’ people might search. They are used as ‘research starting points’
- Researched Keyword Phrases: These are phrases we have validated to be ‘phrases people often search’. These phrases can, do, and will make your business money. NOTE: Right now, a website that appears on page 1 in Google when searching those phrases are making MONEY! This is money right now you are missing out on! If you want the money, your website needs to start competing against those websites by ALSO ranking on page 1 in Google (and ideally in position 1 – 5 on page 1). This becomes a fight for high-ranking dominance. The best websites with the best SEO win! “Play hard, play fair and win!”, I say! Side note: Myself and my team apply the same ethics, tenacity, focus and desire to win when doing SEO, that I put into playing good basketball as a youth!
Some of the tools we will use to do the keyword research:
- Google Keyword Planner Tool
- Your Google Analytics Account
- Answer the public
- SEMRush Keyword Magic Tool
- There are also other tools
Remember: many searches people do in Google are questions…. and that is why we use the ‘Answer the Public’ tool. This means that some of the keyword phrases we determine your website needs to rank for will be ‘question phrases’ or ‘long-tail keyword phrases’ as they are called.
The idea of targeting 30 or 50 keyword phrases at once (vs 100 or more), is that it is cheaper (aka: less of an upfront investment to you) for us to focus on a limited number of keyword phrases at a time.
Note: we can focus on 100 or more keyword phrases at a time if you really want, but the monthly fees for doing so are going to be MUCH more than if we were just focussing on 30 or 50. This is because the amount of work and hours we would need to do each month to achieve a good result for you would be MUCH higher!
Side note: Using our method, once we have your website ranking on page 1 in Google for most (if not all these keyword phrases), you can then let us know if:
- You simply want to continue to rank for these phrases via ongoing SEO efforts
- OR you want to rank for even more keyword phrases, to gain even more traffic to your website each month.
Setting up a SEMRush Project
We use the SEMRush tool. It is a very great tool. It allows us to find areas of your website that need improving and/or fixing in your SEO. It also allows us to provide keyword phrase rank reporting (PDF reports we send to you regularly), we can monitor your SEO competitors, plus much more.
Now that we have done the keyword research, we set up a project for your website/SEO in our SEMRush account. We then load all the keyword phrases into it so the tool (the software) then shows us where in Google your website is ranking when someone (other than you or us) does a search for each keyword phrase.
We need to monitor your keyword phrase ranking regularly. They help tell us (and you) how the SEO efforts are going. The higher your website ranks in Google for each target keyword phrase, the more quality traffic (aka: people who actually are searching for what you offer) your website will get. We can cross-check this by looking at traffic data in your Google Analytics account.
Side note: Imagine manually searching Google to find out how your website ranks for 30 – 50 different keyword phrases every week and importing this data into an excel file so it can be tracked. What a time-suck! As in, that’s a lot of time I am sure you would MUCH prefer to be using to do something else. This is one reason why SEMRush is excellent! It saves soo much time because it does this work for us auto-magically!
Benchmarking
Now that we have a SEMRush project setup, we want to generate the first keyword phrase rank report. This is a benchmarking activity so we can see how your website currently ranks for the target keyword phrases.
We also generate a traffic report from your Google Analytics account as part of this initial benchmarking work too. If you’re using higher-end tools like Oribi we generate a report from them too.
Important note: When we show you the initial SEMRush Rank Report, don’t be surprised if your website does not rank well atm, especially if no SEO work has been done on it before. Just by owning a website does not mean it will rank well, nor that it will be attracting much quality traffic atm.
If your website only gets about 200 visitors each month, and 2/3rds of them are from India and Russia, you don’t yet own a very good website. Remember: it does not matter how good you think your website looks, if it is not converting traffic into good numbers of new customers for your business, it’s not yet a very good website.
ONLY once your website starts gaining great amounts of unique traffic each month from the geographic areas you sell to (and converts traffic into customers), do you actually begin to own what is called a ‘good performer website’.
In situations where you want your website to make you money (via enquiries, leads and/or direct sales), only ‘good performer websites’ are an actual investment for your business. Performer websites make you money (they also massively increase the value of your business, should you wish to sell it at some point).
Does all this sound like a lot of work? If so, you are right. It sure is! … BUT it is worth it!
Effective SEO is about LONG-TERM results! You get wins along the way (when done correctly),… AND you also get MASSIVE wins long-term if you stick with it!
You can make a LOT of money from your website if you go about SEO the right way, and understand it is not a simple activity that you forget about after a few months, 6 months or even 12 months.
SEO is an ongoing process so that you:
- Stay relevant in the eyes of Google and Bing
- So you continue to provide a website that is up to date, relevant and useful to those you wish to sell to.
- So you continue to increase the amount of quality traffic
- So you keep increasing sales and ultimately reach your longer-term financial goals
Over the years, those that have put in the time each and every month to do SEO correctly, are the ones who are now running extremely successful (and profitable) websites (and/or have sold them for big-bucks). As the saying goes, “You get back what you put in.”
Thanks for reading. In part 3 and 4 of this SEO series, we cover some of the next activities including:
- PageSpeed Optimisation of your website
- Fixing up any design issues (if your website was not created by us)
- Online Business Directories
- Social Media Channel fixes
- CrazyEgg or Hotjar
- Conversion Rate Optimisation
- And more…
Jay Daniells has been doing advanced Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) work for clients since 2010. He is an SEO specialist. He first started doing SEO work in 2005. He has also been creating websites full-time since 2003. Amongst things Jay is also a graphic designer, digital marketing consultant and creative person. His focus is helping businesses, community groups, clubs, charities, organisations and other entities achieve their goals. He is the owner of Green Valley Digital.