Step SEO Strategy

 

 

STEP 1: DEFINE YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE AND THEIR INTERESTS

Step 1: Define Your Target Audience and Their Needs

Step 2: Categorized Keyword Research

Step 3: Finding Gaps and Opportunities

Step 4: Define Competitors

Step 5: Spying On (and Learning From) Your Competitors

Step 6: Customized SEO Strategy & Recommendations

Step 7: Must-have SEO Recommendations

Step 8: Prioritize and Summarize

The first step in most marketing campaigns, Search Marketing included, is to start by defining your target audience.  Your target audience is a defined set of people who you are marketing your product to.

Traditionally, defining a target audience involves determining their age, sex, geographic locations, and especially their needs (aka pain points).  Check out usability.gov’s description of personas and how to do task analysis & scenarios for more details, or better yet, read Vanessa Fox’s upcoming book about personas related to search and conversion.

 

What we want to zero in on for our SEO Strategy are those pain points.  What do they want?  What are their needs that aren’t being met?  Knowing these things will help us better define a content strategy and prioritize content to bring to the forefront.

There are two reasons we start with audience needs rather than jumping straight into keyword research

 

1. Content Strategy: You want to provide content and tools that are as relevant and useful as possible to your target audiences.  This goes beyond regular SEO practices and into site strategy, although providing relevant, useful content in itself is linkbait. For example, let’s say I have a health site.  I have several types of articles on health, drug information, and information on types of diseases and conditions.  My angle on the site is that I’m targeting seniors.  If I find out seniors are primarily interested in information on prescription drug plans and cheap Viagra, then I know that I want to provide information specifically on those things.  This allows me to hone in on that market’s needs and deprioritize or bypass other content.
2. Targeted Keyword Discovery: Ideally you’ll want to do keyword research based on what the audience wants, not solely on what content the site already has (or plans to have sans audience targeting), which may be limited. I can do keyword research on health conditions and drugs (content I have on my site) and determine what the general population is searching for and optimize my current content, or I can cast my net wide and look at what my target audience wants first, then do my keyword research.  You may find there are needs that your site is not meeting.  Knowing my senior audience is interested in primarily in prescription drug plans and cheap Viagra, I can first make sure I’m providing that content, and then further determine the top keywords in these areas (in the next article Step 2), and use those terms in relevant and high visibility areas on my site.

This screenshot from my own Strategy template below simply suggests adding information on the target audience and what they want. Specifics are as good as the research you do, and will likely be very different with each project.  Let your Strategy template give you breathing room. 

 

 

So how do you get target market info?  Lets start with these scenarios. 

 

Scenario 1: I know who my target audiences are, but I don’t know their pain points:



Check out market research studies* online (you can find many free reports, but in-depth ones will usually cost you some money).

Conduct surveys of your audience by putting surveys on your site, sending emails, hiring survey professionals, or using survey sites like SurveyMonkey

Conduct focus groups – either on your own (if you can gather a group of people that you know are in your targeted demographic) or through a professional market research company

Use social media listening platforms that provide topic buzz volume and sentiment by demographic (Nielsen Buzz Metrics and NetBase are two options, although not cheap)

Forrester has a nifty little demographic profiling tool for social behavior online by audience 

 

Scenario 2: I know my industry but don’t know whom exactly to target:

 

Check out industry research studies* online (you can find many free reports, but in-depth ones will usually cost you some money).

Search for industry statistics online. For example, here I found some great statistics on seniors that would allow me to better understand their current situation and what they need.

Hire a research company that specializes on your industry

Use social media listening platforms that provide topic buzz volume and sentiment by industry. I haven’t tested any social listening platforms with specific industries in mind to know exactly who provides demographic info based on industry.  If you happen to know of tools that do this, please share with us in the comments.

A few of the places you can find industry/market statistics:

• eMarketer
• MarketResearch.com
• Forrester
• Federated Media
• InternationalBusinessStrategies.com
• The U.S. Census Bureau

Social media tools are especially useful if you’re planning on integrating search and social campaigns, as they are great research tools for both channels. Here’s a screenshot from NetBase that shows a demographics module on the left, as well as demographic results for the Crest Pro-Health brand being searched.




Research can get expensive when you really get into it, but you can find data if it exists on your industry/demographic, and you’re an experienced searcher. Be sure to check your sources, and don’t be afraid to email people and ask where they got their information if you need to.

Here’s what I found in free online info about my seniors audience in the Healthcare industry

• Seniors’ specific conditions (source)

Data found: Arthritis, hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, and respiratory disorders are some of the leading causes of activity limitations among older people. Alzheimer’s disease and dementia alone afflict 4 million Americans, a figure expected to increase 350% by 2050 if no cure is found.

• What this means to me: These are topics I will provide extra information and tools on
• More senior women with disabilities than men (source)
• Data Found: Older women were more likely than older men to experience disability, 43 percent and 40 percent, respectively
• What this means to me:  I will put a little more emphasis on targeting senior women on my site, with articles and tools specifically geared to women.
• Top geographic locations where seniors are (source)
• Data Found: Florida, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia were the states with the highest proportions 65 and older in 2000: 17.6 percent, 15.6 percent, and 15.3 percent, respectively
• What this means to me:  I can provide local information like pharmacies, doctors,  caregivers, nursing homes, etc with those primary areas highlighted. I can also target PPC ads in those geographic locations.
• Retirement info for single seniors (source)
• Data Found: Fewer [seniors] who are married with children from a previous relationship and single females have a clear vision of what they hope to experience in—and what they must do to prepare for—retirement.
• What this means to me:  Provide advice column content on retirement, especially geared towards these seniors.
• Caregivers are a secondary target (source)
• Data Found: 34 million adults (16% of population) provide care to adults 50+ years.
• What this means to me:  I might want to consider a section and/or tools/and/or articles targeted at people taking care of seniors as well.
• Potential advertising partners (source)
• Data Found: Forty-eight percent of caregivers reported using at least one of seven outside services (e.g., transportation, home-delivered meals, respite, etc.) to supplement their caregiving
• What this means to me: These outside services are good targets for partnerships and advertising for the site. 

This was all free information I found online in less than an hour, that gives me some great ideas for content, partnerships and potential tools to build into my site to be relevant and useful to my target audience. Of course this is just some quick loose data, so I'll emphasize again: be careful where your data comes from (try to validate when possible), and think about how to use your data wisely

 

START CREATING RECOMMENDATIONS IN YOUR STRATEGY DOCUMENT

 

Each of these discoveries is potential content or strategy, and should be written up in your SEO Strategy document. Provide as much data and reasoning as possible for why you recommend this content.

 

See the screenshot below for some of the sections for specific recommendations that you can add which will provide the meat of the document. Keep in mind this is a very flexible document – add recommendations that make sense (for example you may not always have specific design considerations for a project). Remember, it will be different every time you do it.

 

 

For each piece of content you are recommending, try to provide:

1. Backup Data: Provide information backing up why this content will appeal to your audience
2. Specifics: Be as specific as you can with your recommendations.  For example if you’re suggesting partnering with meal home delivery sites, find out which ones are going to provide the most relevant info, at what cost if possible, and what the ideal partnership would look like for content and SEO purposes.  Even provide contact information if you can.

This doesn’t have to be completely formalized right now because we’ll be getting even more insights to layer on top of this from our keyword research and competitive research in later steps.  But add as much information as possible for now – you can always add more, change it or even change your mind and get rid of it later.  We will finalize recommendations in Step 5. 

 

NEXT STEP: KEYWORD RESEARCH

 

In the next article we’ll take a look at some methods for doing categorized keyword research that allows you to further prioritize content based on the popularity of categories of keywords. 

In the meantime, do you have any suggestions, insights, tool recommendations or great places to find market research data or create personas?  Please share! 

Step 2 Categorized Keyword Research

CREATE A TEMPLATE

 

First lets create an Excel template that will hold all of our keyword lists. We’ll be categorizing keywords so the easiest thing to do is to categorize them now, rather than pouring through hundreds or thousands of keywords in excel sheets trying to separate them out and categorize them later (I’ve tried both methods and believe me, the latter can suck the life out of you). I usually open up a clean Excel sheet and start creating tabs for categories of keywords I think are relevant (go as deep or as high level as you want), and leave one tab in the front for all of your keywords combined. We’ll leave that tab empty for now.

 

Keyword categories can be based off of our persona types and their needs, or you can categorize keywords based on topics based on how your site might be sectioned, or if you’re really inquisitive like me, you might do persona groups with keyword subsections for each.

If you’re covering several topics per persona, or if you have an especially large site and you’re covering several topics with subtopics, you can create a different worksheet for each main topic/persona that has several subtopics within it. That will be easier to decipher than one worksheet with 40 tabs that represent topics and subtopics.

 

 

 

 

Don’t be afraid to make keyword tabs for as many topics as you want – you don’t have to use the data if you think the search volume is too low.

For example, if I’m working on my seniors’ health site, my categories might look like this:

• General seniors & elderly terms
• Senior & elderly health
• Diseases and conditions
• Weight loss, diet and fitness
• Assisted living
• Drugs
• Aging
• Doctors
• Self-diagnosis
• Information for Caregivers

 

In my target audience research findings I saw that Florida, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia were the states with the highest proportions of people 65 and older in 2000: 17.6 percent, 15.6 percent, and 15.3 percent, respectively, and I thought I might want to provide local information for my visitors (ideally I’d also look up the highest numbers of seniors by state in addition to percentages).

 

So I might also add some special interest keyword sections with some local terms. And although I made it up, (because I haven’t actually done any in-depth research) I think seniors might be interested in prescription drug plans, so I’m going to create a special interest keyword section for that too, to do some exploration:

• Local senior health
• Prescription drug plans

The more exploratory you are, the more work you might have to do, but the more insight you’ll get back as well, so feel free to make as many categories as you want, and ditch some once you’ve done the keyword research if you don’t feel they’re relevant or no one is searching for the topics.

 

The purpose of this keyword research is to determine and discover the topics relevant to what you can provide, determine the best keywords to target and incorporate, and eventually to prioritize content and topics based on relevance and search volume.

You could also use keyword tools that allow you to create and store keyword lists like Keyword Discovery or WordTracker, but for this example I’m going to use the free Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

Now that I have categorized my keyword sections in my Excel sheet, it’s time to fill them in with data.

 

EXPAND KEYWORDS & GRAB VOLUME DATA

 

Now that you have keyword categories setup in your Excel sheet, you can do some research and expansion. While you’re expanding your keyword list you’ll also be collecting search volume data.

In the end, you’ll want this data:

• Keyword
• Search Volume

In the next article (Step 3) we’ll be comparing your site’s referrals from Google to the Google Search volume for each keyword (with a calculation to allow for clickthrough rates) so we’ll be adding referral (and potentially conversion) columns to our Excel sheet. This is why I prefer using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, since it gives us estimated monthly Google Search volume. And it’s free.

We’ll also only be looking at Google data for this example, primarily because Yahoo and Bing currently don’t release search volume data. To be more thorough, you could estimate other search engine search volume (based on each search engine’s market share), but as I mentioned, for this example we’ll just stick with Google.

Here’s how to collect your categorized keyword data:

1. Go to the Google AdWords keyword tool
2. Type in a word or phrase from your first keyword category. Type in a few words or phrases if you want, but don’t overdo it in one query. You’ll get back a limited set of results, so you’re better off getting more terms based on one or two keywords than the same amount of results based on 10 or 15 keywords.
3. Choose Exact from the Match Type dropdown

When I do keyword research, I usually start with high level general words, which lets me see what is popular around that topic, and what other related terms I might want to add to my lists, possibly even as another category if there is enough volume.For example, if I start my senior healthcare site keyword research with the terms seniors and elderly, I can see how popular searches are with each of those terms in them, but I can also see that the related search results show me that Alzheimer’s and nursing homes are high volume related topics that I want to be sure I have keyword categories built out for in my worksheet (and eventually possibly content on my site).

 

 

If I had an existing senior healthcare site, this might give me insight into content opportunities that I’m currently not targeting. For example, if I didn’t have any content on my site for nursing homes, I might want to consider either adding content and/or partnering with advertisers or content providers to cover that topic.

 

I also mentioned I thought my visitors might be interested in prescription drug plans. When I do research for those terms, I can see that searches around Medicare topics are much more popular. I’ll add these terms into my worksheet.

 

 

1. If your results look mostly good, scroll to the bottom of your results and export your results into a csv file for Excel
2. Open up your CSV file and move column widths so you can see the keyword
3. Do some manual filtering by removing keywords that aren’t relevant (remove the entire row). You may also want to remove any competitor brand terms, unless you’re trying to attain/convert traffic for them.
4. Are you interested in global search volume or local? Whichever you’re interested in, make sure you have matching referral data later (for existing sites only). We’ll be comparing referral data per keyword to search volume in the next step (optional, but good stuff to know), so if you’re interested in global data, make sure you have global referral data. Whichever column you’re not interested in, delete it. You can also delete the Advertiser Competition column unless you want to use it for further analysis, but we won’t be using it for these examples. You should now have two columns: Keyword and either Global or Local Search Volume.
5. Copy your keywords and your search volume data and paste them into your keyword category tab in your Excel worksheet*.

 

1. Repeat this process for all keyword categories in your worksheet
2. It’s a good idea to note somewhere in your worksheet what time period the data is you’re pulling. Google AdWords keyword tool shows data in a monthly chunk, so note the month in your worksheet so you don’t forget when you’re comparing your own site referral data later.
3. *Alternatively, you can save each keyword list export as its own file rather than copying and pasting it into a master Excel sheet. Keep in mind that you may do several keyword list searches and exports for one topic though.

You can get even more creative in your keyword research by also looking into what your competitors are targeting. Use the Website Content tab on the Google Keyword Research tool, or other tools like Keyword Discovery to discover terms that are semantically relevant to your competitors’ websites. This might provide more insight into terms you can or should target for your own site. We'll delve into much more competitive research in further steps.

 

Everyone has their own method of doing keyword research, so do what works best for you. All that matters is that you end up with categorizations that you care about, and some search volume data that we’ll use later in our strategy. This part of the strategy should end up giving you a really good idea of what’s popular and what types of terms and topics you might want to target.

 

We’ll look at how to prioritize and how find potential Gaps and Opportunities (for existing sites) in the next article: Step 3.

Do you have any similar (or completely different) methods for collecting and categorizing keywords? Please share!

Step 3: Finding Gaps and Opportunities

In this step we’re going to look at two things:

1. Highlighting initial prioritizations
2. How to find Gaps and opportunities based on current performance (for existing sites only)

PART 1: HIGHLIGHTING PRIORITIZATIONS

 

Now that you know your keywords and their search volume well, highlight tabs/keyword groups (I usually give them a color) that have a lot of search volume, or tabs that you otherwise feel are important to pay attention to. 

 

For example, if I have 10 Excel tabs, each with a keyword category related to types of furniture I sell (living room sets, kitchen stuff, dining room sets, outdoor furniture, bedroom sets, etc) and I find that there are a heck of a lot of people searching for the living room furniture terms but comparatively few people searching for the outdoor furniture terms, I might highlight the living room furniture tab because I’ll want to prioritize that content in my strategy and on my site. 

 

Within each of those tabs, you can also go through and highlight specific terms or sets of terms that you find important because they have high search volume or for any other reason.

You may want to mention these categories and/or specific terms directly in your strategy recommendations later on. We’ll revisit what you highlighted in Step 6 when we start really building out and organizing your recommendations.

 

PART 2: FINDING GAPS & OPPORTUNITIES

 

This is manual, and can be time-sucking, painstakingly laborious, but insightful.  But the amount of detail you get into is also up to you – so don’t get your panties in a bunch just yet.

Finding Gaps and Opportunities basically means we’re going to look at estimated search volume, and referral volume to try to get a sense where we might be doing well and we might not be. 

 

Because search volume numbers that we have are estimates, I don’t suggest taking the actual numbers too seriously.  There might even be times when your referrals are higher than the search volume. So you might not want to show the execs or clients the numbers (and have to answer for them), but rather show them what we’re going to learn from them instead.

 

• GAPS: Are areas where there is content on the site for a term, but the referral volume is very low  (especially compared to search volume) or none.
• OPPORTUNITIES: Are areas where there is significant search volume for something relevant to your target markets (and what your company is offering), but there is no content on the site to attract those searchers.

Here’s how we find this. 

 

Open your Excel sheet with all of your keyword lists. Pick a list. In column A you should have the title “Keywords” and the rest of the column should contain your keywords.  In column B you should have the title “Search Volume” and the rest of the column should contain search volume numbers for each keyword in column A.

 

What we’re going to do first is go into your analytics system and pull out referral numbers for each keyword and paste them in.

 

More on this in a minute, but here’s what you’ll need to consider for now.  If you’ve got an Excel sheet with several tabs and dozens or even hundreds of keywords in each tab, you will probably want to consider doing a small sample of only a few keywords per list. 

 

For example if my Erykah Badu keywords list has 1500 terms in it, I don’t want to have to look up each of those terms manually in my reporting system and copy and paste the referral numbers one by one, until its all done and I’ve wasted two weeks of my life… Instead I’ll choose a sample set of 20-50 terms per list. 

 

 

 

 

Here’s three suggestions for ways you can choose a sample set:

Based on your target market needs: Did you take Step 1 to the level of building out Personas, where you identified your target markets and their needs?  If so, take a sample set of terms from each list that most represents what they need and the questions they’re asking
Based on high-volume (head) search terms: If you’re the competitive type and you just want to go for the gold (and why not?) then choose a sampling of the top search volume terms.
Sample high volume (head) and low volume (tail) terms: Tail terms are important, and it’s great to see how you’re doing on more competitive and less competitive terms.  Depending how deep your lists are, you might be able to get a sense of this by taking a few terms from the top (head terms) and a few terms from the bottom, and making that your sample list. 

Use your noggin.  If there is a sampling of terms that makes more sense – this is your work of art.  Do what feels right for you. BUT, don’t just choose terms that you know your site is doing well on.  Choose a set of terms that your site should be doing well on.  This way you can put your site to the test.

 

Feel free to choose a larger sample size, or even pull referral values for the entire list.   If you have a way of pulling the data out of your analytics or just the terms in your worksheet (through APIs or other means), you’re golden. You can and should pull the referral data for all of your terms.  As with all of the work we do in these Strategy steps, the more research and data pulling you do, the more insight you’ll have.  Just be sure to manage your time wisely.

 

Now that you have an idea of the work ahead of you for this step, let’s DO this.

1. Create a new column in each worksheet in column C titled Google Referrals
2. Create a new column label in Column D titled CTR (Clickthrough rate)
3. Create a calculation in the first cell in the CTR column that does this calculation (=referral#/volume#). To do that type this into the cell:
   =C2/B2
   and hit enter This should insert a number into the cell.
4. Format that cell to show the number as a percentage.  To do this, right click on the cell and choose Format Cells. Choose the number tab, and choose Percentage.  You should leave one or two decimal points because a lot of clickthrough rates are likely going to be under 1%.

 

 

       5. Now we’re going fill that calculation into the rest of the cells in that column.  Do this by hovering over the bottom right corner of Cell D2 where we just did our calculation. You’ll see your curser change to what looks like a plus sign.

 

 

When it does, grab that corner and drag it all the way down to the last row at the bottom of your keyword list. This will fill I the calculation for every cell, so when you add referral values into the C column, the CTR in the D column will calculate automatically.

 

 

• Now we’ll fill in referral data.  Go to your analytics platform.
• Find referring keywords for the month coinciding with your search volume research. For example, if you did search volume research for the month of April, then make sure you’re looking at referral data for the month of April.
• Also make sure you’re looking at Google organic keyword referrals. No PPC and no other search engines.  This is because we’re comparing this to keyword research we did using Google’s Keyword Tool which shows estimated searches in Google. We want to try to compare apples to estimated apples.
• And make sure you’re either looking at local or global referral data, depending on which search volume numbers you’re using from your Google keyword research.
• Now, search for referrals to your site for each of your terms. The referral terms should match exactly. For example, if my term in my keyword worksheet is Erykah Badu, I need to find keyword referrals for exactly that phrase. Referrals for Badu Erykah, or Erica Badu or Erykah Badu music don’t count
• Paste referral numbers for each term in the appropriate cell in the C column of your worksheet
• You should see CTR numbers fill in automatically

Remember that because search volume from Google is only an estimate, these CTR numbers are not going to be exact.  We’re basically using them to look for areas for potential optimization or new content.   

 

Once you’ve pasted all of your referral numbers, we’re going to re-sort the data by the CTR column and look for Gaps & Opportunities.  Do this by selecting all 4 columns A, B, C and D (click on the A column label and drag your mouse to the right to the D column label (note – column label where it says A, B, C, D, etc., not column title where it says Keywords, Search Volume, etc.). You should see the rows all 4 columns completely selected.

 

 

Now sort by descending values in the CTR column.  Do this by choosing Data > Sort while your columns are selected. 

 

Make sure Header Row is selected at the bottom of the window, and in the first text box dropdown choose your CTR column.  Check the radio box next to it to make it descending. Leave the other fields blank and hit ok.

 

 

This should have sorted your data so that all of the keyword value pairs stayed in tact row-by-row, but they are now all sorted by the ones with the highest CTR value to the lowest.

Now here’s the stuff you’re getting paid to do.  Let’s find Gaps & Opportunities

 

FINDING GAPS:

 

Remember Gaps are where we have content but don’t have a good CTR.  What’s a good CTR you say? Well, we know that with all of the stuff to click on a search result page (including going back and refining the query instead of clicking on anything), a number one ranked search result rarely if ever gets a 100% clickthrough.  It might be about 35%-40%, or even higher if your result contains images, videos or rich snippets. But if you’re getting 35% CTR you’re doing well.  This is not a Gap.  Most of the time you’re going to see a lot of CTR numbers that are 2% or less.  You’ll probably want to zero in on those.

 

Lets look at some Gap examples in our Erykah Badu data.

 

 

 

There are several things we can tell by looking at this set of data.  First of all, the site who’s data we’re looking at is doing fairly well for Erykah Badu videos and lyrics.  This is good, but let’s assume this site also has contains Erykah Badu photos, and song downloads. 

 

The first Gap we can see are the songs.  The two phrases [erykah badu songs] and [erykah badu song] collectively have over 73,000 searches in April but only 128 referrals.  And the popular song titles like [erykah badu next lifetime], [erykah badu tyrone], [erykah badu love of my life] and [erykah badu bag lady] have little to no referrals, with the highest CTR at less than a half percent. 

 

This Gap might represent two types of pages – a high level Erykah Badu page for all of her songs and the landing pages for the actual songs individually (assuming there are landing pages – which oftentimes is the problem).  Note this Gap in your notes. We’ll be pulling it out again in our set of recommendations.

 

Do you see another Gap?  Gap #2 is pictures and photos.

 

 

Our site has photos of Erykah Badu, but overall pretty dismal traffic numbers.  Note this Gap as well.

And lastly, the site does allow people to download the songs for a price.  This is one way they’re making money, so it is an important action.  Yet, the fairly popular phrase [erykah badu download] does not have any referral volume. 

 

 

Add this Gap to your notes as well.  Because we know it’s associated with a monetary conversion, we don’t want to forget it in our site recommendations.

 

Determining The Reason For Gaps.

 

Now that we know what the Gaps are, we’ll want to look at why the site is performing poorly.  This where your SEO superpowers come in.  There could be several reasons the site is getting low or no traffic for these terms; from not being indexed, to poor SERP displays, to bad architecture and so much more.  I’ll leave it up to you to use the skills you’ve learned here at SEOmoz to dive into that part.  Do your assessments for each and add them to your Recommendations section of your Strategy Document.

 

FINDING OPPORTUNITIES:

 

Opportunities are similar to Gaps, but are content your site doesn’t actually have and might want to consider.  This is why we expand keyword research out in Step 2, so we can cast a wide net and compare against that.  Never do Step 2 and 3 (creating keyword lists and finding Gaps and opportunities) using only the terms already being referred to your site. 

 

This limits you to what you’re already receiving traffic for, rather than looking at what people want and then benchmarking how well you’re making yourself visible to them in Search.

Here’s an example of a potential Opportunity for our Erykah Badu set of terms we’ve been looking at.

 

 

I can see here that people are searching for Erykah Badu concerts, her tour, and to buy tickets.  The site currently doesn’t provide that type of information.  But based on the search volume, and knowing that this is something my target market is interested in, I might consider it, especially if I can monetize it.  This can be added to the Recommendations section of your document.

 

PERFECT YOUR ART

 

So far in Steps 1-3 we’ve

1. Determined who our target markets and/or personas are and what they need
2. Discovered the terms they are searching for online
3. Found out where your site is not getting adequate traffic in search results
4. Found out things our target markets are searching on that we aren’t even providing. 

With these Excel worksheets we’re looking only at visibility in organic search.  You can take this to other levels by adding in paths from search to conversion, comparing PPC, and more.  I can’t give away the farm or else I’d be giving away some of the crop that fuels our consulting business (our partnership is to be announced within the next two weeks – stay tuned!).  So again, use that big smart brain of yours to determine ways in which you can expand on this worksheet that are valuable to you and your customers. 

 

In the end you’ll have SEO assessments for specific Gaps and specific areas of Opportunity to put in the Recommendations section of your strategy document.  This is one of the things that makes this different from a regular SEO Audit.  You’re not just going through the site saying ‘optimize for this and that.’  Anyone can sell the SEO Basics these days.  If you’re reading this you’re not just anyone.  This stuff gives you or your clients specific areas to focus on that are directly related to their customers and their site.  And we’re not done.

 

In the next two steps we’ll be defining competitors and doing some competitive research that will give you even more targeted strategy recommendations.  Maybe it’s time you reconsider your salary/rates?

 

Step 4: Define Competitors

DEFINING CATEGORY COMPETITORS

 

Step 4 is a simple one where we’ll be defining our competitors in SERPs for use in dissection in the Step 5.

 

We’ll only be looking at search engine competitors here, and not comScore, Hitwise or other types of industry-defined competition by Uniques or Page Views, or any other metric.  For the SEO Strategy we’re building here, we’re concerned with Search, therefore we’ll stick to competitors in search results only. 

 

I can already hear you saying – this is easy – just do a search for your keywords and see who shows up.  True.  That’s part of it.  But because we’re going to do some serious dissection in Step 5, we’ll want to make sure we get the right competitors to dissect and compare ourselves against.

We broke our keyword research out into categories in Step 2, so we’ll want to define competitors for each category (or pick just a few important categories – especially if you're working on large enterprise-sized sites).

 

What I mean when I mention defining competitors by categories is this: If I am working on a site all about celebrities, my competitors might be OMG, TMZ, Perez Hilton, etc.  But that’s only at the high level.  My keyword categories from step 2 might cover subtopics like celebrity photos, celebrity news and more. Each of those subtopics has someone who is dominating those rankings.  It may be the same one or two sites across the board, but it’s likely that each subtopic will have different high-ranking competitors.  We want to know specifically who’s doing well for each topic.

 

HOW TO FIND YOUR COMPETITORS

 

There are several ways you can do this. If you’ve already got a method you like and want to stick with – by all means do (and if you’re compelled to share your method with us in the comments – you know we love to hear it).  I’m going to give you an example of how I pull this data together. 

 

Here’s how I set it up:

 

Grab a new Excel worksheet and name it something like ‘Competitors’.  Create one tab to keep track of your overall site competitors, and if you’re tracking any subtopics on your site (likely the keyword categories we defined in step 2), create a tab for each one of those that you’re going to do competitive research for.  We’re not going to do any calculations or fancy stuff with this worksheet – it’s just for keeping track of your competitors in one place.  You can use a Word doc or good ol’ pen and paper if you want too.

 



 

The easy way to figure out who your competitors are is to type a couple of terms into the search box and see who shows up.  So let’s look at that method. Here’s what I see in the top 5 results for [celebrity gossip]. 

 

 

 

Take note in your Excel sheet of who’s appearing in the top rankings for a couple of terms for each tab/topic.  You don’t have to look up the competitors for every term in your keyword group, just pick a few and make note of what comes up.

 

You can also choose to check the top rankings in all three search engines, or just pick one. It’s up to you.  In the end you’ll be looking for which site(s) show up the most often for this keyword group.

Another method of doing this is to use SEOmoz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool.  The cool thing about the Difficulty Tool is that you get extra insights along with your top competitors.  But for this example I just want to get my top-ranked competitors in a downloadable csv file that I’ll just copy and paste into my Excel sheet.

 

To get this info, type in one of your terms:

 

 

Below the difficulty score and authority comparison graph are the top-ranked results...

 

...and at the bottom of the page you can export the results.  I’ll do the same thing for a few more terms that represent the topic I’m researching, and add the results all to the tab for the topic.

In the end I have something that looks like this – here’s my general terms (there’s only two for this example, but the more terms you can use the better idea you’ll get of who shows up in the rankings the most):

 

 

I’ve highlighted the sites that show up in the top 5 rankings for both terms and made a note of it on the top.  This is a competitor I know I want to target.

 

Here’s another example of one of my subcategories:

 

Here I see two sites appearing for multiple keywords. I’ve highlighted them and made note of them at the top.  These are competitors I’ll be targeting for my competitive dissection of sites for the Celebrity News subtopic in Step 5.   

 

Again, there’s only 3 terms in the screenshot example above – I recommend pulling the data for at least 5-10 per topic.

Note that you can also choose to target 2 competitors or 5 competitors for each category – whatever you prefer (I usually like to do at least 3).  The more sites you choose the more work you have to do in Step 5, but the more insight you’ll get back. 

 

That’s the jist of it folks.  Now you have targeted competitors defined for each topic you’re interested in.  In the next post we’ll look at how to dig into the competitive landscape to uncover site features, content, and SEO strategy that should be built into your site in order to outrank your competitors. This is where we really start to take SEO to another level. 

 

In the meantime, if you use any of the vast selection of SEO tools out there to define your competitors, or just do it in a different way, please share with the readers in the comments!

Step 5: Spying On (and Learning From) Your Competitors

Let me start by asking you this.  What makes your site:

1. Different?
2. Remarkable?

In competitive landscapes these are very important – no – absolutely necessary questions to ask yourself.  Now that we’ve gone through defining target audiences, doing categorized keyword research, finding Gaps & Opportunities and defining who the competition is, we’re going to take one more important step before dumping this all into a big juicy pile of strategy.

 

We’re going to sniff out the competition and see what makes them different and remarkable, and we’re going to use those creative noggins to work on topping them. Are you feeling confident?

We’re going beyond comparing title tags here; We’re looking at product features that would make people want to visit your site instead of your competitors, and not just visit once, but visit repeatedly, sign up, link to, email their friends, share on Facebook and Twitter, etc.  We’re looking at what makes your competitors sticky, what makes them linkbait, what makes them lovable.  Because SEO today isn’t just great meta tags, it’s a great product.

 

We’re going to slice and dice the competitors in a couple of different ways, and like most of what we’ve covered so far, you should feel free to do any kind of research or use any tools that work for you – you don’t need to do exactly what is shown here. I highly encourage getting creative and breaking out your own competitor template and/or build on top of these examples,

 

TEMPLATIZING COMPETITIVE RESEARCH

 

If you’ve read the previous steps in this SEO Strategy series you know I’m an Excel junkie and you probably know what I’m about to say next, don’t you?  That’s right! We’re going to open up Excel and make tabs!

 

This time we’re making a competitive research template that you can use for any of your SEO competitive research projects.   The tabs we’ll create for this example will be:

• Features
• Sentiment
• On-Page
• Inlinks
• Traffic

 

I know I don’t need to say it again (but I will) – this is just an example. You can do whatever you feel is right here.  The idea is to get a good big-picture look at what our competitors are doing, not just in their title tags and inlinks, but what features, tools and social visibility do they have? What is it that’s making them rank so well, and what is it that’s making people like them, want to share their content, want to link to them, etc.   We’re not just counting inlinks and looking at the anchor text.  We’re comparing product offerings. We’re looking for what makes a site naturally popular.

 

It’s important to realize that SEO is so much more than inlinks and tag optimization. There have been plenty of sites that have gained top rankings and high visibility before they ever accomplished SEO basics.  If you’ve got a hot product, links and traffic will come more naturally. And if that’s what our competitors are doing, then we want to peek into their properties and see how we can do even better, or at least do great at the parts they’re slacking on (finding or refining our niche).

 

We’ll create one of these Competitive Template worksheets for each category we’re comparing (from the categories you defined in Step 2 and/or the Gaps and Opportunities you want to target from Step 3).  This way we’re looking at our competitors in each niche, rather than just for the site as a whole, since they oftentimes are very different.

 

GET IN THE MINDSET

 

Here’s here we ask ourselves, “Self? Based on what I’m learning by looking at my competitors’ offerings, what specific things should be built into this product in order for it to have a good chance at outranking them?”  Remember in high school when you wanted to be cool like the popular girl so you studied how she acted, what she said, who she hung out with, what she wore, etc?  It’s sort of like that except you don’t want to be like her, you want to be even AWESOMER.  You want to be the one who has the coolest clothes, the most interesting friends, and the best parties in town that everybody wants to go to and cant stop talking about. 

 

So I encourage you to be as specific and thorough as possible in your research, but also be realistic. If you just can’t afford to be that cool for example, then can you be the coolest kid in town for a specific group of people (aka can you be the best and most relevant site for a specific niche or subgroup/subtopic)?  Think creatively and always keep in mind who you’re targeting and what you can bring to the table. 

 

Now that my cliché high school movie clique speech is out of the way, I’ll  share some examples of research you can do, but feel free to compare whatever features you feel are important.

 

REMEMBER YOUR TARGET MARKET AND THEIR GOALS

 

If you’ve done some persona research or defined target markets in Step 1, keep that in your mind for this Step.  Remember that you’re looking at these site features and content from your target market’s perspective, and you’ll want to check that whatever goals they are trying to reach are available on your site and the competitors’ sites, and how easy those goals are to find and to achieve. 

For example, let’s say I have a music site, and I defined a persona in Step 1 that I named Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy. Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy is a Rolling Stone reader and music aficionado who likes to impress his friends with his endless wealth of music industry knowledge.  Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy likes to stay on top of the latest Rock ‘n’ Roll news, so he’s looking for the best site online to get breaking rock ‘n’ roll news and fresh perspectives in his RSS feed and maybe could be swayed into a newsletter.

 

I would have created a music news keyword category just for Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy in Step 2.  I found out who my competitors are for music news keywords in Step 4.  Now, when I dig into these competitor’s sites, I can poke around and look at everything they’ve got going on, but I also want to pay special attention to the task(s) at hand for Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy. 

 

Does my site and/or my competitors’ sites offer what he’s looking for? Is it easy to find? Are steps to conversion simple and user-friendly? How does my conversion process compare to my competitors? What product is Rock ‘n’ Roll Randy more likely to subscribe to, come back to, share with his Rock ‘n’ Roll friends, etc?

Putting this lens on allows you to catch things you might not have noticed by just comparing inlinks and tags. If you’re intrigued by this process, check out my favorite industry book to hit the shelves recently - Vanessa Fox’s Marketing in the Age of Google. It goes into this kind of stuff in more detail – you’ll love it.

 

Now let’s get into some spywork, shall we?

 

TAB 1: FEATURE & CONTENT COMPARISON

I’ll usually compare at least these three types of things in my feature & content comparisons:

• Content & Landing Pages
• Resources, Widgets, Tools
• Social Presence & promotion

I’ll create a matrix with my site and 1-5 of my top competitor sites (that we defined in Step 4) in the rows, and the aspects I’m comparing in the columns.   So it might look something like this:

 

 

The stuff I compare is different every time I do one of these.  Think about what you want to compare that would be important to visitors and/or your targets, and put that in there.  I’ll usually end up adding things as I go along.  For example if I find out that one of my competitors provides a calculator tool and I hadn’t thought about that, I’ll add it to the feature comparisons.

Once you’ve done this, step back and take a good look at what sets these sites apart.  Ask yourself some of these questions:

• What features/content do my competitors have that I don’t?
• Does this content serve a need my target markets are looking to fulfill?
• Could/should I provide those features/this content? Could I make them even (more comprehensive, easier to use, more valuable to my visitors, provide it faster, easier, cheaper, etc)?
• How active are they in social networks where my target markets might be?
• How are they promoting their content through social sharing functions on their sites?
• Do they have proper targeted landing pages for the terms I care about?
• Are there calls-to-action on the landing pages? How apparent are they?
• Are there features of the site (tools, calendars, calculators, communities, etc) that might encourage repeat visits to the site?

I could go on, but the idea is to get a good feel for what’s going on in this competitive space, and start to form some recommendations based on this comparison that you’ll put in your Recommendations section of your Strategy document.  Take notes on this and start to form your recommendations now.  You can iron them out and make them sound good later, but you don’t want to forget, so make sure to get these thoughts while their still fresh in your head.

 

TAB 2: SENTIMENT (LIKES/ DISLIKES):

 

This one can be a crap shoot, but if you can get any insights out of it – excellent.

First, if you happen to have any good social monitoring tools that are half decent at determining sentiment (I’m a huge fan of NetBase for larger shops) use these to determine what people like about your competitors products and features, and what they don’t like about yours (if applicable).  Also check out what they wish someone provided, or what they want or need or are looking for that they haven’t been able to find online. 

 

If you don’t have a social listening tool or you’re just not getting good info from it, use the tool we all know and love: Search!  Search for any variation of things like:

• “like” + [your brand name]
• “love” + [a feature you provide]
• “I wish” + [a feature you provide]
• “sucks” + [an author or blogger on your site or your competitor sites]
• “hate” + [your competitors’ brand names or features]

 

What you find may or may not be useful, and remember, we’re not just looking for SEO-related stuff here – we’re not looking for whether people love or hate our SEO – we’re looking for what people love or hate or how they feel about your product and your competitor products.  We want to know why they like the popular girl more than the other girls.  Or more specifically, we want to know why they visit, revisit, link to, share, email, bookmark, or talk about that product.

If whatever you find is relevant and insightful, make a note of it.  The insights you gain from here will go into your Recommendations in the next step.

 

TAB 3: SEO ON-PAGE COMPARISON

 

On-page comparisons can be automated, and there are a few good tools that provide usable data.  But of course the best on-page comparisons come with a touch of SEO know-how to not only show where there might be a flag, but of course determine 1) if the flag is actually a concern, 2) the level of concern/priority for each flag, and 3) the actions to take to fix it.

Here are a couple of on-Page SEO Comparison Tools that you can use any combination of to compare yourself against competitors:

• SEOmoz Crawl Test
• SearchCLU
• Website Grader
• Covario

Of course there are lots more out there – feel free to share your favorite with us in the comments. But remember, automated tools are not SEO consultants.  They can only do so much. Use this as a base to compare some of the on-page features, and add your own analysis to what’s working or not working for you vs. your competitors for these on-page factors.

 

Make notes of the things you consider flags - not all of it has to be noted or used in your recommendations.  In fact, I usually only note a few things here that stand out.  For everything else, I point to regular canned SEO best practices from the Recommendations section of the Strategy document.  This isn’t a best practices document; this is a custom analysis with specific insights and recommendations (which is why you’re worth so much). 

 

TAB 4: INLINK COMPARISON

 

I’ll keep this one light and simple – you guys know how to do link research by now. You can use some of the inlink tools to compare the number of external links to the site and even the anchor text used in those links in this tab.  If you do, be sure to graph the results. 

 

 

What I’ll often do with inlinks too, is create a grid to see if I can determine who’s possibly link-shacking with who.  Take your top x sites, including your own, and put each site in a cell across a couple of columns of your Excel tab.  Put the same sites in rows in the cell tab that you’ll cross-check with the columns. 

 

 

Then do this search in Yahoo Search:

 

Site:site1.com linkdomain:site2.com

This will return any pages from site 1 that are linking to site 2 (and indexed in Yahoo).

 

For example, here are the pages on Wikipedia.org that link to seomoz.org: 

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site%3Awikipedia.org+linkdomain%3Aseomoz.org

 

Do this for each site (both directions).  Keep in mind some of these links might have nofollows on them (use the SEOmoz toolbar to easily see nofollows).  Sometimes you’ll see some sites with heavy cross-linking.  This might mean a partnership, network, or paid links.  Whether or not any of this cross-linking info is useful is questionable, but I like to see it if I have time to do the work. 

Use this tab for any link comparisons you feel are important to explore. 

 

Because I’m skimping on this section a little, I expect you guys to share your competitive inlink practices in the comments.  If you gain any good insights from what you find in your competitive inlink research in this tab, make a note of it for your Recommendations that we’ll build out in the next step in this series.

 

TAB 5: TRAFFIC COMPARISON

 

We know who our competitors are in search results.  I also like to look at overall traffic to get an idea of who’s killing it beyond just Search.  If your competitors are getting a lot of traffic in general, they’re doing something right.  Also what are their traffic trends?

Here are some tools you can use to look at traffic and traffic trends:

• Compete
• Alexa
• AttentionMeter
• comScore
• Nielsen
• HitWise

 

This is another one of those things that I like to look at, but usually isn’t extremely actionable for SEO.  I like to know the trends and the overall popularity of my competitors.  I might gain some insight from looking at these, like if any competitors are losing ground or gaining fast (many times this could be due to search traffic since search often drives a large percentage of traffic to many sites).

 

TAB 6+: YOURS

 

What else do you want to compare?  Add as many tabs as you like.  This isn’t necessarily something you have to give to your client (although you could add it on as an appendix), this is a space for you to use to explore the competitive landscape.  Add what you feel you want to dig into, and take notes on what you find that is useful for your recommendations along the way.  We’ll be creating that part of the Strategy document next.

 

WHAT YOU NEED IN THE END

 

You need specifics. You need competitive insights that go beyond title tag comparisons.  You need to know everything about the popular girls.  The most important tab for me in this whole process is usually the features & content comparison.  This is the stuff that speaks to why a site is popular (as long as I’m comparing the right things) and it’s the stuff that can affect some of the other tabs like inlinks and traffic.  I use the insights I gain on this tab almost every time.  I may not find any really good insights in the rest of the research, but I almost always find some juicy nuggets in the feature & content comparisons.

 

You should now have a really good idea of what you’re up against, where your site stands competitively, and what you might need to consider in terms of providing a unique, remarkable offering to your target markets.  Combine that with Gaps & Opportunities we found in Step 3, and categories and keywords of interest you found in Step 2, and you should have a nice set of notes that you can use to form some solid, specific recommendations in the next step.

Step 6: Customized SEO Strategy & Recommendations

Turn your computer up.

Now go here and play this song.  Ready, Creator?  We’re going to create the heart and soul of your SEO Strategy masterpiece right here, right now.  Large black coffee advised. 

If you’ve been following Steps 1-5 you’ve been taking notes on what you’ve found along the way, either in the Excel spreadsheets we’ve created or in a preliminary Strategy document for the customer or in a notebook or on your hand or wherever.  These notes are going to be the seeds for Step 6 – the Strategy & Recommendations piece. 

 

Like every other step of this 8-Step SEO Strategy you should do this in whatever style or format that feels best for you. I’m going to show you how I tend to put these documents together, but even my SEO Strategy documents change from client to client.  So use your properly caffeinated noggin to create what your customer or your site teams need

. 

HERE’S WHAT YOU’LL NEED

 

We gathered some notes in previous steps, so let’s take a look back at what we might be able to throw into this document.

 

Step 1: We defined target markets & their needs

• You either used target markets or personas available to you, or you defined them.  We’ll revisit these in this in this strategy document.
• You also found some high-level things these people are interested in – their wants, needs, interests, etc. We’ll also note these.

Step 2: We did categorized keyword research.

• If there were any particular insights you’ve found during this research that you want to share with the client, we’ll be adding that.

Step 3: We discovered Gaps & Opportunities

• If you highlighted any specific areas or terms you want to call out in your document – we’ll be using those.
• We’ll be putting your Gaps & Opportunities in the strategy document as well

Step 4: We determined our competitors

• We probably wont use anything from this step

Step 5: We spied on our competitors

• We compared features & content. Learnings will be used.
• We looked for sentiment for our product & competitors' products. Well use anything we found there.
• We did crawl and inlink comparisons. We’ll bring out any good insights from there.
• Optional: Traffic comparison charts
• Optional: any other competitive diagnosis you’ve done or insights you’ve found.  We’ll put it in!

THE DOCUMENT STRUCTURE

 

Here’s what I usually do.  I create either two parts to the deliverable or I create two documents.  In the first part/document, let’s call this Insights, I throw in all of the juicy insights I’ve found.  I want to give the client a really good sense of what is going on – where the problem areas are, how they stack up against competitors, and maybe even where they’re doing well and have less opportunity to improve. Then I also have a second part or document that has custom, actionable strategy and recommendations based on what I learned from those insights.  We’ll call this Strategy. 

 

THE INSIGHTS PIECE

 

Here’s where we’ll take specific issues, data, etc that we found in all of our previous steps and give the client something that will help them understand where they stand now. The more visuals you can provide, the better.  The client will like you much better if you give them nice charts and graphs than if you make them read a book and try to decipher your data.

Let’s look at some of the specific things you can put in this Insights piece.

 

From Step 1:

• Recap who your target audience is. Be as specific as possible
• List what they need, want, are interested in finding

 

From Step 2 & 3:

• Particular keywords or groups of keywords that you highlighted.  Is there a story there? Is there something that would be of value for your client to know?
• Gaps: Reveal areas/keywords where the client has content but is not performing well.  You do not need to give recommendations for how to fix this yet – we’ll do that in the Strategy piece.
• Opportunities: Reveal areas/keywords where the client does not have content and might want to consider it.

 

From Step 4:

• Reveal the top competitors you found and why. Clients often consider brick and mortar stores or competitors with the most Unique Visitors to be their competitors. Make sure they know who their competitors are in Search, since that is often different.

 

From Step 5:

 

 You don’t have to use everything from your competitive research.  Just pull out nuggets that are worth exposing to the client and that tell a story.

• What features or content did competitors have that your client didn’t, but they might want to consider?
• Were you able to find any negative sentiment about your client site? Make sure they know what people aren’t satisfied with.
• Were you able to find any negative sentiment about your competitors?  You can use this to move in on the areas where they are weak or don’t provide what your communities want.
• If you found any major crawl issues that you’d like to expose here, put that into your Insights document too. Remember, in this example we’re putting all of the recommendations/strategy in a separate part or document, (although you could do it differently if you please) so right now you only need to show problem areas. Go as deep or stay as high-level as you want.
• Show inlink comparisons between your client and their competitors
• Optional: Add in traffic comparison charts between your client and their competitors
• Optional: Add in any other competitive diagnosis you’ve done or insights you’ve found

 

Now that we’ve scared the pants off our client showing how dysfunctional their site is, let’s save the day and give them some solutions.

 

THE STRATEGY PIECE

 

I’ve got a template for this that I use each time and just add or delete whatever I need to.  This template usually has these sections where I can fill in strategy and recommendations:

1. Specific Terminology to use
2. Specific Design elements to consider
3. Specific URL considerations
4. Specific Internal Linking to consider
5. Specific External linking to consider
6. Specific Partners to go after
7. Specific AJAX usage considerations
8. Specific Flash usage considerations
9. Specific Video considerations
10. Specific Blogging considerations
11. Potential Original vs. Syndicated content issues
12. Site Features and Content
13. Global Scope (Are there potential duplicate content issues from this content being shared by other Intls? If so, what specifically needs to be done to avoid these issues?  What is the strategy for domains, hosting, and targeting Intl search engines?)
14. Your subcategories here

 

Here’s where you’ll provide solutions.  This is probably the most flexible part of the entire strategy. This is your baby to build out as you please.  The idea here is to provide specific, custom strategy and recommendations based on all of the stuff you’ve found.  To cover other site issues or high-level SEO basics, you can consider either

• Linking to SEO basics for each item listed here on the web or in your intranet.  For example, our intranet at Yahoo holds over 200 pages of SEO best practices, so because this isn’t a best practices document, I would just link to URL best practices, linking best practices, etc from each section to provide additional guidance beyond any specific recommendations you’re going to give them here.
• Providing a separate document with a more technical assessment or SEO best practices review.  If you’re getting into recommendations for writing titles, meta tags, etc it might be a little overwhelming for this document.  It’s ok to provide several deliverables to the client, but try not to overwhelm them with everything in one 200-page document.

You might not have any recommendations for AJAX or Global scope or any sections you have in this template, so then leave it out, or just point to best practices from that section.

Other considerations for your Strategy piece:

• Separate recommendations by who will be implementing them. For example, put all of your content recommendations in one group for the Product Manager, all of your technical recommendations in a group for your web developers, groups for writers, designers, or whoever will be implementing.
• Give each section or even each recommendation a priority.  I did one of these where *each recommendation* was put into rows in (you guessed it) an Excel spreadsheet, and the columns had prioritizations and owners (developers, editors, designers, etc) for each one PLUS a scale for difficulty for each one.  Make sure you charge appropriately for your time if you’re doing this.  ;) 

MAKE THIS YOUR OWN

 

Working with several different SEO/M vendors while at Yahoo, I got to see how each of them presented deliverables.  Every one of them couldn’t be more different from each other, and this is OK.  If you’re not satisfied with how I’ve put the Insights and Strategy together here, please do feel free to present your information how you see fit (and share with us in the comments if you’d like!).

When you’ve completed this Strategy document you can make a copy of it and take out all of the info and templatize it for use in future projects. 

 

BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!

 

Once you’ve done all of this and you’re happy with your deliverable, don’t close it up and send it just yet.  In Steps 7 and 8 we’ll add two more simple things.  You’ve done all of the hard work in steps 1-6, so now you can reward yourself with a little Irish coffee if you please. You deserve it.

Have ideas, thoughts, questions, Irish coffee recipes, etc you’d like to get off your chest?  Please share with us in the comments!

 

Step 7: Must-have SEO Recommendations

You know the client.  The one that really needs your help.  The one that gets pumped when you explain how keywords work.  The one that has an image file for a site.  Or maybe the one that insists that if they copy their competitor’s title tags word-for-word, they’ll do better in search results (I had a product manager make his team do that once.

 

Needless to say (I was thrilled when) it didn’t work). 

In Step 6 of the SEO Strategy document I noted that this strategy document we’ve been building isn’t a best practices document, and it’s more than a typical SEO audit.  It is a custom set of specific, often product-focused recommendations and strategies for gaining search traffic.  For that reason I recommended linking out to SEO basics and best practices elsewhere (in an intranet or a separate set of documents).

 

But most of the time you’ll still need to call out some horizontal things that this client must have put in front of their faces, or else it will be missed completely.  SEO/M is your area of expertise, not theirs, so help them make sure they’ve got their bases covered. You can create an additional section for these call-outs, wherever you feel it is appropriate in your document.

 

WHAT CAN I INCLUDE HERE?

 

Here are some examples of things you could include if you felt your client needed this brought to their attention:

1. Press Release optimization and strategy
2. SEO resources for specific groups in the company:
• SEO for business development (linking strategies in partner deals)
• SEO for writers/editorial
• SEO for designers
3. SEO for long term results rather than short term fixes
4. International rollout recommendations
5. Content management system – how it is impairing their SEO
6. Risks and avoidances
7. Anything that you feel should be covered in more detail for this particular client, that wasn’t covered in your strategy in the last step. This is a catchall – a place to make sure you cover all bases.
8. Nothing - if you dont feel it's needed.

If the client really needs a lot of help, you’d want to provide training and best practices, either as separate deliverables along with the strategy document, or better yet – work on training and best practices with them first, then dive into more specific strategy. You don’t want to end up with a 15 page (or even 4 page for that matter) best practices document in your strategy doc.

 

Remember, we’re beyond best practices here, unless, in this case there’s something specific that needs to be called out.  

If the client needs more than one thing called out, do it.  If it’s several things, consider either adding an appendix, or as I mentioned, creating a separate best practices document.

The reason I recommend best practices as a separate document is because it is really a different project, often for an earlier phase.

 

EXAMPLE 1:

 

Let’s say for example, my client has the type of content the press loves to pick up. They don’t do press releases, mostly because they don’t know how exactly to write them and where to publish them, but they want to.  I‘ll add a Press Releases section after the strategy and I might give them these simple tidbits:

• High level benefit of doing press releases
• What person or group in the company might be best utilized to manage press releases
• Examples of what to write press releases about
• Channels they can publish press releases to
• Optimization tips
• References they can go to for more detailed information

EXAMPLE 2:

 

My client gets it. They’re pretty good at taking on most SEO on their own. This strategy document I’m doing for them is to really dig in and make sure all gaps are closed, and that they’re taking advantage of every opportunity they should.  Additionally, in a few months they are going to roll out the site to several international regions. 

My dig into the site and its competitors (and search engines) for this strategy have all been for the current site in this country. Because the Intl rollout hasn’t started yet, I will add a section to my document with specific things they need to keep in mind when doing this rollout.

• Localized keyword research (rather than using translate tools)
• ccTLD  (country code top level domain) considerations
• Tagging considerations (like “lang”)
• Proper use of Google Webmaster Tools for specifying region
• Potential duplication issues
• Maybe even a lit of popular search engines in those countries
• Point to more resources or list as a potential future contract project

Make sense?  Use your judgment here. Like we’ve seen in the rest of the steps, this strategy document is your work of art, so paint it how your own creative noggin sees it, Picasso.

Other suggestions for what you might include here? Love it? Hate it? Think this step stinks or mad I didn’t include music to listen to for this one? Let’s hear about it in the comments!

Step 8: Prioritize and Summarize

PRIORITIZE

Well, hello go-getter. Glad to see you’re ready to do some prioritizations. There are two ways I’ve done this before, and at this point I don’t need to tell you again that however you want to go about this is up to you.  Create this document in the manner that seems best for you.

 

a) Prioritization Summary

 

After you’ve created your magnum opus of specific recommendations in Step 6 that will make the next big internet sensation out of your client’s product, you may want to take all of those recommendations and wrap them up in a nice (short) summary that says, “this is the most important thing you can do, and these things are very important also”.  Let them know where they can start and what they cannot ignore if they want to see results.  This is different than the overview which we’ll look at later, that will summarize the entire document in a much more broad manner.  This is specific to the recommendations that you’ve listed. You and I know that the more of the recommendations they follow (especially the high-impact ones) the better off they’ll be, but you and I also know that the chances of the client implementing 100% are usually not so great, so make sure you let them know what’s the most important. 

 

b) Prioritize by Item

 

This is more time- and labor-intensive, but I’ve found it has really helped for teams who have a lot on their plate. Prioritizing each task that you’ve given your client in Step 6 can help them place your recommendations in their queue along with the 1,000 other things they’re working on, without having a doubt as to what will potentially make the most impact. Without specific prioritizations they might just implement whatever is easiest, and then call you in 4 months when there hasn’t been any change in results.

 

For example, the template I’ve built has prioritizations to choose from built in, so that I can stick these in wherever necessary. If I have several recommendations under a category (like Specific Content to Build), then each recommendation within that section will get a prioritization. 

 

Feeling even more ambitious? (Might be the sugar in the Tokaji – go with it!)  Note which team each recommendation should be owned by.  For example, recommendations for external linking might be relevant to Design, Web Dev, and/or Biz Dev.  Specific terminology recommendations might be relevant to Writers/Editorial. I’ve learned the more you give them the more they’ll get done, and the better it will look for you – both in presentation and when they start seeing results.

 

SUMMARIZE IN AN OVERVIEW

 

This is it. This is the big shiny bow on this custom handmade contribution of your unmatched talent and innate inner wisdom that you’re lovingly bestowing upon your client. The crescendo, if you will.

The overview is for the beginning of the document.  Rather than just jumping right into demographics and recommendations, give the client a short summary of the purpose of this document and what they’ll find in it. Here are some of the things you might consider putting in this one or two paragraph overview (I don’t suggest it be much longer than that):

• Summarize why this document has been commissioned – what is the goal they are trying to attain
• Recap the issue(s) the client is having now (the reason they’re seeking your help)
• Explain the potential outcome the client can attain after implementing
• Explain the originality of this document – that it is a custom set of recommendations created specifically to meet the clients individual visibility needs (or something like that). And that it is not a best practices document.

This, by the way, follows the typical steps to persuasion (shown here in my words):

1. Show how awesome life would be if everything was perfect and nothing needed help
2. Show the reality – here is a problem & here’s how its hurting you
3. Let them know you have the solution for them
4. Let them know the solution is attainable if they take action
5. Give them the tools to take that action (this is really the rest of the document)

By the time they’re done reading your overview they’ll be salivating for what’s in this SEO Strategy document. 

And with that we come to a close of the 8-Step SEO Strategy. Thanks for taking this journey with me and I hope some of the info in these 8 steps has given you insights and ideas to make you worth gobs of money.  :)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Share this

Share on FacebookPlus on Google+