A Noob's SEO Plan of attack... can you critique it for me?
-
I've been digging my teeth into SEO for a solid 1.5 weeks or so now and I've learned a tremendous amount. However, I realize I have only scratched the surface still.
One of the hardest things I've struggled with is the sheer amount of information and feeling overwhelmed. I finally think I've found a decent path. Please critique and offer input, it would be much appreciated.
Step One: Site Architecture
I run an online proofreading & editing service. That being said, there are lots of different segment we would eventually like to rank for other than the catch-all phrases like 'proofreading service'. For example, 'essay editing', 'resume editing', 'book editing', or even 'law school personal statement editing'.
I feel that my first step is to understand how my site is built to handle this plan now, and into the future. Right now we simply have the homepage and one segment: kibin.com/essay-editing. Eventually, we will have a services page that serves almost like a site-map, showing all of our different services and linking to them.
Step Two: Page Anatomy
I know it is important to have a well defined anatomy to these services pages. For example, we've done a decent job with 'above the fold' content, but now understand the importance of putting the same type of care in below the fold.
The plan here is to have a section for recent blog posts that pertain to that subject in a section titled "Essay Editing and Essay Writing Tips & Advice", or something to that effect. Also including some social sharing options, other resources, and an 'about us' section to assist with keyword optimization is in the plan.
Step Three: Page Optimization
Once we're done with Step Two, I feel that we'll finally be ready to truly optimize each of our pages. We've down some of this already, but probably less than 50%. You can see evidence of this on our essay editing page and proofreading rates page. So, the goal here is to find the most relevant keywords for each page and optimize for those to the point we have A grades on our on-page optimization reports.
Step Four: Content/Passive Link Building
The bones for our content strategy is in place. We have sharing links on blog posts already in place and a slight social media presence already. I admit, the blog needs some tightening up, and we can do a lot more on our social channels. However, I feel we need to start by creating content that our audience is interested in and interacting with them on a consistent basis.
I do not feel like I should be chasing link building strategies or guest blog posts at this time. PLEASE correct me if I'm off base here, but only after reading step five:
Step Five: Active Link Building
My bias is to get some solid months of creating content and building a good social media presence where people are obviously interacting with our posts and sharing our content.
My reasoning is that it will make it much easier for me to reach out to bloggers for guest posts as we'll be much more reputable after spending time doing step 4. Is this poor thinking? Should I try to get some guest blog posts in during step 4 instead?
Step Six: Test, Measure, Refine
I'll admit, I have yet to really dive into learning about the different ways to measure our SEO efforts. Besides being set up with our first campaign as an SEOPro Member and having 100 or so keywords and phrases we're tracking... I'm really not sure what else to do at this point. However, I feel we'll be able to measure the popularity of each blog post by number of comments, shares, new links, etc. once I reach step 6.
Is there something vital I'm missing or have forgotten here? I'm sorry for the long winded post, but I'm trying to get my thoughts straight before we start cranking on this plan.
Thank you so much!
-
Definitely worth setting up RSS news feeds from both Google Alerts and Google Blog Search for your keywords to keep an eye on what's happening in your niche. As well as lots of ideas for new content/articles you'll also see what's happening in your niche and what your competitors are up to.
You can also set up a twitter search for your main keywords too. I'm sure there must be opportunity there - lots of students tweeting about getting their assignments proof read etc.
-
You're welcome!
I love your idea about analyzing the popular blog posts from the top tech blogs - this is unique (at least I haven't seen it done this way), and you could generate interest through exposing the mistakes and the best practices - a bit entertaining and informative.
Try that out and keep looking for unique ideas like that, and improve them over time, and I'm sure you'll do very well.
-
Doug,
Thanks for the awesome, and thorough reply.
I do know a lot of this, but it's great to be reminded and definitely helps put things in perspective.
We went through the 500Startups accelerator program last summer and they really pushed us to understand our customers' needs, pain-points, etc. However, it was largely in terms of building a solution for those individuals and it's easy to forget this actually needs to apply to all aspects of your business.
Now that we are looking to be more hands on and generate awesome content, it's vital to revisit that research. For example, we need to remember that students want to improve their grades on their essays, but most likely not at the cost of their social life. When you think about the typical college student they are very busy, stressed during finals, and still figuring out how to budget their time. Realizing those things can really help guide is in our content strategy for this market segment.
Your reply definitely made me think and mentally put myself in the shoes of those students... what would I feel like if I had a ton of homework, pressure from my parents to get good grades, yet wanting to have a social life? How can we help them solve their problems, feel more at ease, and get better grades, etc.?
It's a great exercise and has already helped me brainstorm some awesome content ideas.
Thanks!
-
It's nice you have the resource in-house to generate content.
I would start with a few articles like 'How to create a killer intro for your CV', 'How to layout a CV like a professional editor', to me and im sure to others this is juice content.
Check out copy blogger, they create content about copy writing for blogs and get some good social sharing going on - http://www.copyblogger.com/how-to-write-headlines-that-work/
-
Good stuff! Before you leap into generating lots of great content - have you considered...
1. What are you business goals. (It's not getting hits to a website!) How is your website going to support these goals. Try and think a little longer term than just "selling our service." How are you going to build a relationship with your customers and retain them...
2. What are you customers needs/goals. What motivates them. Do you have a clear understanding of your customers. (Beyond the broad categories like "students" or "home based businesses". Can you break this down further to build personas?
3. What is a customer worth? How much is a customer likely to be worth? Not only in their first purchase, but during their whole life as a customer. How much is the business prepared to invest to get a customer? How many customers does the website need to deliver in order to make it a success.
Once you understand these, you can start to think about the content you need to do some research. You need to to work out how you can connect your services with your target market by developing suitable/compelling offerings. (How do you know there is a market out there?)
This is where keyword research comes in. But don't limit it to just using the google keywords tool. If you can, talk to your target audience then do! I know you've already done some keyword research, but I've often been surprised at how differently prospects search for solutions about their problems! It amazing what people will tell you if you're prepared to listen!
Look at Google Insights for some of your keywords to look for seasonality. Understand why this happens and how you might run different campaigns/need different content at different times of the year. Look at the geography can you identify specific target markets there? It'll also show you some top searches and rising searches.
Can you talk to your potential customers? If your can, don't talk about your service, but listen to what their problems are, what pain can your relieve? What are their concerns. Why wouldn't they use your service (what do you need to do to reassure them?) What are your competitors doing?
Undertake competitive research to fully understand your competitors. Take a look at their websites. What markets are they focusing on. How are they appealing to their customers.
Using Open Site Explorer, take a look at their Top Pages and the Anchor Text of inbound links to see if you can identify the search terms that they are optimising for. (You can tell how much SEO activity they are engaged in too!)
Once you've got all this info, think about: What makes you unique/remarkable. Why should people come to you rather than your competitors. What's the promise your going to make to the world. What are you going to stand for? How are you going to stand apart from the herd.
How do your services solve the problems your potential audience has? What are the benefits of your service (flip "features" into benefits by asking why is this important to your customers) What content do you need to target a specific market niche.
Once you know this, you can start to build your initial content. Instead of building a page hierarchy. Think about building your sales funnel. Think about your landing pages (your offers), The supporting content to address concerns/build credibility (Testimonials, guarantees, samples etc), And the Goal pages (sign-ups, contact pages and purchase pages)
Be wary of "Services" pages. Nobody sits down with the intent to find/browse some services. Always think about the "What's in it for me" angle from their perspective. Why should they be interested in your services. Instead of a Services section for instance, you might want to have different sections for your main market niches: "Small Businesses", "Students", "Legal" etc.. Try to keep an external perspective. This isn't about you. It's about THEM!
Think about the purpose/goal of each and every page, it's position in your sales funnel and how it's going to move people on to the next step. Why does the page exist. What does it have to do? If you know how your sales funnel is meant to work, you can measure the flow of customers through your funnel and identify content/pages that aren't working and fix the leaks. If you don't know how people are going to move through your site it makes it much harder to do this.
Once you've got your core up and running, then you can continue to add further offers (specific to different market niches). This widens your funnel, but you need to watch how these new leads convert and identify any content you need to support this process that's missing.
Clearly identifying your target audience and their needs will also help you write/target your blog content . You want to be investing in content that's relevant to your audience.
Hope this helps, and hope that it's not just telling you stuff that you're already aware of!
-
Stephen,
Thanks for the reply (and the typo fix).
Honestly, I planned on starting with some 'softball' content... stuff that I feel we can write about and our current users will appreciate and read. However, I understand this is not content that will probably garner a lot of links. The point of this would be to develop a discipline and a streamlined system while moving toward better in-depth content.
I understand that the better the content, the easier it is to get external links. But I do feel it's important to start showing some sort of presence on our blog and getting in the habit of writing.
For example, we can easily write about the pitfalls of people's personal statements. We see and edit a lot of them, however, to me this isn't really juicy and hugely linkable content.
On the other hand, I am planning a pretty interesting piece. I want to take 100 blog posts from each of the 5 top tech blogs and have them run through our editing network, analyze them to see how many error, typos, etc. they have and then publish our findings in an info graphic and even see if there's a correlation to the number of errors and their traffic numbers. To me, this is juicy, linkable, grand slam content. Obviously it isn't easy to create something like that every day or even every week.
-
Your fourth step: what content are you actually looking to create? Does it answer common questions, or provide rare 'insider' knowledge? Does it give a genuinely interesting, or entertaining perspective on subjects related to your field? Are you wanting to cover lots of bases with good information (e.g. daily blog posts), or are you wanting to 'dig deep' into one particular area, perhaps with multiple channels (e.g. ebook and related video)?
Link building is much easier, and worth a lot more to you, once you've actually gotten content that people actually want to read. And getting that type of content means making sure you understand exactly how you will add value to your audience, via your website.
On another note, still in the vein of being constructive, in the second paragraph, in the context in which you've written, you mean sheer, rather than shear.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can cross domain canonicals help with international SEO when using ccTLDs?
Hello. My question is:** Can cross domain canonicals help with international SEO when using ccTLDs and a gTLD - and the gTLD is much more authoritative to begin with? ** I appreciate this is a very nuanced subject so below is a detailed explanation of my current approach, problem, and proposed solutions I am considering testing. Thanks for the taking the time to read this far! The Current setup Multiple ccTLD such as mysite.com (US), mysite.fr (FR), mysite.de (DE). Each TLD can have multiple languages - indeed each site has content in English as well as the native language. So mysite.fr (defaults to french) and mysite.fr/en-fr is the same page but in English. Mysite.com is an older and more established domain with existing organic traffic. Each language variant of each domain has a sitemap that is individually submitted to Google Search Console and is linked from the of each page. So: mysite.fr/a-propos (about us) links to mysite.com/sitemap.xml that contains URL blocks for every page of the ccTLD that exists in French. Each of these URL blocks contains hreflang info for that content on every ccTLD in every language (en-us, en-fr, de-de, en-de etc) mysite.fr/en-fr/about-us links to mysite.com/en-fr/sitemap.xml that contains URL blocks for every page of the ccTLD that exists in English. Each of these URL blocks contains hreflang info for that content on every ccTLD in every language (en-us, en-fr, de-de, en-de etc). There is more English content on the site as a whole so the English version of the sitemap is always bigger at the moment. Every page on every site has two lists of links in the footer. The first list is of links to every other ccTLD available so a user can easily switch between the French site and the German site if they should want to. Where possible this links directly to the corresponding piece of content on the alternative ccTLD, where it isn’t possible it just links to the homepage. The second list of links is essentially just links to the same piece of content in the other languages available on that domain. Mysite.com has its international targeting in Google Search console set to the US. The problems The biggest problem is that we didn’t consider properly how we would need to start from scratch with each new ccTLD so although each domain has a reasonable amount of content they only receive a tiny proportion of the traffic that mysite.com achieves. Presumably this is because of a standing start with regards to domain authority. The second problem is that, despite hreflang, mysite.com still outranks the other ccTLDs for brand name keywords. I guess this is understandable given the mismatch of DA. This is based on looking at search results via the Google AdWords Ad Preview tool and changing language, location, and domain. Solutions So the first solution is probably the most obvious and that is to move all the ccTLDs into a subfolder structure on the mysite.com site structure and 301 all the old ccTLD links. This isn’t really an ideal solution for a number of reasons, so I’m trying to explore some alternative possible routes to explore that might help the situation. The first thing that came to mind was to use cross-domain canonicals: Essentially this would be creating locale specific subfolders on mysite.com and duplicating the ccTLD sites in there, but using a cross-domain canonical to tell Google to index the ccTLD url instead of the locale-subfolder url. For example: mysite.com/fr-fr has a canonical of mysite.fr
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatello
mysite.com/fr-fr/a-propos has a canonical of mysite.fr/a-propos Then I would change the links in the mysite.com footer so that they wouldn’t point at the ccTLD URL but at the sub-folder URL so that Google would crawl the content on the stronger domain before indexing the ccTLD domain version of the URL. Is this worth exploring with a test, or am I mad for even considering it? The alternative that came to my mind was to do essentially the same thing but use a 301 to redirect from mysite.com/fr-fr to mysite.fr. My question is around whether either of these suggestions might be worth testing, or am I completely barking up the wrong tree and liable to do more harm than good?0 -
Can't get auto-generated content de-indexed
Hello and thanks in advance for any help you can offer me! Customgia.com, a costume jewelry e-commerce site, has two types of product pages - public pages that are internally linked and private pages that are only accessible by accessing the URL directly. Every item on Customgia is created online using an online design tool. Users can register for a free account and save the designs they create, even if they don't purchase them. Prior to saving their design, the user is required to enter a product name and choose "public" or "private" for that design. The page title and product description are auto-generated. Since launching in October '11, the number of products grew and grew as more users designed jewelry items. Most users chose to show their designs publicly, so the number of products in the store swelled to nearly 3000. I realized many of these designs were similar to each and occasionally exact duplicates. So over the past 8 months, I've made 2300 of these design "private" - and no longer accessible unless the designer logs into their account (these pages can also be linked to directly). When I realized that Google had indexed nearly all 3000 products, I entered URL removal requests on Webmaster Tools for the designs that I had changed to "private". I did this starting about 4 months ago. At the time, I did not have NOINDEX meta tags on these product pages (obviously a mistake) so it appears that most of these product pages were never removed from the index. Or if they were removed, they were added back in after the 90 days were up. Of the 716 products currently showing (the ones I want Google to know about), 466 have unique, informative descriptions written by humans. The remaining 250 have auto-generated descriptions that read coherently but are somewhat similar to one another. I don't think these 250 descriptions are the big problem right now but these product pages can be hidden if necessary. I think the big problem is the 2000 product pages that are still in the Google index but shouldn't be. The following Google query tells me roughly how many product pages are in the index: site:Customgia.com inurl:shop-for Ideally, it should return just over 716 results but instead it's returning 2650 results. Most of these 1900 product pages have bad product names and highly similar, auto-generated descriptions and page titles. I wish Google never crawled them. Last week, NOINDEX tags were added to all 1900 "private" designs so currently the only product pages that should be indexed are the 716 showing on the site. Unfortunately, over the past ten days the number of product pages in the Google index hasn't changed. One solution I initially thought might work is to re-enter the removal requests because now, with the NOINDEX tags, these pages should be removed permanently. But I can't determine which product pages need to be removed because Google doesn't let me see that deep into the search results. If I look at the removal request history it says "Expired" or "Removed" but these labels don't seem to correspond in any way to whether or not that page is currently indexed. Additionally, Google is unlikely to crawl these "private" pages because they are orphaned and no longer linked to any public pages of the site (and no external links either). Currently, Customgia.com averages 25 organic visits per month (branded and non-branded) and close to zero sales. Does anyone think de-indexing the entire site would be appropriate here? Start with a clean slate and then let Google re-crawl and index only the public pages - would that be easier than battling with Webmaster tools for months on end? Back in August, I posted a similar problem that was solved using NOINDEX tags (de-indexing a different set of pages on Customgia): http://moz.com/community/q/does-this-site-have-a-duplicate-content-issue#reply_176813 Thanks for reading through all this!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rja2140 -
How Google Adwords Can Impact SEO Ranking ?
Hi SEO Gurus, I have a question. How Google Adwords Can Impact SEO Ranking ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webdeal
Positive , negative or neutral impact? I will appreciate if you will provide detailed answer Thank you for your time webdeal0 -
Looking for good examples of website's geotargeting
I am looking for some examples of sites that handle their global presence well (geotargeting and languages), ideally from a single .com domain thanks! Stephen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | firstconversion0 -
Soft 404's from pages blocked by robots.txt -- cause for concern?
We're seeing soft 404 errors appear in our google webmaster tools section on pages that are blocked by robots.txt (our search result pages). Should we be concerned? Is there anything we can do about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline4 -
I want your opinions on the lack of increase in Pintrest's PR
Many months ago, a fellow marketer at my company introduced me to Pintrest, claiming that it would be good for our business. Pintrest was very much unknown by many just a few short months ago. Since then, I have seen it take off like wildfire, with excessive media coverage, registrations, and people putting the button on their sites. It must have thousands more backlinks now than it did six months ago--high quality ones too, as it's had coverage in virtually every major new media outlet. I want your opinion as to why it has remained a PR6 site this entire time. It was a PR6 site then and it still is now. I know the increase in PR is algorithmic, but come on! Can people share their experiences they've had link building for those higher PR sites? How much harder does it get?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | UnderRugSwept1 -
What's going on with my organic traffic from Google?
I am working on eCommerce website Vista Stores. My website's traffic is going down due to certain reason. I have done R & D and have assumption with auto generated content which I have added on few product pages. You can find out attachment to know more about current situation of traffic. 6789134845_d1a1578960_b.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
Tool to calculate the number of pages in Google's index?
When working with a very large site, are there any tools that will help you calculate the number of links in the Google index? I know you can use site:www.domain.com to see all the links indexed for a particular url. But what if you want to see the number of pages indexed for 100 different subdirectories (i.e. www.domain.com/a, www.domain.com/b)? is there a tool to help automate the process of finding the number of pages from each subdirectory in Google's index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0