Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of making your website compatible with search engines. Even if users enjoy the content on your website (whether it is written, video or audio) it still may not do well with Google. This is because the way Google analyzes your content is different to how a human uses it. Therefore, you need to make your website compatible with both users and search engines. The key is to find keywords that will not only generate traffic to your site but, more importantly, they attract paying customers to your site.
Once your users get there, you need to make sure that your content is enjoyable and engaging for the reader and it remains compatible with how Google analyzes and indexes websites.
This three-phase SEO Plan will help you generate more traffic, more conversions and ultimately more revenue. In this plan we start with doing research, then we optimize your website while we build content and then, we finally build links and social shares back to your site.
It’s important to keep in mind is that SEO is an ongoing process. You have to keep at it, it’s just like exercise. You can’t exercise once and call it a day. Staying fit requires regular exercise and having a well-tuned, search engine optimized website requires regular attention.
Why You Need to Do Pay-Per-Click Advertising When You Start SEO
Getting SEO right is a very hard and long process. It usually takes about six to nine months before you start to see results. Paid advertising is much easier, faster and converts better than SEO. Therefore, you should launch a paid advertising strategy while you’re building up your SEO results.
If Google made it easy to rank, then nobody would ever spend money on advertising because doing SEO would be easy. Therefore, it’s good to use a combination of SEO and paid ads. As your SEO strategy starts to show results, take the money you start making from SEO and invest it in more paid ads, so you keep growing bigger and bigger. Scale up as much as possible for as long as it’s profitable.
Phase1: Research and Competitor Analysis
During the first phase you are going to be looking for the RIGHT keywords for your niche. If you don’t determine the correct keywords to use in your content, you run the risk of generating the wrong traffic. You could end up with a lot of traffic, but NONE that turn into paying customers.
Since it takes about six months for SEO to kick in, you want to do your homework to make sure you’re targeting the right keywords, those that will result in conversions.
For example, if your site is about building muscle and you target people looking for a healthy lifestyle, those visitors may not convert. Even though muscle building and living a healthy lifestyle are similar regarding health, they are, nonetheless, two different things. If you drive people looking for a healthy lifestyle to your site and only present tips on building muscle, your content will not be relevant to many of those people. Maybe a subset of them will get a few useful tips out of it, but it may not be enough to convert them into paying customers. You need to get super focused on finding people looking to build muscle because the products that you offer are all about building muscle.
Therefore, all traffic is not equal, so you need to start by going after the right keywords.
Go to your keyword search tool of choices such as tools like SEMrush (paid) or Ubersuggest (free) and you can type in keywords from your niche. They’ll give you the following important metrics:
- Suggestions of other similar keywords within your space,
- The monthly search volume, and
- The cost per click for each keyword.
Cost per click is really useful when you’re doing paid Google ads or just doing SEO because a high cost per click is likely to be worth more and result in more conversions, otherwise why would other advertisers be willing to pay so much for them.
So, you’re looking for quality not the quantity of traffic. If you’re solely optimizing for traffic, you’re wasting your time. You want to attract relevant traffic that will convert.
SEMrush or Ubersuggest will break down competition, cost per click and search volume. Ideally, you’re looking for terms that have:
- High cost per click
- low competition
- high search volume
You won’t always find all these but this is the ideal mixture.
This can be really tedious, so for a good hack go to SEMrush, type in your URL and it will show your closest competitors. Make a list of your closest competitors (people selling the exact same products and services that you are). Once you have the list, type in your competitor URLs and SEMrush will show you:
- The keywords they’re using paid ads on Google to build traffic.
- The keywords they’re ranking for on Google.
- Which of their pages are ranking for those keywords.
- How many visitors they’re getting from those keywords.
If you know your competition is successful, these are the main keywords to go after. But make sure you check more than one competitor to catch any patterns.
There is no right number of keywords, but you want at least 20 or 30 keywords, some even extend to thousands.
An example would be a blogger on health and nutrition. This blogger can go to SEMrush and type in “Dr. Axe” (their main competitor), and it would show all the top pages for Dr. Axe that are getting traffic, and this then tells the blogger all the terms and keywords that Dr. Axes are ranking for. The blogger can then go into their analytics to see if they are targeting any of these terms to decide if they should go after them as well.
Tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs will show you “content gaps.” When you put in your URL and your competitors, it will show you all the keywords that they rank for, that you don’t, so you don’t have to do it yourself. These tools are what most SEO firms use because they are really useful, so you should use them too.
Now you’ve done your research and competitive analysis, and you have a list of keywords to focus on.
Phase 2: Optimizing Your On-Page Code and Building Content
In this phase, you want to focus on optimizing your website pages and building amazing content that will get your users engaging with it. Your number one job to do well with SEO is to produce great content on a consistent basis.
If you use WordPress, there is a plugin called Yoast (which has a free and a paid version) that will do most of your on-page SEO for you.
What is On-Page Optimization?
Google reads the source code. They read letters. They can’t see an image the way you or I can see an image. What you need to do is make your website compatible to Google when it comes to the code so not only can crawl, but it can read all your pages. So, if it can’t read your ones and zeros won’t be able to crawl your website. If they can’t crawl every single page on your website that means it will never get placed within Google and you won’t get ranked. So, the Yoast SEO helps to ensure that your on-page code (the code that Google is seeing) is compatible. Even if you’re not technical, Yoast has a guide on their site on how to set up and use the Yoast plugin and it is pretty self-explanatory.
It is important to sign up for Google Search Console, which is a free tool by Google that breaks down how your website is doing. So not only do you need google analytics, but you need the Google Search Console as well.
What’s the difference between them?
Google Analytics will show you your search traffic, but it won’t show you which keywords are driving that traffic. It will usually say “not provided” because of data privacy reasons. However, Google Search Console will showcase that data and ideally, even though you need Google Search Console for Phase 2, you should install it during Phase1. It only takes five minutes.
Now that you have set up your on-page SEO, it’s time to create content. If you’re starting off, you can start off with just one blog post per week.
Your goal should be to create content that drives people to engage with it. Google can see if people are engaged with your content by how they interact with it. Do they stay on your site for a long time? Do they scroll all the way through it? Do they leave comments? Do they share it on social media? It’s not just about creating text-based content. It’s about creating text-based content that people engage with.
There are a few things you need to do when you’re building content.
Check out the competition: The first is to use tools like SEMrush to see what popular articles your competition is creating. Look at that as a sample of good articles that are getting traction. Your goal would be to take those articles and write better and more up-to-date content in your own words. Whatever you’re creating, it has to be better. You want to make it significantly better or else what’s the point.
Use an engaging tone: Content in conversational tone does better. Use the words “you” and “I” such as:
“Aren’t you tired of going to the gym, looking in the mirror and still finding yourself not losing weight or becoming healthier? I know how it feels. I was in that position six months ago, but I figured out a solution that changed my life.”
By using “you” or “I” and storytelling, you’re having a conversation. Users respond more to a conversation than someone talking at them.
This helps with SEO because it is more engaging and Google looks for writing styles that are more engaging. Google wants to do what’s best for the user, and they can figure out what text gives the best user experience.
Please the user: You want to please the user because Google uses “user signals” or user behavior such as where they click and what they click to figure out how to rank a webpage. For example, if the majority of people clicked on the first search result and immediately clicked the back-button, Google will realize that that first search result isn’t as relevant, and it will lower it in the rankings.
To please the user:
- Write longer, more thorough blog posts. Articles on page 1 and 2 of Google have at least 2,200 words. Google likes in-depth content vs. articles that are short.
- Don’t stuff your article with keywords. Use your keywords, but don’t just stuff your content with them (neither your reader or Google will like that!).
- Use subheadings – this makes your content easier for people to skim and read.
- Keep paragraphs short – 5-6 lines are a good rule-of-thumb.
- Use images. Images make your content easier to read and digest. You can also add a video or audio content in your articles. This keeps people in your articles longer and keeps them engaged.
Always include a conclusion: Always wrap up your blog post with a conclusion and end your conclusion with a question.
For example, “What do you think about these weight loss tips? Do you have any others that work well?”
Questions will encourage people to comment and engage more. If users engage more, they are more likely to join your email list and to subscribe or to share your content.
Phase 3: Building Links and Getting Social Shares
Every link to your website looks to Google like a vote that your content is good. There are two types of votes:
- Links – another website linking to your website.
- Social Shares – doesn’t directly impact your search rankings but the more people that share your content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. the more traffic you get. The more traffic you get, the more chances for engagement. The more engagement you get, the higher your rankings.
You want to get relevant links and authoritative links: You want relevant links from the most authoritative people in your space.
If a page with a lot of authority that is relevant to your page links to your page, then that has more weight than a page that isn’t related to your topic doesn’t have much authority. So, if you had a blog about motivational speaking and Tony Robbins linked to your site from his site, that would be the ideal backlink. Google will weight that link from Tony’s site to yours very highly.
On the flip side, if you had a blog on cooking and Tony Robbins linked to your site, that link would be good, but it wouldn’t be weighted by Google as highly because Tony is not an authority on cooking.
Google doesn’t just look at who’s linking to you; they look at whether that person is relevant to you. A marketing site linking to another marketing site is much more relevant in the eyes of Google than a dog website linking to a marketing website.
To get authoritative links, you can use the SEMrush and Ahrefs tool.
If you recall, in Phase 2 you used SEMrush to see what popular articles your competitors are writing. You did that to find these articles and write better versions of them. In Phase 3, you take those same competitor’s URLs and put them in Ahrefs. Ahrefs will show you every single person and website that has linked to them.
As you can see, all that tedious work in Phase 2 can be used as a building block in Phase 3.
You then take that list and try to find the contact person for each of the websites that linked to your competitor’s articles. This is manual and tedious, but you can email every website owner, and let them know that you have created a better and more up-to-date version than the site they are currently linked to. Here is a sample of what you could say:
“Hi, [NAME]! I noticed you linked to a post [give link] about ABC. I just wanted you to know that I’ve created a post with similar content, but my article also includes XYZ which I think might be of value to your audience. Feel free to link to [include your article URL]. Thank you for your consideration!”
Many people won’t answer you, but if you can get 10 to 20 links a month, it will go a long way. You can hire a virtual assistant on Fiverr or Upwork to help you with this.
You can also use a tool called Buzzsumo. You put in keywords or URLs (for example, the URLs of your competitors) and Buzzsumo shows you not only how many social shares it has but also every person that shared that article on Twitter. You can reach out to those people and ask them to share your article as well.
Here’s a sample email:
“Hello, I noticed you shared this article from Jeff called XYZ…, which talked about how to optimize your Facebook ads. I created a similar article, but mine has ten more ways to optimize your Facebook ads, so maybe you would like to share my article as well.”
Another way you can use Buzzsumo is type in keywords like, “Facebook advertising,” “nutrition,” “marketing,” “weight loss,” “losing weight,” etc. and it will tell you all the popular articles that have been written on those subjects in the last few months or years.
This is a great strategy because when you can see what people love, it will help you spot patterns and trends and allow you to hone in on what specific types of articles in your niche do well and which ones don’t. This way you can stick with the ones that will do well so you can come up with better ideas for content creation. This helps you avoid topics that may not be popular.
Try not to spend more than 10 hours per week in each phase.
Conclusion:
In this guide, we talked about a three-phase plan to build an SEO strategy. These three phases include doing research and competitor analysis in Phase 1, optimizing your on-page code and building content in Phase 2 and building links and getting social shares in Phase 3. The goal of this three-phase SEO Plan is to help you generate more traffic and more conversions, so you end up generating more revenue.
SEO is an incredibly important activity that involves making your website compatible with search engines. As mentioned above, the key is to figure out the keywords that will drive the right traffic to your site – people who will turn into paying customers.
You want to structure your content so it is enjoyable for the reader, and they engage with you but also, so it is compatible with Google’s requirements to index your site and rank it in its search results.
SEO is a very hard and long process. It usually takes about six to nine months to start to see results, so it’s a good idea to implement a paid advertising strategy while you build up your SEO efforts.
Lastly, SEO is an ongoing process. You have to continually do it, just like you would continually mow your lawn. Remember that your competitors are continuously tweaking their SEO strategy and adding new content so, to compete, you have to continue your efforts as well.
What do you think about this 3-phase SEO strategy that we outlined above? Do you think you can implement it? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
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