EP 2: Successful SEO Requires a Structured Process

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Podcast Transcript

Intro:

Welcome to SEObits, the podcast that helps smart business owners jumpstart their SEO strategy. Tune in each week for fresh SEO insights and actionable tips that will help you improve your site’s SEO one bit at a time. Now, here’s your host, SEO Trainer and Consultant, Rebecca Gill.

Rebecca Gill:

Hey everyone, it’s Rebecca Gill and I’m back to offer more bite-size pieces of SEO information and advice.

In this week’s episode, I want to talk about establishing a solid SEO process. This may seemed like common sense to some people but the reality is, most website owners and bloggers completely skip this process part and they jump right into writing content. That my friends will not work. It is really, really important for you to establish a solid process so that when you write content, it is fully optimized, it is targeted, and someone other than your mom will be able to find it. It’s just really important and it’s something that I continuously preach and I’ve been really screaming it from the rooftop for the last year. And that’s why I want to cover it today in our podcast episode.

So, as I walk through my SEO process today, I want you to know that this is something that I – the steps in the process is something that I utilize for both myself and my clients. It’s the same process I’ve used for over a decade and I stay consistent with it because it works. This isn’t something that I pulled off the internet from someplace and then some other consultants and I started to use because they’ve already proved it. This is s a process that I figured out on my own that I put into place and I’ve established and continued to utilize year after year.

So when I first started with SEO, I did a lot of trial and error. Back then, it was the only way to learn SEO. We did not have the massive amounts of SEO courses and articles and videos that are readily available today. We truly just had to figure out how SEO worked by trying things out, making mistakes and kind of documenting what really did work and then write the process for it to keep us on track. And it seems so silly and old school but that is really how we had to do things that long ago.

So I’ve used the process that I’m going to go through today. Back then, I established it and I’ve used it throughout the years for again, myself, our various websites for Web Savvy and then my website design and my SEO clients.

I’m so focused on this process and having structure that I have an SEO template in Basecamp and every time we kick off a new client that involves any aspect of SEO, I bring in this template and then I use that as a basis to add and remove tasks. And this is because again, I know it works and it has really kept me on track so therefore I need to use it with my clients and make sure that they are also staying on track with me.

OK. So if you’ve ever been to a conference presentation or an online webinar of mine, you may have heard me go through this before. I’m going to repeat it today because it’s super important for our podcast listeners to understand that the process exists, what it is, and for them to be able to use it to find short and long-term success.

My SEO process is broken down into three core stages. These are research, planning, and execution. So, the phase one is research, and it has three core groups within it. So, the first one is asking questions about you and your target market.

The second one is using data tools like Google Analytics or Search Console or SEMrush to figure out what’s going on with you and your website or your blog.

And then the third is to research your competitors in tools like SEMrush or Spyfu.

So let me talk about each one of those a little bit in more depth. So, the first one is asking questions about you and your target demographic. Why is this important? It is really important because you need to understand who you are and what you offer and how does this applies to your target demographic, who they are, and what they need as well as what kind of challenges and questions that they’re facing.

And the reason we want to dig into that is because it’s the best way of being able to really target that group of people with SEO. We don’t want to just target the terms that are focused around your service or your product, we want to also hit questions that they have that they’re going to research before they ever get to the point of inquiring or purchasing. It’s pushing further down and deeper into that buying cycle and hopefully, more towards the start where you can really reach them.

And if you’re a blogger and you’re not actually selling something, it’s the same kind of process. Someone, maybe if you use food, they’re just not looking for a food recipe. They’re also looking for other things that might be a question before they get to that food recipe, that subscribed option that you want them to get into.

So there are lots and lots of information that we can learn through those questions. I’m actually going to make sure that the next episode that we do is focused on those questions. So while I’m not going to talk about all of these today, we’ll hit that next week on our next episode.

So the next section within my research group is the data about you. Google Analytics and Google Search Console and even Bing Webmaster Tools are completely free tools that have oodles of information if you utilize them.

SEMrush is purchased. And for me, it’s worth the money because I have data for both myself and my clients. It maybe overkill for you. But if that’s the case, you need to use Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Google Analytics tells you what’s happening on your website once people come and Google Search Console will tell you what’s happening in the search engine results pages. So people who may never actually read your website. It also gives a lot of invaluable information about the technical aspects of your site and if it’s healthy or not healthy.

If you take nothing away from this episode today, it is to make sure that you are reviewing that data. And my process we use at the beginning and ask clients for access to that right away because it is really so important and it gives me so much more information that I can get by asking them questions.

So the next area within the research is competitors. Why do we look at competitors? So the reason is, is it’s very simple. If you want to beat somebody and you want to excel and you want to take over what they’re doing, you have to understand what’s going. You need to know exactly where they’re ranking, what are their top pages, what are their top keywords, where is their traffic coming from, is it social media, is it emails, is it organic search?

You need to have that kind of information and you also need to open up your eyes to know that your traditional competitors may or may not be your online competitors. And I want you to take that away as well. So as we move forward with podcast and we talked about education and we get to the section on research your competitors, I’m going to push you to look at both traditional and online competitors because a lot of times, your traditional competitors may not be influencing search at all. It might be somebody completely different. And that’s why tools like SEMrush and Spyfu are so important for giving us that valuable data.

So after we get through the research space, we movie on to planning. And in planning, I have five different elements that we utilize. They are, first, we build the seed list of potential keywords that we’d like to target.

Next, we go into tools like KWFinder and we get search volumes for these keywords. So we know if somebody other us actually looks for them.

Next, we pull those search volumes into an Excel spreadsheet or some other type of document so we can actually add another column to that and start grading those for relevance. And relevance is how closely those terms match both you and your target demographic and the things that you offer and the things that they’re searching for.

Next, we’re going to select our top focus keywords, those phrases that we really want to target. And then we go through and we map keywords to the sitemap within our blog or our website, and it could be existing content as well as future content.

So there were five those and I ran through them and if you’re listening, these are on the website in the article for the episode so you can go grab them there. But again, it’s build the seed list, pull search volumes, rank for relevance, select or focus keywords, and create a sitemap which maps keywords to specific URLs within the website either current or future state.

And this planning process is really important and the reason it is important is because a lot of times, people just write content and throw keywords at the website and hope that the search engines are going to figure out what’s the best content for giving keyword phrase. OK. That’s not how surf works. That’s not how SEO works.

You have to make it very clear for the search engines. You have to create a roadmap for them that shows them the best piece of content for a given keyword phrase. That’s what this planning stage is about. And it’s not just giving them a roadmap, it’s making sure that those keyword phrases are going to really translate and resonate with your visitors and make sure that the visitors are using the right phrases that would bring in revenue or subscriptions to your blog or whatever your conversions focus is.

You have to always make sure that they kind of align together and that the clients which would ask me about a given keyword and I would just kind of look at them and say, “OK, let me ask you a question. Is that search going to produce an authoritative environment with you and the visitor? Are you going to now be a source of information that they’re going to respect you as the person who has information on this topic? And will it actually translate into conversions whether that’s revenue or subscriptions or something else?”

And sometimes it comes back, “No, I just want to write about it.” Well, that’s great. You can write about it but then it doesn’t really have keyword focus.

So, we want to make sure that the phrases that we’re going after are going to translate into conversions. We want to make sure that they’re going to produce a positive environment for the human visitor when they arrive on the site and it’s going to help them know that they’re in the right place, they found the right piece of information, and they want to stay with you long-term. That is the whole goal of that.

OK. So the next phase is execution. And in execution, we are now taking our plan, our keyword list and our map and we’re actually going to start making sure that we have high quality long form content for that. And again, this is new content or existing content that we’re going to go back and update.

A quick note here is high quality long form content is not 300 words. It is actually 1,000 to 2,000 words and the average amount of words for page one ranking for Google is like 1,700. And if you’re very at the top of that list, it’s going to be over 2,000.

Now, the Yoast SEO tool for WordPress just modified their plugin which I’m so thankful for and they set that benchmark at 900 words if it’s what’s considered cornerstone content. And we’ll talk about that in another episode.

But know that when you’re writing content or you’re updating your existing content, it needs to be of high quality, it needs to be really written for the human visitor, and it needs to be not just like very short 300 words.

So the next thing on my list in execution is to optimize that content for both SEO and usability. That means making ensure it’s readable. It’s short paragraphs or sub-headers or bullets. And you’re making sure that you’re utilizing your keyword appropriate throughout all the elements of that content whether it would be the URL or the header or the content itself so that the search engines will embrace it and understand that that keyword is focused on a given phrase. And that’s the whole point and I will make sure that in the show notes I include a link over to the on page checklist, the template, so that you can utilize for that process.

OK. So my next item is #4 within execution, and that’s to promote and build links. So once you published, you’re not done. You have to make sure that you’re building links into this content whether it’s inside of your website or blog or from third party sites, and that you’re sharing this in social media. And this is for two reasons; a) it helps bring in traffic but b) it tells the search engines that somebody other than your dog cares about what you write. And I use that as a joke but it’s true.

Social media sharing and comments and likes and things like that and those links coming in, those are triggers, those are data points for the search engines to understand that somebody cares about your content. When they think somebody cares about your content, they are going to give you an opportunity to rank better. It means that it’s of value. So it’s really important that as soon as you publish, you go to that next step and take care of that.

Now, the last thing in my execution stage is to reverse engineer the process that you’ve done. Find where you’ve succeeded and failed and figure out why. That’s that trial and error from before. You are going to see some things really worked and you’re going to see some things didn’t. And there is a methodology to this and a formula. You got to figure out your formula.

Everyone has got a different formula, different threshold, but we all have one and it’s easy to see once you start using that data. Once you figured out what’s successful and what you did right, you document it and you repeat it. And that is the heart of this whole process and you’re going to optimize your process and modify your process for yourself and your industry in your specific site or blog, and that’s OK. It’s making it your own. I want to just make sure I get you on the right track and I keep you moving forward in the right direction.

So, the problem again that I see is that most people forget the research and planning. They jump right into writing content and they totally forget about their target demographic and competitors and existing success rates and what’s working and what’s failing. Don’t do that. Make sure that you are producing content that has keyword focus, that you’re doing the right steps, and that you’re not jumping into that until you have a process in place that has created a roadmap for you and the search engines.

So, a takeaway for you is with your next piece of content that you’re going to want to write, just ask yourself, are you jumping in or do you have some type of structure in place? It is really important for you to have that structure and it’s really important to make sure that content, if it’s SEO-focused is of value.

In the last podcast episode, I talked about being a servant and using this role in your website or your blog to help your human visitors that are coming. Make sure that what you’re doing helps them and educates them and empowers them and answers their questions and builds their trust. That’s how you’re really going to work and win with SEO. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re small business or you’re large organization or you’re a blogger. That’s the route that you go. You have to build up that authority and that trust with both human visitors and the search engines. And once you can do that, you’re going to really make strong progress as you move forward.

OK. So before you leave today, I want to make sure that you stop and think for a few minutes about a couple of questions I’m going to ask. I want you to make a mental note of each question as I ask them because I really want them to hit and stick and stay with you. So here we go.

While working on your marketing, have you documented who you serve, what they need, and what questions they may ask?

Have you ever dug into your existing data to see where you’re ranking and where you’re completely missing out on opportunities for search traffic?

Have you ever dug into your competitors and research their top content, keywords, and sources of referral traffic or links?

Have you listed out your preferred keyword phrases and rank them for how well they relate to what you do, what you offer, and who you serve?

Have you map these phrases to your existing content and brainstorm new content you can create?

Have you written SEO-focused content that is long form and of really high quality? And once done, did you actually promote this content via social media and building links into it?

If you’re like most website owners and bloggers or marketers, the answer is probably no to a lot of these question. But don’t fret. That’s OK. I’m here to change that. I’m here to get you on track and into a solid SEO process. That’s what this whole podcast series is about and that’s my goal and it has been my goal for the last couple of years as I have pushed myself out into the community and really try to be an advocate for educating people on SEO whether it would be a presentation I’m doing or my SEO courses or bootcamps.

I want to make sure that you are educated so that you can either do SEO on your own and do it well or select the right consultant that will really serve your needs and make sure they’re taking care of you and your target demographic.

So please join me next week as we start answering some of these questions and I push more questions at you about your target demographic and you and how you can successfully help your target demographic succeed and in turn, really help your SEO and your ranking.

Thanks for joining me today.