So now in step 2, we have all that great research, now we conduct the keyword research based on all that super detail we have on your customers and what their needs are.
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.
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.
Here is an example of the top 10 competitors for the term “celebrity gossip”. We actually used a tool from SEOMoz to generate this but you get the idea. If you had a website about celebrities and news about them, people interested in that information likely would use this term. These sites are who you are competing against.
So we do this analysis for a fair number of the most important categories of keywords and put all that info into a nice workbook.
We don’t do the analysis of this data right now. All we are doing in this step is finding out who are competition is in the search engines. The next step is where we do all that analysis.
Okay, so now we’ve completed the first four of six steps. Here, in step 5, we are going to look at that competitor list we had in step 4 and see what these web sites are doing righ. Why are these competitors doing better than your site? What can we learn from their title tags, external links, navigation structure, template design, etc….
So what kind of stuff do we analyze?
We try to look at multiple aspects of the competitors:
features, what content do these sites have that we don’t?, what tools do they have on the site that we should try out?
Information architecture – how are these sites organized? Do a lot of your competitors organize their content in a similar fashion? How does these sites organize their information compared to your site?
We also look at links coming in to the site and how they compare to your site
If possible we look at relative traffic volumes as well
Okay, so we have completed all these five steps. The last step is to create the actual seo strategy for your web site.
Well here we are. We have done the following:
Step 1: We defined target markets & their needs
Step 2: We did categorized keyword research.
Step 3: We discovered Gaps & Opportunities
Step 4: We determined our competitors
Step 5: We analyzed our competitors
So now we put all this together and come up with your SEO strategy document.
Here is an example of the document outline….
Insights: we take the most important insights, issues and findings from all those steps and give you a concise summary of where you stand.
Linking partnerships – here we suggest new external linking partners, blogs, forums, directories that we have identified as good link candidates
New content – we provide you ideas on new pages or even entire new sections to add to your web site
We then assign keywords to each of your urls
Page titles and suggested meta descriptions
In some cases we will suggest reorganizing your web site content and internal linking to achieve better seo performance
And finally, we provide you next steps, how you should proceed, we try to prioritize these various recommendations for you.
Any super technical issues and fixes we will provide in another webmaster/technical fixes document.