In this video, Chad & I talk about a great onsite optimization strategy in practical terms that you can implement on your own OR call us for help. In sum, the steps are:
1. Identify existing demand.
2. Do competitive keyword analysis.
3. Test the waters (Start with a fairly easy keyword and see how it goes)
4. Write content on your site.
5. Track the reach of your content. Is it bringing people to your site?
6. Promote your content.
7. Rinse and repeat
Watch the video below to learn about this strategy in detail.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Hello, and welcome to our onsite optimization video. I'm Chad Hill, and I have Adam Stetzer here with me today.
Good afternoon, Chad. We've been talking about onsite seo in our video blog series quite a bit. And I know for a small business, it's a real challenge. They don't seem to do it as much as they should, even though it has great rewards, and a very strong return on investments. So I'd like to dive a little bit today into what a great onsite optimization strategy is in real practical terms.
Absolutely. And I think the first place that that has to start is with identifying keywords, or the demand. What are people searching for? And what kind of content can you create and put on your website that they'll find, and then learn more about your business? That's onsite seo.
So starting with identifying demand, really what we're recommending is that you use something like our web grader, where you put in your website and then maybe a couple of your competitors, and you look at what rankings do they have that you don't. And I'm not saying to focus on their number one keyword, because oftentimes that's very difficult. But scroll down the page a little bit, and find a keyword with 50 searches a month, or 100 searches a month.
And then identify that as a potential target. And then you can check to see how competitive that is by looking. If you search for that keyword in an exact quotes, you don't want anything that has much more than 30, 40, 50,000 results to start with.
I like that. So the first step in onsite seo optimization is actually testing the waters on where the demand is, and how competitive the space is. And you're recommending that beginners start with a fairly easy keyword. I completely agree.
Another tool you can use there is Google AdWords. And when you look at those keywords, change the check box to look at exact match results, rather than broad. I like to pick a phrase that has maybe 150 searches a month, exact match, and is also labeled as low competition by Google when you're picking that first target.
That's a great shortcut there. The second thing you do is actually create great content. And there's a lot of different ways to do it.
One of the ways that were demonstrating now is using a video blog, where we sit down and prepare our topic, and then get on a video blog and discuss it for a few minutes. And then from this, we can generate a transcript when we post it to our website.
But of course you can write blogs. You can do infographics. There are people who create white papers. But all of these are things you can do to create compelling content to ramp up your seo onsite optimization.
And once you have that content, you want to go back and make sure that the topic that you set out to write about was actually mentioned in that video, or in that blog that you wrote. So go back and make sure that you've got the right keywords in there, and they're mentioned enough so that it sorts to the top of being one of the main things you're writing about.
The other thing you want to do is, if you are using video or other rich media in your document, you want to make sure you take advantage of things like schema.org, and authorship that Google offers. So that you can get extra rich snippets in the Google search results. So first you write the content, then you tune it. Those are the second and third steps.
Right and couple other things I would mention are, put good onsite seo optimization links to other areas of your website talking about similar topics. And put links to high authoritative sites that are not owned by you, that would also be helpful to your readers to achieve very natural looking co-citation. And lastly, make sure your page is very attractive.
Put good images within the content, particularly if you have long blog posts. You need frequent breaks for the eye. You need bolded titles, so it helps them drive down the page. And you need to have an image in the frame of the blog, pretty much at all times. And they need to be attractive.
Great additions. And I think the final thing you want to do once that content is out there is you need to track it and promote it. So use Google Analytics to track how many visitors come to the website. Use a search engine ranking tracker to actually see where your website ranks on that term.
And you want to monitor that to see whether or not you're coming up in the rankings, and getting traffic from those terms. Because sometimes you might have picked a keyword that was a little too hard, or maybe it didn't have quite a searches. And so you're not seeing any results. You're not seeing people come in your website from that. And that's something you want to watch.
And then finally one of the ways to kick start that process is to go out and use social media to promote it. So whether that's tweeting it, or posting it on your Facebook page, but also some more interesting things, like getting other people in your company to do the same thing. Have them help you promote it. Because that's a great way of getting an instant audience on that new content, and then seeing where you can go from there.
Yeah, step four is really my favorite part of the whole onsite optimization process. Because you're really getting a feedback loop to see what you're doing, if it's working. And I like that in step one we recommended starting with very low competition keywords. They won't bring tons of traffic. But what they will do, if you follow these four steps, is they will reinforce that the onsite seo process works.
That's very important. As you see your content move up the rankings, and hopefully hit page one, or as Chad said, you start to apply offsite tactics to push it from where it stopped, maybe page three up to page one, you'll get pretty excited about this process. Now if you do what we said, and you picked a low competition keyword with maybe 150 or 200 searches per month, exact match, that's really only a trickle of traffic.
But the point is to demonstrate to yourself that this process works, get excited about it, and repeat. Repeat the discipline over and over again, each time moving up into more and more competitive spaces. And you'll start to see that your overall traffic pattern is really improving, because your onsite optimization is very effective.
