Assessing your SEO Situation By: Wyatt Jozwowski So you have a website Doesn t matter if it s your own website or your client s Either way, you ll have to assess the situation. There are a few things that we need to know Is the site completely optimized? Is there enough relevant content? What keywords are relevant to the content? Do the keywords have a lot of competition? What will it take to beat out the competition? Is it possible to rank this site for these particular keywords? Google is not the Wild West Don t build backlinks blindly And that s where everyone goes wrong They just start building tons and tons of backlinks with no game plan You need a game plan.
Does this sound familiar? You pick keywords that you want to rank your website or video for OR Your client gives you their website + keywords that they want to rank for. THEN You do NOT analyze the competition You never find out EXACTLY what it will take to get to page 1 You do NOT optimize the website with relevant content And FINALLY You blindly build backlinks hoping that the website ranks, but it usually never does (SURPRISE) And sadly, this is how most SEO s operate But I don t like guessing I want to be 90% certain that I ll be able to rank this SPECIFIC website for these SPECIFIC keywords. And in order to do that... You have to strategically plan out your campaign And attack the right keywords with right website
First, analyze the competition And I don t just mean to take a 10 second look at how many backlinks the 1 st result has We want to know the QUALITY of the backlinks Are the backlinks from authority sites? Are the backlinks from high PR sites? For this step, we will be using http://www.majesticseo.com (A Free Tool) So for an example, I ve searched DUI Lawyer Tampa Let s take a look at the 1 st organic result:
http://duiattorneytampa.info I put it in Majestic SEO and get this back: We can see how many backlinks and what kind of backlinks. Now, it s important to remember Just because they have 832 backlinks doesn t mean you need 832+ backlinks to beat them. Quality > Quantity in 2014
Look at the quality of the backlinks We want to see where the backlinks are coming from With Majestic SEO, we can see exactly where their backlinks are coming from and analyze the quality Analyze the PR And Analyze the Authority Just click the backlinks tab
This allows us to check out the quality of the actual backlinks of our competition Along with the anchor text Now answer these questions Can you create higher quality backlinks? Can you create enough quality backlinks to beat the competition while still looking natural? If you answered yes to both of the above questions, then it s time to move on On- Page Optimization with Relevant Content It s no secret that the more relevant content you have, the more of an advantage you will have over your competition But it s not strictly necessary. Remember: It s 2014, we re not keyword stuffing articles anymore. And we re going very easy on the exact keyword anchor text So take this all into consideration when filling out your website. Finally, compare your site s content with your competition s content.
Make sure your site is fully optimized Check your load speeds. Check for 404 errors. Check for broken redirects. And make sure you have an xml sitemap. In fact, I recommend using http://www.woorank.com to make sure your site is 100% optimized for Google s liking. It will even help you out with your META info, even though META info doesn t play a huge rule with search results anymore But that s neither here nor there. And it will help with your headlines, internal pages, images In addition, there are multiple Wordpress plugins that can help you with your on- page SEO Such as: SEO by Yoast https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress- seo/ Once your site is optimized And then Attack! And you ve picked your target keywords
And you ve thoroughly analyzed your competition And you ve officially decided that you can take over the 1 st, 2 nd, or 3 rd spot on the 1 st page Then it s time to start building those backlinks, baby (I recommend building them yourself, so you can control the speed and monitor your results closely) But that s a whole different game, and I ll leave that for another day. Hope you learned a few things! Talk soon, Wyatt Jozwowski