Before you hire an SEO Expert, know these 5 basic things. (Part I)

I am not an expert. I am a startup guy. Always short of time. Always short of money. So below, it’s a wholistic view of everything SEO and backlinks. You won’t need to spend a penny. Just follow the step by step approach given here.

A crash course in SEO, is what it is.

How do you optimise SEO for your website? That too without spending money?

This is a question i used to ponder and read about. I am an obsessive note taker and below is an excerpt from my SEO notes.

Before we start, it’s a pre-requisite that you set up some webpage (maybe via wordpress) where you can edit content. This is a game you cant play sitting on the sides.

Let’s get to it.

It’s a simple thing, actually. There are only 5 things that you will have to worry about, some more than others.

1. Keyword Research
2. Technical basics
3. Pagespeed & UX
4. Backlinks
5. Negative SEO

I am covering Keyword Research and Technical basics in this part. Keyword Research is the most important and time consuming part in my opinion. The next 3 things can be found in Part II, which will be out soon.

#1 Keyword Research

Okay. Number one thing. For any sort of SEO analysis. Keywords are the bedrock of your content and this probably might be the only place where you can get creative. Here we will discuss finding the words that have the capability to rank you well.

With the backlinks becoming less and less important each day, content is the game you can play long term.

There are 2 types of keywords. Long Tail and Broad Keywords.

Long Tail Keywords (3–8 words) vs Broad Keywords

Long tail Keywords focus involves narrower user base and more targeted user base.

Most users will start with a short tail keyword like “Wordpress theme” and get a lot of links which they will open and might bounce out since it doesn’t suit the exact requirements.
The user will then type in a long tail keyword like “wordpress theme free travel blog” and then if you make that, and you optimise on that long tail keyword, the user will see you on top and that is beneficial for both user and website.

They are of 3 types:

1. Informational Eg. “How to use a smartphone”
2. Transactional Eg: “Buy graphic card online”
3. General Eg: “Ecommerce wordpress website”

Broad keywords come with high competition. Not recommended! Broad keywords also require a very high “Domain authority”. Eg: try searching “best processor”, a broad keyword and check on moz for the top two links. Both the links will have a very high domain authority.

Competitor Research

Why do you need competitor research? Well because you can’t generate all sorts of ideas and keywords on you own.

You need someone that is just 2 steps ahead of you. Someone who is using the same strategy but is just an edge away. Someone you need to take down.

We don’t want to compete with a very difficult competitor as we might end up focusing on a very broad keyword, which the strong websites are able to match due to strong domain authority.

So here’s what you do.

Step 1: Google your description in a broad keyword fashion.
Step 2: Pick top 5 competitors
Step 3: Go to similar web to find your right competitor. Their global rank should be somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000.
Step 4: Check the chosen competitor’ competitors.
Step 5: Repeat Step 3. Iterate. Again remove strong competitors.

Sidebar: A rank of 1,00,000 means a daily traffic of 4000–5000 Daily Unique visitors.

Stealing organic keywords from your competitor

For this section, I am going to use 4 tools. All of them free, so no stress.

Tool#1: Ubersuggest

Step 1: Go to ubersuggest.io (neilpatel.com).
Step 2: Search your competitors. Scroll down to the bottom and click ‘view all SEO keywords this domain ranks for’ button to open the detailed keyword analysis of this competitor.
Step3: Export as csv.
Step4: Open csv. Remove the ones with less than 1000 volume. Sort descending. We want the higher volumes.
Step 5: Remove ones with position value greater than 20. We want a smaller value of the position.
Step 6: Remove ones with SEO difficulty> 40. Greater difficulty=Greater competition.
Step 7: Take the list of keywords in the top 5 ascending and add them to the bucket.
Next repeat Steps 1–6 for the next competitor. Add their top 5 keywords to the bucket. Keep making the list longer. Step 4–6 can be played around with, the values of 1000, 20 and 40 are not constant.

The main use of Ubersuggest to me is that it is specific to looking at your competitors. You can look at the specific pages that your competitors are scoring in. You can look at the words they have specialised at, you can look at how many people search for that exact thing and how many people end up at your competitor’s webpage via that keyword. Google Keyword Planner is not aimed at that

Tool#2: Google Keyword Planner

This is a subset of Google Adwords and is much more reliable since we are (mostly) looking at Google SEO. There is a simple hack you need to know first, if you don’t want to be entering your credit card details and setting up an Ad.

Step 1: You need to click on ‘Skip the guided tour’.
Step 2: Now you’ll be taken to another page, where you’ll be asked your email, country, time zone and currency.
Choose them appropriately and click save and continue button. Now you can go to Tools in the menu bar and select keyword planner to access this tool directly.

If you don’t follow this procedure, then you might have to create your first Adwords advertising and you need to give your payment information too, before accessing keyword planner tool.
To avoid this hassle follow the procedure that’s said earlier.

Check this video to know that bit if you want to know more.

Google Keyword Planner is pretty similar and you should be able to find keyword planner as shown.

Tool#3: Need more? Just Google it :P

Simple but effective. You will see suggestions that Google throws at you.

More keyword ideas.

Tool#4: Google Webmaster Tools

Your website administrator would have an account here. From here you can see where your traffic is coming from and gauge your progress. Very helpful.

Note: This traffic on Google Webmaster is not the total traffic. It’s only the piece that’s coming from your google searches. Keep the two numbers different.

#2. Technical Basics

From a technical perspective there is a threshold here. You (almost) can’t beat others by being more technically superior. Here, our goal is to satisfy the bare minimum.

Metadescription

Given below is the example for meta description. A good metadesciption having the required long tail keywords helps boost SEO ranks. This is what metadescription looks like.

H tags

Titles, in plain language. H1/H2 tags are html tags to titles.
Titles should ensure that they represent a metadesciption match, since that is what the user came for.

If that doesn’t happen, bounce rate will increase and google will push you down.

Bounce rate is the percentage of single page visits i.e the visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page. It is also a measure of visit quality. So a higher bounce rate generally indicates their landing page is aren’t relevant to your visitor. You should know this fact that the Google takes the bounce rate as an important SEO ranking factor.

Domain SEO visibility/Domain Authority

Domain Authority basically points towards how credible the domain is. For new websites, it might take years to build that.

To improve domain SEO/domain authority visibility, there are two way

1. Backlinks
2. Direct domain name searches: If people are directly searching your name, you seem credible.

Keyword in Domain Name

In 2015, Google reduced the control of both of these in SEO ranking. Hence buying a new domain name to get that keyword in domain name is not useful.

HTTPS

Is relevant. Needs to be bought for 9$/per year approx. SSL certificates are needed. Easy task. Necessary. Don’t cheap out.

It’s a Wrap! Next 3 sections in the next part.

Huge acknowledgement to Arun whose bestseller course carries a lot of this and where my notes originated from. Cheers!