- Hey, so in this video,
I'm going to walk you through
how to create SEO content step-by-step.
And this is an interview
I did on Content Champion,
and I literally walk you
through the entire process
from finding keywords,
qualifying keywords,
creating the content,
and then optimizing the content
so that it actually ranks in Google.
So if you wanna learn
how to write SEO content
that actually works,
watch this entire video.
It's extremely in-depth
so you probably will wanna take some notes
so that you can actually
take this information that's
in there and act on it
as soon as you watch the entire video.
So if you're excited about
this free training video,
please like this video
and drop a comment below
saying you're excited, and
I'll see you in a second.
- Look, tell us a bit about Gotch SEO,
the blog itself, how did that grow?
Because you've got this
great authoritative site now
that's really at the forefront
of the industry as it were.
- Yeah.
When I first started that blog,
it's odd because I never really thought
about building it up
from an SEO perspective.
I just started because I was like,
hey, I can publish case studies
and things that would
help my clients realize
that I know what I'm doing, really.
So in the beginning,
pretty much all of my
content in the early days
was case studies and really specific stuff
that was literally just designed
for content marketing purposes,
not really for driving
organic search traffic.
But then, over time, I started to realize,
okay, I should probably start trying
to drive organic search traffic,
so then I started focusing
on more top-of-the-funnel type of keywords
like back links and anchor
text and those things.
And believe it or not,
depending on what your business model is,
those types of keywords aren't great
if you're trying to get clients
because most clients wouldn't be searching
something that specific or granular.
So I'm attracting people that already have
somewhat of an understanding of SEO.
Those people are more
appropriate for my training,
more appropriate for my
white-label services,
but they're not appropriate
for becoming a client
so that's why I also have
pages targeting St. Louis SEO
or Santa Monica SEO.
Those are the transactional
pages I built out back then.
St. Louis SEO, if you searched that,
I've been ranking that
page since 2013 or 2014.
It's been in the top.
When I was taking on clients,
that was really a big
source of client acquisition
was literally just that one page.
But yeah, it's interesting
'cause the intent
is so important to understand
which is something I
didn't really understand
in the early days.
All I understood was like,
hey, here's a keyword
and I'm gonna try to
rank from this keyword.
But now, I understand,
okay, not all keywords
are created equally.
I have to really be smart about
who am I trying to
attract into my business
and is it appropriate for
what I'm trying to sell.
So I have to think about that now.
- Okay, and that dovetails really neatly
into the subject of today's show.
We're gonna be looking
at your nine-step SEO
content creation process.
So let's go through each
of those stages in order,
look at an overview of each one.
Just give us a rundown of
what we're gonna do in there,
and then for each section,
and then we can send
people over to GotchSEO.com
to have a look at the great
post you wrote on that.
We start off, stage one:
finding our keywords.
- Probably heard it many, many times
from various SEO blogs that
you need to find keywords,
but then there's also
a big group of people
that say you shouldn't focus on keywords,
you should just focus on topics.
Those are both true.
But at the end of the day,
you need to write content
and create pages around the queries
that searchers are conducting,
whether it's topics or keywords,
it doesn't make a big difference
but you need to be able to find keywords.
My go-to technique for finding keywords
is always just to take a competitor
in whatever industry I'm working in
and then just put 'em in a Ahrefs
and just extract all their keywords.
That's usually my first step
'cause that's the easiest way.
You just know, okay,
they've already done SEO,
they've already done all
the hard work for you,
they've already done all the
keyword research for you,
so that's the quickest way
to find great keywords.
Now, at the beginning
of every SEO campaign,
I always built a keyword database.
At that point, I'm not super concerned
about whether I'm gonna go
after all these keywords.
It's more of just I'm building it out,
building as big of a database as I can
using various methods,
and, like I said, looking
at competitors' keywords
and also some other methods
like I love going into
Quora or going into Reddit.
You can find some really great
long-tail keywords in there
that actually don't have
a ton of search volume
but they are getting searched,
it's just that there isn't
a lot of data to support it.
I've seen countless times
where I attack a query
that has 10 searches a month
and it ends up driving a ton of traffic
just because Google doesn't
have the data on it really.
So that's something to consider.
But just building out a nice database
of basically as big as you can,
and then once that's done,
then you go into the qualification phase
where you're gonna basically
break that list down
and turn into a list where
you're actually going
to go after a set of keywords.
- Okay, I think number two then,
qualifying your keywords,
I think this is very difficult
if you haven't done SEO before
'cause it ties into
some of the later things
about search intent and everything else.
How do we know?
Like you say, you're not gonna be ranking
for what seems on the
surface like a great keyword
that doesn't drive any sales?
- There's a lot of different
parts of qualification.
There's the first part where
you're looking at the keywords
from just a pure competitor
analysis standpoint
from an SEO perspective,
like okay, can our website,
in its current state,
actually rank for these keyword phrases?
And if the answer is yes,
then you need to know, first of all,
actually, I won't get into that far.
I'll wait 'til later
to talk about what you need
to do to get a ranking,
but as far as qualification,
the first phase is to figure out
if you can actually rank for it.
And typically, what I'll do
is I'll compare the target website,
it could be my client's site over my site
against all the competition,
and just looking at overall site authority
because that's a really huge factor.
And if you go into Ahrefs
and you look at their
Keyword Explorer tool,
what they'll show you is
the keyword difficulty
and that's a really, really great metric.
And it's really good for
surface-level qualification.
But the challenge is that
when you search a keyword,
and there, it's only gonna show you
how many links you need to rank
for that specific keyword
and that one page.
And what it doesn't consider
is the fact that the people ranking,
although they may have
less than 10 links going
to that specific page,
they may be extremely
authoritative as a whole.
And so that's really where
the key difference is.
So you always wanna compare
your site as a whole
against the other websites as a whole.
And what I'll do is I'll just
take the top 10 competitors
and I'll just average them out
and then I compare my site against then
and say, okay, how big
of a gap is there here?
If it's huge and I'm like,
okay, maybe I need to
find a different keyword
and then I can go after
that one in the future.
And then the second part of the process is
you might be able to rank for a keyword
but you have to decide is
it actually worth the time
and the investment to
rank for that keyword?
Is it actually going to produce a result
that you want in your business?
There are plenty of keywords
that you can go after.
There are unlimited keywords
so you have to figure out
is it actually worth it.
And so one way that I figured
that out is first of all,
you always wanna target
as many transactional keywords as you can
in whatever your industry is
because those are gonna be the
ones that drive the results.
Those are gonna drive the leads,
those are gonna drive the sales,
so those are the big ones.
But then, after you've tackled those,
then you do wanna go
into those informational type of keywords
just to drive additional traffic.
Now, they won't convert as well
but they do help build your brand
and start to give you
that traction you need
to eventually turn that
traffic into leads.
One thing that's important,
which is a side topic,
is if you are targeting
informational keywords,
you need to know that that traffic
is probably not going
to convert really well.
So what you have to do
is you need to have a
conversion foundation set up
and then also a retargeting
foundation set up.
When I think of
conversions, and typically,
not very informational
type of content-focused,
so almost always have a lead magnet
or something to capture an email address.
That's really one of the best ways.
'Cause if you look at
your conversion rates
for informational keywords,
maybe you're converting less than 1%
of search visitors into a new customer
but if you add a lead
magnet to those pages
or your informational assets,
you could convert up to three to 5%
of that traffic into an email sub,
and then you can nurture them
and actually bring them
back to your website
when you create new content.
It creates this nice little cycle
where you can just nurture over time
and then you can drive
more conversions that way.
The second part is to make sure
you have retargeting set up
'cause most people are not
gonna convert to anything.
They're just gonna leave.
It's actually funny
because most informational
traffic is often cold.
They don't know who you are,
they're completely new users,
so although you may have produced
an incredible piece of content,
you may have answered that
query to the fullest extent,
they still don't really know who you are
so once they've gotten their answer,
they just exit and then
they're gone forever
in a lot of cases.
So if you have that retargeting set up,
you can bring them back,
and then hopefully, they can convert
on that second try or that third try.
So that's really, really important.
- Okay.
And that follows on then to stage three.
Out of all those keywords you've got,
you're qualifying them, you're
looking at your competitors,
we're gonna do some analysis
of our competitors like you say,
then you're gonna select for
SEO content purposes a keyword,
the main keyword for that article.
So is that just gonna be the one
that at the top of the
funnel gets the most traffic?
- Not necessarily.
I don't always do it
based on most traffic.
Typically, there needs
to be a traffic there
to make it worth the effort
because depending on
how competitive it is,
it could very resource-intensive
type of situation,
but I'm looking at a variety of things.
I'm looking at traffic,
I'm looking at the overall
keyword difficulty,
how many links am I gonna actually need
to actually rank for this
because you can create the
best content in the world
but if your site isn't authoritative
and you don't have links,
it's not gonna matter.
You're not gonna rank.
So unless it's really,
really uncompetitive,
you may only need a few links.
But in most cases,
you're gonna need a pretty
decently-strong website
and links going to the
actual informational asset.
Typically, I'm just looking
for whatever's the lowest-hanging fruit,
what's the least competitive
but also can drive a lot of good results
and is worth the investment
of time and resources?
- Okay.
And that comes out of
the return on investment
for that keyword as well
if you're looking at it so holistically.
If your average order
value is $500 or whatever,
if it's gonna cost you thousands
of pounds to rank that,
head turn that keyword, it's
never gonna be worth it, is it?
- No, no, yeah.
For example, if you're running
a content marketing company,
ranking for content marketing,
yes, that would be really valuable for you
but is it really--
- That would be nice.
- Yeah, but really, how
valuable would it be?
How long would it take
for you to actually get
a return on investment
because of how much you have to spend
just to be able to rank for that?
You'd have to buy hundreds and hundreds
and hundreds of thousands of
dollars of link placements
to even rank for something like that.
You have to consider those things,
and it's really, really important.
Honestly, I'm always looking
at it from a money perspective
'cause really, it's a business.
SEO isn't this fun
little game that we play.
It's really just a marketing
vehicle to grow a business.
You shouldn't be just ranking for keywords
just because you want rankings.
That's a pointless endeavor.
You could really be spending your time
doing a lot of other things in business
than just ranking for keywords
that aren't gonna drive any conversions.
And there's also a better
way to even build your brand.
If you're purely focused on SEO,
it's really not a great
way to build your brand
'cause it's always an
individual type of situation.
You rank for a keyword,
you get cold visitors,
and then they leave.
And you're not really building your brand
unless they're seeing you multiple times.
There's a lot of other
better ways to do that.
- I looked at ranking
for content marketing
a couple years ago,
just what would it take,
and I thought I'd have to take
a loan out against the house
to ever do that so that's
not gonna be an option.
So okay, number four.
This is very difficult.
I still struggle with this,
unless I go and actually
look at the top 10 in Google
to see what Google says
is the search intent.
So tell us about establishing
a search intent strategy.
- Yeah, so this is huge.
Really, if you get this wrong,
this can pretty much wreck
your entire strategy.
Like you said, really the best way
to figure out the search intent
is just to literally go into Google
and see what it's showing.
I was having this discussion
with someone in the
Gotch SEO Academy Group
and I've been noticing that some people
have been getting this
concept a little misconstrued.
So what happened is I said that,
yes, you wanna model the search intent.
There're pretty much four
types of search intent.
There's informational
intent, transactional.
Informational just means
how to build back links.
They're just looking for
solutions to their problem.
They don't really know
what the solution is.
They're just looking to
learn more about the topic,
so it's really top-of-the-funnel.
And like I said, going back
to what I said previously,
not gonna convert super well.
But then there are transactional keywords
which are gonna be the
ones like someone searching
for a St. Louis SEO company,
or searching for the best SEO tool.
Those are all transactional
types of keywords
because they could lead to
a conversion in some way.
And then you have comparison queries
which aren't as frequent
which would just be
like Moz versus Ahrefs,
SEMrush versus Ahrefs.
Those are the type of comparison queries,
and they're actually transactional as well
'cause it's someone
who's in the research
phase of the process.
And then the last one, our
navigational search queries
which are fun to go after
but that means that someone is
searching for the brand name,
so they typically already
know what the brand is.
So they're either searching
for Gotch SEO blog,
or searching for Ahrefs,
or they could even be searching
for Ahrefs login page for example.
So those are all navigational keywords.
Those have value in different ways.
But yeah, so understanding
those four types
is really important.
But the one thing you have to do
is when you look at the search results
is you need to see is Google
showing informational content
or showing transactional content?
And pretty much, most of the time,
you can figure it out
in about two seconds.
'Cause you can just tell.
If I search how to build back links
and every single post is
about how to build back links,
it's pretty clear it doesn't
have transactional intent.
It has informational intent.
Now, the one key nuance
that some people have
been getting mixed up
is just because every single person
on the first page for
how to build back links
has 17 million ways to build back links
and it's a list post,
that doesn't mean you
should create a list post.
It's not about the type of
content you're creating,
it's about the intent.
And that's a really big nuance,
and I've been seeing
some people mixing that up a little bit.
But if all the top 10
results have list posts,
I am not gonna create a list post.
That is 100% a fact.
I'm gonna create something
that is so radically different,
because then when someone's
looking through a search results
and 10 of them are list posts,
and all of a sudden I'm in there
and it's a data-driven post,
what's gonna stand out?
I'm gonna attract all that organic CTR
even if I'm not even ranking number one
just because it's totally
different than what's ranking.
That's really an important concept
and I have been seeing
some people mixing it up
but it's just important
to know that nuance.
- Hmm, okay.
Stage five then: developing
a content strategy,
coming out of that search intent strategy.
I'm gonna throw a bit of a
spanner in the works here
because Surfer SEO is a
great piece of software
for on-page optimization.
It's telling people who create outliers
of really large content
that maybe they should
scale the content back
to fit with what everyone else is doing.
But that fits what you're saying
about search intent strategy, doesn't it,
when you're going to create
your content strategy.
- Yeah.
Yeah, so at this stage,
basically, what this means
is developing a content
strategy and a content brief,
so how you're actually
gonna execute that content.
Yeah, that's an interesting concept
where you want it to be
exactly like the competitors
just because that's what Google's showing
but I actually don't really
agree with that concept
because that's not modeling search intent,
that's just copying someone's
content type. (laughs)
That's not really the same thing.
So for me personally,
and I'm probably on the
extreme side of this,
but I always think if you
are going after a keyword,
your page and the way you optimize it
and the copy that you use
should just be radically different.
It's gonna benefit you
from an SEO perspective.
It's also gonna benefit you
for a ton of other reasons
because you're just standing out.
It's like the purple
cow type of situation.
So I think that's really important.
But yeah, as far as developing
the content strategy,
a lot of that preliminary work
that we've walked through,
it's setting you up to already have
that strategy developed in a lot of cases,
but a few things that
I'm doing at this stage
is I'm actually going
competitor by competitor
and examining them on a page-level basis.
What I'm looking for is, first of all,
what's the average word count?
That is a good thing to know
because least you can know,
okay, the average work
count is 2,500 words.
I know I need at least to 2,500
words in most cases or more.
We can talk about word count.
I've changed my philosophy
about that a little bit
because I've had a few posts
where we've actually decreased word count
and seen an increase in performance.
And the reason is
because we made it leaner
and better, better writing,
and so that actually will benefit more.
'Cause it actually, if you think about it,
if you just have a ton of
content, it's unreadable,
it's not gonna perform well
'cause then the users are gonna bounce
and they're not gonna consume the content.
So really, the goal of
every page should be
to get the users to consume the content
which increases dwell
time, leads to conversions.
And those are all things
that, of course, Google knows is going on,
so they can track everything.
That's really important but
that's a separate topic.
But the main thing I'm looking
for when I'm analyzing a page
is average word count across
the top five or 10 competitors,
and then also I wanna look
at various other things
like are the pages well-designed?
Are the pages readable?
Is the content really readable?
Can you tell that it's been through
a deep editorial process?
Those are things that I'm thinking about.
And I'm basically looking for weak points
in the competitors' content.
My biggest strategy is to figure out
what my angle is going to be.
And if everyone has a list post,
I know, okay, I'm not
gonna do a list post,
so that's off the table.
I'm gonna do something
that no one has done.
And oftentimes, in a competitive industry,
you're gonna have to do something
probably pretty radical.
In the SEO industry, it's
extremely competitive.
You're competing with people
who know how to create good content.
You're competing with people
who understand these
concepts really, really well.
So you have to do a lot of dramatic stuff
to get any traction.
But if you're in the coffee industry,
you're not gonna be dealing
with the same type of caliber of content.
So you can do stuff that's not as intense
but still really stands out.
That's like what I'm thinking about
when I'm thinking about
the content strategy,
but it's looking at the content itself,
the design, the user experience,
and thinking about a
way to just make a page
that's better for users
and attacks that search query the best.
- And in the case of Gotch SEO,
that would include custom
videos and custom graphics.
So everything's totally
unique, everything.
It really sets the bar higher, doesn't it,
than just putting your
stock photos in there,
someone else's video.
It's all made with that
high editorial process
like you're a publishing house,
that you're producing something
that you can be proud of,
really, at that stage.
- That's exactly right.
And the thing is, if I don't
do that caliber of work,
I'll just disappear
because there are people that
are doing that caliber work
so there's no way that I can
just come in with stock photos
and a 400-word article.
Nothing's gonna happen
for me if I do that.
It's always gonna be
dependent on the industry.
You have to adjust your strategy
depending on what you're working with.
And obviously, the end goal
is to always try to rank
with the least amount of
resources and investment.
If you can rank with spending
100 bucks, then do it.
You should totally do it.
And then you can improve
that page over time
and invest in that page over time
once you get that traffic flowing in.
But really, the goal is to rank
with the lowest investment possible.
But unfortunately, in our industry,
SEO or digital marketing,
it's hard to rank without investing
at least a lot of time or a lot of money.
- So stage six then,
this is the bug bearing many people,
especially if they're busy,
they're small business
owners listening to this,
creating a content, they
might not have time to do it.
There might be someone
internally that can do it
but at this stage, creating your content,
if you've got all the steps previously,
you could have a great framework
that you could get someone
else to write for example.
- Yeah, that's right.
And really, the way
I've built this process
is so that you can't hand it
off to someone to create it.
Of course, in certain situations,
it's really, really hard to
create expert-level content
if the expert isn't creating it.
You can obviously try to ghostwrite it,
you can have the subject matter expert
come up with all the unique points
and they can proofread it
and they can do all that,
it's definitely possible, I've done it.
But in some cases,
you will need the expert or
the subject matter expert
to actually create the content.
In a lot of cases, what I like to do is,
well, actually pretty,
much in every case now
because of ITH and the standards
that Google has now for expertise
and making sure that information
is extremely credible,
something they really
care about a lot now,
you do want your content
to at least be approved
by a subject matter expert,
and then the person that that
content's being attributed to
should be someone who's at
least competent in the topic,
has some sort of qualifications
to write about it.
So that's important.
But there are really two paths
when it comes to creating content:
create it yourself or have
someone else create it.
But at the end of the day,
the most important part
in the middle there
is to have it created
with an expert level type
of editorial guidelines.
- And if you put all that work
into doing all your research
and get all the strategy in order,
the search intent, everything else,
this is where a lot of people fall down
because they don't wanna invest
in that content creation process.
You've gotta make that Rolls Royce content
if you can, haven't you?
Because it converts better, everything!
I've had clients where if you
provide fantastic content,
people actually read it.
You can see they're
reading the whole page.
You can see they're clicking
on the calls-to-action
and they're doing the things you want,
but they're never gonna
do that, like you say,
unless you provide that really
high-quality stuff in the first place.
- Yeah, that's exactly right.
And honestly, out of
every marketing investment
I've ever made over the last six years,
nothing has ever been better
than just investing in
really good content.
It's just always the
best investment longterm.
It's obviously a big investment upfront
but longterm, it always
outperforms everything else.
It just does.
I would just say that
the thing that we've been doing recently
is we don't even try to create
a lot of content anymore.
And that's been my philosophy for a while,
but when we find a keyword,
we literally only focus on one keyword
until we're dominating.
It's an odd approach but
it just works so well
because what happens is
if you're just focusing
on one keyword that's been
really well-qualified,
you know that it's conquerable,
and you allocate all your time,
all your resources into
ranking that one page,
that one keyword, primary keyword,
you'll be surprised what happens.
I'll give you an example.
My wife has a fashion blog.
And for the first two or
three years of that blog,
I purposely told her, I'm like,
I'm not gonna help you with the SEO,
I'm not gonna help you with the marketing
because I didn't wanna be
the overbearing husband
who's like, hey, you should
be optimizing your title tags.
I'm just not gonna do that.
I'm not gonna be involved with that.
So I just let her do her own thing
and what happened is she was
creating a lot of good content
because what she was doing,
she was modeling the other competitors.
So the other fashion
bloggers, what they would do
is they would just post these outfit posts
and it would be 10
pictures of their outfit
and then there'd be 50
words on the blog post.
That's fine if you have a lot
of branded searches coming in
or people searching your individual name,
but if you're trying to
drive organic search traffic
without having a big brand,
that's not gonna work really well.
She built up, she
accumulated 200 blog posts
of just really thin content like that.
So then I came in about a year ago.
She's like, okay, now you have to help me
'cause this is too much.
So I'm like, all right,
fine, I'll help you.
So what I did, the very first thing I did
is I looked at her content,
and I said, okay, a lot of this content's
gonna have to be deleted or
consolidated or improved.
We ended up deleting, I think
it was 110 blog posts deleted,
not even anything, just deleted, gone
because they just
weren't adding any value,
didn't have any traffic,
they didn't have any links.
And a lot of 'em weren't even that unique.
They were just a collage
picture of a various outfit,
or didn't even have her in it.
So that was content
you need to get rid of.
And then what we did is we
we took some of her content,
these are unique outfit pictures,
and we consolidate it into one page
for a keyword we were targeting.
And then for the next year,
we just focused on making
that page better and better.
We did, every month, we could consolidate
another post into it that was relevant,
and another post.
Ended up consolidating,
had to have been at least
15 different blog posts
into this one asset to just
have this massive outfit post.
And then what we did is we're like,
okay, this post is long enough now,
it's 4,000 words, something crazy,
so then we started to work on the design.
So then we took all of her pictures,
instead of them just
being a really long page
of all these different pictures,
we created a custom slider
so she could have all the pictures
easily accessible for each outfit.
So then just making
iterations on it over time
and acquiring links to it,
the page just dominates.
Her traffic increased by
1,300% in nine months.
Not just that individual
page, her entire site,
that's all the traffic.
So it's just crazy what can happen
when you find a great
keyword that's been qualified
and you just go all in on that keyword,
and then you can just
continually iterate on that page
and make it better and better.
And of course, you need a lot of links too
which is the next step
coming up here soon.
- Okay.
Where does that fit, really
quickly, just a side issue,
with themed clusters of content?
'Cause you've taken all
of those smaller posts
and rolled them into one,
you're dominating with that one mega post
that's really well-optimized,
would you then go after any
more authority in that theme
or is it then done by
virtue of having that post?
- There's always a fun
discussion about topic clusters
and building topical relevance that way.
But for me, once we hit a
keyword, that keyword's done.
We would go after other variations
that are still relevant
to that primary phrase
but we would never go after that keyword,
that exact phrase ever again.
And so in this case, it was like,
she had 20 different
pages about fall outfits.
So each individual page
had one unique fall outfit.
And there's nothing
inherently wrong with that
but I thought it'd be a lot better
to have 38 fall outfits in one post
because she's never gonna
rank for fall outfits
with any of those little posts.
There's just no way she
would ever rank for it.
So we know that the only
way she'd rank for it
is to have one dedicated
page to fall outfits.
And then we know,
okay, now we need to
create a spring outfits,
and then a summer outfits,
and then a winter outfits,
and then a Christmas outfits.
Those are all technically different
but they're still topically relevant.
They're all helping each other,
they're all supporting each other.
And then, of course,
making sure you have a good
internal linking structure
once you start to build out those assets.
But yeah, building out those
really big pillar assets
should be the focus of
most websites, I think.
- Okay, cool.
That was number six in
SEO content creation
for the master class as it were.
We're on to number seven.
We've created the content
so number seven is
optimizing that content.
Tell us about that.
- I don't optimize content super hard.
I just try to do it as
natural as possible.
So placing the keyword in
the most important spots,
gonna be a title tag, meta description,
H1 and the first sentence,
and then I'll try to get
it in the first H2 tag,
but usually it's gonna be
a variation of the primary keyword,
and then maybe one more
time in the last sentence.
And then from there, it's
all just writing naturally.
So whatever comes naturally.
Of course, one thing I do is
to avoid doing anything that's spammy.
So in the case of the
fall outfits example,
I could have, for each
outfit, did it like:
fall outfit number one,
fall outfit number two,
fall outfit number three,
and I just figured that's a little much.
I don't need to jam that
in there every single time.
So I just did outfit one, outfit two.
Trying to think through it,
do I really need to be jamming the keyword
in every single spot?
I definitely don't.
Can Google understand this page
based on the way I've structured it?
Probably.
At that point, once
you've put your keywords
in the most important spots,
then you wanna focus on
adding keyword variations
into the copy in a natural way.
So in the case of fall outfits,
you wanna add stuff like outfits for fall,
or if you're trying to find
really good outfits for autumn,
just really trying
to get those different
variations in there,
and then even adding title modifiers
is another important thing
that I do pretty much all the time
unless it doesn't make sense
which is adding the word best or top
and then adding the year is always huge.
It always drives so
much long-tail traffic.
It always shocks me how
many people don't do it.
It's literally the easiest optimization
you can do on a page,
you just add best or add the year
and you'll see such a spike in traffic.
It's honestly insane.
The thing that's cool about it
is if you're targeting
a competitive keyword,
so if I'm targeting anchor text,
I could of course target anchor text
and it's gonna take me a
long time to rank for that.
It's gonna take me a really short time
to rank for anchor text 2019.
In the meantime,
while I'm trying to rank for
that really hard keyword,
I know I can start getting
traffic into that page
which then could lead to social shares
and user engagement and possible links
which then would help support ranking
for the harder keyword.
Yeah, so you have to think
through those things.
And then as far as outside
of just placing keywords,
some other really important factors
is the actual page loading speed.
That's always huge.
That can be a challenge
when you're dealing
with really big assets,
especially in the case of hers
where she has so many images
that she's working with.
That was a tough situation
that we had to deal with.
So we had to literally
take all of her images
they were gonna put in
there, take 'em off her site,
resize them to the site
that they're gonna be on the actual page
because downsizing is a really big factor
when it comes to page
loading speed on the images.
So we had to do that,
then we had to compress them all,
and then we had to bring
'em back onto the site.
So it was a big process to
go through in doing all that,
but we knew if we just kept
them the way they were,
the loading speed would've been awful.
Thinking about that, and
then at the end of the day,
just making the page good for users
is really the important part.
- If then, we've got an
item here, number eight,
which is publish that,
we've done everything prior to that,
we've just optimized the content
but we're publishing as part
of some overarching content
strategy, aren't we?
We're not just hitting publish
as soon as we think we're ready,
we've gotta get that editorial standard up
and everything else, don't we?
- Believe it or not,
everything I just gone through
is like the first part
of the process, (laughs)
which just might shock some people.
But yeah, once you publish,
the work has kinda just
started because from there,
you're gonna have to watch
how this asset performs
and you're gonna have to
promote it like crazy,
and you're gonna have
to acquire links to it,
and then you're gonna have
to see how it's performing
and if you need to iterate
on it and make it better.
You need to give yourself a window
of at least three to
six, sometimes 12 months
depending on how
competitive the keyword is.
But my approach is almost
always just to publish,
try to acquire a couple links,
see what happens, see where it goes,
and if it gets stuck on the
second page for a couple months,
I know, okay, it probably
needs more authority,
maybe needs more content.
And typically, in most cases,
I'm gonna be adding more
content, making the page better,
and then acquiring more links.
So I just use a combination
of those two things
over and over and over
until it gets to where it needs to go.
- And how long does that take?
Given you've done all of those steps,
you've done them really thoroughly,
for someone like yourself
who's got a really authoritative blog,
that iteration process
of a bit more content, few more links,
you kinda nailed that.
You don't have to do too
much of that, do you now?
- No.
That's the beauty of once
your site gets strong.
You don't need as many individual links
going to those specific pages.
So for example, when Forbes
publishes an article,
they're ranking on the
first page immediately.
It may not seem fair but
that's just the way it is.
It takes a lot of time
to build the authority of a site.
Acquiring links is hard.
It's not an easy thing at all.
What you have to do to get
those links is even harder.
So it does take a little
bit of patience as well.
But really, I pretty much tell this
to every member in the academy
and anyone that I talk to in consulting
or even clients that the biggest,
one of the biggest goals
for an SEO campaign
is to build your site's authority
'cause that just makes everything easier.
It's literally the lead domino.
Once your site's authoritative,
everything gets easier.
That should always be the objective.
And really, there's really
only one way to do that
and it's to get links on
relevant blogs in your industry.
That's really the only solution.
- But everything we've done up to now
gives you a really good horse in the race,
gives you a favor, as it were,
with the content you've created.
If you don't create your
SEO content properly,
no one will wanna link to you anyways.
If you don't invest in that,
you're just wasting your time.
- Yeah, that's exactly right.
Even before that, just
targeting the right keywords,
which is where a lot of people actually,
before they even get
to making the content,
they end up targeting keywords
that are just way outside of their league
to even be going after and
they don't even realize it,
and then they're like,
why are we spending
all this money on links
and spending all this
money on this keyword,
and it's not even on the
fifth page of Google.
And it's not because they're doing
something technically wrong,
they targeted the wrong keywords.
It's literally huge.
It's so huge to target the right keywords,
and that's why I spend a
lot of time in that phase.
I don't just skip right over.
I really think about it a
lot and analyze it a lot
before I make a decision to go after one.
- Okay.
So we've gone through everything,
we've got to number nine, the final stage,
everything's gone to plan,
we're ranking, we're dominating
for that search term,
we repeat it all.
- Yeah.
I was explaining my strategy earlier
is kind of like a focus strategy.
So we, a lot of the time,
we'll just create either
one to five assets,
and then those just become
the focus of our promotion
for the time being
because we just don't wanna
spread our resources too thin.
If we're trying to acquire links
to 20 different blog posts,
it's gonna be really,
really hard to do that.
And more than likely,
if we put up 20 assets,
they're probably not gonna be that good
and even deserve the links
that we're trying to get.
So much better to focus
on a couple assets,
make 'em incredible, make
them very link-worthy,
and then go out there and
get as many links as you can.
- Well, look, I've done this
'cause I'm a member of Gotch SEO Academy
based on what you said, and it works.
So that is a great, great
system that's proven
and that anyone can follow.
So remind us where we can
find the Gotch SEO Academy
and your great blog as well.
- Yeah.
So you can just GotchSEO.com.
Currently on the homepage,
I have a free training set up
so you can just enter your
email and sign up for that.
But the academy is closed to the public
for the majority of the year.
So I only open it up about
one to three times per year.
So if you join my email list,
you'll get notified when it opens,
and then you can enroll.
- Fantastic!
Well, look, thank you very much, Nathan,
for coming on the show.
All that remains to say is
I wish you the best of luck
with everything in future.
- All right, thank you so much.
