Launching a startup is a huge task all on its own. While it can be a challenge to factor SEO into the mix, it's an incredibly important consideration. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand shares a comprehensive plan to kick off your new SEO audit and grab a piece of that organic search pie from the get-go.
Pro tip: For easy listening, this video is broken up into 9 chapters that correspond with the transcript below.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Hi, everyone down at StartCon. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Rand Fishkin. I'm the co-founder of Moz, and today I'm going to be talking to all of you and to Whiteboard Friday fans everywhere about how to kick-start an SEO audit for your startup.
So what I've done here is I've taken our classic SEO pyramid, sort of you've got to start with a strong base and work your way up. Well, I flipped it, because, in an audit scenario, we're actually going to start from the bottom and work our way to the top. So I've inverted our pyramid. We're going to start with crawling and accessibility, and we're going to work all the way up to conversion.
Now, SEO in a startup setting can be challenging. I'm going to assume that your startup has already launched your website or your web content, your application, and that now you've just realized, "Wait, maybe we should do some of that SEO stuff." And yes, you should. Let me make three big reasons, three big cases why you should.- Search traffic is among the highest percentage of all referral traffic on the web. So whereas social traffic sends approximately 5% to 6% of all the web's referral traffic, search engines send about 28% or 29% of all the web's referring traffic. This is data according to SimilarWeb who has a large clickstream panel that they look at.
- Organic search traffic is more than 90% of all the clicks that go to search results. So 90% of the clicks are going to organic, 10% or actually less than 10% are going to the paid results. Companies around the world are spending $40, $50, $60 billion a year or more on Google's paid search results alone. That organic stuff is a competitive advantage because it means low cost of customer acquisition. It tends to mean higher retention. It tends to mean higher conversion rates. Very, very attractive traffic.
- Searches are a specific request from a user that says, "I want this thing and I want it right now." That's some of the most powerful traffic you can possibly be in front of on the web, and, as a result, the startups that can get their product, their service, their company, their brand in front of those searchers can have an outsized impact.
Now, we need to kick off this audit.
Crawling, indexing, and website structure
What I've essentially done here is taken sort of the top three things to be thinking about for each of these and detailed them for you. So when it comes to crawling and web structure, we want:
1. Everything on one sub and root domain.
I can't tell you how many times I've seen startups use blog.startup.com, or use startupblog.com. Or they blog only on Medium.com instead of blogging on their own site and using Medium as an additional network to amplify that content. Or they put everything on their app and their app is one page, and so Google can't index anything except that one page. Generally, all of these are terrible ideas. If you can, keep everything in subfolders, or if you call them subdirectories, of your website. Don't separate out your content on to multiple sites, and don't build anything on somebody else's site unless you're also using it on your site and just referring back. You want to use Medium, that's great. You want to use Facebook, great. You want to use LinkedIn Publishing, fantastic. Always have the "Here's the link to the original" and point it to your website.
2. You can sign up for Google Search Console (it is free).
That will help you identify a lot of crawl errors and issues. If you work with a professional SEO, chances are they're going to use a tool like OnPage.org or Screaming Frog or Moz's Crawl. Those are all good too. They can provide a little bit more extra detail.
3. Eliminate duplicates, search URLs, and thin pages
One of the things that you will want to do, when you're looking at your site, is eliminate duplicates, search URLs, meaning pages on your site that are essentially just search results — Google does not like your search results in their search results — and thin pages, pages that have very little content. You might think, "Oh, but they target some extra keywords for me." Yeah, but Google considers your site as a whole. If you have thousands of pages with very thin content, they're going to rank your other content lower, and that is not a good thing. You do not want that.
Keyword research & targeting
1. Make a big, broad list.
You could do this in Excel. You could do it in a Google Spreadsheet. You could do it in a tool like Keyword Explorer. I want you to use a bunch of different sources. I want you to look at keywords that your competitors are ranking for. You can find that from lots of different tools. You could use something like Keyword Explorer. You could use SEMrush. You could use KeyCompete. You could use SpyFu. There are lots and lots of tools that allow you to do this.I want you to also use the related and suggested search terms that come up when you search for the key terms and phrases you're already targeting in Google. I want you to use semantically-connected terms and terms that are in the format of questions. A lot of folks like Answer The Public. Moz also has the filter in Keyword Explorer for queries that are in the form of questions. These will give you a big, big, broad list.
2. From there, you're going to need some metrics:
- You want volume, you can get that from Google's AdWords Keyword Tool. You will have to either start an account and pay some money for some paid search ads. Otherwise, Google only shows you these terrible things. Or you're going to have to use a third-party tool like a SEMrush or a Keyword Explorer.
- You want difficulty, so you want to know how hard it will be to rank. That is not the same as the Competition Score that you get from AdWords. Competition in AdWords is just the competition in the paid search results. Not the same thing as how difficult it will be to rank in the organic search results.
- You want to know click-through rate opportunity. If there are lots of ads above the fold, if there's a knowledge graph, if there's an answer box up top there, that's going to drive clicks away from the organic results, and you need to know that before you choose to target a keyword.
3. Prioritize by the importance to you and to your company.
You're going to use these metrics and you're going to prioritize by the importance to you, to your company. You're going to prioritize by the ease, the difficulty, and by the traffic, which is some function of the click-through rate opportunity and the volume, in order to choose right keywords for you. You're going to prioritize that big list that you've got, and then you're going to start targeting. We are going to create content that targets those searchers and serves them well.
Accessible content that delights searchers
1. Don't just serve your own interest, your own funnel.
Satisfy those searchers.
2. You can use low engagement metrics to identify poorly performing URLs.
So if you filter in your Google Analytics, your Omniture, whatever you've got, by pages that receive traffic from Google referrals and then you look at bounce rate, you look at time on site, you look at pages per visit, and you see pages that are very low on those metrics, well, that is going to tell you, you are not doing a great job of serving those searchers. Google will probably, over time, push you down, push your competitors up. That's a bad thing.
We want content that is doing a great job of delighting searchers. It has to serve both their implicit and explicit query. The explicit part of the query, that's usually obvious. The implicit part can be a, "What do they really want to do after that, once they have that answer?"
Keyword use & on-page optimization
Next, we're going to take that content and we are going to optimize it for search engines and searchers. That means using keywords intelligently and doing some smart on-page optimization.
Now, classic SEO kinds of things, some of them no longer apply. The meta keywords tag, for example, that's gone. We don't need to do the same sort of every little variation of a keyword demands a different page that we used to do in the past. But things like...
1. Keyword use in the title, the URL, the meta description, the headline, and inside the content still matter.
What we should be doing nowadays, though, is taking all the keywords that share the same searcher intent, where the searcher is trying to essentially accomplish the same thing. Let's say I'm a mobile phone directory and I have a bunch of reviews of mobile phone devices. "Best mobile phones, best cell phones, best smartphones, best smartphones 2016," guess what? They all share the same searcher intent. I should have one page targeting all those keywords, not a separate one for each one.
2. All the keywords that share the same intent get one URL.
Snippet, markup, & schema
This is essentially where I'm trying to stand out from the pack in Google search results. If you've performed a search in the last five years, you know that it doesn't just look like 10 blue links anymore. There are a lot more rich options for how your snippet, the search engine result position that you appear in, can look to searchers, and that can drive a lot more traffic.
1. Check out Schema.org.
So check out Schema.org and check out the types of results in your specific field or industry or that go with your content that could be met by schema that Google supports right now.
2. Look at your keyword research for the types of results that already appear in your SERPs.
You should be taking a look in your keyword research at the types of results that already appear in your search engine result pages. So if you check out your keywords, you're using a tool like Keyword Explorer, you can see here's a distribution of search results that contain images, ones that contain news results, ones that contain recipe-rich snippets, ones that contain video, whatever it is, and then you can choose to do those.
3. Identify "answer box" opportunities.
15%, just about 15% of all search queries in Google today have an answer box of some kind. An answer box, meaning that featured snippet up at what we call result number 0, before the top 10, usually right after the ads. That can drive a tremendous amount more traffic. If you have answer box opportunities, you can take those from your competitors, or you can have your snippet appear in there. There's a great presentation from Doctor Pete that you can check out on Moz or a Whiteboard Friday on that same topic as well.
Alternative formats & engines
Next, we want to think about non-Google sources of traffic or non-google.com web search sources of traffic. For example:
1. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.
YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, ahead of even Baidu, ahead of Bing, ahead of Yahoo. If you are doing video content, you should be thinking about YouTube. Even if you're not doing video content, you should be checking YouTube's search volume to see if lots of people are searching on YouTube for answers to the questions that your business could answer with video.
2. Consider alternative search formats like images, news, and apps.
You also want to consider alternative search formats, like images, news, and apps in lots of spaces. For example, in home decor and home repair, image search is very, very popular. Obviously, in spheres like politics and technology, news is very popular. For lots of kinds of queries, apps are very popular, particularly those ones that happen on mobile and have a clear app use or need around them.
3. Check out Google Maps if you're in local.
If you are in the local space, you're going to want to check out Google Maps, which can send a tremendous amount of traffic. Through there, you can use a tool like Moz Local or Yext for that.
4. Ecommerce should pay attention to engines like Amazon or Etsy.
If you're in ecommerce and you're selling a physical product, there might be engines like Amazon or Etsy, where you could and should be putting your product.
Links and amplification
Yes, links still matter. Yes, they are still critical for rankings. You will need a lot of links from good places that are editorially pointing to your content, to your website, in order to rank well.
You also want to earn other forms of amplification that will then lead to links. Social sharing is one of the big ones. Word of mouth is obviously a big one. Lots of forms of advertising can eventually lead to links through awareness and those sorts of things.
1. Before you ever create content, ask the question: Who will help amplify this and why?
If you don't have a great answer to that question, and I mean a specific list of people or a specific list of outlets, you shouldn't hit Publish. Go and do that work first and every piece of content that you create will have more success in terms of amplification and reach and link potential and the potential to earn an audience. And why are you creating content if no one's going to see it? This isn't a forest. You don't need no trees falling.
2. You want to choose a link flywheel that's going to earn you links over time.
There are a few different structures.
- News and press tends to be a good structure that earn links over time in a flywheel sort of format.
- Content marketing tends to be one.
- Partnerships tend to be one.
- Embedded content tends to be one.
These flywheels tend to encounter friction, and that's where you use these smart hacks, like submissions to certain kinds of directories that are editorial and high-quality, or outreach on a one-to-one basis. But you don't want to be doing these one-to-one kinds of hacky link building unless it's in the service of a flywheel that's going to move faster over time and grow your link profile while you're asleep.
Conversion and funnel optimization
So you've done all this stuff to serve searchers well, to earn their trust and their traffic, and now we have to realize two things.
1. Conversion takes time and it takes a lot of visits.
In fact, WordStream, Larry Kim, did some great research showing that, over time, on a second or third or fourth visit, conversion rates move up by hundreds of percents versus that first visit.
Don't expect that you're going to rank for a keyword, drive someone to your site for the first time and convert them instantly. That rarely happens. Sometimes, but rarely. What's generally going to happen is that you're going to earn that click first, and then, over time, you're going to earn them back again, maybe through social channels, maybe through amplification, through word of mouth, through type-in traffic, through a branded search, through another completely unrelated search. Then eventually, they'll find their way back to you, and on the third or fourth or fifth visit, they will convert.
So we have to be thinking about: How can I delight people? How can I brand them? Then, eventually, I want to draw them back to my website and close the deal through my funnel. That's what conversion optimization is when it works in the organic world.
FAQ
Okay. We're through this very, very basic audit process. A few frequently asked questions that I always get from startups:A. "Should I get a consultant, an agency, or should I do it in-house?"
- If you know that SEO is going to be a long-term, competitive advantage that you continue to invest in and it's going to be something you need to do for the life of your company, you should go in-house as soon as possible.
- If, however, it's (SEO) more like a nice-to-have and it's a helpful marketing channel, but it's not a core competency and you're not going to build the company's marketing strategy around it, consultant or agency can work just fine. And there are some great ones, by the way.
B. PPC versus SEO.
- Paid search is easy to invest in. It is high-cost, but it's fast to get started. For this reason, it's incredibly competitive, and it tends to be the case that people are bidding at or very close to their maximum ROI to spend ratio, meaning, unless, you have an incredible business model that's way better than all your competitors, there's not usually a lot of competitive advantages to be earned in return on investment or in cost of customer acquisition to lifetime value ratio in PPC.
- SEO, on the other hand, takes a long time. It's a lot of investment. This is often a six-month or a year process before you start earning big returns, and, therefore, very few people invest in it strategically. It is a much bigger competitive advantage.
C. I get this from a lot of folks, especially in the technical world. "Can't Google just figure this all out?"
- No, they absolutely cannot. If you ignore these things and choose not to invest strategically and specifically in SEO, Google will not just figure it out. That has never happened to anyone who has made SEO a true competitive advantage in their startup, in their company's marketing channels. It's just not how it works.
D. "Does social media impact SEO?"
- The answer is yes, but indirectly. When you do good things on social, they can lead to good links. They can lead to good engagement on your site, which is certainly a positive signal for Google, and they can lead to word of mouth, which can result in branded searches and more clickstream traffic to your site, and all these sorts of things that Google can see. But if you think that buying a bunch of likes or a bunch of tweets on Fiverr is going to help your page rank higher, yeah, you're in for, well, five dollars of pain. Fiverr is quite cheap.
All right, everyone. Thank you so much for having me on StartCon. Thanks for watching me on Whiteboard Friday. And I hope to see you around Moz and maybe down in Australia sometime in the near future. Take care.
Thanks for mentioning the fundamentals. I didn't realise just HOW important YouTube can be for this, so maybe I can even more time checking this to optimise my sites. I did on the other hand overestimate (maybe) the quality of social media for this, so this is something more for me to think about and reconsider maybe. Thanks.
Nice WBF. In terms of building pages for the sake of building pages - the analogy of the tree falling in the forest and no one being there to hear it fall - this is great, but I often advise startup businesses to get as much content up as possible to start off with and not to spend too much time planning everything before acting, after a while this provides a good base from which to work back by seeing what works and what doesn't, by improving the content that is working and merging the content that doesn't work.
Nice comment Simon,
I think SEO is more difficult every year, now we have not only content issues, it's URL cannibalitation too and a lot of things more...
Interesting... I definitely see value in having a content strategy that doesn't restrict experimentation too much. I'm a little skeptical on the "build a bunch of stuff before the site launches" approach vs. building after and more ititeratively, to see what moves the needle and what resonates, but if it's working for you/your clients, certainly go for it!
Often said and still true, failing to plan is planning to fail. Building lots of pages and content sets a bad precedent in a company. Plus you're going to do a lot of work that is worthless, which is a waste of time. Time that you could spend in other areas of the business.
Hi Rand,
Two things just came to mind for me on this SEO Audit.
1. Responsive and mobile friendly. That is a must for at least 30% better SEO rankings in Google Mobile 2017 and beyond :-)
2. Also, site security. This should also be added to the SEO audit. I have had a few sites hacked and it killed me in Google. Major nightmare to get them back and get the rankings back. I actually spent months and 40+ extra hours. For WordPress I found Securi works quite well to help potentially eliminate the entire issue and secure your site. The free version works well and they have a paid version too. Believe me it is worth it's weight in gold. Just get hacked once and you will understand. Or better yet, use a good site security program and your lisitngs and site will be safer and maybe you will never have to experience it :-)
Thanks.
Good additions - thanks Mark! I believe you on the security side -- had a site get hacked recently, and it's a royal pain, plus a big rankings loss usually, too.
With so many ways to approach mobile-ready web design, I wonder if within that "30% better" SEO rankings if there is a subset of templates or approaches that stand out. Like, a Squarespace site vs a Boostrap custom site vs a Wordpress Theme X site in the same niche. That would be interesting to see if one structural approach vs the other makes any discernible difference.
I'm not that particularly experienced when it coems to site audits, I understand the fundamentals but this was really helpful. Thanks Rand, onwards and upwards!
Glad to hear it Brett! If you've got specific site audit questions, feel free to leave 'em in https://moz.com/q - lots of site auditing experts over there :-)
Howdy Founder,
Hope that you are good and as usual great explanation.
In second last option you said " why are you creating content if no one's going to see it? " - Absolutely right, because publishers only think about link earning. They don't think about searchers and readers. They think if Google can see my content and contextual links then why needs someone to see. Priority is not Google, Priority is readers & searchers. If content is not readers worthy, not related to category and not researched well then it's useless. If you think about your readers/searchers, Google will surely think about your website/blog. - (As per my opinion)!!!
Thanks!
We're in agreement there -- content can't just be for search engines or for links if you want a holistic, long-term strategy.
Yeah Exactly.
I have a suggestion for the first part here. In 1.1 you're saying to avoid subdomains and in 1.3 to keep content integrity. Breaking these two rules in combination is a great hack, you can create any content and host in on a subdomain for some extra traffic. Works great for landing pages.
Also I'd say that autocomplete suggestions are great for content creation anf ideation, but not always good for SEO, so it's not the best idea to use them for on-page, due to low search volumes. Well, sure some of them re alright, but there are hundreds of millions of those and they're mostly very low on search volume.
Did you have a chance to check out Serpstat? It's a tool I work for and it can help with many tasks from this list, not unlike Keyword Explorer.
Hi Igor!
On my point of view, this is a really good hack if you keep the number of subdomains on a low ratio, if it starts being more and more subdomains, then it's a high penalization risk!
What do you think about it?
I have a suggestion for the first part here. In 1.1 you're saying to avoid subdomains and in 1.3 to keep content integrity. Breaking these two rules in combination is a great hack, you can create any content and host in on a subdomain for some extra traffic. Works great for landing pages.
I am trying to follow your thoughts here, not sure if I get it. Would you not want search traffic to find your landing pages? Do you have a bit more of a working example?
I'm not quite sure I understand the issue of subdomains interfering with content issues... Subfolders work much better in my experience. One exception to this rule, though -- if you already dominate the top position for nearly all the queries in your space (for example, Zillow does this in most head terms for real estate), owning other positions in the SERPs via a secondary site (probably a separate domain, but possibly a subdomain) can be helpful (e.g. Zillow owns Trulia, which almost always appears in the top 3 under Zillow themselves -- pretty solid strategy).
Landing pages* should be used for targeted traffic coming to your site. This gives you the best chance to convert the traffic and understand your customers, if you run feedback polls.
* I work at Unbounce, which is a landing page platform.
Amazing content Rand! Great work
Thanks for sharing interesting point for startup SEO audit for the site.
"Don't just serve your own interest, your own funnel." This is the only thing in SEO we get fail to understand that what searchers want. Only the understanding of this single line can work for us like "Well begun is half done".
What a great article You have covered everything in short so now my question is how google is listing youtube video in there search ?
Hello Ziyush,
Title, Descriptions and Keywords that included there are the factors how a your video ranks in Google and even youtube search. Now, there is the cycle how it actually gets ranked in SERP step by step -
You have created a video -> Created a title and description including keywords that has good search volumes -> Your video will get views -> People Like and Shared -> Once people shared, it got backlinks in a natural way -> Now it ranks in SERP due to contents, title, video length, backlinks and of-course numbers of views/likes .
Well, this is a process how Google list a Youtube video in SERP results. And how you can rank your video, that can be find on Google.
Thank you !
Down in Australia? When may this be?
Graeme
The conference actually happened last November, but we posted this video after it took place. Sorry about that!
Hey Rand, I wish I could articulate this whole process as well and you...lol Anyway, I keep telling my clients that SEO is like panning for gold, it's a long term commitment, but we need to look for as many SEO gold nuggets we can! What are SEO nuggets you say? I like to call these nuggets the low bearing fruit, we look for keyword phrases (long-tail) that have a lot of monthly searches, but with low competition and a good overall yearly trend. Then (let's not reinvent the wheel) we look at who is already winning for that keyword phrase, look at their content, and just write it better, easy enough right? Like Rand said "All the keywords that share the same intent get one URL", whether in the body or subtitled throughout the article. Now we should have a page that 1. Answers a lot of queries, 2. A page that can get to page one fairly quickly (depending on domain authority), 3. You're not lost in the forest where if a tree falls, your the only one that can hear it...lol
I also try to tell my clients, SEO is no different the owning real estate, keywords and keyword phrases are like owning real estate, heck, try buying a domain name with a keyword phrase built-in that has a lot of monthly searches and you'll be shocked! Actually, I believe investing in your website is better than owning stocks, we know how volatile that can be. We've all played the game of Monopoly before right? Anyway, I look at the top 5 organic positions on the first page as Park Place on the monopoly board, position 5 as one green house, position 4 as two green houses and so on - Then when you get that big red hotel on the board... The Big Rent begins!
Unless something big changes...Your website is the better retirement plan my friends...For Real!
Hi Rand, I really love your reverse pyramid as it's showing a great representation on how everyone should act (even Agency). I never understand how people can define their SEO strategy without scheduling the crawl first. Crawling a website MUST be their starting point before even seeking for keyword or whatever.
Another point I think you should have developed further (maybe in your next whiteboard) is Link and Amplification. For my point of view, there is no advantage of getting links with those links can't be amplified or better promoted. The way a link is promoted, for e.g through social media should be consider as a whole strategy, and requires a lot of investment in term on time and commitment. Btw, great article as always.
Grrat stuff here. Nice to see a sort of quick and dirty version of an all-in-one every now and again.
Hey Rand, if my start up already has a blog with some decent rankings on a blog.website domain, do you still think it is worth making the switch to put everything on one domain? Any pitfalls there I should look out for if we do switch? Thanks.
blog.website is not different to website/blog. It's still on the same domain.
I am pretty sure there is a guide on moz about why website/blog is not the same as blog.website, and why website/blog is better. - sorry dont have time now to find the link.
This is not correct UKBB. Moving from blog.subdomain.com to subdomain.com/blog has, in our experience, almost always had long term positive impacts. Check out Mention.net's case study on this - they did it just recently, with great results: https://twitter.com/randfish/status/81148785321345...
This is correct UKBB. Google looks at subdomains as a new and different website. One reason you've to create filters in GA if you want to track any subdomains on your accounts.
Hi Chris - yeah, when you do move (which we've seen to be almost universally positive for traffic and SEO), make sure you get the redirects correctly pointing 1:1, and validate that those are working properly. There's definite risk if those redirects don't function properly (301s, from every piece of content to its according version on the subfolder).
Rand, I can't thumbs-up vote this advice enough :D Even when you THINK you've got all redirects sorted, be sure to double check.
I once witnessed (many moons ago) a brand who'd bought a domain (so domain > domain 301s, not subdomain > subfolder on same domain, but similar principles) for $1m (yes, a domain for 1 million USD!) screw up 301s and drop out of the SERPs for hugely competitive search terms for a few weeks (finance terms, lots of head terms too). It was a client's competitor at the time, so was interesting to watch - part of my brain was happy, another part (that I had to ignore for commercial reasons!) wanted to help fix it!
Luckily in your situation, you should be able to do a RewriteCond & Rule set to handle everything (so long as you're maintaining the same URLs) - This might help (but DO check this carefully), assuming blog. is the subdomain and /blog is the new blog install location and 'domain.com' is your root domain. Of course I don't know if you use www or not, or have http or https... So the below is just an example.
# --------- htaccess code for subdomain to subfolder for Chris ----------
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blog.domain.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://domain.com/blog/$1 [R=301, QSA, L ]
# ---------
Modified from Stack Overflow but added a 301 as they didn't for some reason ;)
Debugged here: https://htaccess.madewithlove.be/ (the page looks a bit messed up in Chrome for me, but fine in Firefox). Although I debugged to check the code, DO test yourself too before using Chris, to make sure it's okay. Plus always, always take backups before playing with .htaccess files!
Chris, If you have any doubts, post in Q&A on Moz and also send me a message, I'll happily help you get it sorted.
EDIT: In case you want to know (though you may already, adding here in case it's useful)...
Thank you for the interesting whiteboard friday. I think our website have some trouble with thin content. But how to determine when Google see a page as thin page...? Is there a way to discover those content 'easily'?
Your engagement metrics can help here -- if you see pages that have very high bounce rates and very low browse rates (i.e. pages/visit), those can be good signals.
Great WBF, Rand!
Thank you so much for your dedication... This is very useful for beginners, I'll show it to my team!
Fantastic WBF Rand! No longer (personally) a beginner, but I find watching and seeing guides like this really helpful to strengthen my knowledge I have and always give me an excellent refresher!
Now I gotta ask the question we are all thinking--where did you get that amazing t-shirt?
great kicking form
Hi Rand,
Wishing you a wonderful beginning of new year.
I saw SEO Audit for startup and this is very good and easy to understand. The terms that you have discussed is very important to optimize a website for user friendly as well as search engine friendly.
When I doing a website audit then I faces some problems in keywords analysis, content optimization and how to use keywords in op-page optimization in a better way?
Thanks for sharing this video. This will help a lot of us.
Regards,
Amit Kumar
Hello Amit,
Actually, I am sharing most common things which are SEO's used. Like, SEO-Friendly URLs, Start title with targeted keyword, Title explanation in H1, Using properly heading tags, Keywords in 100 words and more. But the main thing is use that keywords what readers are actually looking for or think of to related your website/blog category. Look out that keywords trend/ search volume and make it sentences with good optimization. For keyword analysis you can go with relevant topics to related your website category, research related terms, long tail keywords and more. It goes to your strategy also.
Hope It may help you.
Thanks!
Great Whiteboard Friday Rand! I actually watched this whilst making an Omelette (my macbook often suffers from stray ingredients whilst I cook!) :D
Really like the section on conversion towards the end. I know this creeping out of organic and in to paid a bit, but I think this is where organic and paid, by using Retargeting ads, can work really, really well. Organic mixed with retargeting ads are great for 'funnel nudging' like this.
Love the anchor spots of the video timeline too! Not noticed those before... when did they come in?!
Thanks for this WBF. Perfect timing as I just read the beginner guide to SEO because I'm launching a new site in a few months and this is great prep work to understand where I can play in the field and win. Keyword Explore tool was also helpful at finding some keywords I didn't think about when it came to people searching for a solution to their problem.
I think it's simple, well structured and smart roadmap for startups into SEO. Well done, thank you!
How i add news when i search my website at google i am not know about this so please help me to tell me about this i really want to know this.....
interesting post about SEO and how audit one start up.
i am working with this in my website with google search
Hello Rand, thanks for the SEO blog, I think these blogs are very important for companies that are dedicated to this sector, like us. The article I see very interesting and everything that is related to SEO helps us to grow as a company. Thank you very much for this Friday board. SEO every day you learn something new and I believe that with these blogs we make life easier. :)
It's unbelievable that many companies skip the fundamentals of SEO and jump right into Outreach, blasting out emails in the hope of a few dozen low quality backlinks. I've been banging this drum for several years now ... 1. Research & Strategy, 2. Build & Optimise, 3. Promote, 4. Assess & Reassess
I'm so glad the people with louder voices than mine are still singing my tune!!
HI George, my name is Bright Lee, I found a problem with this method in Chinese I seemed not what you think it is the root of the problem? Baidu is such a search engine do you think there is any way to be more efficient?
I don't understand your point. If you said that youtube is second searching system of the world. Why did you replace your white board Friday to own system? If you put existing video to youtube channel too will be that duplicate content?
I think I saw a Twitter conversation recently where Rand & the Moz video guy are working at adding the Whiteboard Friday's to YouTube and that this is meant to have been happening anyway. I'll see if I can dig it out later, but have to head off for now unfortunately. I'll paste a link here later/tomrw if you haven't had a reply from anyone by then :)
Moz and Rand have a great brand. Similar to Gary V. There are exceptions to having videos on YouTube. Also maybe the platform they use offers them more control and options then what YouTube can offer.
Thanks for the informative post! I'm working in a small start-up / digital agency, we've been teaching ourselves SEO for two or three years now, but there's still a lot to learn. That's why I'm a regular WBF watcher ;)
What I always struggle with is assessing keyword difficulty. We often use Moz's DA/PA and what you call click-through rate opportunity here, so now I'm not sure if I understand what keyword difficulty is essentially, and how to rate it?
Also:
"So you've done all this stuff to serve searchers well, to earn their trust and their traffic, and now we have to realize two things.
1. Conversion takes time and it takes a lot of visits."
What's the second thing? ;)
Greetings from Germany, Lea
Hi Rand,
Hope you are doing well. Wishing you a wonderful beginning of new year.
Specially thanks for your video sharing about SEO Audit. I watched your video really you discussed with us more valuable point and Some tools name. Really it will help us in perfect SEO Site Audit.
Thanks
Vikas Sudan
Hey Rand,
Great topic again!
I would like to know your views on "FAQ: B". Do you think startups should initially invest some amount in PPC to gain some CTR for blogs? Just because many people believe that CTR coming from paid ads may help to improve search existence (overall rankings).
I don't think this is true, also a PPC person here. From research I've seen. Spending on paid in no effects your SEO. I'd only do this tactic if the article was already doing well on it's own to boost it. Maybe even look at Twitter or Reddit as places to boost your content.
Great Summary Rand!
I particularly like the content development planning bullet, "Before you ever create content, ask the question: Who will help amplify this and why?". "This isn't a forest. You don't need no trees falling."
LOL but really great point. In many ways that one point can solve many of your problems. Baring blatant mistakes and errors, if you actually have a strategy for who will need and share your content and why, then that will build good quality links, ranking, exposure, and greatly assist SEO validation. Not to mention saving you a lot of time writing content no one will ever see. :-)
Thanks Rand, loved this. I have a question:
I have my webapp living under <app.domain>, but as you warned, I haven't buried any good content in it. I am however pushing users to my <www.domain> when they logout of the app. I am waiting to look at some of the data to try answer this question myself, my intial thoughts are;sure it will push a few more clicks to my domain, but likely skew my bounce rate.
While on this topic, does anyone have good ideas or best practices to leverage your webapp users traffic?
I am solving a problem in a niche space, while competing for search traffic with a few large fintech's. So I need any competitive edge that I can grab.
Thanks guys!
That's a tough one. You can certainly use ad pixels and do re-targeting to your app visitors (assuming you have further things you want to market to them). But in terms of using them for SEO or other web marketing... Maybe earning their following/amplification on social? Or identifying the influencers among them and building personal relationships?
Brendon, maybe I'm missing the mark here, but would the app users find a feed of your latest useful guides from your main site, displayed neatly in the webapp somewhere useful? Of course it'd need to not be anywhere that gets in their way when using your app as UX is king here, but if you're publishing guides etc that they'd genuinely benefit from, might be possible?
Hi Rand, another fantastic SEO's lesson. I have a question, what do you think about https on SEO effects? If you don't have "critical" data, Is it really necessary?
Thanks for sharing
Yes, great content.
What about internal linking?
Don't you think this is an important thing to care about for a startup?
Thanks.
Yes... ish. If the problems you're encountering are around either A) discover-ability or B) crawl issues with Google, then internal linking may play a part and should be looked at. I don't usually see it as a low-hanging fruit for most startups, but it can pop up from time to time.
well said nadeem.
we should maintain content and description in a way that is useful to users not for the sake of google. And stuffing of keywords in content should be useful to user.
Very useful suggestions, Rand. Quick question: if we use one webpage to target a number of keywords (such as best mobile phones, best mobile phones 2016 and so on), wouldn’t it lead to keyword saturation and result in a drop in SEO rank? As for the impact of social media, it’s a good way to interact with your audience. But then again, social media engagement for SEO takes time.
Hi Rand,
Great overview of the fundamentals, thanks! A lot of good tools being referenced too, however I'm missing one:
Can you (or someone in the community) recommend a good tool for gauging YouTube-specific search volumes?
Or elaborate as to whether Google search volumes are indicative and useful for the types of keywords research, when you look at YouTube as an alternative format?
Thank you in advance!