SEO for Beginners Step #1: Analyze Competition

the question i get asked most often is like chris how do i rank a new website is there the sandbox effect whereas new websites can't rank and a lot of people are just stuck at like what step one two three four in exact format and how the hell do i get my website to rank on google so today's video is going to be a part one of a series i'm gonna outline exactly what i do i mean you're gonna actually watch me do it this is a real client's website i'm starting at zero zero traffic zero everything i'm gonna show you the stats and i'm gonna walk you through the exact process that other people might not want to walk you through and i'm doing it absolutely free of charge [Music] [Music] if you like the video hit like show some appreciation and that's all i need okay that little like gives me a real smile makes me a happy man so in today's video this is what we're gonna go through this is my client's website and my client happens to be my cousin so yes he knows that i am going to be looking at his website in great detail there are going to be no secrets at all to this uh if something's not working well i'm going to tell you it's not working well part of the process in this five part video series is going to be do the work and watch how google responds okay so do the work prepare for the work come up with a strategy and see how google responds without doing that exact process you don't know if something's gonna be successful and if you're watching this video and there are a hundred different people watching this video or a thousand every single one of you are gonna have to do slightly different variations of what i'm recommending in order to rank remember every keyword or let's really dummy this down every word that you want to rank for on google it's going to have its own road to success but what i want you to understand is reverse engineering success in creating a game plan is the single most important element here do not go into seo blindly okay don't pick keywords because you like them pick keywords because they're available it's not highly competitive because you're a new website or you're not and no more talk let's just actually get into this so there'll be a link to the website that we're we're gonna use for the next five videos is gonna be one website so i'm gonna break this down to you and i'm excited about this so the website is terrace aluminum railings and dot com in today's video we're gonna go through this so let's just do a quick quick overview when the video is edited and uploaded i'll put time timestamps on this so if you want to jump from one to the next although i don't i think that this video is very important for you to truly understand seo and if seo is something that excites you because it does for me i rank very highly for a lot of keywords and it's generated millions of dollars for me i really say you watch these videos from start to finish and probably pause and make notes and watch it a few times to be honest with you in today's video we're gonna go over this step one uh client homework okay step two print marketing because print marketing in my eyes is a form of marketing and it's hugely important with ranking your website on seo and yes i said that okay seo is not just digital you need to generate traffic to your website in order to rank want to be an authority guess what print marketing is part of becoming an authority i'm going to walk you through my process and show you how i actually incorporate print marketing into my seo strategy some of you seo guys are gonna hate me you thought seo and ranking number one was so easy hey it is if you're smart step three we're gonna go through in today's video how to reverse engineer success and how to pull the stats that are really really important when moving on to the next step which is keyword research that will be video two we'll do that in another day uh but i mean the game plan here is literally just to really dummy this down and shoot like five videos straight step one step two step three nothing else is gonna distract us i'm going to europe late next week next weekend heading to albania i'm trying to do like eight countries in in two weeks before my birthday i'm gonna do it safely i wear a mask but if any of you guys are down in like albania or romania or serbia uh montenegro i might head to poland uh i'm not sure if you guys are down in that area leave a comment below add me on instagram say what's up if i'm in your town i'd love to meet up maybe you show me a traditional meal in your country and or city say no more first and foremost when i'm taking on an seo strategy for a client if it's a pre-existing client they've already had an seo team and or it's a brand new website the first thing i'm going to do is prepare homework okay so seo is not like a client can hire me for 500 a month or a thousand or 2 000 and simply let me do all the work it's not like that okay part of this strategy is almost like a fitness like i'm overweight right if i want to get in shape i hire a personal trainer and we work together together i'm not just giving them the reins and they're getting me this great success that's not how it works no different with seo okay so if a client comes to me and says chris i just want you to do the seo i don't want to be involved you better be paying me an awful lot of money straightforward because my team and i have to do everything so with this this is my cousin let me show you exactly what i walk through and understanding that every month is going to be a slightly different strategy based on the results from the month prior so the first thing i'm going to do is reach out to my cousin his name is jessie and say jesse i need you to become google my business verified sign up for google my business and get verified they're going to send you an envelope in the mail with a pin number and you're going to type that pin number it takes roughly seven days depends on where you are in the world that is step one that's the responsibility of the owner of the website not the seo company step two i want you to sign up for social media and i'll break this down and i'll i'll actually look let's do it now i'll outline what i want i want instagram okay facebook twitter um depends if they want to dance or not we could pick a few others but i would say let's let's break it down into the top 10 social media platforms they have to do it themselves okay they have to sign up for it themselves i'm not going to sign up under my email that has to be homework step three is testimonials once you've been approved with your google my business now it's the responsibility okay i'm going to be the motivator i'm going to tell them what has to be done and i'm going to set goals but i called jesse and say jesse i need you to get 10 proper honest google reviews within the next week okay because jesse's been in business 20 years this is his first website he's been going word of mouth for 20 years handing out business cards doing big contracts for basically the same people and he came to me and said chris i want to target other people i want to go to residential communities and do individual jobs that are going to pay well and i'm going to profit from so he has the ability to reach out to previous clients to get these type of testimonials i recommend that he reaches out to them with a direct link to the google review and ask for an honest review now if you go the route of let me sit back and hope it's going to happen on its own it could take years to get reviews and understanding that in order for you to become an authority and get ranked on google for keywords you need testimonials and reviews on your google account so be proactive so part of this once again i'm not just giving homework i'm asking for a certain number of things to get done and i'm setting timelines because once again this is a collaborative effort next print marketing i explain to my cousin this if you want to rank on google which is digital you need to be getting a certain percentage of traffic to your website okay there's different ways to get traffic to your website print marketing is one that's very important so how does google know that you've printed stuff and handed it out well people are coming directly to your website they're going to the url box the address bar at the top and they're typing in your domain directly you want to get a real punch you want to be aggressive with your seo go hand out 10 000 business cards or flyers make sure they're decent looking professional you're handing it out in a proper neighborhood and yes i know covid nobody wants a damn flyer right now i get it but find a smart way to do this okay get people to your website directly and that is absolutely absolutely 100 part of my strategy for myself and the reason i rank so well and it is also something that i recommend to my clients so if you want to do this you know what we can let's just find this very quickly since we're going all in let me just show you what i've designed for my cousin so mock up flat here here's a mock-up and [Music] so let me go show you quickly so we did two two different types of print the print is actually being done by vistaprint very simple a business card which he can hand to his regulars and to people that he meets along the way small easy not much to it it's a business card everyone should have one and secondly this is more like a postcard something larger has a little bit more information some real call to actions and outline some of his specialties like 20 years in business i put a five stars people are always looking for stars so i think that's important builds a brand has a phone number has a domain three times it shows him in his his work crew so those are the two print marketing look i did both of them within about 90 minutes i have a membership for envato and envato has templates that i can use look our products if we go to elements well worth the investment i can type in postcard or business card or anything hey i like this one i download this and i move it around change the branding colors change some shapes add the photo i don't need to reinvent the wheel this does not have to be brain science okay you can use this use a template you're not hurting no one you're putting together a nice proper professional print marketing in a timely manner so that's what i did that's how we got there next i'm gonna reverse engineer success okay so i can go about this two different ways and i'm gonna do it right now one could be i call jesse and say jesse tell me who your biggest competitors are okay so i call the client call the client let's go a little bigger with these fonts so you can see them so that's option number one call my client just so you know my client my client and let's say and request uh competitors okay so normally i would say anywhere from one to five competitors i don't want to make this overwhelming i don't want to give them too much homework the second option because i know he's working right now installing some railings i'm going to do it myself so chris how the hell do you find the competitors hey google's going to tell me the answer so i'm going to google and create a list of three to five and some of these are direct competitors the majority of them are but i'm also gonna look at bigger areas like new york city uh texas and houston um to get other ideas as to other people within the industry what they're doing so why am i reverse engineering success i'm going to look at some key stats in a few moments how many pages they have on their website how much content is on their website what type of backlinks they have how many keywords are they targeting and how much traffic are they getting okay so before i actually commence because in this video i'm not actually doing seo i'm getting ready for it i'm sort of pre-planning and getting ready to jump into seo and yes this is a part of seo this is like studying the competitor before you get into a boxing match without knowing what their specialties are or what they're good at then how the hell are you gonna do it yourself so take this step and follow me on this journey so what we're going to do is we're going to find the competitors right now we're going to pull the vital stats hey it says stake keywords we're not going to stake any keywords we're going to steal them maybe we're not going to steal all of them but we're definitely going to steal some of them so let's go through these steps right now in reverse engineering i'm going to do that right here and once again if you want to get into video 2 3 4 and 5 this is going to be the content on those videos so i'm going to literally outline absolutely everything but this is a part that's i don't see my competitors telling you about this when putting together an seo strategy so let's do it so first and foremost i already know about this because it's my cousin's website but let's pretend i didn't i would definitely go through the website thoroughly to get a good grasp and understanding as to what they do so even at the title itself i know it's an aluminum aluminum railing company and i've gone through the site so i know they do residential and commercial so i just want to get an idea look at the portfolio i read the text i see who they've worked with before um and i continue let's look at the products so i mean even the titles on the pull down really give me a good understanding as to who they're targeting and what their market and what the service is so gallery pricing contact etc so if you're new to the website um i i before anything you need to understand the the service that you're attempting to rank for so first and foremost let's find the competitors so we're going to do aluminum railing let's see if we can steal aluminum railings so i'm located in downtown toronto so we're going to start by doing toronto once again just looking for competitors okay one two look how easy it is to find the competitors three let's just start with those three so aztec aluminum railing number one wow look at this they don't even have an ssl certificate horrible we're going to beat them quick you watch how fast i beat them and i'll show you the stats shortly and during these videos i'll continue to show you the stats next aluminum railings limited so right now we've gotten three direct competitors located in toronto let's open this up a bit maybe too much okay so we've gotten three competitors in toronto direct competitors people that we're fighting for for business i also want to look at once again other cities let's look at nyc let's just see i normally use nyc in la big cities i'm in canada so i'll often look at vancouver so let's look at this but this is a fence company so i have to look into it deeper this is a manufacturer which we are not glass and aluminum railing system so i got to look at it because they offer a lot more services i want to find people that are are more so targeting just the railings these guys do indoor and outdoor storefront okay let's use them nyc glass works oops what did i do here it's tough to record think and type at the same time i'll get through it okay we're gonna look for one more no ssl certificate like what year are we living in that all these websites have no damn ssl certificate horrible uh let's pull one more for the sake of keeping the numbers even let's go to vancouver our good friends in vancouver so let's do this one only because the top option has custom fencing and gates my cousin here doesn't do that terrace aluminum railing does not do that so here's gonna be our fifth website that we're gonna pull for stats okay and i always pull my clients website of course right doesn't that make sense if we're going to do a direct comparison we want to see this so here we go we have six now i'm going to use semrush does not mean that it's the only tool that you can use but it is meaning this the tool that i do use and first and foremost we have teres aluminum railing which is my client you'll see they have zero authority score it's day one like the site just launched two or three days ago zero organic traffic they're ranking for two keywords but the positioning is 97th and 77th the volume is pretty good 390 search volume per month for grass glass railings toronto in 320 for aluminum railings toronto so you'll see during this process that this number of keywords that are ranking on google will become a lot higher so what we're going to do is we're going to put together a list i'm going to look at organic traffic i'm going to look at backlinks i'm going to look at number of keywords ranking i'm going to look at number of website pages okay so what i'm looking for i'm going to look at for all the competitors i want to get a good understanding of who i'm going against and what they're doing right in order for me to copy and follow their footsteps guys is this not the simplest way of thinking in life if you're attempting to start a business no matter what the business is look research and study those that have done it before you now with a tool like semrush it allows me to see all the stats and if you understand these stats and where to look for them and what to do with them it saves you years of frustration because i know what works based on the fact that it's worked for other people remember the way we found these competitors is because they rank first second and third on google so you know they got to be doing something right through these stats we're going to see what they're doing right and wrong and find a good strategy based on that but there's no way in the world any single seo strategy should ever get started in any other way like literally this is the only way to get started i don't know why this is orange but forgive me okay organic traffic we know it it's a big egg zero how many backlinks guess what zero number of keywords ranking two number of website pages guys if you wanna see the number of website pages simply come up here type in site colon backslash backslash and he has 14 pages oops 14. i should have copied this first now what we're going to do is we're going to look at the competition you're going to see a common theme i did not do this before but i guarantee this the more content the more pages uh the better the ranking and the more traffic okay everybody thinks this is a backlink game everybody went new to seo is like well how do i get backlinks how do i get backlinks and backlinks ah backlinks are they're a very small portion of the way you actually get traffic to your website okay it's not a numbers game it's not about how many backlinks you can get it's about the quality of the backlink and i can say 20 things off the top of my head that are more important than dem backlinks so no more damn backlinks comments in my videos although we are going to cover backlinks what video is that going to be backlinks is going to be video four so for you backlink fanatics stick around video four we'll talk about it i'll walk you through and i'll show you how i get the damn backlinks okay next aztec aluminum railing let's look at all of their vitals where did i put their website there we go so we're gonna steal this we're gonna go to up here we're gonna do domain authority and for those guys that don't have semrush i don't know find another tool if you're not looking to invest money into making your life more profitable and more educated you don't want to spend money on semrush don't but i don't know how else to do it like find a different tool find a free tool okay next organic traffic so right up here you'll see organic traffic they've had a very good month they've been up 170 from the last month but even that their numbers are fairly low hey man we're going through covid but i don't see how many people are going to add railings to their house right now but we're still going to pull the stats okay backlinks they have 316. if you want to see where i'm getting it i'm getting it here 316. how many keywords are they ranking for 19 only 19 that's a very low number oops sorry about that so where am i they're attempting to rank for 19 and number of pages so guys site colon 27 pages only 27 pages my cousin's going to be real happy and i'm going to be happy i'm going to conquer these guys i'm going to be like godzilla and i'm going to be picking them up off the building and eating their heads off and throwing them away i'm like bigfoot i'm going to be running through the jungle no one's going to stop me guys i'm going to destroy these people if you're the owner of this website get out of my way because it's gonna be game over and just so you guys know my cousin's not paying me a thousand dollars he's gonna give me partial cut of every single sale that comes online so i'm motivated i want to get rich i want to get richer so this game is over can't believe that person's in first place they stink please no defamation lawsuits not today but seo wise i'm sure they're wonderful people but from an seo standpoint not too good um okay let's go back i got sidetracked sometime i get too motivated you know i apologize sometimes i act a little crazy it's because i am okay let's do a domain overview cp oh that's not even the website what am i doing i'm off track let's go to this website since we've already written it down we're doing a domain overview getting these vital stats okay organic traffic last month was 149. okay guys if you want to look at the lifetime of the business look they had their best best organic traffic was december 2017 that 801 people so if you look at these months whatever they did this month they did it successfully look at this huge drop because me could mean that they dropped their seo team or they decided seo is not important to them anymore but everything i'm showing you today i also use during my sales pitch i pull these stats in real time in order to sell my service of seo i'll be like to the client did you know like what happened november 2017 you were doing x exponential expense i don't know what the word is and what happened how did you drop so drastically you did something wrong do you not want to get that traffic again okay let me get back so backlinks how many backlinks they have guys 344 you see the number 344. how many keywords are they ranking for guys 91. hey better than everything else we looked at 91 number of website pages so what do we do site colon backslash backslash 273 pages so look out of everybody so far they have by far uh more pages i don't know how i skipped this once again guys i get more excited like when i do this on my own i'm quiet relaxed i can think when the camera's on i get shy and introverted and a little nervous um okay let's do this again so right now there's no clear leader i'm not seeing any great results at all like the numbers are are low they're not numbers that i would be happy with so organic traffic last month 149. if you want to look at the best month they ever had march 2015 they got 1500 people to their website so curious to know what happened that month backlinks they have the most 524 524 number of keywords they're ranking for 184 and in the next video we're going to actually go through the keywords that each person's ranking for to create our own keyword list like picasso says great artist copy or good artist copy great artist deal yes we're stealing their keywords and i have no shame in my game let's go back to this once again there's no ssl i keep telling you horrible i should email them just out of niceness and said hey guys sign up for an ssl you're going to rank higher better for more keywords next they have 70 pages on their website let's go down here we're going to do two more here's the website nyc glass works so we're going to look at an american company therefore we're going to change from canada to u.s so their traffic is higher organic traffic is 314 which is right here last month they have by far more backlinks 5.4 k they're ranking for 637 keywords which the number is right here and the number of pages on their website is 21. surprising i can't lie i thought it was going to be more than that last but not least let's do this we're going to look at main land aluminum since we're here let's see how many pages they have on their website they have 12. very tiny site very small i'm going to do a domain overview once again it's in the u.s organic traffic is 62. guys i want you to keep all of these numbers in front of you test me on it 31 keywords so on this list right here very quickly put together organic traffic in the lead we have glass works nyc glass works for organic traffic they have the most so they're in first place so let's give them a round of applause congratulations is that anywhere near where i want to be absolutely not but it gives me a good understanding that in order to rank first and get traffic i need to target more keywords they went with backlinks which is not a common for me it's not that important i'm looking for content and you know what while we're here it wouldn't make any sense if i don't show you myself so you know what i'm talking about let's throw a nerd's world in the mix why not i'm a competitive guy now even though we're not competitors and i just had a big drop in traffic let's just do this quickly so let's say a nerdsworld.com my website organic traffic backlinks so we're going to do this twice we're going to do this since we already have us open then we'll do oops why is there a period canada okay so organic traffic last month was 3.3 k from the u.s which is found right here a drop of 27 percent you see the drop let's look at that drop it's dropped backlinks 55 000 number of keywords that i'm targeting in the us is right here 1560 okay number of pages on my site let's do it guys you can do this for all your competitors i have one thousand one hundred and forty one one four zero so let's just pull the canadian stats quickly eight point two thousand one one eight one um these dots okay guys very quickly now obviously there's ups and downs and look i'm not nowhere near where i i was looking look back in may i was getting 29 000 organic visits per month opposed to here huge difference huge decrease covet has a lot to do with it and my lack of effort towards my own seo no question slap myself on the face it is my fault there's nobody else to blame but let's get into this a little detail deeper let's get into this a little deeper so what we're going to do is this let's pull up one of these competitors and let's actually see where the traffic's coming into and this is how i'm gonna conclude today's video uh the next video once again let's touch upon it what we're gonna touch upon this is gonna be a classroom and we're gonna do video two we're gonna do keywords we're gonna do the research i'm gonna teach you how to pull the stats and i'm gonna show you how i actually like choose which keywords i want to target because once you have the list what do you do with the list and that's going to be in step two but very quickly before we end this video let's pull these guys for example let me remove me from the list that was me just being arrogant showing you some of my stats sorry about that guys it's my style sometimes okay so we pulled this as tech aluminum railings.ca and here are the keywords in which they're ranking for so we can look at this in many different ways we can look at this as a volume so the word itself aluminum railings is being searched 3 600 times per month from canada so it's a huge keyword that we definitely want to rank for and we will but their current position is only 12th position it's not that perk it's not that good let's look at their positioning so there's only one keyword that they're ranking first for which is aluminum railings toronto so you know when i start the next video and i'm putting my keyword list together i am absolutely writing down railings toronto concord aluminum railings and i'm looking at the search volumes normally what i do is i actually put this right here so that i have all the volumes lined up and i see what their current position is now if you want to see how how much opportunity is out there get your calculator ready and start calculating all these volumes and this is just a few key words out of what's available out there but i mean if you total this up it's probably four or five thousand people per month and if you look at their their traffic they're only getting 184 visitors out of thousands and thousands and thousands so there's a lot of great opportunity in this industry i could see that alone by reverse engineering success uh from the competitors that i polled and non-competitors there's not really much competition for me i'm excited to show you what i'm capable of doing and that will lead into video two so that's it short and sweet we'll see in the next couple days with the next video all the best hopefully you guys enjoy have a great day goodbye you

Channel: A Nerd's World

Views: 6,728

Keywords: seo for dummies, seo for beginners, beginners seo, step by step seo, search engine optimization

Id: gcCO1AjgbCQ

Length: 33min 4sec (1984 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 16 2020