SEO for Beginners: The Best Way to Spend 35 Minutes (Real Website, Real Stats, Real Advice)

good saturday afternoon ladies and gentlemen i'm back at it like a crack addict i'm excited today's gonna be a freestyle good afternoon my name is chris a hughes co-founder of a company called a nerd's world and as i previously mentioned i'm about to audit at least one website let's see how in-depth we get maybe two three see how it goes i have nothing pre-planned i'm just freestyle i got a comment under one of my videos that says we launched our site and new business about four months ago and followed your seo advice as best as we could all the way through the site it was our first website so let's take a peek at surface scan dot co dot uk at first glance uh site looks decent there's definitely a lot going on but in today's review we're only looking at the seo so i'm gonna walk you through the exact process that i do when i'm attempting to sell my service of seo when i'm auditing a website and also when i'm putting my strategy together for seo so the first step is always to manually review the website just get an idea as to what they're attempting to do what they're selling what they're promoting and who their target audience is at first glance i can see words like 3d scanning services uh reverse engineering which is one of my favorite set of words 3d print services okay as we scroll down what areas do we cover okay they're from kent i see they're highlighting this word i'm already i see that that hour should not be highlighted when you're doing this type of anchor text or hyperlink you should only be targeting the keyword that you're attempting to rank an hour is never a key word that's a simple fix easy to do let's scroll through so once again guys first look just trying to get a peek and see what they do let's see what their social media presence is like okay they have 23 followers which is very low okay so the three services they're targeting is 3d scanning reverse engineering and 3d printing about us family photo i love it if you go to our nerds world you click on our about page to family photo as well spelt business wrong okay the site itself doesn't look bad not a huge fan of the order i would definitely put home then about then services then blog then faq then contact contact should always be to the furthest to the right okay there's some blog content i don't want to take too much time manually going through the site but let me see what a blog post looks like okay pretty short but i mean here it looks like they're doing the right thing the anchor text is right this is right this not so much but anyway now the fun part let's pull the stats this is where we're gonna find out what's working for them and what's not if anything's working we're gonna figure it out right now so i'm using semrush sem rush and i'm simply doing a domain overview to see things like domain authority and such so they said they're in the uk so we're going to take a look at the stats in the uk and we know it's a new site the gentleman said it's a new site four months ago so i'm seeing very little traffic organically so i mean in the last 28 days there has been three people visit the website organically simply put only three people went to google typed in the service oh there's a falcon flying by right now right by my window oh incredible so close um okay let me let me get focused only three people found their website through organic search going to google typing in a service and then finding them and i know the reason for that is not because they're not putting effort it's not because they don't want to rank simply because they're not ranking and i will not use the excuse that simply because it's a new site because i see some new sites rank fairly well uh the domain authority is fairly low but we'll work on that backlinks are 94. we'll look at the backlinks and let's see what they're attempting to rank for so if we come down here to top organic keywords and we click on view details we're going to get a better gist of what's happening here so at first glance we can see that they only have two keywords on the first page of google one of them is 70 search volume per month one is 50 search volume per month so that's why the traffic is so low their best ranking keyword is eighth place and we know nobody goes to eighth place or very few people go to eighth place so what we need to do is we have to build a strategy in order to get them to first another thing that i notice at first glance is they're only attempting to rank for 12 keywords which is which is a very very very low number okay so let's put attempting we're going to make notes along the way to rank 4 12 words so the easy fix for this for this is to increase keywords being used oops being used and targeted what does that mean it means to create landing pages and blog posts specific to new keywords okay i'll get into that even deeper when google reviews their website in which we just manually did there's a lot of words on the page okay but google has to go through it and see what is the actual website about and what are they looking for they're looking for things like this big text okay they're looking for images are they saved properly are they titled properly and right now they are but if you notice it's 3d scanning if you notice it up here it's 3d scanning services so if you look at it here it's done properly it's just not done enough okay so google is seeing this and the anchor text is good like the site itself is laid out pretty good but because the authority is so small meaning there's no good quality backlinks there's no social sharing there's no social following and other things that we're going to touch upon that's the reason why their authority is so so low and therefore they're not ranking so to go back to it you they're only ranking for 12 keywords and here are the 12 keywords and if you look at them let's go through them quickly quickly 3d printing 3d scanning mobile 3d scanning 3d scanning 3d scanning again 3d printing 3d printing mobile scanning services 3d printing offer 3d services 3d printing etc so we we need to we need to increase that so what i would recommend to them if they're here watching i'll start a list of recommendations this is just notes for me so whenever i'm auditing a website i make notes so recommendation right away would be to come up with a new keyword list a new keyword list and i would say a minimum of 200 keywords so just because you compose that keyword list does not mean that you necessarily have to target every single keyword but having that list is good normally i only do a keyword list once every three months or one every once every six months so that you can keep referring to it when you have time to do seo you refer to your keyword list i like to manually print it out because when i've completed a landing page i get great pleasure out of highlighting that off the list and then i get to watch the stats and see how my effort was worth the time and investment so first and foremost i would start by putting a new keyword list together because right now the keywords that you're targeting are okay but they're not they're not enough and i understand this is a very niche service that you're attempting to rank but what we're going to do is we're going to reverse engineer success in a moment we're going to pull your competitors keywords and we're going to compare them so right now what i'm going to do is a very quick overview and you could do this too with yourself and your clients and yes i'm using semrush and it's a premium plugin or a premium software does not mean you need to do that right there are there are free softwares and free ways to do this it will take a little longer i pay for this because this makes me money and this gives me all of the stats that i need at first glance like i know where to find them in order for me to sell my service and to actually do the seo but i don't want you to lose fact of this this is only a tool right this is not needed in order to do seo if you locked me in a bedroom and i only had a computer and access to the website that's all i would need i do not need semrush to rank semrush is not some magical potion that's going to get me to first place it's simply a tool that i'm using to pull stats and to monitor keywords because i want you guys to really get that because i get that question all the time like what's the most important software for me to rank on google this is not it this is just a tool so what i want to do and what i always do and i provide this to my clients as well i want to get an overview of where they sit where they sit today okay so very quickly let's look at a few things sir let's say that again surface scan dot c o trying to do two things three things at the same time quite tough but i'll tell you what i look for okay and if you've seen i've talked about this before but let's go look we're gonna go for a number of keywords number of keywords we're looking at we're going to go for a number of website pages we're going to go for a number of backlinks let's dumb it down let's just keep it very simple right now like this number of keywords that they they're targeting is 12. number of website pages i'll jump back to in a second i'll show you guys how to do that i've showed you guys how to do it in the past but i'll show you how to do it again and let's just put traffic here as well let's put traffic first traffic so the traffic is three people organically last month here we're going to go to backlinks where did we go do this one more time how you guys doing today while we're waiting for the page to load how is everyone doing today i'm actually going to make this video very in-depth so in this video i'm only going to review one website in the future i do very quick but i think this deserves a full all-in look as to exactly what i do so right here we're going to go to 94 and then we'll jump back to the number of pages in a sec 94. so i have a beautiful chart this is not one but i'm just doing it quickly so now i want to see the number of pages on the site so all i do is this i take the domain open a new window and i put site colon backslash backslash before the domain and i see a number it's an estimate it says there's roughly 64 pages on the website now i know there's less than 64 but it gives you a good idea i'm not going to manually count so now what i want to do is i want to use semrush to find out who the competitors are normally i ask the client who are your competitors because then they get involved in the process and even though they might think somebody's a competitor that's truly not it makes sense for me to add them into the mix but because we're not talking to this person right now what we're going to do is we're going to simply pull the competitors with semrush now if there's somebody like levels above meaning they generate hundreds or thousands of visitors per month semrush is not going to look at them as a competitor so right now because their stats are so low they're saying that nobody is competing with them like they there is no they're in a class of their own which unfortunately at this time is a bad scenario because you want to be at at a certain level or in competition with other people so what we're going to do is we're going to figure out what who is the biggest for them so they said they're in kent let's just pull this we're going to simply do a google search and i don't know why i googled google when i'm already on google but um we're gonna go uk and we're gonna start pulling so these are ads so we're gonna ignore the ads we're gonna take a look at them we're going to take a look at them and we'll take a look at them so at first glance look they're doing exactly the same thing i can see the services are the same the look is somewhat similar and they're both from kent so this must be a direct competitor so what i'm going to do is first and foremost i'm going to put my quick list together once again i'm going to pop this guy down here let's get rid of that get rid of that let's go back to semrush all i'm doing guys a domain overview here just shows you what's possible with a little bit of effort so what we can do is we can really look into this deeper so let's pull this domain because this is for me the person that's currently in first place let's pull this information and let's see why they're generating more traffic and see what we can do to reverse engineers their success with our clients website we see that they're ranking for 221 keywords so what we want to do is start scrolling down and i would show my client their list i would literally download their whole list as a pdf i would export it i would show it to the client say please highlight all the keywords that you think are important to your business so then i would come back and i would start viewing the pages so for example let's say that laser scanning services was very important to my client i would say look this client's in second place okay they get 90 search volume per month from the uk that type in laser scanning services and i would want to see what the page looks like that i'm about to compete with so this is the page we're going to compete with and i look at it visually and i say oh there's it's a pretty nice looking page a lot of content okay so what i would then do is put together a game plan which we call i call guidelines and i would simply do this i'm doing a word count i want to see how many words are on this page so on this page there are 651 words so i would go back i would type in the keyword that we are attempting to write for which was laser scanning services laser scanning services and it has 651 words on the page also i want to go and see how many pieces of media so i can count one picture at the top two this is a video three four five another video six seven eight so we got eight eight photos and two or three videos so that gives you an idea if we want to rank for this we need to beat that when i say beat that we need to double the number of words on the page we need to have more photos and more videos and the page itself has to be laid out in a manner that's better better for the user better optimization we're also going to do a density check we want to see how often they're using the word laser laser is being used only twice so it's not being used a lot scanning is being used 22 times so we go like this 22 times scanning and then what's the final word services is being used eight times so right now if this is a keyword that i want to target it's as simple as that i put my guidelines together so when i'm putting content together i know what i have to write don't go into this game blindly this is a competition this is a competition of life and death do not go in without looking at the very basics of who you have to be let's go back to our clients keyword list again so once again i would give this keyword list to my client and say this is your competitor's keyword list here's what they currently said tell me which keywords mean the most to your business i'm involving them in the process picture this pretend i'm talking to a prospect and they're iffy about seo chris why should i do seo seo i don't know i'm old school i don't think people use google et cetera and then i hit them with this i download a pdf showing them who their direct competitors are and show them that they're doing seo and they're doing it properly and it's become generating traffic for their website that's an eye opener that's like wow i didn't even know they were doing seo but now that i see the stats and the keywords are targeting it makes sense and this is how business owners think they think if they're investing money i need to invest money too let's go back to my client my make believe client for the sake of this video now let's look at their keyword list how how small it is okay i want to toggle back and forth for a sec so the reason they're only targeting 12 keywords or google's only seeing 12 keywords is because there's very few pages if we do a direct comparison with number of pages there's a lot less pages on my client site than the person that's currently ranking in first and second what do we do about that we create landing pages and i'm going to give you my list of recommendations so what you'll notice this if you click on this and you view the details every single keyword the majority of keywords here will have their own website page so i can click through and see what all these pages are so like the the difference between where you sit right now with three organic visitors per month and what's possible at 508 organic visitors per month is simply creating landing pages rather than me explaining exactly what a landing page is i'll link to it up there you'll see landing page i've shot a video on it very detailed but reverse engineer success now as i talked about what i would do first and foremost is a new keyword list so i would come up with the keywords from three different places okay my mind always first and foremost my mind my clients mind my mind and clients mind just equal like start spitting out keywords start spitting out all the things that you think someone's going to do or writing google if they're looking for your 3d services 3d printing 3d scanning reverse engineering services and just write them down and that should normally look like a list of maybe 20 or 30 keywords next i want to use your reverse engineer success so we're stealing we're stealing your comps keyword list we're just stealing it just like i showed you we're stealing it i just did this with one competitor do it with all them depends on how much time you want to invest if this is your own website you're willing to invest all the time in the day in order to rank higher so i want to take their keywords and add it to my keyword list next i want to use google because i want to use the intuitive search so i want to pull words like this let's say 3d object scanning services i want to open up google type in i don't know why i did that again 3d scanning service so look i'm canadian based because i'm in canada so this gives me an idea exactly what people are typing in to look for that service so i would manually add that to my list and combined i want a list of about 200 keywords and that's what i'm going to start targeting on okay i've jumped from here to here and back but i'm just showing you the way my mind works let's go back to the actual website see what else we can see that is done right and what is done wrong look this is good okay all the big text on the site this is telling google like very loudly what the website is about so there is a decent amount of content and you do have your keyword in all the right places so thus far my my biggest recommendation is simply building out more pages that's what you're lacking right now because the site itself is not bad you need more landing pages so if i were to tell you my next step is to build out landing pages once again i have a video you can watch on how to do that so your competition has 451 keyword your competition has 451 backlinks we're going to take a quick look at them and see where we can get some of the same backlinks and we're also going to look at your backlinks so first and foremost let's look at your backlinks so here we have a directory backlink it's a text i can see it another directory backlink if you watch my videos you see i'm a strong promoter of getting free backlinks on business directories websites okay five ways a small 3d scanner can get through a lockdown so that's an article it seems some somebody's linked to you so if we went through it manually there is a link there somewhere that's a neat backlink assuming that the authority is somewhat decent so these all look authentic to me which is good now clap my hands to that it doesn't seem like you just went out and fraudulently purchased backlinks okay they look they look good it's just a lack of them you have 94 decent backlinks let's see what your competitor is doing so what i would do is i would manually go through here and figure out where can i steal backlinks like literally as simple as that if you look at this what is let's click on this and see so here's a here's a backlink on 3dprint.com which is promoting and linking to your competitor's website and here's it's just an article so i might reach out to 3d print with your own article on the topic to see if they're interested in publishing you look this was published august as a year ago almost a year ago today so i mean it's time for a new article so what i would recommend my client to do if they would like to or my team would do it depends on what the budget is would be to create an article similar more up to date more content and then email the same exact person that's published this backlink for them your competitor in the past i would continue to go down oh this is a very good backlink right here this is a museum it's a museum you're getting high quality authority and it's good if you can get a backlink from a school a hospital a government website it will definitely help and look i'm seeing a bunch of them from the museum of wales i would reach out if your competitor got in there maybe you can get in there as well look another one another one like khaled would say another one i'm counting four or five right there from the museum another one museum so i know this is tedious and it takes time and effort but i would manually go through i would look at the article to see if there's a way that you can make it look better and or if you don't feel like doing it the long way if there's an option to leave a comment leave an authentic comment that's not spammy this one does not give me that option that's not spammy that also gives you a backlink nationalpreservation.com so once again if i was doing this for myself i would be looking at absolutely every single option so this is just a forum post but look how easy it would be for you to sign up and leave some good valuable information and get the same backlink what five minutes it would take me to sign up presuming i'm knowledgeable on the topic this is a 10 year old blog post no this discussion started in 2018 so it's a two-year-old ugly website but yet you can get it so i also want to see if you're linking out to any resources so when i click on this i see bespoke 3d printing face mask to help in the fight against coven 19. the title itself has some good keywords the blog post itself is very small and i'm seeing the word 3d so many times that this is in my eyes is oversaturated it's keyword stuffed let's take a look at how many times the word 3d is being used 35 times as you can see it's overkill to me it is overkill and you have so many different look one two three four five different hyperlinks or anchor text the bbc let's see what happens okay i like that it links out i like that i like that i don't like the word that you're just using like here whenever you have here here or as i mentioned before you don't highlight that only highlight the keyword that you're targeting it confuses google so if the keyword that you're targeting is customized face masks highlight that not here never do get in touch and hear focus on the words you're actually targeting but i mean i just think there's too many options with the lack of actual content on this page i think it's also missing a social sharing option so somewhere here on the right or the left or the bottom i would have social sharing so even if it's yourself once you publish this article you want to click on all five options twitter facebook linkedin etc blogger pinterest and share the article yourself even yourself sharing it is a social signal if other people like the content that they're reading on your website they also share that's huge when it comes to authority so actual i would add and i would also say to to lengthen the blog post literally more content and less i don't know what how you want to call it less here in anchor text but i mean it's not bad if this is your first time doing a website in seo it's not bad you're not getting the fruits of your labor simply because you don't have enough pages but for me to wrap this all up in a nutshell as to what you're doing right and wrong and what you can do better let's go over this one more time the keyword list that you're targeting right now is not long enough you need to come up with a new keyword list and my recommendation is 200 keyword minimum now with each of those keywords that you have on a list a new page of content in which we call a landing page very quickly a landing page is to target only one keyword so going back very quickly to your competition so when i click on view details if i want to destroy these guys like i mean if i want to just rip them out the water and i want to take away all their clients i'm taking their whole keyword list and i'm literally writing one page of content on every keyword that makes sense for my business now i understand this is not an exact replica of your business so there are some keywords here that are not going to make sense but if it were the same or if you were to manually go through and highlight all the keywords that make sense make sense for your business i would simply create one page of content i would create a landing page specifically on that keyword the url the h1 the content would all be pertaining to that one keyword i'm targeting and if you did that let's say over the course of the next three months you created 100 new landing pages targeting 100 new keywords you know what would happen when you then pull your stats instead of seeing a menial 12 keywords that you're highlighting you're going to see that number be a lot higher i mean it would be 100 and something 112 keywords in order for you to rank for the words that you want to rank for you have to create content on that exact keyword and don't let google question which keywords are most important to you do what you're doing just do it a little bit better make sure that the words are very visible like you did there make sure that the urls so let's click on 3d scanning for example look 3d scanning services it's not bad because you have uk in your domain name so it's not bad um let's see reverse engineering yeah it's not bad and if you really want to see how to do it and how to name your url reverse engineer success so let's go here to google let's type in uk and let's see who's currently in first and let's see what they've done my my whole whenever i'm giving a recommendation to my client or to my team or i'm doing seo myself i'm coming up with ideas myself based on my experience but i'm also reverse engineering success of other people right this is not a guessing game it's not like well i hope it's going to work and no it's like let's figure out what worked for other people we know what worked for them so we know what will work for us so look when i come here look all they've done is a subdomain but i mean basically it's it's the layout itself is exactly the same as what you have so now we want to scroll through look the site is very small so they must have some very good quality backlinks to this page not just to this website let me say that again when you're getting backlinks you're looking for backlinks to specific pages on your website that are important to you not merely to your home page i think that's often overlooked so when you create these new landing pages and you're attempting to get backlinks i want you to target those backlinks to the landing page that's another reason why we want to have social share buttons on certain pages so it's easy for you to share google is going to see that so that's a very quick overview to what i see right and wrong and as far as you might think you are right now with three visitors compared to 508 you're really not i think in the next three months realistically you could be beating them in traffic beating them at their own game beating them at their own keywords by simply pulling that list from their competitor and utilizing your time to create content those are my thoughts for today's video hopefully you get an idea as to what i look at in month one for any seo strategy that's exactly what i do in month two is slightly different because i'm documenting everything that i've done in month one because i wanna see what sticks to the wall every single website in the world is going to need a different strategy in order to get ranking so do mini case studies normally i start off by doing it on my own if i want to attempt to rank for a new keyword such as toronto website design i will set up three four or five landing pages on my website all targeting the same keyword i know some people are gonna say oh cannibalization you're competing against yourself and i say i know i'm doing that in order to see what works best so on each of my five landing pages that are targeting exactly the same keyword i'm going to do a variety of different things like one page will have 2 000 words of text with one photo one page will have 10 photos with 200 words of text one page will be somewhere in between but have three videos one page will be very small but have some good quality backlinks and the fifth page will be completely different and chris why are you doing this that's how i'm gonna know what works well in my industry and on my website for google once i've built up those five landing pages we'll call it a case study i sit back i eat popcorn and i watch netflix i watch to see what's going to happen on google i'm not getting too excited at first glance so let's say in the first week google starts ranking one of the pages that that does not mean that's an immediate winner it means i got to sit back and wait a little longer so most often when i'm doing case studies i'm waiting one to two to three months really depends on how i see things go then what i when i see a definite winner in my landing pages i'm gonna delete the other pages i'm gonna write down exactly what worked well for me and i'm going to test it on my clients okay so i know i've talked about content being king and it is but it's not as easy as simply writing a 2 000 word document for every keyword and thinking you're going to rank first it's not it's about trying new things and i recommend you try on yourself it's not going to hurt you and i also recommend to a certain extent you try on your client presuming that you're doing a white hat service and you're not simply going out there and buying thousands of backlinks then everyone's going to gain nobody's going to lose from this you're not doing anything illegal or anything that's going to hurt or detract from your rankings that's exactly you've looked i know this is not the most exciting video in the world but you've looked deep inside the mind of chris a hughes and i hope you guys have a wonderful day goodbye you

Channel: A Nerd's World

Views: 6,997

Keywords: SEO for beginners, seo audit, seo strategy, search engine optimization for beginners

Id: FnHxTSF4oJw

Length: 35min 0sec (2100 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 29 2020