We are making search engine optimization since 2009. The significant experience gained during those years made us expose here the part of our usual SEO procedure. It is not a simple task. Maybe you know about the Pareto principle — you focus on 20% of the job, and it brings you 80% of the result.
When one starts to make SEO for a website he faces a question: which steps to follow?
Here are they:
1. Download a big list of keywords relevant to your website from the Adwords Keyword Planning Tool. https://adwords.google.com/
2. Select some keywords from the Adwords list which have the best relation to traffic/competition and traffic/price per click.
3. Check the level of competition for every selected keyword and detect if your website is capable of fighting with top-10 competitors.
Below it’s shown how to do it.
First of all, you need to have a Rank Tracker software; you can download it here:
http://www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker/download.html
Using this tool, you can get the following data of your top-10 competitors for any keyword:
At this example, we have taken “SEO America” as a keyword. Our website www.milloret.com is at spot 1. Why? It has one of the highest levels of on-page optimization and a significant number of backlinks. The other factors are not so important in this case since the upper part of the websites have metrics which are not so much better than lower positioned sites. You can do the same check for your website. If you see that your competitors have numbers which can’t be achieved by your project, for example, his Alexa Rank is less than 10.000, and the number of backlinks is several thousand; it’s better to select another keyword for your project.
Also, you can make a more in-depth check of your competitors using tools offered by http://domainmetricstool.com/
These two tables show the other parameters of your top-10 competitors. For example, CF/TF value (majestic.com has created these parameters) of www.milloret.com is one of the lowest. It means that TF (Trust Flow) is bigger than the number of backlinks CF (Citation Flow).
The last table shows backlinks of which topics are essential for ranking for a selected keyword.
4. At this point, you have the list of keywords which will become target keywords for ranking your project.
5. The next step would be to determine the weak points of your website if compared with your competitors using the methods shown above and take measures to optimize the relevant factors.
Do you agree with this method? Want to add or comment on something? Leave your comment below