At Pubcon 2014 in Las Vegas I was able to sit down and talk to Steve Wiideman of Wiideman Consulting to discuss SEO strategy development.
Steve has a lot of background working with big brands, as well as mid-to-large sized brands. There’s a lot that goes into the strategies put together for these companies and in the video below, Steve sheds some more light on the process, starting with the first phase of strategy development.
Here are some key takeaways from the video:
- Whether you’re dealing with big brands or small businesses, strategy always comes before all else. One of the first steps is performing an obstacle analysis. What that involves is taking a look at what could be better from an indexing perspective. What could be improved on the website level for better indexing?
- The next thing Steve does is perform a competitive analysis. You can do this by gathering data on all your website metrics so you have a baseline to compare against. That way you’ll know if your SEO strategy is making a difference.
- The next step is keyword research, which also involves an assessment of the competitive landscape of various keywords.
- Then, once all this data is gathered, Steve aggregates it and comes up with a segmentation of what are the sales-driven search terms, what is the customer intent based on those keywords, what kind of content are users looking for based on those keywords.
- With all those segments of data, Steve uses those different lists to guide the content strategy going forward, including what kinds of new content to create and how to leverage existing content.
- The last part is a deep look into link analysis. The idea is to try to understand what the link profile looks like currently, what links need to be cleaned up, and what are some obvious opportunities to acquire new links.
- When doing a competitive analysis, it’s not always about looking at direct competitors, but what Steve calls an “eye” competitor. This is a site that shows up alongside your business website in the search results. Even if you’re not competing with this other site for sales, you’re still competing with them for user attention and clicks and so forth.
- For performing a competitive analysis, Steve recommends tools such as SEMRush, Compete.com, and Bright Edge.
- For more information, check out Steve’s detailed post on Quora about boilerplate SEO strategies.
Please visit SEJ’s YouTube page for more video interviews.
Category
SEO
