When it comes to building SEO strategies it’s easy to get overwhelmed with all the different ranking factors and the rave around Private Blog Networks (PBNs).
A great way to produce your strategy is to carry out a competitor analysis. Here are our steps to get you on your way to SEO success:
- Run your website and your competitor’s websites through a well-known tool such as MOZ or Ahref.
- Compare the number of high-quality links so you can set your sights on what to exceed.
- Try get a backlink from the websites linking to your competition.
- Look at the top ranking Page Titles & Descriptions for each of your products and services then generate better optimised & targetted versions for your own.
- Use Google search parameters to find backlink opportunities such as ‘inurl:backlink list‘ which will search for Excel files with the word SEO in them.
- Find articles that ranked well for your industry and produce a more comprehensive & relevant version.
Following the steps above will provide a solid foundation to improving your websites positioning and authority but set realistic expectations, SEO results aren’t short-term in many cases.
It’s also worth using a website checker such as http://nibbler.silktide.com/ to compare your website to some of the better-performing ones in your industry, just to check that you’re not being penalised. Some final thought to help get the best start possible on your SEO campaign.
- SSL – Google now factors in Secure HTTP requests as a ranking factor so having an SSL certificate for your website (the padlock next to the URL) will help your website rank better.
- Re-directs – broken 301 re-directs or www. and non-www. competing can affect your page authority and therefore your search rankings.
- Slow loading pages – Users are more likely to leave your website if it takes too long to load, increasing bounce rate and making Google think your website is less relevant.
- Missing Meta Descriptions & Page Titles – An obvious one but you’d be surprised how many times we’ve found homepages with no Descriptions or heading tags!
- Ensure that your website works well for mobile as google have now fully implemented their “mobile-first” indexing.
- Ensure you have all the latest social media accounts and that they link o your main website and include all the relevant information such as name/description/address and phone number.
- Create a Google My Business account so that you have all your business information at the side of any search results and so that you appear in google maps. This also helps if you want to collect reviews as this is the primary way people can judge a business based on their review rating.