What makes up a good SEO campaign? Well, that depends on what your competitors are doing.
I can rank first for “random long phrase one two four” in a matter of 5 minutes because there are currently no competitors. Yet, if I want to be competitive with something like “voip los angeles” then I have a lot more work to do. That work starts with looking at what my competitors are doing.
On page factors are very important but ultimately at the end of the day those are pretty easy to figure out just by comparing the similarities in the content and keyword usage of the top 10 people in your niche. Then, you could even compare those top 10 similarities to similarities of 10 results on page 5. The differences will be obvious and show you what and why it’s working.
Once you have a good idea of what is working you can build your page based on that new-found knowledge. That will be a good starting point. From there, hopefully you know more about SEO than your competitors and can improve upon what they have already shown you works.
Next, and probably the most important step in the process is building relevant inbound links. You can also see who is linking to your competitors and compare similarities in inbound links amongst the top 10 on the first page vs 10 on the 5th page. You’ll immediately see that it’s a mixture of quality links and the quantity of inbound links.
Many more factors go into an SEO campaign, but my point of this article is to show you that anyone can figure out how to setup a basic SEO plan. All you have to do to setup a basic SEO plan is to look at the competitors and do some research. Figure out what’s working for the people at the top spots and compare those to people at the bottom. Walla!
Even if you know nothing else about SEO and all you are good at is analysis then you can now at least have a starting point. I’m certainly not saying that SEO is all about copying what everyone else is doing (in fact outright copying will probably get you on the blacklist, a duplicate content penalty or really poorly ranked.)
Study your competitors! Using this “SEO = Competitive Research” mindset you can get far with SEO, even if you don’t know much about it.
Great post Brian, am going to bookmark this for future use…
Do you ever consider a keyword phrase to competitive to even attempt? If you have a new site, how do you compete against authority sites with thousands of pages indexed?
If you want to compete in a really competitive niche you’re best shot for the least money is probably trying to buy out an established domain with some solid PR.
That will help you move a lot faster than starting from nothing.
nice one i am going to put this into action this week