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.

The next time you visit your local car repair shop, hair salon, spa, car dealer, electronics store (ok, not the major chains), even grocery stores, ask to see the manager. Present yourself as a happy customer who’d like to give something back, and tell them what you work with. Ask if they’re currently doing any online marketing, if they have a website, if they’re happy with it, if they’re interested in slashing advertising costs and increasing their ROI (return on investment, meaning they will get back more than they invest) etc. Some of them will, some of them won’t.

Always be professional, because if you are, you might land a client who first said no a bit later. Tell them about pay per click (or whatever you think is suitable for their niche, but ppc works for most businesses), tell them about ranking high on google, heck, even bring a laptop/iphone and show them the competition’s ads for the keywords that would be relevant for them. Tell them how this new kind of target marketing will slash their ad costs compared to newspaper advertising, and there is a great chance that it will increase their ROI greatly.

Set up a deal with them, and the kind of deal will depend on what they want and what they do. Maybe they need a new website, maybe the current one needs to be a bit optimized, maybe you need to get a commission for all online sales, if they sell stuff online, paid per lead, or just a ppc management fee. Bring in 5-6 clients, and quit your day job.

Now, I know that if I end my post here, people will start begging for a blueprint like “what did you say, how did you do it, how much do you charge, how did you know what to do, I don’t know PPC, etc.” Okay, here is EXACTLY what I did when I first got started, and it should be enough for you as well:

1. First client was a hair salon, I happened to know the owner. He wanted more clients and was complaining about the competition who seemed to do so well online, but all he did was lose cash when trying that “pay Google thingy.” I said “let me get back to you, we’ll fix it.” At the time I wasn’t really too knowledgeable about PPC, so I went to some forums and asked what the best book on PPC was, and got he answer “Perry Marshall’s ‘The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords‘,” so I bough it at a bookstore the same day. I read the book twice in a couple of days, went back to my friend and explained how I was really good at PPC, and that we should set up a deal.

At the time, I didn’t really know about lead generation and performance based marketing deals, so I just said, give me $199 a month, and I’ll take care of it. He set a budget, I opened a Client Center account with Google, put in his account (yes, he paid the click fees to Google, I didn’t), and off we went.

2. Next client was my car repair guy. I actually Googled him, and discovered that he wasn’t online at all. No website, no presence. I went over there and explained how he was missing out, and showed him other garages in the area and what they were doing on my laptop. He got all excited, so I said the same thing: Give me $199 a month, and I’ll take care of it, and I’ll charge you 700 bucks for a simple 5 page website. That was about 2 days of work, and it brought in $900 for that month. I actually did the website myself at the time, now I outsource all website creation to elance.com.

3. And so it went, I learned about more marketing models and started charging commission, lead generation fees, doing SEO work for $499-$1200 a month, that I outsourced completely, and started offering custom software/programming/backend solutions, also outsourced, as my programming skills are completely non-existing. Not very long after, I was making way more with my new clients than I’d ever done before. Now I have a couple of other ventures going on, and I’m not actively pursuing new clients, but if I see an opportunity, I ALWAYS ask about their current marketing strategies.

Don’t ever be afraid of asking, don’t ever fear a no, read up on sales techniques, and I can dearly recommend Tony Robbins, Brian Tracy, Zig Ziglar, Jim Rohn and those guys. Fantastic!

Get some audio tapes, listen to them on the computer, in the car etc. This is a real business, this is your life, take action now!

Peace out!

–Sam