Weekly Wisdom with Ross Tavendale: How to Build an SEO Strategy
Modified transcript Hello, and welcome to another Weekly Wisdom. In this video, we are going to look at how to actually build an SEO strategy. To do that, we need to look at the main pillars of SEO, which are: Technical On-page Off-page From here, inside of each of the pillars, we have to categorize them based on themes that apply to the research and evaluation stages that we have already done. This assumes we have done things like keyword research, gap analysis, tech audit, backlink analysis, competitor audit — the whole thing. So I am just going to make up the research data to show you how to start thinking about SEO strategy. Adding Value Before we actually get into building the strategy, we need to apply a cash value to each of the parts of the strategy. A lot of you are going to be like, "Well, that is kind of impossible. We don't know the real-world outcome of broad optimizations." And to be honest, I would agree with you. However, it is your job to talk to the client and agree on a ballpark calculation so you can agree on a hierarchy of value. The easiest way to do this is just to pull Google Analytics data for each subfolder and work out average transactions or lead value per URL so you can get a rough idea of, based on the optimizations, what the cash value is going to be. So let's, without further ado, get into it. Breaking it Down First and foremost, we are going to need to work out how much money the client is going to make if we make these fixes. And the way we do that is really simple. So what you can see here is that we have broken it down by topics: If you go into GA and look at all the different subfolders, and get the URLs that sit underneath these subfolders, and then pull out the revenue information, we can start to work out a relative value for each of the URLs on the website. So we are assuming topic one; it has got ten URLs in it, and when we pull down the revenue for all those URLs combined, it is a hundred pounds. That would mean that revenue per URL is 10 pounds. Similarly, topic two, 25 URLs and a hundred, we can just start filling these in a lot quicker: We are going to use this as the basis for everything we are going to do with our on-page, technical, and backlink stuff. We are going to start using this as a basic framework to apply cash value to the fixes we are going to make. So we can eventually plot them all together and see what one we should do first according to the actual business value. Content Audit When it comes to optimizing the content, there is a couple of things we will typically do. We will either delete the pages if you have got too many in there cannibalizing each other. We can also maybe just optimize them and make them rank a little bit better. We can merge them together if you have got multiple pages on the same topic that we can put on the same page, or we might just create brand new pages altogether. But when it comes to making these decisions, what do you start with? Do you just go make new content? Do you just start deleting stuff? Well, if you use the framework we have just gone through, it will help you decide what you want to start with. So we have got all our topics as we did before, one through four, and the "number of issues" is the amount of pages that we have decided in our audit that we are either going to delete merge, optimize or create.