My Solid SEO 2016 Plan

Here’s a typical process many SEOs use when building content:
 

1.      Conduct keyword research to discover what people are searching for relative to your niche.

2.      Pick a series of high-volume, low-competition phrases

3.      Build content around these phrases and topics

4.      Launch and market the page. Build some links.

5.      Watch the traffic roll in. (Or not)

6.      Move on to the next project.

You want to close that gap. We’ll ask and answer these 3 questions:

1.      Is my content matching the intent of the visitors I’m actually receiving?

2.      Based on this intent, is my search snippet enticing users to click?

3.      Does my page allow users to complete their task?

 The key to task completion is to make solving the user’s problem both clear and immediate.

  Optimizing for user intent

Now that we understand how users are actually finding our page, we want to make it obvious that our page is exactly what they are looking for to solve their problem. There are 5 primary areas this can be accomplished.

1. Title tag
2. Meta description
3. Page title and headers
4. Body text
5. Call to action

 

  Submit for reindexing

Measure results, tweak, and repeat

• Rankings, or overall impressions
• Clicks and click-through rate
• Engagement metrics, including bounce rate, time on site, and conversions

Link Acquisition

Step 1 Opportunity Discovery

1.      Relevant Communities

2.      Competitive links

3.      Press/ Publications

4.      Resource lists / Linkers

5.      Blog / Social Influencers

6.      Feature, Focus, or Intersection Sources

7.      Business Development and Partership

Step 2 Your Link Acquisition Spreadsheet

Url Domain | Opportunities Type | Approach |Contact | Link Metrics

Step 3 Execute, Learn and Iterate

Link Building Bruckets

1.      One to one outreach

2.      Broadcast like social media sharing

3.      Paid Amplification- like social ads, native ads, re-targeting, display. All paid formats

One: one-to-one outreach. This is you going out and sending usually an e-mail, but it could be a DM or a tweet, an at reply tweet. It could be a phone call. It could be — I literally got one of these today — a letter in the mail addressed to me, hand-addressed to me from someone who'd created a piece of content and wanted to know if I would be willing to cover it. It wasn't exactly up my alley, so I'm not going to. But I thought that was an interesting form of one-to-one outreach.

Broadcast works well if, in your niche, certain types of content or tools or data gets regular coverage and you already reach that audience through one of your broadcast mediums.

Paid amplification tends to work best when you have an audience that you know is likely to pick those things up and potentially link to them, but you don't already reach them through organic channels, or you need another shot at reaching them from organic and paid, both.