Many website owners often ask themselves a question, “How can I promote my website?” Then a popular term “SEO” springs to mind. SEO is a way to promote a website and it’s so well-known that none of these website owners can ignore it.

How should you use SEO? Is it just picking up a generic keyword, stacking this keyword for many times on a page and building countless links by leaving comments on blog and forums? Unfortunately, this strategy won’t work.

SEO is a powerful method to leverage your website’s brand awareness and bring more traffic and revenues but only if it is done properly. If not, it’s just a process of wasting your time, money and gaining useless traffic.

1. Think who is going to bring revenue to your website.

Quite often, we have clients asking me if we can get their websites to rank for a top position quickly, for a key term like “diesel generator”, but they have limited budget. Yes, this keyword can bring a decent amount of traffic, but considering time and money that will be consumed, how much return will this client finally obtain?

Let’s think about who is going to search for this keyword,

- Potential customers that look for information about diesel generators
- Students that have course work about diesel generators
- Generator manufacturers that search for competitor’s product information

Among this traffic, there is only one type which can be considered as quality traffic, this is potential customers that look for diesel generator information and compare. But why are they searching for “diesel generator”, that’s because most of them need to find different information sources and compare. After comparison, they are likely to make their decision and search for more specific keywords, such as “diesel generator A103 for sale London”. (I made this model name up, but you get the idea)

So before starting any SEO, please ask yourself, who are you targeting?

 

2. Think what keywords are likely to convert.

After knowing your potential customers, now it’s time to conduct a keyword research.

Firstly, brainstorm some generic keywords that are relevant to your business.

Secondly, create a cluster for each of these generic keywords. This step is critical, as if you have a proper group of keywords, you are on the right track to SEO success; if you don’t have a proper one, you are more likely to waste time and money in the future. This step has two important tricks

Ask someone’s opinion who is not an expert in your industry. Reason is simple, most of your customers shouldn’t have much expertise in your field, you don’t want to rank for some very specific keywords that nobody is going to search.

Think about your customer’s buying cycle. E.g. we are an SEO agency, our potential customer might  have this searching process

- Search for “SEO” first to understand what it is.
- Then he is curious about the price, so he searches “SEO prices”
- If he is happy about what SEO can bring to him and not worrying about the budget, he probably
searches for “SEO agency London” because he needs some experts in London to help him.
- After comparing some of these agencies, he doesn’t know which one to choose, so he might type in “which SEO agency is the best in London”

If we are ranking high for “which SEO agency is the best in London”, then we will probably have very little traffic, but these visits can still bring us quality leads. In addition, these long-tail keywords apparently don’t require as much effort (not even close) as a broad term such as “SEO”. Not to mention the content that targets long-tail keyword often contains several generic keywords as well.

 

3. Keywords mapping and content generating

Once you’ve finished your keyword research, you can start mapping them to your different pages. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to assign every single keyword to a different page, especially as the homepage can target several competitive keywords at the same time.

If you find out there is no specific page for one of your topics, or there is one, but not so relevant, you need to create a page for this topics specifically.

There is a trick when you generate a new content page, that is, list all the keywords which are associated to a topic and put them into the content as natural as possible. It’s much easier to write a “well-optimised” article if you have the keywords list in hand.

Another thing to bear in mind is to add new content about new long-tail keywords consistently, search engines love freshness. If you have 10 articles to be published, don’t publish them within 10 minutes, publish one article a day. This will buy you more time to write new content and keep your website updated consistently.

 

4.   Internal linking planning

Many webmasters might not know the importance of internal linking, a well-structured internal linking can greatly increase the crawlability and leverage the benefits from global link popularity.

Don’t believe me? Think about Wikipedia, it has countless pages dominating search engines. Do these pages all have loads of links from other websites? No, actually these pages rarely get many inbound links, but they benefit from wikipedia’s superb internal linking structure because if any of these pages received links from other websites, it can quickly pass a tiny bit of authority to other pages, imagine how many topics Wikipedia covers? You will be amazed.

Also, by building internal links, you can easily let search engines know what pages are important on your website. E.g. if you sell a product “yellow widget”, meanwhile you have many pages talking about “yellow widget” and have links linking to this product page, then search engines will realise this product is a core of your business.

 

5. Competitor analysis

The competitor analysis here is not only about checking on-page elements and quality and quantity of inbound links. As a business owner, you have to analyse your competitors’ business models, what make them outstanding? How do they get links naturally?

Grab a pen and a paper or create a new spreadsheet, open your competitors’ websites and start working. Here are few things that you may want to take notes on:

- What is their unique selling points and unique linkbaiting points?
- If you are a customer, would you be happy to give them a link on your blog?
- What are people saying about them on social networks?
- Number of domains that link to your competitors
- Anchor texts distribution (does hypertext contains keyword?)
- Do they have long and informative content on the page?

After noticing the difference between you and your competitors, I am sure you will have a clear mind of what to do next. They can be

- Enrich your content by adding texts, videos and pictures
- Improve your products’ unique selling points and unique linkbaiting points
- Promote your website on social networks
- Ask for an anchor text if the person who gives you a link doesn’t write any anchor text on the link (DO NOT change all the existing anchor texts to the keyword you want to rank)
- Start link building

6. On-page optimisation

This is the easy part, once you decided what keyword to target on this page, you can check if the keyword is included in

- Page title (Make it short and descriptive)
- URL (Make it short and memorable)
- Content (Don’t stuff your keyword and do use synonyms)
- Image alt tag

More details can be found in our SEO audit page.

Of course there are many other on-page elements that need to be checked, such as keyword location, meta descriptions and etc, but the most important thing is to:

- Structure your content well
- Be informative
- Stick to the topic
- Do anything that can to give visitors a reason to link to you

 

7. Off-page optimisation

Off-page optimisation, also known as link building, is to increase a website’s global link popularity by achieving inbound links from other websites. This is a big and tough topic, as there are numerous ways to get links, but it’s very hard to obtain quality links.

Link building is a bit like how we establish network in our real life, it’s very easy to ask neighbor to do you a favor but it’s nearly impossible to ask Prime Minister, in fact, you can’t even find a chance to talk to him.

So as a business owner, the easiest way to achieve links is to ask your friend and business partners to kindly link to you. Don’t be bothered to spend days and days leaving links in blog’s comments and forum, these links are pretty much guaranteed to be ignored. However, communicate with blog owner and forum members by leaving constructive comments, this can bring you a large amount of traffic and many opportunities to get a link in the future.

There is one thing you need to keep asking yourself when you build links, WHY should your visitor give you a link? Once you resolve this question, there is no problem getting more and more links.

 

8. Data tracking and web analysis

This is not exactly a SEO activity to promote your website, but it is so critical that you can never ignore it. You need to track your website’s statistics and compare to the history, so you will be able to know if your website is on the right track or not. By analysing the data you gathered, it’s not hard to find out what goes right and what goes wrong. If you find anything wrong, go fix it!


SEO is not something that you stuff some keywords on your page and get some inbound links to rank on search engines. It’s a method to optimise the entire website to please your visitors and convert them into customers. It takes long time and often makes you frustrated because it is not easy as you thought. But if you have the patience, desire and will to make your website better and better, SEO will become much easier in the long run and you can gain more benefits from it than you would have thought.

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