5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
TABLE OF CONTENTS About The Author Strategy 1. Comprehensive Competitive Research Strategy 2. Go After Lower-Competition, High-Converting Keyword Strategy 3. Create Popular and Authoritative Content Around Those Keywords Strategy 4. Promoting Your Content So That People Link To It From Authoritative, Relevant sites Strategy 5. Produce & Offer Free Tools Case Study 1: How We Can Increase Harley Finance’s Lead Number by 500% Case Study 2: How We Can Grow Warranty & Insurance Growth of Revenue 100K Year on Year
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Huyen Truong is a Search Marketing Strategist with a passion for SEO. She entered online marketing world in early 2000s when SEO was still in its infancy. She has done hundreds of SEO, Web Development, Online Marketing projects and gained extensive practical experience over the years working with businesses at different levels. She also have a solid knowledge and experience in Marketing and Business consulting that set her apart from other technical SEO experts. She has been invited as the Search Marketing expert contributing her content for popular business news sites such as www.allbusiness.com www.business. com www.itwire.com among others. Huyen acquired her MBA at one of the top MBA programs in USA in 2010. This ebook will showcase the best 5 strategies that have been working very well for her clients. Follow Huyen Truong on Twitter @HuyenTruongMBA Connect with her on LinkedIn
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
5 SEO STRATEGIES THAT YOUR COMPETITORS AREN’T USING With millions of websites and companies clamoring to get to the top rank in Google, search engine optimisation is becoming an insanely competitive marketing channel. If you’re looking to rank on a national scale, it could take years of hard work to build a solid foundation. As you may know, following the wrong SEO advice can cost you…big time. It can cost you traffic, cost you subscribers, cost you customers (and if you get nailed by a penalty), it even can cost you your business. Even so, SEO is one of the most cost-effective and worthwhile digital marketing channels available, and if you strategize efficiently, you can get the edge over your competition. There are some excellent SEO strategies that your competition is probably neglecting or that they do not know yet that you can use. If that’s the case, perhaps that’s an area we can exploit. First of all, we need to know what your competitors are doing in order to find out what has worked well for them and what could work well for us. Then we need to plug the gaps they haven’t found yet.
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
STRATEGY 1:
COMPREHENSIVE COMPETITIVE RESEARCH RESEARCH THEIR CONTENT MARKETING ACTIVITIES What type of content are they producing on their website? Is it good? Do they attract lots of social attention, likes, shares, comments? Look at how often they publish. What subjects do they write about? Do they offer free e-books? Are they any good? Sign up and download the e-books to evaluate their quality. Can you do better? The more you understand about your competitors’ strategies, the more you can do that better.
RESEARCH THEIR KEYWORDS Research your competition’s targeted keywords. Identify the low competition keywords and high converting keywords. There are a couple of great tools that I use to find this information GOOGLE KEYWORDS PLANNER: this is free. All you need to do is to create a Google AdWords account and after logging in you can find it under Tools -> Google Keyword Planner. Keywords are the most important part of SEO. They are more important than on-page. They are more important than content. And they are more important than backlinks. Unfortunately, most people use Google Keywords Planner completely the wrong way. They start by typing a keyword into the Google Keyword Planner. This is the worst way to start the keyword research process.
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
Why? Google Keyword Planner has two big problems. Problem #1: It only spits out keywords that are very closely related to what you put into it Problem # 2: Everyone goes after keywords that the tool suggests and some keywords become insanely competitive
Here’s how you should use Google Keyword Planner: Step #1: Click on the “search for new keywords and ad group ideas” just like you normally would. Here’s the screen that you’ll see.
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
Step #2: Enter a competitor’s landing page into the “your landing page” field. Technically, you’re meant to type your own landing page here. But there’s no rule against entering other pages. Do that and you’ll find a truckload of outsidethe-box keyword ideas. Let’s use a car finance business example. As you saw, the Google Keyword Planner (GKP) didn’t give us any fresh ideas when we used a seed keyword like “bad credit car finance”. Watch what happens when you enter a weird page, like the ranking page of a competitor—in this case www.savvy.com.au/car-loans/bad-credit-car-loans As you can see, we can identify some relevant but a bit less competitive keywords such as “ second chance car finance”. In the “truck finance” landing page, you can find less the competitive keyword “truck finance brokers”.
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
A SECOND KEYWORD RESEARCH TOOL IS SEM RUSH: I love this tool. It provides a more complete picture, that doesn’t just include reports on competitors’ organic keywords and paid keywords, but it also provides backlink profiles, ads copies, ads artwork and video advertising.
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
Below is the explanation of the meaning of each parameter in the SEM Rush keyword report. • Keyword: Keywords for which pages on your competitor are getting traffic • Position: Keyword positions in search engine. • Volume: Number of exact match queries for that keyword in the local search. • CPC: Cost per click for the ad (on average) • URL: Corresponding URL to which that keyword is driving traffic. • Com: How can a search engine marketing tool be complete without a competition check? This shows the competition of advertisers for that keyword. A lower number means less competition and a higher number means greater competition for that term. • Results: Number of search engine results. A lower number here is better. • Trend: This is one column which I find very interesting. In order to find profitable keywords, we need to make sure the traffic trend for that keyword is not dying. This column pulls the uptrend for that keyword for the last 12 months.
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
RESEARCH TRAFFIC CHANNELS Research traffic channels that your competitors engage with, to find the ones, which generate the most traffic. I use a tool called www.similarweb.com to achieve this. www.similarweb.com enables you to: • Benchmark yourself against your main competitors • Peek into the hidden marketing strategies of your competitors, across industries and countries • Easily perform keyword research that’s based on actual traffic statistics • Discover new opportunities while reducing risk by learning from your competitor’s mistakes With this tool, you will be able to know what online marketing channels your strong competitors are promoting mainly:
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
Where they get their referral traffic from?
How much effort they are spending on SEO and AdWords, and what keywords they are targeting.
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
What their social traffic looks like?
What sites they spend their display advertising on?
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
You can even track what ads they use for their campaign. Isn’t it amazing?
In summary, here are my favourite powerful tools for competitor research, and their cost. - Google Keyword Planner: FREE - www.semrush.com: Pro $69.95/month - www.similarweb.com/ : Basic Plan $199 / month Use the following tools to research their link building activities. - www.ahrefs.com: $79/month - https://majestic.com/ $50/month After researching your competitors, you will have some ideas about their current online marketing strategies, so what are the next strategies?
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
STRATEGY 2:
GO AFTER LOW-COMPETITION, HIGHCONVERTING KEYWORDS Use the research you’ve just done to help you to now define the low competition, high converting keywords. -> the step from competitor research just helps us do part of the keyword research, on strategy 2, we need to mention 03 ways that we do keyword research and competitor keyword research is just one of those (competitive kw research, Google AdWords, Longtail KWR)
COMPETITOR RESEARCH DATA As I told you above, the competitor research will help you reveal about what keywords are actually working for your competitors. You can find them through all the tools that I showed you above
GOOGLE ADWORDS Through tracking software such as call tracking, click tracking from Google AdWords, you will be able to know what keywords are bringing good leads for you.
GOOGLE ADWORDS As well as the normal keywords, use the research techniques we’ve just discussed to also identify long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are longer and more specific search queries that users type into a search engine. For example, if I wanted to find bad credit car loans service, I might enter “bad credit car finance”. This is a broad term or “short-tail” keyword.
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
If I wanted to fine-tune my search, I would type, “bad credit car finance no deposit”, or “ bad credit car loans guaranteed”. These two search terms are “long-tail” keywords. Instead of going after commonplace keywords/key phrases, go after long-tail key phrases. Long-tail key phrases more closely resemble what an actual user would type into a search engine. For example, rather than rank for “truck finance” create a more specific page about “no deposit truck finance” and “truck finance for bad credit people”. The chances of ranking for these long-tail keywords are much more likely. Studies reveal that long-tail key phrases/keywords drive better results due to greater relevancy and less competition. Neil Patel, one of the world’s leading online marketers has pointed out the advantages of long-tail keywords over popular short-tail keywords in his article of Steps to integrate long-tail keywords within blog posts. He says, long-tail keywords perform 2.5 times better than short-term keywords.
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
Take this example: “Truck finance” and “How do I become a truck driver in Australia”. My team has managed to rank Harley Finance as number 1 for the short-tail keyword “truck loans”, not just one spot on page one, but three spots (this is, by the way very competitive keyword and the cost per click on AdWords is around $20)
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
This article alone about “How do I become a truck driver in Australia”, has brought more than 9,000 new visitors to Harley Finance in the past year. The image below is the number of sessions generated by this article:
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
STRATEGY 3:
CREATE CONTENT Your third strategy needs to be to create popular and authoritative content around the keywords you’ve just discovered. Here is the winning formula: Great Content + Targeted Outreach + Added Value = Links (The more people link to your site the higher ranking, more traffic) The questions are: How do you create content that generates targeted, highconverting traffic, and how do you then promote that content? Also, how do you publish content that generates social shares, comments, traffic and backlinks? I believe awesome content generates great power. However, I’ve been around long enough to know that “great content” isn’t enough to get you onto the first page of Google. Like beauty, “great content” in the eye of the beholder. In other words, you need to create content that your audience thinks is ‘great’. Not you. You don’t need to think it’s great. Not the marketing manager. The marketing manager doesn’t need to think it’s great. It’s your target audience that needs to think it’s great. If you want to be successful with content marketing, you need to figure out what people actually want to read. This may sound like common sense, but it’s surprising how many people publish content that they “think” people will like. It’s not so difficult to do this.
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
STEP 1 IS TO FIND POPULAR CONTENT IN YOUR NICHE.
Why bother reinventing the wheel when there are literally hundreds of thousands of successful blogs posts, articles and videos? Do some research to find content that’s already done well. For this to work well, pick a keyword with a decent search volume (at least 1,000 searches per month). Use Google Keyword Planner Tool for this part of the task.
Next, go to Google (in incognito or private browsing) and search for your keyword. Investigate the results to see what you’re up against. Type one of the keywords you found above into Google. For example, “tick treatments for pets”.
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
You can see top ranking page and articles on page and have a sense of what they are and see if you can outdo them. I think the best one out there, is the one from petmd.com.
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
STEP 2 IS TO MAKE THAT CONTENT GREAT (NOT JUST GOOD)
There are several ways of improving content. You can make it more in-depth, more trusted, better looking, or improve some other aspect of it. It’s very important that you improve the content in the first few search results not by a bit, but by a lot. You want to tell your audience that linking to your content will improve their stories or resource pages exponentially . OK so you’ve identified the common threads that tie popular content together. Now it’s time to come up with better topic. How about “15 Ways To Treat Tick in Dogs and Cats - Comprehensive Guide Infographic” Does it sound more enticing? First of all, it is comprehensive guide with clear 15 ways to treat tick paralysis in dogs and cats. Secondly, it is infographic, people love it, it is easy to read and follow, it also has images and graphics to entertain readers. Thirdly, bigger lists like that have a VERY high perceived value, which means people are more likely to share them. Now that you have your high-level content in hand, it’s time move onto the final step. This is content promotion.
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
STRATEGY 4:
PROMOTING YOUR CONTENT In strategy 3, I showed you how to produce great content. The final strategy is to promote your content so that people link to it from authoritative and relevant sites and to knock out what’s already out there. Your high quality content can be articles, infographics, videos but what has worked amazingly well for me is infographics.
HOW TO GET BACKLINKS USING GUESTOGRAPHICS: 5 SIMPLE STEPS The Guestographic Method couldn’t be easier. Here are the five steps: Step 1: Create and Publish a (Really Good) Infographic Step 2: Find sites that write about your infographic’s topic Step 3: Show them your infographic Step 4: Offer them unique content (“the bribe”) Step 5: Get them link back to your site Let me show you each step in more detail.
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
STEP 1: PUBLISH AN AWESOME INFOGRAPHIC
There’s no shortcut here. If you want people to share your infographic, it has to be good. Fortunately, you don’t need a 6-figure marketing budget. In fact, my tick treatment infographic only cost me $US250. (You also have to take into account your time drafting the content for the infographic - another 2-3 hours) The design is really important, but it’s only one part of an infographic’s success. What really matters? Choosing the right topic really matters. You need to pick a topic that’s what I like to call, “freshly relevant”. When it is coming closely to ‘tick season’ which is around summer time in Australia, people are hustling to find information and prevention tips for their pets. To stay abreast of this, we proposed a content plan which was done 6 months ago when we first started doing SEO for Gordon Vet about producing content to suit the seasonal factors. In my case, I noticed that people were publishing articles about tick treatment for pets every week, but they rehashed the same advice and not comprehensive enough. That told me that there was lots of demand for the topic, but no up-to-date content to meet that demand. I’ve found that these infographics always get a tidal wave of social shares, referral traffic, and backlinks. (other sites referencing back to your website for a particular topic).
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
That is why I came up with the idea of creating the most comprehensive infographic out there “15 Ways To Treat Ticks In Dogs & Cats – Comprehensive Guide – Infographic” which includes;
- Some stats about tick paralysis
- What are they?
- Where can they be found?
- Where do they attack pets?
- How dangerous are they?
- Signs or symptoms of tick paralysis
- Treatments: 15 ways
- Preventions: How to protect pets and homes from tick paralysis
I bet you can’t find any more comprehensive infographic like this out there.
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
STEP 2; FIND PEOPLE THAT ARE INTERESTED IN YOUR GRAPHIC.
Once your infographic is ready, it’s time to make a list of people that might want to check it out. The easiest way to do that? Search for keywords that describe your infographic’s topic. Let’s say that you just published an infographic about the ‘5 Signs of Arthritis in Dogs and Cats’. You can go on Google and find a list of blogs that cover that topic. The basic idea is to find infographics that your competitors or some influencers in your niche have made in the past and see who republished them and linked to them. Google “[competitor or influencer] + infographic” or Google “[targeted keyword] + infographic” Or you can use backlink checker tool such as www.ahrefs.com or www.majestic. com to find sites that link to existing popular articles on the same topics
Image: Example of finding blogs that link to PetMD article http://www.petmd. com/dog/parasites/evr_dg_10_ways_to_stop_ticks_from_biting_your_dog Once you’ve found a quality blog in your niche, here’s what to do next: Email people linking to the old content to let them know about your new piece of superior content.
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
STEP 3. SEE IF THEY’RE INTERESTED IN YOUR INFOGRAPHIC
Email them the infographic (image only) and tell them they can use the embedded codes like Gordon Vet did here, to paste on their site’s blog page.
STEP 4. MAKE SHARING YOUR INFOGRAPHIC A WALK IN THE PARK
When you want another site to link to you, you need to remember that the more barriers you remove, the more success you’ll achieve. One thing that prevents people from sharing an infographic is that they have to write a unique introduction to go with it. Your job is to remove that barrier by writing the introduction for them.
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
Here is an example of our outreach work that we managed to feature on a number of Aussie domain sites (Yahoo!) http://petproblemsolved.com.au/blog/5-signs-of-arthritis-in-dogs-catsinfographic/
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
STRATEGY 5:
PRODUCE & OFFER FREE TOOLS Create a useful tool for your community to encourage backlinks and traffic. When we talk about content, we usually talk about text, audio, or video. But you can consider content as a type of tool, as well.
OPTION #1 – CREATE A SMALL TOOL 5 SIMPLE STEPS I’m talking about a tool that your readers and colleagues can use: something like a Truck/ Car Finance Calculator with Balloon Payment. But don’t get too ambitious. Keep it simple. You take on less risk with a small tool. If you spend a few hundred dollars and for some reason it doesn’t do well, it’s not that too big of a deal. If you spend thousands, then it starts to hurt. There are hundreds of truck finance calculators out there, but what’s different with this tool is that it is designed specifically for Australian marketing and features Balloon payments which is a feature that is not available on other calculators. As a result, Harley Finance easily ranks number 2 on Google with other big financial institutions with the keyword “truck finance calculator with balloon payment.”
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
We made the second version of this tool called “Car Finance Calculator with Balloon Payment” which is designed for car finance and we sent this calculator to other car or financial sites to embed for FREE. Who wouldn’t like a free gift? This has given us some great links that have worked out to about $2-$20/link, once we factored in the cost of the tool, which is excellent.
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5 Winning SEO Strategies That Your Competitors Aren’t Using
OPTION #2 – CREATE A POWERFUL TOOL STEPS Alternatively, if you see the opportunity to solve a big problem with a tool, you can take it. That’s what I did with the Responsive Testing Tool few years ago when responsive design was just a new thing.
SO LET’S WRAP THIS UP Here are the important take-aways from this article. Your search engine traffic is driven by three things: 1. Keywords that have low competition but which are high converting 2. Your ability to create authoritative content around those keywords 3. Your ability to promote that content so that authoritative, relevant sites link back to it Building links is important for SEO and your site’s growth and I recommend you dedicate a good couple of hours to this task each week. Here’s what to do next: 1. Send a message to my personal email address huyen@resultdrivenseo.com. au to let me know what you think of this report. 2. Consider trying out these strategies 3. Congratulate yourself. You’ve just read a 20-page e-book.
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