How to Write SEO Content That Ranks in 2020

– Hey, so in this video, I'm going to walk you through how to create SEO content step-by-step.

And this is an interviewI did on Content Champion, and I literally walk youthrough the entire process from finding keywords, qualifying keywords, creating the content, and then optimizing the content so that it actually ranks in Google.

So if you wanna learnhow to write SEO content that actually works, watch this entire video.

It's extremely in-depth so you probably will wanna take some notes so that you can actually take this information that'sin there and act on it as soon as you watch the entire video.

So if you're excited aboutthis free training video, please like this videoand drop a comment below saying you're excited, andI'll see you in a second.

– Look, tell us a bit about Gotch SEO, the blog itself, how did that grow? Because you've got thisgreat authoritative site now that's really at the forefrontof the industry as it were.

– Yeah.

When I first started that blog, it's odd because I never really thought about building it upfrom an SEO perspective.

I just started because I was like, hey, I can publish case studies and things that wouldhelp my clients realize that I know what I'm doing, really.

So in the beginning, pretty much all of mycontent in the early days was case studies and really specific stuff that was literally just designed for content marketing purposes, not really for drivingorganic search traffic.

But then, over time, I started to realize, okay, I should probably start trying to drive organic search traffic, so then I started focusing on more top-of-the-funnel type of keywords like back links and anchortext and those things.

And believe it or not, depending on what your business model is, those types of keywords aren't great if you're trying to get clients because most clients wouldn't be searching something that specific or granular.

So I'm attracting people that already have somewhat of an understanding of SEO.

Those people are moreappropriate for my training, more appropriate for mywhite-label services, but they're not appropriatefor becoming a client so that's why I also havepages targeting St.

Louis SEO or Santa Monica SEO.

Those are the transactionalpages I built out back then.

St.

Louis SEO, if you searched that, I've been ranking thatpage since 2013 or 2014.

It's been in the top.

When I was taking on clients, that was really a bigsource of client acquisition was literally just that one page.

But yeah, it's interesting'cause the intent is so important to understand which is something Ididn't really understand in the early days.

All I understood was like, hey, here's a keyword and I'm gonna try torank from this keyword.

But now, I understand, okay, not all keywordsare created equally.

I have to really be smart about who am I trying toattract into my business and is it appropriate forwhat I'm trying to sell.

So I have to think about that now.

– Okay, and that dovetails really neatly into the subject of today's show.

We're gonna be looking at your nine-step SEOcontent creation process.

So let's go through eachof those stages in order, look at an overview of each one.

Just give us a rundown ofwhat we're gonna do in there, and then for each section, and then we can sendpeople over to GotchSEO.

com to have a look at the greatpost you wrote on that.

We start off, stage one:finding our keywords.

– Probably heard it many, many times from various SEO blogs thatyou need to find keywords, but then there's alsoa big group of people that say you shouldn't focus on keywords, you should just focus on topics.

Those are both true.

But at the end of the day, you need to write content and create pages around the queries that searchers are conducting, whether it's topics or keywords, it doesn't make a big difference but you need to be able to find keywords.

My go-to technique for finding keywords is always just to take a competitor in whatever industry I'm working in and then just put 'em in a Ahrefs and just extract all their keywords.

That's usually my first step'cause that's the easiest way.

You just know, okay, they've already done SEO, they've already done allthe hard work for you, they've already done all thekeyword research for you, so that's the quickest wayto find great keywords.

Now, at the beginningof every SEO campaign, I always built a keyword database.

At that point, I'm not super concerned about whether I'm gonna goafter all these keywords.

It's more of just I'm building it out, building as big of a database as I can using various methods, and, like I said, lookingat competitors' keywords and also some other methods like I love going intoQuora or going into Reddit.

You can find some really greatlong-tail keywords in there that actually don't havea ton of search volume but they are getting searched, it's just that there isn'ta lot of data to support it.

I've seen countless timeswhere I attack a query that has 10 searches a month and it ends up driving a ton of traffic just because Google doesn'thave the data on it really.

So that's something to consider.

But just building out a nice database of basically as big as you can, and then once that's done, then you go into the qualification phase where you're gonna basicallybreak that list down and turn into a list whereyou're actually going to go after a set of keywords.

– Okay, I think number two then, qualifying your keywords, I think this is very difficult if you haven't done SEO before 'cause it ties intosome of the later things about search intent and everything else.

How do we know? Like you say, you're not gonna be ranking for what seems on thesurface like a great keyword that doesn't drive any sales? – There's a lot of differentparts of qualification.

There's the first part whereyou're looking at the keywords from just a pure competitoranalysis standpoint from an SEO perspective, like okay, can our website, in its current state, actually rank for these keyword phrases? And if the answer is yes, then you need to know, first of all, actually, I won't get into that far.

I'll wait 'til later to talk about what you needto do to get a ranking, but as far as qualification, the first phase is to figure out if you can actually rank for it.

And typically, what I'll do is I'll compare the target website, it could be my client's site over my site against all the competition, and just looking at overall site authority because that's a really huge factor.

And if you go into Ahrefs and you look at theirKeyword Explorer tool, what they'll show you isthe keyword difficulty and that's a really, really great metric.

And it's really good forsurface-level qualification.

But the challenge is thatwhen you search a keyword, and there, it's only gonna show you how many links you need to rank for that specific keywordand that one page.

And what it doesn't consider is the fact that the people ranking, although they may haveless than 10 links going to that specific page, they may be extremelyauthoritative as a whole.

And so that's really wherethe key difference is.

So you always wanna compareyour site as a whole against the other websites as a whole.

And what I'll do is I'll justtake the top 10 competitors and I'll just average them out and then I compare my site against then and say, okay, how bigof a gap is there here? If it's huge and I'm like, okay, maybe I need tofind a different keyword and then I can go afterthat one in the future.

And then the second part of the process is you might be able to rank for a keyword but you have to decide isit actually worth the time and the investment torank for that keyword? Is it actually going to produce a result that you want in your business? There are plenty of keywordsthat you can go after.

There are unlimited keywords so you have to figure outis it actually worth it.

And so one way that I figuredthat out is first of all, you always wanna target as many transactional keywords as you can in whatever your industry is because those are gonna be theones that drive the results.

Those are gonna drive the leads, those are gonna drive the sales, so those are the big ones.

But then, after you've tackled those, then you do wanna go into those informational type of keywords just to drive additional traffic.

Now, they won't convert as well but they do help build your brand and start to give youthat traction you need to eventually turn thattraffic into leads.

One thing that's important, which is a side topic, is if you are targetinginformational keywords, you need to know that that traffic is probably not goingto convert really well.

So what you have to do is you need to have aconversion foundation set up and then also a retargetingfoundation set up.

When I think ofconversions, and typically, not very informationaltype of content-focused, so almost always have a lead magnet or something to capture an email address.

That's really one of the best ways.

'Cause if you look atyour conversion rates for informational keywords, maybe you're converting less than 1% of search visitors into a new customer but if you add a leadmagnet to those pages or your informational assets, you could convert up to three to 5% of that traffic into an email sub, and then you can nurture them and actually bring themback to your website when you create new content.

It creates this nice little cycle where you can just nurture over time and then you can drivemore conversions that way.

The second part is to make sureyou have retargeting set up 'cause most people are notgonna convert to anything.

They're just gonna leave.

It's actually funny because most informationaltraffic is often cold.

They don't know who you are, they're completely new users, so although you may have produced an incredible piece of content, you may have answered thatquery to the fullest extent, they still don't really know who you are so once they've gotten their answer, they just exit and thenthey're gone forever in a lot of cases.

So if you have that retargeting set up, you can bring them back, and then hopefully, they can convert on that second try or that third try.

So that's really, really important.

– Okay.

And that follows on then to stage three.

Out of all those keywords you've got, you're qualifying them, you'relooking at your competitors, we're gonna do some analysis of our competitors like you say, then you're gonna select forSEO content purposes a keyword, the main keyword for that article.

So is that just gonna be the one that at the top of thefunnel gets the most traffic? – Not necessarily.

I don't always do itbased on most traffic.

Typically, there needsto be a traffic there to make it worth the effort because depending onhow competitive it is, it could very resource-intensivetype of situation, but I'm looking at a variety of things.

I'm looking at traffic, I'm looking at the overallkeyword difficulty, how many links am I gonna actually need to actually rank for this because you can create thebest content in the world but if your site isn't authoritative and you don't have links, it's not gonna matter.

You're not gonna rank.

So unless it's really, really uncompetitive, you may only need a few links.

But in most cases, you're gonna need a prettydecently-strong website and links going to theactual informational asset.

Typically, I'm just looking for whatever's the lowest-hanging fruit, what's the least competitive but also can drive a lot of good results and is worth the investmentof time and resources? – Okay.

And that comes out ofthe return on investment for that keyword as well if you're looking at it so holistically.

If your average ordervalue is $500 or whatever, if it's gonna cost you thousandsof pounds to rank that, head turn that keyword, it'snever gonna be worth it, is it? – No, no, yeah.

For example, if you're runninga content marketing company, ranking for content marketing, yes, that would be really valuable for you but is it really— That would be nice.

– Yeah, but really, howvaluable would it be? How long would it take for you to actually geta return on investment because of how much you have to spend just to be able to rank for that? You'd have to buy hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands ofdollars of link placements to even rank for something like that.

You have to consider those things, and it's really, really important.

Honestly, I'm always lookingat it from a money perspective 'cause really, it's a business.

SEO isn't this funlittle game that we play.

It's really just a marketingvehicle to grow a business.

You shouldn't be just ranking for keywords just because you want rankings.

That's a pointless endeavor.

You could really be spending your time doing a lot of other things in business than just ranking for keywords that aren't gonna drive any conversions.

And there's also a betterway to even build your brand.

If you're purely focused on SEO, it's really not a greatway to build your brand 'cause it's always anindividual type of situation.

You rank for a keyword, you get cold visitors, and then they leave.

And you're not really building your brand unless they're seeing you multiple times.

There's a lot of otherbetter ways to do that.

– I looked at rankingfor content marketing a couple years ago, just what would it take, and I thought I'd have to takea loan out against the house to ever do that so that'snot gonna be an option.

So okay, number four.

This is very difficult.

I still struggle with this, unless I go and actuallylook at the top 10 in Google to see what Google saysis the search intent.

So tell us about establishinga search intent strategy.

– Yeah, so this is huge.

Really, if you get this wrong, this can pretty much wreckyour entire strategy.

Like you said, really the best way to figure out the search intent is just to literally go into Google and see what it's showing.

I was having this discussion with someone in theGotch SEO Academy Group and I've been noticing that some people have been getting thisconcept a little misconstrued.

So what happened is I said that, yes, you wanna model the search intent.

There're pretty much fourtypes of search intent.

There's informationalintent, transactional.

Informational just meanshow to build back links.

They're just looking forsolutions to their problem.

They don't really knowwhat the solution is.

They're just looking tolearn more about the topic, so it's really top-of-the-funnel.

And like I said, going backto what I said previously, not gonna convert super well.

But then there are transactional keywords which are gonna be theones like someone searching for a St.

Louis SEO company, or searching for the best SEO tool.

Those are all transactionaltypes of keywords because they could lead toa conversion in some way.

And then you have comparison queries which aren't as frequent which would just belike Moz versus Ahrefs, SEMrush versus Ahrefs.

Those are the type of comparison queries, and they're actually transactional as well 'cause it's someone who's in the researchphase of the process.

And then the last one, ournavigational search queries which are fun to go after but that means that someone issearching for the brand name, so they typically alreadyknow what the brand is.

So they're either searchingfor Gotch SEO blog, or searching for Ahrefs, or they could even be searching for Ahrefs login page for example.

So those are all navigational keywords.

Those have value in different ways.

But yeah, so understandingthose four types is really important.

But the one thing you have to do is when you look at the search results is you need to see is Googleshowing informational content or showing transactional content? And pretty much, most of the time, you can figure it outin about two seconds.

'Cause you can just tell.

If I search how to build back links and every single post isabout how to build back links, it's pretty clear it doesn'thave transactional intent.

It has informational intent.

Now, the one key nuance that some people havebeen getting mixed up is just because every single person on the first page forhow to build back links has 17 million ways to build back links and it's a list post, that doesn't mean youshould create a list post.

It's not about the type ofcontent you're creating, it's about the intent.

And that's a really big nuance, and I've been seeing some people mixing that up a little bit.

But if all the top 10results have list posts, I am not gonna create a list post.

That is 100% a fact.

I'm gonna create somethingthat is so radically different, because then when someone'slooking through a search results and 10 of them are list posts, and all of a sudden I'm in there and it's a data-driven post, what's gonna stand out? I'm gonna attract all that organic CTR even if I'm not even ranking number one just because it's totallydifferent than what's ranking.

That's really an important concept and I have been seeingsome people mixing it up but it's just importantto know that nuance.

– Hmm, okay.

Stage five then: developinga content strategy, coming out of that search intent strategy.

I'm gonna throw a bit of aspanner in the works here because Surfer SEO is agreat piece of software for on-page optimization.

It's telling people who create outliers of really large content that maybe they shouldscale the content back to fit with what everyone else is doing.

But that fits what you're saying about search intent strategy, doesn't it, when you're going to createyour content strategy.

– Yeah.

Yeah, so at this stage, basically, what this means is developing a contentstrategy and a content brief, so how you're actuallygonna execute that content.

Yeah, that's an interesting concept where you want it to beexactly like the competitors just because that's what Google's showing but I actually don't reallyagree with that concept because that's not modeling search intent, that's just copying someone'scontent type.

(laughs) That's not really the same thing.

So for me personally, and I'm probably on theextreme side of this, but I always think if youare going after a keyword, your page and the way you optimize it and the copy that you use should just be radically different.

It's gonna benefit youfrom an SEO perspective.

It's also gonna benefit youfor a ton of other reasons because you're just standing out.

It's like the purplecow type of situation.

So I think that's really important.

But yeah, as far as developingthe content strategy, a lot of that preliminary work that we've walked through, it's setting you up to already have that strategy developed in a lot of cases, but a few things thatI'm doing at this stage is I'm actually goingcompetitor by competitor and examining them on a page-level basis.

What I'm looking for is, first of all, what's the average word count? That is a good thing to knowbecause least you can know, okay, the average workcount is 2, 500 words.

I know I need at least to 2, 500words in most cases or more.

We can talk about word count.

I've changed my philosophyabout that a little bit because I've had a few posts where we've actually decreased word count and seen an increase in performance.

And the reason isbecause we made it leaner and better, better writing, and so that actually will benefit more.

'Cause it actually, if you think about it, if you just have a ton ofcontent, it's unreadable, it's not gonna perform well 'cause then the users are gonna bounce and they're not gonna consume the content.

So really, the goal ofevery page should be to get the users to consume the content which increases dwelltime, leads to conversions.

And those are all things that, of course, Google knows is going on, so they can track everything.

That's really important butthat's a separate topic.

But the main thing I'm lookingfor when I'm analyzing a page is average word count acrossthe top five or 10 competitors, and then also I wanna lookat various other things like are the pages well-designed? Are the pages readable? Is the content really readable? Can you tell that it's been through a deep editorial process? Those are things that I'm thinking about.

And I'm basically looking for weak points in the competitors' content.

My biggest strategy is to figure out what my angle is going to be.

And if everyone has a list post, I know, okay, I'm notgonna do a list post, so that's off the table.

I'm gonna do somethingthat no one has done.

And oftentimes, in a competitive industry, you're gonna have to do somethingprobably pretty radical.

In the SEO industry, it'sextremely competitive.

You're competing with people who know how to create good content.

You're competing with people who understand theseconcepts really, really well.

So you have to do a lot of dramatic stuff to get any traction.

But if you're in the coffee industry, you're not gonna be dealing with the same type of caliber of content.

So you can do stuff that's not as intense but still really stands out.

That's like what I'm thinking about when I'm thinking aboutthe content strategy, but it's looking at the content itself, the design, the user experience, and thinking about away to just make a page that's better for users and attacks that search query the best.

– And in the case of Gotch SEO, that would include customvideos and custom graphics.

So everything's totallyunique, everything.

It really sets the bar higher, doesn't it, than just putting yourstock photos in there, someone else's video.

It's all made with thathigh editorial process like you're a publishing house, that you're producing somethingthat you can be proud of, really, at that stage.

– That's exactly right.

And the thing is, if I don'tdo that caliber of work, I'll just disappear because there are people thatare doing that caliber work so there's no way that I canjust come in with stock photos and a 400-word article.

Nothing's gonna happenfor me if I do that.

It's always gonna bedependent on the industry.

You have to adjust your strategy depending on what you're working with.

And obviously, the end goalis to always try to rank with the least amount ofresources and investment.

If you can rank with spending100 bucks, then do it.

You should totally do it.

And then you can improvethat page over time and invest in that page over time once you get that traffic flowing in.

But really, the goal is to rank with the lowest investment possible.

But unfortunately, in our industry, SEO or digital marketing, it's hard to rank without investing at least a lot of time or a lot of money.

– So stage six then, this is the bug bearing many people, especially if they're busy, they're small businessowners listening to this, creating a content, theymight not have time to do it.

There might be someoneinternally that can do it but at this stage, creating your content, if you've got all the steps previously, you could have a great framework that you could get someoneelse to write for example.

– Yeah, that's right.

And really, the wayI've built this process is so that you can't hand itoff to someone to create it.

Of course, in certain situations, it's really, really hard tocreate expert-level content if the expert isn't creating it.

You can obviously try to ghostwrite it, you can have the subject matter expert come up with all the unique points and they can proofread itand they can do all that, it's definitely possible, I've done it.

But in some cases, you will need the expert orthe subject matter expert to actually create the content.

In a lot of cases, what I like to do is, well, actually pretty, much in every case now because of ITH and the standards that Google has now for expertise and making sure that informationis extremely credible, something they reallycare about a lot now, you do want your contentto at least be approved by a subject matter expert, and then the person that thatcontent's being attributed to should be someone who's atleast competent in the topic, has some sort of qualificationsto write about it.

So that's important.

But there are really two paths when it comes to creating content: create it yourself or havesomeone else create it.

But at the end of the day, the most important partin the middle there is to have it createdwith an expert level type of editorial guidelines.

– And if you put all that workinto doing all your research and get all the strategy in order, the search intent, everything else, this is where a lot of people fall down because they don't wanna invest in that content creation process.

You've gotta make that Rolls Royce content if you can, haven't you? Because it converts better, everything! I've had clients where if youprovide fantastic content, people actually read it.

You can see they'rereading the whole page.

You can see they're clickingon the calls-to-action and they're doing the things you want, but they're never gonnado that, like you say, unless you provide that really high-quality stuff in the first place.

– Yeah, that's exactly right.

And honestly, out ofevery marketing investment I've ever made over the last six years, nothing has ever been better than just investing inreally good content.

It's just always thebest investment longterm.

It's obviously a big investment upfront but longterm, it alwaysoutperforms everything else.

It just does.

I would just say that the thing that we've been doing recently is we don't even try to createa lot of content anymore.

And that's been my philosophy for a while, but when we find a keyword, we literally only focus on one keyword until we're dominating.

It's an odd approach butit just works so well because what happens isif you're just focusing on one keyword that's beenreally well-qualified, you know that it's conquerable, and you allocate all your time, all your resources intoranking that one page, that one keyword, primary keyword, you'll be surprised what happens.

I'll give you an example.

My wife has a fashion blog.

And for the first two orthree years of that blog, I purposely told her, I'm like, I'm not gonna help you with the SEO, I'm not gonna help you with the marketing because I didn't wanna bethe overbearing husband who's like, hey, you shouldbe optimizing your title tags.

I'm just not gonna do that.

I'm not gonna be involved with that.

So I just let her do her own thing and what happened is she wascreating a lot of good content because what she was doing, she was modeling the other competitors.

So the other fashionbloggers, what they would do is they would just post these outfit posts and it would be 10pictures of their outfit and then there'd be 50words on the blog post.

That's fine if you have a lotof branded searches coming in or people searching your individual name, but if you're trying todrive organic search traffic without having a big brand, that's not gonna work really well.

She built up, sheaccumulated 200 blog posts of just really thin content like that.

So then I came in about a year ago.

She's like, okay, now you have to help me 'cause this is too much.

So I'm like, all right, fine, I'll help you.

So what I did, the very first thing I did is I looked at her content, and I said, okay, a lot of this content's gonna have to be deleted orconsolidated or improved.

We ended up deleting, I thinkit was 110 blog posts deleted, not even anything, just deleted, gone because they justweren't adding any value, didn't have any traffic, they didn't have any links.

And a lot of 'em weren't even that unique.

They were just a collagepicture of a various outfit, or didn't even have her in it.

So that was contentyou need to get rid of.

And then what we did is wewe took some of her content, these are unique outfit pictures, and we consolidate it into one page for a keyword we were targeting.

And then for the next year, we just focused on makingthat page better and better.

We did, every month, we could consolidate another post into it that was relevant, and another post.

Ended up consolidating, had to have been at least15 different blog posts into this one asset to justhave this massive outfit post.

And then what we did is we're like, okay, this post is long enough now, it's 4, 000 words, something crazy, so then we started to work on the design.

So then we took all of her pictures, instead of them justbeing a really long page of all these different pictures, we created a custom slider so she could have all the pictures easily accessible for each outfit.

So then just makingiterations on it over time and acquiring links to it, the page just dominates.

Her traffic increased by1, 300% in nine months.

Not just that individualpage, her entire site, that's all the traffic.

So it's just crazy what can happen when you find a greatkeyword that's been qualified and you just go all in on that keyword, and then you can justcontinually iterate on that page and make it better and better.

And of course, you need a lot of links too which is the next stepcoming up here soon.

– Okay.

Where does that fit, reallyquickly, just a side issue, with themed clusters of content? 'Cause you've taken allof those smaller posts and rolled them into one, you're dominating with that one mega post that's really well-optimized, would you then go after anymore authority in that theme or is it then done byvirtue of having that post? – There's always a fundiscussion about topic clusters and building topical relevance that way.

But for me, once we hit akeyword, that keyword's done.

We would go after other variations that are still relevantto that primary phrase but we would never go after that keyword, that exact phrase ever again.

And so in this case, it was like, she had 20 differentpages about fall outfits.

So each individual pagehad one unique fall outfit.

And there's nothinginherently wrong with that but I thought it'd be a lot better to have 38 fall outfits in one post because she's never gonnarank for fall outfits with any of those little posts.

There's just no way shewould ever rank for it.

So we know that the onlyway she'd rank for it is to have one dedicatedpage to fall outfits.

And then we know, okay, now we need tocreate a spring outfits, and then a summer outfits, and then a winter outfits, and then a Christmas outfits.

Those are all technically different but they're still topically relevant.

They're all helping each other, they're all supporting each other.

And then, of course, making sure you have a goodinternal linking structure once you start to build out those assets.

But yeah, building out thosereally big pillar assets should be the focus ofmost websites, I think.

– Okay, cool.

That was number six inSEO content creation for the master class as it were.

We're on to number seven.

We've created the content so number seven isoptimizing that content.

Tell us about that.

– I don't optimize content super hard.

I just try to do it asnatural as possible.

So placing the keyword inthe most important spots, gonna be a title tag, meta description, H1 and the first sentence, and then I'll try to getit in the first H2 tag, but usually it's gonna be a variation of the primary keyword, and then maybe one moretime in the last sentence.

And then from there, it'sall just writing naturally.

So whatever comes naturally.

Of course, one thing I do is to avoid doing anything that's spammy.

So in the case of thefall outfits example, I could have, for eachoutfit, did it like: fall outfit number one, fall outfit number two, fall outfit number three, and I just figured that's a little much.

I don't need to jam thatin there every single time.

So I just did outfit one, outfit two.

Trying to think through it, do I really need to be jamming the keyword in every single spot? I definitely don't.

Can Google understand this page based on the way I've structured it? Probably.

At that point, onceyou've put your keywords in the most important spots, then you wanna focus onadding keyword variations into the copy in a natural way.

So in the case of fall outfits, you wanna add stuff like outfits for fall, or if you're trying to findreally good outfits for autumn, just really trying to get those differentvariations in there, and then even adding title modifiers is another important thing that I do pretty much all the time unless it doesn't make sense which is adding the word best or top and then adding the year is always huge.

It always drives somuch long-tail traffic.

It always shocks me howmany people don't do it.

It's literally the easiest optimization you can do on a page, you just add best or add the year and you'll see such a spike in traffic.

It's honestly insane.

The thing that's cool about it is if you're targetinga competitive keyword, so if I'm targeting anchor text, I could of course target anchor text and it's gonna take me along time to rank for that.

It's gonna take me a really short time to rank for anchor text 2019.

In the meantime, while I'm trying to rank forthat really hard keyword, I know I can start gettingtraffic into that page which then could lead to social shares and user engagement and possible links which then would help support ranking for the harder keyword.

Yeah, so you have to thinkthrough those things.

And then as far as outsideof just placing keywords, some other really important factors is the actual page loading speed.

That's always huge.

That can be a challenge when you're dealingwith really big assets, especially in the case of hers where she has so many imagesthat she's working with.

That was a tough situationthat we had to deal with.

So we had to literallytake all of her images they were gonna put inthere, take 'em off her site, resize them to the site that they're gonna be on the actual page because downsizing is a really big factor when it comes to pageloading speed on the images.

So we had to do that, then we had to compress them all, and then we had to bring'em back onto the site.

So it was a big process togo through in doing all that, but we knew if we just keptthem the way they were, the loading speed would've been awful.

Thinking about that, andthen at the end of the day, just making the page good for users is really the important part.

– If then, we've got anitem here, number eight, which is publish that, we've done everything prior to that, we've just optimized the content but we're publishing as part of some overarching contentstrategy, aren't we? We're not just hitting publish as soon as we think we're ready, we've gotta get that editorial standard up and everything else, don't we? – Believe it or not, everything I just gone through is like the first partof the process, (laughs) which just might shock some people.

But yeah, once you publish, the work has kinda juststarted because from there, you're gonna have to watchhow this asset performs and you're gonna have topromote it like crazy, and you're gonna haveto acquire links to it, and then you're gonna haveto see how it's performing and if you need to iterateon it and make it better.

You need to give yourself a window of at least three tosix, sometimes 12 months depending on howcompetitive the keyword is.

But my approach is almostalways just to publish, try to acquire a couple links, see what happens, see where it goes, and if it gets stuck on thesecond page for a couple months, I know, okay, it probablyneeds more authority, maybe needs more content.

And typically, in most cases, I'm gonna be adding morecontent, making the page better, and then acquiring more links.

So I just use a combinationof those two things over and over and over until it gets to where it needs to go.

– And how long does that take? Given you've done all of those steps, you've done them really thoroughly, for someone like yourself who's got a really authoritative blog, that iteration process of a bit more content, few more links, you kinda nailed that.

You don't have to do toomuch of that, do you now? – No.

That's the beauty of onceyour site gets strong.

You don't need as many individual links going to those specific pages.

So for example, when Forbespublishes an article, they're ranking on thefirst page immediately.

It may not seem fair butthat's just the way it is.

It takes a lot of time to build the authority of a site.

Acquiring links is hard.

It's not an easy thing at all.

What you have to do to getthose links is even harder.

So it does take a littlebit of patience as well.

But really, I pretty much tell this to every member in the academy and anyone that I talk to in consulting or even clients that the biggest, one of the biggest goalsfor an SEO campaign is to build your site's authority 'cause that just makes everything easier.

It's literally the lead domino.

Once your site's authoritative, everything gets easier.

That should always be the objective.

And really, there's reallyonly one way to do that and it's to get links onrelevant blogs in your industry.

That's really the only solution.

– But everything we've done up to now gives you a really good horse in the race, gives you a favor, as it were, with the content you've created.

If you don't create yourSEO content properly, no one will wanna link to you anyways.

If you don't invest in that, you're just wasting your time.

– Yeah, that's exactly right.

Even before that, justtargeting the right keywords, which is where a lot of people actually, before they even getto making the content, they end up targeting keywords that are just way outside of their league to even be going after andthey don't even realize it, and then they're like, why are we spendingall this money on links and spending all thismoney on this keyword, and it's not even on thefifth page of Google.

And it's not because they're doing something technically wrong, they targeted the wrong keywords.

It's literally huge.

It's so huge to target the right keywords, and that's why I spend alot of time in that phase.

I don't just skip right over.

I really think about it alot and analyze it a lot before I make a decision to go after one.

– Okay.

So we've gone through everything, we've got to number nine, the final stage, everything's gone to plan, we're ranking, we're dominatingfor that search term, we repeat it all.

– Yeah.

I was explaining my strategy earlier is kind of like a focus strategy.

So we, a lot of the time, we'll just create eitherone to five assets, and then those just becomethe focus of our promotion for the time being because we just don't wannaspread our resources too thin.

If we're trying to acquire linksto 20 different blog posts, it's gonna be really, really hard to do that.

And more than likely, if we put up 20 assets, they're probably not gonna be that good and even deserve the linksthat we're trying to get.

So much better to focuson a couple assets, make 'em incredible, makethem very link-worthy, and then go out there andget as many links as you can.

– Well, look, I've done this 'cause I'm a member of Gotch SEO Academy based on what you said, and it works.

So that is a great, greatsystem that's proven and that anyone can follow.

So remind us where we canfind the Gotch SEO Academy and your great blog as well.

– Yeah.

So you can just GotchSEO.

com.

Currently on the homepage, I have a free training set up so you can just enter youremail and sign up for that.

But the academy is closed to the public for the majority of the year.

So I only open it up aboutone to three times per year.

So if you join my email list, you'll get notified when it opens, and then you can enroll.

– Fantastic! Well, look, thank you very much, Nathan, for coming on the show.

All that remains to say isI wish you the best of luck with everything in future.

– All right, thank you so much.

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