Grassroots SEO - Strategy, Process & Life Cycle |
| Grassroots SEO - Strategy, Process & Life Cycle Posted: 26 Dec 2011 01:16 PM PST Posted by stevewiideman This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. If you're a patron at search events, conferences and workshops, you might walk away the way I typically do: full of "stuff" to try but no clue where to start. Weeks go by, your notes become a beautiful art piece with dozens of brown coffee cup circles and doodles, eventually getting crumpled into a ball and tossed across the room just next to the trashcan you were aiming for. There goes another $1,300 of inspiration without actionable takeaways. In this post, I'm going to give you a way to organize information you receive (and some of my own tactics) into what you will now and forever call an "SEO Strategy." There are rockstars who multi-task and play all the search channels at once, optimizing content, creating links, rendering videos and engaging with social media elements while juggling 12 bowling pins and guzzling an energy drink. Good for them. For the rest of us, let's stick to something a bit more palatable and a lot more doable. Below you'll find the basic layout of your 6-12 month campaign, starting with what's in your SEO strategy. Let's start with milestones. You can put your milestones into a Google Spreadsheet in bold, font 24. Paste items in between milestones respectively, as you grow in your understanding of SEO best practices and techniques. You can also use project management tools, such as TeamWorkLive.com or Basecamp, both of which allow you to calendar your milestones and create assignable task lists beneath them. If you're an agency, you can create templates and cookie cutter your boilerplate SEO campaign. Example: Milestone 1 - Your SEO Strategic Plan (1 Month)You are going to get to hundreds of ideas and tools thrown at you for keyword research, spying on competitors, finding link opportunities and elements to consider when planning your SEO campaign. Problem is, most presenters don't actually say "okay, add these line items to your research to-do list, phase 1 of 5 in your holistic SEO strategy", they just say "here's some stuff you can do". What's in Your SEO Plan? Below is a list of reports and actionable lists to carry over to your project management system (or spreadsheet). The planning phase can take up to a month, but will save you a lot of time and frustration later in the campaign. Remember, this is boilerplate, so you can squeeze in new research and data-mining tasks you pick up from events. Isn't it nice to have a place to start putting the "stuff"?
Now that you have all this terrific data, what the heck do you do with it? Here's where actionable items or deliverables come into play.
Now that the technical stuff is done, you get to start the creative and social media campaign planning. Pull a group of super smart people into a room for a full day and come out with awesome link bait, widget, tools/giveaways, and other creative link building strategies to add under your respective milestones. Milestone 2 - On-Page SEO (2 Months)There are thousands of smart (and sometimes silly) things you can do to optimize your website. You already have a To-Do List assigned in your project management system to square away OAR findings, and a To-Do List for your content team based on the keyword themes you want to optimize for. This initial phase of your SEO shouldn't take more than 60-90 days and typically isn't rocket science. You're going to get all sorts of new ideas from the seomoz.org blog, Search Engine Land, SEO Roundtable, and thousands of Tweets if you follow #seo in Twitter. Therefore, if you're using a project management system, your template will be growing and growing over time. Local and Ecommerce websites will have a few special To-Do Lists for data feed optimization, location-based landing pages, and a few other things you might extract from David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors or elsewhere. Milestone 3 - Off-Page SEO (3 Months for the Basic Tasks, 6 for Moderate)Mike Essex wrote an excellent post awhile back on 99 Ways to Build Links by Giving Stuff Away. I also like to use my Meetup.com group to have everyone provide 1-3 creative link building ideas to everyone who requests ideas, along with some crowd-sourcing tools, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and similar services. Choose the top ideas based on the business and industry and add them to an Advanced SEO To-Do List in your project management system. You will definitely need to create several project briefs for each idea so it makes sense to the tech and marketing teams. I keep a Google spreadsheet going that has nearly 400 link building opportunities now (thank you Eric Ward). You'll also have a list for Basic Link Building (industry destinations and directories), Moderate Link Building (outreach, and slightly more technical than submission-based linking). Advanced link building tasks are really more of an initiative and can be tracked outside of the the project management system as ongoing marketing innovation. Milestone 4 - Social Media Optimization (1 Month for Setup)This milestone gets a bit tricky and requires getting in bed with those crazy social media people we all love. Perform an audit of all the current destinations our SMM teams are working with and insure they all contain relevant keywords, profile links, and (if location-based) business name, address, and phone number. Next, seek out new social media opportunities, such as niche social destinations, popular social networks that have not been claimed yet (Google+ might be a good start). You might even buy lunch for the social team, and then try to give them training on how to blog with keyword-rich links every so often. If their eyes start going crazy as if you fed them after midnight, run away and try again another day. If not, train your social team, in distributing content, video, and micro-blogging to give you a serious lift in ranking. The trick is to make them think it was all their idea. Milestone 5 - Video & Mobile (2 Months for Setup)Technically, you can break video and mobile into two different milestones. But for the sake of the novel this post has become, let's bundle them together. For video, I recommend having a quick chat or consult with a pro, such as Mark Robertson of ReelSEO on campaign, channel and distribution ideas. Get ready to setup some video XML sitemaps and to start distributing video to relevant sharing networks. Also be prepared to start using video ads (PPC), which may help long term placement on key YouTube videos. For mobile, you'll want to slip ONE task in for Milestone 2, insuring your mobile users have a custom experience that's mind-blowing and award winning. The rest will revolve around the creation of mobile apps for your products, mobile search optimization, and possibly even a few short code campaigns. We love Vegas, so I'm always excited to get my MB SMS offers from Mandalay Bay). I've Completed My Milestones, Now What?If you get through all the milestones (6-12 months on average - some might overlap, but they don't have to), your project management system should be empty of tasks. If so, you're no longer in Production Mode, you're now in Operations Mode and need only use your link and campaign tracking tools (here's a sample) for your day-to-day SEO initiative. However, you may elect to start over and repeat the entire process annually, depending on the results from the first round. Now you have 5-6 vehicles of SEO in an organized form. You may decide to create a page for each milestone on your yellow notepad when you attend SEO conferences and events. If a presenter gives you some cool "stuff" to do, you should be able to easily classify the task into one of these buckets, so later you can update your project management template, as though you were putting another piece into a seemingly endless puzzle; which beats the heck out of creating scribble for your crumble ball with beautiful coffee rings on it. Thanks for reading.       |
| Tools, Twitter and a Ton of Opportunity Posted: 26 Dec 2011 02:19 AM PST Posted by Corey Eulas This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. Often times, you need to discover the right combination of tools in your toolbox to have the internet work for you. In regards to twitter, you can pull more data than you've ever wanted - and easier than ever. I wanted to share some information that I've managed to make use of for a variety of projects, that turned out to be rather helpful. Through the years, I've wanted to accomplish a few simple things:
And, to my surprise, it's actually easier than ever. There are hundreds of tools, often times overlapping each other in what they accomplish. I'll outline a few methods to accomplish some steps here, to give you the ability to chose however you want to use it based on your needs. Using these strategies, you can start modifying it a thousand ways and I'm sure you clever SEOs can use this strategy to your advantage ;). Gather the audienceThe first thing I did here to identify the audience I wanted to capture, is simply find all the folks who use the same hashtag, and hopefully:
The best way one could accomplish this is use a free tool called The Archivist, which you download and allows you to easily search on twitter and export the data quickly into excel. This is what you'll get after using it. If you are not using a PC, and/or don't want to download programs here is an alternative way to get all the twitter users: 1) Visit http://archivist.visitmix.com/ (web based version) And....This is what I get:
If you need more help, or are a little lost, here is an amazing article from Justin Briggs on more ways to use the "Scrape Similar" tool. (TIP 1: FollowerWonk allows you to export searches by twitter bios, however it's paid.) (TIP 2: If this is something you want to do one-time you can use RowFeeder, which pulls all the URLs for a hashtag and puts it into a GoogleDoc. RowFeeder is paid after one-term, and I prefer to just do this my way.) Sort the AudienceIf you're feeling really excited you can take your long column of twitter usernames and pull in their Klout score right away. To do this quickly with XPathOnURL using Niels Bosma SEO Tools for Excel all you need to do is: =XPathOnUrl("http://api.klout.com/1/klout.xml?users="&A2&"&key=[your_api_key]", "//users/user/kscore") Though this is great, and helpful and we can use VLOOKUP later to pull all this data in - what I really want from this though, is the website that these people have. (If you need help with excel and how it works with Excel, you'll need to read the excel guide from Distilled.) Do they have a URL??Again using Niels tool I can find this out: =XPathOnUrl("http://twitter.com/"&A2, "//a[@class='url']","href") After a quick manual scrub (sort by A-Z, keep the http://, remove the Facebooks/LinkedIns, remove the garbage), you have hundreds URLs, that are worth playing with. (TIP 3: For help with XPathOnURL or other awesomeness check out this article, from Richard Baxter at SEOGadget.) Prioritizing the AudienceI use a quick excel sheet from BusinessHut.com that I modified to include more of Niels metrics (=FacebookLikes, =GooglePlusCount), and Klout Score you get this: You can make this list as long as you want and sort by whatever metrics matter most to you. I'm sure this will give everybody enough information to get started and have a little fun with some data. Outreach & ManagementNow that you've got the URLs and contacts, prioritized by vertical/niche, you can start doing some neat stuff with it. You can grow it, sort it, tag it, and figure out who you'd like to engage with and who you don't. You can easily extract the contact information for organizational purposes for all the URLs by inputting them into Citation Lab's Contact Finder or by using a nifty toolset from Buzzstream. Lastly, use this as a weapon in your toolbelt to grow your community, engage with your audience, and build new high-quality relationships. There are hundreds of articles on doing outreach correctly, so instead of re-invent the wheel:
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