Developing Organic Search Strategies

1. Introduction: Hello. My name is Alexis Sanders, and I am so excited to be sharing this brand new skill share course developing organic search strategies. As I mentioned, my name is Alexis. I'm an S e o manager at Marco, which is a full service marketing agency. As long as creator of the Technical Expert Challenge. Definitely give it a go. You have some free time, as little is a contributor to Los Search engine land. The on call ball as well as your event was blocked. So definitely checks in that stuff. That's well, So what is this course about? Essentially, it is an introduction to building organic search strategies. So the plan is we're going to define what that actually means. We're going to outline the prewar considerations as well as generate actual recommendations . And then we're going to organize and prioritize them. And then finally, we will actually build out recommendations through a series of many challenges in the project, which I'm super excited about because there's and we will edit and practice rehearsing that as well. Course, it's totally optional, but we'll go over that later. In terms of core target audience for the sports we believe that anyone who has an interest in digital strategy will probably lean something from the course. And hopefully, however, having about 3 to 6 years of s you experience either technical or content will help to facilitate stronger recommendations, understanding how things work in the weeds. The mechanics of how search engine results Peters works will definitely be helpful towards generating more actual recommendations in terms of skills that you actually need to have. There really aren't any. Simply all you need is an Internet connection and a little bit of extra time. You may also find a bunch of seo tools helpful. There are a ton out there in the actual presentation, and I'm not gonna list all of them now because you don't need them on now. But if you're interested in particular tools that solve particular problems, they're available for you in the slides I listed some here. Having cured analysis tools as well as crawlers could be very helpful. We're gonna be talking a little bit of the project, which is a totally optional, however maybe growth inspiring project that you'll be investing in. Throughout this course, there will be 12 many challenges that will lead to a final delivery ble, and the goal of the project is essentially to create in organic search strategy. In Power Point power points, not always the best format will go over that a little bit later. But for the sake of our course, it makes sense to use PowerPoint as a medium. So your first challenge will be to select a client and how this could be an existing client . It can be a client of interest or even a local nonprofit. I prefer local nonprofits. I think it would be really cool to do some more for companies that don't necessarily have a lot of budget for the types of services and type of skill sets that we have. The second part of the first mini challenge, This is a two parter, so it's a little bit of a longer challenge is to identify 1 to 2 KP eyes off the client. Now the reason we want to do this early on is because it's going to service our sort of North star throughout the entire building of a strategy and understanding. What's important and wides important is a critical component of building strong or getting short strategies 2. What is an Organic Search Strategy? : So what is an organic search strategy and organic church strategy is all about taking a vision from a higher level executive or a very terse goals such as improving user experience or improving revenue, taking that, making a plan and executing it. So we can define this as taking high level executive goals and transforming them into a working channel level strategy, which can then be broken down into tactical action items. It is also a problem with no simple answers. There may be some best practices involved, but it doesn't necessarily have to have that and in may transcend multiple areas. Within search is about what the businesses should be doing, what they can dio and providing a room out to get there and always involve the competitive ecosystem, the users and their interaction with the brand. In the online experience clients KP eyes and always involves prioritizing for value what is realistic, what is scoped, what time is available and we're gonna get more involved in the mini challenge with contemplating what areas of S e O could be affected within your particular delivery ble for the second mini challenge, we are going to do some pondering and jot down a few notes. The first question is what areas? ASIO could be involved in this deliverable so we can think of things like Web content, local surge, the user journey, information architecture and many, many more areas. Feel free to write down obvious areas to tackle. And if you're doing work for a client, make sure to know what work is actually scoped within your contracts. 3. Things to Know Before Getting Started: First, we're going to dive into what I like to call the pre pre work, which are just great questions to know before doing any type of client work. A pro tip is as you're going through these questions to write down any issues that you come across, we'll organize and prioritize them later. Just making sure that you have mental notes of everything going on. Because as you start to uncover some of this information, you're gonna find a lot more things that come out and a lot of different opportunities and at this point really don't need to be that organized. So the first thing is to know the client. Where is their brand going? What are their executive initiatives? What does their mission statement say? What are their core products? What makes them money? You can find that information by looking at their revenue, our financial reports. What do investors say? What are their competitive advantages and then make them successful? Would do their customers say? Are there any particular themes that appear consistently during reviews? Or is there anything that they say that they do the worst? The second element is to know the customer who are the users? Why do they buy? What are their demographic psychographic behavior? Said they exhibit. What do they need? What queries are they using? What is their journey? What is a journey of calming competitors? The third element to know is to know the site. What are their top ranked pages? And that's where keyword research tools come into play such as Bright Edge. A WR gets top. And why did those pages, more importantly, perform so well? What is about them is that their relevancy is that the links that they have is that the content is incredible. Also knowing what are the sights, strength, what are their weaknesses? And this can include things like user behavior flow, user experience, their mobile experience or even technical S CEO can be a strength or a weakness, and that really relates to boss ability to crawl, index, render and render the site as well as understand the signalling that's going on in terms of like canonical tags and linking and any sort of thing related to the link. Html tag knowing Are there any clear problems? Are gaps within the experience as well as how are we engaging prime ing and directing the user through the site. Is it The experience isn't the ambience that we really want to ultimately achieve and reflects our brand? And then, finally, are there any low hanging fruit that you notice, even just looking at the site? Any opportunity for improvement that you confined without digging that deep into things? And finally, knowing the industry, water industry trends and some other things that I think are important to look for are, Is there anything appearing within the news? Often, especially national news or industry specific news? What our experts within that industry saying, Where is everyone's minds going? Are they all going towards a particular direction? That maybe your client is er is not going? And it's something to understand and appreciate with them. And what are things that are likely gonna happen within the next year? Maybe within the next five years, so that you can prepare the architecture, needed the base understanding? And then what are digital industry standards? Who were the top competitors? What it wears a client, not at that standard. And what are the competitive blind spots, threats and opportunities? No, there's a very useful tool that a lot of people see in business school, which is called a SWAT analysis, which is a strength, weakness, opportunities and threats analysis. And essentially, it's just a plane that you can use to map out water clients strengths, weaknesses in terms off their own internal challenges and then map out opportunities for thing and threats that they face from external sources. And we're gonna go over a little bit more of this within the mini challenge. Many Challenge three has four different parts, but each of them will go a long way and establishing a base knowledge that would be useful for later on when creating organic search strategies. The first part is to do a little research, maybe jot down some notes, but really going through each question in this section and making sure you have a full understanding of their answer. The second part of this challenge is to perform a cured gap analysis. Essentially, where's our top competitors ranking that we're not? There's some tools that make this a little bit easier, like some rush or bright edge, but ultimately comparing our ranks against competitors with using that third party type of data. The third challenge is to perform a crawl of the site and outline any technical s CEO issues, focusing on crawl ability and crawl efficiency, index ability, render ability and signalling elements. And if you have any of questions about those, I recommend checking out the CEO cyborg article on laws, which add the checklist of all the different elements within search to go through, going through all those different elements and then for the fourth part of the many challenge, taking all this information, all this knowledge and creating a SWAT analysis relating to your clients organic search presence. 4. Considerations: So we've made it to the pre work work, which is considerations, and the first step is to define a problem to solve, or at least one to start with. The second part is to determine time estimates to complete these action items, and that could be a total guess. It really could be. It could be in toss up in the air, but it's really important to establish a timeline to set realistic expectations later. One note. As a side note, managers should take into account the time difference that it takes for them vs a junior employee to complete such a task. For instance, something that might take a manager or someone experience within the field an hour may take a newer, greener employees. Ah, whole day. So making sure to account for that is really important. The third part is to ensure that you have approval and buying for addressing this particular problem with the client. They may know something that you don't know whether it's maybe they're working with someone else, and they're hard to work with on a particular problem, and they prefer that you focus on a different problem, so making sure to have by in that it's in the contract that you approved with them first is absolutely critical to ensuring your long term success and finally outlying any potential research sources for this particular problem and that can include things like case studies , third party data, long from articles, actual research. Really, it's limitless, but making sure that you outline any areas that you want to look ahead of time. All right, comin at you with many challenge number four, this one is also a simple one. And this is really about outlining three potential resource sources. Can you find any case studies, third party data articles about this particular problem that you may find useful in when you actually have to solve them, present your own ideas? 5. Research the Problem: in the last many challenge, we outlined a few potential resources relating to a particular problem. This next stage is all about diving into that problem, trying to figure out the mechanics that are related to it and how we can appropriately address it. So the first question is, Are there any commonly agreed upon best practices for this particular problem? The second would have third party case studies shown, but more importantly, have we tested anything related in the past and found actual first party results. The next questions relate to what are the best in class solutions to this problem. What Arkan top competitors doing to solve this issue? What is the ideal implementation? Thinking Blue Sky? What is it that we really, really want? Ultimately, and what does your client need to do to be an industry leader within this particular fields ? And finally, are there any relevant user journeys that intersect this path? Can we segment the target and analytics and trying to find out more about what's actually useful to them? And we'll go over more in the fifth Mini Challenge? Many Challenge five relates to a competitive analysis and what we're going to do is research reflect and, of course, jot down some notes on what our competitors doing to solve this particular problem and what are they doing that is effective? 6. Determine the Message Format: we're finally to the part where we get to determine the message format, and this is really important to understanding a front because it's ultimately going to be what we build Shakespeare once said to Power Point, Excel, Word or email, that is the question. Well, Shakespeare didn't actually say that, but it is of critical importance. How you're gonna present that information is exactly how they're going to interpret it. You also have to figure out how much work you want to do each time that this type of delivery Ballis requested, so something that could be automated, maybe more suitable for particular requests. And really, this is all about understanding. Who is your audience? Who will get the item? What are their needs? How did they like or prefer to receive information? What did they specifically asked for and ultimately, what is going to give them the biggest bang for their buck? There are two things that I think are really important to consider knowledge level and their particular role within the organization. The first consideration is knowledge level. Are you going to be talking to experts or novices, generalised or executives for an expert? We want to keep processes sink because they already know, and we want to really focus on why a particular decision is optimal. Conversely, if we're talking to a novice, we may want to focus more on the process and the explanation of how we reached that in conclusion, so that they can learn the same as you and how you ultimately reached that conclusion will want to define any and all technical terminology because they're not gonna be familiar with that type of stuff or they probably won't be. And we want to make sure that we outlined the benefits. Clearly, a generalised and executive are kind of those in between areas. When you're talking to a generalised, you really want to make sure that you understand their knowledge base and present a healthy mix between what they know with a quick review and what they don't know, which with an extended focus. Now executives are totally different. They really just typically want executive summaries to understand what approvals they ultimately need to give an outline. Any resource is that they need to sign off on as well. The second element to understand is a role. So are you gonna be talking to your day to day contact who is typically either an expert or generalised in executive or tactical leads well that are on different teams. If you're talking to your day to day, they're typically very well versed in ASIO and understanding what is feasible for their company. Common needs our data and story to convince others to support their cause and an example of this maybe deliverables Combining overview with tactical substance An executive typically has limited time with high impact decisions. They need to be able to quickly decide if an action is right or wrong for their business. So with day two days and executives, data and story are absolutely critical, executives need summaries clear next steps with approvals that they need to sign off on called out and high impact visuals, particularly data visualization that allows them to quickly interpret information Tactical leads. Conversely, whether you're working with developers or specific content managers, etcetera are the implementer Z. They're experts in their field, but may not necessarily know everything about our field, and it's really important for them to understand what is being requested of them and the priority level because they're trying to build up plans for their own to human organize everything as well as including potential timelines that you hope to achieve. What really helps tactical leads is a prioritized checklist of request so they can go through and understand each action item finally, as one off little pro tip here I always like to build and use templates, especially building them early on can be very useful because it can minimize at its later on in the process. And this is particularly useful with power points, which can have a lot of tiny tweaks here and there. 7. Ideating: Now that we've done our research, we have our purple and we know the format that we want to use. It's all about taking our ideas and expanding them, which is really exciting. So we take a step back and look at the elements of creative thinking. There are three main required components. Divergent thinking, acceptance, any suspended judgement. Divergent thinking is the process of expanding on an idea and large ing adding, combining with other ideas, looking at it from a new perspective and finding additional options. Acceptance, on the other hand, is an attitude towards favoring new ideas, providing a certain amount of nurturing and is necessary to bringing a fragile idea toe life and developing them into high quality solutions. Suspended judgement is the skill of setting aside your evaluations and critical reactions. That voice in your head that says, Well, I don't know if that makes sense, setting that aside in order to learn as much as possible about a new situation or an idea. So the first step is establishing alright what options exist that are available to us. A common technique to get to that point is called brain writing. Now many of you have probably heard of the idea of brainstorming where you simply list out any idea under the sun, good and bad for a particular solution in a group like setting, with perhaps a whiteboard or something along those lines, the idea being to get the brain how creative mode list on everything that you can think of and then later use more convergent thought toe limit the options down options down to the best idea. Brain rating is very similar to that, but one of the issues that brainstorming has is that it typically has issues with groupthink, which means that a few voices will be more dominant. What brain meeting allows you to do is have everyone write down the information right down all their ideas and then share it the end, which typically you won't have as many issues with groupthink if you do this particular technique. The second technique for creative thinking is called provocation techniques. There's a very famous guy called Amano, which has particular hats, which you could do more research into if you're interested. But essentially with provocation techniques, it's about taking an idea and challenging it in different ways. Now, one of them is to simply ask why, and I've heard that it takes about five wise to get to the root of any issue. As a technique in analytics. However, we can also use it for search as well. Why are we doing something? And ultimately tried to get to the root? Often issue compare and contrast makes a match exaggerate ideas until we get to that blue sky solution, escape, reverse, distort and maybe even disproven idea. The whole idea is to get your brain going, get all the different options that are related to a particular solution out and really approach this from a creative perspective so that later we can end up with the best highest quality solution. In earlier miniature challenges, we jotted down a bunch of notes. So now for projects six, our challenge is to list out all of those identified issues, whether onward on your computer or even on a white board. The next up of this challenge is to use brain writing and provocation techniques to expand this list of opportunities. Don't worry about priorities yet. Just expand your current list of potential solutions 8. Prioritizing: in the last session, we went over idea hating and expanding upon ideas. Now we're going to go from possibilities to priorities. Everything in decline deliverable should be prioritized from most to least important when organizing ideas one of the most commonly is is to sort by impact to their core k p I. Other options include, by impacted to and effort by the theme by story and by user journey to find the impact, the top impacts to KP highs and relate that to the effort required. I like to sort into a priority matrix, which basically involves sorting out what is high impact and what is high effort. When you end up with the results, you ultimately find that you can identify low hanging fruit things to prioritise items to avoid and things to perhaps never do a priority. Logic must be established, and this can range from things that won't affect performance to hair and fire. We have to get this done as so s please save us. I also really like to use priority list which match out elements and prioritize them into impact, an effort because some people process lists better than information in a shirt. And finally, if we want to organize by a story, we want to figure out how we can use data to make everything feel obvious. We want to establish how each piece connects to the bigger picture organized by top down. So basically, the idea to the tactical, by big idea to the implementation and by why, what and how we're going to achieve something. Many Challenge Number seven challenges you to create a priority matrix with the ideas that you established in the idea aiding many project. The second step is to take those items and organize them into a priority list. 9. Setting Timelines: Now it's time to establish realistic timelines. Essentially, what are the steps to achieving the strategy? How can we make sure that responsibilities for achieving the strategy are clear? How are we actually going to report on this? And then how are we gonna report on this on an ongoing basis without crushing our souls? One of my favorite tools for establishing a timeline for a strategy is called a Gang Charm , which, not ironically, was started by a guy named again who was actually an engineer. And this chart shows wins. Certain parts of the project could be started based on dependencies, and it's a very useful tool toe ultimately see how everything is supposed to flow one pro tip and sure that resources are available to sustain your plan. Burn out is not worth it, especially coming after out of a large strategy, which requires a lot of research and a lot of mental energy. Many Challenge number eight is simply to build a Gant chart. For your project, you can find a sample gan chart within the templates 10. Building: you were finally, to the part where we get to start actually building something where all the pre work that you've done beforehand really comes into play. Some of things that I like to make sure are included in almost every deliverable, especially in PowerPoint, are a table of contents or an agenda because people want to know what you're ultimately going to be talking about or what's contained within this piece of content. And also they can get pretty large two. So having that is really important, an executive summary, perhaps even an opportunity. Summary industry research, the recommendations, of course. Obviously that's what we're all here for. And then next steps, especially with a timeline as a pro tip, build quickly at it, slowly get everything in there that you need tohave and then be very thorough with editing , especially when relates to consistency. We're gonna go over and over editing in the next session, so we don't have to really worry about this now, so just build quickly. This isn't like building a house at all, and then, most importantly and sure that the story flows what should be the flow from one slide to the next what is the connection between each slide and as a pro tip? I like to add transition statements on each slide, things that maybe like if we dive deeper, next thing to consider and finally, that way people can see how everything flows together. Many challenge number nine. We're going to build a 12 to 18 slide presentation relating to one idea in the strategy, which I only can destroy me if you want to build something larger, feel free. As I mentioned before, everything's optional. But some things that you may want include are the table of contents and executive summary. An opportunity summary industry research recommendations and next steps with timelines and then finally, for the last part of the many challenge ensured that the story flows by adding in transitions within the notes of each slide. 11. Editing : it's time for everyone's favorite thing to do. Editing my suggestion. Use a checklist, and any time you see something that's not on the checklist that keeps popping up, add that to the checklist. Some items that you may want to consider or ensuring you went over basic syntax. So there are no spelling errors, no repetitive language, no hedge words used and all sources are listed. Secondly, the actual content are all of the elements of the client's request. Met. Do all the heading summarise the main point of either the slide or the particular piece within writing? And is the data a labeled appropriately, which is absolutely critical, Especially if you get questions about the data to understand what the date is actually showing and where it's actually from and what the date ranges are then branding are your logos and the client logos included? Are they the correct love coast that happens more often than you'd expect and then kind of a more rare one about visuals? Do visuals account for natural assumptions? So, for instance, red and Octagon signal to someone stop where it's green signals go, making sure to take into account basic shapes and colors and people's associations with them is really important to visually conveying your message. And finally, in terms of those last minute touches, is the document consistent? Is everything where it's meant to be in its own little document universe? Does the content make sense when read aloud? And are those appropriate disclaimers included? And then, finally, as a final tip, if it's accounted for and if you have the space for it? And if you have a friend or someone on the account that works with you, I always recommend having someone else look at it. When you start working on big projects, you get too close to it. It's harder to see these tiny details, and by having someone else look at it, they'll be able to tell you won't make sense. What doesn't make sense where thanks flow where they don't flow and also, at the same time, make sure that you don't run into any errors with consistency or basic syntax. And, of course, we can Fortune editor do that Teachers are awesome. Many Challenge number 10 is to review your presentation with the checklist in the project files. Of course, if you find anything else or anything that's missing in the checklist, Please let us know in the discussion for him and will make sure he had it. 12. Presenting : you worked really hard to get to this point, and now it's all about conveying all of that hard work and presenting the heck out of it. The first question you might ask is, How much should you prepare for this type of presentation? Well, that relates to a few questions. How comfortable are you with this topic? Are you comfortable speaking about this topic off the cost? And if you are, if you're super comfortable, if you speak off the cuff about it often, then you probably don't have to practice as much. Then you want to consider how much is actually riding on this presentation. If it's a huge deal for you here firm, maybe it involves you actually getting a job or something, then, yeah, definitely practice it. Other things to consider how many people will be present because if there's more people with, sometimes people feel more pressure. If there's less, people feel more pressure. But understanding how you react to different situations is really important. Typically, the more you practice, the better you'll react, especially if your mind has like, a blank moment. You'll be able to pull yourself out of that much faster and then get more in the zone. Do you have a lot of experience presenting? If you don't practice more, will you be presenting in person? We be, but have that content in front of you are you are. You don't have to speak about it, not seeing the contact that's gonna require more practice now if you've never practice for her speech before, or maybe you have practice for many speeches, I suggest experimenting between scripting and writing a few bullets. Everyone is completely different, and some people have a different mix and match. But regardless, the most important thing is rehearsing. Whether you write everything out or you just read a full few bullets reached thing. Try rehearsing at least 2 to 3 times. And for me, this process has always been extremely painful because I don't I don't even know why it's so painful. But going through the first time is awful, but you have to fight through that because it's important to your audience. It's worth it to your audience to get a presentation that you've prepared and are able to speak to. I also recommend trying or her sing in different spaces. Try outside in a park where people can see you obviously lecture halls that you can sneak into small rooms and spaces, practicing your head, making sure practicing out loud, facing all these different situations like an athlete would prepare for, ah, particular challenge doing trying different things. Ah, present Tater can get more experience by trying different things in that way. And finally, for practicing, focus on the intro and closing practice that at least two times as much as you practice everything else. So if you're rehearsing 2 to 3 times, practice thean from closing 4 to 6 times. Because those air usually the highest pressure type things and usually because the ways people's memory work, people tend to remember the first thing in the last thing. So it ends up being more important tips for presenting during the day right beforehand. Make sure all the equipment is functioning from likes to die, Elin's to the screens and you have your set up completely ready to go. Take a deep breath and remember the work that you put into this content. Remember that it's going to be valuable for them to hear this information, and that always has helped me in the moment. Try to be present and focused. Make eye contact as much as possible. Smile when appropriate and breathe at the endowment sentences versus saying any filler words like uh or so and right after a dumb presenting be kind to yourself. It's really easy to slip into this negative self talk, but Patrick's off on the back. Be kind yourself. You did this. You put in the work you got out there, and what's really important is that people understand what you're saying and you're able to talk to the information. If they understood what you're saying, you did your job. Second, ask if they have any questions you need to clarify anything. And three. Ensure understanding of next steps for Step one of many Challenge number 11. Either write a script or 3 to 4 bullets per slide, expressing what you ultimately want to say. For Step two, rehearse about 3 to 4 times, focusing on the intro and conclusion, and then in Step three. If you have the time in space, record a 4 to 6 minute video and post on the discussion board. We love to see what you come up with 13. Closing: Thank you so much for joining us throughout the course of this presentation. It's been such an honor to have everyone here, and I'm so excited that you made it this far. Honestly, you should definitely pat yourself on the back because, you know, you sat with me for you. Other than that, I hope you're really proud of the project that you've appropriated. I mean, it takes a ton of time to build up these strategies, Pound, doing the research and understanding types of considerations. And then also putting in all that work is takes a ton of time. So definitely pat yourself on the back treatments off 2018. Well, actually, 2019. Treat yourself 2019 anyways going over some key points that we went through in this presentation. Before we close out new your clients, their industry as well as your audiences needs organize everything by priority, if possible, have someone else edit. Because thanks. Bye. And then for important presentations, make sure to hers. Thank you so much for participating The final mini challenge. You've made it through all the hard work. Now it's time. If you so choose to share your content on the forms. If that interest you, which I know I'm interested. Especially if you created new slides That would be so amazing. Also, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter at any time I live at at Alexis Cane Sanders at at . If you send me a mean or if I will probably love you and like that. So definitely do that. If you did work for a local nonprofit throughout this course, definitely reach out to them on Twitter. Share your content. Surely really appreciate the work in time that you put into their mission. Also, check out these additional courses on skill share Introduction to ECM as well as CEO Today by Rand Fishkin My name is Alexis Sanders and I am just thrilled that you're finished. So thank you so much, Charles.