How to Develop an Effective SEO & Digital Marketing Strategy

1. Introduction : Hi there. My name is Zee Hoffman Jones, and I'm a digital marketing consultant based in New York City. In this class, you're going to learn how to do a competitive SEO analysis, which will hopefully teach you how to analyze digital marketing activities that you do on your site, and develop a strategy that will help you out piece your search competition and get you more traffic online. My background is in SEO, but also digital in general. I came from a non-profit background, and was doing web development and user experience. I kept running into the same issues where we would build really awesome stuff, and then no one would come to the thing that we built. By learning some really great SEO tactics and marketing strategies, I started making a difference for our non-profit websites. Since then, I joined a digital marketing agency where I've been for two and a half years, and have been loving all of the nerdy SEO stuff I get to learn and work on, and even create, like this process. This class works for anyone of any skill level, truly. We will go over SEO 101 items, so if you're super familiar with best practices in SEO and understand what it takes to try and go of, you might be able to skip off a few sections, which is great, good job. If not, I will definitely go into what each line item means in our checklist and I hope you understand exactly what we're looking for, why we're looking for it, and where to look for those things. Even if you have no idea what Chrome DevTools means, that's okay, you'll learn. This class is great for anyone who's trying to get more traffic to their website and also get internal or external buy-in to the digital marketing strategies you want to pursue. The purpose of this analysis is to show exactly how your site is doing and how your competitors are doing, so that you can see where opportunities might be, for you to differentiate or to at least catch up with the competition. You'll also have an action plan of things that you can start doing tomorrow, to help your rankings in Google and to out piece your competition. Without further ado, let's get started. 2. The Balanced Digital Scorecard: What is this balanced digital scorecard mean, anyway? Aside from being a mouthful, it's a pretty useful heuristic we use in the SEO community to understand and to explain what it takes for a given page to rank in Google. As I already hinted, it goes beyond keywords on a page, fortunately. That's how we moved from the era of the '90s and that really aughts with pages that just had the same keywords over and over again like fire hydrant, fire hydrant, fire hydrant ranking for guess what? Fire hydrant, and getting more authoritative, appropriate pages that would rank with information about fire hydrants that didn't just say fire hydrant a ton of times. With that understanding in mind, you'll be better able to answer questions of your stakeholders and also frame up for yourself and for your team why you're not ranking for a certain term. Maybe something super frustrated like your own brand name. But if you think about what your brand name means in terms of Skillshares case for instance, Skillshare might be a challenging freeze for Skillshare to rank for, as one word, however, a little bit easier to brand. Let's get into exactly what those pillars are and build that understanding of what we need to consider and think about when we're trying to rank for a given term. Let's break down that balance digital scorecard. Here, we've got five pillars, and these are the pillars that make up the balance digital scorecard. The first pillar of the balanced digital scorecard is having a technically sound platform. Is my content crawlable and discoverable to Google? Or are we telling Google "don't look at my stuff?" If that's the case, then chances are, we're not going to be ranking Google for the terms that we want. The next pillar is, content. Are we producing the right kinds of content for our brand? Is it quality content? Would you yourself, or ideally someone who's actually in your target audience want to learn and read the content that you're disseminating to the public? The third pillar is audience. Are we doing everything we can to attract more people to our content outside of just writing new stuff? We want to make sure we're disseminating our content beyond just publishing something on our website. That means, creating content that folks actually want to click on and explore and possibly, linked to. Audience also applies to what we're doing on social media and whether we're actually sharing our content there or content about what we're doing, about our company at large with a larger audience. Not just hoping that we get more people coming through to us on Google. Our fourth pillar is conversion. It's what we're asking users to do clear. Are there clear calls to action on the appropriate pages? Or do we take users by surprise when we ask them to give us information that might seem a little too soon? If we're asking someone to fill out a form with their email address, they should see it coming. Finally, measurement. This actually, will not be part of our balanced digital scorecard checklist when we review our website in contrast to our search competitors. However, it's a really important pillar that I want to make sure no one forgets. If you don't already have Google Analytics set up on your website, you're leaving money on the table. You need to be able to track what users are doing on your website, be able to ensure that they're clicking on the things that you think they shouldn't be clicking on, and then iterate if necessary. If it seems like users are doing the right action or aren't fulfilling the need that you have and the assets that you have of your audiences, then you need to do something about it. Make sure that you have some sort of analytics platform setup on your site, whether it be Google Analytics or another platform. Ensure that it's properly tracking on every page of your website. In today's lesson, we're only going to cover off on platform and content. We'll be here way too long and you'll be watching a very long video if we cover off on audience and conversion in this one. Let's dive a little deeper into platform and content and see exactly what components make up having a platform that is discoverable and indexable on Google. Then we'll explore the components of content to make sure that we're producing quality content, and to make sure that it's also fulfilling a real need with quality content of our users. 3. Selecting Sample Pages: Before we even dive in to the checklist, we're going to need to select some sample pages from our own website from a few key areas so that we have a good understanding of how we're approaching platform and content across the rest of our website, but we're going to keep it pretty focused. For you and for this class, you're only going to be selecting five sample pages throughout your website. We may want some duplication here, and I'll expand on that a little bit more in a moment. When you're selecting your sample pages, you want to think about all of the content on your site falling within certain buckets. If you're an e-commerce site, as in, you sell products online or if you have a store front and you feature those products online, you will most definitely want one or two product pages in your sample set and I want to see what eyeballs are looking at your product and make sure that those product pages have the right content on them and that they're technically sound following that editorial pages. Are you producing case studies or other editorial content like blog posts on your website? You will most definitely want at least one of these in your sample set. Another item is browse pages. Do you have larger browse or category pages that house links to other places on your website. If you're an e-commerce, a B-to-B site, or even a non-profit site, pretty much any site where you're looking at selections of content, you're going to want to make sure that one of these larger pages is in there. One example for an e-commerce apparel site could be women's blouses. That would definitely be one browse page that I would want to see in your sample set. If not multiples of those. If you're a non-profit or a social good website and you have a page on social good causes that your non-profit or organization focuses on, you're going to want to pull one of those as your sample page and then finally, homepage. Well, I think that this has debatable value. Sometimes the homepage is very important for us to analyze. If it actually is the front door to most users experiences on our web site, we want to make sure we're analyzing its performance against our competitors homepages. That said, if you find that a lot of your traffic comes straight through to a product page, an editorial page or a browse page, and you want to analyze more of those, I am completely in favor and have blessed you for not including a homepage in your sample set. The concept remains the same when it comes to reviewing each website against the balanced digital scorecard. We certainly don't want to review every single page on our website, nor every single page of our search competitions, websites. It's just going take us way too long. As a result, I want us to pick five sample pages from our websites that fall into one of those categories that we just learned about. I'm going to use Skillshare as an example here. Because Skillshare has such great brand recognition and I know they capture a lot of organic traffic on their homepage, we're going to include their homepage for this analysis. As a result, when we identify our search competitors, we're going to need to pull the homepages of each of those competitors as well. Next, we know why we're all here. Skillshare is a platform for learning and they cover numerous topics across the website. They definitely have browse pages and we certainly want to look and see how those browse pages or structure and setup. Here, I've pulled their data science browse page as another sample page for us to review. Keep in mind with our search competitors, we're going to need to pull a comparable page when we're reviewing their performance against our performance and tadar. I've pulled the equivalent of one of Skillshare's product pages. A lesson that lives on Skillshare. You're going to need to have an example of essentially your company or your website's bread and butter and why people are there. If you sell t-shirts or vitamins or simply information through PDFs or Info graphics, you're going to want to use one of those pages as your product page. Now, I don't think it would be sufficient for us to leave our browse pages and our product pages there with just one representative each. As a result, I've pulled in another browse page from another section of Skillshare's website and another product, another lesson from that section on Skillshare. Now, you know that I mentioned blog and editorial content and if you're an avid Skillshares user, chances are, you know that Skillshare has a blog. If I were you, I'd be asking, "Why the hell isn't their editorial content in our sample set?" In this case, our sample sets going to be a little bit bigger. Five is an arbitrary number I picked because it's a nice number and we can get some duplication in there with five. But it doesn't have to be kept at five. We just want to make sure our sample sets are a reasonable number. In Skillshares case, I'm actually going to incorporate two more pages from their website. I'm going to add their blog homepage and a blog article into my analysis. Again, when we look into our search competitors and start evaluating our performance against the competition, we're going to want to look for equivalent pages. Those may not exist and some of our search competitors in this case, definitely don't have blogs or articles that they're producing organically support the lessons they're producing. That said, that's web design that you have to keep in mind. Tonight what I want you to do is identify your sample pages, whether that be five or seven, maybe even more, but I encourage you to limit it and to keep it under ten pages for your website. Identify your sample pages against the buckets that we already went over and then we're going to go into reviewing your website against the balanced digital scorecard items. 4. Class Project : Our class project has a spreadsheet went to it, and in there is where you're going to find the checklist that you should be measuring your website's performance against. Now, since I have been using Skillshare as my example, I'm going to keep using Skillshare as though it were mined name-brand. For the purposes of this class, our main brand is skillshare.com and any competitors and reviews of sculptures performance are going to be using that domain, skillshare.com. So that you can understand the input key and these that I've put here, I'm going to go over what these numbers actually mean. We've got a score rubric here of 0-4. Basically, if you're doing okay by SEO standards, two is the number you should give any of these domains. Granted, I need to give you a caveat here. Our scores may change when we start reviewing our website's performance against our competitors. So keep that in mind. But again, we're only going to start with our domain first. Two essentially means technically we are doing things correctly, we've implemented a title tag correctly. We may not be going above and beyond. For the purposes of this review, we cannot really say whether we're performing above and beyond a competition until we wrote them in. For this first part of our class project, I shouldn't see any students putting squares three or four against their website's performance. Once we start reviewing or competition, however, then I should start to see extraordinary performances. However, you may find that you're going to square your sample pages a zero, or one, or a two for some of these line items. A zero means that we either aren't doing anything. For instance, if we do not have schema markup anywhere on our sample pages, we would want to give ourselves zero. If however, we do have schema markup on our sampled pages but there are errors associated with them or issue items, or maybe there's redundant schema, we're going to want to give ourselves a one for schema markup. This is how I've reviewed Skillshare against the sample pages that I've identified already. Skillshare is using their title tags correctly and they've implemented them accurately. However, when I was looking at our sample pages, a solid skill shares actually using more than one H1 tag on one of our sample pages. As a result, I score them zero for H1s being technically optimized. To make this process a little bit easier, I set up this other sheet in our spreadsheet so that we can more easily look at our title tags in H1 tags, so we don't have to go to each individual pages. I went over it a sample pages and I put in each of sampled URLs of here for my own tracking purposes and here to use import XML to pull this page's title as well as this pages each one tag or tags. In this case, Skillshare's homepage has one correctly implemented title tag and then to H1 tags on the page, done the same for following sample pages for Skillshare, and I'd like for you all to do the same for your main website. In our case, or at least in this example, I would start with one and my sample pages, the Skillshare homepage. Then I would couple of levels deep just to see how we're linking to content and what content we're linking to. I wanted to click into design and see what rules are associated with this internal like. I'm going to go and open up Chrome dev tools, right-click the page and select "Inspect". This is a free to use tool that comes with out of the box Google Chrome. So all you have to do is download Google Chrome. They do know that there are equivalents in Firefox and other browsers as well. I'm going to click this little arrow tool so that I can select various elements on the page and see how they're coded. When I select this tool, I'm then going to be able to inspect an individual element on the page. In this case, I want to see how these elements are linked to and make sure that there aren't any strange metal robots rules that are preventing global from crawling the sections. It looks like there aren't, so I'm going to go up a level and look at all categories, and we're going to look at primary tags. I don't see anything blocking Google from crawling or indexing these high-level sense check that you will need to do for each of your sample peaches. Again, this is only one level deep, even though it's still an extension of the homepage. We're looking at different content here and this is another level. So we're going to want to go and additional level to an individual lesson page and perhaps click on over to a different kind of content on this page. We're looking at Skillshare blog posts for instance, we're going to need to go over to their blog subdomain and then click into an article or two. Following that, you'll need to check and see whether there's any schema markup on any of your individual sample pages. The way that you can check this is by using a free news tool called structured data testing tool. From here, you can plug in individual URLs from your sample pages, and you will need to put this in for each sample page that you've got for your website. In this case, I only want to show you the structured data testing tool results for the Skillshare homepage, but you will need to do this for your other sample pages. Skillshare is doing great here. They do have organization markup on their homepage which is good thing to do, and that's where it should be. They also don't have any errors or any warnings for this organization schema markup, and they don't have redundant schema, meaning they don't have multiple organization markups here that are appearing because if they did, Google would simply ignore it. Next, this is a little bit of a cheat, but we already know that there's a long for newly published content. The skill share site effectively is that hub for newly published content and there is a blog, there's a subdomain for all of their editorial articles. As a result, we can give skill share a two here. If you know your site that well and you don't need to navigate to each of your sample pages to see if there's a long for new content, by all means, go ahead and give yourselves two. Then finally, we're not obviously messing up technical SEO. In Skillshare's case, you're doing pretty darn good. You may already know that your site is technically sound. You've already done a full technical SEO audit. In that case, give yourselves a two. In order to do a sense check of this beyond these items above, I like to look and see what we're block in our robots.txt file, and I may do that for some of our competitors as well to see what their strategies are for blocking content. Then finally content. Again, when it comes to title tags in H1 tags being editorially optimized, you can look on over to your sample pages spreadsheet and made sure that there are actually differences between your titles and your H1 tags. You want to make sure that you're providing additional context for the pages in your H1 tags and not simply repeating what happened in your title tag. Additionally, you might want to judge the quality of the H1 tags. For instance, for this writing section for Skillshare's writing courses, you might ask yourself whether rating is the best keyword to target in the H1 tag, or if it would be bolstered by a modifier or an additional key word that is important to Skillshare. Internal linking again, supports organic content. Instead of looking for technical reasons that Google might not be crawling our internal links, we're instead going to want to see the content we're linking to. When you're clicking through to secondary and tertiary links on your sample pages, we want to see the kinds of content that you are regularly linking to. Are you linking to editorial articles or things that bolster the arguments on specific pages? Or are you only linking to top-level content that you can find in your navigation? You want to give a lift to some newer fresher content again, so that you can help pass on link equity to these pages and get more eyeballs on those pages and share more of that authority and Google to newer content. The next line item, appropriate informational content. Make sure the content in your sample pages are actually appropriate to what your business is designed to do, whatever your business is, mission is. In Skillshare's case, they're an online learning platform. They can teach just about anything and that is pretty broad. However, they really aren't well equipped to necessarily give medical advice. If they had a medical advice article or a section that was promising to teach us important medical lessons, that would give me pause because they are not an accredited medical institution, and I would argue that Skillshare is not the right place for you to be learning about medicine. Finally, this is a classic you know it when you see it, make sure that the quality of your content is well-written and not scraped from other websites. Copy and paste some sentences from each of your sampled pages and paste it into Google to see if it's been pulled or plagiarized from other sources. Again, you know when you see a poor quality image or video, or an irrelevant image or video to the rest of the content. This will require you to at least skim your sample pages and see the kinds of images and videos that you've got in there. Make sure that the images are rainy and that they're actually reflecting the content on the page similar to any video content that's on your sample pages. With that, I wish you good luck. Complete this first lesson and fill out these scores for your own website against your 5-7 sample pages, and share any places in the comments of this lesson where you might be getting stuck or confused. Ensure your progress with the rest of the class so that we can all help you do even better next time. Good luck. 5. Audience and Conversion: By now you have evaluated your site against the platform and content sections of the balance digital scorecard. Next, we need to pop on over to audience and conversion in the same spreadsheet. Without further ado, let's pop into it and get started. We know that it's not just platform and content that matter when it comes to ranking in Google. Let's break out audience and conversion as metrics. First, when you look at the total number of linking root domains, as well as the quality of those linking root domains. Now a linking root domain might sound like jargon. Basically, it's just another website that links to us. The reason we're calling them linking root domains, however, is that I don't want us to look at individual links from, let's say Youtube.com, I just want to see that Youtube.com has linked to us. If there was a BuzzFeed article about Skillshare, I don't necessarily care if there have been multiple BuzzFeed articles about Skillshare that have been linked to our website, I want to see that BuzzFeed is an authoritative domain that has linked to us. I want to see how many of those domains I have in total, as well as how many of those domains are actually authoritative and essentially have a good reputation in Google's eyes. The next line items are going to cover off on whether people talk about slash share our content broadly, whether that be on social networks or on other websites. Then after that, we're going to look and see whether we with our own website, are actively promoting our content. Whether we're encouraging other people to share our content on social networks. Then finally, we're going to do a somewhat subjective review of whether we're creating content explicitly for organic acquisition. This means we're not just being self-promotional all the time. We want to create content that's uniquely shareable and interesting to our audiences. As a result, we're going to need to see whether our content really meets that need. After we've reviewed our own website for how we're speaking to and promoting content to our audiences, we're going to make sure that our website is conversion rate optimized, otherwise known as CRO. Of course, we could do an entire audit across the whole website for CRO, but we don't have time for that. Looking at our sampled pages, we're going to evaluate their calls to action against the following line items: we're going to first make sure that the calls to action are clear, is it obvious what a user is being asked to do and what they're going to get out of this? If you're asking a user for their e-mail or for payment information, they need to know that they're either going to get a PDF or some other reward, maybe a T-shirt, or another thing that they're ordering from your site in exchange for the information they're giving you. They need to be aware that they're giving you something and it's an even exchange. This next line item is conversions are appropriate to final steps. Meaning, it's understood that when I ask you for something like payment information or like your e-mail address, it's the right time to be asking you for this. Again, it's then clear what you will receive in exchange for the information you're giving my website. Finally, we want to make sure our calls to action actually match the user intent that they're inferring from your content. You shouldn't ask a user for their payment information when you've promised to give them something for free. Now, let's look at a few examples of what this will look like when you're evaluating your website against the audience and conversion metrics. Let's go over where we're going to find those answers. Now we got the quality of these linking root domains because you can have a ton of links from a low-quality website which really won't pay many dividends for your own site. As a result, we need to look at those domains, domain authority. It's a metric that other websites like Moz or ahrefs.com or other SEO companies have put together as ways to measure the quality of websites that link to other websites. Chances are if you were looking at a reputable news site like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or Scientific American, it's likely that those websites have a higher domain authority because they've got a good reputation when it comes to other websites. Other websites link to them aggressively and use them as definitive resources for their information. Then that builds up their reputation overall and we want to make sure that those good reputations are trickling down to our own website. Where I like to look for this information is in a tool called ahrefs.com. Ahrefs is a pay-to-play tool, which means that you will need to license this software. However, I highly recommend it. It's a really powerful SEO tool and I use it on almost a daily basis. I've already done some leg work for us. I've logged into Ahrefs and put in our domain, skillshare.com. I want to see all of the linking root domains that point to all of skillshare.com. Not just one page. I'm making sure that this section over here is set to domain with all its sub domains and not just exact URL or the domain without sub domains. I've clicked on over to referring domains because I want to see again which of these domains are linking to us rather than individual links. Then finally, I'm going to change the link type to do follow because I only care about domains that are already sending us link equity rather than domains that have actively chosen not to send us any link equity. When this loads, you'll have a nice list that you can then export of all the domains that Ahrefs can identify that link to your website. What I'd then like to do is export these and bucket our domains by their domain rank, otherwise known as domain authority. This will tell us largely how reputable these domains are. I'll bucket each of these domains in groups of domain ratings from 90-100, and then 89-80, and then 79-70, so on and so forth so that I can see approximately how many really popular and really reputable websites are linking to us as opposed to less authoritative ones. Once you have those data, you can plug them in into the sheet on our spreadsheet labeled linking root domains so that you can make sure that all of these are collected in one place, and then a chart will automatically appear when you have all of your competitor data filled out. Again, when you export the do follow linking root domains and their domain ranks from either Moz or ahrefs.com, you'll plug in the total number of linking root domains that have domain rankings under each of these buckets with a domain rating of 0-10 will then be counted under our brands, column B. It'll continue up until this last group of domain ratings, 91-100. After analyzing our linking root domains, we're going to need to see whether other people talk about our content and whether it seems like we're actively promoting our content. The tool that I like to use for this is called Buzzsumo. This is another tool that you need to license. First, I like to see what other people are saying about our brand, but not from our brand. I don't care if we think that we're the best. I care what other people think about us. Using Buzzsumo, I'll put in our brand's name, and then I'll use this rule, which is indicated by a minus sign to exclude any mentions of our name from our own domain. I like to set the time frame to the past year, because it's a nice round number and it gives us a sense of who talks about us when and accounts for any seasonality associated with our brand. Again, we can export this list, and then I like to come up with a total number of engagements from each social network to see in general how actively other people are talking about us. This is the best easy to reach metric that we've got for this, and it's yet to let me down. Next step, we need to see whether we are actively promoting our own content. As a result, I like to plug in the actual domain of our own website, because I want to see in general how actively people are promoting stuff from our site on social networks. Again, this isn't the most perfect metric. We're not the only people sharing content from our website. However, it's usually very obvious when you're looking through this to see which websites have prioritized sharing their content outside of their websites and which ones haven't. Again, set this to the past year, put in your own websites domain and then export all of the shared content from the past year and round up the total engagements from each of these items from our website. When you have those data ready, you'll take them over to our spreadsheet again and log it under other people talk about our content so that you can better examine your performance against your competitors when you're ready. For the actively promoting our content piece, I haven't included a spreadsheet there. You will need to separately track, on average, how many shares your content gets from your own domain. You'll want to keep a track of those shares against your competitors so that you have an idea of how actively your website promotes its content against your competitions. Whether we're accurately creating content for organic acquisition, I like to use a tool like Ahrefs or Moz, or even SEMrush to see what the estimated traffic is for the content that we're producing. For this, I've gone on over to Ahrefs and navigated to content explorer. Then I put in my website's domain, and I search everywhere to see what the most popular content appears to be for my domain. Then from that Export, I'm going to want to pull the organic traffic estimates for these URLs. I'll do the same thing for our competition when we're ready to do that. In this case, I've already done the work for us, and I have given Skillshare it too. 6. Who Are Your Search Competitors? : By now we've evaluated our own domain against the pillars of the balanced digital scorecard. We largely know how are domain in terms of platform, content, audience and our calls to action. Now, we need to go and identify our search competitors and do the same thing for those guys. I like to use SEMrush for this part.I don't want you going into Google and just searching for random keyword terms, because as you all know by now, that won't be a comprehensive view of all the keyword terms that you're targeting, and all of the competitors out there that you may not realize you're competing with. I like SEMrush because it's a robust tool and it's very intuitive and pretty easy to use. If you are trying to figure out which of the tools from this course you should invest in, I recommend SEMrush first and foremost. It's a great SEO community tool. I know most of my colleagues use it, and I use it on pretty much a daily basis. No, I'm not being paid by them, but maybe someday. I navigated on over to SEMrush and I plugged in skillshare.com. I wanted to identify at Skillshares competitors. In your cases,I want you to put in your own sites domain because we want to know who your search competitors are. Unless your for Skillshare, don't do a for Skillshare. In SEMrush, you're going to plug in your domain and then you're going to navigate on over to "Domain analytics." Within domain analytics is this section called organic research. You'll be able to see your main organic competitors. That's the report that we want to go into because it's going to show you the different domains that you're competing against, as well as the approximate number of keywords that you're both targeting, so, what's the keyword overlap in terms of the content on this domain versus the content on your domain. You can get a sense of the websites that are showing up there. Like any tool, SEMrush is only as useful as the ways in which you use the program. You don't necessarily want to go after some irrelevant domains that really don't seem to have a lot in common with your site. Again, I know frequently our business competitors are different from our search competitors, though you would expect to see some similar industries and you want to make sure that you're not, for instance, selecting Wikipedia as a competitor for you, unless of course, you are Encyclopedia Britannica, in which case, Wikipedia is your competitor, and I have bad news for you. They're doing very well. In this case,in looking at our competitors for Skillshare, we have a lot of different domain, especially edu's. Now I get why these domains are coming up. They're educational resources and Skillshare also has educational resources. But really, if we want to be strategic about this, we do want to try to focus on websites that appear to be in the same industry as us. That's where we get to this sweet spot between organic search competitors and real life business competitors. Because Skillshare really is not going up against Academy.edu, and they shouldn't, they're not a university. But on the other hand, I do see other sites that look like they could be decent competitors. For tonight, I want you to identify six search competitors from your website, and share in a few sentences, one to three, about why you think they're good search competitors for your site. While you're at it so that I can help you with this process and so that you can hopefully get even better at it for the future, I want you to identify three websites that appeared in your SEMrush digging that don't look like good competitors. Please don't steal Wikipedia because I gave it to you. No. You can use Wikipedia if you want. But I want you to identify three that you think are not great search competitors, even though they're in top 10,20, whatever, and tell me in a couple of words or a few sentences why you don't think they're good search competitors. Then, I also want you to identify three different websites that you're on the fence about, like they could have made the cut and you may actually not be sure why they didn't make the cut. I want to see what those websites are, and I do want your thought process around why you're on the fence about them. Try it out, see what comes up there. As people like to say, there are no wrong answers. But this step in the process is very important because, we do want to make sure we're comparing our site against appropriate domains. I want you to share your progress in the class notes section, and ask me as well as your classmates for support. Don't hesitate to reach out with any questions. If you get some along the way, I'm here to answer any questions and your classmates are definitely there to offer support or words of wisdom. Good luck. 7. Evaluating Your Search Competitors: Hi Anne, so you've got your search competitors, which is really exciting. Now we can see how our competitors are doing and measure them against how our domain is doing. We have to go through the same process that we did before SERPs, we have to identify sample sets of pages amongst our search competitors. Same group of pages and they have to correspond with the pages that we selected for our domain. Now, I know that no site is going to be exactly the same. That's what makes them a competitor. But to the best of your ability, you need to be able to identify types of pages again, as well as you can find an equivalent product page if you have products on your site for sale. To the best of your ability, identify a corresponding blog post. If you post such things on your domain. If you're a new site and posting articles, try to find something like an article or a blog post on your competitions website. Then you just go through the same process that you did before, filling out the scorecard checklist and evaluating the performance of those sample sets of pages on the other domains against how your site did. As a side note, it is normal to be inclined to change your scores after seeing how your competition is doing. This doesn't mean just give your site a good score or give your site a bad score because you had a good or bad day. No, these score should be relational to each other. If one site is technically very strong and you kept noticing that on your site you've got multiple H-1 tags or spammy schema markup, those scores should reflect that. Site that's doing excellent technically no issues from what you can tell, they should get 3s and 4s, probably 4s across the board. If you did even have some low hanging better SEO items that you have to change, that should be reflected on the scorings. Maybe consider bumping yourself down to a one, in some cases maybe a zero. It's not to make anyone feel bad, it's to get a good read on exactly. Again, who you're up against and what they're doing differently from you. Now, I know you've got six search competitors and doing this analysis with all six of those search competitors, and those sample sets of pages can take a long time. What I want you to do is if you are short on time, do at least three of your search competitors and identify the three most compelling. If you need help identifying those, the class notes are always here for you to ask other students questions, and I'm also here to answer any of them. Don't hesitate to reach out there and share which sites you're on the fence about. But using three, three is a good number and it's a good sample set for you to go through this process and understand what you need to do, should you choose to do the full analysis against your six search competitors. Good luck, and please don't hesitate to lean on your instructor or the other students in my class below. 8. How Does Your Site Measure Up? : Hi class. We've got all of our scores for our competitors and now it's time to put them to good use. What I want you to do is at the bottom of your spreadsheet, I want you to take the averages of the performance of your site and all of the competitors you've evaluated against platform, content, audience, conversion, which will map out a bar chart at the bottom that I've already programmed for you. This is a good opportunity for you to then dive deeper to see on which line items there was the greatest differentiator. In terms of conversion, it does look like there might be some conversion rate opportunities for us. Are there ways that we can make our calls to action even clearer or easier to find? I want you to look closer at where the peaks and the valleys are in your performance and the competition's performance and ask yourselves these questions. If you are noticing these and you're stumped, like, why are we doing so poorly in content? What can we do there? We're always here to help. Please share what's going on in the class notes section and ask your fellow classmates and me any questions that you've got. I would look at the individual line items under content and see where we explicitly fell short. If it seems like we're pretty average across the board with other competitors, content might not be the thing that we have to worry about. What we really want to see is in general, where the biggest gaps are. For tonight's work, what I want you to do is take a look at how your site's doing in contrast to these other domains and I want you to come up with three to five things that you could do to improve where you're falling short. Share your progress in the class notes, and feel free to share your completed scorecard with us so that we can [inaudible] , help you interpret the results, and make some recommendations for the action items that you could put together and start working on tomorrow. Good luck. 9. Conclusion: Hey guys. You made it. By this point you've completed the competitive analysis checklist and you know where you stand in contrast to your competition, and you have a plan of action of what to do next. Now if I were in your shoes and I needed to get buy-in from a stakeholder or a boss or if I needed to get my team to trust my plan, I would put this together into a Google slide presentation or a PowerPoint and I would show the process that you went through and put in that very nice bar chart to show how your domain is stacking up against your search competitors and then present the next steps of what it'll take to outpace those people, and show the next steps in your SEO strategy so that you can finally outrank them. Now you've got some real analytical data to back up what you need to do in order to improve your online marketing. Which is pretty damn cool. I hope that this was super helpful and that this is a tool that you can rely on again and again in order to make sure that the marketing tactics that you're using are the ones that will make a difference. As always I will be checking in here to help and other students part of the Skillshare community will also be taking this class. Never hesitate to reach out and share what you've learned and share your progress with us. If in a few weeks time you're noticing some differences or maybe not, then show those too. We're here to continuously help you. Best of luck and I can't wait to see what happens next. Take care.