Practice SEO Wisdom First Not Later – Your Clients Will Thank You
As I recently spoke about the smartest ways to start up your own SEO business and I often get a few questions, so let’s take a second to answer a few of the most common ones here.
Question:
John, you talk about the most important aspects of starting a new client based SEO business as being the aspect of establishing credibility fast. How can this best be done?
Answer:
One of the biggest favors you can do yourself, is to do your keyword forensics up front first, before you agree to accept your client. Let your initial keyword forensic research, establish the strength of the client’s “window of opportunity” for their industry related topics. If you’ve been reading about keyword research these days, you’ll notice the trend has been shifting from keywords to topics and even entities.
If you have attended the 5 Day SEO Workshop before, you’ll already know that we have been teaching this concept already for years now. The term forensics, is a much stronger initiative, since it enables you to look beyond keywords and begin to identify “user search behavior” and “user intent” for specific topics that are hot.
In that way, you can learn to identify the hottest topics related to your clients audience. By hot topics, I mean topics that are well in demand and yet fairly low in the competitive landscape.
Your first few clients should be those that you see the biggest windows of opportunity for based on user behavior. If you use these factors to determine who your first clients will be, then you increase the odds, dramatically that every new client you take on will be a success story. This will rapidly build your credibility as a new SEO in business, because with each new success story, people will talk about the difference that you have made.
In Summary:
The secret is a simple one. Use your Keyword forensics skills up front to determine who you will accept as your first clients and who you will not accept.
Question:
John, how can I really observe what me competitors are doing in the market?
Answer:
The short answer to this is to not focus specifically on only the work of one competitor. Doing so is only going to be a distraction from you getting any fresh work done on your own site.
Some people spend hours, trying to figure out what their competition is doing, differently than they are.
A far better practice is to stay focused on your own projects and instead of trying to understand what a specific competitor is doing…broaden your scope and learn how to look at all of the competing pages together with all of their influences, so that you understand the the entire competitive landscape, what challenges you are up against (regardless of who the various authors are.)
Question:
What is the most effective way to discover which SEO influences are the most important ones? When serving my clients I want to get it right first time.
Answer:
There really is only one way to accurately measure the SEO influences with any true exactness. If you are trying to do character counts in the Title or if you are trying to measure the impact of inbound links or regardless of what you are trying to measure, the one thing you absolutely must remember is this.
The only way to measure hundreds of SEO influences with any sense of accuracy, is that you must have a way to measure them all together at the same time. The reason why is because, all of these influences each have an measurable effect on SEO, but they also affect each other. So taking steps to only analyze one or two elements at a time, leaves a whole lot of room for error.
If you want to learn more about how to measure your influences accurately, we do teach that process in detail as part of out Advanced 3 Day SEO Workshop.
For a complete list of SEO dates and locations globally please see this page,
John Alexander
Founder and CEO
Search Engine Academy
Come Discover a Whole Powerful New SEO Within You!