TRAFFIC
“If the linked website is no longer registered, we may
evaluate buying and using that domain to link our money
site within a PBN (private blog network) strategy.”
however suggesting you obtain links
from anywhere, but from sources which
are credible, relevant and related to your
niche.
4. Avoid broken links. Google doesn’t like
it when a website has too many broken
links, as they contribute to earning you a
bad reputation among users.
5. Failing to track your users. You now
have a nice website, have written unique
and useful content and have got some
good links. This is not the end of the job,
though, as now you need to monetize your
website. To do this effectively, you need
to track your users, looking at what they
do and at how they move through your
website. The best tool to perform this task
is good analytics software which is able to
register funnels, and a heatmap software.
While avoiding these mistakes is key
to not derailing your SEO strategy before
you’ve even got started, real improvement
in website performance will only come
through and experimentation. So, buy
a website and work on it, and don’t be
scared of making minor errors even at
the cost of losing money, as each mistake
will enable you to learn and become a
better SEO.
Supporting your content with
market analysis
Now you know what mistakes to avoid,
it’s time to start to defining your niche and
identifying keywords you can really compete
for in order to write optimized content.
If you start out today with a brand new
website, your chances of ranking for highly
competitive keywords such as “forex”,
“casino” or “online casino” are practically
nil. So target “long” and “long long” tail
keywords, those with lower monthly search
volume but which are easier to rank for.
When identifying keywords, always
remember to try and put yourself in the
user’s shoes. They probably don’t know
technical terms so best to concentrate
on the most common keywords, keeping
technical terms back for use in content as
supporting evidence that you are really
prepared and knowledgeable on your niche.
To obtain a complete list of keywords
you want to rank for, a good starting point
is competitor analysis.
For this, we use three different tools
in our daily job: SemRush, Ahrefs and
Majestic SEO. SemRush is the best to
identify competitors’ keywords, Ahrefs is
great at finding competitors’ backlinks and
Majestic SEO shows how trusted a website
is and gives us an idea of its topical trust
flow (we’ll explain the concept in more
detail later).
●●Semrush
Let’s start with Semrush. First, we
go to www.semrush.com, input
the competitor’s website, select the
geographical target, and click “search”.
The first screen will give us a panoramic
overview of our competitor’s website,
including the most important areas for
our analysis - keywords and backlinks.
After scrolling down to reach the “Top
organic keywords” table, we need to
click on “View Full Report” to obtain a
list of the most-searched keywords that
specific website ranks for. By default,
the free Semrush version shows up to 10
keywords, to unlock the rest, you will
need to buy a subscription.
For each keyword, the most important
data sets are those relating to position,
monthly search volume (tagged simply
as “volume” on the platform), CPC
(the higher the cost-per-click, the
more profitable that keyword is) and
competitive density.
Taking a closer look at the latter, this
number ranges from 0.01 to 1, with
keywords towards the upper end of the
range being more competitive.
For a brand new website, we suggest
extracting the keywords from the list that
comply with the following values
•Up to 0.20 in terms of competitive
density
• A monthly volume search of at least
10,000
Once these are ordered in terms of
decreasing CPC, we can start to
produce optimized content based
around the highest ones.
●●Ahrefs
Now that we have a list of keywords we
can rank easily for, it’s time to reverse
engineer our competitor’s backlink. For
this, we’ll use Ahrefs, by far the best
tool in this area. First, visit ahrefs.com
and undertake a free registration. Once
logged in, click on ‘site explorer’ from
the top menu, enter the website URL we
want to analyse and click ‘search’. The
most important pieces of information to
look for are the number of backlinks and
referring domains.
From the left menu, we click on ‘links’
to identify all the links our competitor’s
website has. For every backlink we can
know if it’s still ‘live’, the date of first
discovery (the older the backlink, the
stronger it is for Google), when it was
last checked by Ahrefs’ engine and when
that specific backlink was eventually lost.
We are aiming to get as links from as
many different sources as possible, so
to make a complete and more precise
analysis, we need to exclude duplicates
by using the “referring domains” page,
accessible from the left-hand menu.
Here, we can see every single source
linking to the website under analysis.
While the main goal of our backlink
analysis is to try to obtain links from
the same sources our competitors have,
it is important to analyse each a nd
every backlink source, because if our
competitors got links from a spammy
website, we don’t want them!
The last step we usually perform is
to click on ‘broken links’ under the
‘outgoing links’ section accessible from
the left-hand menu. This page shows
if the analysed website has any broken
outgoing links.
If so, we check if it is due to an error
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