iGB Affiliate 55 Feb/Mar | Page 41

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 iGB Affiliate Issue 55 FEB/MAR 2016 37