How can I go back to Ranking #1 again for my top keywords?

Last week in SEO Fundamentals Room – Marketing Club, we received questions about backlink strategy, advice for newbies, keyword research, and a site audit request. Let’s dive deeper into the answers to those questions.

Here is the list of Questions

1) What is your advice for a newbie in SEO?

2) Site audit question: What can I do for ranking back to #1 “Best faux olive tree” keyword ( houseofhipsters.com)

3) How to do keyword research?

4) What is a good backlink strategy?

5) How long does it take to receive leads from a keyword (if she is organizing an event)

Room Details

What is your advice for a Newbie in SEO?

First, get a broader understanding of each aspect of SEO. SEO touches on many aspects of marketing such as branding, SEO, audience, content marketing and UX/UI. Then you’ll find your niche and get specialized in that area.
Then focus on the fundamentals. There are many resources, videos, guides, tutorials, podcasts, ClubHouse Rooms such as Marketing Club and courses (both Free and Paid). Learn from those resources and start creating your website.
Run tests on your website to gain experience in SEO. Be careful about what you hear from others because they might conflict with each other. Therefore, some of them will be helpful for your SEO journey, and some of them are not. That’s why testing is a fundamental topic in SEO.
Now it’s time to decide on which area of SEO resonates with you the most. You may want to specialize in content marketing, Technical SEO, on-page optimization, or off-page optimization. Select your niche and gain as much expertise and knowledge as possible.
Set up Google Search Console (GSC). It will help you concentrate on which channel/channels your clients or potential clients are hanging out with. It might be Facebook, Linkedin or Quora.
Do not overcomplicate your SEO journey. Always take one step at a time. Be patient in learning and testing the processes. It’ll take time. You may see the results within three months, or it may take longer depending on the industry, competitive landscape, topic, keyword/keywords and how good you’ve implemented the process.
When you finish one process such as on-page SEO, learn link building or anything you want to proceed with. You can see SEO like a video game. When you complete one level, the next level will open. You can check out Itamar Blauer’s Youtube Channel
Get a Medium account, create an informational article with proper keywords, meta descriptions and page titles. Challenge yourself. Try to start with the least competitive keywords or topics.
Check out the “How Search Works“ video by Google and Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines

2) Site audit question: What can I do for ranking back to #1 “Best faux olive tree” keyword (houseofhipsters.com)

Revisit the core of your business—audit whether your company still can deliver value to the customers via your website.
Analyze the critical keywords for your niche and see how you are doing with those keywords and topics. Check out the keywords you haven’t been indexed yet and your competitors’ keywords that are indexed.
Make a domain comparison analysis. To do that, Ahrefs is a valuable tool to deploy.
Make a content gap analysis and compare it with your competitors. Check out what type of content they have used on their web page. Is it video, slide shows, infographics or text?
Understand how your competitors content matches the search intent. Is it informational or transactional?
Check out the history of the SERP Graph and detect which pages ranking and to do that, use an SEO Tool like Ahrefs
Examine the coding at your website and see whether there are any changes happened. Inspect any common errors.
Discover your content’s strengths and weaknesses. Moz, SemRush or ahrefs will be helpful when investigating your content.

3) How to do keyword research?

Compare your content structure and head terms with the top 10 search results by Google.
Check out other keywords and terms used by your competitors.
Make sure that your content answers the questions from the “People Also Ask” section of the Search Results.
Open up an ask.com account and see what questions have been asked related to your keywords. Create content answering those questions.
Find a mentor, visit rooms like ours (Marketing Club – SEO Fundamentals) and don’t hesitate to ask questions. The discussions in this room are summarized on a blog called Bite-Size Marketing News by Firuze Gokce. Follow it up at https://firuze.blog to check out the significant takeaways from each week’s session.
Use Bing Webmaster tools and get the backlink data from Bing
Don’t forget to set up the Google Site kit plugin for WordPress. It will make it easy to set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

4) What is a good backlink strategy?

Avoid getting web 2.0 backlinks created dynamically because they are messy, and many of them are link farms.
Send a disavow file to Google and prevent any punishment from those backlinks
Get backlinks from thought leaders or authorities from your industry. Increase the creditworthiness of your content.
Always have quality backlinks versus increasing the quantity of the backlinks.
Finishing content is only 20% of what you need to do. The rest is all about promoting, receiving links, networking, relationship building, running paid ads at Google or any other social media platforms and participating in discussions at Quora, Clubhouse or Reddit
If possible, create an infographic and post it on Pinterest
Send your content to news outlets (It’s not easy to get recognized but do it anyway)
Post your content to HARO (Help a Reporter Out): HARO is a passive link building strategy, and it’ll take time, but at the same time, HARO is free. In the HARO database, the journalists find resources to help them complete their reporting piece. They’re asking their questions. If your content answers their questions, you will receive a link that might lead to a substantial boost from a prominent media outlet coverage.
Check out the timeliness of the topic. Is it a trending topic?
If somebody gives you a link, try to reciprocate in a meaningful way. For example, you may mention their name and link them back in your blog post.
Link Equity is vital. It happens when you receive a backlink from a high authority page. That page’s authority passes to the linked page. Link equity helps your page to get boosted.

5) How long does it take to receive leads from a keyword (if she is organizing an event)

It depends on the circumstances such as keywords, competitors, domain authority, user intent and relevancy. Therefore, it will take time.
One of the best ways to fasten this process is using Event Schema and creating your page months before your event’s starting date.
Then post your event by saying that the event will happen soon and develop relevant content for the event.
The content might be in the form of infographics, videos, blogs or photos.
Don’t forget to get backlinks for the event page, either.
Update the event page as regular as possible to keep the attention intact and create curiosity.

This is a summary of the significant takeaways from the Oct 19^th discussion.

Don’t forget to join our next session and ask your questions every Tuesday at 8 am Pacific Time in Clubhouse!

We are open to answering any question from beginner to advanced level.

Looking forward to seeing you next week!

I will be more than happy to offer you a 30-minute FREE Consultation for your business.