How to Differentiate Your Website from Your Competitors

SEO Fundamentals – Sep 7, 2021

Last week I had a chance to listen to and take notes for Marketing Club’s “SEO Fundamentals Room”.

There were great questions by the audience coming from every walk of digital marketing. The experts’ solutions were also detailed, impactful, clear, and actionable. You can find some of the questions and their answers in this blog post.

(FYI Marketing Club’s hosts are all well-grounded, well-respected, and top SEOs of the Search Engine Optimization Industry)

Rob Bertholf greeted the members and opened the session.

Here you’ll have a quick look into the questions. The answers are underlined below.

Q1: How to sell SEO services if you are an agency or freelance SEO?
Q2:How to get her services to her target audience when there are too many competitors?
Q3: How to use SEO in promoting an App?
Q4: How to choose an SEO Provider?
Q5: What is the best way of making video content?
Q6: How to get clients as an SEO beginner?
Q7: The Guest’s page has lost its number one position on SERPs. How can she understand what happened?
Q8: Does he need to be a developer for Tech SEO?
Q9: Another Guest wanted a quick audit for his website and asked whether linking two different topics was a good thing or not?

How to sell SEO services if you are an agency or freelance SEO? (Question1 )

Check out the answers underlined below:

Understanding what clients want to achieve with SEO and their business objectives.
Setting up reasonable and achievable goals for the client
Breaking down their expectations and objectives into actionable pieces.
Determining and informing the client of the relevant KPI reports
Communicating with the client to show them things you can control as an SEO and you cannot. For example, you have no control over Google Algorithm changes, but you can help them make adjustments for their SEO strategy.
There are indeed automated tools to run SEO audits. However, there is a difference between SEO tactics and SEO strategy. Therefore, the client can efficiently run audits with the free versions of those tools. However, making sense of these audit results and creating strategies is another story. Tactics (use of automated tool outcomes) and strategies are not the same. For example, the strategy can be getting more social media followers, prioritizing blog posts, and creating more content on topic A instead of Topic B.
Another tool class is Automatic Content Creation Tools. Those can be so desirable, but they lack the search intent and might not reflect customers’ pain points in identifying the problems. Explain to them what they are missing if they only use automation tools.

Guest 2 asked that: “How to get her services to her target audience when there are too many competitors? (Question 2)

Here are the answers by the hosts:

Instead of focusing on seed keywords, target longtail keywords. Since longtail keywords generally have low competition but possess high converting value.
Targeting specific search queries that your customers ask and directing that traffic to the particular pages that fully match the search intent.
Focusing on what kind of solutions people want to get. Position your content as inclusive as possible to solve their problems.
Working on the internal linking at her website.
Creating engaging content and offering value to the user by creating lead magnets such as PDF documents.
Using a good keyword tool such as ahrefs. SEMRush, The Moz, etc. If you cannot afford it, there are also free versions of those tools. Another way is to put your keywords into Google Search Box and see what search results you get. Look into the first page results and visit each of those websites.
What type of content they have created
What keywords they have used
Are those keywords longtail or seed keywords?
Check out the content gap: Topics that you can write about which they have not covered yet
Work on your Keyword Leadership. Be a thought leader in your niche by covering anything and everything about your topic. Write articles on related topics. Show your expertise.

Here is Rob’s take on this question: There are four levels of keywords:

First degree keywords (Navigational keywords): Building up About pages with navigational keywords.
Money Maker keywords (transactional keywords): Focusing on Customer conversion. What are people looking for, and how? It is essential to position keywords that are specific to industry insiders and client keyword structures.
What words are my competitors using for creating informational content, such as How to Pages or Guides? Informative content creates authoritativeness which is crucial for SEO success.
Who is asking the questions? What are their personas? Use aspirational language and keywords. Show them how they can make their lives better by choosing your offering.

For detailed information please visit https://bit.ly/rob-content

Guest 3 from Egypt asked how to use SEO in promoting an App? (Question 3)

Here is what our experts are saying:

Creating informative content about your product/services. Talking about how you can ease their (app users) pain. Giving them a great reason to download your app.
Adding explanatory videos and using Video Schema Markup. The results could be incredible.
Manually contact some people who may need your service and let them know about your app and how it could help them. Also, ask for feedback to make your app better.

The second question by Guest 3 (Question 4)

How to choose an SEO Provider?

Ask about their prior references
Find out how they are going to do SEO
Do you get in the form of analytics, and how often do you get them?
What type of reports you’ll receive.
Do they have prior experience in your industry?
Refrain from overpromising SEO providers
Set up your expectations realistically.
Ask the proven results, look at previous client testimonials. If you can reach out to them, ask about their experience.
Also, trust your gut feeling
Collect 4-5 proposals and compare them.
Check out whether they are working ethically.

Guest 4 asks, “What is the best way of making video content? (Question5)

Video is critical because some people do not want to read a long article, but they prefer to hear a summary as a video.
Lumen5.com is an excellent source to start with. They also have a FREE version. Even with the Free version, you have a lot of things covered.
You can make different versions of a video. For example, a Story Video Version, a Vertical Format Video Version or, a YouTube Format Video Version

Guest 5 from Nigeria Asks: How to get clients as an SEO beginner? (Question 6)

Learn SEO by checking out articles, webinars, or training videos by Moz, ahrefs, etc. Rob Bertholf also has created training materials for SEOs. He is working on an SEO Certification program too. If you are interested, you could send a message to Rob during the next Club House session. (Sep 14, 2021, at 8:00 AM PST)
Start working on your own stuff. It could be a blog or your professional website, which will give an idea to your client. When they approach you, tell them that you are a newbie, which allows you to focus on their case entirely.
It’s also an excellent practice to narrow down and only specialize in one SEO area, such as On-Page SEO, Technical SEO, or Link Building.

Guest 6 from Canada asks that her page has lost its number one position on SERPs. How can she understand what happened? (Question 7)

Our hosts answered this question as follows:

Sometimes it’s not what you have done, but what others do can change your position.
When this situation arises, focus on your core offerings and expand your topical coverage like the Hubspot model. This way, you can show your authoritativeness.
Creating guides, niche topics, and relatable content in the form of pages
Adding timely, aspirational, complementary, and news content in the form of blog posts.
Adjust and update your blog content for any time changes.
Getting a “Connection not Secure” message can also impact your rankings. Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) means that the session between the web server and the browser on the mobile is encrypted.
Creating content in the form of rich snippets. Using a rich snippet format that is suitable for you.

Guest 7 says he is a newbie and wants to know whether he needs to be a developer for Tech SEO. (Question 8)

Languages to know: HTML is important, CSS and basic Javascript are bonuses. Generally, knowing Java Script is enough. However, you may want to go as deep as possible and get trained as a Software developer.

Guest 8 wanted a quick audit for his website and asked whether linking two different topics was a good thing or not.(Question 9)

He has content as a VC website and also created another one on Covid 19 infusions.

Since these two topics are not relevant to each other, linking them does not pass topic authority, but domain authority from the VC website to the new Covid infusions website may pass.

In a nutshell, we had received excellent answers from the top people in the SEO Industry. If you want to learn more, please join us every Tuesday at 8 AM PST at the Marketing Club Room in ClubHouse.