How does SEO Encapsulate all the Elements in Marketing?

On November 16, 2021 we had another Room on SEO Fundamentals. The first part of the discussion began with Rob Bertholf asking a question directly to the moderators in the panel.

Question 1:Let’s assume that a startup that needs an SEO service.What’s the first thing for an SEO strategy? How do you approach starting an SEO?

Question 2: How do you run an audit on a website?

Question 3: Are you charging for your Initial Audit Services?

Question 4: How to build up quality backlinks?

In the second part, moderators answered questions coming from the audience.

Question 5: Do you use Google tag manager, Analytics, Google Search, Google My Business simultaneously?

Question 6: How to optimize a Youtube Channel? (Even though this question is not in the scope of this Room’s main topic, moderators tried to help the questioner as much as possible)

Question 7: How does SEO encapsulate all of the marketing channels as a whole, and how do you explain the ABCD’s of Marketing?

Q uestion 8: Is there any correlation or causation between Youtube videos and the website’s visibility?

Room Information and the Moderators

1 – What’s the first thing for an SEO strategy?

Understanding what the site is about: what’s the product, what’s the offer, who you are selling to
Start with a Competitive Analysis to see:
1. Who are in the market?
2. What is their strategy?
3. What are they offering?
4. How are they promoting their product?
5. What kind of keywords are they using?
6. What type of content have they created (Blog, video, Images, widgets etc.)?
7. In which social media platforms are day-active?
8. Can I apply any of the applications or strategies to my clients that my competitors are using?

What is the ideation behind a startup?
1. Are they ideating on Passion?
2. Are they ideating on Demand?
3. Are they ideating on Empathy?

Understanding where they are coming from sets a different foundational layer and strategy for a startup in terms of SEO strategy. With this ideation exercise, they’ll create connections with the potential customers and understand at which stage their customers are through their customer journey. This is important because startups can chime at the right moment with the right product and content, which will create value for their customers. Check out Rob’s lesson for Ideation

What type of a problem is the startup solving, and how do they approach the problem?

Answer the following questions:

1. What’s going on in the search landscape?
2. Is the solution making a difference in customers’ lives?
3. What type of pain point are they solving?
4. Understand what your consumer research tells you
5. What type of keywords and topics does a startup need to create to match the different search intent levels?

Being aware that SEO is integrated into all the pieces and elements in marketing strategy.
Understanding their goals, their ideal client, geographic areas, and branding strategy.
Assessing whether a startup’s branding strategy and SEO strategy are compatible or not.

2 – How do you run an audit on a website?

Understanding what the client is looking for and how much they want to pay for. Because SEO is an intense and costly process and a long-run game. Therefore, knowing where your client stands is crucial to understand. It makes it easier to be able to charge your services and manage the client’s expectations.
Checking out if there are any coding errors, broken links, broken or missing information on the site? (Technical Audit)
Looking at the content through the lens of keywords, ranking and performance. What’s missing, what’s an opportunity, what’s intense competition and which keywords are hard to rank for
Reviewing their community, social media channels, backlinks, digital PR opportunities and getting rid of the bad backlinks.
Running a Competitive Analysis. Looking at their competitors by monitoring their keywords and backlinks. Are there any content gaps and opportunities?
Log in to their Analytics by using Google Search Console and Google Analytics
Finding out what the client wants to achieve and where they want to rank for
Assessing whether there is any room for improvement or ranking higher?
Inspecting the status of H1, H2 tags, page speed and image optimization.

3 – Are you charging for your Initial Audit Services?

An audit is a fundamental foundation for laying the principles and steps forward. Thus, it needs time and thorough examination. That’s how you can create value for your clients. Otherwise, it could only be done on the surface without touching critical points and improvements.
Another approach is providing a 15-minute free initial audit and strategy call. Taking a quick look at the client’s website will give you enough time to understand what’s missing and what’s an opportunity. As a result, during the call, you will know whether you are a good fit for each other or not. This type of fundamental analysis helps you to provide value when you’re speaking with a potential client. Going through this process also allows you to understand whether they have a budget for it or not. If so, it also gives a clue on how this budget looks like. If you and the client are on the same page, you’ll create a proposal and go very deep into SEO Analysis. At this point, you can set your pricing very clearly.
The third approach is to talk with the client and understand their needs during a Sales call. After asking the potential client’s needs, you’ll evaluate the call with your teams, including web design, UI/UX team, content creators, PR team, and technical SEO team. That helps to determine how much you are going to charge and what services you’ll offer.
The Forth Approach is having a sales call with the client and letting them know about our services, our client base, what we have done so far and what we have achieved for other clients. We also ask our clients what is their time frame to get results. Is it asap, is it six months or is it a year? That question helps us to know how we prioritize our SEO strategy for that organization. Ensuring those questions get answered will give us a clear understanding of how we can price our services for that organization.
It’s crucial to communicate with the client openly, which, in return, shapes how much time you put on this project and how much you need to use that organization’s internal resources and work together with them. Setting up proper expectations and informing about the processes are essential for success and long-term relationships.
It’s good to give a list of actionable items to prioritize and not overwhelm the client with multiple items since you are doing the foundational stuff in the first 1-3 months. If you can let them understand that this is an ongoing process, that will be also helpful in building up trust and cooperation.

4 – How to build up quality backlinks?

Once you have created the content and published it on your website, think more holistically and find ways to continue the conversation. Post it on LinkedIn/FB/ING/TW or create a video on Youtube, join forum conversations or discussion groups. Monitor what people are talking about the same topics. Is there any related thread on Reddit, or does anyone ask a related question on Quora? Explore the opportunities for partnerships that you can develop with other websites.
What is your backstory? How do you put up your product in the market, and how do you position it? What kind of questions has been asked? Try to answer any questions asked when you are creating your transactional pages. Create great content and demonstrate your expertise and authority. Develop relational content and develop relationships, talk to, or help journalists (HARO)
Research who’s linking to your competitor’s website and contact those websites to see whether they can connect to your website too.

5 – Do you use Google Tag Manager, Analytics, Google Search, Google My Business simultaneously?

Google Search Console (GSC) analyses how you are doing with the Google Search Results regarding ranking and keywords.
Google Analytics (GA) monitors how well your website is being used in terms of traffic, conversions, leads and goals.
Google Tag Manager is just one place to put all the information you got from Google Search Console and Google Analytics for tracking purposes. Instead of juggling between different tools, Google Tag Manager is a simple one-step solution for your tracking. If you start with Google Tag Manager (GTM), you don’t have to set up your Google Analytics or Google Search Console since putting the GTM code in your site will also set up your GSC and GA accounts. If you are using WordPress, install the Google site Kit plugin , which will help you reach out to those tools within the WordPress dashboard.
BTW Google My Business has changed its name to Google Business Profile (GBP). It is a whole another platform. It will give you insights into your business listing page, reviews, and customer questions.

6 – How to optimize Youtube Channel?

Start with running an audit at the Youtube Channel.
Check if the proper tags are on it.
Find out whether the type of content the client is putting matches the content that people are searching for.
Check the title of the video, the description, the thumbnail, the length of the video, the link back to clint’s website… The list goes on.
Try to build up authority with the YouTube channel around your topic area.
Suppose you have long videos and a lot of videos that haven’t been viewed. In that case, you need to revisit those videos. Place some of the videos on your website, provide their summaries and timestamps.
You can also repurpose your videos for different formats in Google or social media platforms as Stories, Reels or Tik Tok videos
Consistently create quality videos.
Youtube wants to show engaging videos. To understand whether your videos are attractive, check out whether people search for the topics that your videos are covering. Use tools like VidIq, which is a YouTube Analytics tool. When you use a tool like this, you can easily find how many people have searched for the topic you will cover. And this is a good starting point.
Before promoting any video on a YouTube channel, you should look at how your foundational elements are doing on YouTube, just like optimizing for your website’s SEO.

7 – How does SEO encapsulate all of the marketing channels as a whole, and how do you explain the ABCD’s of Marketing?

Let’s start with the ABCD’s of marketing. Any marketing planning begins with the Audience. Check out Rob Bertholf’s Audience lesson:

You need to understand your customers, who they are, what solution or product they are seeking, where they are, and the context or story behind them in searching for an answer. To find the answers to those questions, you need to communicate and collaborate with cross-sectional teams like customer success, product development, software developers, Branding, UI/UX designers, social media team, PR team, content marketers and sales team. This is an essential exercise in understanding every angle that touches SEO. The process needs to be done by carefully integrating different angles into your Audience Research.

Right after the Audience, there comes Branding, which facilitates and includes our positioning as a brand, communication style with our Audience, use of a unique tone and voice tailored to the needs of our Audience and local SEO. All these factors help us to be an authority which is also a critical must for successful SEO.

Then we move on to the Content Marketing aspect, which acts as a bridge between where the customer is today and where they want/needs to be in the future.

We also make headway to the Design process. We aim to discover how we correctly visualize the messaging that we want our customers and potential customers to receive. We need to create a solid foundation for the website during the design process, which brings up the technical SEO, page speed, user experience metrics, and Onpage SEO.

After we build up a strong foundation in terms of:

Understanding your Audience,
Delivering a product that empathizes the Audience’s needs through Branding, https://bit.ly/rob-branding
Putting out Content pieces for matching every stage of the customer journey and search intent, https://bit.ly/rob-content
Designing and developing a website which satisfies necessary technical aspects of Google crawl (as well as other Search Engine crawlers from as Bing, Baidu, Yandex etc.) and provides a tremendous user experience, https://bit.ly/rob-design
Connecting with your Audience through multiple social media channels, creating Communities and developing relationships with your peers or building up partnerships to receive backlinks and support
Finally, use Analytics to analyze necessary metrics to evaluate your situation and performance to make data-driven decisions aligned with your goals, objectives, and initiatives.

“Anything good for a human is good for Robots.”

8 – Is there any correlation or causation between Youtube videos and the website’s visibility?

If you are creating YouTube videos, start with keyword research in both YouTube and Google. See what type of pages showing up and which keywords were used on Google and which videos were created on YouTube by who. This information will give you ideas for the format and the main topic that you’ll cover.

If you want to use video on your website, embed the Youtube video and publish the transcription and timestamps (chapters of your video)

In addition, take advantage of schema markup language and use video markup. This will be a great strategy to receive traffic to your website by making Google understands that page as a video page. As a result, you create an environment where you can cross-promote your website and your Youtube Channel. This is like “Two birds with one stone.”

When you upload your video, don’t forget to add your keywords

Use Tubeboddy, a research, optimization, publishing and testing tool for Youtube.

Use Youtube cards as clickable links to relevant content such as your website, a fundraising page, or any vital link.

If you have any questions for your website I will be more than happy to offer you a 30-minute FREE Consultation for your business.