digest
Short Summary
Main recommendation: Beginners should use a small set of SEO tools (Moz, Ubersuggest, BuzzSumo, Keywords Everywhere, Ahrefs, Google Trends, and AnswerThePublic) to find keywords, learn what content performs, build links, track brand growth, and answer searchers' questions.
Key Points
- Moz monitors a website, flags errors such as on-page problems, duplicate content, and broken title tags, and ranks which issues are urgent.
- Ubersuggest expands a known keyword into long-tail variations (three-, four-, and five-word phrases), which can be worked into existing pages to capture more traffic.
- BuzzSumo surfaces popular articles in a topic area based on social shares, to show what readers respond to, with the goal of inspiring ideas rather than copying.
- Ahrefs' Link Intersect shows sites linking to your top three competitors but not to you, since sites linking to several competitors are more likely to link to you too.
- AnswerThePublic turns a keyword into the questions people ask, so you can cover those questions on your site.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions: Enter your site into Moz to see its error list, and fix urgent issues first.
- Concrete instructions: Enter keywords you already rank for into Ubersuggest, then work the relevant long-tail variations into the existing page.
- Concrete instructions: Add long-tail keywords only where they fit the article; expand the content if needed so it still flows, and do not stuff keywords.
- Concrete instructions: Search your topic in BuzzSumo to find popular articles, and use them for ideas about what readers like, not to copy them.
- Concrete instructions: Install Keywords Everywhere (a free Chrome extension) to see related keywords and search volume directly in Google results.
- Concrete instructions: In Ahrefs, use Link Intersect to find sites linking to your top three competitors, then reach out to them.
- Concrete instructions: In Google Trends, compare your brand against a competitor over time and by region to see where you need to improve.
- Concrete instructions: In AnswerThePublic, enter a keyword such as "marketing" and update your website to cover the questions it returns.
- The speaker gives his own example of ranking for 'digital marketing' and says that by integrating long-tail variations into that page, he quickly started ranking for the long-tail terms within 30 days.
- The speaker recommends an omnichannel approach to brand growth: content marketing, link building, updating content, and targeting more phrases.
Bottom Line
Start with these tools in a workflow: find keywords and questions, check what content performs, build links from competitors' linkers, and track brand growth, while keeping content natural and useful to readers.
