Enfusen’s Roger Bryan explains the SEO strategies that are most successful to increasing keyword rank.
Highlights
1:26 Level I – Traction
3:37 Level II – Velocity
6:06 Level III – Rank
Transcription
Hi this is Roger from Enfusen and I want to outline the fundamental of why we’re so successful with Enterprise SEO. It really comes down to having a great methodology for testing on an ongoing basis the keywords and strategy that you’re implementing. I’m going to outline that for you real quick.
I’m going to start by doing this, I’m going to draw an upside down pyramid, which really isn’t going to make much sense for you right now. This is going to be the rank of fifty plus, and then up here is going to be rank one through three, four through ten, and then down here is eleven through fifty. Now, the reason we do it like this, the reason that we have these four buckets is that each one of them requires a different strategy. I don’t care how competitive the keyword is, how many competitors are using it, the different dynamics of competition across it, these are the different buckets that we use. The goal is to increase rank. The reason the pyramid is upside down is because it does require of course more effort the higher you get into the pyramid, that’s why it’s upside down. It takes very little effort to do this part, it takes a lot of effort to get into this.
Traction
Let’s talk about how we move through the first bucket, this would really be what we consider no ranking. We use fifty, we used to do a hundred, and there’s way too much space there. What we call this is when you break across this line, we call it traction. What traction tells us is that this page is indexed, Google recognizes it having a correlated value to this specific keyword, and that now we can actually start doing real SEO work. What does it take to get to traction? Let’s write down some of those different things. Some of the things that you need with traction is you need good onsite. That includes META, that includes SCHEMA. If I say SEO Yost, if you’re a WordPress user you’d understand what that is, so I’m going to write that as content optimization.
Those are really the primary things that you need in order to get traction. If you’re starting out a brand new website, or if you’re working with an old website that just isn’t ranking for keywords, this is really where you want to start. You might want to come up with a set of ten, or twenty primary keywords. Then you want to look at these elements, is my onsite now, now onsite for me is really site code. There can also be an element of server code, between the two I’m talking about things like page loop speed, whether there’s any errors in the code, all of the different elements that are really important to making sure that your page can be indexed quickly, or indexed at all, and that the search engines are getting what they need.
For a lot of professional marketers you’re actually going to look at this and think that it’s pretty simplistic, but this is the strategy that we use to charge between five and twenty thousand dollars a month for our SEO packages. This is what’s needed at the enterprise level and it is a little simplistic.
Velocity
Now the next stage is okay, we’ve got traction, now we want to start to move the keyword up. The next thing that we want is we want velocity. This is where the dynamic changes a little bit, a lot of these things aren’t initially in your control but they’re things that you’re going to need to work on. Now we start to look at domain authority, and page authority. We’re not really in the game of volume link building, haven’t been since 2008, don’t believe in it, don’t think that you need it. What you do need in order to get beyond traction into velocity and moving the rankings up is you are going to need some super high quality links going specifically into all areas of the domain, and directly into that page. The higher those numbers are the easier it’s going to be to move up this list. Let me kind of draw a line here.
Canonicals
Now the next thing that we start looking at here, and you can do it down here, you can do it up here, is we start looking at canonicals, fun word to spell, and looking for any duplicate content. Now, some people would say, “Well why didn’t you do that down here?” Well, think of it like this. If you’ve got a website with ten thousand pages and you’ve got somebody that’s working on five hundred different keywords, you really going to want to try to get traction first. That’s a big part of this, this is a constantly moving element to your business. You can’t look at this once, come up with a keywords strategy and say, “This is what I’m going to do for the next twelve months.” If you have an agency that’s trying to do that with you they’re wasting your fucking money, so stop.
What you need to be doing is we examine this on a weekly basis algorithmically looking at how keywords, where they’re positioned from a traction perspective, and a velocity perspective so that we know exactly where to focus our efforts for maximum impact with the least amount of effort. Again, domain authority, page authority, canonicals. What do you do if you have a bad domain authority, a low or a low page authority? This is where you want to start looking to strategically get one or two super high impact links a month from like a Huffington Post, a Forbes, and Entrepreneur Magazine, and Ink Magazine. Not the run of the mill press releases that will get you two or three hundred medium quality links, but really super high quality links that will come in and really give Google a sense that this is something that you want to be looking at.
Rank
Okay, these are the two primary things that we look at here, now when we get up into this next level, this is where you really start to put on the burners. This is where we’re going to start using buffers, parasites, PR, all of those big primary things that are going to start to do a little more volume work. Again, we’re not going to do this to all of the pages or to our entire website right from the get go because we don’t know which keywords we’re going to be able to push up that fast. We want to get traction, we want to get velocity, and then this is really where we start to call a rank. If your keyword ranks number eleven your chances of getting traffic or conversions to that page are very, very slim. We’re not even going to call that a rank until you hit spot number ten, now we’re ranking, now we’re someplace that we can do something with this.
Buffers, parasites, PR, now we’re also going to start looking at an individual page basis, time on site, and bounce rate. We’re going to look from a top down approach at the website, which pages are getting the most organic traffic, which pages are getting the most organic conversions, or which ones are getting the least. We’re going to start to look at how do we keep people on those pages longer, how do we get them to not bounce? This is a combination of homepages, landing pages, slash pages, product pages, E-commerce pages, blog posts, resources, anything that you’re putting on your site needs these things to be considered. Now, some exceptions if you’re using a direct response landing page for banner advertising, you’re probably never going to get a good time on site, make sure you know index that page so that you’re not hurting the overall site.
Now that we’ve got ranks, now it’s time to make some money. In order to get a keyword to rank number one through three it’s not easy. Really when you’re dealing with the enterprise level it’s very hard to do. When we get things into the ranking spot that’s where we feel like we’re starting to earn our money. When we get things into the top three spots, that’s where the clients are going to really start to make some money. That’s where at a minimum you start to capture about twenty one percent, I guess I could just write that as a percent. This is where you start to get twenty one percent of the traffic is sitting up here, twenty one percent or more when you consider all different elements from paid on Google, things like that.
Top-ranking keywords
Now how do you get a keyword to rank in your number one? Well the reality is in today’s world, especially a competitive market, you really need to be perfect on everything below. There’s really no exception to that. Can some people sometimes get some landing pages to rank for some keywords without doing all of this? Yeah, there’s a lot of tricks out there in order to do things. This is stable, long term, white hat. What are buffers, parasites, and PR’s and how do they have a play in this? We are still a big proponent of high quality external blogging.
Now, I’m going to assume that anyone that’s trying to do this is already going to have one hundred percent unique content, high quality, love my spelling, and that you’re using engaging videos, text, images. I mean I could easily sit here and start talking about like when I say content optimization go into the H1 text, keyword in the URL, I’m going to assume that a lot of that stuff is known to the audience that’s watching this, alt tags in your images. This is really looking at beyond the basics, what is the strategy for getting there.
Now we have an algorithm that looks at this, like I said on a weekly, monthly basis. What it does is it tells us, okay, I’ve examined this page, I’ve looked to see what you’ve been doing externally, I know what the statistics are from a domain and page authority perspective, this is the keyword that you really want to be working on this month, and it does change every single month. We use a grouping strategy between primary, secondary, synonyms, targets, direct, so that we can continually work through what the best optimization opportunities are.
This is a quick video on enterprise SEO from its most simplistic terms, how we close and keep clients for five to twenty thousand dollars a month doing exactly this for them over and over again. If you have any questions leave a comment below, if you want to chat about this, go ahead and send us a message. Thank you.
