The best plan is the one we can actually follow

Strategy

All great endeavours start with a plan. Only this plan is better than most other plans.

You know where you want to go. The business goals. Your KPIs, MQLs to hit this year. Let's work out exactly where you are know with the site so we can map out the exact strategy to cross that gap from now to SEO success.

There are loads of ways of auditing a website and turning it into steps. Some I like, others I hate.

We made something custom. The Website Quality Audit. 

Using a lot of code magic we pull in data from all our favourite places. Ahrefs, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, Site Bulb, SEMrush to name a few. Throw them all into a put and compare all the outcomes. Looking at your site in every which way. Pages get teased out into two main actionable lists. Technical fixes and Content Fixes. We give all pages a job and then keep them accountable to that job.

No more generic audit templates. No more missing chunks of the site. No more bullshit list.

Only actionable steps to making your site the best vehicle it can be for chauffeuring content to the front page of Google.

Build a site on a foundation of stone

Foundation

Now we've got the fixes to the site done. We need to make sure the on-page is on-point for what currently exists.

In the foundations sprint we're going through the current pages. Seeing what ranks well, what could rank better and where the easy existing wins are.

The biggest part of the foundations sprint is a full content audit.

Refresh, rewrite, merge and delete.
Taking what exists and shaping it to function for you. Not just exist.

Identifying the new opportunities for existing content. Strengthening the bonds between pages, the internal links, using science. There are people out much smarter than I am who have written some crazy algorithms to help us figure out what Google is looking for.

This process is the difference between "we have a blog" and "the blog alone hits our min MQLs".

It's designed for a minimum of 35 blog pieces, a dedicated content manager/writer and a yearning that the blog could, should be doing more than it is.

I did it. I used the "marketing word"

Growth

For many growth is a bit of a taboo word in the whole marketing space. When it comes to content marketing it's even fluffier I find. What is growth? How do we measure it?

Is it just more blog pages than we had last month? More sessions? Email sign ups?

In this case it's the content needed to rank for new keywords. Growth here the creation and ranking of brandable assets. Be it resources, whitepapers, long-form blog content. Creation of value to a new audience. It's the constant grab of people's attention, the lubrication from Top of Funnel to clicking "Book a demo".

At this point we're looking at a combination of mostly top of funnel keywords, with a sprinkling of easy to grab bottom of funnel. What are the questions and musing of your customers that lead to a bell being rung in the sales room? You have a bell right?

Again, this entire process has no guess work in it. It's data backed, fully researched and nerdy as fuck and I love it.

We can create the exact outlines to rank for pretty much any keyword. The exact TFxIDF, contextual keyword density, internal links with anchor text.

E V E R Y T H I N G.

Never again will your content team not know what the purpose of the content is. Never again will a content get written just because. 

No more - "We stopped using the blog because we weren't getting any views"

More - "The outline was so perfect we ranked as THE FEATURED SNIPPET". <This has happened twice.

If you build it they will come, once you've screamed in their face

Promotion

If a tree falls in the woods, but there's no one to hear it, does it makes a sound?

Let me rephrase that. If you write content, but no one reads it, did you waste your time?

Annoyingly Google only has 10 spots on the first page. Those 10 spots are pretty important. Depending on who you talk to, it's top 3 or bust.

Once we have the on-page content on-lock, it's all about trust. It's a conversation of links.

We could send any old links to the site, but we're not literally any other SEO. 

Or we could do it properly. Safely. And with long term success. Again, data backed - we made our own analysis software to see what the trust is on other sites, what kind of links they have and what's the secret sauce we need to rank our own. Even down to running Monte-Carlo simulations to work out the ROI of backlinks and the timeline we can expect until we rank. 

Then we acquire real links. On real sites. With real traffic. No PBN's here. Only sites with a minimum 1,000 monthly unique sessions, industry specific and no mention of "Paid guest post" anywhere.

And to top it all off. They're your links. We don't rent links. Once the sprint finishes they're yours, and guaranteed for 2 years.

It's the backbone of long term success. Compounding trust for compounding growth.

The plan.