My SEO and Content Gap Process – Exactly what I do when you become a client

I run an SEO and content marketing company in Bristol (UK). Over the past few years I have built processes and systems to give you the very best service for your money.

I thought I would write down exactly how I do it with the aim that my transparency will show you exactly how I do things and overcome any objections you have to become one of my selected clients.

I am still only a small business so there are a limited number of people that I can work with at a time. I tend to top out at 5-7 clients, and I currently have space for 2 more, so read this page and then get in touch to see if we are a good fit.

Setting Your Website to Rank High on Google

I always start with auditing and optimising clients websites. This step is necessary to make sure the following link building will bring optimal results.

SEO Audit and Optimization

Actions that I perform to make the site optimized and ready to rank:

•       Install / Optimize SEO Plugin
•       Internal Page Analysis
•       Title Tags Optimization
•       META Tags Optimisation 
•       Content Optimisation 
•       Heading Tags Optimisation
•       Images Optimisation 
•       Internal Links Analysis/creation 
•       Robots.txt Creation/Optimization
•       Sitemap Creation/ Optimisation
•       Canonicalisation/301 Redirect
•       404s / Error Fix
•       Responsiveness Analysis
•       Broken Links Audit 
•       Hyperlink Analysis

I present more details about my on-page SEO services on my blog and my SEO Services page. If you are mainly interested in such a service, please go to this page.

If you require quality link building to boost your rankings, below are details of my link building process and my offer.

Link Buiding – My Step by Step Process

Here I present step by step the process I use to acquire high quality links for my clients.

1. Create Gmail

The first step of any and all campaigns is to create a Gmail account that uses the persona of the business owner, I then use this email to contact the link targets that I find. The benefits of this are that it is much easier to get links when people think you are the business owner than if you are some guy who they hired to build links.

2. Get access to Google Analytics and Search Console

This is an essential step, I will have you give me access to your Google Analytics account so that I can get an insight into your website, it’s content and what visitors do when they come to the site.

Access to your Google Search Console account will allow me to discover which keywords your website is showing up for already, how effective that result is at driving traffic and any quick wins that may be around.

I will analyse both of these accounts and use them to uncover:

• Which are your most popular pieces of content
• Which keywords rank fairly well but could use a boost, these are your quick wins (usually ranked between positions 7-35 for their keywords
• Whether you have some “sleeping giants”, these are keywords that are receiving impressions in the search results but aren’t being clicked on

3. Check anchor text ratio

I will use tools such as Ahrefs, SEM Rush, and Majestic SEO to analyse your incoming links and the ratio of their anchor text.

It looks very unnatural if all of the links to your site are coming in using anchors that you want to rank for. If required I will build some “easy” links to dilute this with some standard and natural looking anchors.

4. Content audit, on-site and links

I then take a look into your current content:

• What do I have to work with?
• Are you actively creating content?
• Do you have a content creator?
• How many social shares does each piece of content get?
• Do you have distribution channels built out (email list, social following etc)
• Are you willing to invest in content creation?

I then make a list of all good content URL’s so that I have easy access to them when I am approaching link targets.

5. Links audit

I will run a thorough audit of your current incoming links, this involves:

• Is your domain clean? No links that are spammy or unnatural
• Is the anchor text ratio clean? Not over optimised
• Run majestic on target pages to make sure that everything is in order from a linking perspective
• Check your metrics, TF (trust flow), CF (citation flow), DA (domain authority), PA (page authority), link history for any blips, links from relevant websites, this allows me to see if there are any pages that aren’t being utilised to their full potential, or whether there are some that are already earning links.

6. Add content to targets tab

I make a list of all of the information I have gathered from the few steps above (I keep this list in a reporting document that is updated in real time, and can be accessed by you any time you want to).

This keeps track of all of the content that I will be using, the keywords that it is currently ranking for and any that I think it should be or can rank for.

7. Generate a huge list of Google operators

I then use the keywords generated in the step above to create an enormous list of Google Operators, these are powerful words and characters that can be appended to search terms in Google that help to filter out specific results.

These operators can allow me to find any number of very specific types of websites that will be perfect for the types of links I am targeting.

For example, if you are building links in the “lego” niche, you could use a term such as –

Type this into Google - lego inurl:resources

This would return any pages about lego that have the word “resources” in the URL. This is likely to be a list of resources about lego, so if I have spent some time to create one such resource, then all of the pages returned for this would be ideal like targets for me.

8. Create a project management plan

At this point everything is in place, I have all of the information that I need to run your campaign, it’s time to create a roadmap of how the next few months will go.

In your reporting document, I create a project management tab that will show you exactly what will be done over the next 3 steps, this is very detailed and items will be updated in real-time as “assigned”, “working” or “completed”.

This keeps you constantly updated on what I have been doing for you and will be doing in the next few months.

9. Find opportunities, concentrated on contact name and email

Ok so by this point I know:

• Which keywords you want to rank for
• The content that I can use to rank
• The types of links I want to get for you
• The search operators I will use to generate targets for links

I use these 4 things to create a list of targets, I call this prospecting. This is a constantly ongoing process, so if you ever look into your reporting sheet, you will see all of the targets and their status.

10. Outreach to opportunities using personalised and most appropriate emails

For each of the targets I have found I will then send a personal email, using their name if possible and the most appropriate type of email based on the type of link I will be asking for.

11. Follow up

Probably one of the most important parts of the process, mostly overlooked by other people.

People get hundreds of emails every day, you probably do too and it’s extremely easy to ignore them, for this reason, I send a follow-up email (or 3) to all the targets who don’t get back to me.

I also track email opens, so that I know who has opened an email and not replied, and who just hasn’t seen it yet, these people receive completely different follow-up messages.

Results

The benefits of the methodology that I have created are primarily based on 2 performance indicators.

1. Referral traffic growth
2. Organic traffic growth

People click on the links that I have earned for you. These people click on the link because they are interested in what it is that I have presented to them, this usually results in extremely targeted traffic that converts exceptionally well into customers/clients or buyers for your products or services.

The second benefit is that all of these links will be on relevant and authoritative sites, this is essentially the “food” of search engines, we are giving them exactly what they want and they then reward your site with higher organic rankings which result in traffic for you.

Typical links expectations

This is completely dependent on the type of content we have, what your site is selling, and the reaction and attitudes of the targets being approached. But I tend to get between 10-20 links per month.

The more willing you are to create content for me to use, specific content that I choose and create it quickly, the higher this number will be.

The document, reporting and tracking

I do all of my reporting in a single document:

Project Tracker – this is a live spreadsheet containing various tabs, that will show you the project plan, all targets, the status of outreach, opportunities, the content I am using for outreach, the passwords of any accounts I have set up for the campaign, live links, and plenty of other useful information.

This can be accessed by you at any time (you will have a link to the google sheet) to check up on the work, it is updated in real-time by me so is always completely up to date at all times.

So how much do I charge?

I offer straightforward options. I sell in blocks of 100 targets, priced at £750 ($1000) per block. You can buy any multiple of 100 targets.

I highly encourage to get at least 200 targets package to get the link building benefits faster. 200 targets should give a minimum of 10 links. In most cases, I’m getting more than 10 links, but this is what is guaranteed.

Note: For the best results I recommend at least 3-6 months campaigns.