Taken from a Tweet/Post I made this week. I enhanced it a bit here.
How to do SEO in 5 Steps:
- Observe the SERP’s
- Get ideas
- Create test setup
- Split Test (Important!)
- Observe results
Details:
1. Observe the SERP’s
Search for keywords, collect results. Check pages indexed, content, backlinks. What’s being done there? Do you see any patterns? You can use ahrefs free version to get a rough idea about backlinks.
The point here mostly is finding sites that rank, maybe starting to reverse engineer a little bit how/why they rank. This goes hand in hand with the next step.
2. Get ideas
How could you replicate what you saw? What do you need to do? What’s required? Do you need special domains? Do you need content to be written? Write it down, think about it. Estimate who long it might take before results appear.
The point here is getting a clear idea of what needs to be done. You want an effective plan on hand on which you can easily execute.
3. Create a Test Setup
This can be a whole site or just a post, can be on a parasite (wordpress.com) You should create more than one test, because sometimes tests just fail randomly. You might also want to run several tests at the same time (new domain+expired).
One important thing I didn’t mention in the Tweet/Post: Make sure you have proper logging. You want all the data later on. For example, how many crawls and when, when did it got indexed, how many hits and when etc etc.. Better track too much data than too little.
4 Split Test (Important!)
Normally you want to prove or disapprove a certain assumption. Example: 1k words rank better than 500. To prove that you need to do a split test. So one test will be your old way, the other your new way. You want something to compare your test with.
I can’t stress this enough. Your test is pointless if you have nothing to compare it against. Same was with step 3, keep all the logged data.
5. Observe the results
Observe what happens closely and start drawing conclusions. Did it work as expected? If your test needs adjustments, go back to 1. Otherwise, scale.
The point here is to have some expectation first. Like ‘I expect rankings in 3 weeks’. If 4 weeks have passed, your test most likely failed.
It’s the same as with stock trading. Before you open a position, you make an assumption on what you expect to happen. If that doesn’t happen, you close the position. Everything else is gambling.
That’s it. Congratulations. You are ahead of 99% of those wannabe-poopy-pants-I-ask-John SEO’s out there.
You can do it.
Good luck.
👑