Creating a SEO campaign for a new website is relatively easy, because normally, this website is being created by us, or we have all the information about its development, controlling everything that has been done so far. However, when it’s about launching a SEO campaign for a customer’s website, a page that is already created, we have to take into account many other factors.
REviewing the website
Why is it important?
When working with a site that is already operational and already has content, we have to stop and carefully analyze this website, to analyze what is its real situation in order to take the necessary decisions about the SEO campaign.
Content analysis
The content is one of the most important parts of any project, therefore we will have to analyze the content of the website before creating the campaign.
First of all, we have to see if the content posted on the website is original, to make sure the content was not copied from other sites. This may seem very obvious today, but there are many webmasters who are still copying content from other websites, running the risk of being penalized by Google.
To analyze the content, you can use tools like CopyScape and others that allow you to detect the content that was copied from other pages, but if the website doesn’t have many pages, you can analyze it manually making sure Google has indexed those texts.
In addition to confirming if the content is original, we must consider whether this content is in accordance with the website, or if it is content that should be removed because it is not within the context of the page.
In the same way, we have to check if the contents are of good quality, if they are related to the website. For example, in an e-commerce sports shop, the webmaster should not add pages about what is happening in politics, since it is something that is not related to the niche of the site and therefore, it should not be published.
If the content of the website is not what users expect, they will Go back to google to try to find another website, and this will worsen user metrics and CTR dramatically, which will have a very negative impact on SEO.
SEO analysis on page
It is very important to check if the main landing page, which we will try to position on Google, is optimized for the main keywords. If we neglect the sEO on page, we are not using a valuable tool which can improve positioning on Google.
Indexer
Confirming that all parts of the website can be indexed is one of the important things to consider. We have to study the website structure and internal links to guide the Google system to all pages of the site, not just the most important links.
Also check the canonical, noindex and robots.txt to confirm that they are configured correctly and are not blocking zones that should be indexable. You will also need to confirm that duplicate content is not being indexed, to avoid more serious problems.
Another important factor is to study well the optimization of the title and meta description not only for keywords, but also to improve the CTR, i.e. in order to improve the number of users accessing the website through Google. Improving CTR will help to improve positioning on Google.
Usability analysis
We need to put ourselves in the user’s place and check if the website has good usability, if it is possible to navigate without great effort, to make sure it is easy to use, etc.
Why? Because we don’t want users to close the page and go back to Google to find another website because the navigation is not comfortable or it is very complex. This would have a negative impact on user and CTR metrics.
Link Profile Analysis
Something very important before starting any project is to study the profile of the currently created Links, since without knowing the link profiles, you will not be able to create new links.
You must confirm that the link profile is optimized, checking anchor texts (anchor text of exact keyword).
We also have to check that the links that direct to the website are good quality links and are not “junk” links as links in Other languages, non-relevant topics, links from penalized websites, Etc.
Keyword Analysis
It’s very important to know what keywords are being used so that you can try to position them in the search engines, checking if the keywords are correct for the project, if they need to be changed, besides knowing which are the most relevant keywords for this niche.
On the other hand, it is also interesting to study other keywords that are attracting visitors to the project to see if they can be a good option for new content. We can use Google Analytics, Search Console and other tools like SEMRush, or Xovi, to check which keywords are attracting visitors to the website and try to improve positioning.
Preliminary analysis conclusions
After this review we will have enough information to be able to get the SEO On page and SEO off page of the website planned.
Analysis of your main competitors
Content
The content posted on our website doesn’t depend on what we think it will work best for this site, it will depend on what really works for this niche and the only way to have this information is by checking all the available stastics tools.
The amount of content will vary depending on the type of website that is being published.
This is why it is very important to study the type of content, to find out what your main competitors are using, because it is this type of content that you should create.
Links
According to the subject of the website, link profiles can be totally different. There are cases where we have niches in which the link profiles are at the limit of optimization or even exceeded the limit, and even if we think this is not a good idea, they are working perfectly.
Why does this occur? It’s just like the content, each niche has a different link profile, (Obviously within limits). That’s why it’s very important to study the link profiles that are in the first pages, as these profiles should serve as a reference.
Planning Linkbuilding
Depending on the link profile found in the reports, we can have different situations in the planning process of our SEO campaign, which are as follows.
Link profiles with exact keywords
If most links use exact keyword anchor text, start working on a more natural linkbuilding strategy to avoid future problems.
You will need to work with “myweb” links “Miweb.com” etc. And natural links, such as “click here” “Enter”, “web” and so on. This will allow you to decrease the number of problems related to links, by creating a much more natural link profile.
It is important to try to add as many corporate links as possible.
If you have a low quality link profile
If we are facing a case where the link profile has problems, for instance if we have several low quality links, before start creating new links, we will need to clean this link profile.
Ideally, it would be important to try to remove all these links, but in most cases, this is impossible, due to the fact that we can’t control these links, however we can work with an interesting tool called disavow tool to disallow such links. Thus, Google will ignore these links and they will not affect the marketing strategy.
In case you have just a few links
If we have a website that has practically no links, we must first start creating corporate links of type “Myweb”, “miweb.com” etc. And natural links like “Click here”, “enter” “web” etc. With this, we can create a very clean link profile. From there, we can start generating exact keyword links And exact keyword links + branding.
If done in reverse, the domain could end up with a bad reputation, before even starting the strategy.
You should also remember that by starting to generate links of exact keywords and variants, you need to closely control these links, or you could have future reputation problems.
Conclusions
Planning a SEO campaign for a site that is already active is relatively complex as we have to consider many factors that already exist on the website and we can’t ignore, so we have to check all aspects of SEO on page, SEO off page and usability, even before we start working on the campaign.
Are you already creating your SEO campaign?