Free SEO Strategy for a New Website ($37,695 Value)

Here is a brief summary of the key points from the transcript: The transcript outlines how to build an SEO campaign from scratch for a new scuba diving business in Phuket. The key steps include: - Conduct keyword research to identify the core keyword "scuba diving in Phuket" and related keywords to target. - Acquire an exact match domain name to build authority. - Create a comprehensive content strategy and sitemap targeting related keywords. Use AI tools like ChatGPT to help generate outlines and draft content. - Build backlinks, focusing first on getting links competitors already have. Use outreach, guest posting, and link building services to build quality backlinks. - Optimize on-page elements for conversions - eliminate distracting elements above the fold, use clear CTAs, structure content for readability. - Build citations to strengthen local SEO rankings. - Continuously create new content, build links, and optimize pages. Bridge gaps in factors like content length, backlinks, and reviews compared to competitors. The key focus is creating a cohesive SEO campaign centered around the core keyword, with supporting on-page optimization, content, and links. Converting traffic is also critical.

Speaker A: In this video, I'm going to show you how to build an SEO campaign from scratch with a brand new website. I'm Nathan Gotch and I've led hundreds of successful SEO campaigns over the last decade. So if you're excited to learn how to build an SEO campaign from scratch, please like this video and let's dive right into it. Okay, so what we're looking at here on the left hand side is Google.com, and on the right hand side we're looking at the Thailand version of Google. And the reason I wanted to show you this is because whenever you're dealing with a keyword that's not us based, and I know my audience is largely us based, you're going to want to compare both of those search engines to ensure that there's not a lot of variance. And in this case, there really isn't much variance. So basically this is going to simplify our strategy. Now, from here, what we want to do is we really want to study the SERP, see if there's anything here that could pull away from organic CTR. And so right away, I see a few things. Number one, we've got a little sponsored block up here that could certainly take away from organic CTR, but it's also an indication that we should consider investing in ads because it's clearly prioritized in the search results.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Another thing to consider here too is people also ask each of these questions are certainly questions that we can create content around. And if we do a good job, we might end up ranking in this people also ask section.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: And then finally, we're in the local pack. So to be able to actually perform for this keyword, you're going to need a Google business profile and you're going to need to be able to rank in the local pack. And I'll be showing you everything that you need to do to be able to achieve that goal. And finally, in the organic. All right, so basically what we're looking at here is we have multiple opportunities, opportunities to occupy more SERP real estate. So now let's jump into doing some keyword research. So the primary keyword that we're going to build this entire campaign around is scuba diving in Phuket. Now, keep in mind we're doing this from the perspective of building a brand new website, a brand new business. Now, with that in mind, you're going to see here in a second why I'm about to make this decision. But for us to really be able to achieve the goal here, we're going to have to use a keyword rich domain and not only that, a keyword rich business name. So the first thing that I would do is I would take this keyword and I'd immediately go into the instant domain search and I would see if that exact match domain was available.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: You could also see if there's a variant, maybe a shorter one that's like this. But in this case I'm probably just going to go with the exact variant and you're going to see why this is really, really important here in a second. But the point is we want to build a hyper relevant asset because it's going to make our job so much easier. And this will help build that initial relevance on the domain level, which then will make everything else much easier. Okay, so that's kind of step one. Now what we want to do is we're going to want to go and start to build the keyword database. So we know that this is the core keyword that we're going after. So everything from this point forward should be designed to support this keyword. So we're going to build little connections around this page and this keyword that can help us build our overall topic authority. Okay, that's the objective here. Now what you can do, because this is a brand new website, what you want to do is go into the keyword gap and you actually enter the domain, that new domain that you're going to be using.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: And then go ahead and enter the top three competitors. Now the kind of key point here, the little nuance is go down and make sure you pick competitors that are actually located in that location.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: So don't pick Tripadvisor or any of the super authoritative websites. Pick the actual businesses that are there, want to compare against them. Now looking at this, the beautiful part about doing the keyword gap is obviously you have a brand new domain, so you're not going to have any keywords that are ranking for in the top, top 100 at all, really. So you have a nice, beautiful keyword list that you can work with.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: So you can take these keywords, add them to your keyword list, export into a Google sheet, whatever you want to do. But you need to go through and start to identify keywords with unique intent. Okay, that's the key. So we start to identify these keywords with unique intent and then we start to build our sitemap. So that's part one. So we do this, then the next thing you're going to want to do is go into rankability and we're gonna go into content optimizer. And this is really important. We're gonna enter the keyword and then we're gonna open up the content optimizer. Okay? So scuba diving phuket. And then what you're gonna wanna do is actually copy these keywords. You're gonna copy them like this. And then we're gonna go into chat GPT, alright? And the reason why we wanna do this is because I wanted to show you this little example in chat GBT. So you could, you could theoretically use chat GBT to do some pretty solid like topic research. But it's gonna be a little broad and not specific enough in a lot of cases because it doesn't have all the information. But to elevate this, to go to the next level, so you can create that really deep level content, you can use the NLP keywords.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: So what you'll see here, to go down, I said expand on these content ideas, but make sure they're relevant to phuket. And then I added all of the NLP keywords that I extracted from rankability.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: So now at this point, what we're going to see is we're going to see much better topics now. And of course it's putting it in the context of like building out kind of pillar posts or big assets. Nothing wrong with that. Definitely going to want to do that. But what actually what I'm looking at is I want to see kind of specifically what it's talking about in each little subtopic. So talking about best dive sites, okay, that's a topic on its own, right? Talking about Shark point, which is a specific type of dive site that is a topic on its own as well. So what I'm looking for is I'm trying to identify topics that have different intent. Because if they have different intent, I'm going to build out a separate page for each of those little topics. And the reason for that is because not only does that help you build more topic relevance, but it gives you more opportunities to get backlinks, it gives you more opportunities for internal linking, and overall just builds more strength around your core keywords. So the end outcome of going through this and digging through it is you end up with a really nice sitemap. And what you see here is, this is the byproduct of me just looking at Semrushen using rankability and then using chat GPT to kind of synthesize all of that together. And as a result, I've got a beautiful sitemap, you know, a future sitemap that I can go ahead and just start creating content for. And you'll notice that I've put these into little clusters, and this is one, one area where I see a lot of people, I hate to say, mess up, but they kind of do, which is they'll find a good, you know, a good topic, like best dive sites in Phuket, and they'll build out a solid page for that. And that's, that's the right idea. But then they don't go any deeper than that. You want to, you want to go extremely deep in each of your little clusters. You want to get to the point where you have exhausted that topic to the fullest extent, where there's nothing left to say. And if you can get to that point, then move on to the next cluster. But people just shifted, you know, one new cluster without even going deep. They go basically, you know, an inch deep when they should really be going a mile deep on these topics. Okay, so on the dive sites, one you can see I've got a significant amount of assets that we can create. I've got about 13 different assets I can create just for best dive sites. Okay, so this one here functions as the pillar post. Like, this is the pillar post. And then we're going to talk about a lot of these things in that pillar post. But then we're going to internally link to those sub assets. And then on those sub assets like Shark Point, divesite and Phuket, that's going to internally link back to the pillar posts. So we're cross linking these different assets together in this one cluster, and that will just elevate that entire cluster and the SEO performance and rankings of that one cluster, then you can cross link each cluster to each other. So I can link the dive sites cluster to some of these other things. Like if I talk about any of the species, if I talk about the different times, I can cross link them together. So this is what you want to be thinking about is like, how do I expand each of these clusters? And like I said, all of this was pulled directly just by using a couple of tools. And this is going to give us a lot of work to do. There's tons of work to do here. But you'll notice that whenever you find a good topic like this one, like, best times to scuba dive in Phuket, just sometimes you have to use some common sense on this and realize, like, okay, if we're talking about the best times to dive, then we're probably talking about the types of months that you know, or even we could go even as narrow as like best time of the week. Like we could go that granular. But in this case, I just did it based on the months. But once again, we've expanded this cluster so significantly. And you know that there are people searching for this. You know that people, there's some people searching how it's going to be in January or how it's going to be in September because they're trying to plan their trip. So you're, you're putting one more line in the ocean to attract more organic search traffic. Okay? And this, you need to be this specific if you really want to take your SEO to the next level. Okay? So now we're going to talk about how to rank in the local pack in this one scenario. So one thing I really want to put, you know, push your attention towards, and this is a commonality in a lot of local serps these days, is a lot of keyword rich businesses, okay? It just works. And I see it across so many local verticals. I see it honestly on a daily basis there are competitors that are ranking this way. And I don't see that changing because it's a matter of relevance now in this particular scenario. This is the most extreme I've seen in a long time because the top 14, like the top 14 that are ranking all have phuket in them, okay? Every single one has phuket. Now if we look at this, we'll take even another keyword, just look at scuba and we'll see how many have scuba in it. And once again, you see the large majority have scuba in it, okay? And if we go look at diving, let's see how many have diving in it. Okay, well, even, it's actually even more than scuba.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: So the point is, is that having a keyword rich business name, or at least optimizing the listing to include the keywords is clearly a, is really the only way to be able to perform here. If you try to come in here with kind of just a branded generic type of domain, you basically have zero chance to rank. And so this is why I wanted to go and get that exact match domain, because if I get that exact match domain and I get that exact match business name, that's going to give us a very, very powerful signal for the local pack. And it, because there's other gaps that are much larger. This will give us a significant advantage. We should be able to hopefully get into the, let's say the top ten pretty quickly just by having that really keyword rich business name and then obviously starting to narrow all the other gaps. So once we've got that squared away, we've got the business name squared away. That's really, really important. One of the biggest variables, then we're going to need to look at the reviews. So I just took an average here to get the total reviews as a target. Okay, so 344 reviews. A lot of work that has to be done here. Okay. We're gonna have to get a lot of reviews to be able to bridge this gap. But the good news is we do see that there is one competitor here at number eight that only has 63 reviews. So it is certainly possible to at least get into the top ten without a significant amount of reviews. But to get to the next level, to get into that top three, which is really what you need to be in the top three to be able to generate enough click through, rate enough CTR and calls, and ultimately leads. But for the most part, like, we can start to see good progress just when we start to break that hundred review mark. But to get to the next level, we're going to have to get very serious about review collection. And I could dedicate a whole video about review collection. But the point is, number one, make it super easy for them to leave reviews. And number two, ask them for reviews. That is the key. Every single person who uses your service, ask them for a review. Of course, ask the happy ones. But what you can do is get a QR code. So this is a little trick. Go and get a QR code and you just put your Google Business profile review link in here, and then you get the QR code. And you can put that QR code on a little card or whatever else, or on your website or however else you want to deliver the ask for review. And this will make it easier for them to go and do that. Now, I recommend doing it in person. So when someone finishes their dive and they're, you know, maybe they're, they're back into the dive shop, you would ask them, hey, by the way, can you leave us a quick Google review? And then you do it on the spot, because adding a little bit of pressure in there can certainly help. Now, you can't technically incentivize reviews, although a lot of businesses do. But what you can do is you can incentivize your team members to get reviews.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: So what you could do is you could create, you can kind of gamify the process and say, you know, at the end of the month, whoever gets the most Google reviews gets a bonus, right? You could give your employees a bonus, a team a bonus and really gamify it because to bridge this gap is going to take some serious, serious effort and some serious work. Okay, so those are two variables are really critical is the business name itself and the reviews. Now the other big variable is just the location that you're in, like your actual address. And obviously you need to be in Phuket to be able to rank. I know it seems really obvious, but when you look at the top three, like their focus is just phuket, they don't have a bunch of other variants in there. So if I was trying to rank here, I would just focus on Phuket and that would be it. And, you know, when we think about the most important local pack variables, number one is your actual location, like where you are located is the number one ranking variable. Simple as that. Number two, I would say, is honestly probably your business name because it has such a huge influence on performance. And then finally number three would be reviews.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: Of course, if Google were to somehow resolve this relevance thing and they could somehow figure out how to rank businesses without keywords, then yeah, it wouldn't be as important. But that's just not the case, right? That's not the case. It clearly works and you can't, you know, you can try to go against the tide, but I don't know why you would want to. Okay, so the next one, I would say is like the fourth variable here is your website relevance.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: And you'll notice once again, when we look at this website relevance is a big one.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: So we have, the majority of the top ranking results have highly relevant domains, okay? And this is why I said using that exact match domain is going to be really critical because the proof is already there, right? The proof is there that we need to have an exact match or keyword rich domain.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: So really no way around that unless, you know, the only way you can combat this is if you have significant authority. So like CB's right here, they have a, they're one of the strongest domains here. So clearly that's helping them. But if you don't have the keyword rich domain, you're going to have to leverage other variables. You're going to need to get more links, you're going to need to build more relevance with anchor text and other. You're going to have to tap into those other levers. So that's the beauty of an exact match domain or even a keyword rich domain is it just gives you such an advantage out of the gate that you don't need to tap into other levers as much. You don't need to get as many backlinks, you don't need to be aggressive with anchor text because the domain is already giving you that relevance. So just different ways of doing things. But I just prefer to take the path of least resistance. Okay, now the, the final variable here on the local pack that really makes a huge difference is just the overall domain strength and then of course just the quality of the backlinks. Again, I'll be talking more about that here in a second, but we can look at the authority score and say, okay, they're at an 18 on average so we need to get in that range. We can look at the amount of referring domains and we see on average about 675 referring domains. So a lot of work needs to be done and I'll show you kind of what that looks like here in a second. But the point is we need to look at all these gaps and these just become our targets, our goals.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: And we just need to start to chip away at these. And keep in mind, when, when you're trying to get the 300, let's say 344 reviews, it's not that your competitors are just going to be standing still, right? You're not just going to be able to acquire reviews and they're just going to be, you know, not doing anything. They're still required acquiring reviews. So you actually need to be acquiring at a faster rate than they are because you need to be in a surplus to be able to finally catch up to them. Right. Because there's a lot of ground that has to be made up. Okay? So at this point we have a good idea of what the Serps look like. We know the content strategy that we're going to deploy here for this entire SEO campaign and we also know what the local pack looks like. So already a lot of work to do, but now we're going to start to get into the execution side of this and to be able to perform at the highest level for this. Even though you have the keyword rich domain, you're still going to have to create a lot of supporting content, a lot of pages. So when I refer to content, I'm just talking about any page that you are creating, right? Could be a page, could be a post, doesn't make a difference. But the point is we're building pages around dedicated keywords. So I use the 80 20 rule and that just means that 80% of your pages should be built around a topic where there's quantifiable proof that people are searching it, people are engaging with it, it has some sort of demand, okay? And the other 20% is more for what I would call your higher risk bets. So this might be trying to jump on a trend or creating link bait or do some sort of content marketing asset. That's the other 20%. But for this particular video, we're gonna be focusing more on just that 80% of, you know, hyper focused topics.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: So what you wanna do is take one of these topics and we're gonna start to build this content from scratch. Now in this case I'm gonna use the most obvious one, which is just scuba diving phuket, which is the main keyword that we're going after. So more than likely because we would have that keyword rich domain, this would be the target for, this would be on the homepage. So we would use the root domain, the homepage to target this keyword. And then every other page that we build is going to be on the internal page. But you can see, to be able to rank for this the right way, we're going to have to build a pretty comprehensive piece of content. So it's about 1600 to 2900 words. So what I will do is just to get the initial kind of outline in order is you can go ahead and copy this and then we're going to go into chat GPT alright? We're going to scroll down here and we're going to have it create an SEO content outline for us. All right? So do it exactly how I've shown it here and then just paste the NLP keywords for rankability. And this is really critical. If you've been watching my videos before and going through this process, like you have to do the outline first. The outline will make the end output much, much better. Don't just come in here and just say, write me this article, it won't turn out as well. We've just, we've tested this hundreds and hundreds of times. It does not work as well. What works the best is if you do the outline first. Okay, so what we do is we do the outline, we see how it looks, right? So we can go ahead and just copy this and we'll see how well the outline looks as far as in rankability.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: And so we'll copy this and we'll paste it in and this will probably score really well because it does include a lot of the keywords you can see. It's like telling you to use the keywords in those sections. So that makes a lot of sense. But from here, the point is, like, what do you want to do from this point? So you could, of course, just, there's a few options. Number one, you could write this yourself. Like, let's say you're the subject matter expert. You're a decent writer. You could write this content yourself, right? That's certainly a possibility. And like, I write a lot of the content for my own brand myself too. Like ungod SEO, I write a lot of my own content. That's because I have certain nuances in my skillset and I'm also, I've also been writing for a long time, and I can write decently and I'm able to share my ideas pretty clearly. Okay, but if you don't, if you're not confident as a writer, the alternative is you continue to use your subject matter expertise, but you have a copywriter bring those ideas to life. So in this case, what you would do is you just go up here to share and you would copy this, and then you can share this link with a copywriter.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: So you share this link with the copywriter, you give them this beautiful, already prepared outline that's going to be perfectly optimized for SEO, and then they can go in here and just work their magic. And when they're done with the draft, then you come in as the subject matter expert and you say, okay, let's add these nuances. Let's add these little details that no one else would really know unless they were an expert, right? And that's the key to ranking long term, is to add those little details that, you know, some copywriter who doesn't have any experience, real life experience here, would be able to even know some of those details. So those are my recommendations. As far as getting the best outcome from your SEO content and just your SEO campaign in general, is either use the subject matter expert to create the content, or have the subject matter expert fact check and guide the content and then have a good copywriter actually bring it to life. Those are the two best ways to do it. You're going to get the best results that way. You're going to get the best long term results that way. But let's say you want to really accelerate this. You don't have a budget to hire a copywriter. Yes, you can certainly use AI content, but keep in mind once again, I don't recommend just blasting your site with AI content. Instead, what you want to do, you've got to be a little more deliberate about this. We're going to take that outline. And what we're going to do is we're going to tell it to create the content in the, in the appropriate word count. So I just pulled this directly from rankability, that, that particular word count. Keep in mind this word count is the median word count. So we're eliminating outliers and we're finding the true word count target that's most accurate because you don't want to over invest in your content. I see this a lot in a lot of campaigns, people, you know, some of the other content optimization tools will say you need to create 3000 words for this content asset. But then you go and look at the keyword and you're like, this is wildly uncompetitive. Why would I need to create 3000 words? It just doesn't, it doesn't add up. And I've, I've proven this so many times that you can go against those recommendations and still outperform. Because, of course, if you've been doing this a long time, you have the skill set to know how much content is required. But if you're newer to this, you should use the word count guidelines to at least guide you. And this is particularly important when you're outsourcing copywriting. You need to actually give your, your writer a word count to work with.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: So, and it also allows you to forecast your budget as well. But in this case, we're just going to feed the AI this particular word count. And as you can tell, it creates a really solid asset. And remember, it's creating this with the NLP in mind. Right. So we've fed it the NLP so it knows the little nuances that the competitors are writing for, that are already have written for. So we'll go in here, we'll get rid of this and we'll paste it and we'll see how it did on its first draft if it got optimized decently. And it did. Yeah, it's at a solid 70 right out of the gate. That's great. This is a perfect place to start. And so from here you have a few options. The first option is you, once again, just like before, bring in the subject matter expert and have them dig through this content and add the nuance and add the little details to it. That's one option. The other option is you can bring in an AI content editor.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: There's a lot of people that do this now where they come in and they can edit your AI content. And so, like, she's very busy because I think I keep sending a lot of people her away. But, but she is really good. She's super, super good. And by the way, she doesn't, I don't get paid for this. We don't have any relationship. I've just used this service a lot. And so when she's available, you know, feel free to use her. She does a great job. Hopefully, we don't choose to get too busy. But the point is, like, she will do a tremendously good job, and she won't just, you know, there's a lot of people out here offering this type of service, and they're not very good because all they do is they go in here and they just, like, they make the content lower quality. They intentionally make mistakes to trip up the, you know, the tools to detect AI. They're doing those things intentionally, not actually making the content better. But what she'll do is she'll come in and really, anyone who's a good editor will come in, they'll humanize it, they'll make it flow better, they'll make it sound more engaging and more actually speaking to the reader. And overall, just make the content better.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: That's what we're trying to do. And at the end of the day, I'm not trying to trick the AI detection tools. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to make the content show clear experience. I want to show that there's clearly experience. I want to show that there's nuance in this content. And I want the content to be engaging. And I'm not talking about the copywriting. I want the copywriting to be engaging so that we can actually get the outcome that we're going for. So in this case, the outcome we're going for is get someone to book a scuba diving trip in phuket. Right. So that's what we really, what we want here. And one other kind of nuance here, which I won't go too deep into, but just a slight nuance. When you're, when you're creating content with rankability in particular, you'll notice that a lot of the content here, there's a lot of green.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: And green is good. That means it's highly relevant. And these keywords here are pulled directly from the top ranking competitors. So you know that if you talk about these topics you're talking about, you're covering all the topics that your competitors are covering. That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to make sure that we've built the most comprehensive asset that covers the topic in full.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Don't worry about how many times you mentioned specifically keywords. Totally irrelevant. Doesn't make a difference. In fact, that actually leads to over optimization. Don't worry about that. Instead, what you want to do is just focus on covering each of these topics. So for me, I'm trying to hit green on a lot of these. That's phase one. Get that relevance in order. But then what you want is you actually want a few pockets of no green content, right? So what you want to see is a few different things in here where there's just a lack of green. And this might sound kind of odd, but the reason, because we want to have information gain, okay? And that geeky term really just means we want some originality in our content. And if you don't see green, that actually indicates that you're talking about things that the competitors are not talking about, okay? Because all of this is pulled from the competitors. So if we see here these certain topics are being covered here, that's actually really, really good. Now, the whole thing doesn't need to be completely unique and original, but at least have, you know, 2030, maybe 40% of it have some, you know, some areas where there's some pockets of just originality, okay? Because that will help kind of elevate you above the competitors. So if I was a subject matter expert and I knew I needed to add, let's say, some, some uniqueness, some, some originality into this content, I'd come in here and I try to find, like, okay, I'm going to enter some stuff here about. Because maybe you've been doing, you know, scuba diving in Phuket for 20 years. I'm sure there's certain little new nuances about these dive sites that no one else, unless you've done as many dives as you have, would know, right? So you add in here, you add your unique flair, and already it'll make your. Make the content deeper, make the content more unique, and of course, add the levels of experience into the content. So this is the way that you can go about doing this. I don't like, the one thing I don't recommend is just going in a chat, GPT generating AI content and just slapping it on your site. Yes, it can certainly work, but really what we're trying to go for is really long term results.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: Want to go for those long term results? And there's some indications that Google can detect some levels of AI content with large language models. But the point is, like, the goal is not to trick the AI tools or do anything like that. The goal is to create a good asset, a good page that actually converts. That's what we're going for. So you need to humanize it. You need to make it engaging. And don't take as many, don't take shortcuts, just don't take shortcuts because it won't pay off. Like, this is your business, you need to take it seriously. And if you're doing this for a client, like this is your client's business, treat it with respect. Treat it the way that you would want your business to be treated.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: So yes, invest a little bit more into the content because that's going to help produce better results. And most importantly, let those results achieve very long term rankings and stable rankings. So at this point, all you have to do is just start to chip away at these different content assets that you need to create, okay? Just start creating them and try to do it consistently. It's going to take you a long time. It's going to take a significant amount of time and effort and even budget to be able to do this, but just spread it out over time and start to chip away. Now, at this point, if you've done everything I've showed so far, you can certainly get really good results, right? You can get really good results and you can take it really far. But if you don't have the most important variable, which is backlinks, then it's going to be really difficult to achieve the maximum amount of results. So now at this point, we need to narrow the backlink gap between the business that we're working with and the competitors. So what we're looking at here, as I mentioned before, looking at the 675 referring domains, this means 675 unique websites, on average linking to your competitors. So this is our target. Now keep in mind, this is not a, this, this doesn't include a lot of nuance of link building. This is just a pure volume based target. So 675, what does that even mean? Well, number one, we don't need to get that many links and that many referring domains if we get links from very high quality sources, if we get links from super authoritative websites. Okay, so there is some nuance here about link quality because this doesn't consider link quality at all, doesn't consider link authority at all. So we can actually bridge this gap a lot faster if we get links from very powerful websites because getting one link from a powerful website is the equivalent of thousands of just mediocre or below average links.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: So it actually is that significant of a difference. So before we talk about that, the first thing you want to do is you want to identify opportunities that your competitors already have landed.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: So you go into Semrush and you can just go to the backlink app tool. Once again, enter your domain, which is going to be brand new. So it's going to be, you know, it's going to show you a lot of link opportunities and then enter your top three competitors. Once again, pick the ones that are in that location. If you pick some huge authority site, it's just going to show you like, ridiculous amount of links. Gonna be totally irrelevant. Okay, so what we wanna do here is we wanna see what are the links that they have. And right away, this should be your number one priority. Your number one priority is to get the same links that your competitors have. Don't try to get fancy, don't try to get different types of links. Like, look at the links that they have and try to get these links, because that's like, just to get into the playing field. Just to get in the playing field. We're gonna bridge these, this gap here. We already have everything that we need. So like, for example, scuba board. Clearly, this is going to be something that's relevant and it looks like it's some sort of forum. So first thing I would do is I'd go and register on this forum and I would start to contribute to this forum and then look for opportunities to drop a link or two.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: And the way that you can do this on a forum is you can be a little bit sneakier, is you can create something very informational in nature and then in that, in that particular asset, you could link to one of your pieces of content in the body. Right? So instead of just like dropping a link, you're using it as a resource and you're also linking out to other resources that are not your brand. So that way it can somewhat muddy the waters. As far as which. Which one do you own? Which one do you not own? And I also recommend not, when you sign up for a forum like this, don't sign up as like, the business name sign up is just a normal person. You're just contributing. You've been doing scuba for so long, especially if the subject matter expert, like, you're just contributing to this community. So right away, this is very easy thing to do. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to bridge that gap then just continually just start to chip away at these different ones and see how do we get links on, you know, this, this website here. How do we get. And you just keep chipping away. And you can also look and see like how did they get links? So if we look at this one, how did they get links on this site? Well, it looks like they got on the listicle. So we find a listicle here. Now we just have to reach out to this website and say, hey, I saw this listicle. We actually are a brand new scuba business in Phuket and we were wondering what it would take for us to get on this list. Thanks for your time. And you could just say you have to send a lot of outreach emails to get a lot of lines in the ocean. I, but the point is, is like this is going to take some work. You're going to have to send outreach emails. You're going to try to get on the same places that your competitors are. And you're not going to get on every single, you know, every single website that your competitors are on. But the point is like, this needs to be, the focus initially is just bridging this gap.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Once you've done that, the next thing you should want to focus on is starting to build some really, really authoritative links. Now you can go and do, you know, Haro based link building. Now Haro got replaced by, by a different brand, which is connectively. But you can go and do this yourself, right? So you can go in here, you can respond to journalist queries. It has a pretty low success rate. So you could assume maybe you'd get like 5% on a good, a good day success rate as far as landing link. But it, you know, it's gonna take some effort, is essentially what you can do and you'll get some really powerful links doing this. Another option is to use search intelligence and search intelligence is going to go and just basically do all this work for you. They're going to get the high authority links for you because they're going to use a bunch of different PR tactics like reactive PR, expert commentary, which is similar to Haro, or now connectively. And then they'll also create dedicated assets for you to score these links as well. So this is the fastest route you can go if you're willing to invest some capital, but this can really accelerate your results a lot faster. And going back to what I mentioned before, when you have a high, high authority links coming in, like I said, one high authority link is the equivalent of sometimes thousands of average links.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: So that's why making this investment is so important, because you can really start to get these powerful links which then makes it easier to bridge this gap.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Now one other technique that you can use as well is when you look at a lot of these competitors, you're going to see they have a lot of probably directory based links. Good news is you don't need to go and build these yourself. You can just go and use a service like Loganix. So this is what I use for all my citation building. You build all these citations, it's a one and done activity. Do it once and it's done forever and you can get hundreds of citations without any work. So. And Loganix is not sponsoring this. I just really love the work that, that they do. But this is the way to kind of bridge that gap again. Once again, you can bridge it by 100 referring domains basically in a couple of weeks.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: So just doing those things alone will have a significant impact on bridging this link app. And at the end of the day, when it comes to link building, there is no end to this. You're just going to have to keep sending out reach emails, keep creating linkable assets, which I didn't really talk about, but a lot of these assets here that you're creating, there's some linkable elements to them. So you might get some links naturally, but you also want to explore creating some linkable assets. Nuke force. Just go into chat GBT and ask. Give me ten link bait ideas for a scuba diving company located in Phuket. Right. And my go to typically is just to create data driven content. So if you can create data driven content that's going to, that can certainly help you acquire links passively and naturally. But a lot of these, like I said, a lot of these content assets, they do have the capability of getting links themselves. So everything I showed you so far can help you get better Google rankings and increase your organic traffic. But once that traffic lands on your website, you have to actually be able to convert that traffic. And this is a huge mistake that I see so many people make. They get so obsessed with SEO that they forget that when the traffic gets there, we needed to actually do something. We needed to call our phone number. We need them to submit a lead form. We need them to convert.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: And Google is actually tracking this. If users are on Google Chrome, they are being tracked. And when people click on the phone number, when people submit a lead form, when people go to a second page, all of those user signals are being tracked by Google Chrome and likely informing Google search. You can go and look at the recent Google court case and see that there's evidence of this. So the point is that users engaging on our website can influence SEO, but that isn't even actually what matters. What matters is that we're creating a website that's built to convert, okay? Because at the end of the day, this is all about conversions. We're only doing SEO because we want people to actually book diving trips. Right? This is what we want. So I'm going to go through a few examples here from the different people that are ranking now. Funny enough, a lot of the examples I'm showing you here are actually the top ranking results. And it just shows you that just because you're ranking well in Google doesn't mean that your site is built well for conversions per se. Right? So they are actually missing out on a ton of opportunity and they're actually not getting the full advantage of all this beautiful organic traffic that's coming their way. They're actually missing out on a lot. So I'm going to show you some examples. So first things first. Whenever you're building out any landing page, any page that you're trying to drive conversions on, you have to be very, very deliberate and very careful with what you put above the fold.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: And we look above the fold here. You know, there's a commonality. And one of the commonalities is that they're putting these social media icons above the fold. Now, it might be that they're using the same web design companies, all of them, or that they're all copying each other. Whatever it is, this is an example of, like, why you shouldn't always copy your competitors, because they're sometimes doing the wrong stuff. And so when it comes to conversions, having these above the fold is a very, very bad idea. Because what it could do is if someone clicks on Facebook and they go to Facebook, the chances of you converting them now is virtually zero, right? Because once they're on Facebook, it's game over. Now, if you want to see an example of this, go on YouTube, go on Facebook, go on any of these social media platforms and notice they don't link out. Like, they don't link out at all. And in fact, they punish creators who externally link. Like, if you drop a link on your profile, your posts will get suppressed, like, dramatically. It will get no reach. And the reason for that is because these platforms do not want you to leave. They do not want you to leave the website. They want you to stay on the website. Because the longer you stay in the website, the more likelihood that they're going to get ad revenue. And it's the same with our websites. We need to treat our websites like this as well. We want to keep the user on the website. So then that increases our chances of driving a conversion. So eliminate these social media icons from above the fold. Put them in the footer. Like put them way down in the footer. And if someone wants to follow you, they could certainly go and do that. But that's not the goal of the website. The goal of the website is to drive leads. We're trying to drive leads. We're not trying to get more Facebook likes. It's not that Facebook likes don't pay the bills, so we need to get more leads. And so I would eliminate that. That's number one. Number two is if you have a phone number above the fold, which you should, which most of them do. Each of them has a phone number over the fold, which is great. Make sure that it's clickable. So this particular one, they have a phone number, but it's not clickable. So that means someone on mobile can't actually call them without having to look at two different windows to try to figure out, to remember the phone number. That will kill conversions. So don't. Don't do that. Next one is when we look at the landing page. You don't want to have these huge sliders that have no utility. Okay, so this is a slider that takes up a massive amount of space, but does not help drive any conversions whatsoever. It just is there for, I guess, aesthetic reasons. But once again, we're not trying to have thing like random elements just for aesthetics because it doesn't actually drive any type of conversion that we're going for. So if you're going to have a big hero section like this, you need to have some calls to action in here. And honestly, like sliders in general, no one really like you. As far as modern web design practices, no one really uses sliders anymore. So I would, you know, have a hero section is fine, but we need to restructure how that looks.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: So when we look at this, this is an example from another competitor and they're doing a much. This is a much better approach.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: They've got the nice hero section, which adds nice visuals, which is great. They've got a nice headline, sub headline and some, and some CTA buttons. Perfect. This is a perfect layout. This will do the job. Obviously there's room to improve even on this, but I'm not going to get that granular. But the point is, this is the proper structure that you should go for in a. Above the full section. Just to give another example, this is on Apple. Like, they have a very big hero section. But notice there's a little CTA section. So they've got, you know, a little branding, they've got a little sub headline, and they've got their CTA's okay. And now in this case, they are using a video based section, but that's because it aligns well with the product that they're trying to promote. Okay, and then now let's move on to the next section here, which is right below the fold, is when we're trying to persuade someone to convert, we want to make sure that whatever we're doing, it's highly readable. And so this is a big no no, in my opinion, is having two blocks next to each other like this, because it's just not the way that people consume content online. Like, most people are reading top, you know, top down. And if you have this, it's like, okay, am I reading this, like, going across this way or should I go down this way? Like, it's very confusing for the eyes, it's confusing for the user. So instead what you want is the classic left right format. So you're going to have content on the left, image on the right, image on the left, content on the right, and you split it up like that. And you'll see this is, you know, you can do it this way. Like, here's a similar format but done a little bit cleaner, is apple. And you'll see, like, they have, you know, left and right blocks like this, but you'll notice there's contrast, and they're also really simple and they have a lot of calls to action in theme.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Another example, like I said, is the left right format. This is my preferred format. When you're kind of working through different pieces of content, you have a nice image and you've got a little bit of content, and then you just reverse that. So then you would take this content, you put it on the left and the image on the right, and you keep reversing back and forth because it helps it much easier to digest the content. And more than likely, there's probably too many words even here. There's probably. This can be cut down leaner. I better copywriting. All that good stuff. Okay, next one here is just looking at the individual landing page itself.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: So when we look at these landing pages, they're not really doing the objective that we're going for, right. And when we build a landing page, the goal is to drive conversions. So when we look at this page that there's a lot of challenges. I won't get into each of them. But number one, having the Facebook page here, once again, we're just, we're asking them to do something that we don't want them to do. We don't want them, I mean, maybe you want them to follow the page, but that's not, I would assume that's not what the business really wants. What we would really want is we want them to actually convert. We want them to call you. We want to submit a lead form. We want them to do something that's going to lead to revenue. So getting them to follow our Facebook page, that's not going to do the job. Right. So what I would do is I would eliminate this sidebar altogether. So any landing page you have, there's no sidebars, no distractions. We're just building it straight for conversions. Then even smaller things like the date here is from 2013. It just a lot of room to improve.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: And then the same one on this side, this one's a little bit better. It's a little bit cleaner. But once again, we've got this sidebar that's not really serving any purpose whatsoever. Once again, there's a search function. Do we want them searching or do we want them to convert? Do we want them to go to these different pages, or do you want them to stay on this page and achieve the objective that we're going for?

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Very small changes. Now here's a different one. This is an example of a good landing page. And if you ever want to see good landing pages, just look at Google Ads. Go and look at the best Google Ads and you'll see they know how to create pages that convert.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: And you should emulate those exact same ideas and templates for SEO driven landing pages as well. It's the same thing as the same goal here. It's not like your SEO pages should be different than your PPC pages. It should be the same if it's a commercial based keyword to drive conversions.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: And notice there's no menu here. There's no other objective here other than actually filling out this form. Right. There's, there's one objective on this page, and anything else is distracting from that one objective. Okay, another one here. This is actually, I like this section. It's nice to have it kind of split up like this, but this is a very, I'm getting very detailed here and very nuanced, but you don't want your headline and your copywriting and your buttons all to be the same color. You want to create contrast. Contrast is good when it comes to user engagement and conversions. So an example here is on convertkit. You can see they've got, they're using a lot of different colors here. But notice that the, the actual call to action button is significantly stands out because it has that green contrast. Among the other colors are here. Okay, this one here, another example of kind of. It's kind of like a pricing table. It's kind of confusing. I don't really know. Like, is this a button? Is this a price? It's hard to say. And I believe this is a button. Okay, so, but once again, this is not like, numbers are not a call to action. So a call to action is, you know, book your trip now or, you know, book your car, call now or whatever it is like some sort of call to action. So this needs to be reworked. Another one here. Once again, big, big hero section. This site, they don't have any call to action above the fold. So just wasted space. So we want to have a call to action above the fold. And we want to have a phone number in the navigation, adding just like random sections onto the landing page that don't have any utility. Okay, so like this section here, there's no call to action. It's not really doing anything. It's just here. And we don't want that. Be deliberate with every single thing that you put on your page. Every single thing needs to have utility. It needs to have a purpose. And I don't believe this has much of a purpose. So either it needs to be reworked or it needs to be eliminated. Another one here, which you see quite often on a lot of these sites, is you have a headline here. Once again, no call to action. And then once again, we have the same, basically headline again. So we haven't really moved this conversion journey any further. If you're going to have a headline, each headline needs to be unique. It needs to build upon itself. It needs to add to the overall experience. And then going back to the overall landing page, this one's actually a little bit better as far as potential conversions. But having these, these share buttons above the fold is, once again, not a terrific idea because if someone goes and shares this page on Facebook, I mean, yeah, that, that's nice. Thank you. But that doesn't actually achieve the objective, which is them submitting a lead form or calling a phone, calling the phone number to become a lead. So what I would do is eliminate this, push this contact form above the fold and I would change this. Even the call to actions on this particular form. We don't want them to just contact us. That's a little, not very specific. What's the objective here? Book your trip now. Get very specific about what you want them to do. And probably add a little more detail here into the fields, because more fields, you have the higher quality, the leads on average. Another one here is just general copywriting 101. Like centered text like this is like you can have centered text, but doing it with a lot of text like this just looks odd. And you, once again, this would benefit significantly by having the left right format also more than likely probably just cutting down on the content. There needs to be more brevity practiced here. So big blocks of test text like this, people just are not going to read. They're not going to read this. This is the Internet. Like, people have very short attention spans because of TikTok and various things. Okay? They're not going to read through all this unless you're some very gifted copywriter. And a good copywriter wouldn't have these huge blocks of text. They wouldn't have these huge paragraphs. So either this needs to be cut down, it needs to be broken up, it needs to be, there needs to be visuals added into it. There's just a lot of room to improve as far as readability. Now, this section here, I actually really like, this is a, you know, I gave this a check mark here because this is a great section. It's nicely designed, it's got some kind of value propositions. It's got a nice image. This is a great section. So I think emulating more sections like this would be a good idea. And then once again, similar to what I showed before with kind of these, just a lot of content. Big wide type of container here, which, you know, having to read is like your neck. You almost get a little sore in your neck having to read like this. And the text is small and the text is not black. So using any non black text is typically going to be hard to read. It's smaller fonts, so it's hard to read as well. And then in addition to that, this scannability of the content, you want to use really narrow containers on the Internet when you're trying to get people actually consume the content. So just a small adjustment on the container, making the content leaner, changing the font size, changing the font color, all would significantly benefit this page. So that's how you build an SEO campaign from scratch. If you like this video, please like it and subscribe for more SEO training videos like this. And if you want to take your SEO to the next level, want to have that consistent and predictable SEO results that you're going for, then make sure you secure your free trial of rankability. I'll have a link below this video. Thank you so much for watching.