We should start with a quick note: while anyone can do research, it takes some experience to know what you’re looking for, and what to do with the data once you have it. At its core, experience is what you’re hiring a Colorado SEO firm for. Regardless of who does the research (you or your SEO company), let’s look at the basics of SEO research.
What is the Point?
If you want to grow your rankings, be more competitive and move the dial on your goals, you’ll need to execute an SEO strategy. Knowing where to put your effort starts with research. For example,
What queries are your customers searching for?
Which keywords are the right targets?
How much competition should you expect?
When will a new strategy pay off?
These are the kinds of questions you’ll need to quantify before you dive in. Your SEO company will spend 30 – 90 days pushing the new strategy before you can effectively decide if it’s working or not, so pointing in the wrong direction can be a big waste of time.
Where to Begin?
There are a few kinds of SEO research. Today we’re going to look at three, Keyword Research, Competitor Research and Technical SEO. Here are the basic definitions:
Keyword Research allows your team to see the galaxy of keywords your users are looking for; you can’t choose keyword targets without spending some time with the full list.
We’ll dive into the process a bit more in an upcoming article, but what you’re looking to gain is a set of target keywords. For example, if you sell shoes, you can start researching the keyword, ‘italian shoes’, but after reviewing all 480 keywords you might settle in on ‘mens italian slip on shoes’, which is a good fit for one of your categories. While ‘italian shoes’ is what you’re selling, that exact keyword might be too ambitious.
Competitive Research is pretty self-explanatory, but we should add that you’re not looking at your competition to copy their strategy,your aim should be to benchmark against their rankings and traffic.
You probably know who your direct competitors are, but if not, start by looking at the sites that rank for your target keywords. Do they offer something similar to your site? Put them on the list!
Once you have a solid list of 3 – 5 main competitors, your team can start digging into their strengths and weaknesses. How does their Site Health compare to yours? How about total rankings and organic traffic? What you’re looking for is a gap in their ranking portfolio. Those keywords could be especially effective for your site.
Technical SEO research is effectively self-evaluation. Your SEO company will use a research tool to pick apart your site and your results. The deliverable items will be a concrete list of areas to improve.
For example, how do your Site Health and rankings look today? If you’re scoring lower than ~80% that’s a good place to start your SEO effort.
Once you have the Technical SEO to-do list in hand, you can start collaborating on a content-based SEO optimization. All SEO tools want to help you choose keywords and optimize for them, but to date, AI isn’t great at choosing keywords. Rely on your keyword research to find valuable keywords. Your team will choose one keyword for each page you want to optimize. Working them onto the page is a bit of an art form but if you have a strong keyword as your guiding light, you’ll get there.
We’ll get into more detail about the three main facets of SEO research, but now you should have a basic understanding of the concrete deliverable items of your research. Each of these parts of the research will come with lists and charts and scores…actionable data that you can use to inform your strategy.
If you’re going to work with a Colorado SEO company, expect them to walk you through these (and other) results during the presentation of findings. If you’re taking on the research yourself, learn more about the metrics and the lessons you can take from the data you find.
If you have questions or aren’t prepared to jump into research on your own, get in touch. We’d be happy to answer questions or kick off a research project for you.