Each campaign must begin with comprehensive research.
From making sure your initial benchmarks are right to doing an in-depth analysis of competitors, you need to make sure your data is accurate and complete from the start.
Scuba diving at night without sending an SEO campaign headlamp is not like collecting this data. You will have no direction and you will be able to find it anywhere, perhaps inside the mouth of a shark, rather than at the top of Google results.
The next section in the next section will go over various data points and where this information can be found. For all of these data points, we use Semrush or Google products.
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Benchmarking using Google Analytics and Google Search Console
If you already have Google Analytics installed and receive data, you can find various data points by clicking on Audience Overview, Availability Overview, and Audience Benchmarking.
There are many tutorials for understanding Google Analytics, and most of the details are simple to understand.
If you are a Google Data Studio user, you can create a report to track and benchmark your data using one of the templates available.
Here are some suggestions:
All-in-one Search Console Template
Google Analytics Receipt Overview
Once you have audited Google Analytics and Google Search Console and created your benchmarking reports, we can start analyzing data from Semrush.
Bird’s-eye view of your site’s benchmark report
We will start by getting an overview of the current operation of the website. The following screenshot shows the Domain in Semrush overview report:
This report provides various data points about the current health of the site, including:
You can click through this report for more detailed information or export this report for an overview of all your initial baseline data.
We will then create an actual report for download with custom data.
Create a baseline report
For this report, we will use the Semrush reporting feature.
In Semrush, create a project for your site. Start by running a site audit. When the audit data is complete, create a new report. Here is an example of a baseline report template:
You can use this template to create your own and use the Quick Change to change the URL.
Organic research
Go to Organic Research and type in your website domain. The following organic research report will be generated:
Pay close attention to the numbers under Keywords, Traffic, Cost of Traffic and Branded / Non – Branded Traffic. These are great metrics to track as your campaign progresses.
Site overview
Then you can view the individual graphs, toggling between keywords and comment. Here is the graph for the Organic Trend Keywords box:
This example shows all the potential keywords from the top three onwards, but you can select the ones you want to display using the checkboxes:
Are your organic traffic and keywords going up or down? Are they changing over time?
You can also click on Comment to view the estimated traffic graph:
Notice that you can change the date range to see the time Every once or two years, one year, six months or one month.
Positions
When you click on the settings tab, you will see the following screen:
This section allows you to go deeper into your keyword rankings to find out how many of them rank for your particular post.
You can also export your keyword ranking report into a spreadsheet that will tell you metrics as follows:
Export this table and save by using the date on the first run to use this table for your benchmarking reports.
Position changes
When you click on the Position Changes tab, you should see the following:
If you briefly scan the overview of the keyword change report, you will see the following headings:
This data can help you figure out where your SEO priorities should be placed as part of the benchmark. You can use these keyword / page combinations to focus your SEO efforts and to create SEO experiments as your campaign progresses.
Pages
Then, let ‘s take a look at the pages that are performing well on your site and how many keywords there are in each page.
This section gives you specific metrics such as:
Clicking on one of the pages will give you more details about each page.
Subdomains
The subdomains tab of Semrush’s organic research can reveal vital subdomain information, such as sub – domain decision – making decisions based on subdomain removal (if desired), 301 diversion removal (if required) and features that are or may be downgrading. they need to be removed.
Now that you have a solid understanding of the current status of your site, the next step is to explore your competitors and the competitive landscape.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and do not necessarily include Search Engine Land. The team authors are listed here.
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About The Author
Marcela De Vivo is an industry veteran with over 20 years of digital marketing experience, Marcela travels the world talking about SEO, data-driven marketing strategies, and workflow automation and optimization. Marcela owns a digital marketing agency called ContentKarma based in California.
How do you write a SEO strategy?
Below, you will find an 11-step creation process to help you create a strategy that sets you up for success.
- Benchmarking Your Current SEO Performance. …
- Analyze SEO Strategies for Competitors. …
- Set Your Goals and KPIs. …
- Define your Keywords and Column Pages. …
- Find Long-Tail Keywords and Define Cluster Content.
What is included in an SEO strategy? SEO strategy is a detailed plan to improve website search engine rankings to capture more organic traffic. This plan takes advantage of many basic pillars, including technical SEO, content strategy, on-page SEO, link building and user experience.
What is high quality backlinks?
So, in a nutshell, a high quality backlink is one that is natural, highly credible and highly relevant. While high quality backlinks bring the most value, you can still gain good momentum through medium quality links, and you want to avoid low quality / spam links at all costs.
Does the quality of backlinks matter? Much of the increase in Domain Authority comes from link building, but link quality is far more important than quantity. One high quality link is worth more than 100 links from low quality sources. In fact, too many links from low quality sources can even harm your site.
What are strong backlinks?
What is a good backlink? A good backlink is a relevant outbound link to a trusted, authoritative site. A site is generally viewed as a trusted site if it is targeted by many strong backlinks. Google views these backlinks as one way to ensure that your site has high quality helpful content.
What is a good number of backlinks?
In general, ranking 60 to 100 is great, 40 to 50 is ok, and below 40 is not great. If you want to build high quality backlinks, then start building links from high-authority domain websites that are also relevant to your niche and trusted by searchers across the Internet.
What are the most powerful backlinks?
The most powerful backlinks are dofollow links. Dofollow backlinks are backlinks that go to the SEO juice of the website to bring the backlink to the website getting the backlink.
What is an example of a backlink?
Backlinks are links from one page of one website to another. If someone has a link to your site, you have a backlink from them. If you link to another website, they have a backlink from you. For example, these keywords link to YouTube, so they now have a backlink from us.
What is a high quality links?
An even higher quality connection has more power, if it is difficult for competitors to get a natural connection from the same source. Links from relevant sites and authorities that only talk about your website and not your competitors can be considered great link opportunities because they are unique to your site.
What do you consider a quality link?
Steps for relevant valuable keywords in their industry niche. It provides value to visitors, either through service or through thought leadership. It was considered an authority in your industry. Related to your niche.
What makes a good SEO strategy?
The following are the four main areas of SEO that site owners need to consider: Technical SEO: How well your content can shrink and be indexed. topic: Have the most relevant and best answers to an expectation question. On-site SEO: Optimizing your content and HTML.
What is KPI in SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) KPIs are values that marketing teams use to measure the performance of their websites for organic search results.
What 3 KPIs of SEO should you track? Monitoring revenue, ROI, conversions, and organic visibility are all key SEO Performance Indicators important to track for your SEO program.
What KPI means?
KPI stands for key performance indicator, a quantifiable measure of performance over time for a specific objective. KPIs provide goals for teams to seek, milestones to measure progress, and insights that help people across the organization make better decisions.
What is KPI in a job?
KPI stands for key performance indicators, which are measurable values that allow you to understand the performance of your department or organization. A good KPI should help you and your team understand if the strategies you are using are moving towards your goals.
How is KPI measured?
KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator. Key Performance Indicators are key metrics that allow you to measure the success (or otherwise) of campaigns. KPIs are used to help make informed business decisions based on the performance of the project being measured.
How do you define a KPI?
Definition of Key Performance Indicator (KPI) A quantifiable measure used to measure the success of an organization, employee, etc. to consider the achievement of performance objectives. A set of quantifiable measurements used to measure the overall long-term performance of a company.