If you are in a hurry and you want to rank your business high on search organically, dominate your competition, get more leads, looking for a proven plan to help you out, this blog post is for you. If you are time-bounded, have a limited budget, wiling to put in the effort for the next 6 months or more, this blog will help you strategize accordingly. If you do not want to pay for paid advertisements, or your ads are not giving you the return on investment you expect, this blog will show you how to get a better ROI using organic search.

 

Who is this blog for? This blog is for those who want a proven plan to get more visibility using organic search. You will do whatever it takes to get this sorted out. You will invest the time and put in the effort. You plan to treat this marketing endeavor as an investment that will pay a dividend in the long run. Getting your business to rank high on search organically must be your top two business priorities. You must allocate the time, at least 4 hours daily for the next 6 months or more to get this figured out.

What this blog not? This blog is not a magic pill. It will require you to put in a good 4-12 hours of work daily for a minimum of 6-8 months. You will most likely have to push outside your comfort and overcome obstacles to master SEO the right way. Unless you are not willing to make SEO the highest priority in your business, you should either outsource the work or continue paying for advertisements.

If you believe you can fix SEO in 2-3 days or quickly then you may have to re-consider reading this post. We are not talking about ranking for 1 keyword here and there. We are talking about ranking for a broader set of keywords and attract a ton of traffic.

This post is most applicable for a business that is already doing well and now you want to take your business to the next level. Preferably for a business that has allocated a budget (time, money, effort) for marketing. If you are starting, spending the next 6 months to get this working can daunt as you won’t see any R.O.I immediately. Resort to other means to get customers while working on this on the side.

This is a long terms strategy for dominance. We want to build a healthy foundation for you to market your goods, service, and products for months and years to come.

In this blog, I won’t be talking too much about what tools to use and how to install a platform. Why? Because there are a million blogs out there on this subject. This blog is about having the right game-plan and strategy. I will mention how to get access to some tools and resources that will be necessary to help you get started quickly.

There are few things you can expect from this blog. You  will,

The purpose of this blog is to give you all the ammunition to bring more visibility to your brand through online search. For that we will have to set the rules. Only if we know what the rules are, will we know how to play the game. The 1st section is all about the rules of SEO.

Then we need to tame your mind. We need to get you in the right mindset. This will help you get up to speed. Mindsets acts like rules giving you structure with which you can perform optimally. Without the right mindset you won't be able to absorb the information from this blog.Only with the right mindset will this blog make sense.

Then we proceed to the 'SEO psychology' section. In the psychology section we will talk about how we all use search engines and why we search the way we do. What is going through your customers mind when they search. What question or intent do they have and how should a webpage answer those questions. All of this and more will be discussed in the psychology section. After we discuss SEO psychology, we will talk about the strategy to dominate your competition.

The strategy part is where we structure your game plan. We will talk about how to structure your website, how to design your website, how to write content on your website, how to position your brand the right way and how to use intent based education marketing to attract prospects, convert them to leads and eventually customers. You will learn a ton in this section. 

After we know what our strategy is, we will then create a detailed time line action plan for you to execute. We will divide our plan into 6 months worth of work and explain what we need to get done. We will divide our task into 1 month chunks and sub divide into 1 week chunks. 

Finally, to execute on the game plan we need to acquire some skills. Here we will talk about the main skillsets you need and where to obtain your learning resources from.

This blog is filled with information. To learn the skills and master SEO the right way you will have to push outside your comfort zone and overcome obstacles. There is a lot of work ahead of us. Let us get started.

Avoid reading other blogs and articles. The only blog you should be reading is the official Google Documentation. As much as it is important to learn new things and expand on your knowledge, it is also important to unlearn things that will hamper your growth. I highly recommend following the advise here first and build your online asset. 

If I ask 10 different people what SEO is, you will get 10 different answers. To me this is what SEO is:  

What do we mean by optimization? We will be discussing more about optimization in the rules section, but in simple terms it means train your website to become a better salesperson. Which is to say give it the right ammunition for it to show up on search, give it the ability to engage with visitors and prospects, give it the ability to convert prospects to customers, give it the ability to build trust, give it the ability to virtually talk to many clients/prospects as possible and a lot more.  Optimization in this context is nothing but train your website to perform.

In the next section we will talk more on how to optimize your website. Let us move on.

The rules for SEO must obey with search guidelines. Which is to say, if you are optimizing your website to rank for search terms you need to comply with search guidelines. If you do not, they may black list you and you may never be able to appear on a search result. We definitely do not want that.  

In this section we will 1st read the rules proposed by Google and then we will dive into what signal search is looking for when displaying search results (ranking parameters). 

First, let us understand the guidelines. 

This cannot be said any clearer. Search engines are a business. If they do not cater to the needs of their customers they too will run out of business. The customers of Google are users who want to user search engines to navigate the internet. Most likely these users are real human beings. If Google started to rank pages that were not human readable, no one would use Google. It would be worthless. It is in their best interest to rank pages for users. OR else, they too will run out of business.

This is the core concept of SEO. At ANTSAND everything we do is to make the internet a better place for users. This is the mindset we need to have when you create a website and start to do online marketing. 

What does this really mean? You do not want to populate your page with info that will somehow allow you to rank high on search, but when users click on your link, your page is completely different from what they expected. This is deceiving. How often have you gone to a page expecting to get an answer to a question or news article only to realize that page takes you to a link you did not expect. Simply a spam link. Not good.

This is self explanatory. I tell my clients, focus on your customers not your competition. We will be diving a lot more into this concept later on in this blog. Our SEO campaign is all about making the internet a better place for our users. This is what we want to achieve. By doing so, you will comply with search standards. 

An example of playing with rules that manipulate search rankings is the use of backlinks. Many SEO agencies strategically add back links to a website in order to improve it's search rankings. Back link are number of links on other websites that link to your website. In our campaign we won't be creating some dumb back links to help boost rankings. Why? No customer I know has made a purchase because a website did not have x number of back links.  If a user does not care about a backlink, we should not care. This is going to be the basic principle of our SEO campaign. 

This is so critical. We will go in depth into creating a beautiful web-page that showcases value, makes it engaging, stands out and is unique. 

In our 6 month campaign, I need to make sure we are setting the rules right. I want you, my reader to succeed for the long haul. To do that we have to be disciplined marketers, not spamy sleazy sales people. The above rules are not really search rules, these are the rules of a good internet. Google is like a police in this regard. 

We now move to the next section and understand what signal search is looking. In the SEO world, these signals are call ranking factors or parameters.  

How does Google work? And how does it rank a website?  To understand more of search, read the official Google document. It explains how Google or how most search engines work very elegantly. Have a read.

There are numerous parameters that help in ranking a website. Below are just a few. 

From the official Google - How search works section - 

What does the above imply? When you are creating a website, you too need to understand what is the intent of your user. Are they coming to your page with an intent to buy something from you or are they coming to your page with an intent to learn something from you. Some users may come with an intent of just doing market research, they want to know the cost of a product what to look for in a product or service they plan to purchase in a near future. You website must be able to cater to various types of user intent. 

If you can position your website based on the different types of user intents, you are helping search find and rank you. 

Search needs to analyse the content of each webpage and see if it is relevant to what the user is searching for. One of the strongest parameters is to test if the webpage has the exact keyword or keyphrase the user has typed on the search bar. Does a webpage have the same word or phrase as the search query? This is one of the basic indication that your page might be relevant.

If you spam your webpage with multiple keywords, then you will have an issue. Search today will be able to analyze your website and know if your webpage is spamy and filled with random keywords or does it really help the user.  Be mindful.

This is particularly important if users are searching for the latest news.  Freshness is very dependent on the content of the search query. If you want to know the latest tennis score, you probably are looking for the one that recently happened. Freshness matters. If you are looking how to make the best butter chicken, a great recipe with a lot of reviews and raving fans talking about how delicious the food is, is more important than a new recipe. Context is everything.

for your local business, if there are upcoming trends and news in your market, if you talk about it regularly, you content will be important to certain search queries.  If you are just selling products and services, how frequently you update your website may not help immediately but keeping your website updated is always a good thing.

Just because your webpage has the same keyword as the search query does not make the quality great. For that Google or any other search needs to look for other signals. How long are users engaging with your content, how trustworthy is the article, how many other website references your webpage. The goals is to position your brand as an authority and build trust. This will ensure that your content is of high quality.

When a user comes to your page you want to make them feel welcomed. Which is to say, you want them to have a great experience using your website. You want your page to load decently fast for slow internet connections, you want your webpage to render properly on all types of screen resolution's, device types and browsers and you want users to easily navigate your website without too much friction. 

Why is this important? The greater the experience of using your website, it makes the search experience so much more worthwhile. It is in the search engines best interest to rank pages that perform well, are secure and are easy to navigate and use. 

Many of us have a Google account or have an account with a search engine. They kind of information you are searching for, the location from where you are searching for is very particular to you. Those are your settings. When search engines display results, they need to take in account for the users search behaviors. 

For. e.g. if you search for  "SEO agency", search needs to understand the context. It won't make too much sense to show some agency in some other country. May be that is what you are looking for. For the most part it is better of showing you results that are local in your neighborhood.  You preferences and settings do play a role in search results. Keep that in mind.

The older your webpage, for some business it can send a strong signal that this is a high authority website for a particular market. New website might have a hard time to rank high on search, but the older your website is, search has more information about your website and business and will have better idea on what search terms to rank you for. Longevity of your domain and company does affect search rankings. 

There are numerous parameters that can help search to rank a particular website. The above parameters are the most important ones. We do not want to optimize for parameters that have a high probability to change when search algorithms are updated. We want to optimize for parameters that only get better as time passes. Which is to say, we want to optimize your website for trust, authority and engagement. The more we focus on these signals the better chance we have of search ranking our website for now and well into the future. 

Before we start our 6 month campaign, let us get you into the right mindset. 

SEO mindsets are like mental guidelines. They will help you think clearly, help you make better decisions and help you reach your goal effectively. If you want your business to standout you need to do remarkable things. Remarkable is when your customers and prospects are willing to make a remark on your product or service. To achieve this, let us set mental rules. 

Money is important. Do not get me wrong. Unfortunately humans hate to be sold but they love to buy. Which is to say you need to convince them sub consciously that they need to buy your service and product. In order to do this you need to build brand awareness, build authority and influence them over time. Having a long term strategy is all about capturing the broader market or small segment of the market but creating a brand following filled with raving fans. This is what you want. You want customers to come to you and find you. Hunting them down might be fun for some, but inviting them in purely based on their intention is a superior strategy. 

Think of SEO as climbing the peak of mount Everest vs trying to get to base camp 1. The strategies and tactics are so different depending on your goal. My goal in this blog is to get you to the peak of Mt. Everest. Think of Climbing the peak of Mt. Everest as total and utter dominance. Which is to say, when a customer thinks about a service or product in your market the 1st thing that comes to their mind is your brand. If this is what you want, this blog is definitely for you. 

Now that we have the right mindset for SEO, let us move into having the right psychology. In the psychology section, we will talk about how users navigate the internet, what are they really looking for and how you need to position your brand accordingly.

In this section we want understand how a typical user navigates a search result. What are they looking for, how are they searching and what kind of search results would trigger them to select on a link. W 

Why are your customers using search engines to find business like yours?

What are your prospects secretly looking for when they use search?

What questions do they want answered when they search?

How do they judge if a site is trustworthy?

How do they make the decision to buy a product or service? 

Having the right mindset is critical to getting your website have more visibility through search rankings. In the psychology section we touched on why your prospects might user search to find products and services like the one you offer and how you need to position your brand accordingly. Taking all o the above information into consideration we will now devise an effective strategy. 

After all, every one of your competition is competing for the top rank, so you need to convince search that your website should rank higher than your competition because your website offers more value. Let us devise a strategy that make your website more value giving.

Let us get started!

There are two types of pages you need to have regarding your website. One is a sales page or a landing page and the other is educational pages. When you build a website you need to first focus on what you plan to sell. Once we know what we are selling, we then create education material to support what we are selling. This allows us to rank for a broader set of keywords. This is the most effective strategy for long term success. 

1st we create a website for selling your product or service that users are search for, then we support it with impeccable education marketing.

Let me clear some jargon. 

Landing page == sales page == page that you are asking prospects for money in return for a service or a product

Education page  == blogs/podcast/education == page that you are educating users and prospects with the intention to build brand awareness and guide them to your sales pages. 

Let us device a strategy to create a great website. A website is not one page, but a group of pages to support your product or services. The ANTSAND method to SEO is to build an online empire. Which is to say, we need to create a site map that caters to all types of question and intent your prospects might have regarding your products or services. The reason why we do it this way is to answer all objections your prospect or customer might have related to your product or service.   

Home page -  This the main page of your website. The page that people come to when they type your domain name. It should list all the product and services you offer and what value users will get using your service.  Your home page is the entrance.Explain to your prospects what value you offer and turn away those who are not interested in your offer. 

Product/ Service page - This is where your SEO really starts to kick in. You want each one of your pages to rank for the specific product or service you offer. Each product or service page must be a separate page. Make it look unique. Make each page stand out. Give it something that inspires your prospects to choose you. Your product page is a sales page. It needs to sell to your prospects. There is a method to selling properly. It is called Conversion optimization or CRO. We will talk more on that a little later, but for SEO purpose make a separate page for each of your product or services.

Location based pages -  If you are servicing clients at a particular location, you need to have a page either describing the locations you serve, or a separate page for each location you serve with each service you provide. The more specific your page is, it has a higher chance to rank for location based search queries and product based search queries. If you want your SEO campaign to be effective, we need to create a combination of pages.

F.A.Q page - One of the most underestimated sections or pages on your website. Most of our search queries are either questions or statements for which we want and answer for. F.A.Q is the page where you want to clear all doubts. This is where you tell your clients or prospects things like, why choose you, whom does this service or product work for, etc. We will be talking more on how to create an effective F.A.Q page later on. Again, if you want you SEO campaign to be effective, clarify all doubts and make your website stand out. 

Another reason why F.A.Q pages are effective is because Google now shows your F.A.Q on its search display. This makes it attractive for users to click on your link. 

How it works page - This can be a section or you can create a separate page. This is you explaining to prospects what the need to do to become your client or customers. Walk them through the process. The goals is to minimize friction. If a prospect does not know the next steps in your order process, explain it to them. They do not have time to figure things out. Why? Because if you don't who will? You prospects are busy, they have options and your job is to make it easy for them.

For our ANTSAND website maintenance page we created this how it works section. An interactive layout to help our visitors understand the process and turn them into our clients or customers. 

About us page - For many businesses especially local business about us pages are one of the most frequently visited webpage on your website. In here you need to write what motivated you to start your business, what problems did you see that compelled you to solve it, why is your business unique, what is it that you are doing for your customers other are not and what is the motivation behind it. Your about us page is for customers or prospects to know why are you in business, why you want to service them and how will you serve them. Give them your story. 

You job in the about us page is not to talk about you and yourself. but how you can serve your customers. It is a page for your prospects to know more about your motivation. Stop bragging about you and start talking about how you can serve. This is what this page is about. 

Contact us page - Without any explanation this is a page where users can get in touch with you. You want them to fill a form or call you or send you an email or book an appointment, this is that page. 

Testimonial page - Have a separate page for all your reviews and testimonials. This will he build trust. You want to have social proof. This is the page where you can show your prospects others too have used your service and they benefited. If you use our service you too will benefit. 

Our Teams Page - This is the page where you talk about your team. Prospects want to know the face behind your company. Showing them your face, your team helps build trust. Makes your company more human. 

Privacy and terms of use - A privacy and terms of use page is to tell your users how your website works, what security policies are in place what will you do with the information you get if you collect any, are you installing any cookies on your clients we-browser. It is a way to explain to your users you take their privacy and security seriously. Builds trust.

Hiring pages - If your business is growing and you are starting to hire new people, having a page stating whom you are looking for is also a great way to use SEO. This is also a great way to build brand awareness and start growing your company.

The reason why we have the above site structure is for 2 main reasons. Build trust and make it friction less for your users. This in turn will help you in SEO. Which such a site structure you will rank for a broader set of keywords, you will have information that your competition fails to have and over the long run, all this content will be your asset to give. 

This is the 1st step in your SEO campaign. Organizing your website and site structure.   

In the next section we will talk about a simple template you can use to fill content on most of your pages.

Every page is different, but we can make a cookie-cutter template that will help you write content for each page.  We want each page to communicate something to your prospect. Either you are trying to build trust or minimize friction/ uncertainty . Let us dive in. 

There are two methods to populating your website. 

A.I.D.A is an acronym that helps you remember the four phases of ALL marketing.

A -Attention 

I - Interest 

D - Desire 

A - Action

The first step of all salesmanship/marketing is to get people’s attention.

Once you have a prospect’s attention you must get him or her interested in what you have to say, or what you want to offer, or what you wish to show them.

Once a prospect is interested in what you are talking about it is time to get his greed glands going and make him really desire the product or service.

The last phase of all marketing is action. This is where you call upon the prospect to buy now. Some marketers call this phase the “call to action.”  To give them a sense of urgency you can tell them the sale is ending soon and the price will be higher if they wait or that there are only a few left or offer a bonus for those that act now.

Every webpage that you create can have these four elements. You want your page to be filled with information that is engaging to the user. 

Another method that you can use to fill your pages is the ANTSAND Method. This is the method we most frequently use when designing a website.

VP - Value Proposition

PD - Problem Definition

AAS - Amazing Attainable Solution

PC - Proof and Credibility

CTA - Call to Action

Value Proposition is where your prospects understands the value they will get from this page. The value should be communicated in the 1st three seconds to the user. The format which you use to explain the concept can be through pictures, videos, text, audio or a combination of all. You want your prospects to just get what you are offering. 

The value proposition must also chase away those who are not interested in your offering. You are not trying to sell to anyone and everyone. You only want to sell to prospects who are motivated and have an intent to purchase. 

In case of ANTSAND, let me give you 3 examples of value proposition:

E.g. 1: 

E.g 2: 

E.g 3 

The value proposition is the part of the page that the user sees first. They should not scroll down or click a button to find out more. You need to convey this message immediately. Each of the above, are 3 of the many different products and services we offer at ANTSAND. But each page is unique to that offer. The number one mistake most people make is that they use a template and customize each template for that product and service. Nothing wrong. But it won't really help you in SEO. 

Why? 

1. You are being lazy. Hence the effort to make it work is not optimum. Each of your product or service is unique and you may attract different customers/ prospects. It is in your best interest to first create the value your product or service offers and then design the page around that. Not the other way around. Most websites I see they have a template and then they customize it to fit the product or service in it. This is a lazy approach. If you want to rank high, put in the work.

2. You may say, if each page looks different it won't be brand consistent. Branding is nothing got to do with each page looking different. Branding is the feel and emotions your users get when they interact with your business .Do they feel trusted, do they feel you are an authority, do they feel if they do business with you they will get the results they are looking for. This is more important than trying to make your website "look good". On the other hand, if you really care about branding the right way, which is to give your users the right experience of your product and service then the design and experience of that page would be remarkable. 

Problem Definition is where you describe the problems your users are facing. Enlist the problems in a elegant manner. Which is to say, list them clearly. No jargon, no ambiguity. Simple and concise.  

For one of our ANTSAND SEO service, we listed all the pain points our users might have. Simple, clean and elegant. 

Amazing Attainable Solution is where you talk about the solutions you provide. Give your prospects the reason to choose your service and buy from you. Display your solutions elegantly. 

Proof and Credibility There is nothing much to say about this section. Display your clients testimonials, case studies, what they rave about your products or services. 

Call to Action This is where you prompt your clients what they need to do if they want to be your customer. There are various ways to display what action you want your visitors to take. You can ask them to call you, email you, fill a form, book an appointment or purchase directly from your website. Either ways,  without a call to action, you will have a hard time converting visitors to customers. 

Let us now move to the next section of our campaign. Providing education to rank for a broader set of keywords and making the internet a better place.

You might have noticed above, we have not included blogs and other resources that help educate your users. Why? Education is different. Let us not tangle education with selling. In this section we talk about writing blogs and filling your website with education material to help you rank for a broader set of keywords. Education marketing is almost like another part of your business. We need to design a separate strategy and site map. 

Written Blogs - There are many types of blogs you can write on. To learn more on blogging I recommend reading  Blogging made easy - Ultimate guide to writing blogs people want to read and search engines want to rank. This is one of the most comprehensive blogs on the internet that explains how to blog the right way. Have a read.

In a nutshell, written blogs are a way to educate your market and prospects in written form. Written form is always a good way to promote your business. It does help in SEO but it also helps sharing valuable content to your prospects directly, growing an email list or making, sharing your written content on social media etc. In the later section of this blog we will talk about how to plan you blog and how frequently you need to blog.

Video blogs - Video is another medium in which you can share your content effectively.  We try to create videos periodically. You should too. Video search is huge. Be active creating valuable videos related to your brand. 

Events - As much as you need to create content and promote your brand online, using offline methods is also a critical part of SEO. More brand awareness you build with your community, people will start to search for your brand directly on search. This will send a strong signal to search about your brand, and will help you rank higher. In a nutshell be active using offline methods too. 

Podcast - Promote your brand using podcast. Google and other search engines are now listing podcast into search results.   

Google displaying Vancouver SEO Expert Podcast by ANTSAND

Keyword analysis

keyword analysis 1 day 

page structure and template selection - day 

Set up pages and site map/ site hierarchy - 2 days 

Get started creating each page + content uniquely. 3 days per page3 X 15 

Tools you need - ANTSAND

Layout our website structure

Design your web page - template shop

Copy writing and content creation

Value proposition

problem definition

Your solution

proof and credibility

faq

how it works

testimonial

Content calendar

Education Material

Create blogs X 26

create blog title and content calendar

Create Podcast

Create Event 

Create a course curriculum

Create marketing resources

Case study - the ANTSAND Empire      

Completing the above can take anywhere from 6 to 8 months.

At the end of the day, you need to believe in your product, You need to love educating people about your product or services. You need to be passionate about your process, your company and serving your prospects. If you are not, it will show in your content an no one will relate to your brand. 

This blog is all about the mechanics of promoting your brand. In-spite of you doing all of the above, if your prospects do not like what you are selling, this won't work. This does not defy the laws of economics. This only helps in attracting more prospects using the internet and search. 

Please comment below if you have questions, ideas or how you can apply it. At ANTSAND, we apply everything we preach and teach. What we put out is based on our experience, our failures and success. We love to be transparent, as it really brings out the best in us. We will soon be creating a $5/day monthly marketing package for our readers. You can pay us for one cup of coffee every month, and in turn we give you strategies, ideas, tactics, mindsets and exercises, you can apply in your business immediately. If you want to know more about it, just type in the comments below, "Coffee with ANTSAND". We would love to hear your feedback. If you want to read other blogs that might interest you, have a look below.