Speaker 1: I'm going to show you how to develop an SEO strategy that will help you achieve results like this and this. And this will work even if you're new to SEO or you're a seasoned SEO pro. I'm Nathan Gotch, an SEO professional with over a decade of experience, leading hundreds of successful SEO campaigns. And I'm the founder of Gotch SEO Academy and RankAbility. So if you're excited to finally crush your SEO competition, then like this video right now and let's dive right in. So first, what is an SEO strategy? Well, an effective SEO strategy should be unique to your specific SEO situation. You're fighting a war in Google against your competitors and every keyword you attempt to rank number one for is an independent battle that requires a unique strategy. Which brings me to step number one in your SEO strategy, which is only pick the battles you can win. So if you're already ranking for some keywords, then go into SEMrush, enter your domain, go to organic research, click on positions, then click on the positions dropdown and enter two to 15 in the custom range. Then filter by search volume to only show keywords that have more than 100 searches per month. Next, click the KD filter and select very easy. Now click intend and select commercial and transactional keywords. So at this point, you should be left with low competition keywords that you're ranking decently for, have good search demand and have a high probability of conversion. Now look at the keywords and pick one that closely matches your products or services. So in my example, I'll select SEO training Denver because my business sells SEO training. Now click on the keyword to open the keyword overview and scroll down to the SERP analysis and click on the domain tab. SEMrush will then show you the average domain authority score. And this step is critical because the KD metric that SEMrush gives you for the URL tab is only based on how many backlinks you need on the page level. It doesn't consider the overall strength of a domain. But with this analysis, you can see the authority score of your competitor's entire domain. So for a keyword to pass this qualification test, you need to see domains ranking that have low authority scores. In this example, there are four domains that have authority scores lower than my domain, gotchaseo.com. In 99% of cases, this keyword would pass the qualification test, but there's a slight nuance here that's very, very important. There's one variable that can partially negate overall domain strength and that's domain level relevance. For example, notice that boulderseomarketing.com is ranking number one for SEO training Denver. This domain is extremely relevant to the area and it will be challenging for a domain outside of Denver to win. So as of right now, partial match and exact match domains are working very, very well. For example, I'm beating my own domain, gotchaseo.com for St. Louis SEO with a tiny little website. Extreme domain level relevance works when you know how to do it the right way. Once you've selected a keyword, it's time for step number two in your SEO strategy, which is to exploit your competitor's weaknesses. Open up all your top competitors for your keyword and begin by taking note of their strengths and weaknesses. For example, I wanted to rank for the keyword best SEO books. So I analyzed the top results and found a massive opportunity. So at that time, most of the top ranking results were just regurgitated list posts based on doing a quick Amazon search of the best SEO books. So my unique strategy was to actually purchase 26 of the top SEO books, read all of them, and then create a content asset that ranks them based on my real experience. And this page has consistently ranked in the top three for a couple of years now. So here's the key takeaway. Study your competitors so that you can come up with a unique angle that's never been done before for that keyword. And you can use ChatGBT to help you brainstorm angles using this prompt. So once you've found your unique angle, it's time to develop a perfectly relevant content asset. Go into Rankability to secure your seven-day full access free trial. Enter your keyword phrase into the Content Optimizer and then click on Brief. You can either build this SEO content brief manually or use AI to generate it for you. And then go into the Outline section and create your outline. Once again, you can do this manually or you can use AI to give you a solid foundation. Now go to Share and you can share this link with your copywriter and they can write the content inside the Content Optimizer based on the NLP keywords. This is critical because these are the exact topics that the competitors have covered for that keyword. Now don't worry about how many times you mention a specific keyword phrase. Instead, view these keywords as topics that you have to cover in your content to achieve maximum relevance. So just to review the SEO strategy thus far, number one, only pick battles you can win. Number two, find a unique angle for your keyword. And number three, create your content with NLP in mind to achieve maximum relevance. And now step number three is to build a moat, which is a concept popularized by Warren Buffet. In the context of SEO, it's simply your competitive advantage that'll protect your rankings from challengers. And there are three pillars to building an SEO moat for a business. First, build topic authority. Google's algorithms use topic authority when deciding what page and website should rank for a particular keyword phrase. So here's my favorite way to do it. Go to SEMrush, enter a URL that's already ranking well for some keywords. Go to Organic Research, click on Positions, and then click on the Positions dropdown and select 51 through 100. These keywords are what I call clustering opportunities. In short, Google is telling you that these topics are highly relevant to your page, but your page likely isn't relevant enough to rank. For example, my SEO books post ranks 65 for the Art of SEO book. There is no chance this post will rank well for this keyword because it's not relevant enough. So what I would do is build more topic authority and splinter this keyword off to create a dedicated page. Then I would repeat this process for all relevant keywords that are ranking in this range. The key is to make sure that the keyword has different intent. But this is my go-to strategy for building topic authority because it works so incredibly well. For example, this Surfer SEO review was ranking beyond number 50 for Surfer SEO Group Buy, so I splintered off and created a dedicated asset, and now it's ranking in the top five. So there is no set number of assets you need to build to achieve topic authority, but I'd aim to match or exceed your competitors. Every micro asset you build supports your original mother asset through topic support and internal linking. The second pillar for building an SEO moat is building an actual brand, and you can measure how well you're doing based on branded searches. So go into SEMrush and search your brand. Ideally, you wanna see search volume associated with your brand or any associated entities. And you can build brand awareness using SEO, but you need to adopt an omnipresent strategy and go where your audience lives. For example, if you look at the websites that survived all of the recent Google algorithm updates, you'll see that they have one thing in common, they're actual businesses. So I recommend deploying a traditional digital marketing strategy that hits on all the different categories, including owned media, which is content you create on your branded assets like YouTube, social media, podcasts, and newsletters. Earned media, which can be achieved using PR tactics like what Search Intelligence does, and they create assets with proven angles that reporters love. Then they promote these assets to their database of PR contacts to score powerful backlinks. And if you have a figurehead in your company, they can also score backlinks via expert commentary. So I highly recommend Search Intelligence if you're trying to scale your PR and get super powerful, high-authority backlinks. And the final piece of digital marketing is paid media. And this includes online advertising on platforms like Facebook, Google, and TikTok, or even affiliate or influencer marketing. I've also worked with many brands that do offline advertising on the radio or billboards, which can also drive branded searches via Google. The point is, the bigger your brand, the bigger your moat, because all of these offsite activities directly and indirectly support your SEO campaign. And the final pillar of building an SEO moat is your backlink profile. So when you combine brand plus overall domain strength, it will dramatically decrease SERP volatility and penalty risk. The question is, how do you build side authority? Well, there are many different link building techniques, but I'm someone who loves to build linkable assets that have the potential for passive link acquisition. The truth is, you can buy backlinks until you're blue in the face, but you're always going to suffer from one big issue, which is scalability. If your entire strategy is to buy backlinks, then you'll always be constrained by budget unless you have an unlimited bankroll. But for the rest of us, the only scalable backlink acquisition strategy is to create assets that people want to link to. And I have an entire section dedicated to link bait in Gotcha SEO Academy, but here are three techniques you can use. Number one, acquire free tools. So search best free your niche tools in Google, add the URLs to a Google Sheet, and then run them through SEMrush's bulk analysis tool. Then prioritize tools that have high quality and relevant backlink profiles. Then just collect contact information using hunter.io and send the following outreach email to get some feelers. Then just negotiate to acquire the assets. The next step is to host the free tool on your domain, make sure it's functioning properly, and then 301 redirect the tool to your new page. So if you want to see a live example, check out WebFX's backlink profile. Number two, create free tools and software. Now this used to be very difficult before, but you can now use ChatGPT to create awesome free tools that function perfectly as link bait. Here's how. Okay, so this free tool was created 100% using ChatGPT. I don't personally have a lot of coding experience, I just know very basic HTML and CSS. So I cannot build tools like this just out of the gate, I need a lot of support. So I use ChatGPT to build this completely. So you go into ChatGPT and you can just enter a very simple prompt, copy this, and just do like, create the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for whatever the tool you're trying to build, okay? So we'll put that in there, and then it will start to build this out for you. Now, it's not gonna be usually perfect out of the gate, you're gonna have to go kind of back and forth with ChatGPT, so basically, you'll take this code, you'll put it into, if you're using WordPress, you can use a plugin like WP Coder, and you go ahead and put the HTML in, the CSS, and the JavaScript, and you put it into each of these areas, and then it will generate a short code for you, okay? And then, you just go into your posts, you put the short code element, and then you just put that in there, okay? And then I wrote some copy in here as well, but the point is, that's how simple it is to get this up and running. And so, it took probably about an hour for me to go back and forth with ChatGPT, but basically, I had to go through, make sure it looked a certain way that I wanted, and I went back and forth and made sure it was working, and then eventually, it got to the point where it was absolutely working perfectly, and now this works really well. We can go ahead and enter 2,000 words, and actually, the only reason I created this, because I wanted it for myself, okay? So, I needed to see how long it would take me to read some of these scripts, okay? And you can paste it in here as well, so you can see how long this will take. So, very simple stuff, not super complicated, but when you're trying to build free tools, you want it to be single use case type of tools, tend to attract the most backlinks, okay? And you can see this post here, although my goal was just basically to get links, you can see it's actually generated a solid amount of traffic coming to my site, and you can see it actually has generated some solid backlinks from some strong domains. So, this absolutely is one of my favorite ways to build link base, just build free tools, build free resources, and put a lot of lines out there, and that will increase your chances of getting backlinks passively and naturally. Number three, create data-driven content. So, we created a case study with unique data analyzing the top CMSs for SEO, and it now has countless backlinks from authority websites. Once again, we didn't do aggressive link acquisition, I just created a unique asset that no one else had ever created. So, if you aren't sure what to create, then use this chat GPT prompt to get the idea machine rolling. So, at this point, you should have a fully functioning piece of link bait you can promote and start getting backlinks. So, that's how you develop an SEO strategy that will actually work. Like this video if this was helpful, and please subscribe, because I have a lot more awesome videos coming soon. Thank you so much for watching.