SEO Benchmarking is the act of discovering your competitor’s positioning strategies and applying them to your site.
In this episode, Brenda Malone gives a lesson on how beginners can benchmark their SEO strategy and free tools to help.
She is currently a Sr. SEO Tech Specialist at Niel Patel Digital.
She discusses;
Name: Brenda Malone
What She Does: Brenda is Sr. SEO Tech Specialist at Niel Patel Digital
Company: Niel Patel Digital
Noteworthy: Brenda is an SEO Technical Strategist with a five-year career experience in a large, fast-paced Agency as an analyst and practitioner.
💡Understanding SEO Benchmarking.
Brenda provides a detailed explanation of SEO benchmarking. She describes it as a snapshot or study of a website, its competing websites, and other pages ranking for relevant keywords. The purpose of SEO benchmarking is to assess how a website can improve its ranking and learn from successful competitors’ strategies.
Instead of reinventing the wheel, Brenda emphasizes the importance of adopting competitors’ best practices to elevate a website’s search engine rankings. She likens SEO benchmarking to a roadmap guiding a website to reach the top page on Google.
💡Importance of SEO Benchmarking
Brenda elaborates on the significance of SEO benchmarking. It allows website owners to understand what competitors are doing right, what people are searching for, and how to tailor content to meet user demands.
By measuring marketing activities through benchmarking, website owners can identify the effectiveness of their efforts and track their progress over time. Regular benchmarking keeps website owners focused on SEO and encourages them to actively improve their site’s performance instead of expecting passive results.
💡How to Benchmark SEO.
Brenda provides an overview of the process of benchmarking SEO. She simplifies the process into five basic steps:
💡Metrics for SEO Benchmarking
Brenda details the specific metrics that website owners should focus on when conducting SEO benchmarking. These include:
Monitoring Organic Traffic Using Google Analytics and Google Search Console
Brenda explains how to monitor organic traffic using Google Analytics and Google Search Console. In Google Analytics, she advises website owners to look at the page view screen to track traffic trends over time. Comparing data month over month or year over year can help identify improvements or areas for optimization.
In Google Search Console, Brenda emphasizes that this tool is crucial for understanding search performance and the actual search queries that lead users to the website. She encourages website owners to export and analyze this data to align their keywords and content with user search intent effectively.
Utilizing Page Speed Compare to Improve Website Performance
Brenda introduces Page Speed Compare as a valuable tool to assess a website’s speed metrics and compare them to competitors. By analyzing the data, website owners can identify areas for improvement, such as reducing page load times, optimizing images, or selecting a faster server. She emphasizes the importance of regularly monitoring page speed to ensure a smooth user experience and better search engine rankings.
Visual Competitor Analysis for Website Enhancement
Brenda advises website owners to visually analyze their competitors’ websites to gain insights into design, layout, and user experience. By examining elements like images, paragraph lengths, calls to action, and color schemes, website owners can make informed decisions to enhance their own websites.
She encourages website owners to emulate successful competitors while adding their unique touch to stand out in the market.
Taking Incremental Steps in Website Optimization.
Brenda suggests taking a methodical and steady approach to website optimization rather than overwhelming oneself with numerous tasks. She recommends focusing on one aspect at a time, such as optimizing page titles and meta descriptions or improving site speed.
Brenda stresses the importance of measuring the impact of each change and using data from tools like Google Search Console to track progress over time.
Identifying Organic Competitors Using Google Search Operators
Brenda shares valuable tips on identifying organic competitors using Google’s search operators, specifically “all in title” and “all in URL.” By entering relevant keywords or keyword phrases with these operators, website owners can discover the websites that rank for specific terms. This approach helps businesses in different industries find their competitors without relying on additional tools.
Importance of Patience in SEO Results.
Brenda highlights the necessity of being patient in SEO efforts, emphasizing that significant improvements in search rankings and organic traffic take time. She advises website owners not to expect overnight success and to keep a long-term perspective.
Monitoring metrics consistently and making incremental improvements will ultimately lead to sustainable growth and success in the competitive online landscape.
Connect with Brenda;
Brenda Malone 0:02
Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining today and listening to me talk about SEO benchmarking for beginners. You know, this is going to be a little bit, not quick, but abbreviated, there’s a tonne of steps. And I could talk for a week about SEO benchmarking, but I wanted to make it something that you can understand and take back and do at your own websites and your client websites. I am Brenda, I am the Senior Technical strategist at NP digital.
It’s Neil Patel. And I’ve been there for about five months. I’ve been in SEO for about six years. And I’ve always loved the technical part. So that’s where I focus. And I am always on Twitter, at underscore Brenda Malone or at LinkedIn. And feel free to tweet or send me a message on LinkedIn. And I’ll give you a copy of this. So you don’t have to scribble down my contact information. Okay, let’s get started. covering today, we’re going to talk about what is SEO benchmarking, why it is important to benchmark your SEO, how to benchmark it, the metrics that you need to understand and the most important part, what do you need? What tools do you need to actually do to date and benchmark either your site or future client websites to get to the top to be found in Google searches? Okay, let’s begin with what is SEO benchmarking.
It’s basically a snapshot in time or study of your website, you’re competing websites, or other pages that are ranking for the keywords that you want to rank for. It’s basically judging the landscape to see how your site can be elevated to be closer to the top on the Google search results. And we’re going to learn from the competitors, because obviously, they’ve done something right if they’re appearing on the first page of Google. So instead of reinventing everything, let’s just see what they do, take their best practices, and apply it to your own website. It also gives you a compass of where to go, people just say, do a website and get it to the top.
Well, this is kind of like the roadmap of how to get you to the top to page one on google. And again, it’s very important, because you want to see what the competitors are doing. You want to see what people are searching for. Because you want to tailor your content, your website, what you have, to what people are actually searching for, so that you will be found. It measures your marketing activities. You know, you can be doing a lot of things on your website, and you don’t know which one is working. But since you have actual numbers and have benchmarked it, it’s an easy way for you to look back in time and say, oh, yeah, I was on page 30.
But I’ve done such such such and now I’m on page 10. So that’s why you need to benchmark it to see where you are a snapshot in time. That also keeps you focused on SEO. Instead of just putting a website out and expecting it to do the work for you. You have to put some work into your website so that you can be one of those people that the competitors want to follow. How to benchmark is your SEO, basically, really abbreviated, there’s probably 3000 steps, but today we’re only going to talk about five basic steps of benchmarking. The first thing is in this similar to any other thing that you want to measure, you measure it before you get started.
It’s like baking a cake. You get all your ingredients together, you measure everything. Then you mix everything put it in oven, bake a cake, see if it tastes good. If it doesn’t adjust the rest is a peon do it again. And that’s the same analogy that we’re going to deal with websites. You determine which metrics you need to copy or emulate from your competitors. To make your website, go to the top, you do compare your technical differences, you’re on site, you’re on page differences. And you’re linking your off page, your social media, basically, you want to just be a fly on the wall on their websites, see what they’re doing, and come back and apply what is applicable to your website.
And it’s not a one and done thing. You need to regularly monitor it for profit for the life of your website. And it’s not a big task. But once a month, going forward, just go look at the metrics and make sure that you’re still climbing upwards. How do you determine what you want to benchmark? Well, based on your business priorities, and it’s gonna be different for different sectors, like for a dog walker, versus someone who wants to be a content writer for other people, versus someone who wants to have a small store. So it’s kind of hard to put everybody in the same bucket. But based on what you want to achieve, whether you want to sell more, sell more widgets, or get more people clicking on a specific button, or have more people calling you to order your services. That’s what you need to use to determine what’s important to you what you want your website to look like.
You need to look at that total organic traffic from all of the other websites. And from your website. At one specific point in time, you need to look at basically the top 10 competitors, and go dissect their sites and see what keywords they’re using. And those are probably the ones that you want to start using and tailoring your website to use. It may be signups maybe you want people to sign up for your newsletter, or maybe you just want people to send you a contact form so they can call you. So it all goes back to what will help your specific business or the purpose of your website. You also need to pay attention to the backlinks. Because Google is basically a popularity contest.
It shows popular content first. helpful content first. So you want to be helpful and popular and authoritative via your content. You want people to know that you know what you’re talking about. And those are the three things that move you up in the search results. You want to be all that to anybody who’s searching for anything in your subject. You also want to look at your bounce rate, your dwell time, and your goal completions. But in the beginning, I’ll be honest, that is really not that important.
While you’re trying to get to the top. Don’t worry about the fine minutia of bounce rate, dwell time and completions. You can schedule that later in your campaign. But the most important part is to sit down and think about why you have your website. What you want people to do when they get there. Do you want to play a game? That might be your goal, but only you can determine that and adjust your metrics to what you want to need to measure.
Now how do you measure the metrics? After you’ve determined which ones you need to look at? You can use any number of free tools. the SEO world is full of latest and greatest tools, applications. Some of them are so crazy expensive, that you get into paralysis state thinking that you need to get these expensive tools. And actually you don’t everything that I’m going to discuss here today. Absolutely free. You don’t pay a dime. So this is kind of that turns you into a detective and being creative with how you need to analyse your site. And don’t get tripped up over SEMrush H refs on crawl. Those are nice to have for big corporations.
But for little people like you and me, I don’t even have those tools. So you can still be successful and use what’s available on the web. And what we’re going to talk about today are using Google Analytics, Google Search Console. Neil Patel, Uber suggests tool cart page speed compare. Add another site that offers free tools for rank checking is doppelganger, we’re going to use Screaming Frog. And they do have a free version. And that should be totally fine because the page limit is 500. And it takes a while for you to get 500 pages in your website. So you should be fine using the free version. And there’s another application called Word stream. And that lets you analyse your keywords. And basically, we need Excel Google Sheets or any other spreadsheet application for you to document what you find.
Or if Microsoft Word or Word document helps just do that. Or even if it’s a notebook, pen or paper, whatever you need to do to document what you find, use that. So I’ve saved you 1000s of dollars a month with these free tools. So don’t fret about not having SEMrush. And all of those other nice to have things. What you’re going to do is compare the technical differences and the content differences between you and your competitors, you’re going to look at that URL structure of your site, versus what the competitors are having. And by that, I mean the URLs. For example, one site may be by foods.com/dairy/milk. You don’t want it to be by food.com, dairy, flavour, flavour, texture, milk, that’s too long. So you go on look at what your competitors are doing, how short their URLs are, and try to make yours short. But still try to use the keywords and keep the descriptive.
We’re gonna look at comparing the core web vitals or site performance. Google introduced that ranking signals sometime early last year. And it’s been a struggle for a lot of websites, because they want to add a lot of sliders and JavaScript and fancy animations. And sadly, in Google fonts. And sadly, that slows down the loading of your website. So you need to keep an eye on those things, and learn how to keep mice clean website. We’re going to look at how to determine the content structure, comparing keywords that are used in your landing pages. I’m sure Elena and everybody else has been talking to you about keywords.
That’s the guiding light here, determining your keywords, and trying to rank for those that that is really a key indicator of success on your website. We’re going to look at how to compare your page Titles and Meta descriptions with those of your competitors. We’re going to show you how they have not how, but show what backlinks they have. So that you too can target those companies and try to get those same backlinks or backlinks from a similar company. And we’re also going to look at how to look at your technical things like are you using an HTTP s certificate? Do you have a bunch of four Oh fours, which you know, is frustrating the user?
Are your links broken and testing your outbound links. So basically, you just want to make your website nice and smooth, like a smooth riding car that’s chasing your competitors up the hill. After you determine and look for your metrics, and you get your metrics, you look and compare what’s on your site versus what your competitors are doing. And you try to move your website in that same direction. You look at what page titles, they’re using the page meta, and you go and tweak the ones that are on your site to kind of better address what people are searching for. And if your website is slow, try to work with someone to help it get faster, or maybe consider not using like animations or a lot of slideshows.
And if your competitor has a lot of links from some domains that you think you could get, that lets you know what campaign you should use to help you get those links. Basically, it’s just picking what metrics you have, versus what the competitors have. You tried to become even with them, move up the ladder to be like them. Let’s talk about those metrics. The first metric is organic traffic. organic traffic is different from pay per click or ad generated traffic. This is genuine pure traffic, someone types in a search term, and your web, Google shows your website, and then they click on it. That’s the purest definition of organic traffic. And you want to keep track of that.
It’s very easy. First off, you need to once you have your website, I’m sure you’ve been talking about this for the past six months. But it’s very important to connect up Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and maybe even Google Tag Manager, the very minute your site is established, or if you have not done so by now. Never too late, go and connect up Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Tag Manager, at least that will allow you to do a deep dive inside of your site. And I won’t go into how to put those on your websites. So that’s another topic. Or you can do some Google searches, or you probably have been talking about it already. But those are absolutely free.
And they are the truth from Google. So your source of truth will always be what Google says they are seeing on your website, not what another tool says they see. But go to the source. So once you’re in Google Analytics, and you’ve set it up, you just want to go and look at the page view screen, just to monitor your traffic and see what’s happening. And you can adjust the time period in the Google Analytics. So you can compare month over month, year over year, or just what happened in the month of August. In case you’re curious, maybe you launched a new piece of content, and you want to see if people are clicking on that. So go to Google Analytics, go to the path, the site data on the left hand side and just go look at your traffic. You don’t have to really download anything, because Google Analytics will save your information.
So it’s not necessary to export or anything of that nature at this point. Just want to make sure that that graph, it fluctuates, but mainly make sure it takes an upward trajectory. And if not, that lets you know you need to go back to your website and adjust something, maybe adjust some keywords, maybe adjust some meta descriptions or your page title, maybe change some content, maybe the content is not what a lot of searchers are looking for. So again, you would go back to your competitors and see what they’re doing, see if they’ve changed up anything and apply it to your site. Another way to measure your organic traffic is in Google Search Console.
And this is probably the most important Google app you can have. This shows you absolutely what’s happening on your website. And it shows the actual search results that Google is measuring when people it shows how Often Google shows your site in the search results, and also shows when people click after reading your title and meta and thinking, Yeah, this could be the site that I’m looking forward to help me solve my problem. So in Google Search Console, you’ll go over to the search results. And you can change the date range from last three months, last month, last day, last year, but it is your source of absolute truth.
If you do nothing else, just make sure that you have Google’s search console installed on your site. And it’s very easy to instal these products. If you have an SEO plugin, usually they have a section where you put your Google Search Console code in. And that’s all you need to do. The next metric is looking at the organic traffic from your competitor. Now, unfortunately, you cannot put a competitor’s website in your Google Analytics or your Google Search Console, I wish you could, because it’d be a lot easier. So you have to use tools that spy help you spy on competitors. And the best tool to look at your organic traffic of your competitors.
Well, one of the tools is over suggest, and it’s a free Yeah, that free model and a paid model. But everything that you need to do, you should be able to do with the free model. So what would you do is go to over suggest you enter in your competitors, website competitor.com, or that cold that UK search, and it will show you that traffic that that competitors website has been getting, it also shows you a whole bunch of stuff. So first thing you want to do later today is if you have never used Uber Suggest, just go type it in and put it on some different websites and see what their metrics are. But this is how you spy on your traffic from your competitors.
And you would do this for each of your competitors, probably up to five or six competitors, you want to do a deep dive as best you can under the cover of what they’re doing. The next metric, next metric that you check are backlinks and domain authority, not domain authority is kind of a made up term. Google doesn’t give websites numbers or rankings like that. But it’s a general metric that we can use to generally say this is a good site, or not a good site, you don’t want to emulate a site that Google thinks is full of spam. So kind of pay attention to the domain authority, and just use it as a guiding light not as an actual absolute fact.
And again, the free tool that will will you we will use is Uber Suggest put in the domain of the competitors, and even put in your website to see what Uber suggests things about your own website. And it will show you the backlinks over any period of time that you that you choose. Now this is probably not 100% accurate. But it gives you a starting place. And something to help you climb up the mountain when it’s it’s very valuable for at least that even if it’s not 100% valid. It’s pretty dang close. So you would do this for your site. And for about five to six of your competitors. And you would export. They have export buttons on all of these tools, what you would do is export the data into an Excel spreadsheet, specifically because you don’t know if it will be there when you get back when you’re dealing with tools that are free and they don’t allow you to save things.
You always want to take screenshots or download and export the data and just keep the screenshots within your spreadsheet or put them somewhere on your computer somewhere that you can refer back to. But that’s a very important thing to do when you’re using free tools. take screenshots document because it probably won’t Be there when you get back or something has changed. So it’s not under your control, document, snatch it down right away and store it. You also need to look at keyword positioning keywords. They’re the blood of the internet, keywords, key phrases, whatever you offer. And I’m pretty sure you guys have had classes in determining your keywords.
And if not, I’d be happy to come back later and help you determine how to determine your keywords. But keywords, knowing your keywords is vital. Because you need to figure out what people are searching for. And you need to do the backlinks that try to bring those keywords back to you. You want to search for links that are appropriate for your keywords. Like if I have a dog walking service, I don’t need backlinks to an agricultural site is probably not going to help me. So use your keywords to determine who you want to link to. And
Brenda Malone 26:19
keyword tools can be extremely expensive. But word stream allows you to look up your competitors for free. You put in the URL, the domain of your competitor and hit New Search. And a list will come up of the keywords, the monthly volume. This information also gives you bid monies. But that’s if you were doing a pay per click campaign. And you needed to know the price the approximate bid price. But what you will mostly want to look at from this page would be the competition level, whether it’s a difficult keyword, or low volume keywords, and how many monthly searches. So you want to look at what your competitors are ranking for.
Are they ranking for high volume, keywords, they get a lot of searches. And you know where you need to go if they are or start on that journey. So one day, you will be somebody that they want to put in the keyword tool and see where you’re going. But that’s an absolutely free tool. And it works pretty good. And you’ve saved 1000s of dollars over buying a keyword tool. The next metric that you need to check are the queries that people use to find your website. Unfortunately, you cannot do this for the competitors. But in order to get a snapshot of where your site is right now, or going into the future, go to Google Search Console. And it’s the only best tool for this.
It gives a metric called search results. And then the search results windows, it shows queries. Pages, the page your popular pages that people clicked on the countries where the people live well, where their computers are, when they clicked on your site, the devices they were using when they click that link, what page of google your search result was fine found on and the date, what you really need to capture is your query. Google is great. It shows you every query that the person the visit or the search are tight. And they happen to show your site as an answer to that person. So this is very important for you to go and look at your queries.
And if you just set up Google Search Console, it takes about a month or so for you to get data. So look at your data. And then you can export this and look at it and compare it against what you thought your keywords were. Maybe you you need to adjust what your keywords are. So I will pull down the queries. Because that’s a real world information, what people are actually typing to find you. It doesn’t matter what you think they will type. Google Search Console shows you exactly what they’re typing. So export that and compare it against your keywords to make sure that you’re on the right track with your keywords. Maybe you’ll have to adjust your content At a little, adjust your page titles, adjust your meta descriptions to more match what people are currently searching for.
The next metric is page Titles and Meta descriptions. If we’re this, we’re going to recommend Screaming Frog. For those who have not used it, it’s very easy, it’s really not that hard. But it gives you so much information. In fact, I’ll be talking about it for the next few slides. You can download it from the web, absolutely free for up to 500 pages and starting out, I don’t think you’ll have an issue with the page limit. What you do is you start it up, you put in the domain, right in the bar, and you let it go. You can do this for any web site, ever. This is a great spying tool to spy on your competitors, and to see how your website is doing. So you’re going to do this for your site, and those other five to six competitors that you’ve identified.
And the first thing that you’re going to pull down, you’re going to look at the titles, and the meta descriptions that your competitors are using, that have made them very successful. And then you’re going to look at yours, and see if you need to tweak yours to better match what people are searching for. Or to match what made those people successful that they’re on page one of Google. And everything and Screaming Frog can be downloaded and exported to Excel where you actually look at it, and work with it. So that first metric, you’re going to pull down, you’re going to list the page Titles and Meta descriptions. Screaming Frog is is great.
And it’s not just for technical people. I know lots of people at my office. They’re not anywhere near technical, and they can run Screaming Frog and pull down information. But if you need a class on that, I’m very willing to come back and go into detail on exactly how to use Screaming Frog. But there’s also Google searches and YouTubes to help you. Also, you’re going to use Screaming Frog for yourself and five to six of your competitors. You look at their crawl errors.
Do they have a lot of four Oh fours, do they have broken links to other pages and Screaming Frog. It’s got like maybe 50 different tabs. And each tab gives you different information. So you won’t be able to find that information. And at your competitors, you just want to see the technical layout of their site. See if they have a lot of 404 pages or pages that are canonicals. That shouldn’t be canonical. It’s a great tool. But for you for your website, you need that information so that when you find you have a lot of four Oh fours or broken page links, you need to get on it and fix those. So I recommend doing a Screaming Frog poll for your own site at least once every month, just so you can see the portal fours and a broken links. So you can fix that. And I recommend Screaming Frog versus a lot of people want to put it on their website tools that do that.
But they slow your website down. So I prefer that you use a method that does that get installed on your website and possibly slow it down. Also screaming, I told you will build Screaming Frog Screaming Frog is just the magic bullet here. You need to get it I’ll show you the the URL structure. And this example you see, like item number 12345 You’ll see the actual URLs of the website. And you just want to look at that and make sure that you do something similar. Like when they say Screaming Frog that code at UK slash services. Your site may be dogwalker that code that UK slash services you need. So you can see that your URL is too long and you need to abbreviate that.
So it’s a great spying tool. To pull all of these down into XML alphabetize them, and then just look at the file structure of what the successful people have done so that you can do that. So you can be successful. The next big thing is performance. As I said earlier, last year, Google made Page Speed page performance, extremely important. And people have been losing their minds trying to get their sites fast. But in order to get them fast, you need to know if they’re slow. So there’s a great tool called Page Speed compare. You don’t have to do your URL, usually, you could go to Page Speed Insights by Google. But that only lets you put in one page at a time, this tool 100% Free,
Brenda Malone 36:00
will let you after you’ve pulled down all of the URLs, from your competitors, or from your site, you take that list the addresses, you copy them, and then you paste them in the box and Page Speed compare. And it spits out all of the speed metrics for any, for any of the for all these URLs. And you need to look at that it makes sure that Google sees that your site is fast or slow, or where you can improve it, and how its ranking over time.
So this is another excellent tool, you can even put in, you can mix your site with other sites, too. So let’s say you wanted to compare the page speeds of yourself. And five competitors, you would take the URL for the homepage for all of those six sites and copy them and put them in this tool, hit Run audit, and it will show you how you compare to your against yourself and all of your competitors. And unless you know that you have work to do, whether it’s using less fonts, or not so many animations, or maybe get a faster server. Usually, the server counts a lot when you’re determining page speed, so maybe you just need to move to a faster server.
Or if it’s something that you can’t move, just do whatever you can to try to get your site fast and perform it. And this tool is outstanding for that. And the most important thing is once you have determined your five or six competitors, you’re not done yet. You need to one by one, go to each one of your competitors sites. And look at five to 10 pages visually, take a look at their site, see what they’re doing. See how many images they have.
See how long their paragraphs are, see exactly what elements they put on the homepage, see what their call to actions are. See what they put in their footer, see what their contact page says what their bow page says, see how their buttons are placed the colour of the buttons, the colours that they use throughout their fonts. And you’re going to do that for all of your competitors. Just so you can visually see how your site compares to the top of the top and try to come somewhere close.
Adjust your fonts, adjust your colours, adjust your content, adjust what you show on different pages. Try to emulate what they are doing. And that this is a fun part is actually very fun to do that. So get your competitors and then one by one. Go through their website. And you’re going to increase their metrics too. So that’s fun to do. Once you’ve done all that, you need to regularly do this. you’ve established your baseline. But then you need to actually work on using what information you have.
But there’s so much data and people will tell you there’s so many different things you need to do. Clear the noise. Focus on only what you think you need to know if you only need to work on getting your page titles in your meta descriptions together, work on that first, don’t worry about the 9000 other things that we’ve done, or that you need to do, take little baby steps towards to getting there. This is just not a race. Don’t get overwhelmed by all the data out there.
Because people want you to get tools and data and make it so urgent that you do X, Y, Z, ABC, right away, go slow. Just do one thing a week that you think will help. But look at the measurements of monthly, I would say, look at your Google Search Console traffic, to make sure that that’s steadily increasing, to make sure that your pages are still being indexed. And if they are not being indexed, Google will tell you why they’re not being indexed within search console. That’s why Search Console is just so critical. And you actually don’t want to improve too many things at once. Because you don’t, you won’t know what made you ultimately successful.
Because you want to duplicate this on be at your site. Or in the future. If you do another site, you want to know what moves the needle, what made you go up higher. And if you just dump everything you know, at once on your website, and it goes from 100. To one, you won’t know what specifically help. So go slow, do one thing, try for a week and look at your metrics, and see if it moves you up. See if the search queries as shown in Search Console are improving.
And just chill and take it slow, you don’t have to do everything at once. People hype it up so much. And it’s just not that critical. Because it takes a while for a new website. After about six months of you know, when you put your work into it, it may start to go up slightly. But in actuality, it probably will take a year year and a half for you to go to let’s say from page four to page one, it’s gonna be a lot of work and a lot of time. So it’s not an overnight thing. So go slow, be methodical and take your time.
And I’ve done a lot of talking about your competitors. I’m not sure if you guys know, have identified your competitors. But here’s one way that I use, especially if I’m in an industry that I don’t know about. I use Google, Google can help me identify competitors for a specific niche or a specific topic. Using search operators. There are so many search operators that you can use in Google. And I’ve got another whole presentation for that. So if you want me to talk about that later, I can come back and talk about that. But the two that I use the most to help you find your organic competitors. From the eyes of Google are these two search operators in the search bar, you would type all in title, colon, and then choose your keywords or your keyword phrases.
Put those in there. And then hit enter. And Google will show you the sites that rank for that term. And only that term. And what you want to do is go through, go down that list and pull out the competitors, their URLs, not the pay not the ads, but the genuine pure URLs of competitors, and put those in your spreadsheet. That’s how you determine your competitors, the easy way without any tools. Also all in title, what that means I should explain that. You’re telling Google to only show results.
If in the title of the page are all of the words doc centre near me. So Google’s gonna go out and do a search. And only that’s why those page titles are very important, by the way, any any page that has that as their page title will be shown. And that is your competitor. And the second operator all in URL, colon means in the actual page you wor L, if those four words are found, Google will only show the sites that are having those words in their URLs. So that’s a quick and dirty way to find your competitors, if you have never identified them before, and you’re just curious as to who is ranking for what you are rank you want to rank for. So those are the two most important all in title, colon, or all in URL, colon, and then put in any key phrase that you want.
Brenda Malone 45:39
And I am giving you the list of the free tools that I’ve used within analytics, Search Console, over suggest Page Speed compare. And there’s a doppelganger that. It’s in the UK, it’s a UK company, and it gives you some tools that you can use for free, which is why I put it there. Screaming Frog is free. And WordStream helps you analyse your competitor keywords, and you’ll need Google Sheets or any other spreadsheet or Microsoft Word or notebook and paper, anything that you need to keep all this information documented
. And given the limited time. That’s all that I can talk to you about this, I could go on for eight hours talking about benchmarking and how to do your metrics. So I’ll be happy to take questions. Oh, and I will in the chat, I’m going to throw a PDF of this presentation so you can get the URLs. But I’m gonna stop sharing now. So I can take questions or
Chima Mmeje 46:57
yeah, you can stop sharing Brenda.
Brenda Malone 47:01
Okay, and I’m gonna put in the chat that a PDF?
Chima Mmeje 47:06
Yeah, you can you can put it you can put it into the PDF in your chats, and send it to me on Twitter after so whenever we take this live, who are the people
Brenda Malone 47:16
probably putting on Twitter would be better? Yes. Tweet it to you.
Chima Mmeje 47:20
Yeah, tweet it to me don’t put it publicly because this is just selling Sorry. Yeah. And whenever I take this live, we will add the PDF to someone can just get both information at the same time. I was, I was busy taking notes. I was busy. And then pressing them.
Brenda Malone 47:47
There’s so it’s such a big topic that I’m sorry, I just couldn’t go. I want to go into so much detail. But I’d have you guys here all night. Yes, seriously,
Chima Mmeje 47:56
thank you so much. Well, first of all, for using free resources, because a lot of the members can afford to pay for page resources. So thank you for being cautious of that. And for using free resources. If anyone has any questions, you can just raise your hand and I can bring you up to ask Brenda, your question. But if nobody has questions, then I’m going to stop the recording soon. And I think your presentation was good enough that people don’t have questions. He was so good. So, so good.
Brenda Malone 48:29
It’s hard once I start talking, because I do actually have a lot of other things that I could already prepared. And I can actually send you those. I’ve had presentations on Google search operators, keywords, and I can send you all of those presentations.
Chima Mmeje 48:48
All of them. So the link will take it live. So they just have like all this list of resources alongside this video to kind of like really help them. So I think someone has has their hands up. Let me just okay, I thought someone had their hand up. I think no one has,
Brenda Malone 49:09
I think I hypnotise them all. Right, I given too much information. I’m sorry.
Chima Mmeje 49:17
There is no such thing as too much information it was beginner friendly. I really enjoyed it. Well, I think I just have one question like, and I think it comes down to matrix because it’s something we talked about, actually, for those who are just starting out the thing you want to be doing is showing results. Actually, if you want to walk in house, or even if you want to fill us in needs to be showing results because that’s your language to get better gates and then to move up. So I saw the list of metrics you get to track well, if you had to prioritise your top three metrics to track when, when he is where you’re where you’re benchmarking, SEO, while those be top three metrics
Brenda Malone 49:59
Oh, boy, probably, you were anything that will get you at the top of the search results, your keyword ranking your page titles and metas. Even if Google shows you on page one, if your page title and your page meta description are not interesting, people won’t click. So I could take it to the mountain, but you won’t climb it if you don’t think it’s interesting. So definitely look at your page meta in your descriptions. And look at the key words that other sites are using so that your titles, your metas, and your keywords, matching your content to your keywords isn’t just critical, is critical. So make sure that that’s happening. And the other metric is your traffic in Google’s search console. Always look at that.
Chima Mmeje 51:03
That’s that’s the thing with traffic. Yeah, I It’s, it’s, it’s it’s addicting in your way, because those numbers and you’re like, more, more, more
Brenda Malone 51:16
It’s amazing. It’s actually a lot of fun to see that other people are interacting with your site. You’re like, oh, really, five people wanted to see what I was talking about. You know, it makes you happy to know that you’ve fulfilled somebody else’s need.
Chima Mmeje 51:32
Last year, I did about 1500 people on my website, and I’m going to do my content. One or two blog posts a year.
Brenda Malone 51:42
Yeah. 1500 People want to know. It is amazing. Isn’t it is amazing. So if you structure if you keep looking at your metrics, and see what other people are searching for. Put that in your content, your keywords, your page title, your meta description, you’re gonna go up. Awesome. Awesome. Make sure your site is getting fast. Don’t put a lot of crap on your site. Slow it down. Animations are cool. Sliders are cool, but they slow your site down way too much. Awesome.
