We’re celebrating and spotlighting some of our favorite, highest rated sessions from our Digital Summit at Home events from 2020. In this recap, we feature Market Mindshift Founder/CEO, Mindy Weinstein (@mindyweinstein) who delivered a fantastic, practical 3-Step SEO Plan That Actually Works at our Digital Summit at Home October event.
Whether you’re a digital marketer or a full-stack web developer, [Market Mindshift CEO] Mindy [Weinstein] has a 3-step SEO plan that will fit your strategy seamlessly, which she delivered at a recent Digital Summit at Home. The session was packed with tips from start to finish during the session. The high points (which you can explore in more detail in her session video above), summarize like this:
Step 1: Advanced Keyword Research (03:32)
When doing keyword research, you should follow these 4 steps:
- Brainstorm your list: In this step, you should write down any keywords or phrases that you think people will search for.
- Expand your list: In this step, you will think of related or semantically-related keywords that people may use to find your product or services. Mindy suggests the following tools to make this process easier :
- Keywords Everywhere (05:16)
- SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool (05:47)
- SE Ranking (06:09)
- Answer the Public (07:15)
- Validate search volume: Next, you will determine if these keywords have search volume – meaning if people actually search for these terms. But relevancy and conversion rates are also important factors. Mindy suggests the following additional tools for researching search volume:
- MOZ
- SpyFu
- Bing
- Identify search intent: In this step, you will determine what category the keyword intent falls into: know or buy. Know means the user wants to know something, whereas buy means the user wants to make a purchase. Mindy details (at 12:28) and shows you how to discover the keyword intent.
- Bonus step – Identify the journey: (14:02) Make sure your website is optimized for keywords throughout the buyer’s journey and have content to capture these moments. Imagine the user going from the awareness stage to consideration all the way to the decision stage.
Step 2: Troubleshoot Errors (16:53)
Next, you should focus on troubleshooting technical SEO errors. Technical errors can make even the best keyword research completely irrelevant. While this step may seem difficult for those who are not technically savvy, so Mindy provides some really great resources to help make this process easy. She suggests using the following:
- Web.Dev
- SEMrush
- SE Ranking
- Google Lighthouse
- Google Search Console
- Screaming Frog
- Redirect-checker.org
- Siteliner
- GT Metrix
Whether you’re technically advanced or a complete developing noob, you can and should check for these common errors (19:48):
- Robots.txt
- Canonical link elements
- Redirects
- Page speed
- Duplicate content
When you find technical SEO errors, pass them along to your web developer to resolve. Technical SEO is the foundation piece of SEO, so don’t skip these critical checks.
Step 3: Pursue All SERP Opportunities (27:18)
SERP results are always changing, so it’s important to understand the search intent behind your keywords and how to use that intent to bring traffic to your site. You should begin by creating a blueprint that helps you understand the intent for that keyword, what search engines are rewarding, and help you review the top-ranked pages. Leverage tools like Buzzsumo to identify what content does well for your keywords, or Answer the Public to find data-driven topics and questions.
SERP opportunities don’t end with content. Video optimization (32:16) and featured snippets (34:14), and schema markup (35:34) are three opportunities commonly overlooked. By optimizing your sites for these SERP opportunities you can easily increase traffic for your brand.
To hear from experts like Mindy and hundreds of others that teach at Digital Summit, check out our 2021 calendar of virtual and in-person events.
Kick off 2021 with a bang and join us on January 27 for Digital Summit Go!, a FREE 1-day online event featuring 12 of our best speakers. Hear 12 rapid fire talks on Content, Social, Email, and SEO with tons of actionable takeaways to help your marketing soar in the new year. Did we mention that it’s FREE? 🙂