Putting our money where our SEO is!

The summer break is a great time to relax, but for us it is also a great opportunity to get our creative juices flowing outside of the office and come up with new ideas.

Our debate this summer revolved around the topic of SEO, a service that clients request more from us every year.

Even though all brands, big or small, probably understand the power of SEO and how their business could benefit from it, the truth is many have questions and are often skeptical. The fact that SEO is a marathon and not a sprint makes a lot of people uncomfortable, as the correlation between effort and result is often not obvious, and definitely not immediate.

Despite our best efforts to help the brands we work with understand the basics of SEO and set expectations, we sometimes find the journey to be a bumpy ride, full of ups and downs, budget cuts, pauses, etc.

Let’s face it, explaining SEO fundamentals, setting expectations, justifying budgets, etc. is a good start, but nothing beats results. A case study with real numbers and regular progress reports can be worth a thousand pitches!

So, we’ve decided to put our money where our mouth is. Starting in September 2022 we are going to launch a website from scratch, which we will attempt to grow for the next 12 months through SEO alone.

The project will be code-named, but we will share all the relevant information for anyone to be able to track our progress during this challenge.

We will be publishing a monthly report with an update: Post published, length, strategies implemented, keywords rankings progress, and more.

So without further ado, let us introduce our new SEO projects:

Project Jupiter

Most websites don’t have an infinite number of possible pages, limiting the opportunities to gain organic traffic. That is why, after making sure your key pages are SEO optimized, having a blog is usually one of the most effective strategies to gain large amounts of organic traffic.

With this in mind, project Jupiter will be a blog-like website.

The content of project Jupiter will be written in English, and our goal will not only be to gain as much organic traffic as possible, but also for this traffic to be mainly from the US and Canada.

So, to sum it up! Project Jupiter:

• Language: English
• Website type: Blog
• Launch date: September 2022

First steps

We are set to invest in SEO. We’ve wrapped our heads around the fact it’s going to take a few months of hard work before we see any results. We are ready to start this blog… So where do we start?

In a nutshell, these are the first steps we are going to take:

Niche research and selection

This step is very important and worth spending as much time on as needed. Finding a good niche, or a good angle into your niche (if your site/business is already up and running), will make everything that comes after easier.

What is a good niche you might be asking yourself?

Well, a good niche is a niche that a reasonable amount of people have an interest in, and which is not super competitive.

When we say a reasonable amount of people need to have an interest, what we are actually looking for is some amount of search volume on Google. If nobody is searching for the thing you are writing about, nobody will find you, no matter how good your content is. Bear in mind there are almost 8 billion people in the world, many of which are spending time online, so if 0,5% of the world’s population is searching for what you are writing about, that might be more than enough! You don’t need (actually shouldn’t) aim for trending topics that everyone is talking about.

And by low competition we mean that the topic hasn’t already been covered a hundred different times already. There are a limited amount of spots on Google’s first page of results, and our goal is to gain one of them, so if that page is full of high-authority sites outranking them would be like a kid picking up a fight with someone twice their age.

Create a brand for project Jupiter

Many people who create websites to rank on Google focus only on the content and totally neglect the design side. Even some people we admire and from whom we’ve learned quite a few SEO tricks do this.

We simply can’t. We believe in doing things well, it’s good karma 🙂

So we will create a brand for project Jupiter, a logo, a color palette, a nice combination of font families… and most importantly, we will design the website we are going to build.

There are plenty of prebuilt themes out there, true, but most of them perform poorly in many aspects. Plus, we believe it is a bit naive to think that any content can fit any theme. Technically it can, sure, but we are not only looking to provide great content, we are also trying to create the best possible experience for our visitors.

Develop a custom WordPress theme

The next step will be to develop a custom WordPress theme to match our design.

Again, many would skip this step and just use a prebuilt theme. But building our own is important, not only so that we can achieve the exact look and feel we are going for, but also to ensure we get the best performance. Site speed is one of the few variables of the algorithm that Google has confirmed has an impact on rankings, so we want to make sure we excel in that.

Keyword research and article outlines

Since the niche selection will be very recent we probably will already have a good amount of keyword research done.

What we will do is refine that list, see which KW makes sense to aggregate, and come up with article titles and outlines.

Start publishing articles

At this point we will be ready to start publishing content on our new website.

The length of each piece and the frequency of publishing can’t be determined until we select the niche and do some KW research.

We believe the most important thing is for an article to make sense. If it takes 600 words to explain something, good, if it takes 2000, then so be it. Stuffing articles just to reach a word count will make for a bad user experience, so we won’t do it.

It is true though that if our competition is putting out 2000-word articles three times a week, we kind of have to match that in order to compete (not exactly, but generally speaking). If that’s the case we will always try to cover more in the article, and never add bluff that doesn’t add any value to the piece.

See you in the next update!