In this workshop, we’ll be doing one of my favorite things: creating an SEO strategy for a brand new site. We’re looking at This Well-Seasoned Life, a site devoted to healthy cooking and living.
Let’s Take a Look at Your Home on The Web
We’ll start by scrolling through the homepage—it’s just a simple blog roll with a sidebar and header navigation. I’m already noticing my first problem here: the site is way too generic. The navigation items are: about, blog, podcast, social media, stuff I like and contact me. From this, we have no idea what the site is about. It doesn’t mention that the site is about healthy living anywhere, which not only hurts the user experience, it also loses any SEO value.
Additionally, the navigation structure is extremely confusing. The drop-down menu has its own drop-downs embedded inside. This makes it difficult for users and Google to figure out what’s going on here. This site could really benefit from some content strategy.
Now, on to the keywords. Let’s review the site’s top keywords using my favorite tool ever ahrefs. Its overall organic keywords are for “Bright Line Eating Recipes” and “Wildtree Shakes.” So here, we really want to own the keywords that we already rank for. Once we’ve built out a significant amount of traffic for these, we can work on other topics.
How To Win With A New Website
I AM SEO – The Best SEO Framework
As always, we want to plug this site into our I AM SEO framework: intent, asset and medium.
The intent here is clear: people want Bright Line Eating recipes.
The asset should be a recipe on a single page. No one wants to see an ad after every paragraph and I doubt this site is making much money from these display ads so we should cut them.
The medium is the website itself, so we don’t drive people out to Facebook (and off the website).
Do That Topical Research
Since the bulk of this site is about Bright Line Eating, let’s look at top keywords around that. We have some great ones here: Bright Line Eating Review, Bright Line Eating FAQs, Bright Line Eating Food List. All these could make fantastic articles that would rank well on Google.
Another good tip is that readers love seeing results so showing before/after photos or creating an article about the results of Bright Line Eating would perform really well. Lots of opportunities!
Rock Those Content Clusters
Your site should have all its content organized into content clusters. The best way to think about this is your core topic in the middle (in this case “Guide To Bright Line Eating”), with clustered content on the peripheries (“Bright Line Reviews,” “Bright Line Food List,” etc.). For the time being, you want to live in these clusters, interlinking between clustered content to keep users on your site.