Rand Fishkin

Rand Fishkin is the founder of SparkToro and was previously cofounder of Moz and Inbound.org. He’s dedicated his professional life to helping people do better marketing through the Whiteboard Friday video series, his blog, and his book, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World. When Rand’s not working, he’s most likely to be in the company of his partner in marriage and (mostly petty) crime, author Geraldine DeRuiter. If you feed him great pasta or great whisky, he’ll give you the cheat code to rank #1 on Google.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Rand’s success

Unique SEO content crafted to rank highly by employing smart research and talking to the audience before creating content

Result if you follow the steps in Rand’s session

Great SEO ranking for your website content

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

The biggest thing to start with on that front is keyword research.

So basically, you’re trying to understand, okay, here are all these people. What are they searching for? How do they phrase those queries? What words do they actually type into that box in Google or say, into their phone? That results in the query being returned with that, that set of search engine results, the SERPs as we call them an SEO?

And until and unless you do that keyword research, I think it’s really hard to understand what people are actually looking for. And I recommend two things.

So not just looking at the specific, you know, hey, this person looked for, I don’t know, for example, let’s say that I’m looking for a new yoga studio. So I’m going to type that into Google. And Google is going to return, you know, a set of yoga studio results. And if I scroll to the bottom of that Google search result page, or you know, if I’m on my mobile device, and I scroll to the bottom there, you can see related searches, right?

And those are things like yoga studio app, yoga studios, Seattle, because I’m in Seattle, yoga studios for Mac yoga studio app subscription. So I’m getting a sense of what else people are looking for after they search for this. And obviously, some of that has to do with locations of it has to do with this particular mobile app.

Some of it has to do with the types of yoga so you know, yoga studio vinyasa or yoga studio, all these other types of things, when you can get into the heads of people who have performed that query and understand, okay, they want to know, location, they want to know type, type of studio, they want to know instructor they want to know times, they want to know schedule, they want to know cost.

So providing a page that’s just about our yoga studio is probably not nearly as valuable as if I had a page that was here are all the yoga studios and times and schedules and reviews, read truly getting into someone’s head and St. Kosh, what do they want, when they’re looking for this? And so keyword research is huge with that.

The next thing is, I really encourage people to spend some time with their actual audience. Right. So when I was doing, you know, content, I would spend a bunch of time talking to marketers about what they were looking for in terms of SEO? Oh, what do you want to know about this?

Well, you know, I’m really curious how Google treats this. I’m really curious about whether this ranking factor matters more than this one. I’m really curious about this news around? You know, Facebook’s privacy issues, does that have any impact on this? Right?

So you get a sense for what people are looking for from having those conversations, I think without that, as part of your process, you miss out. So if you can talk to even find people who have gone to a yoga class recently, or are looking for yoga class, or have moved and are looking for a new one. And that’s a really powerful thing to do.

And the next step is actually crafting that content. So you’re going to make an outline, you’re going to say, I want to hit all the points that my research revealed were important. And then from there, you’re going to need an answer to the question, how am I going to be uniquely valuable from everything else that’s in the search results right now.

So if you go to that Google page, and you’re scrolling down, I want you to visit all of those individual links and see what they have. See what they don’t have? Where are the gaps? What are they missing? And now how are you going to be uniquely more valuable than anything that’s on any of those pages? Right? And so now, you know, you’ve created your unique value proposition for your content.

And finally, last but definitely not least, because Google is so reliant still, on links and amplification signals, you need to be able to have a great answer to the question. Who will help amplify this? And why? And not just a broad answer, but a specific answer, like oh, well, these seven websites, I know, they would link to me, if I did x, and then do x, and then get in touch with those seven websites and get those links.

I think if you follow that process, you’ve got a really, really solid path to get great rankings.