10 Questions to Supercharge a New SEO Process

Starting a new SEO process with a new client or site, especially in an industry that you have no experience or a new country or language market means that you will likely need more time to research and analyze your competitors and audience to be able to establish a winning SEO strategy.

To help you with this sometimes very time consuming analysis I want to share 10 questions that have helped me to effectively prioritize, focus and set new SEO processes strategies and efforts.

1. Which keywords are your competitors targeting that you're still not?

Use SEMRush's Domain vs. Domain feature to identify and consider those keywords for which your competitors are already performing well but you're still missing with the "unique keywords" intersection feature:

2. For which keywords have your competitors lost their visibility?

Of course, you don't only want to target the same terms and phrases for which your competitors are already ranking and for which they're likely already better optimized than you.

You can use SEMRush's position changes feature to check those keywords for which your competitors have lost their rankings (identify the potential reasons, as you're given the pages that were ranking for them) and start targeting them yourself if they're also relevant to you... you will likely find less competition:

3. Which is the most socially shared and linked content from your competitors and how does it compare with yours?

Identify the most popular and shared content of your competitors in social networks to see which are the content topics and formats that connect better with your industry's audience and that you should be taking into consideration.

You can use SocialCrawlytics to crawl your competitors domains and get their pages listed by the amount of shares in the most popular social networks:

Complete this information by identifying the most linked pages of your competitors' domains (along their social shares) with Open Site Explorer.

Which content topics and formats earn a high volume of links as well as social shares? Which don't necessarily perform well in social but are highly endorsed by other sites with links? Get a better understanding of what drives each type of action from your audience:

4. In which social networks is your audience sharing and participating the most?

Use SocialCrawlytics to directly verify where is your audience sharing your competitors and your own content. Identify which are the social networks where your audience is active and where you should be focusing to develop your community and to promote your content:

5. What content has gone viral in your industry?

Go beyond your own and your competitors sites and use Buzzsumo to check which have been the most popular pieces of socially shared content in your industry, as they might have been developed by other sites.

Identify additional content topics and areas that you might have missed before. Filter by type of content and date to check the best performing formats and actions:

6. Which sites are linking to many of your competitors but still not to you?

Use the CognitiveSEO's Competitive Link Analysis feature to easily get the information about the sites linking to one or many of your competitors but still not linking to you.

If they're already linking to many of them chances are that they're featuring articles or resources covering your sector and they would likely be more open to feature you too:

7. Who's sharing your competitors content?

You want to get to know, connect, interact and become visible to the people in your audience actively sharing not only your own but also your competitors content in social networks, especially the influential ones, with a higher reach and engagement, the ones who drive action among your communities. Use SocialCrawlytics to identify them:

8. What's the difficulty level of the keywords you wish to target?

How to prioritize all the keywords, phrases and topics that you have identified already as highly relevant and with a high search volume, that would be profitable to target?

Use the Moz Difficulty Tool to easily identify your keywords difficulty level, giving a reference of how competitive they are based on the sites that are already ranking for them.

Don't only take into consideration the difficulty score but also compare these ranking sites popularity and relevance metrics with your own and check the feasibility to do it:

9. Have your site or your competitors suffered from an Algorithmic Google Penalization?

Starting a new SEO process you should always ask and verify if the site you're working with has suffered from penalizations (manual or algorithmic) in the past, due to which you will have more challenges (and additional work that you will need to prioritize) to achieve your goals.

To easily validate if the site has lost its organic search traffic as a consequence of a Google Update you can use the Panguin Tool, which overlays Google updates with the organic visits timeline of your Google Analytics, allowing you to find a correlation:

You can also check your competitors organic search performance and high traffic drops in the past by analyzing their domains' positions trend data with SEMrush:

10. Which are the sites referring traffic to your competitors?

Remember that the value of links doesn't only rely on their popularity but also as traffic channels and of course, you would also like to prioritize building links on those sites that can bring both.

Use SimilarWeb to verify which are the top referring sites of your competitors and that could also potentially provide you traffic. These would likely be sites where they have a prominent organic presence with endorsements or even collaborations, that you can also take into consideration, at least as a reference to develop your own:

It's time to Supercharge your new SEO Process!

Hopefully these questions will also allow you to advance faster and identify opportunities in your new SEO processes. For complementary information take a look at the Illustrated SEO Analysis Workflow I created some time ago. If you have any questions you can let me know in the comments or ask me in Twitter.

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Aleyda Solis - With more than 7 years of experience doing SEO for European, American and Latin-American companies, Aleyda is an International SEO Consultant -service that she provides through her company Orainti-, speaker and blogger. You can connect with her in twitter or her website.