Learning SEO – 15 Burning Questions to Erik

I've been out on the town again. This time, meeting SEO-consultant Erik Bråneryd. Between drinking good ales and eating nuts, we (...you guessed it!) went NUTS on talking about search engine optimization. I had so many burning questions! So let's save time and get to it, what did I learn today?

Questions asked

• How do you get secure that what you propose for the client actually is the 'best'? As it is a long-term strategy. 
• How do you drive change for/with the client?
• Do you do competition analyses?
• Do you often use schema.org? 
• Do you provide the client with economic estimates of the result that the SEO-campaign will bring?
• How big of a portion of working with SEO is about creating content?
• What is a 'good' sitemap?
• How often should the sitemap be updated?
• Everyone is talking about the use of excel in SEO and SEM, how do you use it?
• Do you give the client the answer to every detail, or do you rather give them a broad direction?
• Re-branding, design, UX, and SEO. How does one work with SEO as the subject branches over to so many other subjects?
• How do you find what content to create SEO-wise?

*Puuuh* a lot basically! Okay, so that wasn't 15 questions. It was 12. But some of the questions are hard to translate, and not so related to this post.

1. The importance of learning from others

What I realized AGAIN is the importance of learning from others. You can Google your way to any knowledge, but the QUALITY of knowledge gotten from other people is SUCH a BIG difference than a curated article or such never can do. Ironically I am writing an article. Yes. But it is not so curated luckily. Because there is something when you narrow down on the article's scope, you also forget the questions a junior-SEO: er, full-time marketer, might have. A 5 step guide is great learning from, but the nuance of learning about another person's own 5-step guide is on another level! Just sayin'. Somewhat mildly.  

2. Feedback on Keyword Research

What's been boggling my mind lately is keyword research. Still a bit unclear, but now a bit clearer. 
I asked Erik to check my keyword list so far, and what I learned from that is:

1. Don't have to generic keyword such as 'To Sale' as it can be anything
2. Always think about the user intent, perhaps 'housing market' is interesting to write about for a real-estate agency, but how many of the users want to actually read about the current housing market situation from a real-estate? A hypothesis. But up for discussion.  

3. What is the industry standard delivery when working with a client?

Asked specifically - "Do you give return of investment estimates from the SEO-efforts you are/will be doing with the client?"
Here it is always, of course, an estimate not a guaranteed ROI. But, with click-through-rates, clicks gotten on keywords, search engine positions click share, search volume etc. you can do a well-qualified guess on the ROI. So yes, that is a good idea. 

Also - How do you drive change with/for the client?
Give the clients reports weekly about the positions, show the ROI. As SEO also is a lot about content, a good tip is to not only give the client a keyword to optimize for on a page but some inspiration on what that content could be like.

4. How do you work with SEO when it is part of UX, Design, Branding and many more subjects?

Backstory! I've just started proposing SEO implementations for a client, and a few of them are mostly UX based. UX is part of SEO as one cannot neglect the user experience of the site. Remember, Google loves two things; content and a good user experience. 

Here, what Erik proposes to his clients are mostly SEO-based implementations. But of course, some things branch over to UX. For example, minimizing the menu as it gives more 'link-power' by having fewer links on the start page is such a thing. It results in designing a new menu that is more condensed with fewer links. 

5. How to be sure that your proposal is the 'best'?

Here it comes down to experience. Experience of working in SEO, then you find out what works well and what doesn't. But likewise reading articles and other sources of information to find out the best practices. Such as the issue of having it on a subdomain or not, that is such a thing!

6. How do you actually rank for keywords?

Might seem like an obvious one, but hold your horses. Sure, one thing is having the keyword in tactical places such as title, h1, subheaders, content, URL etc. But what do you do when you want to rank for even more keywords?
The glorious answer from Erik is - Landing pages. You create different landing pages for each specific keyword.
A practical example. You sell estates and optimize your site's start page to the keyword "Find housing". What if you want to be seen on "Find Apartments" as well? Then create specific landing pages for each specific keyword.
Remember to have content on them as well. Preferably over 300 characters. 

7. Increasing Page Rank by having fewer links on the start page

Your start page will structurally have the most page rank as it will probably be the site that gets the most links. Therefore, by having few links on the start page, for example, by having a more thought out and condensed menu, you will increase the page rank as it will not get divided into as small chunks as before. Increasing page rank for all pages in the structure. A learning here - always think about what pages are linked to on the start page and think them through. Are they necessary to be on the start page? What is really needed in a menu? Etc.

Pro Tip!
Check all the sites that mention you (can be done within Ahrefs) but that don't link to you - and try to build links that way.

Pro Tip 2! 
Use Bulk Analysis in Ahrefs to see which 404's that has links, so you know which 404s to perhaps make live again or re-direct to still get that yummy link and if you're lucky, perhaps even some traffic!

Erik Bråneryd is a great SEO-consultant at Pineberry. Thank you, Erik, for a great learning experience!