Hello DP community, this is Marty. I'm new to the community and completely new to SEO (as noob as it gets) and I'm currently doing an internship at an SEO company in Japan. We have a team and we are doing a project that was handed to us with a certain degree of urgency since the top dogs are out at the moment. Unfortunately, none of us are very experienced and we only know the basics of using SEMrush, Trend, Analytics, and doing basic PPC. That said, we have all the resources the company has at our disposal, which is very powerful...its just that we don't know what exactly to do lol. Here's an overview of the project we are assigned: We are asked to find the reason why our client, a manufacturing firm, is seeing a large gap in the number of unique users to its foreign-bound website, written in English, compared to its competitions. What we have is information on the client itself and the number of UUs. Our Ultimate Goal: The client has asked us to help discover how wide the gap in external access between them and their competitors is, as well as what to do about it. As for our team, we are planning to carry out the task in the following manner. However, if you can give us feedback on any critical information that we've missed as well as any actions that we should take, it will be greatly appreciated!! Our team’s planned approach: I. Research brand-name keywords. ①Research growth rate using Google Trend. ② Find out how many brand-name keywords are listed in high positions using SEMRush Tool. The Goal: To find the amount of growth in brand-name keyword searches. II. Research non-brand-name keywords. ①Conduct organic search. Find the top 20 sites produced through the non-brand keyword search. ② Check PPC. Find whether ads are assign to the non-brand keywords mentioned above. The Goal: Find out which non-brand-name keywords are bringing in the users. III. Research site structure and layout. ①Check the entire site’s HTML files and whether they are indexed. Find out how well the site is being discovered by the SEs. The Goal: Find out if the site has any structural problems and flaws. Surely, improving the site internally is closely related to improving the number of UU access. Yet, that is offlimits to us at the moment =( So if you can provide suggestions on how to achieve our objective without mentioning internal improvement, it would be greatly appreciated! Thank you so much for taking the time to help us =D Due to the urgency of this project, it would be spectacular if we can have a response ASAP! Thanks ahead of time!!
That is an interesting project - I wish I had time help you! Nevertheless, to put things in better perspective. SERPS and visibility in the SE is determined by. 1) On page factors 2) Offsite factors. Roughly 1) accounts for 30% and 2) 70% in terms of ranking. Although Google is placing more emphasis on 1) It looks like you are focusing on 1) On page factors, but looking at indexing rates is a one factor, you must look into: a) Internal linking b) External linking to authority websites and avoiding low quality sites. c) Frequency of updates. e) Content duplication f) Load performance. g) Silo structure h) On page SEO i) Bounce rate j) Poor design, missing mandatory pages, or anything that may trigger penalties. My last bit of advice is that SEO has dramatically changed in the last year. So make sure you ignore most advice that is over a year old. Failing to do so, can be potentially damaging to any website if you act on outdated recommendations. GOOD LUCK
Here's my insight.... Use Google Analytics, and determine what the majority of users are doing to visit the site in the past. *Are they typing the company website in the URL Or Google to visit the website? If that's the case, it's more of a branding issue, and more people are starting to lose awareness/interest in the company. *Are they using keywords to enter the company website? If so, then you are most likely losing traffic because your competitors are outranking you in product keywords. Before analyzing the competition, it's easier to just analyze your own company's traffic first, and work from there. You'll have a better understanding of what needs to take place first.
@youngworks, @coloma21, thanks guys for the great suggestions. I forgot to mention that we don't have access to google analytics =( I don't know why but that's all we have... Nonetheless, @youngworks, we will definitely look into links, content,　and structure. @coloma21, this is definitely the way to go. I think we will proceed with analyzing what youngworks illustrated above while at the same time gather evidence to convince the client to grant Analytics access, so we can better help them. Whatever the reason is, this is definitely a very unique project. Thank you both for the great help!! =D