Our company is currently ranked #1 on Google My Business (Google Maps, Google Local) for keywords like Asheville SEO and Asheville Web Design – we’ve held this position now for many years. Before we rebranded in 2020 from Asheville Web Design and SEO Company (https://revenue-growth.com) to Revenue Growth (https://revenue-growth.com), we had organic rank on Google Page 1 for many seo and web design related keywords in Asheville. Since most of our new business comes to us through referrals and word of mouth, we haven’t ever needed to push real hard in terms of our own marketing and SEO efforts. However, we thought, since we are currently not ranking anywhere near Page 1 for any seo or web design related keywords, other than the Google My Business listing, we are going to run a live SEO demonstration and experiment.
I have a theory about a specific type of landing page design and layout of content that I believe will outperform competitors, so we are going to learn about the potential results of this through live experimentation. Overall, for us, this experiment is not necessarily about needing the rank and traffic (although, that’s a really nice side bonus!) — it’s really all about demonstrating what we do for our clients on a regular basis and chronologically blogging about it so our prospects and clients can get an idea of the process through all stages from Day 1 (today) all the way through to completion, where we begin to meet our goals of the campaign which is to rank as high as possible for our target keywords.
Step 1: Planning, Keyword Research, Competitive Analysis
The first step we took was to run some keyword research. We use a tool called SEM Rush for all SEO keyword research.
The keywords we found to be most relevant to what we want to rank for are as follows:
| Keyword | Volume |
| asheville seo | 260 |
| seo asheville nc | 90 |
| asheville nc seo | 50 |
| asheville seo services | 20 |
| seo company asheville nc | 20 |
| seo experts asheville | 20 |
| asheville seo company | 10 |
| honest seo asheville nc | 10 |
| seo company asheville | 10 |
| seo services asheville | 10 |
Based on volume, we selected our primary keyword target for this demonstration and project to be asheville seo.
Since we already have a page on Revenue Growth at https://revenue-growth.com/search-engine-optimization-seo/ we are going to set that page as the parent for our new page, and set the new page URL at https://revenue-growth.com/search-engine-optimization-seo/asheville-nc . Ensuring your keywords are covered inside the URL structure is important. Ideally, we would want a URL that has /asheville-seo in it, but as an experiment I’m testing a theory that this particular URL can perform just as well since it includes both seo and asheville in the URL, just not together. The top 3 competitors in the organic rank positions 1, 2, and 3 for asheville seo are all using the /asheville-seo as part of their URL structure. I’d like to see if I can outrank those competitors despite having a different URL structure.
Once we selected our top SEO keyword targets, we then put together some instructions for one of our superstar content writers. While putting this together, we realized we needed to decide on how many words of content we need for the page we are going to build. We went to the top 3 competitors pages and used a free web page word counter at https://www.searchbloom.com/tools/bulk-web-page-word-count-checker/ — we found out one competitor has around 1920 words, another has around 1240 words and the other has 1760 words. With this determination, we decided to give our writer the assignment of 2500 total words so that we are outdoing the competition in word count. We also included our special proprietary formula on how to integrate the keywords we are targeting above, along with specific instructions on the tone, personality we’d like the content written with and some instructions on the general organization of the content in preparation for the type of page design we have in mind.
Our writer normally takes about a week to produce this much content, sometimes two depending on their schedule. While we are awaiting the content to come back, we will proceed with some other steps.
Here are our raw notes about the elements we are going to include on this page:
Header Area – Above the Fold
– Beautiful Image
– Strong Headline
– Call to Action (form, button, lead magnet, download, video)
Product and Service Offerings
Written / SEO Content mixed in throughout
Features, Functionality, Benefits
Written / SEO Content mixed in throughout
Testimonials
Blogroll (for this category of keywords only)
Instagram roll (for specific hashtag)
YouTube / Video Roll
Written / SEO Content mixed in throughout
Everything will point back to call to action at top.
Step 2: Setup Target Keyword Tracking
At Revenue Growth, we take data, measurement, analytics, KPIs very seriously. We need to know where things are at, how things are performing for various aspects of a campaign at all times. Every decision, every pivot, every recommendation we make is data driven. In order to truly measure the performance of the project we are starting here is to know what our campaign goals are and to setup tracking/measurement so we know how we are doing with those goals on a regular basis.
In this case, our two goals are to improve rank position and gain organic traffic. We want to improve rank position on the target keywords above, but we also know when we do an SEO project like this, a secondary benefit of what we are doing is potentially raising the rank of all of the keywords we monitor. For tracking and measurement we went ahead and added the target keywords above to our SEM Rush keyword position tracking tool. Below is a screenshot of all of the keywords we are monitoring including the additions from above, along with the current rank position as we are getting started (screenshot taken on 8/27 at 12:30pm EST).
Step 3: Setup Instagram Content With Hashtag
One of our team members is going to begin developing some Instagram content to be published on our page related to this series and SEO in general. We will designate a specific hashtag which we will use a plugin on our site to pull in content onto this page based on the hashtag found in the post. If an IG post contains a specific hashtag, it will be pulled in by the plugin and published on the page we are creating for this project. This task has been assigned and we will report back on progress with this as we go.
Step 4: New Blog Content Related to Target Topic
Since the target topic of the page is SEO, this post is the first blog post that will be shown on this page. We will setup a category based blogroll on the page which will show a blog blurb (the first parts of the blog post and featured image) on the page. I will likely set it to display 5-6 blog posts on the page – as newer blog posts are added, older ones will roll off. This series live demonstrating our SEO process will be the first contribution to the SEO category blog roll on our site for this page.
Summary
With the following tasks assigned — content writing, instagram content development, blog content development — we are well on our way to this project getting started. I will post an update early next week (it’s Friday today, and it’s a special birthday weekend for me, so I’ll check back in early next week).