SEO Training Course | Competitive Analysis Training

Introduction

This SEO course enables you to refine your SEO strategy and focus your efforts where they will be most effective — by closely analysing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) found in your own web sites and in those of your most successful SERPs competitors.

The course challenges you to come up with objective answers to questions like these:

• Are your current SEO goals really achievable - by your or your competitors?
• Are you really targeting the correct audiences and search expressions?
• Is your website coding up to snuff? - e.g using latest HTML5, CSS3, WAI-ARIA?
• Are you exploiting new SEO channels? - social media, geolocation, structured data
• How good are your semantics, categories, taxonomies and labelling?
• How good are your links? - focused, maintainable, cost-effective?
• Do you have a content marketing strategy? - is it good enough?

Having compared yourselves with your principal SEO competitors, we take you through a series of drills, exercises, discussion, and checklists, designed to produce the first — very rough — draft of a newly focused SEO strategy. The critical feature of this strategy is that it must be expressed as behavioural objectives, i.e. achievable outcomes which can be objectively measured.

Pre-Requisites

There are no pre-requisites for this course.

Who should attend?

This workshop is ideal for SEO and digital marketers who need to adapt from older link building techniques and join the dots on their digital campaigns. It also works well for PR and broader marketing practitioners who want to learn how to work with SEO and Social Media. The course is also for individuals looking to offer SEO as a service or at a consultancy level

What will you learn?

• On completion of this course, students should be able to:
• Distinguish SEO competition from generic competition
• Identify SEO key performance indicators (PKI)
• Identify who their real SEO competitors are
• Identify competitor pages per product/service
• Analyse competitor's markup, semantics and links
• Evaluate sites and pages for competitive advantage
• Devise a feasible competitive SEO strategy
• Setup and optimise SEO performance measurement
• Continually enhance their SEO over time
• Utilise cutting-edge web design for SEO

Course Outline

Comparing non-interactive, visible, content

• Titles
• Headers
• Introductions
• Subheads
• Emphasis
• De-emphasis
• Lists
• Order and sequence
• Focus
• Vocabularies
• Expression
• Content layering

Comparing link content

• Keyword locations
• Within pages
• Within content blocks
• Within links themselves
• Keyword selection
• Keyword layering
• Relationship between anchor descriptors and target content
• Anchor descriptors and adjacent content

Comparing link relationships

• Finding and counting competitors' links
• Tracking social media links
• Link types and attributes, e.g. nofollow
• Qualitive link relationships, e.g. source value, targeting, etc
• Google's link: syntax
• Commercial link-finding tools
• SEOMoz, WordTracker, SEOElite, Majestic SEO, etc
• Understanding how these tools gather data
• Tool-specific metrics, e.g. MozRank, ACRank, etc.
• Identifying potential link sources

• Visual order vs. source code order
• HTML5 semantic elements — presence and organisation
• HTML5 semantic attributes
• Whole page metadata
• Dublin core and Open Graph Protocol (OGP) metadata
• Rich snippet metadata
• HTML5 Microdata
• Microformats
• RDFa
• Other invisible metadata, e.g ARIA roles