This content was created by Eric Siu. This content was uploaded by Eric Siu. This is a YouTube podcast episode titled "The One Thing You Have to Do Before You Start Doing SEO | Ep. #865" (Marketing School) recorded December 13, 2018. It's a short conversational episode hosted by Eric Siu and Neil Patel where they advise listeners to perform competitor research in tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush before starting SEO. They discuss examining competitors' top pages, keyword positions and value, content gap analysis, keyword difficulty, link requirements, using BuzzSumo for social shares, and end with a call-to-action to rate/review the podcast and attend a live event. The excerpt is instructional/marketing-focused and intended for podcast listeners seeking SEO tactics.
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Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
And I'm Neil Patel.
And today we're going to talk about the one thing you have to do before you start doing SEO.
So the one thing that you need to do before you start doing SEO is look up your competitors in either Ahrefs or SEMrush. You can pick whatever tool you want. The reason you want to look them up is they'll show you all the most popular pages that they're getting their search traffic from. The terms that those pages rank for, the positions, how much it would cost if they had to buy those keywords from a cost-per-click standpoint, and the total traffic value that those pages are getting. This will all help you determine what you should be targeting first. Because if you're going after random keyword ideas and pages that your competitors aren't necessarily getting traffic for, but you know your competitors are making a lot of money, because they may be on things like the Growth Everywhere podcast revealing their numbers, you won't know if you're going to be doing well. Just because you get traffic doesn't mean it's going to help you generate revenue. So looking to see what pages your competitors are generating the most of their search traffic for and the value of that traffic, that'll help you get a kickstart in which when you start creating content, you start focusing on your SEO efforts, you know what to focus on first because you know your competition's making money.
Yeah, I love that. So, I mean, whether you use Ahrefs or SEMrush in this context, once you find one competitor, it's going to list a bunch of other competitors. And there's graphs that they show that, that shows just how much search volume that, or that person's occupying or that website's occupying. So there's like, there's like one circle, there's like another big circle. And then there's like your circle, which might be a little smaller, who knows? But you're able to not only look at the top pages for one competitor, but look at the top pages for multiple ones. And what I also like doing too is when you open up Ahrefs, you're basically doing competitive analysis at this point. You are looking at the content gap. So, content gap basically means you plug in like 3 or 4 competitors and you plug in your website and you can see all the content that, you know, maybe the other 4 are covering that you're not covering. And it might give you an indication of maybe you should go down that route or maybe you shouldn't. But if you want to go down the rabbit hole even more, if you want to, if you want to determine if that keyword makes sense for you or that topic makes sense for you, Use the keyword difficulty tool inside of Ahrefs and you're going to be able to see how hard it's going to be for you to, you know, at a high level rank for that specific topic.
And how many links you need to also rank for that topic.
Yeah, big one.
The cool part about doing this is you can also take those URLs and plug them into BuzzSumo and see all the social sharing data and who's sharing that content because they have this little feature called View Shares and it'll show you who's sharing that content. You can reach out to those people as well. And try to go get the social shares that your competition also has.
All right, so that is it for today. Don't forget to just start by using a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush. These tools are our favorites. Before we go, we need your help.
And they either have free trials, free versions, or $7 trials.
Oh yeah, Ahrefs. Ahrefs is $7. All right, that's it for today. Go to— I was going to say go to 1 million downloads. Go to marketingschool.io/stats. We need your help getting to 1 million downloads. We are currently at 800,000 right now. We need your help. The action item, the giving item, the giving spirit, it's the holidays right now, is to rate, review, subscribe, share this podcast to people that you think, loved ones that you think could benefit from this. And then once we get to 1 million, you can track our progress on that URL, marketingschool.io/stats. We will do the live event in Los Angeles, sunny LA, free food, free recordings, free hangout with everyone, free good time. It's going to be great. Check it out and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.
