5 Step PR and SEO strategy that Neil Patel didn’t tell you

If you don’t have the luxury of putting X amount of money into a campaign and get traffic to your website without hurting your margins then you understand the long-term impact of a good SEO and PR strategy.

So over the next 5minutes of a careful read, you will understand the ins and outs of an awesome strategy for SEO and PR that will not just generate traffic but will get you conversions and all of it for FREE!

But remember nothing in the world is actually free. This strategy might take some time and effort to implement but trust me it will be worth it. I have been using this strategy to grow organic traffic for startups and even today this strategy has never failed to surprise me.

Keyword research:

The first step is old good research for keywords that are low on competition but most importantly are deeper in your conversion funnel. Eg: “Book a hotel for couples in Delhi” is deeper in the funnel than “Hotel for couples”.

If you are having trouble finding keywords you can rank for then get the keywords you are already ranking for and then put that in Google and see the auto-suggested results. That will give you good enough ideas for long-tail keywords but remember to keep the keyword density below 3%.

These would entertain long-tail keywords. Then type the finalised keywords in Google again. Then remove the target keywords that are already getting targeted by some high DA (Domain Authority) website. You can use the free MozBar plugin to gauge the DA of domains on the SERP page.

Generating content:

Once you have finalised the keyword, let’s get down to the actual work of generating that valuable piece of content. Study the search results for the keyword and talk to experts in the subject (could be your salespeople) and generate content ideas that will satisfy the user’s query in the best possible way. Keep in mind the following points while putting together your piece

• Section headers
• Bullets and numbered lists
• Small paragraphs
• Highlighted text
• Blockquotes
• Use images to explain abstract concepts
• Use simple words
• Keep a glossary to incorporate the LSI keywords
• Keep your keyword in the first 100 words of the article
• URL should be short and succinct
• Keep the article length from 1000–3000 words
• Use Internal linking on high PA pages and missing internal link: Query this on Google Site:www.yourdomain.com “your keyword” and you will find the unlinked keywords

Fine-tuning the article:

TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) is a way to figure out how important a word is in a document based on how frequently it appears in it. This is a pretty standard statistical process in information retrieval. It is also one of the oldest ranking factors in Google’s algorithms.

You can use Grammarly or Hemingway to edit your content and dumb it down. You can also use MarketMuse’s free trial to see the level of depth that is required in your article and make adjustments accordingly.

Compile the target list

Once you have completed that piece of content, you can now look for relevant blogs that can link back to your article. Parallelly you can work on ramping up your activity on social media to drive social traffic to your piece and incorporate the feedback to your article.

Study the backlinks for your competitor and look for backlinks opportunities on Google. Simple queries like these can come handy ;

• {keyword} “guest blogger” OR “guest post” OR “guest article” OR “guest column”
• {keyword} “become a contributor” OR “contribute to this site”
• {keyword} “write for us” OR “write for me”
• {keyword} inurl:category/guest

Once you have finalised the blogs, you could use Hunter.io or ClearBit to look for the email addresses of the writer or if the name of the writer is missing, you can look for the editor on LinkedIn.

ProTip: Look for broken backlinks and if you find anything relevant, make sure to point that out to the editor and ask for a backlink to your article instead.

Outreach for links

You should ideally prepare the list of easy targets and the difficult ones. For the easy ones, you can use a template to reach out to them.

The template could look something like this;

Subject: something missing in your {keyword} article

Hey {name},

I am a big fan of your work and I have been following your work for a while.

I was browsing for a {your keyword} and I came across your article on {keyword}, and I really liked it.

Reading through your post, I noticed that your post is missing some aspect of {keyword} including some {other things converted in your piece}.

Our team took 2 months of research to come up with a comprehensive guide on {keyword} and compiled it in a behemoth of a guide on our blog {link to your blog}

I wanted to share and ask for your feedback on the same. Also thought it would be worth a mention in your article.

{link to their article}

Either way, keep up the awesome work!

Cheers!

For the more valuable ones, I would suggest writing personalized emails to build a long-term relationship with them.

Pro Tip: If you are just starting out you can use a strategy called “Parasite SEO” which essentially is to put your article to third-party websites that already have a good ranking instead of posting it on your website.

And voila you are done! Remember to create a successful brand you would need to put out at least 1 long-form article which could be a roundup post or a detailed piece of content, every week for 3–4 months to see the results.