How should I start?

[RyanUK]

Hello Everyone,

I have just launched a new education website for the UK market. Its been a very long time since I did any link building or SEO. I dabbled in it for my own business almost 10 years ago and although I was (and I am) an amateur it was nevertheless very successful and effective. It felt like you could get some links and rank without throwing a huge amount of money at it. However, it seems a minefield now. It also feels like if you don't have deep pockets you don't have a hope in getting ranking. And my budgets are very limited.

I am looking for advice in terms of what I should do to get this website to rank and get a decent amount of traffic. I am hoping Moz members can help me with this.

I have a website which I published less than a week ago. It has now been indexed by Google. On a positive note, I believe its a very powerful exact match domain. And as its education, it has a lot of content or pages, which will only grow.

I am happy to post the domain here, I don't know if I should?

On the negative side of things, it obviously has no history or links. So if you were trying to rank a new website, what would you start with? What would you do first and second etc? Do people still get directory and forum links? Are they useful? It seems like its mainly blog articles now. Please educate me a little. I am trying to read up as much as I can. But there is a lot to take in.

Thanks.

Ryan

[JohnSammon]

Hey Ryan! Congrats on the new site. Did you happen to build the website in WordPress? I can give you some tips on how I would start but it would be super helpful to know a little bit more about your site structure. Thanks - John

[madis74]

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[RyanUK]

Hi John,

Thanks for responding. The website is: https://gcse.co.uk

Since you are American, the words GCSE may not much to you. Its basically the compulsory exam all high school students in the UK take. So for this sector, its the best domain you could have (in some ways)!

We are going to re-adjust the product and service offering a tiny bit. As being online (just) one week has made us realise a few things. Instead of providing subscription-based instant tutoring service, we may focus on booking tutors online and providing mock exam or revision app (which is both web and app) based.

I have even had people ask me to turn it into a free resource based site!

However, getting traffic is the key for us. And getting links back in is proving to be an expensive exercise.

Thanks.

Ryan

[JohnSammon]

Hey Ryan,

I was doing SEO 10 years ago and it's so much different these days. The exact match keyword phrase domain was gold at that time (2008). You could put up a site and it would be within the top 10 for that keyword phrase in 2-4 weeks. It's much different now. It's still a positive that you have the exact keyword in the domain. That will help you as you get your hands dirty into some SEO.

Given that - here's where I would start:

1. Do your keyword research using the Google Keyword Planner. I would assemble a list of 40-60 phrases to target that combine both longtail and general keyword phrases. Long tail keyword phrases make great blog posts to write about. Make sure the content is relevant to the visitor too.

2. Do some competitor link building research - the Moz link tool (https://analytics.moz.com/pro/link-explorer/linking-domains) can help you identify links that your competition has acquired so that you can start to build a backlink portfolio.

3. Submit your sitemaps to both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools

4. If you have the funds and a physical address, sign up for yext.com. Claiming your local profiles will help build you a backlink portfolio which will help

Does that help? Let me know if you have other questions. SEO is much harder these days but you have to take the slow and steady approach to win in the long run.

[JohnSammon]

Hello! Can you tell me more about what you're looking to accomplish with the site so I can tailor my feedback? Thanks!

[RyanUK]

That helps. I am already doing most of that apart from Yext. I have never heard of that before.

[JohnSammon]

Yeah - check it out. It runs about 50-60 USD per month but it's well worth it for what it does for your site.

[salmanKhan8874]

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[MeenaMirashi]

I request you to read what is SEO and how it changes over time.

[vinon31]

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