0:00:00 What do real discovery deliverables for a real client in the real world actually look like? This is one of the most popular questions that I get in the inner circle.
We’ve done a bunch of discovery trainings on how to actually do parts of the discovery, but we haven’t done a training on how to present that to the client. People ask like, do you create beautiful gorgeous slides and keynote and get on the call with a client on zoom and walk them through this beautiful presentation or it’s just very raw and here are the facts, here’s the data, here’s the analysis, here’s the game plan. This video is going to answer that question.
I’m going to take you into a real project folder, a discovery folder for a real project for a real client. We are going to look at exactly what was delivered to them in terms of discovery deliverables and then we’ll talk about also we need to talk about how discovery looks different for every single client and the deliverables are a little bit different for every single client but this does give you a glimpse into what was done for this particular client and a lot of which is fairly common and fairly routine and you are going to see that is very much raw relevant here’s the facts here’s the strategy here’s the analysis, here’s the game plan, whatever. It is not, let’s take a bunch of time and make everything super beautiful and create this presentation, that’s not needed, it’s not important, it doesn’t really help anything.
We just need to know what’s the facts, what’s the analysis, what’s the game plan, okay? So we’re going to take a look at exactly how all of that is presented and then if you have any questions at the end, I’m happy to answer them. I do want to say that nothing you are going to see here is proprietary information, secret information, nothing.
All of this is publicly available, so I don’t have any problem showing it. But, you know, be respectful of our agency, be respectful of the client. One problem that I’ve had in the past, especially when I give the name of a client, is everybody will rush to their sites, right?
And it’s like, this, we haven’t even done a new site for them yet. But even if we do, right, when thousands of people rush to the client’s website to look around, oh, what’s here, right, what can I see? It messes up their data, okay?
And remember, this happens, people are encountering these trainings over and over and over again. So this continues to happen for months and months and months and years and years and years that their data is just not super accurate. So I try my best not to give client examples, okay?
So just kind of be respectful of the client. Another thing people do is that you definitely don’t have to do. I understand going and looking at a website, all right?
Even though that does mess up the data. What you don’t have to do is like fill out their forms and stuff. People are like, I wanna see what happens in step two.
And stuff like, what happens next? And so now, not only are they getting junk data, they’re getting junk leads. Okay, don’t do that.
Like have respect for the client. Don’t fill out their forms, okay? Don’t contact the client.
Just, if we can’t play nice with the training, I have to completely shut down. Like you will never see a real client ever again, okay? So just have respect for our agency.
Have respect for the client. But with that said, nothing here is secret, okay? I’m not revealing anything.
Everything is publicly available if you know where to look and you know how to look. All right, so with that said, let’s just go ahead and dive right in. All right, here we are inside of the discovery folder.
This is in Basecamp on the clients project. I wanna reiterate, nothing that I’m going to show you contains any trade secrets, proprietary information. All of this stuff is publicly available.
I’m just showing you how we’ve done the research, compiled the research into discovery deliverables and what that actually looks like for a real client. So we’re going to start at the top and this is probably the most important deliverable, a lot of the other stuff like, you know, competitor research and the technical audit and, you know, everything that we’ve done in terms of actual research pretty much gets compiled into the sitemap. As this, the sitemap is our game plan for this project going forwards.
So it ends up being the most important deliverable. We’ll take a look at that in just a moment. We have a PPC folder.
Not every client, you know when I say every client is different, the discovery is tailored to the needs of the client and the needs of the project, this is what I mean. Not every discovery folder that you open is going to have a PPC folder inside of it. Only if PPC is deemed relevant to the client and they’re interested in actually moving forward with PPC or at least exploring the potential to move forward with PPC, that’s when there will be a PPC folder.
And you see with this client, PPC is very, very relevant. Then we have a competitor research folder. Just to let you know, in terms of the sitemap and my process with SEO and competitor research, I do SEO research, and out of that I start to compile the new sitemap and the new site architecture.
And I get as far as I can, all the way through my own personal research before I start looking at competitors. Then what I do is I start analyzing their top competitors. Because what I want to do is two different things.
Number one, I want to compare what I’ve found on my own with what competitors are actually doing and maybe what they’ve found in their own research and experience in the industry. And that allows me to confirm whether the things I’ve found, like I’m on the right track with those things, okay? So instead of being influenced or persuaded by what competitors are doing, I like to look at things myself with fresh eyes, with my own eyes, especially a lot of times being an outsider in an industry.
Okay, I’m not like deeply embedded in the crane rental industry or anything like that. So I come in with fresh eyes. I just wanna ask the question, what do I see based on just general marketing knowledge, sales knowledge, experience, expertise, web design, UX, UI, et cetera.
And so I do all my own stuff first. Then, then I go to the competitors and I say, all right, what are you guys doing? Did you guys see the same things I saw?
Are you guys doing things that I would expect you to do? Or are you doing things that are like, whoa, okay, maybe I missed something. That’s the other thing I’m looking for when I do competitor research is, because I’m not deeply embedded in this industry, what did I potentially miss?
And what are competitors doing really well? What are competitors absolutely not doing well? I look at all of that stuff.
But that comes later on in the discovery process. We also see a technical website audit here. This is an audit of their existing website.
I have a training on exactly how to do this audit. And I talk about reasons why this audit is done. And in this case, we’re getting rid of the old website.
So a technical audit on the old website isn’t all that important. It does give insights to the client. I used this audit to land this client.
It was just another piece, right? Another straw on the camel’s back, so to speak, when you’re trying to get the client to agree to move forward with a project. They see the technical issues with their existing website, and that’s all going to be fixed as part of their new website.
But really I ran the technical audit because I wanted to uncover all of the published pages on the website just to make sure when I’m doing the architecture, all of the important bases are covered, and we also know what we can get rid of and what potentially has to be redirected. So that was the real reason for the technical website audit, but you know, there’s many reasons for an audit and many benefits from doing an audit, and that’s why I say you should run one for pretty much every project when they have an existing website. Next you see a copy and messaging workbook.
This is actually, I would say, the final piece of the discovery process, and one that has not been done yet. So I have a whole training on copy and messaging, discovery, and I have a workbook that I give you. This is all available inside the Inner Circle.
We are going to do that exact process with this client. It just hasn’t been done yet. And once that process is done, those findings and those deliverables will be put inside of this folder.
But you already have a training on that stuff, so you don’t really, I mean, it’s neither here nor there, whether you see it or not in this video. If you wanna see what came out of it, I guess I can do a little follow-up for this, though I don’t think it’s all that important. Okay, so let’s go ahead and start with the sitemap.
And I will say, I love just putting this up in Basecamp because it allows us to have a conversation on every individual deliverable. It keeps everything organized, keeps everything compartmentalized, everything is there for people to access anytime they want to. They don’t have to remember, oh, where was it?
Was it a shared Dropbox folder that I was given? They just know it’s in Basecamp because everything is in Basecamp. And so, I don’t know, I think a lot of people maybe are expecting some gorgeous, like do we do some sort of PowerPoint presentation with all these gorgeous slides presenting all of the discovery?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It’s very much raw. And just here’s the data, here’s the facts, here’s the findings, here’s the game plan, okay?
We don’t need to waste a bunch of time making everything super pretty and beautiful. Though you will see one deliverable in here because we’re doing branding for this client. You are going to see our brand designer put a little extra into one of the deliverables.
But again, that’s not a typical thing because we don’t typically do branding for clients in our agency. So that’s something you won’t often see in most of our projects. Okay, so let’s take a look at the sitemap and we’ll just go over this together.
So this is the actual sitemap as is right now delivered to them as like this is your game plan. I have shown this before, I have a training in the Inner Circle on how to build sitemaps, it’s part of the SEO training that I cover, but I am going to just go over this with you. So the white box in the middle, this is the homepage right here.
The left hand side, everything on the left over here is blog content, content marketing type stuff. Everything on the right is core pages and areas of this website designed to sell, convert, rank, etc. So if we just ignore the left hand side for right now, we’ll just take a trip down the right hand side.
All right, so up here at the top, we’re gonna have our about page, there’s gonna be a safety page coming off of that. Then there’s a cranes page. The cranes is gonna cover, and it says right here in this note, cranes page details each type of crane, shows Phoenix’s available cranes, et cetera.
And we’re building these pages because these are, every one of these is a keyword, okay? They don’t need volume necessarily, and we’re gonna talk about these metrics that are attached to these keywords in just a second. They don’t really need those metrics because the metrics are there, but they don’t matter because we’re not deciding whether these pages are important or not.
We’re saying these pages have to be there. These are the types of cranes that you offer, so you have to have pages for them. The metrics, we don’t care because they have to be there anyway.
We’re not deciding whether to create them or not. Next, we have a different section and this is gonna be for actual crane rental. And it says crane rental pages are gonna show the rental details for each type of crane.
So you imagine these are gonna be the facts about the cranes, like all about the crane and what it can do, the types of jobs that it can do and why you would wanna rent it and what it’s for and yada, yada, yada. And then these pages actually go over all the rental details involved in the crane and, you know, FAQs for renting the cranes, associated costs, operation-related services, etc. , etc.
And because these are specifically looked for in terms of rental, okay, that’s the context that these are searched for in. So tower crane rental, mini crane rental, that’s different from tower cranes. What are types of tower cranes and what do tower cranes do and how do tower cranes work?
And like those are different contexts, different meaning behind the searches. And so we’re going to separate out those pages. But if you notice, it’s marked right here, these are going to be reciprocally linked.
So these pages will link to their corresponding rental page and vice versa to create that association. Okay, now we’re going to come down and we’re going to see crane services. All right, what are these?
Well, you see heavy haul, crane repair, there’s something called millwright services, industrial rigging, lifting, hoisting equipment, emergency crane repair. So we have this whole section called crane services. If you look at their existing website, this is not really the structure.
This is a change in architecture for the strategy of maximizing SEO going forwards. Okay, and then we come down and we’re going to see the service areas that were proposed. All right, so we have our in slug, which is very common.
If you’ve watched my service area trainings, it’s the method that I use on pretty much every site for a service area network. And then we’re breaking out into our top cities, and you’re going to see here service area pages for ranking top three in strategic areas of operation. Eventually, this website is going to have 50 to 100 plus service area pages, but this is what we’re starting with.
This is the phase one approach that is being proposed. But the client knows, hey, to really get to where you wanna go in terms of local SEO dominance, we’re gonna need to expand the service area network tremendously. Okay, it can’t stop here.
So I’ve already got them in a position where they’re basically agreeing to lots of future work, lots of future work just within this service area network. Then we’re going to come down, there’s going to be a rent a crane page, a contact page, a careers page, and then there is SEO potential. These are literal keywords right here.
The slugs of the pages are the keywords that we identified that we want to go after. They’re going to have forms pages and then FAQs. Notice it says we’re going to dynamically insert these based on you know what they pertain to, bi-directional relationships.
On the left hand side here we have a blog, we have case studies. Right now they don’t really have a lot of relevant stuff published on their blog. These are all relevant articles and information to, as it says right here, build brand authority and demonstrate expertise.
There’s going to be a lot of internal linking opportunities back to crane rentals, crane services, types of cranes. I also made a note here that rent a crane is the second most popular head term next to crane rental. Since we’re using crane rental as the slug for the crane rental overview page, we’re going to use rent a crane for the main homepage.
That is the game plan, the initial game plan. Now these things could change in the future based on how things end up playing out, but this is the initial game plan. So this is a, and this is again, this is like the holy grail, this is like the bible of what we’re going to be doing for this project.
All of the SEO research that we did, the market research that we did, the competitor research that we did, all of that is baked into this game plan right here. So this becomes the most important deliverable. Alright, I’m gonna get out of that and now we’re gonna go into PPC.
So in the PPC folder you see we have a PPC campaign structure, we have a PPC forecast, and then we have PPC discovery notes. I’m just gonna open the notes first. What this ended up being is less about notes and actually more about an actual discussion here with the client.
I had a lot of conversations about, you know, when somebody rents a crane, what’s the average revenue, what’s the profit margin on that, how many of those do you do a month, do people re-rent cranes over and over and over again, how long do they rent them for, just a whole conversation that I needed to have, knowing like, alright, we’re putting together a strategy for how we’re going to get in front of people, what we’re gonna tell them when we get in front of them using PPC, how we’re gonna try to convert them, on and on and on and on. These are things that we have to know in order to map out a successful campaign. All right, so we’re gonna open the PPC forecast here.
I’m gonna hit View on Google. It’s gonna open this Google Doc. You can actually go into Google Ads and you can feed it a bunch of keywords that you’re planning on bidding on.
And you can tell it what your kind of campaign architecture slash strategy is going to be. You can put in sample budgets. It’s gonna give you estimated clicks, estimated impressions, and estimated cost, estimated click-through rate based on data in similar, like within that industry, really.
And it’s just gonna go all the way down the line to like, can you give it like a value per conversion? How many conversions are you likely to get? What’s the return on ad spend related to all of that?
Now, this is a forecast, right? It’s guesswork. It is based on real data that Google has available.
But at the end, it comes down to how well do you write the ads? How well do you do the targeting? How well do you do PPC account optimization?
Right? Male versus female, locations, time of day, day of week, on and on and on and on. All of the stuff, all of the levers that you have available to you, that you’re able to pull, how well are you pulling all of those levers?
And then beyond what’s happening in the actual Google Ads account, when the traffic actually gets to the landing page, how good is the copy? How good is the UX? How good is the UI?
How good is the offer? And then beyond that, obviously, we have to talk about how good is the follow-up? Okay, if the company gets leads, but Jane gets on the phone with them and she’s not good at selling, right?
They’re not gonna turn those leads into money in the way that they should be doing. Or what if Jane is a little lazy and takes 48 hours to get back to the person. Well, people don’t wanna wait 48 hours.
They’ve already contacted three other crane rental companies and one of those companies got the business. We got Jane the lead, the lead was on her desk, but she didn’t pick up the phone for 48 hours. Is that our fault?
Well, yeah, it actually is because when we’re driving this ship, okay, when I’m tasked with doing PPC for a company, best believe I’m asking, I’m asking, hey, who’s gonna follow up with these leads? How are they gonna follow up with them? How good are your processes around that?
I’m asking those questions, because ultimately at the end of the day, if the money in their bank account is not growing, you are getting fired. It doesn’t, you can’t say, well, we’re not Jane. It wasn’t us that took 48 hours to pick up the phone.
The client doesn’t care. All they know is they’re paying you a bunch of money and leads are not turning into dollars. Now they might fire Jane too.
They might fire Jane too, but guess what? You’re getting fired also, okay? So you have to do the legwork to make sure you know every part of this funnel and that every part of the funnel is built for success or designed for success basically.
Okay, let’s go into the actual campaign structure. So this is yet another sitemap kind of looking thing, but it’s just building out like, all right, here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna target each specific city, and these are the campaigns that we are going to go with here, like the ad groups more or less.
And again, this is, we put a recommended budget on here per month, times three cities, and this is really just a discovery kind of PPC strategy that we’re outlining here. This is not the full blown thing. This is like we’re gonna run tests, we’re gonna check the numbers, we’re gonna make sure everything is the way that we think it’s gonna run, and then if everything’s running based on what our theory was, now we’re gonna start pouring more and more and more and more money into it, and going deeper, deeper, deeper into the optimization.
But this is where we’re going to start. And it’s very important, when you are doing advertising for clients, PPC, Facebook ads, TikTok, YouTube, doesn’t matter. You have to explain to the client, look, advertising is based on experience and expertise, 100%, but that’s 100% accurate.
Expertise and experience, absolutely very important. But every single campaign is also based on theory. And a lot of them don’t work, and a lot of them do work.
Okay, and the experience and expertise a lot of times is when you launch a theory, knowing how to analyze the results, knowing how to interpret all that’s happening, okay, and figure out which part of it is not working well. Right, is it the ads? Is it the targeting of the ads?
Is it the copy? Is it the media? Is it the landing page?
Is it the copy on the landing page? Is it the UX on the landing page? Is it the offer?
Is it the form? Is it the on and on and on and on and on? It could be any of these things.
And the experience and expertise is being able to come in and take something that’s working okay and making it work really, really, really well. Making those adjustments and tweaks that are necessary. But the client has to know, hey, it’s very possible some of these dollars, like not every dollar can be guaranteed to produce an ROI.
Some of these dollars will get lit on fire. That is the process of figuring it out. You’ve got to figure it out as you go, because a lot of it is based on theory.
Okay. So this is the theory for the PPC that we’re gonna start with. And then we’ll jump out of there.
So that’s basically, and the PPC was not the main focus of this project. Not that like, they don’t even know, just to give you an idea. They had somebody doing their PPC for a little bit.
They don’t even know if their ads are still active. That’s where they’re at with PPC, okay? So it’s not like we’re taking over this, you know, well-oiled PPC account machine.
We’re not starting from scratch in terms of PPC. We’re going to do a whole audit of their account as well. But PPC is kind of like the, if you guys can make it work after all this other stuff is done, like our new website’s done, all of that, SEO is very important to us.
If you can make PPC work after that, then we would love for you to do that. But it’s not the main focus of the project. Okay, next is the competitor research.
Let’s dive into this one right here. I’m going to start with the competitive analysis for branding. This is one of those deliverables where I said this is not a typical deliverable that you’ll see from Digital Gravy, but we happen to be doing branding for this project and this is what our brand designer put together as a competitive analysis.
So we’ve got Phoenix over here, this is the client, and so all of their strengths, weaknesses, recommendations, we did that on brand, we did that on web presence, we gave every one of them a score, here’s all the core brands that they wanted to emulate, these are basically like the competitors that they were like, hey, these guys are doing really well in the industry, we wanna know what they’re doing great, what are their strengths, what are their weaknesses. Down here, these were national brands, not like direct competitors, but other people in the industry who are big, big, big players, you know, what do they look like in terms of analysis? Territory competitors, and then we had some non-standard rental companies.
There’s like some middleman crane rental companies in there. Think of like an Airbnb for crane rental type thing. Not companies that actually own and rent cranes, but act as that middleman.
Okay, so that’s a deliverable that was given. So we have an SEO dominance rating, and it says the purpose of this report is to compare SEO dominance among various competitor examples. Again, we were given the list of competitors.
All right, where do you guys rank among them? And so we put these in order, and you see Maxim Crane at the top. We did this based on their domain authority.
And then, you know, the actual organic traffic at the end of the day is kind of what matters the most. You can have a lot of authority, but you’re not really doing any content marketing, you don’t really have a service area network. So you’re not bringing in a lot of relevant traffic, that’s always possible.
So you can’t just go on domain authority, right? It’s domain authority, it’s traffic potential, it’s a lot of different things. This is referring domains right here.
So this is the number of like unique backlinks to the website. So that gets factored in as well. This is what influences authority right here for the most part.
Okay, let me go back. I clicked that link on accident. So what we gathered from this is that, there’s quite a large gap in authority from where our client is at to the people at the top.
All right. You can see one reason that is, 84 referring domains versus 523 referring domains. Backlinks are very important for authority.
And then traffic, I mean, this is organic traffic, right? Organic traffic, huge, huge, huge discrepancy in organic traffic. Now, what does this tell us?
This tells us that the current website is not doing a great job in terms of SEO. It’s not doing a great job in terms of content marketing. It’s not doing a great job in terms of gaining authority and market share.
Okay? So there’s a lot of room for improvement. So what we are proposing, the goal of what we are proposing, is to start to close this gap.
And then if we look at a website like this in position number four, we can see, hey, here’s a website with similar authority that’s actually doing much better than you, okay? And that goes to show, it’s not just a matter of improving authority, it’s like, there’s just a lot of stuff that’s not done on this client’s website that should have been done, and if they had been done, they would be more in the middle of the pack rather than at the bottom where they currently are. So this is very promising.
It lets us know, because there’s such great room for improvement, almost certainly we’re going to be able to get a lot of fantastic results for this client. If your client’s already at the top, like they’re bumping their head against the ceiling, it’s gonna be tough to make them a lot of promises and paint a big picture for them because they’re already bumping their head against the ceiling of some sort. When you have a client who’s at the bottom, you can just say, hey, I’ve got the confidence that we are going to be able to get you tremendous results from this new, because I can see all the pieces that are missing.
Imagine having a client that’s bumping their head against the ceiling, you look for missing pieces, there’s no missing pieces, I mean, what are you realistically gonna come in and do for them? Okay, so what we see here, and this is confirmed, that we should move forward with this project, absolutely, there’s so much ground to cover, so much that we can do for improvement, so much ROI to be achieved. And so that’s a really, really good thing to see.
All right, let’s go into UX UI competitor notes. So what I did is part of the competitor analysis, you go to every and you put, this is not running reports, this is not running, you know, audits that are, you’ve got a little app and you’ve got spiders crawling websites and telling you data, okay. This is literally putting hands and eyes on competitors’ websites.
And then you just see what you see. This is kind of like what we do on web design for dummies. Now, I don’t talk about all the technical stuff.
Oh, they didn’t put things in a proper list structure, and they didn’t have ARIA tags, and okay. Like, that’s not what this is about. This is about the major things and just interesting things of note, right?
So the first thing I started with was plain language navigation. So I noticed that this competitor, where other competitors have more technical stuff, this competitor was just like, you can lift it, you can rig it, you can haul it, you can engineer it, you can store it. It was more in line with layman’s terms, plain language type stuff.
And it was a point of conversation with the client. Like, what do you think about this? What do you think about what this competitor’s chosen to do versus what other people have chosen to do?
And so next one was case study examples. We talked about the importance of having case studies, the importance for local SEO, case studies in various key cities. And so I linked to some competitors who were also doing a similar strategy just so we could have conversations around that.
I gave a service area network example. Why? To show, hey, I’m selling you on doing this big thing called a service area.
Your competitors are doing it. And that’s one reason they’re beating you. Okay, so this was just to show them the things that we’re proposing,
0:29:54 your competitors are doing them, right? 0:29:56
This isn’t a novel concept or a novel strategy. This is not some idea that we just cooked up in our head. This is something that is very, very important and you can see that it’s important because your competitors are doing it as well.
I made a note about quote forms because every competitor that I looked at used a standard boring form with a bunch of fields that most people just don’t want to fill out. So what we’re going to propose is like a step-by-step form, right, or more interactive or conversational form. I think that that might be a good thing again, again, to test all of these things are like theory.
Here’s our theory. Okay. Based on what we see now, let’s see how that theory plays out.
And let’s be able to analyze the data and make the necessary adjustments. And this is why I say website management, absolutely critical, having an ongoing relationship with the client. Imagine the concept of, Oh, we’re just going to build a site and we’re gonna launch it for you and then you’re gonna take it over.
Like, you basically launched a theory out into the world and then now there’s, which is basically a plane that just took off, okay? And then the pilot straps up a parachute and jumps out the freaking door and now the passengers of the plane are like, did anybody else see that pilot jump out the plane? Who’s flying this plane?
Who’s flying this plane? Nobody’s flying the plane now. There’s got to be somebody around to fly the plane because what we just launched into the atmosphere is theory.
And now we have to look at how the theory is playing out and what adjustments need to be made. Man, I can’t tell you how often people just abandon their clients and they launch that plane, they jump out the window and good luck, right? That’s not how, that’s not how marketing works.
That’s not how, you know, building a central marketing, a digital marketing hub for a business. That’s not how this works. Phone and header.
I said, Hey, you know, almost all your competitors have a phone number prominently in the header, but your website does not. Okay. That’s a problem.
I noted that this one website used, I really, really liked these illustrations of cranes, where everybody else had actual photos of the cranes. You know, photos are, they’re boring. I mean, a crane, like a photo of a crane, it’s not great.
It’s tough to make it very photogenic because they’re so freaking big. So when I came across this, it struck me as different. It also struck me as very clean and very easy for people to see what the differences are.
Whereas if you’re looking at photos of cranes, especially if a photo doesn’t have proper scale, it’s like, ah, what am I really looking at here? But this presentation was different and I really liked it because it was simple. And this is something that my eye, this caught my eye as an outsider because somebody on the inside, think about this, an insider in the crane rental industry, they’re gonna look at photos of cranes and immediately see lots of things that most people who might be renting a crane don’t necessarily see.
But in a little simple, elementary, we could even describe it as, illustration, that goes a long way for more lay people who might be in charge of renting a crane. Okay, certification badges. I said these are important for social proof and trust.
A bunch of competitors had them. This thing I came across, nobody said anything in our initial conversations. Okay, we sat with this client in their office, had long discussions about various parts of the industry and what needs to be on the website.
Nobody said anything about load charts. But when I started looking at all the competitor sites, every single one of them had an area called load charts. Seemed to be very important.
So I was like, do we need to provide load charts for all cranes, right? Just things you find in this process that were not initially discussed. All right, so that was the competitor notes.
Next is competitor insights. This is a folder, so I’m gonna open this up. We’re gonna see insights on various competitors.
These are all, this is all data. This is all raw data. This helps us with building that initial site map.
I do include this kind of stuff so that clients can see, hey, this is what we analyzed. This is what we actually looked at, okay? We’re not just dreaming this stuff up.
We’re not guessing, okay? So like for Maximum Crane, top pages by organic traffic. These are the three, these are, if you want to take notes, okay, these are three key reports that I run on every single competitor.
Top pages by organic traffic. This is very easy to run from inside of Ahrefs. So top pages by organic traffic.
Look, in order, all of their top pages. These are the actual pages published on their website and the stats related to those pages, okay? Very, very, very important.
And it shows you over time, right? It shows you previous top keyword, current top keyword. Just on and on and on, a lot of stuff here.
Okay, I’m gonna go out. Next one, top keywords producing organic traffic. When you pull a keywords report for what is this company ranking for, you will get tens of thousands of results.
What I do is I take out all of the results that are not producing relevant organic traffic. Pages will rank for tons of stuff that drives zero traffic whatsoever. That doesn’t help you in your analysis, right?
So what I end up with is a report of keywords that are actually driving organic traffic and what URLs those keywords are found on, okay? And so this is, again, remember I said, I do my own research and find my own keywords based on my own research. Then I go to competitors and I say, okay, what did you guys find?
Or what are you guys ranking for that I didn’t find? I wanna make sure that we’re closing all gaps, that every stone is looked under, okay? All right, so that’s that.
And then top pages by links. I wanna know what kinds of pages are other sites linking to in this industry? And what’s on those pages?
Can we recreate some of those pages? Are they blogs? Are they resources?
Are they calculators? Are they like, what are they? What are they?
What are people linking to in this industry? And that’s what this report gives you right here. So here’s the pages.
Some of these are files. And I like to, what is the file? Is it a PDF?
Is it a, is it a load chart? Is that what is it? Okay.
Because if we have these same pages and resources on the new website, we can get these similar backlinks. And these backlinks then feed into authority of the website and on and on and on. Okay, so those are the three reports and I just ran those for all top four competitors, analyzed them, built all of that into our game plan and our strategy.
But all that raw data is there if the client wants to see it. Next was content ideas from competitors and these actually came out of those reports that I just showed you right. The top ranking pages a lot of those are articles okay and so content ideas I got my own content ideas from my own research but then I went straight to competitors and said hmm what are you guys ranking for right and this is article ideas like how a tower crane works, parts of a crane, what a crane engineers do, types of construction cranes, top crane companies in city.
This was a big one and this was just one competitor doing this. They had these pages called top crane companies in Atlanta, for example. They listed the top ten and themselves, okay, and it’s a strategy I talk about all the time, but confirmed that this is actually working, okay, because I need to give you the context for this.
This is not just articles these people wrote and published. These are articles ranking and driving organic traffic. These are concepts that we know work.
So in terms of these things, when we write them, we’re not writing them in theory. We’re not saying, well, theoretically, this is a good article concept. This should rank and it should bring you good traffic.
No, no, we know this to be the case because we pulled these ideas from reports that show ranking and traffic. All right, so that was good there. Next, if you wanna run this for all of your competitor in your competitor research.
People ask me all the time, what goes into competitor research? Well, you’re seeing it right here, okay? If you need help running these reports, I can do independent little videos, but you’re kind of seeing the overall strategy here.
The next is a keyword gap analysis. You’ll see the notes there are 263 keywords that two or more competitors rank for that you do not rank for. This is another easy report to run from inside of Ahrefs.
We’re gonna view this here. Here are the keywords, right? Tower crane, types of cranes, crane construction.
What’s the best way to find the load capacity of a crane? Parts of a crane, crane rigging, boom truck crane, cranes near me. These seem to be very, very important keywords.
Guess what? Competitors are ranking for them. Two or more competitors are ranking for these, but the client is not.
That is what a gap analysis is. It’s a gap in keywords. Here’s them ranking for stuff, here’s you not ranking for stuff, that’s the gap.
We’ve gotta close the gap, that’s what a gap analysis is. Okay, next one, we are going to look at link intersect. Basically a gap analysis, but instead of a gap analysis for keywords, it’s a gap analysis for links.
These domains, these competitors, I’m sorry, these domains, these other websites all link to your competitors, but they don’t link to you. That’s the gap. So these websites interacting with your competitors, that’s where they’re getting all their domain authority from.
You’re over here, not part of that linking. We need to close that gap. So if we look on here, we can see here are the actual domains where they are getting their backlinks from.
And so we can literally, when we decide that we want to, a lot of this can be done. If they want to pay for this, we’re not doing this for free, but this is another service that can be added on where we do outreach to these domains and we figure out, okay, are these, you know, what kinds of sites are these? Are they blogs?
So can we guest post? If they’re blogs, we can guest post. Maybe that’s what the competitor did.
We can look into that and see exactly how they acquired their link. Oh, look, they’re guest posting on this site. Let’s go guest post on that site.
Now we got the link. Okay. They could be directory pages.
Hey, look, they bought us a spot in this directory or just applied. Maybe it’s even a free directory. They got a backlink from that.
Let’s go get that link. All right. They could be, um, uh, a local business.
Okay. How did they get that link? They could be a, um, organization, a local organization.
It could be media. 0:40:52 All right.
0:40:52 How do we get the PR that they got? What did they, did they write a press release?
How did, how did they get that PR? Let’s go get that PR. 0:40:57
All right. 0:40:57 That’s a whole service in itself, by the way, multi thousand dollar a month retainer for that type of service.
Okay. That’s, that’s basically it is amounts to digital PR and, um, backlink acquisition. That’s what you sell that as multi thousand dollar retainer easily for doing that kind of work.
So this just sits here and it lets us know, Hey, Hey, by the way, these, I mean we could go get all these backlinks, that DR 19 that you have right now. Remember how your top competitors were DR 34, 35. This is how they got there.
Okay. So just anytime you’re interested in firing up that DR, let us know. We’ll put together a little retainer package for you.
We’ll go get all that authority for you, no problem. Alright, so there you go. It’s another service that you can sell if you know how to analyze this stuff and you know how to actually go and do it.
I don’t tend to do that work, I outsource it because I just hate it. I hate outreach, I hate digital PR type stuff. I don’t have time for it.
I don’t have time to manage people who do it in-house. So I give them the opportunities, okay, because I want to know as the person managing the website, hey, where these competitors get their authority from? So at any point in time when the client’s like, we’re ready, we’re ready to really ramp up our authority online, I just pick up the phone and go, hey, we’re ready, okay?
Whoever I’m outsourcing to, we’re ready to go. All right, cool. Let’s close that up.
Let’s go back here. All right, so that was Link Intersect. So that is the end of the competitor research folder.
Next we have the technical website audit. We don’t actually have to go and dive into that. It’s, again, it’s not really relevant.
I mainly pulled all of the existing pages on the website from that. And then I did use the audit as just to show them, hey, you know, there are a lot of issues with your current website. These are all going to get fixed up when we do the new project.
So just another reason, right? All this stuff, all these great reasons, this is just another reason why you don’t want to keep this old website around. And then the next step for us is going through and doing the copy and messaging workbook.
Remember all of the data, all of everything goes back and lands right here. This is the game plan for actually building the website. Once we do the copy and messaging workbook we are ready to start into the UX phase where we’re going to be doing the wireframe and in inside of the wireframes.
We’re gonna do this in frames for Figma. We’re gonna be in Figma using frames for Figma. And we will be doing the copy and messaging inside of those wireframes, getting all of that mapped out.
And then it’s gonna go straight over to design for the UI to be done. And after the UI or as the UI starts to get done, we’re gonna start in on development. Branding is being done right now.
They’re going through the rebranding process. So what our hope is is that as we’re doing UX and copy, right, for all of the pages, we’re doing all the wireframes, all the copy, all of that, the branding is getting done. The brand should get delivered when the wireframes and copy gets delivered.
And that way, we can immediately start on UI because the brand is going to inform the UI. And so we’re doing some stuff in parallel so that when both of these things are done, we’re ready to go right into UI. And then as UI screens are developed, like a homepage is approved, now we can start development.
We can do design and development in parallel as well. We’re still building approved finished concepts, but we’re not waiting for all the UI to be done before we’re like, oh yeah, we can’t start on any development until every UI screen is available. That’s not how we work.
Once an approved UI screen is done, starting with the homepage, then we immediately get started on development so that those two things can happen in parallel and we can expedite the process of this project. Do you have any questions? Is this what you expected to see?
Is this what you didn’t expect to see, give me your thoughts, give me your questions, give me your thoughts. I hope this was very, very helpful to you. If you need individualized videos on any part of this, let me know in the comments and I will add them to the list.
December and January, I really want to focus on anything involving discovery. I want everything kind of like, so that you guys can hit the ground running in January, doing everything you need to do for discovery. Just like what you see here.
Okay, so if anything is missing in terms of trainings for these steps or these parts of the process, let me know and I will button those things up with independent videos, individual videos and then you guys should have everything you need. videos and then you guys should have everything you need. All right, cheers.
