How To Get Your Website To The Top Of SERPs Without SEO Knowledge [Ratatype's Experience]

Before starting to work on a project, it's crucial to determine the primary KPIs and set achievable goals. As they say, a goal properly set is halfway reached.

At the beginning of 2019, we released two new versions of the website: Ratatype.fr and Ratatype.es. And in the year's second half, we began their optimization and promotion. It's worth noting that we didn't have any prior experience. Luckily, Serpstat helped us figure everything out.

The first step was thorough industry research and determining the target region(s). We started by answering these questions:

You can set your goals based on the collected data and competitor analysis. For Ratatype, we aimed at 10,000 users per week for both projects.

As we were done with goal setting, it was time to devise a specific action plan.
It's vital to focus on both the big picture and minor details, and answer the following important questions:

Our main objective for both websites was link building and increasing traffic.

We selected Serpstat because it allowed us to:

Since our central SEO focus was improving our websites' backlink profiles, we dedicated a significant part of our strategy to it.

We used two methods to find our competitors:

• manual;
• automatic (using Serpstat

Both methods work. However, manual search for competitors tends to be very time-consuming, and some results may inaccurate. Therefore, we prefer the latter.

Serpstat has a tool that collects any domain's relevant competitors based on the similarities in keywords. All you need to do is go to Domain Analysis → SEO Research→ Competitors, enter our domain in the search bar, and select the database and region.

Here's our list of competitors in organic search, with plenty of useful SEO metrics:

You can also check the Competitors' graph in the Domain Analysis → Overview report. It determines the relevance of competitors based on the accuracy and completeness of semantics (keywords). In other words, it's based on the similarities in their semantic structure and level of visibility in search results.
The closer on the graph the website is to yours, the more relevant of a competitor it is.

You can also run your list of websites through Similarweb to asses traffic distribution and geo.

Next, add competitors to a table with all the necessary metrics:

We take each competitor from the table and check it with Serpstat for all the main metrics. First of all, we pay attention to the key SEO indicators, which you can find in Domain Analysis → Overview Report.

Since we are focused on our link-building strategy, we'd like to analyze competitors' backlink profiles. To do this, we go to the Serpstat Backlink Analysis tool. By the way, Serpstat has its own link index, so the data on backlinks in the service is always new.

When analyzing a competitor, we try to understand its link strategy. Let's say competitors have a lot of links from forums, it means they use crowd marketing.
If they have many backlinks from site analyzers and directories, it probably means that a competitor uses cheap ways of link building.

Let's take a look at an example of how we analyze a competitor's backlink profile.
We enter a competitor's domain in the search bare, select Backlink Analysis → Referring Domains and get the list of websites that refer to it:

Next, we go to the Anchors report to see the competitor's backlink anchors. Here we can gather ideas for our own anchor list.

Then, we go to the Top pages report to see the list of competitors' pages that have the most backlinks. We analyze each successful page and try to determine the factors that led to it.

Such an analysis helps to understand what methods your competitors use to improve their rankings, as well as collect linkbuilding ideas.

• Serpstat Backlink Analysis Tool: A Comprehensive Guide
• How To Find Up To 44% More Referring Domains: Comparing Serpstat and Ahrefs Backlink Indexes

These are just some free and easy ways to get first backlinks. If you'd like to learn more, you should definitely explore crowd marketing ;)

Outreach is a link-building method, aimed at establishing communication, and connections with editors, website administrators, bloggers, and journalists.

Outreach doesn't have to be just for getting backlinks. If done right and on good websites, it can drive a lot of targeted traffic and lead to many conversions.

We ended up publishing on two excellent websites, with traffic of about 1 million/month each. After the publication went live, we received a lot of unexpected bonuses: additional free traffic, a boost for the brand, and a new level of website traffic in general. You can see the results yourself:

In terms of internal optimization, our main goal was to expand the list of keywords our website ranked for. We went with competitor keyword research — with Serpstat, we searched for keywords our competitors rank for but our website doesn't.

We already had our list of competitors, so we started analyzing each website's keyword list. To do this, we used the Serpstat Domain Analysis → SEO Research → Keywords.

Serpstat also allows you to compare up to 3 domains' keywords and find the phrases that you're missing on your website. To do that, go to Domain Analysis → SEO Research → Domain vs Domain:

In the report, we can see the intersection of keywords for three domains. Most likely, if two competitors use the same keywords that most likely, they may be suitable for our website.

After collecting the keywords and clustering them, we added the missing keywords to meta tags, alt tags, and texts. Voila! All this helped us fill the sites with more high-volume keywords.

We ended up reaching excellent results, even though we have set quite ambitious goals. So, the initial goal was 10K per week for both projects, and after implementing the strategy, we got 9K. Super impressive, given how little we knew about optimization and how many mistakes we have made — we learned a lot from them! On the graphs you can see how much we have grown over this period:

We wanted to promote and optimize our websites — we did it! And we're still doing it.

Thanks to this experience, we have found a mechanism, using which we can promote our new language versions. After these, each new version will be much faster and easier. This result was due to hard work, faith in the product, and Serpstat, of course.