 I am super happy to be here. This is super impressive. And I came to talk to you about a bunch of things. There's two very important things you need to know about me. The first one is that I'm very lazy, and I'll always look for the quickest, fastest way to get stuff done, which I would say is a strategic advantage. Some other people might disagree. The second one is that I just got a new job. Thank you. And it comes with a buttload of imposter syndrome. So I sign the contract. I start my job. I sit in front of the computer, and I'm like, who the fuck hired me? I have no idea what I'm doing. I don't know if you can relate. But yeah, starting a job as senior SEO manager at Sanity, which is a fucking, wait, sorry. I'm very good. Sorry, sorry. A very good endless CMS. Instructed content platform stories were a lot. And I was like, I have no idea what to do, right? So I did what all of us here do. I turned to the internet. And there were so many helpful SEO resources, many created by people here, sitting in the front row, sitting over there. I know you. I've seen your faces on Twitter. Yeah, that's a lot. It was a lot of very overwhelming stuff. That's just generic best practice, right? Like, is this an SEO strategy? I was hired to be an SEO strategist. It's absolutely not. And then at some point in the entire mental breakdown that I was having, I remember that I'm actually an expert in SEO gap analysis, right? So let's ground it down and talk about it. Why a gap analysis? This is incredibly, incredibly unsexy topic, right? It sounds really boring. But personally, I really, really like it. And that is because it brings us back to first principles. It is we're not ranking in a vacuum, right? We are just trying to do better than our competitors. Ranking is as easy or as hard as doing better than your competitors. There's no more to it. There's only a few spaces on the first page on results in Google. And you need to be better than the billions of people that are trying to rank for the same stuff as you. I'm going to structure these gap analysis around the three pillars of SEO, right? So we're going to be talking about technical. We're going to be talking about links, slash, brand, slash, whatever. We're going to be talking about content. And the way that these three relate to each other. So technical SEO is there to help you delight your users and help search engines find you, crawl you, and understand you. Links are there to say, yeah, I vouch for this content. This person knows what they're talking about. But it is the content, ultimately, what's going to satisfy your user's queries. We're not just googling for the sake of googling. We want to get something done. So look at those three pillars and consider that if you're already the best of one of the three, you're not going to move the needle by furthering that advantage, right? If you're the fastest website, if you've got the most content, if you've got the most links, by getting more links, you're not going to get better. By getting more content, you're not going to get better. You need to find what's the one that your competitors are doing better than you, right? And in order to do that, we need to answer three questions. First one, who are your competitors? Like, really, who are your competitors? We've all landed into a new company, and they've been like, oh, yeah, we're competing against Amazon or against Microsoft. And it's like, no, you're not, right? Let's get that out of the way. Then we're going to have to talk about, what are they doing? And last but not least, especially very much not least, how are we going to do it better? So it begins with competitor identification. Question number one, who are your search competitors? There's three, in my opinion, there's three ways to identify a search competitor. The very first one is they are satisfying the same need for you, right? So if by hiring your competitor, the consumer need gets satisfied, you're no longer needed. Therefore, that's one condition to be a competitor. They're ranking for the same keywords that you are trying to target, and they're speaking to a similar segment of the audience. So you have a similar audience persona. That's how you know you're competing with these people on the SERPs. It's not just a like for like competitor kind of thing. There's two approaches to competitor identification coming from these principles. We've got a top-down approach, very, very easy. And we've got a bottom-up approach that builds a lot of relationships within the business. The top-down approach, we know this one. We go to sales, and we're like, OK, who are your competitors? Who are you competing with? We go to customer service, and we ask them what comes up when you are talking to our customers. Do they ever bring up, this one does it better, this satisfies my needs better? And then you check your list against your favorite competitor research tool. We've got millions. So just cross-check it. And then you've got it. Combine the tool list, and you've got the sweet spot between product competitors and actual search competitors. This is really easy. It's a really fast approach, and it's really good to satisfy your C level, because you're using their input and combining it into a bit of a middle ground. What I like better is the bottom-up framework. So in the bottom-up framework, you identify your target keywords. If you want to be really specific and really targeted with your efforts, you should also cluster them by topic. You download the top 10 results from the SERPs and measure how much of the SERPs this competitor is dominating, right? And you can drill down by topic. As I was saying, this is really key, and it ties up very nicely with Andy's talk at the very beginning of the conference, which was a very intimidating talk, because now I have to come on stage and meet that. But since this is a little bit tricky and hard to explain on a conference, you've got a template here with a step-by-step guide that you can follow. So we know who our competitors are. It's time to start benchmarking. It's time to understand what they're doing and how we are performing against them. It's time to reverse engineer your competitor's SEO strategy. And as I was telling you, I am lazy, and I'm going to look for the fastest way to get around this. I'm going to let them and their work and their data do the work for me. Perfectly fair. We're going to start looking at content metrics, right? So something that you can be looking at is keyword rankings in the top 30 position, the estimated traffic for editorial URL, which is something quite interesting, because it measures the quality of the content. You can do a keyword gap analysis to understand where they are that you're not. An estimated traffic by type is something that I really enjoy as well, because it really tells me where they're focusing their content efforts, right? For SaaS, it is very relevant to look at branded versus unbranded traffic, their editorial traffic, and product traffic, which is where the conversions are going to happen. So I did this, right, for my company. I started looking at what Sanity is doing and what our competitors are doing. I realized that we have some of the highest editorial traffic, but not the biggest editorial traffic in general. That means that we're probably lacking in product traffic. We're probably lacking in branded traffic. We'll look at this later. We've got the least content or some of the least content, but the content that we have performs really well. That is the column titled editorial efficiency, which is something that I made up for this. And yeah, for every URL that we have on our editorial section, we've got significantly more traffic than our competitors. Then it seems a little bit obvious that what we need to be doing is putting out more content. Then we're going to be looking at brand metrics. We're going to be looking at referring domains, at backlinks, domain authority. Bear with me. We're going to perform a link up. Where do they have links that we don't have? We're going to look at link growth. Have these people been link building in the last six months? Is my market a market that focuses a lot on building links and building brand? I'm going to be looking at brand surge volume, because it informs how we are sitting within the brand perception for the market. I'm going to be looking at branded traffic, which does something very similar, and something that's not quite quantitative, but more qualitative is brand positioning. So this is what this looks like for sanity. Here we can tell that we are very clearly below average in terms of branded traffic, in terms of backlinks, referring domains, kind of in the middle when it comes to DA. And brand surge were actually quite high, which is something that surprised me. And when it comes to link growth, we are the biggest. But this is one of the most actively link building markets that I've worked on. These are numbers that I don't typically encounter when I'm doing a link growth analysis. This is measuring how many the growth in the last six months. We have grown by 65% of referring domains, which is crazy. But one of our competitors has grown by 58%, which is also very, very intense. So yeah, I can see very clearly that we're going to be needing some brand work. We're going to be needing some link building. We've got brand volumes, so maybe our PR team is not really using linkable assets. It's a conversation that I'm going to have to have, and then I'm going to have to type in. And then I look at it at the brand positioning here. This is not quantitative. This is qualitative. And I really like looking at it to understand how my competitors are going to be talking about themselves within the market. I look at what our H1 on the home page does, and I look at what our meta description says, along with everybody else. So most of our competitors, we can see are talking about headless CMS, headless CMS, managing content. We're talking APIs. We're talking fast, fast. That is sort of the value proposition that's being used in the market. And on our home page, we've got content is data. What does it mean? I have no idea. I don't think anybody knows. We need to have a conversation with the brand team, because that's weird. Anyway, moving on to Tech SEO. It's one of those stack lines that's like, who wrote this? Anyway, Tech SEO metrics. I hate saying it depends. As an SEO, I hate that my answer is it depends. But it does depend, right? The needs that you have as a website or with your trading your website as a product than you should are going to vary depending on the niche that you're in. I'm in SaaS. I love SaaS. SaaS is pretty easy to manage from a tech SEO perspective. I have to focus mostly on web performance optimization. I have to check that everything is scrollable. I have to check that everything that I want to index is indexable and that all my major files are working as they should. But as we saw on a reach talk, if you're in an e-commerce, you're going to be in a very different situation. So trying to find the most universal solution for most niche, I'm going to be looking at core web vital scores, page fit insights, and performing some manual checks. So this is where we are. Sanity, we're kind of like middle to top tier when it comes to core web vitals, page speed, and on mobile and on desktop. Essentially, what I've done for the core web vital score is I've grabbed all the good, like the percentage of good URLs for each of the main core web vitals. And I've averaged them as the score, generic score. We're doing kind of like mid to top tier in the market. It wouldn't be like the biggest area of focus for me. So yeah, we are found out what we're below average at, and we're going to work on it. That's where the results are. So what are the results of this benchmark? We're kind of averaged for content, basically, because we're not publishing enough. We're below average when it comes to links, even though our brand has one of the best brand recognitions. And we're kind of averaged in Tech SEO, which is OK. I'm good with that. So what are we going to do next? We've got a gorgeous spreadsheet. As you saw, everything was like conditional formatting. We've got the brand colors in there. The C3 loved it. But it's just a spreadsheet. I've not gained any traffic. Because without execution, there's no ROI. And execution is scary. This is also something that Arish mentioned earlier in her talk. When you push the Life button, you're kind of proving or disproving whether or not you're a good SEO. And that is terrifying to me. But we need to execute. Otherwise, there is no point to our jobs. And I'd like to keep mine. So you're going to have to make a growth plan. The very first step, identifying our weakest pillar, we've done that. Brand is my weakest pillar. And I'm going to have to understand why I'm not performing. I've got brand recognition. I've got branded searches. I'm growing in links. But I don't have enough branded traffic. And I don't have as many backlinks as some of my competitors do. So for branded traffic, we're going to do a little project of branded. We're going to try to tackle all the queries of people looking for our brand plus something else. For example, there is quite a lot of searches around sanity SEO. People trying to figure out whether or not we're good for SEO. And all those searches are going to the home page or to people talking about it on Reddit because we don't have that content. So we're going to create that content. We're going to make compare pages. There is an entire editorial plan planned out. And we're going to be looking at doing some digital PR and some link building both to keep up with our link growth and also the link growth of the market, which again, it is crazy. And try to support our existing PR efforts with some linkable assets so that all of that brand search gets translated into domains and referring domains as well. Then I'm going to roadmap how this is going to improve. I've talked you through some of the steps that I have considered, a branded search content project, some collaborations with PR. And I'm going to try and get stakeholder buy-in. A little secret here. Start with a pillar that requires the least buy-in. When I'm talking about doing link building, about doing digital PR, especially if I use the word digital PR, this needs to go to the CEO. This has definitely got to be a talk with the CMO. This needs to get CEO approval. It is likely that I'm going to have some layers of approval beforehand. And I just arrived at this job. Nobody knows if I'm good at it or not. So this is going to be very difficult for me. So I'm just going to go with content, which is also average or slightly below average. And it's a very quick win for me. And then I'm going to be able to get buy-in for the brand staff. So we're talking content. We're going to be combining the branded content project that I was telling you about with some editorial projects as well. And just try to leverage that editorial efficiency that we've got against competitors, even though we are one of the websites in our market with the least amount of editorial URLs. So we're going to go for it. And then it's a trick part you've got to execute. I know this was a lot, so make it yours. You've used your best judgment. The metrics that I've used might not be the ones that work for you. If you're not in SAS, you definitely need to be looking at a lot more tech CEO stuff that I am. So use this template, make yours, change it up to you. It's there. Now, do I know what I'm talking about? I've been an SEO for about eight years. I've been working in media, in SAS, in e-commerce. I've been an agency side. Ola introduced me as having a degree in marketing and a master's degree in digital psychology and one in digital business, which, by the way, was a waste of money. Generally, don't do that. And SEO strategy is kind of my job, right? I'm here to be strategic and show you what to do. Speaking of strategy, I've got a little thing for you. I've got a free upgraded plan on Sanity. If you go to sanity.io slash mosque on, it's going to make me look really good with my new boss. So I'd really appreciate if you signed up. Thank you very much.