I've accepted a request made by a local limousine company to optimize their newly created website for increased natural search traffic. This will be my first attempt at SEO, and after my initial research I divided this project into the following stages: Stage 1: Keyword Research Stage 2: On-Page Optimization Stage 3: Off-Page Optimization Stage 4: Analysis of Results Stage 5: Re-evaluation Much of my process will be recorded in this repository for later reference should I need to make changes in my approach. Because of my inexperience in this discipline, I have opted to take a simple approach to SEO and refine it as necessary as I go along. __________________________ Stage 1: Keyword Research To begin with, it is necessary to determine which specific keyword, or more accurately key-phrase, will be used to optimize the site for natural traffic in google searches. For this initial stage, I opted for long-tail keywords (keywords that have relatively low competition, referring to the long 'tail' of a decreasing, exponential curve on a graph) for which I have a greater chance of making the google front page after optimizing the website for the chosen phrase. I decided on some initial terms to begin with, about 20 or so, then used UberSuggest to generate more terms using the ones I initially came up with. My intention was to start with a very large number of terms, which I could then narrow down based on their estimated level of competition and their estimated freqeuncy of appearance in searches. Using an UberSuggest free trial I generated about 4,000 phrases. From there, I made use of Google Ads' Keyword Planner to upload the phrases and generate data on the search volume for each; with this estimation I could begin narrowing the phrases down in order to determine which of the 4,000 were possible long-tail keywords to use in optimization of the site. Because the limousine company website in question is very new--only a few months old--I needed to figure out approximately what level of competition I would be able to stand against in order to make the front page. My initial research informed me that this could be estimated based on the number of backlinks a site had, as backlinks are one of the main criteria by which google ranks websites in their searches. Backlinks are created as a website is linked to by another website, and google weighs a site in their searches depending on in part the amount of back-links it has as well as the reputability of the sites linking to it. Using SEMRush I determined the number of backlinks for the site to be 34. With this in mind, I decided to target sites with a Google Key-Word Planner competition value of 40-50 to begin with. This is off a hunch, based on some of the initial research I did, and it remains to be seen whether or not this will be a reasonable competition level for the site in its current state. Should the competition prove too great it may be necessary in the future to chose a keyword with less competition. Looking at a spreadsheet of the statistics provided by Google's Keyword Planner, I selected all relevant terms in the 40-50 range for further use. Such relevant terms included the names of areas in which the chauffeur company provides service. Of the search phrases chosen here, I will only be using one to initially implement the on-site optimization in the next stage of the project so it is necessary to narrow them further. To choose this target keyword, I made use of Google Trends to generate data and graphs regarding each term's frequency of use in google searches over the past 12 months, and over the past 5 years. While such terms as "Airport Transportation Atlanta" far outperformed the other phrases in their frequency of use, it would prove far too broad in its scope as airport transportation could cover anything from shuttle buses to airport car rentals to taxis, all of which are services not provided by the local chauffeur company in question. The majority of the clientele for the chauffeur service is composed of travelling business professionals looking for a "black car", "limousine", or "executive" transportation service to travel to and from the airport--and I needed the chosen key phrase to reflect this in order for it to be effective. Removing this outlier allowed me to narrow my search down to just three key phrases; one of which is nearly identical to another. <add graphs>