SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to a website through organic search engine results. It is a journey not a destination.
Quality of traffic. You can attract all the visitors in the world, but if they're coming to your site because Google tells them you're a resource for Apple computers when really you're a farmer selling apples, that is not quality traffic. Instead you want to attract visitors who are genuinely interested in products that you offer.
Quantity of traffic. Once you have the right people clicking through from those search engine results pages (SERPs), more traffic is better.
Organic results. Ads make up a significant portion of many SERPs. Organic traffic is any traffic that you don't have to pay for.
"Search engine optimisation is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimisations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results."
- Google’s Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide
Research - Plan - Execute - Followup
1. Research (Target Market & Competitors)
Ask questions about the client, the problems they solve for their clients and their target market
Review any existing data and history/analytics if it's available - get bench mark of how the existing site is doing.
Research competitors for keywords and tactics (SERanking & KWFinder)
2. Plan (Airtable - Keywords & Sitemap)
Keywords: Build a seed list of preferred keywords in KWFinder & from Google search (KWFinder also gives some competitor and search intent information)
Pull search volumes & Score for Relevance and put into client's Airtable
Create a sitemap (Flowmapp) and plan for keywords
3. Execute
Write quality content
Optimise content for SEO and usability (On page & with Yoast or SEOPress - HTML Titles & Meta Descriptions)
Promote and link build (within the site & externally)
Reverse engineer your success and repeat
4. Followup
Go back and check how it's all going.
Competitor Research
Keyword research
Process: duplicating discovery airtable for client
Process: Saving a keyword list in KWfinder
Process: Importing keyword list into airtable
Redirects
Links
Links control the flow within and between websites and also influence SEO - Rebecca Gill
“The number of internal links pointing to a page is a signal to search engines about the relative importance of that page. If an important page does not appear in this list, or if a less important page has a relatively large number of internal links, you should consider reviewing your internal link structure." Google
Site Structure
Good Overview Article from SE Ranking
https://seranking.com/blog/plan-create-solid-website-structure-important-seo
Website Audits
https://seranking.com/blog/plan-create-solid-website-structure-important-seo/
Gather Redirects:
Coming from an old site? and page names are changing, being deleted or adding new pages...
list all exisiting pages in Clients Airtable
which ones is the URL going to change on
what has Google indexed use command site: domainname.co.nz
map where these pages will go to on the new site
Do you need to note old HTML Title, MetaDescription and H1? Will need to do this if content is very different but URL stays the same. We don't want to loose any SEO advantages (Google Cred) that we already have if the site has been up for a long time.
Process: Kinsta redirects
Process: Htaccess redirects
Process: SEO Press redirects
Process: Redirection plugin redirects
Rebecca Gill's SEO FORMULA
1. Ask Questions – Ask a lot of questions about your client and their target market.
2. Research Keywords –Audit the website and the competitors. Grow a seed list of keywords and search volumes then rank them for relevance.
3. Map the Keywords– Map focused keywords to specific pieces of content.
4. Write Content – Create user friendly, high quality content.
5. Optimize Content - Optimize all on-page elements of the content. Add structured data if applicable.
6. Build Internal Links - Build internal links to the content via content.
7. Build Social Shares - Share content on third party sites or anywhere else
your target demographic spends time.
8. Build Off-Site Authority - Get your main URL noticed and your company mentioned via external sources to strengthen authority.
9. Check Ranking Progress - Give Google time to index and rank the content, then check on your progress.
10. Optimize Further – Ask yourself how can you improve your content, then fix what you missed.
11. Document and Repeat Success - Document what ranked, reverse engineer why it was a success, and repeat process on other content.