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A 7-Step SEO Process For Long-Term Search Success

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A 7-Step SEO Process For Long-Term Search Success

It’s no secret that the adventure of SEO means being in it for the long game.

Optimization is a never-ending process.

One day, you’re ranking at the top of the search results – and the next, your competitor publishes something new that knocks you down a rung.

The promise of SEO can bring traffic, revenue, and growth to your business but many marketers give up right after they begin. They love the promise more than they love the process.

In fact, the process holds the key to realizing your end goal in SEO.

Understanding The SEO Process

SEO is like fitness.

In physical fitness, there are no shortcuts to game the system (i.e., your body) unless you’re OK with taking serious health risks.

You need to have a plan and stick to it. That means exercising, eating right, and pushing yourself to continuously improve naturally.

Similarly, in SEO, there’s no way to “game the algorithm” (e.g., Google) unless you expect to cut corners – something I don’t recommend.

So, I was quite surprised recently on a monthly call to learn that one of my large clients was impatient with the SEO process.

How does someone so successful – and one who typically follows a process for the promise of more clients and cases – not understand and love and respect the SEO process?

You can’t get to the promise without going through the process.

SEO (and most forms of digital marketing) is a process that, with patience and strategy, will bring you the promise of new traffic, leads, clients, revenue, and growth.

To understand the process you have to create a plan, have a strategy, and know all the steps in the process.

1. Audit

The Process

Our process always begins with a technical and/or a content audit.

Technical Audit

A technical audit looks at absolutely every element on the site that can impact your SEO performance.

One of the most important of all these elements is speed.

I’ve seen so many websites put a large video introduction on the homepage that takes far too long to load.

The result?

You have a high bounce rate and have lost a potential client or customer.

If only they did a smaller version of the video or moved more relevant content above the fold, their speed and conversions would be much better.

A technical audit should be in-depth and take weeks to complete, depending on what’s wrong with the site.

Content Audit

If you have a large website with thousands of pages of content, then it’s definitely worth doing a content audit.

A content audit will help you identify which pages are performing well and which ones are underperforming.

Then you can make decisions about which piece of content to keep, optimize or rewrite, or remove from your website altogether.

When you remove content from your website, you may see a drop in traffic – but that’s the point. You want to deter non-relevant traffic.

Non-relevant traffic (i.e., visitors who are not aligned with your target audience) is unlikely to convert into clients or customers. In that sense, that traffic doesn’t really benefit your business.

By auditing your content, you can “prune” out the content that’s driving non-relevant traffic and then focus on optimizing the content that’s likely to bring the best results for your business.

Then, once search engines index all this optimized, relevant content, you should begin to see more conversions.

The Promise

By going through the process of a technical audit, content audit, or both, you will have a complete understanding of everything that needs to be fixed in order to rank well in organic search.

SEO is a puzzle. Put the pieces together.

It is just the first step. But the first step can sometimes be the hardest.

Now it’s time to build upon that momentum.

2. Technical SEO

The Process

When it comes to technical SEO, there’s a lot to think about, including:

Improving your technical SEO requires a holistic approach; tackling just one item on this list won’t really move the needle. You need to consider everything if you want your website to perform.

I like to use the analogy of a house here:

A house needs a foundation, electrical, plumbing, walls, and a roof. If you don’t have all these things, you don’t have a house. You have a shell.

The same is true of technical SEO. You need to get all of these elements right to have an optimized website.

The Promise

By increasing the speed, functionality, and user experience (UX) of your website, you’re likely to see more conversions.

This is because users will find your website easier to navigate, read, and engage with.

After conducting a technical audit, you’ll have a list of technical blockers that may be hindering your site’s performance.

Optimize these, and you’ll make your website faster, crawlable, and in a better place to be indexed by search engines.

In fact, we recently made fixes to a site in the brewing industry.

After fixing all the errors, this company saw a 1,100% increase in traffic.

That’s the promise of technical SEO!

3. Keyword Research

The Process

Keyword research is an integral part of the SEO process.

Without keyword research, you’ll only be making guesses about how users are searching for your business, products, or services.

Keyword research tools reveal how many users are searching for a particular term, how difficult it is to rank for that term, and which related terms people are also using to find information online.

This process starts with thinking about the hypothetical terms your target audience may be using to find your business and then using SEO tools to either validate or refute your findings.

Researching your competitors’ sites is another good way to surface keyword opportunities.

Finally, keyword research helps you uncover geo-specific keywords to help you localize your SEO strategy.

I highly recommend reading Roger Montti’s excellent guide, How to Do Keyword Research for SEO: Everything You Need to Know.

The Promise

Keyword research helps you uncover which keywords are most valuable to you.

Optimizing your content around high-value keywords is what will get you in front of your potential clients or customers when they need you most.

If people can’t find you when they’re looking for a service or product you offer, then they can’t buy from you. It’s that simple.

4. Location Demographics

The Process

Whether you’re doing SEO for a local business or a client who offers a service in a specific region, you know the importance of location.

Much like buyer personas, you need to understand how people search for local businesses and service providers, and who they are.

That means you need to ensure you have accurate NAP (name/address/phone) information and content that references your service area, whether it’s a state, city, or neighborhood.

Claim and optimize your Google Business Profile listing.

The Promise

The goal of your website is to speak to your target audience. And when I say your “target audience,” I mean potential customers or clients.

Demographic research will reveal tons of helpful information about where your target audience is searching for goods, services, or information. You can then use this data to inform your targeted, localized SEO strategy.

Keep in mind that Google rewards websites based on factors such as relevance, distance, and prominence.

The promise of SEO in this phase is if you produce a website experience that’s relevant, localized, and authoritative, Google is more likely to rank your content and display it to your target audience.

5. Content Strategy

The Process

You need a content strategy. Here’s a proven strategy.

Foundational Content

This is your core content that targets your main keywords and topics. Create content that is about your services or products (your “money” keywords).

You can further enhance this content by writing about other relevant services and products you offer and any relevant long-tail keywords.

FAQ Content

Create pages that answer common questions your audience is likely asking using Google.

Make sure it has an SEO-friendly URL, you use breadcrumbs, and it is more comprehensive than any other page on the topic (make sure to check the competing pages in the top 10 positions).

Authoritative Content

Let your clients create content to demonstrate their expertise and authenticity.

User Experience

Think about ways to enhance your content (e.g., using visuals), your website navigation (e.g., linking to other relevant pages on your website), and calls to action (e.g., free consultation, make an appointment, content download).

The Promise

Creating content with a purpose will attract the people you want to become your customers or clients.

Make it easy for people to understand who you are, what you offer, and find exactly what they’re looking for.

You will be rewarded with more leads and conversions!

6. Content Writing & Editing

The Process

Your client may want to write their own content, or they may want you to do it.

Either way, the content needs to be optimized.

Always think about the audience or personas first, but without neglecting SEO best practices.

You want to write content that people will engage with and share (and that Google will index and reward with great rankings).

Ultimately, it’s about moving people toward a conversion.

If you haven’t already, make sure to read Ron Lieback’s 47 tips to master SEO writing.

The Promise

Content is essential when it comes to communicating your brand’s message to your target audience.

It also plays a significant role in SEO; if well optimized, your content can drive more organic traffic to your website.

Content also helps to demonstrate authority, relevance, and trust. Well-written, optimized, accurate, and authoritative content is the best way to do that.

Your content should not simply be a medium by which you shoehorn keywords into your website.

Instead, it should speak of the value your business provides, how users can engage with your business, and overall provide a positive experience for your prospective customers.

On the flip side, poorly written content will do the exact opposite – it will send users running to your competitors!

So, don’t treat content as an afterthought. Be sure to invest in high-quality, optimized content.

7. Ranking

The Process

OK, you can’t control Google or any search engine’s rankings.

However, you absolutely can understand how search algorithms work, which helps. But there are never guarantees.

That said, there is one process that can work.

Be excellent at all of the previous points we’ve discussed so far and you should see SEO success.

  • Know your audience.
  • Create great content for your audience.
  • Provide a great website experience for your audience.

Is it easy? No.

But it works!

The Promise

If you do everything you possibly can to optimize your site and build your brand, and you offer a quality product or service, then it’s inevitable that you will be rewarded with the organic search visibility you deserve.

Conclusion

“Success is a journey, not a destination.”

This quote rings just as true for SEO as it does for life.

If you’re always looking at the end result, you’ll miss the adventure, learnings, and experience of the process.

Every successful SEO strategy starts with a plan. Then, it’s a matter of putting in the work for the long haul.

SEO is a marathon, not a sprint.

The only way to get to where you want to be is to develop and follow a process. This process can evolve over time, but a proper plan is way better than “winging it” when it comes to your SEO strategy.

Then, you can celebrate success at every milestone, improve your approach over time, and most of all, enjoy the process of SEO over your business’s lifetime.

More Resources:


Featured Image: ChooChin/Shutterstcok




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State Of Marketing Data Standards In The AI Era [Webinar]

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State Of Marketing Data Standards In The AI Era [Webinar]

Claravine and Advertiser Perceptions surveyed 140 marketers and agencies to better understand the impact of data standards on marketing data, and they’re ready to present their findings.

Want to learn how you can mitigate privacy risks and boost ROI through data standards?

Watch this on-demand webinar and learn how companies are addressing new privacy laws, taking advantage of AI, and organizing their data to better capture the campaign data they need, as well as how you can implement these findings in your campaigns.

In this webinar, you will:

  • Gain a better understanding of how your marketing data management compares to enterprise advertisers.
  • Get an overview of the current state of data standards and analytics, and how marketers are managing risk while improving the ROI of their programs.
  • Walk away with tactics and best practices that you can use to improve your marketing data now.

Chris Comstock, Chief Growth Officer at Claravine, will show you the marketing data trends of top advertisers and the potential pitfalls that come with poor data standards.

Learn the key ways to level up your data strategy to pinpoint campaign success.

View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.

Join Us For Our Next Webinar!

SaaS Marketing: Expert Paid Media Tips Backed By $150M In Ad Spend

Join us and learn a unique methodology for growth that has driven massive revenue at a lower cost for hundreds of SaaS brands. We’ll dive into case studies backed by real data from over $150 million in SaaS ad spend per year.

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GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After ‘Unexpected’ Delays

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GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After 'Unexpected' Delays

OpenAI shares its plans for the GPT Store, enhancements to GPT Builder tools, privacy improvements, and updates coming to ChatGPT.

  • OpenAI has scheduled the launch of the GPT Store for early next year, aligning with its ongoing commitment to developing advanced AI technologies.
  • The GPT Builder tools have received substantial updates, including a more intuitive configuration interface and improved file handling capabilities.
  • Anticipation builds for upcoming updates to ChatGPT, highlighting OpenAI’s responsiveness to community feedback and dedication to AI innovation.

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96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here’s How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

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96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

It’s no secret that the web is growing by millions, if not billions of pages per day.

Our Content Explorer tool discovers 10 million new pages every 24 hours while being very picky about the pages that qualify for inclusion. The “main” Ahrefs web crawler crawls that number of pages every two minutes. 

But how much of this content gets organic traffic from Google?

To find out, we took the entire database from our Content Explorer tool (around 14 billion pages) and studied how many pages get traffic from organic search and why.

How many web pages get organic search traffic?

96.55% of all pages in our index get zero traffic from Google, and 1.94% get between one and ten monthly visits.

Distribution of pages by traffic from Content Explorer

Before we move on to discussing why the vast majority of pages never get any search traffic from Google (and how to avoid being one of them), it’s important to address two discrepancies with the studied data:

  1. ~14 billion pages may seem like a huge number, but it’s not the most accurate representation of the entire web. Even compared to the size of Site Explorer’s index of 340.8 billion pages, our sample size for this study is quite small and somewhat biased towards the “quality side of the web.”
  2. Our search traffic numbers are estimates. Even though our database of ~651 million keywords in Site Explorer (where our estimates come from) is arguably the largest database of its kind, it doesn’t contain every possible thing people search for in Google. There’s a chance that some of these pages get search traffic from super long-tail keywords that are not popular enough to make it into our database.

That said, these two “inaccuracies” don’t change much in the grand scheme of things: the vast majority of published pages never rank in Google and never get any search traffic. 

But why is this, and how can you be a part of the minority that gets organic search traffic from Google?

Well, there are hundreds of SEO issues that may prevent your pages from ranking well in Google. But if we focus only on the most common scenarios, assuming the page is indexed, there are only three of them.

Reason 1: The topic has no search demand

If nobody is searching for your topic, you won’t get any search traffic—even if you rank #1.

For example, I recently Googled “pull sitemap into google sheets” and clicked the top-ranking page (which solved my problem in seconds, by the way). But if you plug that URL into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, you’ll see that it gets zero estimated organic search traffic:

The top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demandThe top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demand

This is because hardly anyone else is searching for this, as data from Keywords Explorer confirms:

Keyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demandKeyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demand

This is why it’s so important to do keyword research. You can’t just assume that people are searching for whatever you want to talk about. You need to check the data.

Our Traffic Potential (TP) metric in Keywords Explorer can help with this. It estimates how much organic search traffic the current top-ranking page for a keyword gets from all the queries it ranks for. This is a good indicator of the total search demand for a topic.

You’ll see this metric for every keyword in Keywords Explorer, and you can even filter for keywords that meet your minimum criteria (e.g., 500+ monthly traffic potential): 

Filtering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords ExplorerFiltering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Reason 2: The page has no backlinks

Backlinks are one of Google’s top three ranking factors, so it probably comes as no surprise that there’s a clear correlation between the number of websites linking to a page and its traffic.

Pages with more referring domains get more trafficPages with more referring domains get more traffic
Pages with more referring domains get more traffic

Same goes for the correlation between a page’s traffic and keyword rankings:

Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywordsPages with more referring domains rank for more keywords
Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywords

Does any of this data prove that backlinks help you rank higher in Google?

No, because correlation does not imply causation. However, most SEO professionals will tell you that it’s almost impossible to rank on the first page for competitive keywords without backlinks—an observation that aligns with the data above.

The key word there is “competitive.” Plenty of pages get organic traffic while having no backlinks…

Pages with more referring domains get more trafficPages with more referring domains get more traffic
How much traffic pages with no backlinks get

… but from what I can tell, almost all of them are about low-competition topics.

For example, this lyrics page for a Neil Young song gets an estimated 162 monthly visits with no backlinks: 

Example of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content ExplorerExample of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content Explorer

But if we check the keywords it ranks for, they almost all have Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores in the single figures:

Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks forSome of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for

It’s the same story for this page selling upholstered headboards:

Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks forSome of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for

You might have noticed two other things about these pages:

  • Neither of them get that much traffic. This is pretty typical. Our index contains ~20 million pages with no referring domains, yet only 2,997 of them get more than 1K search visits per month. That’s roughly 1 in every 6,671 pages with no backlinks.
  • Both of the sites they’re on have high Domain Rating (DR) scores. This metric shows the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile. Stronger sites like these have more PageRank that they can pass to pages with internal links to help them rank. 

Bottom line? If you want your pages to get search traffic, you really only have two options:

  1. Target uncompetitive topics that you can rank for with few or no backlinks.
  2. Target competitive topics and build backlinks to rank.

If you want to find uncompetitive topics, try this:

  1. Enter a topic into Keywords Explorer
  2. Go to the Matching terms report
  3. Set the Keyword Difficulty (KD) filter to max. 20
  4. Set the Lowest DR filter to your site’s DR (this will show you keywords with at least one of the same or lower DR ranking in the top 5)
Filtering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords ExplorerFiltering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

(Remember to keep an eye on the TP column to make sure they have traffic potential.)

To rank for more competitive topics, you’ll need to earn or build high-quality backlinks to your page. If you’re not sure how to do that, start with the guides below. Keep in mind that it’ll be practically impossible to get links unless your content adds something to the conversation. 

Reason 3. The page doesn’t match search intent

Google wants to give users the most relevant results for a query. That’s why the top organic results for “best yoga mat” are blog posts with recommendations, not product pages. 

It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"

Basically, Google knows that searchers are in research mode, not buying mode.

It’s also why this page selling yoga mats doesn’t show up, despite it having backlinks from more than six times more websites than any of the top-ranking pages:

Page selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinksPage selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinks
Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"

Luckily, the page ranks for thousands of other more relevant keywords and gets tens of thousands of monthly organic visits. So it’s not such a big deal that it doesn’t rank for “best yoga mats.”

Number of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga matsNumber of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga mats

However, if you have pages with lots of backlinks but no organic traffic—and they already target a keyword with traffic potential—another quick SEO win is to re-optimize them for search intent.

We did this in 2018 with our free backlink checker.

It was originally nothing but a boring landing page explaining the benefits of our product and offering a 7-day trial: 

Original landing page for our free backlink checkerOriginal landing page for our free backlink checker

After analyzing search intent, we soon realized the issue:

People weren’t looking for a landing page, but rather a free tool they could use right away. 

So, in September 2018, we created a free tool and published it under the same URL. It ranked #1 pretty much overnight, and has remained there ever since. 

Our rankings over time for the keyword "backlink checker." You can see when we changed the pageOur rankings over time for the keyword "backlink checker." You can see when we changed the page

Organic traffic went through the roof, too. From ~14K monthly organic visits pre-optimization to almost ~200K today. 

Estimated search traffic over time to our free backlink checkerEstimated search traffic over time to our free backlink checker

TLDR

96.55% of pages get no organic traffic. 

Keep your pages in the other 3.45% by building backlinks, choosing topics with organic traffic potential, and matching search intent.

Ping me on Twitter if you have any questions. 🙂



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