In this post, you’re going to learn exactly how to create and implement an effective SEO strategy, step by step. Fresh content with accurate data can keep visitors engaged and improve rankings. Use internal links strategically by directing people (and crawlers) to your most important pages, such as product or service pages.
On-page Optimization
Social media platforms are becoming more integrated with search engines. Businesses will need to optimize their social profiles and engage with customers directly through these channels to improve local visibility. Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) remains a cornerstone of local SEO. Recent updates have enhanced features like messaging, Q&A, and product listings, making it vital for businesses to keep their profiles updated and optimized. Google Business Profiles are a core component of search visibility because of how frequently the local pack still appears in user’s local search results. Local businesses that neglect claiming and optimizing their GBP are missing out on online visibility and local leads.
- Semrush is known for its position-tracking capabilities, making it ideal for monitoring keyword rankings and tracking progress over time.
- WordStream’s guest authors are experts, entrepreneurs, and passionate writers in the online marketing community who bring diverse perspectives to our blog on a wide range of topics.
- Blog articles are an exception to the spectrum, as they can target nearly every search intent.
- It requires discovering the words and phrases potential customers are likely to use when searching for content similar to yours.
- Marketing Hub is free, small businesses can use it, and it’s useful for digital marketing.
- While this doesn’t cover the full scope of how Google analyzes a website, it’s a solid start for building the technical aspect of your SEO plan.
Through developing topic clusters, you’re not only catering to your audience’s needs with targeted, relevant content but also optimizing your site’s structure for search engines. This approach can lead to improved rankings, increased traffic, and a stronger presence in your industry. By using powerful keyword research tools such as Semrush, Ahrefs and Moz, you can pinpoint low-competition yet high-volume terms that are sure to drive organic traffic to your website. You will be able to get a comprehensive overview of the data related to each term as well as make smart decisions about which keywords ought to be included in your content with these platforms. For instance, taking advantage of the Keyword Magic tool on Semrush allows for successful keyword proposals based off whatever information is provided by users. Along with Topic Research generating ideas for content creation should one require it too, downloading full reports for topics available also provides potential subtopics if required.
Stoica provides an example of what this looks like in practice. They then meet weekly to discuss their progress and bottlenecks. If you’re not quite sure about taking on SEO yourself, consider delegating the work to a team member. If you have a person interested in growth marketing, development, or even web design, this would be a valuable skill to help grow their career. But as I said, getting caught often results in a site being completely wiped out from search listings.
For example, the Personal Keyword Difficulty (PKD %) metric indicates how hard it’ll be for your website to rank in Google’s top 10 results for a given keyword. Themes may slow down sites and page speed is an issue for SEO. You may need to optimize a WordPress site for page speed using a plugin like WP Rocket, but also see our tips on How to pass the Core Web Vitals (without a WordPress caching plugin). It is always better to make sure that your hosting and your theme are fast out of the box rather than having to optimize this later.
It’s like checking the pulse of your website and adjusting your approach to keep it healthy and thriving. It’s important to regularly monitor and analyze your efforts to see what’s working and what needs improvement. This is where tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console come in handy. By focusing on these on-page factors, you give your content the best chance to rank well and engage your audience.
Choose a topic you want to get high rankings from your list of primary keywords. This must be specific but broad enough to create several pages around it. It’s a topic with a high search volume, suitable for a pillar page.
Add real value (not fluff)
You must follow this approach instead of creating ‘stand-alone pages’ for several reasons. As SEO has evolved, so have the ideas and practices (and at times, misconceptions) related to it. What was considered best practice or top priority in the past may no longer be relevant or effective due to the way search engines (and the internet) have developed over time. As you add images BHS Links to your site, make sure that people and search engines can find and understand them. Link text (also known as anchor text) is the text part of a link that you can see.
Then, use our Keyword Magic Tool to connect topics to keywords. If you need help with ideas for topics, use our Topic Research tool. A topic cluster is a group of pages that cover more detailed subtopics of one main subject and are linked together. And finding unlinked brand mentions (and asking for a link) is one of the best methods of SEO aimed at getting more backlinks. The Backlink Audit tool will show you how to do all of that—step by step.
