SEO Starter Guide: The Basics Google Search Central Documentation

Measure success using the KPIs you chose to see where you’re winning and where to invest more effort. Before you start your SEO strategy, note where you are now, where you want to be in the future, and how you’ll measure success throughout the SEO process. While SEO brings many benefits in any form, you will experience these benefits more when you have a well-developed strategy.

The Search Atlas On-Page Audit Tool assesses your page’s structure to look into optimization opportunities to improve its visibility, relevance, and user experience. Analyzing competitors’ SEO strategies involves studying how other websites in your industry attract and rank for organic traffic. SEO strategy plays a foundational role within the broader context of SEO marketing. SEO marketing involves a combination of tactics such as content marketing, link building, and technical optimization, all aimed at boosting organic visibility.

We could likely outrank this page by building a few more high-quality backlinks to our page. Google’s algorithm is a complex system that retrieves the most relevant data to deliver the best possible results for a search query. The algorithm considers over 200 factors to determine rankings, and the list is constantly updated. Ensuring your site is properly indexed is crucial, and unfortunately, indexing issues can be easy to miss. For example, a global leader in roofing materials experienced a steep drop in traffic after an accidental “noindex” tag was applied BHS Links to their entire site.

The Ultimate Topic Cluster Cheat Sheet & Checklist Bundle

Each tool plays a critical role in different stages of the SEO strategy creation process, from planning and execution to monitoring and refinement. The Search Atlas Keyword Gap Tool enables you to expand your keyword coverage, target new search queries, and strengthen your competitive position in search results. There are 10 steps to create an effective SEO strategy that helps your website rank higher, attract quality traffic, and meet your business goals. Don’t force keywords into your content where they don’t belong. This can make your website look spammy to search engines and users.

Figure Out That Keyword’s Search Intent

So even though long tails have relatively low search volume levels, they’re much easier to rank for. Keyword research is usually the first step of any legit SEO strategy. Depending on your audience, you could offer a free tool, a study report, a statistics roundup, a template, or even an infographic.

Meaning even new websites without massive budgets can rank for them relatively easily. Keyword research is the necessary grunt work – it’s the foundation of rankings, traffic, and conversions. If it’s weak, everything else in your SEO strategy will be too.

Update the content itself to reflect the latest changes in your industry. These pages likely don’t generate traffic or sales, so addressing them is a top priority. Indexing issues occur when a search engine tries to access a page on your website but fails to index it. Examples include 5xx server errors, 4xx errors, duplicate URLs, and noindexed pages.

Google Analytics can also be integrated into this dashboard so that you can monitor your site traffic along with rankings and your site’s Domain Authority. Luckily, a robust search engine optimization (SEO) marketing strategy will help you rank at the top of results for keywords related to your business. And the right SEO strategy elements will allow you to drive more valuable traffic to your site. After a few months, track how your blog posts are ranking and which keywords they’re ranking for. This can help you adjust subheadings and copy to leverage new search intent that your audience may be interested in.

• In other words, they publish a piece of content… and hope that people share it.
• Also, tracking indexed pages, conversions, ROI, and your rankings on SERPs can help you recognize your success as well as identify areas of opportunity.
• But it’ll usually be pretty clear which page is most relevant for each one.
• That’s why I recommend trying a few tools that specialize in bubbling up burning questions that people have.
• And therefore might make it more likely that you rank for those terms.

The study was shared extensively in the SEO community, and generated 1.4K backlinks from over 200 referring domains. Use the Backlink Gap tool to find domains linking to competing sites but not yours. When you have a plan, create high-quality content for both the pillar and cluster pages. Select the pillar and cluster pages you’d like to include in your strategy. Once you’re happy with your selection, export the list by clicking the “Export” button. Filter the suggestions by search volume, keyword difficulty, or intent.

This opens up the Content Gap report, where you’ll see the common keyword rankings among these pages. Look through the results to see if there are any subtopics you can cover. Now it’s time for me to show you real-life examples of link building in action.