Let’s just start by saying, Google is amazing! There is so much FREE content available on SEO. But the trouble with all these guides, courses, articles, and scams is that you have to weed through all the junk.
If you are trying to do your own SEO and get results, you really have to do a TON of homework as well as updates on Google’s updates.
This is why I wanted to give you a quick summary and background to get your website up and going.
A bit of backstory:
If you guys haven’t seen any of my previous posts, I’ve built several of our own company websites with my team as well as helped others shape up their website and social media pages. If you’d like more background about us, you can check out our personal page at Wuwulife.
Bare with me a bit, since this will be a long post
These are some areas we will cover:
- Get your website to run and load 2x — 5x faster without much technical knowhow
- Optimize your landing pages to rank for direct intent keywords
- Create amazing content that ranks
- ZERO link-building efforts
If you are using WordPress, then use WP Rocket. It’s a WordPress plugin that does all the work for you to make your website run faster.
If you use Shopify, they also have a lot of Apps that can give your website speed a boost without needing any technical background.
Use SMUSH or any similar programs to compress all your images. This will significantly boost your website speed.
Let’s dive in the SEO Basics
Sitemap.xml file. A good sitemap shows Google how to easily navigate and find content on your website. Install YoastSeo on your WordPress site and they basically will create the sitemap for you. Otherwise, you can look for an online XML Sitemap generation tool.
Good Website architecture. Any webpage should be reached with no more than 3 clicks from your webpage.
Image format. JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP can be compressed a lot better than JPG or PNG images. Make sure to compress them so it doesn’t slow down your website loading speed.
Remove duplicate content. Duplicate content is the worst and Google will penalize you! Delete any duplicates.
Update ‘robots.txt’ file. Hide the unimportant pages from Google.
The big thing now is mobile pages, so this is something you do not want to neglect.
For both mobile and PC page loading speed should be under 3 seconds. And let’s be real. If your page doesn’t load for 5 seconds, a lot of your visitors will end up leaving anyway.
If you want to measure your website speed performance, there are plenty of websites that can give you insight. Google has its own speed performance analyzer.
In May 2020, Google rolled out its Core Web Vitals update. This is what it means:
- LCP — Largest Contentful Paint -> under 2.5s
- FID — First Input Delay -> under 100ms
- CLS — Cumulative Layout Shift -> under 0.1
Keyword Research
Once you’ve gone through the basics of optimizing your page, the next step is defining your SEO strategy.
Don’t try to rank for everything, it is incredibly hard. Again, plenty of websites that offer keyword searches and focus on areas that you can rank more easily in your category.
Write down what you want to focus on. Prioritize your content. Keep tracking of the publishing process.
Look for low competition, high traffic, and easy converting words as your priority.
Then go down to mid priority keywords and then low priority.
Once you have mapped out your keyword strategy, start writing good content blog posts. You want people to actually read them in order to get ranked.
Run your top keywords through UberSuggest by famous SEO guru Neil Patel and let the program do its magic. It will give you a complete guide of keywords related to your search.
Go through all the results it’s going to give you, extract anything that’s relevant, and your keyword research should be 90% done.
Create SEO Landing Pages
Optimize each page for their respective keywords.
You can do this by running the page content through an SEO tool.
If you’re not using WordPress, you can use SurferSEO. Just copy-paste your web page content and it’ll show you what to optimize.
Again, content quality plays a huge part. Write better, longer, and more informative content than your competition, and you will outrank them.
But you will need backlinks and a lot more backlinks than your competitors.
SEO Blog Content
Blog post keywords are way easier to rank for than your landing pages. In order to create good SEO content, you need the right keywords and blog content people want to read and want to share.
Understand your audience, and know what interests them. Don’t just write for the sake of inputting keywords.
A lot of beginners add in a lot of fluff to boost the article word count. DON’T. Every sentence should have some sort of value whether it’s informative, funny, or building the story.
If you aren’t good at writing or don’t have time, you can consider hiring writers for you.
Link-Building
Links are essential if you want your content or web pages to rank.
If look at all the top-ranking articles with the Moz Toolbar Extension, you’ll see that on average, each page has a minimum of 300 links and some over 100,000!
Remember: Well written content, long format, easy to navigate and proper formatting
It’s not uncommon to spend $20,000 per month on link-building efforts alone. Of course, if you are starting off, you need to work your way up to that kind of budget. And those are competitive markets like tech, CBD, gambling, health, fashion, fitness, design, etc.
There are a ton of link building ways/strategies, but let's just focus on a few for now
- Outreach program: Reach out and see if other sites would like to use your content as a resource guide.
- Guest posting: This is the most popular and easy ways to build links. Just ask if they accept guest post and send them a pitch.
- Most of these strategies work. Google also has a ton of resources to learn more if you need.
Simply put:
- Create good content to drive users
- Promote your content
- Rank on Google
- Viral infographics
- Share through social media
- Share through your email list
- Consider a small budget paid social media posts
If you do all this right and get a bit of traction, you’ll be surprised how many people will start linking to you without even asking.
By creating awesome content that helps people, and you get rewarded with links, shares, and traffic!
Interlink Your Pages
One of Google’s ranking factors is how long your visitors stick around on your website.
You want to encourage users to read through your article and then be interested enough to browse through your website. And this can be done by including links to your other pages that are relevant to your article.
Catchy Headlines
This is huge because it determines whether it will catch people’s interest to open your page or not. It also determines a lot on Google.
High-quality headlines determined by Google will be rewarded with better rankings.
You can use a scraping tool like Screaming Frog to extract the following data from all your web pages:
- Page title
- Page URL
- Old Headline
Delete all the pages that aren’t meant to rank on Google. Then, head over to Google Search Console and extract the following data for all the web pages:
- CTR (28 Day Range)
- Avg. Position
Make Improvements On-The-Go
SEO is a constant job and is constantly evolving, so you want to be always up to date.
Constantly audit your pages, your strategy, and see what else needs tweaking.
Hope this was informative. If you want shorter quick reads, you can check out more entrepreneurial articles here.
