SEO, on the other hand, is one of the most effective channels in generating organic traffic and building online awareness, making it a very important aspect of a company’s digital marketing strategy.

In this guide, we will learn about how we can use SEO strategy to improve organic traffic, generate leads, and ultimately, drive revenue. But first, let us discuss some key facts of why SEO might be relatively unique compared to other niches.

Whether it’s a B2B company selling SaaS (Software as a Service) solution or you are a direct-to-consumer company, ensuring you have a proper online presence can either make or break your business.

Building 7-Figure Companies With SEO

Learn how founders, CEOs, execs and thought leaders use SEO and Content Marketing to grow B2B, SaaS, technology and startup companies from zero to 7 and 8-figure revenue.

How Incapsula Doubles Their Business Year Over Year With SEO, Content Marketing and CRO

Content Marketing and SEO are the main customer acquisition channels that helped Incapsula achieve:

• Market Capitalization: $1.5 billion
• Protects: 5,000,000+ websites
• #1 customer acquisition channel: Content Marketing and SEO
• Year over year growth: 100%

Learn more

How Content Marketing and SEO Helped BuildFire Become a 7-Figure ARR SaaS Company

Content marketing, the first page rankings on Google and SEO helped BuildFire to grow to where they are at right now:

• Revenue: 7 Figure Company
• Customers: 1000, Powering over 10,000+ apps in the App Store
• Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO
• Organic Traffic: 140,000 visitors/month

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How SEO Helped Time Doctor Become a 7 Figure SaaS Company and Generate 20,000 Trials Per Month

SEO and content marketing are the only lead generation channels for Time Doctor and helped them to generate:

• Revenue: 7 Figure Company
• Customer Acquisition: 20,000 trials/month, 7000 customers/month
• Main customer acquisition channel: organic SEO
• Revenue growth: 10% MoM

Learn more

What Is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is essentially a series of optimizations made inside and outside our website, so the site can rank higher in Google’s and the other search engines’ SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

SERP ranking, however, isn’t and shouldn’t be the end goal of SEO strategy. Instead, it’s just a means of an end in increasing organic traffic. More website traffic, in turn, will help us in achieving other objectives like generating more leads, building digital awareness, and getting more conversions.

Google, as the biggest and most popular search engine, is obviously the main focus of most SEO strategies, but we can also target other search engines like Bing or Yahoo!

We can divide SEO into two different categories: off-page SEO and on-page SEO.

On-Page SEO refers to optimizations that are done inside your website, which can include optimizing your content, the website’s technical (coding) performance, and other aspects.

Off-page SEO is optimizations done outside the website, which mainly involves building the site’s credibility, trust signals, and authority by getting more backlinks/inbound links (more on this later) and social signals.

To be clear, we need to implement both types of optimizations to achieve the desired SEO results.

How exactly? We will discuss it below.

How SEO Actually Works

To really understand how SEO works, we have to discuss several different elements:

The SERP

SERP stands for Search Engines Results Page, which is, the page displayed by the search engine when we search for a specific query.

For example, when we search for “SERP” query, this is the SERP page:

The objective of SEO strategy is to achieve a higher organic search ranking, and if possible, the #1 ranking spot. In the above example, that is the spot right below the “People also ask” box.

It’s very important to consider the fact that 95% of users won’t go past the first page of SERPs. So, getting on the first page of Google SERP is the most important priority of SEO strategy.

However, Google’s SERP has significantly evolved since its actual launch back in 1996, more than two decades ago. Back then, it was pretty simple: paid search ads on top and organic results right below them.

Here is how the SERP for the query “when is the 2025 election” is today:

As you can see, it’s way more complicated. On the above example, there are several different elements included in the SERP:

1. Featured snippet box to inform us about the Date (the direct answer to the search query)
2. Knowledge panel on the sidebar. In this example, a result from Wikipedia
3. The “People Also Ask” box featuring 4 questions
4. The “Top Stories” section featuring video results

Only after all of these elements, we are presented with the organic search result.

What will this mean? Organic ranking is now not the only available objective/priority for SEO strategy. We can also aim to get ranked as a featured snippet or to be featured on the “People Also Ask” questions.

The Anatomy of the Ranking Process

How does Google (and the other search engines) actually rank the websites as the search results?

Understanding the answer to this question can significantly help in really understanding the concept of SEO.

First, according to Google’s own statement, its mission is to deliver the most relevant and reliable information for the human audience. SEO strategy is, to put simply, a way to optimize our website and our content to align with this mission.

So, Google rank content based on its relevance and reliability in meeting the user’s search intent, and here is how the ranking process basically works:

1. Google and other search engines involve the use of web crawlers or search bots, essentially an automated software that will visit all the different websites on the internet. Thus, we often refer to this process as “crawling the page/web”.
2. Google then add the crawled pages to its index. This process is called the indexation process.
3. Based on its algorithm  (more on this later), Google considers all the different ranking factors and shows the most reliable and relevant results from its index when the user enters a search query.

We will have a more in-depth discussion on the ranking algorithms and especially ranking factors/ranking signals below.

Top SEO Ranking Factors in 2025

To be clear, Google features a very complex ranking algorithm and will take account of more than 200 different SEO ranking factors. However, back in 2016, so quite recently, Google basically confirmed its top three ranking factors: Link Profile, Content quality, and User Experience metrics.

1. Link Profile

It’s important to understand that a website’s link profile is not only about backlinks, although backlinks are indeed the most important element of the link profile. Instead, there are three different types of links that will affect your site’s SEO performance:

• Internal links: links from one page of your site to another page(s).
• Outbound links: also called outgoing links, which are links from your pages to third-party websites
• Inbound links: more commonly known as backlinks, links coming to your page(s) from third-party sources

As established above, inbound links are the most important of the three in determining your site’s ranking.

We can think of inbound links or backlinks as the vote of confidence in the digital world. When a website links to your content, they are saying that your page is reliable, credible, and trustworthy. When the link is coming from a relevant, high-quality website, it’s like getting a recommendation letter from a famous person in your industry (read: it’s very valuable).

Nowadays the quality of the backlinks is significantly more important than quantity. In fact, getting too many low-quality backlinks at any given time might get your site penalized by Google.

While inbound links are the most important of the three, that’s not saying outbound links and internal links are not important:

• Outbound links and proper internal linking structure can help improve your site’s relevance. Linking to an authoritative site, for example, can tell Google that you are a legitimate content creator for a specific topic. A proper internal linking practice can also help Google with the indexation process.
• Proper external links essentially tell Google about the niche/industry you are in, the topic you are covering, the potential competitors, and so on. In short, you are helping the search engines to index and structure the whole internet.
• Linking to relevant content (that is already ranking) can provide additional value for your audience (which can indirectly affect ranking).
• When you link to others, you let the other party notice your site and your content. In the future, they might return the favor and link your content. In short, this can be the start of a fruitful relationship.

2. Content Quality

The quality of your content is the center of your SaaS SEO strategy, period. No amount of SEO optimizations and state-of-the-art strategy can help low-quality content. Think of SEO strategy as a way to amplify the performance of high-quality and relevant content and not the other way around.

In the past, SEO content is solely about optimizing the content for the target keywords, and thus we aim for a certain keyword density. It’s very important to understand that today, SEO strategy is no longer solely about keyword optimization.

Instead, the most important thing to focus on is whether your content can meet the user’s search intent. In general, there are four different types of search intent:

• Informational intent. The user is simply looking for information. For example, a user might look for information about SEO by using the “what is SEO” search query. In this case, we can provide educational or informational content to meet this user’s needs.
• Transactional intent. Here, the user is searching for a product/service with the intention to buy. Nowadays, however,  people might search directly on Amazon when they have transactional intent. This intent is usually identified when the user uses “buy” in their query.
• Comparison and Investigation. The user has the intention to buy in the future or is considering to make the purchase by comparing different products/services, check for online reviews, etc. When a user uses queries like “compare” or “review”, it is a strong sign they are having this intent.
• Navigational intent. Users with this intent are trying to get to a specific website. For example, we might type “Instagram” in the search bar for convenience’s sake.

In a software company environment, the user can have all four of these search intents with various queries, so it’s very important to develop a wide variety of content to cover all of these intents.

Google is getting better and better at recognizing how content can cater to a specific intent. Google BERT, the latest algorithm update, allows Google to better understand the context of long-tail, complex queries.

Content optimization for SEO is a very complex subject, but in general, it’s about being better than the other ranking content. Do a quick Google search of your target keyword (more on this later), and analyze the top-ranking pages (if possible, analyze all pages featured on the first page of the SERP). We generally have two options:

• Develop better, longer, more in-depth content than these competitors.
• Be different, and cover the keyword from a unique angle.

Which one is easier? In most cases—if the opportunity presents itself—, being unique is relatively easier, but not saying it’s easy.

Content quality and relevance are extremely related to backlinks (as discussed above). Good content will always get linked, sooner or later. On the other hand, no amount of promotion can help low-quality content that is not relevant to get authoritative backlinks.

3. User Experience Metrics

To reiterate, Google search’s mission is to provide relevant and reliable search results for its user, and the Google search algorithm is constantly being improved to achieve this mission.

One of Google’s major improvements in accordance with this objective is the introduction of Google RankBrain. RankBrain is Google’s first AI-based algorithm that is launched in 2016, and with its machine learning capability, Google is now getting better at measuring and recognizing these user-experience metrics in real-time:

• Bounce rate: the percentage of visitors that leave your site after viewing just one page (single page visit). It can be after one second or one hour, what matters is they leave after just a single page.
• Dwell time: that is, how long a visitor spends on your site. They can view just one page or 100 pages, but this metric is about the total time spent.
• Click-through rate (CTR): the percentage of users that click on SERP results and visit the website

These three metrics combined, essentially provide Google with the information whether your site is relevant for the user, according to the user’s search query and search intent.

Summary: It’s All About Content

To summarize, all three metrics above are centered on one thing: your content quality and relevance. As we will discuss in the rest of this guide, content optimization will be the center of B2B SEO strategy.

Step By Step Guide To SEO Strategy

Step 1: Define SEO Objective

It’s very important to remember that SEO is not a cheat engine or holy-grail tactic to beat the search engine algorithm, but as established above, it’s a series of optimization to align our site and our content with the search engine’s mission to provide more relevant information for the users.

On the other hand, we have also mentioned that SERP ranking shouldn’t be the end goal of SEO strategy, but just a means to an end for objectives like:

• Organic traffic: referring to unpaid website traffic coming from clicks on SERP results. Even if organic traffic is not your end goal, you simply can’t get anything on your site without any traffic. So, in most cases, organic traffic should be one of your main SEO objectives.
• Brand presence: with more people visiting your website and consuming your content, you can improve brand awareness and (perceived) credibility.
• Generate more leads: the website is still the most important lead generation device. The main idea is to convert some of the organic traffic into qualified prospects.
• Sales conversion: pretty self-explanatory, generate more sales on the website. Especially important for eCommerce sites or sites with an affiliate marketing objective.
• Online reputation management (ORM): maintain a positive online presence, mainly by ranking well on branded keywords.
• Customer support and education: publish and promote informational content that can help educate your audience about your product/service or your niche/industry.

You can chase more than one SEO objectives, but make sure that all your goals follow these important principles:

• Specific: the objective must be clear and comprehensive, and can be communicated easily with your team members
• Realistic: that is, attainable. If necessary, break down big goals into smaller milestones to give yourself (and your team members) a sense of achievement with each milestone
• Measurable: define KPIs and measurable metrics for each objective. We should be able to measure the SEO campaign’s performance and progress in accordance with the target objectives.

Make sure to define and list proper objectives that align well with your marketing goals and overall business objectives. For example, if your company’s marketing objective is to generate 30% more leads, then your SEO campaign should aim to help this objective.

Step 2: Site Audit For SEO

The next step is to assess the site’s current state in relation to SEO performance.

We do this by performing an SEO site audit to figure out current on-site and off-site optimizations, as well as technical SEO factors.

Site audit for SEO is a very broad subject on its own, and we won’t give it much justice discussing it here.

However, here are some of the important areas to check in this step:

1. Check Your Site’s Crawlability and Indexability

As we’ve established above, not indexed by Google=your site won’t rank at all, period.

So, make sure Google can crawl your site properly, recognize all of your content pages, and index all of the pages properly. Here are some important things to focus on:

• A proper XML sitemap that lists all your pages
• Make sure your URL is accessible and use HTTPS/ SSL security
• Proper optimization of your robots.txt file
• Use Google Se0arch Console and check your site for possible crawl errors

2. Proper URL Optimizations

We have briefly discussed the importance of enabling HTTPS above, and a secure website URL is now an important SEO ranking factor. Also, pay attention to potential issues like:

• Linking to insecure pages
• Make sure to use canonical URL on your original content to avoid duplication issues
• Make sure your URL is readable, short and to the point. Ensure both the search engines and the human audience can properly understand the URL. Include your target keyword when you can, but do it naturally
• Make sure your SSL security certificate is valid
• Check all your pages and your content, and make sure they are all secure

3. Title Tags and META Descriptions

Title tags and META descriptions are the information displayed on the SERP search result.

For example, for the query “what is software company”, here is the top result

“Software company – Wikipedia” is the Title Tag of the page, and below the URL we can see the META description of the website as the snippet.

As you can see, this information will ultimately determine whether or not the user will visit your site (click-through rate). As discussed, CTR is now an important ranking factor. Various SEO tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, and Screaming Frog, among others, can help us analyze all the various page titles and META descriptions.

The main principle in optimizing these titles and descriptions is to include your keyword(s) as naturally as possible and focus on delivering comprehensive, valuable, and engaging information for the human audience.

4. Content Structure and Optimization

Use proper header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc. ) to ensure easier indexation by Google. A proper structure will let Google know which aspect of the content is the most important or least important.

Check whether embedded images are properly optimized, such as:

• A comprehensive, descriptive filename
• Properly compressed so they don’t slow down the page
• Have proper alt texts or alt tags, to provide information about the image to the search engine
• Links to the images should work as intended

Again, SEO tools with audit features like SEMrush or Ahrefs can help find and troubleshoot image optimization issues.

5. Mobile-Friendliness

It’s no secret that since 2015, Google only prioritizes mobile-friendly sites to rank. If your site is not yet mobile-responsive or mobile-friendly, it will significantly hurt your chance to get ranked and featured as a rich snippet.

Use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool to assess whether your site is already mobile-friendly. We will discuss how to ensure your site is mobile-responsive further below as we discuss on-site optimizations.

6. Load Speed

Your page’s load speed will affect dwell time and bounce rate (as discussed above, both are ranking factors). According to Google, if your site loads longer than 3 seconds, more than half of mobile visitors will bounce.

There are various factors that can affect your site’s load times, from image sizes and compressions, proper usage and amount of scripts, server response time, and so on. Again, we will further discuss how to improve our site’s load speed in the on-site optimizations section below.

You can use various tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix to help assess your page’s current load speed and identify potential issues.

7. Structured Data Markup

Structured data or schema.org markup is essentially a practice of assigning properties and attributes to all the different elements in our page/content, to provide Google with the relevant information about your site’s content.

The main advantage of implementing structured data markup is that your site is now eligible to be ranked as a featured snippet. However, proper structured data markup implementation can also help with crawling and indexing purposes.

Again, you can use Google’s structured data testing tool to check your site’s current state regarding structured data markup.

Again, SEO site audit is a very broad subject, and this shouldn’t be an all-inclusive list. The main idea is to figure out our site’s current state in relation to SEO performance, so we can plan our SEO strategy ahead.

Step 3: Keyword Research and Keyword Optimization Plan

One of the key aspects of SEO strategy is finding the right keyword(s) to target. Although we have mentioned that SEO today is no longer solely about keyword optimization, the right keyword research is still very important.

With that being said, here are some important considerations for proper keyword research:

• Understanding your target audience: their needs, behaviors, pain points, and especially, the search intent. The better you can understand your audience, the better you can find your target keywords.
• Always refer back to your SEO objectives and goals. That is, these keywords must help you achieve the objectives and not the other way around. For example, if your SEO objective is to generate more leads, then, in general, you’d want to aim for keywords targeting informative intent to attract potential prospects.
• When trying to find your keyword opportunities, here are the important principles:
  • The keyword must be relevant and valuable for your target audience, according to their search intent(s). We can usually evaluate the monthly search volume for the keyword to measure this aspect.
  • The keyword, no matter how popular/relevant for the target audience, must also be relevant for your business/industry.
  • Based on the available resources and your objective’s timeline, the competition for the target keyword must be manageable. Some SEO tools might be able to measure this aspect via metrics like keyword difficulty or similar ones.

There are various keyword research tools that can help you in this aspect, from free ones like Google Keyword Planner and UberSuggests to premium, all-in-one SEO tools like Moz Pro, Ahrefs, and SEMrush, among others.

Make a list of all the possible target keywords and set your priorities. If required, divide them by your SEO objectives and possible search intents.

Step 4: SERP Analysis

More than 40% of search queries now involve a featured snippet in their SERPs, positioned above the top organic spot. There’s also the “People Also Ask” box just below it, and the knowledge panel on the side.

In short, it’s quite possible that the top organic spot is not the only available ‘target’ for your keywords: while being featured as a rich snippet might not guarantee organic traffic (zero-click search), it might provide various benefits in achieving your SEO objectives. For example, being featured as a rich snippet for key questions and definitions related to your niche can be a really good branding opportunity.

On the other hand, it’s also important to find keywords with a high potential organic click-through rate (CTR)s. They should be your main priority in generating organic traffic to achieve your SEO objectives.

So, do a Google search for your target keywords and analyze the SERPs (or you can use various tools to help you). This practice will be related to the next step.

Step 5: Competitive Analysis

SEO is, by nature, a competition where you try to rank higher than your competitors, so competitive analysis should be an important part of the whole SEO strategy.

The most basic thing to do here is to Google your target keywords, as discussed in the previous step and check the ranking competitors. Check at least the top 3 competitors for each keyword, but if you can, check for all the sites featured on the first page of the SERP.

Check how the content pieces are structured, how optimized (SEO-wise) the content is, their approach for the keywords, and so on. Imitate and improve upon what they already did well, and fix what they did wrong. Our job is to beat these competitors, and there are generally two different ways to do it:

1. Create a (significantly) better content: more in-depth, longer, and better than all of these competitors’.
2. Be different: take a unique stance and cover the keyword from a different angle.

Being unique—when the opportunity presents itself—, is generally an easier approach (but that’s not saying it’s easy).  When you are targeting a very popular and competitive keyword, creating just a slightly better content simply won’t do the job.

For example, when the target keyword is “best software company in India”, the first page of SERP might be filled with pages with lists covering the top 10 to 30 software companies in India. In this case, would creating another “top 10” list cut it? Probably not. Your list must be significantly better, or you might need to create a really big list covering 50 or even 100 different companies. Pretty hard? In most cases, yes.

On the other hand, if you can find an opportunity to use a unique angle to cover the keyword, you might get more attention, get more backlinks in the process, and climb the SERP faster.

Step 6: Content Strategy and Planning

Content is the core of SEO strategy, period.

This statement is even more relevant today: Google’s ranking algorithm is getting better in understanding the quality of your content, and its relevance to the target keyword and the search intent.

To be frank, there’s no shortcut in getting the desired SEO results besides actually having high-quality and relevant content. SEO optimizations will only amplify the performance of an already performing content and on the other hand, no amount of tactics and optimizations can help a low-quality content.

So, a proper content marketing plan will significantly help your whole SEO effort. Here are some important areas to consider when planning your content strategy:

1. If you have a content development team, decide the PIC for each content (for example, writer A for content A, etc.)
2. Refer back to your target keywords, and plan how you’ll expand each of them into actual topics.
3. Plan the channels where you are going to distribute the content:
   1. Your own blog
   2. Guest post opportunity on third-party sites
   3. Publication platforms like Medium and other sites
   4. Video streaming platforms like YouTube for video content
   5. Email newsletter
4. Plan a schedule of when you are going to publish the content (and how frequent).
5. Develop a content calendar that lists:
   1. Date of content publication
   2. Content creator (author)
   3. The topic or working title
   4. Target keyword
   5. Description of the content
   6. Content objective
   7. Publication/distribution channel
   8. CTA and lead magnet plan (if any)
   9. Ideas/references/mood board
   10. Working status (WIP, published, etc.)
6. Execute and evaluate the content plan:
   1. The overall tone of the content, its quality, how it compares against the competition
   2. The content’s performance according to the objective(s)
   3. The overall execution of the editorial calendar

Depending on the performance, you might want to adjust your content plan according to your SEO objective.

Also, remember that it’s about your content quality and relevance to your human audience. Include your target keywords naturally, but don’t focus on keyword density. Focus on delivering comprehensive content with good readability.

Step 7: Link Building

It’s no secret that backlinks are the most important ranking factor in SEO. As we have established above, the quality of these backlinks is more important than quantity.

The quality of your backlinks, in general, directly proportionate to the source site’s authority. You can use various tools like Moz’s Domain Authority checker to check the authority of the source sites.

Again, the secret of getting high-quality backlinks is the quality of your content. If your content is good and contains relevant information, you will get linked sooner or later. On the other hand, no amount of effort can help low-quality content without substance—at least, without getting penalized—.

There are, however, tactics and methods we can use to amplify the performance of your quality content, such as:

1. Promoting Your Content

Yes, the quality of your content is extremely important in getting these backlinks. However, no matter how good your content is, it won’t bring any value—SEO or otherwise— when nobody actually knows about it.

Content promotion is arguably even more important than the content creation process:

1. It obviously helps in generating organic traffic to your website, which can help in achieving your SEO strategy goals and marketing objectives.
2. Proper promotion can also help in generating more backlinks in the process. More backlinks will improve SERP ranking, which in turn, will also generate more organic traffic.

Thus, promote your content via all the available channels, and whenever you can, aim to get inbound links or backlinks in the process. For example, when you work with influencers to promote your content via influencer marketing, you might also ask them for a backlink from their website.

To summarize, use all potential channels to get high-quality backlinks.

2. Create Linkable Content

Think about it, what’s the reason to provide a backlink to another site? Typically, here are the most common reasons:

• Citing a source site when we make an informational claim (i.e. 30% of surveyed users are…..)
• When we use a term that is related to the content but might not be understood by all of your visitors. For example, in this content covering SEO, we might need to provide a link to another site when we first mention “ranking factor” or “backlink”
• When we include images, infographics, etc.

So, we can simply include these types of information and data in our content:

1. Original, previously unpublished information like an original research report, datasheet, case study, etc. is very linkable
2. Visually aesthetic images, infographics, and photos
3. Data roundup content, when done properly, can generate a lot of backlinks

Remember that you don’t need to be too aggressive in getting these backlinks. Focus on quality, not quantity, and in general, you’d only need to build 3 to 5 high-quality backlinks for each page.

Step 8: Social Media and SEO

While social signals are not a direct ranking factor for SEO, they can indirectly affect your SEO performance.

As we have discussed, link profile, content quality, and UX metrics are the most important ranking factors, and social media performance can help in all three:

1. Social media is where the audience is with more than 3 billion daily active users. More social media exposure will translate to more opportunities to get backlinks
2. Social media is a great place to conduct market research so you can better understand your audience. Meaning, it can help you in developing better content.
3. Social media can allow you to promote your content directly to those who have developed an interest, so it can improve dwell time and minimize bounce rate.

So, how should we optimize our social media content to help your SEO, here are a few tips:

• Post regularly and maintain the quality of your content. Make sure your social media profiles are active.
• Maintain a consistent image/tone for your profile. When opportunities present themselves, include a link to your content.
• Use relevant bio for your profiles.
• Make sure your posts are engaging. Use attractive images when you can.
• Proper, appropriate hashtags.
• Make sure your content is shareable and social media-friendly

Step 7: On-Site Optimizations

In general, there are three important aspects of achieving SEO success:

• Making sure your content is valuable so it can get high-quality backlinks and get a lot of engagement from the audience
• Making sure your site is performing as intended to improve user experience, keeping your site visitors as long as possible (higher average dwell time.)
• Ensuring Google can crawl and index your site. When your site is not indexed, it won’t rank, period.

The first aspect regarding content is mainly covered in the previous steps. This step, on the other hand, is about the second and third aspects.

While on-site website optimizations are very broad subject on its own, here are some of the most important things to focus on:

• Your site’s load speed:
  • Use a website template that is optimized for speed
  • Leverage browser caching
  • Make sure to use proper image and file compression
  • Reduce the use of redirects
  • Improve server response time (might involve changing to a better hosting service or a dedicated server.)
  • Minify CSS and remove render-blocking sprit
• Make sure your site is mobile-responsive.
• Ensure your site is indexed faster and properly by Google. You might want to follow this guide.
• Implement proper structured data markup. This can provide Google with more information to index your site and allow your site to be viable for a featured snippet.
• Optimize the content structure
• Optimize your site’s structure and interface (layout, navigation menus, etc.)
• Test everything regularly on as many devices as possible.

Optimize your site so both Google and the human audience can recognize the contained information properly, and also make sure to maintain content quality.

Step 8: Evaluation and Re-Optimization

The last but not least step is to evaluate and monitor your SEO campaign’s progress.

It’s very important to understand that SEO is a long-term game and not a get-rich quick scheme. In general, it would take 6 to 18 months of continuous efforts before we can see any significant result (i.e. featured on the first page of SERP).

Thus, it’s very important to monitor your SEO performance by evaluating these key areas:

• SERP ranking for each keyword. It should climb progressively overtime. If there’s a sudden decline, you should adjust your strategy.
• Organic traffic. Should also increase steadily according to ranking performance.
• Impressions and organic reach.
• Conversion rate, especially when the page involves lead magnets or CTAs.
• User experience metrics: dwell time, bounce rate, organic CTR
• Page load speed
• Mobile responsiveness
• Link profile, especially backlinks profile, but also outbound links and internal linking structure
• Content structure, layout, readability

Evaluate your site and your pages according to these key metrics (and more, depending on your SEO objective), and adjust your strategy accordingly.

SEO FAQs and Tips

What Is SEO

Stands for Search Engine Optimization, is essentially a series of optimization of your website (both on-site and off-site) to rank higher on organic SERP by optimizing three key areas:

• Making sure your page’s content is valuable and relevant for your human audience
• Optimizing user experience and engagement, to keep site visitors for as long as possible
• Ensuring Google can properly crawl and index your site by optimizing the technical factors of your site

The main objective of SEO strategy is to improve organic traffic to the website.

What is SERP

Stands for Search Engine Results Page. The page displayed by Google and the other search engines after you enter a search query.

SEO VS SEM

SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing, which includes both SEO and PPC (Pay-Per-Click) search advertising.

PPC VS SEO

PPC advertising is paid ads displayed on the top of SERP for a certain keyword/search query. The term PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click, referring to the pricing model for the advertising where the user only needs to pay for the ad each time someone clicks on it.

Why SEO is Important?

Getting more website traffic remains one of the most important goals to pursue for any business, and SEO remains one of the most effective approaches in generating more (organic/unpaid) website traffic. You might want to check this article on the importance of SEO for a more concise answer.

Are SERPs Personalized?

In some cases, yes. Google does track various things related to your online activity from your device’s location to your search history to browsing and purchase history, and can provide a personalized search result for the user. You can search in a private browser window or incognito window to get the ‘original’ SERP.

Is SEO Dead?

Seemingly every year, there are always news and articles proclaiming the death of SEO, but in truth, SEO is alive and well.

It’s true, however, that SEO has significantly changed over the years, and some SEO strategies, tactics and practices are really ‘dead’, that is, used to work but don’t work anymore. For example, keyword stuffing used to be the common practice in pre-2011 SEO, but can get us penalized nowadays.

There are, however, SEO practices that still work effectively, including those we have discussed above.

End Words

Whether you are a B2B company targeting professionals from other companies, or a direct-to-consumer B2C company, SEO should be the core of your digital marketing strategy.

Getting website traffic is very important in a tech-embedded software environment, and hiring an SEO expert remains one of the most effective ways of generating organic traffic. In turn, more organic traffic can translate to more converted prospects and ultimately, more sales conversions for your website product.

The post How To Create a Successful SEO Strategy appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Like how “location, location, location” is a popular mantra in the real estate industry, we can also say that “traffic, traffic, and traffic” are the three most important things in a website’s performance.

However, growing our website traffic is often easier said than done. After all, there are billions of websites today and there are millions of blog posts being published in a single day. How can we stand out among all those competitors?

Don’t be discouraged, though, as in this guide, we will discuss an effective tactic to grow you traffic in just six months with a step-by-step guide.

Let us begin.

Step 1: Know Your Audience Through Keyword Research

The first, and the most important step here is to do as much research as possible with two main goals: understanding your audience; and understanding how your competitors are approaching their marketing strategy. 

SEO strategy remains one of the most effective ways in building website traffic, so keyword research is very important. Find your target keywords according to these three principles:

• The keyword must be relevant to your business, product, and/or service—pretty self explanatory—. Sometimes there are keywords that aren’t so obvious but can be a good opportunity (i.e. ‘slam dunk’ if you are a basketball-focused site).
• The keywords must be relevant to your audience, signified by a high monthly search volume
• According to your budget and timeline, the competition for the keyword must be manageable. 

You can use various keyword research tools to help with this, and you can also use some of the tools to perform competitive research. Gain as many insights as possible about your audience and your competitors to develop your strategy.

Step 2: Competitive Research

In the first step, we have briefly discussed how we should perform a proper competitive research based on the target keywords. 

You can do this manually by doing a quick Google search for your target keywords. Check out the top ranking sites for these keywords (if possible, check out all that are ranking on the first page, but at least the top 3). 

Your goal is to create a (significantly) better content than these pages, so analyze various aspects from their content quality, style and tone, structure, how they use images, etc. It’s also possible to take a different approach and discuss the topic from a unique angle—you can even disagree with the content and deliver your argument—. 

Alternatively, you can also use keyword research tools to analyze these pages. This way, you can gain insights about various metrics from their monthly traffic to readability to backlinks profile. 

You can also check various other areas of these competitors’ marketing efforts from their social media presence and engagement to their advertising campaigns. There are plenty of tools that can help you with this.

The better you know your ‘enemy’, the better you can plan your strategy. 

Step 3: Develop Your Content

There are two different types of content in a website.

First, there’s the static content—the ‘fixed’ information that is always there— like your about us page, your product listing, and so on. The thing is, if you only have static information in your website, you don’t give enough reason for them to come back after they’ve checked out your site.

So, here comes the second type: dynamic content. These are the pieces of content that are updated time and time again (i.e. blog posts), so when a new content appears, a website visitor might visit your site again and probably share it to their friends—netting you more visitors—.

Both dynamic and static content have their purposes, so the idea is to develop content according to the target keywords we have discussed above.

One of the most important things to remember is although SEO is about optimizing your content for the search engine, Google, Bing, and other search engines are now getting smarter. Their goal is to provide the most relevant search results for human audience, so your content must also have the same goal: bring as much value and relevance to your ideal audience. 

So, include your keywords naturally, and focus on readability for human readers. 

Step 4: Build More Backlinks

Backlinks are the commodity of the internet. Think of backlinks—or inbound links—, as a ‘vote’. The more backlinks you have, Google and the other search engines will determine your site as relevant and you will climb the search engine rankings. 

The higher your search engine ranking, the more traffic you will have. This is the main goal of SEO.

It is, however, important to understand that today, quality is more important than quantity. If you get one backlink from a reputable site in your industry, you get more ‘vote’ than getting 5 backlinks from lower-quality sites. In fact, getting too many backlinks at one time might get you penalized by Google. 

Aim to get just 2 to 3 high-quality backlinks a month. Yet, this can be easier said than done. 

How to get backlinks? The most effective way is to actually have a high-quality content. If your content is good, interesting, and informative, you will get backlinks sooner or later.

Yet, how you promote the content is also important. Utilize all the available channels from social media to working with influencers to investing in paid ads to promote your contents.

Content promotion can lead to more organic traffic—our main goal—, and get more backlinks in the process, which in turn will produce more traffic through SEO. A win-win investment!

Step 5: Optimize Your Website

Again, there are two main goals in optimizing the technical aspects of your site: pleasing the search engines (making sure your site is easy to index properly), and bringing value to the human audience.

As this can be a very broad subject, you might want to check out this technical SEO checklist for this step. However, here are a few key areas to focus on:

• Optimize your website’s speed. More than half of mobile users will bounce from sites that load in more than 3 second. 
• Make sure your website is mobile-friendly and preferably mobile-responsive
• Make sure your website is easy enough to navigate according to UX principles. 
• Make sure your site can be properly indexed by Google by optimizing robots.txt file and optimizing  redirects
• Regularly check for broken links, and fix them

Step 6: Invest in Paid Advertising

We can consider this as an optional step depending on the results generated by the previous steps.

The idea of using paid advertising is to cut downtime. Paid advertising—and other paid channels— can virtually generate traffic instantly, as long as you have the budget. 

Find the right balance between your paid advertising budget and time invested. Doing this correctly can maximize the generated website traffic in six months.

The key of online paid advertising is targeting: the more specific you can target the right audience, the more cost-efficient your campaigns will be, and the more conversions you’ll get. 

Conclusion

By doing the six steps we have discussed above, you can significantly increase your website traffic.

The key here is maintaining consistency and work with SEO expert if necessary. So, regularly monitor your progress, evaluate, and re-optimize your strategy accordingly.

The post How To Grow Your Website Traffic In Six Months appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Thus, link building is still one of the most important tactics in SEO and should be the core focus of a high-performing B2B SEO strategy.

However, link building can be easier said than done and can involve several different skillsets from content creation to relationship building to sales and general marketing knowledge. That is why in this guide, we will discuss all you need to know about link building, from the basic concept of inbound links to advanced link building tactics.

Let us begin.

What Are Backlinks and Why Are They Important?

Backlinks also known as inbound links, are HTML hyperlinks on third-party sites that point to your site.

Links are the “vote of confidence”, a recommendation letter of the internet, and arguably the most valuable online commodity. When someone links to your site, that’s telling Google—and the other search engines—, as well as your audience that your site is credible and trustworthy, and the linked page/content contains reliable information.

Just like in the “real world”, a recommendation letter coming from famous people and relevant individuals will pack more weight, and so the source of the inbound links is also important. Links coming from authority sites that are related to your niche/industry will provide more value to your SEO.

According to Google themselves, we can improve the rank of our sites by increasing the number of high-quality backlinks.

How Can We Determine Backlinks Quality?

According to the latest Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines (a book of guidelines provided by Google to human evaluators that manually evaluate websites and SERPs), a high-quality page is determined by its projection of E-A-T quality:

• E for Expertise: referring to who is the creator of the main content (MC) on the website. If the content creator is someone with credible expertise, then the site is regarded as high-quality. The standard for expertise depends on the page’s topic. For YMYL content (more on this later), “expertise” here will translate to formal training, education, or credible experience on the topic.
• A for Authoritative: in general, authoritativeness here refers to how acceptable the site—and the content creator—are as a good, reliable source of information.
• T for Trustworthy: how trustworthy the site is in providing honest and factual information.

More About YMYL Site

YMYL stands for Your Money, Your Life, and is Google’s term referring to content or topics that can impact the consumer’s (reader’s) future financial stability—their money—, health, safety, and overall happiness.

Pages covering YMYL content are observed more strictly than non- YMYL content and are the subject of one of the latest major algorithm updates. In general, Google would prefer that an actual expert with formal credibility is the one behind YMYL content. This will obviously mean a lot to your SEO if you are in a YMYL niche, such as:

• Finance: pretty obvious, the M in YMYL. Investments information, retirement planning, loans, insurances, banking-related content, etc.
• Shopping: probably the most controversial, content related to research or purchase of online products/services, especially eCommerce sites and sites that involve transferring money online
• Important News: news about international events, politics, science, technology, and global business are considered YMYL, but lifestyle news including sports and entertainment are not considered YMYL
• Government and Law:  such as information about voting, adoption, creating a will, child custody, government agencies, etc.
• Health:  and safety, information about hospitals, drugs, emergency, how dangerous a particular activity is, medical issues, etc.
• Groups of people: information related to race/ethnic, religion, age, nationality, gender identity, etc.
• Other: fitness/nutrition, job-finding, college information, housing information, etc.

Simply put, if you are in the YMYL niche and are mainly publishing YMYL content, you have to pay extra attention to building and presenting your credibility, and some niches (i.e. civics information) are more difficult than the others.

So, E-A-T and YMYL are the two most important factors in determining the quality of the sources of your backlinks.

Dofollow VS Nofollow Links

Above, we have discussed how an inbound link should act as a vote of confidence. However, the site giving the link might “bypass” this voting function, by turning this link into a “Nofollow” link.

This is done by adding rel=”nofollow” HTML tag to the hyperlink code, for example:

<a href=”http://www.website.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Link Text</a>

A backlink without a rel=”nofollow” tag, on the other hand, is deemed as a Dofollow link, and it’s very important to note that only Dofollow links have value in SEO.

On the other hand, in some cases, you might also want to use Nofollow links to maintain a trustworthy internal linking structure. For example, in content discussing link building practices like this, you might link to a site using black hat link building practice as an example, but in this case, you can use Nofollow tag to link to this site without telling Google that you trust this offending site.

So, Do We Only Need Dofollow Links?

First, it’s important to note that backlinks from popular sites tend to always be Nofollow, such as inbound links from Medium, Reddit, Wikipedia, Quora, Twitch, and so on. Also, links coming from these sources tend to be Nofollow:

• Links from a forum post (or other platforms allowing user-generated content)
• All major social media platforms
• Blog comments
• Certain news sites and blogs
• Press releases
• All paid links should be Nofollow, according to Google’s guidelines (or you might get penalized)

Links from these sites can still provide value to your business in the form of valuable traffic —although might not directly provide value to your SEO results—. For example, a link to your website from your own Instagram account is a common and effective practice to bring traffic to your site.

It’s generally wise to maintain a good balance between Dofollow and Nofollow links on your backlinks profile (more on this later), but when the Nofollow link is coming from a source where a Dofollow link is possible, you should always pursue it.

For example, if you get linked by a relevant third-party site in your industry, but the link is Nofollow, you might want to reach out to this site’s webmaster and pursue a Dofollow link (and build a relationship in the process).

Your Backlinks Profile

In general, your backlinks profile—or just “link profile” —, is an analysis or assessment of all the inbound links coming to your site, considering factors like:

• The total quantity of links coming to your site
• The quality of each link (based on the factors discussed above)
• Diversity of backlinks sources (i.e. if a site links to you 10 times or 10 websites are linking to your site individually).

Various SEO tools (like Ahrefs, SEMRush, and Moz Pro) offer features to analyze your site’s backlinks profile.

In general, here are several considerations in maintaining a healthy backlinks profile:

• Paid/purchased links are a big no

All search engines and especially Google and Bing absolutely despise paid links, and they are getting better at detecting these frauds. When you are caught buying and selling backlinks, you will be penalized right away. At the very least, the penalized site will drop in ranking significantly, and in severe cases, the site might be permanently banned (as in, can’t rank at all).

• Avoid excessive link exchanges

Working together with your business partners and linking to each other’s sites are pretty normal, and should be okay when these are done naturally—that is, you are linking using proper content and the anchor text is relevant for the external link, and vice versa.—

If, on the other hand, the practice is done excessively, it can get you penalized. How many is too many, then? In general, if the links are natural and relevant to the content, the quantity shouldn’t really matter. It will, however, mean that you’ll need to put at least some content development efforts for this link exchange purpose.

• Low-quality directory links and private blog networks will get you penalized

These two used to be fairly popular grey-hat (or probably black-hat) tactics. In general, these sites (used to) allow you to pay for semi-legitimate links. Some were successful, some weren’t but in most cases, the site will get caught sooner than later.

In short, to have a healthy backlinks profile, it’s necessary to maintain an honest practice in getting your inbound links, as we will discuss in the next section.

Building High-Quality Backlinks

While there can be various different approaches in building backlinks, there are two main principles we should always hold on to:

1. It’s first and foremost, about the quality of your content

Really good content will always get links, period. That is, after all, the purpose of backlinks or inbound links is the online vote of confidence.

We shouldn’t really overthink it, and on the other hand, there’s no shortcut around this principle. That is, no amount of link-building tactics and efforts can help low-quality, thin, and irrelevant content. Link-building tactics will only amplify the performance of already performing content.

2. Your link building tactics should always align with your objectives/goals

Different content might—and should—has a unique objective, which will be related to the audience’s search intent.

That is, if your content is designed to fulfill informational intent, then you should mainly aim to get backlinks from sites that can support this content’s credibility as an informational source.

With those two principles being said, here are some examples of effective link building tactics in 2021 and onwards:

Healthy relationships as your link-building ecosystem

One of the best and the most effective ways to get high-quality inbound links consistently is to have business partners, media, and even loyal customers that you work with regularly. This way, we have a healthy “link-exchange” ecosystem where you can get a consistent, natural, and high-quality source of backlinks.

This approach, however, will require both parties to actually produce relevant and high-quality content that can link to the other’s site naturally, and it will require at least a little bit of time and effort for each backlink.

Outsource to an SEO expert

SEO expert/agency typically has relationships with high-authority sites and publishers and can publish content on these publishers as guest posts (technically). An expert can help get backlinks to your (the client’s) pages by using the following approach:

• Publishing a pair of content: one content for your site (your content), and another content to publish on a high-quality site as a guest post. The SEO agency can develop both of these content pieces, or your content creator team (if any) can work on them. There can be various approaches to do this, but the principle remains the same
• The “guest post” will be the key to this link building approach. It has to relate well with the target content. The placement for the backlinks (as well as the anchor text) should be thoroughly planned.
• This will create a (mostly) win-win situation, the publishing site gets high-quality content from you (or the SEO agency), while you get a Dofollow, highly-optimized link.
• Timing is important. On average it can take 2 to 5 weeks after the publication of the “target” article to get one published backlink.

This is arguably the most effective and safest approach to build high-quality backlinks for most startups and you can hire an SEO expert or link building consultant you need help with acquiring new links.

Consistent publication of high-quality content

We have addressed the fact that the quality of your content is the key to generating backlinks.

That is, we have to consistently—both in quantity and quality—publish relevant and valuable content. Maintain a regular schedule to update your blog, YouTube channel, or any other platforms, but also maintain quality.

Remember, however, that you should avoid delivering low-quality content just for the sake of regular publication. Google is strongly against this practice and you might get your site penalized.

Publish link “hook”

We tend to link to another site when they provide useful data or information—as a “citation” in our content—, or when they provide unique resources (i.e. unique infographic, original research report, etc.).

So, if we want to get more links, we can also publish high-quality content that includes unique and relevant data/information, such as:

• Something really unique or communicated from a unique angle
• Something visually appealing (good infographics, well-taken photos, royalty-free design/photo, etc.)
• Emotionally engaging piece (great story, great photo, etc.)
• Location-specific information
• Useful data/information (research report, case study, etc.)
• In-depth “resource” content

We call this type of content piece “link hooks”, and can be an effective approach to attract a lot of inbound links to a specific page. The more specific you can create these “hooks”, generally, the better, although broader resource pages that can target various different websites can also be useful.

Effective Outreach

Sometimes—a lot of times, even—, all it takes to get a backlink is to simply send an outreach email and ask for one.

However, since we can imagine a popular, high-quality, authoritative site’s webmaster can get hundreds if not thousands of emails every single day, a custom, genuine, and personal outreach email is necessary to capture their attention.

Here are some important principles in attempting an authentic, personalized outreach:

• Keep it short and to the point, any indication that it is a spammy email, and you will be discarded immediately
• Let them know how you can provide value in the opening section of your email outreach. For example, let them know when they have a broken link on their site, and how your content can be relevant to replace this broken link
• If you can mention something really personal (i.e. you both went to the same school, mention the person’s current project, etc.) without being creepy, you can create an immediate connection
• Another approach is to build a genuine relationship first, for example by asking an authentic, engaging question.

Link Building Best Practices

In general, your backlinks should always:

• Come from high-quality, authoritative pages—as we have discussed further above, based on E-A-T principle—.
• Earned links are always better. Avoid self-created, traded, and paid links.
• Aim to get high-quality links “slowly” but consistently, rather than creating links in bulk. It’s better to get 1 high-quality backlink every month for a year rather than 12 links at one time and never grown again.
• The links must come from sites that belong in your niche/industry, or at least topically relevant to your content. For example, if you are a digital marketing site with digital marketing content, it wouldn’t make sense to get a backlink from a site discussing football.
• Use relevant and natural anchor texts for both your outbound and inbound links.
• Remember that the natural purpose of backlinks is to bring relevant traffic to your website, and not only as a ranking factor for the search engine. Thus, links should be earned and on the other hand, strategically given, not just randomly generated for ranking purposes.

End Words

Backlinks—or inbound links—have been and still are the most important factors in determining your site’s ranking on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). It’s true, however, that Google’s—and the other search engines’ — algorithms regarding inbound links have significantly changed over the years.

Nowadays, the quality of backlinks is more important than quantity, and getting links from authoritative sites can be easier said than done. The main principle, however, remains the same: if your content is good, you will always get linked in one way or another, sooner or later. Focus on consistently publishing high-quality content, and the backlinks will come.

The post White Hat Link Building Strategies To Grow Your Rankings and Traffic appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

On the other hand, building backlinks is also very difficult and frustrating, and that’s why losing just a single hard-earned inbound link can be very stressful.

Unfortunately, there can be various reasons for a disappeared link—whether intended or unintended by the source page—, and this is where link reclamation comes in.  

What Is Link Reclamation

Link reclamation, in a nutshell, is any effort to reclaim lost backlinks. 

When you lose a backlink due to one reason or another, there are necessary steps to be taken to get the link back.

The process, will largely depend on the reason why the link is lost in the first place. Different reasons might require different actions, and below, we will discuss the common reasons for link losses. 

Reasons For Link Losses

Why can we lost a backlink in the first place? There are generally four common reasons. It’s important to figure out the root cause in the first place, since different cause might lead to different link reclamation process.

1.The source site removes your link

The page’s owner removes your link from the page for various reasons. For example, when they think another content is more relevant than yours.

2.The source page no longer exists

For example, when the page is deemed outdated by the owner and so is removed from the site. In this case, we usually get a 404 error when trying to open the page giving us links.

3.The linking page is redirected

The page has been (permanently) moved to a new URL so our link profile got messed up. We get a 301 error code in these cases.

4.The source page is no longer indexed by Google

For example, when the page is penalized by Google. In this case, the backlink is technically still there, but since the source site is not indexed, the value might be decreased.

Understanding the reason of lost links will be the key to a successful link reclamation process. Based on the cause, we can take the necessary actions to reclaim the lost link.

Finding The Lost Backlinks

Before anything else, the important preparation phase is to find and list the lost backlinks. Depending on your website’s size and age, the list can be very big, so you might want to create a spreadsheet listing the location of the lost link (your site’s URL, for example, or any other approach), old and new URL of the source site (if any), and anchor text. 

First, you need a backlinks analytics tool to help you. Popular SEO tools suite like Ahrefs, SEMRush, and Moz Pro, among others, mostly include a backlinks analytic feature. Ahrefs is generally accepted as the best backlink analytics tool available, but any tools with the ability to report “lost links” will do.

If you are using premium tools (again, Ahrefs), the report will also list the possible cause of the loss links (i.e. non-canonical, 404, etc.). Some tools will also provide the option to export the lost links report to excel or CSV.

Lick Reclamation Based On Causes

1.Reclaiming removed links

There are many possible reasons for the source site to remove the link to your site, but in general there are four main reasons:

• Your link is replaced with a better one: this is actually very common in today’s competitive SEO. Someone might develop a content that is (much) better than yours and then approach the backlink’s source site.

• They rewrite their content: for example, they might update the article with new information and facts, and might remove some links in the process (your content happens to be one).

• They have a new policy: for example, they might decide that your site is too ‘low-quality’ for one reason or another. 

• They hate you personally: quite rare, but can happen. Maybe you did something to offend them, or probably they don’t like your new content, or probably they don’t like the political stance of your brand, etc. 

Again, figuring out the reason behind the missing backlink(s) is the key to success in link reclamation. To do this, we can use internet archive sites like The Wayback Machine, Archive.is, and others. 

The idea is to compare the current content of the source site with the archived version:

• If the content is changed significantly—or completely new—, then they’ve reworked the content and removed your link. It’s quite possible that they didn’t even realize the removal, and so you might be able to reclaim it. Find possible new place for your link in the current content, then reach out to them and suggest to re-add your link. Just be polite and don’t push it.
• If several or many external links have been removed at a short period of time (or at once), then they’ve implemented a new policy. Usually, there’s nothing much you can do in this case. You can try to reach out and convince them, but don’t expect much.
• If the link is replaced with a competitor’s better content, analyze this competitor’s content and see whether it’s really better. You can reach out to them and ask for feedback to prevent similar issues, or even rework your content to be even better. 
• If your link is removed, but everything else is the same, then you are removed for personal reasons. Reach out and rebuild the relationships. It might take time and it might not work at all, but it’s always better than making enemies.

Figure out the exact reason why they removed your site as an external link, and reach out accordingly. Provide solutions, and always be polite. Remember that you are asking for a favor, and that you can’t force them to fulfill your wish.

2.Reclaiming 404 Error Links

Here, your inbound link disappeared because the source page no longer existed, giving your a 404 error. 

So, since the page is deleted for one reason or another, should we just give up right away?

Unfortunately, that is often the case, with one exception: the page might be deleted accidentally and the owner might not realize it.

Here are some signs of this happening:

• There are a lot of internal links pointing to the page. This can be relatively hard to detect. If you use tools like Ahrefs, you can check the URL Rating of the page, and compare it to Domain Rating and check the number of referring domains.If the UR is high compared to DR, but the referring domains are very few (or none at all), then this page has a lot of internal links.
• The page has a lot of backlinks. If the page has a lot of backlinks, the common sense is to redirect the page and not delete it completely—so it’s most likely an accident—. Or, they might not have too much knowledge about SEO and didn’t know the value of the page. You can use various SEO analytics tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs to check the URL’s backlinks profile. 

If you are confident that the page is deleted due to accident, politely reach out to them and notify them about the situation. In most cases they might be grateful about your information and you might be able to build a valuable relationship in the process.

As mentioned, it’s also possible that they did delete the page deliberately, but didn’t realize the SEO value. Let them know (but don’t be a know-it-all), and you might be able to convince them to reinstate the page.

3. Lost Links Due To Broken Redirects

In this case, most backlinks analytics tool will report the issue as “broken redirect”, and there are two main reasons for this report:

1.Broken Redirect Chain

For example, let’s say you have a link from Page A that is redirected to Page B, and redirected again to Page C. When any of these three pages is down for one reason or another, even temporarily, it will be reported as lost link.

2.Lost Redirect

Using the same example, let’s say you get a link from Page A-Page B-Page C but then the site owner changed the configuration to Page A-Page B. It would be reported as a lost link, but as you can see, it’s not really lost.

You can use tools like Link Redirect Trace (Chrome Extension) to check whether the link will take you back to your site, even when your analytics tool reported it as lost link. If it’s still working, then you might not need to do anything.

However, long redirect chains are generally undesirable, and you might want to reach out to the site owner and ask for a direct link instead. 

4. Links That Are Not Canonical Anymore

When the source page is no longer canonical, it might be reported as a lost link by your backlinks analytics software. 

Simply put, the website’s owner decides that there is another “version” of the page that is better, so the old page that link yours is no longer canonical, such as: 

• When the website migrates from HTTP to HTTPS
• The page is given a self-referencing canonical tag
• Different version of the URL is used (i.e. https://yoursite.com/thiscontent instead of https://yoursite.com/this-content)

In most cases, your link will still have value, existing with the new canonicalized URL. However, in quite rare cases, the new canonical tag might point to a wrong URL. For example, the webmaster might canonized a totally different content or the site’s homepage by mistake.

You can check this by checking the source code for the source page, and then search for (ctrl+f) <link rel=”canonical” href=”. It should be followed by a URL, and check whether this new URL is pointing to the same content. 

Nowadays, Google’s algorithm is actually advanced enough to recognize this mistake, and will automatically ignore the canonical tag. So, it won’t affect your backlink’s value. 

However, just to be sure, you can reach out and notify the site’s owner. They might thank you form it and it can be the start of a fruitful relationship. 

5.Noindex Tag

Another common reason for a disappeared link is due to the addition of the Noindex tag on the source page. 

A noindex tag is used when the site owner wanted to prevent Google from indexing the page. Similar to canonical tag above, you can check for this by looking at the page’s source code and look for content=”noindex. 

However, it’s still an ongoing debate whether Google still count links on non indexed pages. Yet, in general, if a page is non indexed for long, Google won’t count the links (including yours). 

Again, if the page is noindexed on purpose, there’s not much you can do. You can probably try to convince the site owner, but it’s not recommended.

However, it’s possible that the noindex tag is added by mistake, and there are at least two different ways we can find out about this:

• Check SEO signals. Chances are, they wouldn’t noindex a page where they’ve poured (significant) SEO efforts. So, check for signs like keyword optimizations (keyword in meta tags, high occurrence of certain keywords, etc), backlinks pointing to the page, internal links, etc. 
• Check for other noindexed pages. If important pages like their about us page, or worse, their homepage has a noindex tag, most likely it’s a sign of a site-wide noindex tagging by mistake. Check whether there are too many noindexed pages.

Again, if you are pretty sure that the noindex tag is an accident, reach out to them and let them know about it. 

If it’s not a mistake, just let it go.

6.Missing Links Due to 301/302 Redirects

A 301 redirect happens when a page is moved permanently—commonly used for SEO purposes—, while a 302 redirect is used to move the page temporarily. 

Both types of redirects can result in a lost link, quite similar to the issue of canonical tag above. Usually the reasons behind 301 and 302 redirects are also similar to canonical tags:

• Redirecting a page from HTTP to HTTPS
• Redirect to a different version of the URL (https://yoursite.com/this-page to https://yoursite.com/thispage)
• Redirect to a new URL due to site restructuration

Again, in most cases, this won’t affect your backlink’s value as the redirected URL will still link back to your site. It’s not a real lost link.

However, there are cases when the source page is deleted and then redirected elsewhere. This will lead to a real lost backlink. You can check the source code of the redirected URL for the name of your site (i.e. yoursite.com). If you get no results, then the new redirected page doesn’t link back to you. 

In most cases, it’s not worth to pursue this lost backlink, but there are some exceptions:

• There is a mention of your brand, but unlinked. 
• There are clear opportunities where you can add value with a link. 

If the redirected page is totally irrelevant, for example, when old content is redirected to the homepage, leave it be.

7. Claiming Unlinked Opportunities

This, is technically not a link reclamation process, since you didn’t lose a link in the first place. 

However, in situations where there should be a link, we can use similar principles to a link reclamation process to get the backlink.

The most obvious example here is when there’s any mention of your brand name, but you didn’t get any link. In this case, you can reach out to the site’s owner and ask for a backlink.

End Words

It’s important to understand that link reclamation is not a one-off thing. You will always lose links for one reason or another time and time again. It’s important to check for disappeared links regularly and attempt possible link reclamation as soon as you can. It’s better to work with a professional SEO expert if you want to make the most out of this activity. 

In most cases, reclaiming lost links is easier—and more cost-effective—than building a brand new link. So, you might want to allocate some of your time and link-building resources for link reclamation process.

The post Link Reclamation – Get Back Your Broken and lost Backlinks appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

SEO, by nature, is a competition where you try to outrank other sites. This is why an initial competitive analysis is an essential part of any SEO implementation. When done correctly, you can get valuable insights into how your competitors are approaching their SEO strategy, which can generate various benefits such as:

• Get inspirations and ideas on how to build better content, which backlinks you should pursue and how, and which keywords that can be good opportunities, among other aspects
• Figure out your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, and so you can find out how to outdo or outsmart them
• Find your competitor’s secret tactics and strategies you can “steal”.
• Improve your own SEO strategy based on real, collected data. This way, you avoid assumptions when planning your strategy

These are just some of the benefits you can have by performing an SEO analysis, and in this guide, we will learn how.

We will divide this guide into four major sections, from identifying your key competitors to finally analyzing their backlinks profile. Let us begin with the first one: identifying and validating your competitors.

Identify and Validate Your Competitors

The first step of a successful competitive analysis is knowing whom to analyze, which is this case, your competitors. Depending on the size of your industry, you can have very few to so many competitors.

On the other hand, obviously, we don’t have the time and resources to analyze all of our competitors, and so there are two layers to this step: identify your competitors, and validate the ones that are worth analyzing. First, let us discuss the key principles in identifying your competitors.

1.Identifying Key Competitors

Generally, there are three main approaches to determining your potential, most relevant SEO competitors:

• The obvious industry competitor sites

This can range from the market leaders of your industry, your closest competitors, and so on. Here, you are using common sense and the data you’ve gathered from market research.

• Top sites in your industry

The top sites in your industry can belong to the market leaders, which we have discussed above. However, there are cases when these top sites don’t belong to major brands. You can use Alexa and Similarweb, among other tools to check these top sites.

• Keyword Competitors

This is probably the most accurate approach in relations to SEO. Here, we use keyword research tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush to check our target keywords, and the top ranking sites for these keywords are our competitors. Obviously, here you will need to figure out your target keywords beforehand, and you might want to check out this guide by Backlinko here.

These three are the main approaches in finding your key competitors. Now, how can we validate them to make sure we are using our resources and time for the most important ones? This is where the validation process comes in.

2. Validation

The main approach in validating your SEO competitors is through keyword research: you would want to target competitors that are targeting, or are currently ranking on your target keywords.

To do this, we will need a keyword research tool like SEMRush, Ahrefs, or Google Keyword Planner among other tools, and figure out two things:

• Check your current positions for your target keywords
• Check these competitors’ ranked keywords, their positions, and analyze their content pieces whether they are targeting the same audiences as yours

Based on these, you should prioritize competitors who are targeting the same target keywords as yours. Depending on your available resources, you should focus on three to five key competitors to analyze.

Analyze Your Competitors’ Target Keywords

Now that you’ve selected and validated several key competitors, we should first analyze their target keywords. The purpose of this is to figure out our opportunities: we can decide whether we can target the same keywords or find other opportunities based on this data. There are several factors to consider in this step:

• The keyword difficulty (KD) of the keywords. Even if your competitors are successful with a certain keyword, it’s probably not a good idea to pursue it if the KD is too high.
• Find keyword gaps, which is, keywords where your competitors rank for when your site does not. This can be an effective approach to find new target keywords.
• There can be opportunities in your competitors’ branded keywords. For example, if your competitor, X, is the market leader of your industry, the keyword “X alternative” or “alternative for X” can be good opportunities. Similarly, you might want to target “X vs your brand name” keyword and its alternatives.

You can use keyword research tools like SEMRush of Ahrefs to figure out your competitors’ keywords easily. With these tools, you simply need to enter your competitors’ URL into the search bar, and they will display important metrics like search volume, CPC, and keyword difficulty (KD).

Analyzing Competitors’ Sites and Content

The purpose of this step is to figure out how your competitors are approaching their on-site SEO optimization, which can be divided into two things: their technical on-site optimizations and their content optimizations.

First, let us discuss several important aspects of technical optimizations you should analyze:

• The page’s load speed. It this competitor’s site is currently ranking, especially for popular keywords, you should aim to have similar loading speed, if not faster.
• Mobile-responsiveness. Pretty self-explanatory. You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool for this.
• Use of Schema.org or other structured data markups.
• URL structure and XML sitemap
• Metadata optimizations, like how your competitors are optimizing their title tags, meta descriptions, and image/video optimizations

As you might have guessed, the purpose of analyzing these technical aspects is so that you can emulate their efforts, or find areas where you can do better than them. With that being said, let’s see what we can analyze in the content department:

• The most important thing to analyze is how they are optimizing the target keyword(s) within the content. Especially pay close attention to their titles and subheadings. Also, analyze their keyword density using various available tools.
• Examine their content types. Are they using videos, images, or podcasts to enhance the textual content?
• How optimized are their landing pages, including sales pages if it’s an e-commerce site.
• The structure of their content. How long is the blog post? How are they maintaining engagement and readability of the content?
• How many links are included in each content for both external and internal links? Analyze how they are using the anchor texts.
• How are they approaching their content according to their audience’s search intent?

To get better SEO results, you should first and foremost aim to create better content than the top-ranking sites. So, this step is especially important. Hire an SEO consultant to analyze how your competitors are approaching their content, analyze their content promotion strategy, and aim to outdo them.

Analyzing Backlinks

Backlinks are still one of the most important ranking signals in SEO. In relations to SEO competitive analysis, there are two main purposes in analyzing your competitors’ backlinks:

1. Figuring out backlinks opportunities. You can aim to get the same backlinks when targeting the same keywords.
2. Figuring out whether pursuing these same links are beneficial for your site. For example, are some backlinks going to be really hard to get yourself? In this case, you would also want to decide on the alternatives.

In most cases, however, it’s a good idea to pursue the same backlinks as your competitors. In theory, you should at least similar results when you have the exact same backlinks profile. However, there are two major factors when determining whether you should pursue the backlinks:

• Links quality. Nowadays, the quality of your links is far more important than quantity. So, you might not want to pursue backlinks that are low in quality.
• Bad links and broken links. Obviously, you should avoid these two. Broken links are simply backlinks from sites or pages that are no longer operational for one reason or another. Bad links are generally purchased links or links built through blackhat tactics.

However, remember that the higher the quality, generally the harder it will be to get the inbound link. You can build a list from these high-quality backlinks, and start building your relationships with these sites until you earn these backlinks. You might want to check out this guide by Backlinko on more about link building tactics.

When analyzing your competitors’ backlinks, here are a few key areas to focus on:

1. Finding backlinks gap

Here, your aim is to find sites which are linking to your competitors’ sites but not yours, especially on pages where you are targeting the same keywords. There are various tools available that can help you in this aspect, and this list by Neil Patel is a good place to start.

2.The number of deep backlinks

Backlinks that are linking to “deep” pages have more value for SEO than a backlink to your landing page or homepage. For example, a backlink that is pointing to a content page can be considered as “deep”.

The goal of this is to find out whether your competitors have a lot of these backlinks. If the answer is yes, you will need to do the same—if not better—to rank for the same keywords. The best way to get these deep backlinks is to develop relevant, high-quality content pieces and build backlinks for each of them.

3. Anchor text usage

In SEO best practices, anchor texts should always be relevant to the content of the linked page. However, using exact-match anchor text too heavily can get you penalized by Google.

So, analyze how your competitors are using their anchor texts, as well as the anchor texts of the backlinks linking to their sites. Check the ratio between exact-match texts and generic anchors, as well as the usage of semantically-related texts.

4. Sitewide backlinks

A sitewide link is, in a nutshell, links placed throughout the whole site, commonly in the sidebar, footer, or header. Using sitewide backlinks aggressively nowadays can induce a Google Penalty due to the Penguin update. However, it can still be effective when done properly. Check out whether your competitors are getting sitewide backlinks, and you can either aim to emulate them or find different opportunities.

5. Redirects

Using 301 redirects is one of the most common (and effective) link building tactics. This is why you should analyze whether your competitors are using redirect tactics to get their backlinks, and find similar opportunities.

There are three different redirects to look for:

• Traditional 301 redirects: where a brand redirects their existing/old site to the new site, generating a backlink in the process.

• Using link shorteners: can be considered a black hat tactic, but is still quite common

• Merger redirects: where your competitor redirects an expired, but still relevant site to their site

6. Hidden links

There might be cases where a competitor is ranking really high, but has very little to no backlinks at all. In this case, there is a high probability that your competitors are hiding their backlinks.

Quite often, these sites are hiding their backlinks because they are using grey hat tactics like using a Private Blog Network (PBN) or even black hat tactics.

End Words: Learning From Your Competitors

As we have mentioned, SEO competitive analysis should be an integral part of any SEO strategy. A proper competitive analysis can provide very valuable information about your competitors’ performances and their strategies to achieve them.

By collecting this data, you can, in turn, plan your own SEO campaign without relying on instincts and assumptions, that will drive better results. As the old saying goes: knowing your enemy is half the battle, and by knowing how your key competitors are approaching their SEO, you have a much better chance in outranking them.

The post SEO Competitive Analysis: Learning From Your Competitors To Achieve Better Results appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

SEO audit should be performed before you attempt any SEO efforts, especially if you are an SEO agency handling a new client’s website. To achieve the best results, however, you should do SEO audit regularly.

In this guide, we will share 9 important steps you should do when performing an SEO audit, covering the most important aspects of SEO activities.

Before we begin, however, let us discuss the concept of SEO Audit itself.

What Is SEO Audit?

SEO website audit, in essence, is checking the health of your site according to SEO principles. A proper SEO audit allows you to check the performance of your site regarding the important ranking signals. This way, you can find the important weaknesses, as well as as strengths and optimize them further.

Without SEO audit, you can’t properly identify the current state of your site and implement the necessary improvements to improve your ranking on the search engine results page.

Sites that are properly optimized get more traffic and thus, generate more prospects with the potential of converting into paying customers.

What To Expect From SEO Audit?

There are three main things you can expect from SEO audit:

1. The accurate current state of your site, which is, a detailed analysis on how your website is performing according to the ranking signals. Especially, your social media presence, search results performance, number of inbound/outbound links, and any other relevant information.
2. SEO audit checklist, which is a list actions necessary to improve your SEO results.
3. Complete internet marketing strategy according to the available data.

Step-By-Step Guide To SEO Audit

Step 1: Making Sure Your Site is Indexable

No matter the amount of optimizations you do, it won’t matter if Google cannot index your page. So, this step, and arguably the most important one, is to ensure Google that other crawl engines can crawl your site.

First, let us understand how Google crawl your website.

1. Google’s spider bot visit your web page and “crawl” it.
2. Google then add the optimized pages to their index, cataloging them
3. Google then show the best results based on queries

Fortunately, Google does provide a tool to check whether your site can be crawled, which is the Google Search Console. Google Search Console is also an essential tool for any SEO audit activities, so keep it in mind.

To use this tool, you only need a Google account, which the most of us already have at this point. Also, if you already used Google Analytics previously, you can link the two together so you can monitor Search Console data from Google Analytics.

Here are a few necessary things to consider when monitoring Google Search Console to check whether your site is crawlable:

XML Sitemap

Having a proper XML sitemap is essential in making sure your site is indexable by Google. By creating an XML sitemap and submitting it to Google Search Console, you tell Google the exact location of your pages, giving Google an easier time to crawl them. Also, by doing this, you are telling Google that you are the original owner of your site content, which will prevent removal in the cases of duplicated content pieces.

Thankfully, there are many available tools that can help you in developing XML Sitemap. For instance, XML Sitemaps is a fairly popular site providing this service. If your site is WordPress based, you can also use various plugins to assist you, such as Yoast SEO.

Crawl Errors

Use Crawl->Crawl Errors to check for crawl errors on your site. 404 errors are not a direct ranking signal, but the can affect your SEO performances due to bad user experience, and thus, higher bounce and exit rates. Use redirects to fix these 404s if necessary. Again, if your site is WordPress-based, there are plugins that can assist you in this process.

Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a small text file on your site server which tells the search engines which pages of your site they can (and cannot) index.

Not all sites have robots.txt, and Google can still crawl your site in this case. However, having a proper robots.txt can help in optimizing crawl budget.

You might want to check out this guide from Moz on how to optimize robots.txt.

Step 2: Make sure you rank on your brand name

Do a quick Google search using your proper brand name as the query.

If your brand name is properly unique, your own site should be the very first organic result. If your site is very, very new, however, you might need to wait a couple of weeks or even months.

If your site currently rank further down in the search results page, then Google thinks there are other sites that are more relevant for your brand name. Again, this often happens if your brand name is a generic word.

Here are several things you can do when you don’t rank on branded keywords:

• More backlinks, especially from high-authority sites
• Getting a PR mention from high-authority media, relevant influencers, and high-quality sites
• Have a Google My Business account (and verify it), and build citations on local directories. Make sure your Phone, Address and Name are consistent across all listings
• Have a proper presence on all major social media platforms

With these relatively simple steps, your site should slowly climb up the ranks.

However, what if your site is nowhere to be found in the SERP? If you don’t have any indexation problems, as we have discussed on the first step, most likely your site is affected by serious Google penalties. (internal link)

Again, use Google Search Console to check whether you are currently penalized by Google.

Step 3: Use HTTPS and secure your site

If you are serious about your business, you should definitely switch over to HTTPS.

Since 2014, having a secure website URL is a very important ranking signal while also bringing other direct and indirect benefits to your business.  More and more people are now really concerned about online security, and let’s face it, if you land on a site with a security warning, most likely you are going to leave.

Thankfully, migrating to HTTPS is now easier than ever, and you can check out this guide by SearchEngineLand on how to do it. Also, if your site is WordPress-based, you might want to check this guide by WPBeginner.

However, migrating to HTTPS is just one aspect of site security. So, in this step, we will discuss how to audit the possible security issues that might affect your site.

You can use SEMRush’s Site Audit feature, click on HTTPS, and SEMRush will show various HTTPS-related security issues such as:

• Internal links to non-secured pages
• Some pages on your site that are not yet using HTTPS
• Mixed content
• Checking the state of your security certificates and server security protocols

Step 4: Broken Links

Inbound links, or backlinks are obviously essential to any SEO activities: the most important and prominent SEO ranking factor.  Yet, these backlinks will only bring value when they work properly, and this is why checking for broken links is a very important step of SEO Audit.

There are many different tools you can use to identify broken links. Again, SEMRush’s site audit feature can be useful, and if you are using WordPress, you can use various plugins to help you.

Also, consider using DrLinkCheck in this process, the free version have a 1000-URL limitation, which is quite generous.

Step 5: Check for Redirect Chains

Redirect chain, is the term we use to define more than one redirects between two URLs. Redirect chains can affect your link profile, and so affect your ranking. Also, a long redirect chain can affect the page load time, which is also an indirect ranking factor.

A redirect chain can especially happen after a site migration, including when you switch from HTTP to HTTPS.

Most SEO audit tools can find redirect chains and redirect loops, and fix them.

Step 6: Checking Backlinks Quality

Backlinks from low-quality sites not only can hinder your ranking. In a worst-case scenario, you can get penalized by Google. So, during your SEO audit, it is important to find these low-quality backlinks and remove them.

Most SEO audit tools have the feature to check these low-quality links, but again you can easily do this with SEMRush’s Backlink Audit feature.

Here are a few different factors to look for:

• Link Relevancy

The relevancy of the backlinks is extremely important in determining SEO results. For example, if you are a real estate company, having a backlink from entertainment sites can be concerning.

Yet, manually checking the relevancy of each inbound links can be extremely time-consuming. Thankfully, there are many tools that can help you with this aspect, especially Ahrefs with its Bulk Backlinks feature inside Link Map Tools.

• Authority/Quality

As we have mentioned, the quality of your backlinks is significantly more important than quantity. Having just one or two authority backlinks can get your site to rank higher faster compared to having tens of low-quality links. Yet, how can we determine the quality of our backlinks? You might want to check out this guide by SEOMark, and use various SEO audit tools to track the metrics listed there.

• Link Diversity

There are many different sources of backlinks from directory links to contextual links to sidebar links, and so on. You might want to check this list to check all the different types/sources available.

The thing is, you would want a decent amount of diversity to make your link profile more natural. Also, you would want a proper diversity of DoFollow and NoFollow links.

• Anchor Texts Ratio

There are generally two different anchor text types to consider: exact match anchor text (EMA) and branded anchor. The thing is, the majority of your anchor texts should be branded anchors, so check the ratio between EMAs and branded anchors, and adjust your tactic when necessary.

• Homepage Links VS Deep Links

If your SEO is based on content marketing (which is, the most of us), the majority of your backlinks should target deep pages. Again, however, aim for proper diversity to allow a more natural link profile.

Step 7: Page Analysis

Since, as we have just mentioned, the core of most, if not all SEO activities is content marketing, SEO audit should properly address the quality of your content and page optimization of each content.

No matter how good your content is, it won’t get ranked unless the page is properly optimized, and vice versa. In this step, we will first discuss the key areas to audit when optimizing your page.

• Duplicate content check

You can use various duplicate content checker like Copyscape. This is useful if you are outsourcing your content development process, as well as to check whether there are others on the internet who are stealing your content. If you do find a duplicate content, you can remove it (if the duplicate content is yours), or file a DMCA Report to Google, which will allow Google to remove this content from indexation.

• Target keyword locations

There are four main locations where your focus keyword should be included: the title, META description, and the first paragraph (or at least, one of the earliest paragraphs, and the last sentence of your content. Mention your target keyword only once in these four locations.

• URL

Your URL should also include the target keyword. Make sure the URL is short and comprehensive enough for human readers.

• Internal links

For internal links, make sure you are using exact match anchor text (EAM).

Step 8: Content Analysis

As mentioned, an optimized page will only work with an optimized content. If in the previous step we have discussed how to audit your page optimization, here we will focus on content quality.

Analyzing content is both the most important and time-consuming part of SEO audit, and here are the key areas to focus on:

• Uniqueness

Your content should be unique not only in the eye of the search engines, but also human readers.

• Value

Your content should bring value to your audience by giving new information or solving problem. Also, your content should be engaging, usually by using “you” and “your” within your content to address your audience.

• Length

Longer content pieces generally perform better on Google SERP. 1,800 to 2,000-word is the average length for top-ranking content.

• Advertising

Avoid using excessive ads on your content pages, it can distract your audience and even cause a high bounce rate.

• Blog Comments

Look for links in your blog comment, remove any unrelated and suspicious links. Having these links in your blog comment section can get you penalized by Google, so be extra careful.

Step 9: User Interactions

In this step, we will focus on analyzing how your users are interacting with your site, and especially your content.You can do this step just with the handy Google Analytics, and here are some key data points to focus on:

• Bounce Rate

Generally, you would want a bounce rate below 60%, with 80% being the threshold until you should worry about a potential problem. If your bounce rate is above 80% or even 90%, this should be your priority to fix.

• Dwell time

Dwell time is now considered a significant ranking factor, although Google hasn’t confirmed it. However, a high dwell time means there are more chances to convert the audience, so you should definitely aim for a higher dwell time. An average dwell time of above 1 minute is decent, and you should aim for above 2 minutes. Remember, the better your content is, the more time they will spend on your site.

• Exit Rate

Exit rate measures the rate of visitors that are leaving specific pages. This way, we can identify which pages that are not performing well. Again, aim for an exit percentage of around 50-70%, and you will need. High exit rate often occurs when your content in this specific page doesn’t provide enough value or doesn’t answer your audience’s problems.

• Return Visitors

The number of people who return to visit your site is a strong positive signal. It means, your audience finds value in your content, and with more visitations, you have more chance to encourage conversions. If your return visitors rate is low, you either have issues with your content or with your overall user experience (including site optimization).

End Words

There are certainly other areas SEO experts can analyze when performing an SEO audit. However, the 9 steps we have shared above are among the most important, and you can use the same principles to assess other areas.

Regular SEO audit is a very important aspect if you want to maximize your SEO results: monitor everything regularly, find gaps, and know when to adjust your approaches.

The post 9 Steps To Perform Effective SEO Audit appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.