With that being said, the strategy you’ve done in 2016 might not work. Here, we will show you an effective SEO strategy for your software company, after considering all the recent changes in Google’s algorithm and the introduction of RankBrain.

Let us begin.

Content is Everything

Before anything else, let’s have the right mindset: most grey and black-hat SEO tactics no longer work. Both Google and the users are getting smarter: Google with its various algorithm updates and especially RankBrain have rendered various grey-hat tactics to be completely useless—and can get your site permanently penalized.

Even if somehow you can get results through these grey or black-hat tactics, the visitor will recognize it if your content is not high quality, and so you won’t get any conversion. Also, if you have a high bounce rate or low dwell time—among other UX factors—, RankBrain will demote your site from the SERP.

There’s no shortcut for building a succesful B2B SEO startegy for the software company besides actually producing relevant and valuable content. This way, we play along with Google’s goal: making the internet a better place for everyone where it’s easier to get valuable information.

It’s also important to consider the fact that content for SEO today is no longer solely about optimizing for keywords. In fact, it can be counterproductive.

So, what should we do about our content to get the best SEO results and develop a software SaaS SEO strategy that delivers results? Here are some best practices to follow:

1. Optimization Starts From The Planning Process

Don’t blindly develop your content with the aim to optimize later by adding links and optimizing for keywords.

Instead, plan your content strategy with SEO in mind, and there are two main things to consider: search queries/keywords that are relevant in your niche, and the user’s search intent when searching for those queries:

• Use various tools like Ahrefs or Ahrefs alternatives, among others for keyword research purposes. The principles are fairly straightforward:
  • Find keywords that are relevant for both your brand and your audience
  • Find keywords with high enough search, yet with manageable competition
  • Find keywords that are expandable into an informative content
• Tools like BuzzSumo and Ubersuggests can help you find trending content in your niche, based on the keywords you’ve found in the keyword research aspect. Some keyword research tools can also help with this.
• Understand the search intent behind each keyword. Your content should aim to answer this search intent and help the reader to complete a specific task according to the intent. This is why longer content (1000-1500 words and above) generally ranks better, because they provide more information to help the reader.
• Don’t forget the purpose of the content to convert readers. Include engaging CTAs or point them to the next step of the buyer’s journey. For example. you can incorporate lead magnets.

In optimizing content for SEO, the most important part here is to remember that your goal is to align with Google’s mission to provide more value to the human audience. Don’t focus too much on pleasing the search engine algorithm and build your SEO strategy for a software company by focusing on delivering relevant, informative content for your human readers.

2. Proper UX Practices

The structure of the content, proper grammar correctness, and the overall layout of the page will affect how the audience is consuming your content. If the reader is properly engaged, it will increase their dwell time—which is a ranking signal—, and will increase the likelihood of them sharing your content—which can possibly get you more backlinks which are the most important ranking factor in any SEO for software companies.

While there are no set rules about this aspect, here are some key pointers:

• Proofread your content and make sure it’s free of any typos and grammatical mistakes.
• Find the right balance between simple and technical languages. This will obviously depend on your audience’s preferences. You can set a desired tone or language in the content by passing your content through a paragraph rewriter. There you just need to set the fluent mode for simple and innovative mode technical language in your content.
• Make sure it’s structured properly: short paragraph, bullets and numberings when necessary, bold text, etc. Make sure it’s easy to digest the content quickly.
• Use subheadings accordingly, use these subheadings as the opportunity to include keywords naturally.
• Link to reputable sites, and when possible, link to your own content. Also, double-check all the facts you’ve mentioned in the content.

3. Keyword Optimizations

Optimizing for keywords nowadays should be one of the main activities in any SEO for software companies. While there is no set rule on the right percentage of keyword density, the best approach is to proofread your content and see if it’s natural enough.

• There are various tools that can help you analyze your content for keyword density, but there’s no clear consensus. Just focus on using your keywords naturally, and use semantically-related keywords.
• Use keywords naturally—and their variants— within the body of the content. It’s best not to think too much about this aspect, and just write naturally about the topic. Include your target keyword in the beginning and ending of the content (within the first and last 100 words).
• Use keywords (and LSI keywords) naturally in the title, heading, URL, and image text.

The main idea is similar to the above: write naturally with the focus to deliver value to human readers. Also, check top-ranking competitors on how they are approaching their content (structure, writing style, images usage, etc.). Aim to be better than them, and that’s how you’ll rank higher on the target keyword. The end goal of the SEO strategy is to rank your software company on the first page of Google for competitive non-branded keywords.

We will further discuss keyword optimizations in its own section further below.

Analyze The First Page of SERP

Google’s SERP (Search Engine Results Page) has changed dramatically over the years. The fact is, ranked first on your target keyword is no longer what it used to be.

More than 40% of keywords now feature-rich snippets as the top result, just below the paid ad and above the #1 spot.

Also, now there’s the “PEOPLE ALSO ASK” box just positioned above the top organic result.

The thing to consider is, even if you can somehow get featured as rich snippet or in the “people also ask” section, it won’t guarantee a click to your site. A rich snippet is designed so that the searcher can get the required information without needing to click and visit the site, so it’s intended. Nevertheless, it’s still a good branding opportunity.

What will this mean? On one hand, this will mean an additional challenge, but this can also be an opportunity.

1. If being featured as a rich snippet might help you achieve your goals, by all means, pursue it. For example, if you are a local business, getting on the top 3 of the Google Map results with local SEO services (also a rich snippet for local near-me queries) can significantly increase conversion rate.
2. Keyword research tools like Ahrefs can help you analyze keywords with a high organic click-through rate (CTR). In most cases, these are keywords that didn’t feature-rich snippets as a result, but there are also cases where organic CTR remains high when there are featured snippets. These are the keywords you should target.

Ranking on featured snippets will require a significantly different approach than normal SEO, and is a deep subject on its own. You might want to check out this guide by Neil Patel if you want to build-in rich snippets optimizations into your SEO strategy for your software company.

A Little Bit Different Is Better Than A Little Bit Better

The main goal of SEO strategy is to rank your software company website (or get featured snippets) for your target keywords. However, the more valuable the keyword is, the more competition you will have.

To get ranked, you must beat these competitors, and there are two main approaches you can try:

1. Be the absolute best: bigger, more informative, in-depth content than the others.
2. Be different: take a unique angle, come up with some brand new ideas, and so on.

The thing is, in most cases, being different is the easier approach (not saying it’s easy). If you are just slightly better than your competitor—by adding slightly more information, for example—, most of the time it won’t cut it. Also, others will eventually come up with a better content, or the competitors you tried to beat in the first place might update the content, making it an endless cycle.

For example, for keywords like “best SEO tools”, you’ll probably get content listing 10-30 tools on the first page. Developing another content listing 20 tools, most of the time, won’t cut it, especially if you are a relatively new brand. In this case, you might need to develop a really big guide listing 100+ SEO tools to compete with your competitors.

On the other hand, if you can really deliver something different—albeit so slightly—, usually it can compete better. This is the top-ranking content for “best SEO tools”, which is just slightly different than other content on the first page by being an expert roundup: including pictures and quotes from the SEO experts in the industry.

So, if you can find a unique angle to approach the keyword, or if you have different actionable tips than the others, go for it.

Being unique also means there’s a higher chance to get your content shared and linked, which will give your software company those valuable inbound links to fuel your SEO strategy.

Link Building

White hat backlinks are still one of the most important ranking factors and you need to include them in your SEO strategy if you want to rank your software company. However, many things have changed in recent years.

All the changes, however, leads to one thing: Google is now smarter in determining the quality and relevancy of your backlinks:

• Quality over quantity: the quality of your backlinks is more important than quantity. That is, the links coming from authoritative sites in your industry will be considered more valuable.

• Relevance: even if your link is coming from a high-quality source, it won’t bring any value—and actually might get you penalized— if the site is not related to your niche. For example, if you are a digital marketing site but you get a link from a golf site when the content is not related to golf.

• Frequency: If you get too many links in any given time (yet your content is not going viral or not getting high traffic), Google might penalize you.

So, in general, you only need to build 2 to 3 backlinks from high-quality, authoritative sources every month. However, obviously getting links from big, famous sites is easier said than done.

Here are some tactics that are still effective to achieve this feat:

1. Make Your Content Linkable

The best way to get more backlinks is to actually have very high-quality or unique content (as discussed above). If your guide—for example— is very in-depth, complete, and informative, someone will eventually link it. The same thing happens when you provide unique facts or tips not available anywhere else—if the unique fact is actually relevant or interesting.

There are, however, ways to increase the linkability of your content, for example:

• Many people link to other sites when they cite for data. Including data and facts (for example, research results or case studies) can increase linkability.
• If you can coin totally new things, and if it’s interesting or useful, you will get links.
• Find famous things or concepts many people talk about in their content, and write in-depth content about it. For example, many people discussing SEO for software companies will talk about link building, and if you have an in-depth guide about link building, they might link it.
• People tend to link pages that are already ranking on top (at least on the first page). This is why it’s wise to focus to build links on just one or two really good content at first. If you get a lot of quality backlinks to this content (naturally), it will also help your other pages.

2. Social Bookmarking and Social Media Marketing

While Google confirmed that social shares aren’t accounted as “true” inbound links, getting a lot of shares on Social Media will still help your software company with SEO.

First, you will get more people reading your content, which thanks to RankBrain, is now valuable as a ranking signal. Second, the more people see your content, the higher the chance they will link it. Third, sharing your content on social media and social bookmarking sites will help your content indexed quicker.

Social bookmarking is, in a nutshell, leaving your content on social platforms with two aims:

• Leaving its trace on the internet—”bookmarking” your content—
• Getting more people to see your content, and hopefully they’ll share it.

This list by Brandwatch will help you find the best social platforms to bookmark your content, according to your niche.

Also, being active on social media in general—and working with influencers in your industry— can establish your credibility, further increasing the chance for more backlinks and helping achieve your SEO strategy objectives.

3. Guest Posting

Guest posting, when done right, is still a very good source for backlinks.

There are two keys to a successful guest posting campaign:

1. You will need to build your own reputation. It’s generally harder for brand new sites or sites that are unprofessional made to get opportunities. Again, having a strong content marketing game is the key.
2. In most cases, you will need to build relationships with the sites before they’ll give you guest posting opportunities. Comment on their blog posts (not as effective as it used to, but can still work), engage on their social media conversations, or even send an email to introduce yourself.

It is also worth noting that there are reputable sites that will charge money for guest post opportunities (where you’ll automatically get a backlink). In my opinion, it can be considered as a grey-hat tactic so there’s a risk of a penalty. However, if the price is right and the site is trustworthy, it can be a surefire way to get a quality backlink.

4. Pay Attention to Dofollow Links

Not exactly a link building tactic, but an important thing to know nonetheless.

There are two different types of links: Nofollow and Dofollow. The main difference is just a coding tag where a nofollow link will have the rel=”nofollow” behind the html code. So, it’s indistinguishable by human readers, but the difference is very important for Google and other search engines.

In short, Dofollow links are accounted as a ranking signal, but not Nofollow links.

How to check if you have nofollow backlinks? View the page source of any site (especially in this case, look for sites giving you backlinks) on your browser and use the find (ctrl+f) function to search for ‘rel=nofollow’. If you find any, you have a nofollow inbound link.

Source: Wordstream

There are also various tools that can help you. For example, this Chrome extension.

In general, however, backlinks from popular sites like YouTube, Quora, Wikipedia, and Reddit, among others, tend to be nofollow. Links from blog comments, social media platforms (embedded link in a post), and forum posts also tend to be nofollow.

So, aim for dofollow links to help your software company to be successful in SEO.

On-Page Optimization Part 1: Content Optimizations

We will divide on-page optimization into two parts: optimizing your content and optimizing the non-content aspects of your software company.

First, content optimization, and obviously here we will talk a lot about keyword optimizations.

There are three main things to focus on in the SEO strategy in this aspect:

1. Natural keyword usage and semantic keywords

There are usually two different approaches to developing content for your software company and SEO:

• Planning all your keywords beforehand and then incorporate them into your content. Often, a content outline is developed beforehand with a rough idea of where the keywords are going to be used
• Write your content naturally as a draft, and then optimize the keywords later.

Both approaches work, although we personally prefer the latter. The idea is to include your keywords naturally and also include semantically-related words.

You can use synonyms or re-word some of the keywords naturally. Another approach is to use Google search (or any keyword research tool), and use the “searches related to…” or “similar keywords..” feature. Also, there are many tools dedicated to finding these semantically-related keywords or LSI keywords.

Here are some key areas to optimize your keywords usage:

• Your title, use your main target keyword naturally here. If you can, use the target keyword upfront.
• Headings and subheadings. Use your main target keyword and secondary keywords sparingly and naturally.
• Meta description. This will be the snippet shown in the SERP, so it will affect CTR. Include your target keywords naturally and make sure it’s engaging.
• Use appropriate keywords in images’ alt text attributes.
• Your URL (more on this below)

2. URL Optimization

Your URL is often the very first thing seen by Google and your customers. In optimizing it, you will need to consider both your human audience and Google’s search algorithms. That is, make sure it’s comprehensive enough for human readers, but make sure Google can easily index it.

In general, shorter URLs that include your exact target keyword will perform better.

So, if for example, your site is xxx.yy and your target keyword is “brand building”, the URL can be like this:

xxx.yy/brand-building

or

xxx.yy/brandbuilding

or it can be deeper within your domain and looks something like this

xxx.yy/blog/brand-building

How if we have several content targeting the same keyword? In this case, there are two different approaches.

First is to create unique URLs according to the content’s title, so:

xxx.yy/blog/brand-building 

and

xxx.yy/blog/brand-building-techniques

or you can do it like this:

xxx.yy/blog/brand-building/tactics

and

xxx.yy/blog/brand-building/techniques

avoid unnecessary repetition of the keywords, for example

xxx.yy/blog/brand-building/brand-building-tactics 

the bolded part is unnecessary.

Make sure to structure your URLs properly so that they are easily indexable by Google. Also, some CMS (content management system) might automatically generate URLs that can end up like:

xxx.yy/blog/?brand-building=7172

This is called dynamic URLs, and while Google won’t have any problem in recognizing this kind of URL, it will be a problem for human readers. It’s best to edit it out into a static URL variant, as discussed above.

3. Internal Linking Structure

Internal linking is, as the name suggests, when your page links another page in your domain. When done right, this can improve your page’s SERP ranking.

• The main principle is to link from pages with higher SEO ranking/overall authority to pages needing the boost.
• Use proper keywords as the anchor text. For example, the source page might be digital marketing content, and the target page might discuss SEO. Here, “SEO strategy” can be the anchor text.
• Internal linking should work together with how you structure your URLs, discussed above. Plan your content ahead, and plan a linking structure from your most important content covering the broadest topic, linking to more specific pieces.
• There are various plugins where you can automatically add the “related posts” section. It works like an internal linking, but double-check whether the related links are actually related.

There are various ways to implement a proper internal linking structure, and this guide by Neil Patel might help you further.

6. On-Page Optimizations Part 2: Technical Optimizations

This part of the SEO for software companies will be about optimizing your site as a whole. The main goals here are to allow Google an easier time to crawl and index your site, and to give Google the perception that you are an authoritative site for your target keywords.

While technical SEO optimization is a very broad subject, and might vary depending on the type of your site and your niche, there are several important factors to focus on:

1. Mobile-responsiveness

It’s no secret that Google now prioritizes mobile-friendly sites. So, if your site isn’t already mobile-friendly, it’s going to be really hard—if not impossible—to get ranked.

To start, use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool and check whether your site is already mobile-friendly. If not, there are several things you can do:

• If your site is WordPress-based, you can update your theme into a mobile-responsive one.
• Simplify your buttons and menus, and make sure they are viewable on mobile screens. Less scrolling, the better.
• If you use forms, make them as short as possible, and don’t include too many fields.
• Include a search function that is easily viewable on mobile screens, and easy to type into. With this, you can reduce the need for complex navigation.
• Make sure customer service is easily accessible and obvious on every page.
• Avoid pop-ups at all cost, nothing is more annoying than a pop-up on mobile sites, especially when the close button is often obscured.
• In general, reduce the number of texts on your mobile site.

2. Speed

If your site is too slow to load, it will significantly affect bounce rate, which in turn can affect your SEO results.

The general rule of thumb is to maintain your page’s load speed below 3 seconds (for standard 4G signal receptions). If it’s above 3 seconds, more than 50% of users will bounce.

There are two main factors in maintaining loading speed: simplifying your overall design and optimizing the technical factors (coding, database, image compression, etc).

You might want to check out this guide by CrazyEgg on how to speed up your site.

3. Optimizing Robots.txt

Robots.txt, in essence, is a simple text file included within any website with the purpose of giving instructions to the search engine’s crawlers on which page they should index.

In most cases, you wouldn’t need to make changes to your robots.txt, but it is wise to check from time to time whether there are any errors that will affect your site’s indexing.

You might want to check this guide on how to optimize your robots. txt.

Evaluation and Improvements

SEO for software companies is a long-term game and your SEO strategy will require at least a year of consistent effort before you see success.

So, we would need a system in place for us to evaluate our performance, and continue optimizing our site (both on-site and off-site) while following the changes in Google’s algorithm and guidelines.

• Setup a Google Search Console account, let it analyze your site and fix all errors. Check this regularly.
• Pay extra attention when there’s a change in Google’s algorithm. This is a good place to start. Generally, if you follow the topics of SEO and digital marketing, you will be aware when there’s any major change.
• No content is truly evergreen, there is always room for improvement and you can always update the content with new data and facts. Also, if the content is not performing well, you might want to rework it.
• Follow your competitors closely, check their link profile, their new content, and their overall approach to SEO. Remember that SEO is a competition, and aim to always stay on top of your competitors.

End Words

SEO for software companies is far from dead. In fact, it is arguably more important than ever with Google’s current efforts to deliver more value to the audience via rich snippets, RankBrain, and many other changes. SEO remains the main source of sales and leads for many SaaS, IT, software and technology companies.

While SEO is a long term effort, the results generated are also sustainable, where you’ll also get a long-lasting source of leads. SEO and SEO strategy remains one of, if not the most effective ways to build online presence and credibility for your software company.

The post SEO Strategy and the Best Practices For Software Companies appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

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

Learn more

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.

SaaS SEO differs from traditional SEO in that it targets different stages of the customer funnel that are unique to SaaS companies. This includes targeting keywords and focusing on content that correspond with potential customers’ awareness, consideration, and decision stages as they choose and use a SaaS product.

SaaS SEO, in contrast to traditional SEO, also focuses on optimizing pricing pages, free trials, demo sign-ups, and other conversion-oriented elements to entice users to perform desired actions, like making a purchase or engaging with the software.

SEO for SaaS businesses is fairly unique compared to other businesses: the sales cycle is surprisingly fast, with an average of just 40 days for SaaS products priced below $5,000. Meaning you don’t have a lot of room to nurture your prospects.

The biggest challenge in SaaS marketing, however, is arguably about SaaS lead generation. SaaS SEO remains one of the most effective ways to generate more SaaS prospects, and in this guide, we will learn how.

First, we will discuss the right mindset in implementing SEO for SaaS.

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 SaaS 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

Learn more

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

SaaS 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

Content is Definitely King, If Not Everything

For SEO in the SaaS industry, focusing on producing content with compounding effects over time is essential. Long-term benefits can be significant for businesses that consistently create valuable and relevant content. Content development is essential if it is to meet readers’ long-term needs as well as immediate SEO requirements. This strategy makes sure that even when search engine rankings change, the content will still be interesting and helpful. SaaS companies can built a loyal audience over time and establish themselves as reliable information sources by investing in persistent efforts in content creation.

First, we have to emphasize that nowadays, SEO is all about a good, if not excellent, SaaS content marketing strategy.

In the past, we can get away with aggressive optimizations like keyword stuffing, SEO cloaking, and other tactics to rank in a matter of months, if not weeks.

Nowadays, however, both Google and the customers are getting smarter: Google, with its various algorithm updates and especially the Google RankBrain can now better recognize content that will be valuable for the respective audience—and those that simply won’t—. Rankbrain, Google’s A.I. machine learning software, can learn which content that is bounced immediately, and the ones that are actually consumed with significant dwell time.

On the other hand, customers are also smarter. They can immediately recognize content that is not professionally made and sound scammy. With so much information and content available on the internet, some of your visitors can even recognize duplicate content.

So, to succeed in SaaS SEO, there’s no shortcut to actually having relevant, valuable content published regularly. Both quantity and quality are equally important here. While this might mean bad news for some of us, this will ultimately create a better environment for everyone: the ones that actually know about their niche wins, while those who are only looking for quick bucks will be naturally eliminated.

Thankfully, content is already an integral part of the SEO strategy for SaaS companies. However, this will also mean that you will compete with more content.

Source: Hubspot

Even then, simply publishing good content regularly won’t cut it. There are over 4 million blog posts published daily. So, it’s getting harder and harder to get noticed nowadays. Think of good, relevant content as a prerequisite to successful SEO for SaaS companies.

On the other hand, if our content didn’t get noticed, we can’t get backlinks, which are also a very important ranking factor in any SaaS SEO campaign. Promoting our content is just as important as the content development process, if not more important.

The SEO SaaS tactics and strategies we will discuss below will be based on these facts: publishing good content regularly and promoting them properly.

Important Ranking Signals

To be successful in SaaS SEO, we have to understand the SEO ranking factors and adjust our tactics to leverage this knowledge.

Google’s search algorithm is always evolving, and thus the ranking signals have evolved over the years.

However, it’s important to understand that Google’s (and the other search engines’) main aim is to provide better results for the audience. Understanding this fact can help us understand that SEO is ultimately about optimizing our SaaS site for the human audience, and not for the search engine bots.

With that being said, here are 5 of the most important ranking signals:

1. Technical Factors

There are three key technical factors that are especially important for SEO: secure and reliable site (including HTTPS utilization), mobile-responsiveness, and optimal site load speed. In short: having a site that is up to par with today’s standards.

This is fairly basic, but also very important. If your site isn’t perceived as secure by Google, you won’t rank. If you get a high bounce rate because your site is slow to load, you also won’t rank and your SaaS SEO strategy won’t be successful.

SEO performance depends on optimizing websites for Google’s crawling and indexing, as this has a direct impact on how search engines perceive and rank your website. Here are a few reasons why this optimization is necessary:

1. Improved visibility: Potential visitors can find your website more easily when search engines efficiently crawl and index it. Search engines can more easily display relevant results to users when your site is properly optimized. This is because search engines can better comprehend the content and structure of your website.

2. Enhanced user experience: A website that has been optimized for accessibility makes sure that users can find what they’re looking for with ease. You can give your visitors a seamless experience by making technical improvements to your website, such as optimizing the speed of your pages, making them mobile-friendly, and using proper URL structures. Increased conversions, longer visit times, and greater engagement can result from this favorable user experience.

3. Better search rankings: Search engine results pages (SERPs) display your website’s ranking based on Google’s crawling and indexing process. Through the optimization of technical elements such as robots.txt files, canonical URLs, structured data markup, and XML sitemaps, you can inform search engines about the quality and relevancy of your content. This can increase your website’s exposure and search engine rankings while driving more organic traffic.

4. Indexation of all relevant content: Search engines will properly index all of the important pages and content on your website if you optimize it. Your online visibility may be limited if certain pages or sections are not crawlable or accessible. As a result, they might not show up in search results. You can improve your website’s chances of having all of your important content indexed and ranked properly by making technical optimizations.

5. Future-proofing your website: Search engine algorithms are likely to place more weight on technical aspects as they develop. You can stay ahead of these changes and keep your competitive edge by actively optimizing your website for crawling and indexing. Maintaining a high search engine ranking and being able to adjust to algorithm changes will require regular technical monitoring and improvement.

2. Domain Age and overall authority

Yes, age matters. More than 55% of the sites that are ranked on the top 10 spots of Google SERP are at least three years old.

Obviously, there’s not much you can do about this if your site is fairly new, besides probably purchasing an old domain and make it your own.

You can, however, optimize other rankings factors like having more high-quality backlinks to improve your authority.

3. Content Optimization

We have discussed content and its relations to SEO for SaaS above, and how optimized your content is both for human readers and for Google’s algorithm will be an important ranking factor. Keyword optimization still matters, although Google is getting smarter in detecting keyword stuffing. Generally, if you use your keywords naturally and use semantically-related keywords, you are good to go.

The content must also be relevant according to the user’s search intent. Different keywords will relate to different intents:

Source: Karcher Group

• Navigational: the user is aiming to find a specific site, often related to brand keywords
• Informational: the user is looking to get an answer to a specific question.
• Investigational: the user is comparing different products or searching for a product
• Transactional: the user is looking to make a specific purchase

We have to develop content for each of these search intents.

The goal of content optimization is to provide better information for the human audience: focus on being relevant and valuable, and include your keywords naturally. Also, focus on being a thought leader for a certain topic.

4. User Experience

User experience metrics are now important ranking signals, thanks to the introduction of Google RankBrain. With the A.I.-based algorithm, Google can recognize whether a search result is relevant for the users. For example, top-ranking content that is not getting a high enough click-through rate (CTR) will be deemed irrelevant, and thus demoted.

There are three main user experience metrics to focus on while optimizing SEO for SaaS:

• Click-through Rate (CTR): how many people are clicking on your link when it appeared in the search results.
• Bounce Rate: the number of people who immediately exit your site after just a few seconds. This will be perceived by Google that your site is not relevant to the search query
• Dwell Time: how long the user stays on your site after they made the visit. This will often be related to the relevancy and quality of your content.

5. Link Profile

Yes, backlinks are still very important for SaaS SEO, although some things have changed. In a nutshell, when a site links to your site, Google will perceive your site as more relevant.

However, while in the past it was more about quantity: the more links, the merrier, nowadays it’s more about quality. Google will check whether your site is linked by sites that are:

1. already relevant and
2. related to your niche and keywords.

For example, if you are a site about digital marketing, getting a link from a high-quality golf site is deemed irrelevant.

An efficient way to increase backlinks to your website and establish its authority is to incorporate “link magnets” into your content. Infographics, white papers, and in-depth guides are examples of high-value, link-worthy resources that readily draw backlinks from other websites. You can establish yourself as an authority in your industry and entice other websites to link back to your content by creating and sharing these valuable tools. This raises your website’s search engine rankings and attracts high-quality backlinks that can increase website traffic.

6. Social Signals

While Google themselves have declared that social shares are not counted as inbound links—and thus not a direct ranking signal—, the more people that share your site, the higher the chance of getting these links.

We can see that the top-ranking pages on Google usually have a lot of shares, so getting more social shares can significantly help in improving your ranking.

How to Develop a SaaS SEO Strategy

Based on the factors discussed above, here are the key optimizations we should focus on to succeed in SEO as a SaaS business:

1. Optimizing Your Content

The first step in developing a robust SaaS SEO strategy is optimizing your content. To find high-volume, relevant keywords that your target audience is searching for, you must conduct keyword research. You can raise your website’s organic traffic and search engine rankings by carefully choosing which keywords to use in blog posts, landing pages, and product descriptions.

As we have discussed above, the most important key to success in SaaS SEO is your content— both in quantity and quality. Here are the key areas to focus on when optimizing your content for SEO:

• Above all, focus on optimizing for the human audience: delivering value and relevance. Don’t focus solely on pleasing the search engine algorithms
• Proper keyword research is very important. In general, you should aim for three things:
  • Keywords that are relevant for both your SaaS business and your audience
  • Keywords with high enough search volume (will vary depending on your industry’s size, etc.)
  • Keywords with manageable competition
• Use the topic clusters approach, where a more in-depth, longer “pillar” page is targeting the main keywords, and other, shorter content pieces are covering related keywords. All these pages are linked to the main page. For example, the pillar page can be in-depth content about “digital marketing”, while smaller articles can cover “SEO”, “social media marketing”, and more. This approach can help in building your credibility and authority over a certain topic, which is Google’s preference nowadays.
• When approaching keyword density, the important thing is to include your keywords naturally for the human audience. This will include using semantically-related keywords (LSI keywords) to develop more natural content to help your SaaS SEO strategy be more effective.

Here are some tips for creating interesting, informative, and visually appealing content that will effectively optimize your content:

1. Conduct thorough keyword research: Determine the relevant keywords and phrases that members of your target audience are probably going to search firstly. To find low-competition, high-volume keywords to include in your content, use keyword research tools.

2. Create valuable and readable content: Focus on producing content that provides genuine value to your audience. Offer in-depth information, insights, and solutions to their pain points. When it comes to creating readable content, you should avoid using complex jargon. Instead, use words that are commonly known to readers. Doing so, if you face any difficulty, then consider getting help from an AI reworder to quickly simplify the content.

3. Craft compelling headlines: Grab attention with catchy and compelling headlines. Your headline should be concise, clear, and provide a glimpse of what readers can expect from your content. Incorporate relevant keywords naturally to boost search engine visibility.

4. Optimize meta tags and descriptions: Pay attention to optimizing meta tags and descriptions for each page or blog post. These elements provide a brief summary of your content to search engines and users. Include relevant keywords while maintaining readability and enticing users to click through.

5. Focus on user experience: Ensure your website is user-friendly and easy to navigate. Optimize the site’s loading speed, ensure mobile responsiveness, and improve overall user experience. Search engines prioritize websites that offer a smooth browsing experience.

2. On-page Technical SEO for SaaS

The second step in developing a robust SaaS SEO strategy is focusing on on-page technical SEO. To make your website more search engine friendly, you should optimize its headings, meta tags, structure, and URLs. Improved user experience and higher search engine rankings also depend on using schema markup and making sure your website loads quickly and is mobile-friendly.

On-page technical SEO for SaaS involves optimizing various elements of your website to make it more search engine friendly and improve user experience. Here are some key areas to focus on:

1. Optimize headings: Use relevant keywords in your headings (H1, H2, etc.) to help search engines understand the content and structure of your pages.
2. URL structure: Ensure that your URLs are concise, descriptive, and include relevant keywords. Avoid using dynamic parameters or unnecessary characters.
3. Website security: Implement HTTPS encryption to secure user data and improve trustworthiness. Regularly update software and plugins to protect against vulnerabilities.
4. User experience optimization: Focus on providing a smooth and intuitive user experience. This includes optimizing navigation, improving readability, and ensuring clear calls-to-action.
5. Conduct regular website audits: Use tools like SEMrush, Moz, or Screaming Frog to perform comprehensive audits of your website. These tools can help identify technical issues, broken links, duplicate content, and other areas for improvement.

There are two main goals of technical SEO for SaaS:

• Optimizing your site so that it’s easily crawled and indexed by Google and other search engines
• Improving your site’s user experience from mobile responsiveness to fast loading speed to other factors that will keep your audience on your site longer.

Technical SEO optimization for SaaS can be a very broad (and deeply technical) subject, but this checklist by Search Engine Journal—designed for non-technical marketers— can help you.

In the SaaS niche, technical optimization is arguably even more important, since all your competitors are already tech-savvy with properly functioning websites.

3. Optimizing For Rich Snippet

The third step in developing a robust SaaS SEO strategy is optimizing for rich snippets. Rich snippets offer extra details, like star ratings, images, or price information, in search engine results. These details can improve the visibility of your listing and increase click-through rates. Search engine optimization and the use of schema markup can help to improve the likelihood that a rich snippet of your website will show up in search results.

Relatively new to Google is how they now include rich snippets in some queries. According to SEMRush, almost 12 % of all search results are now feature-rich snippets.

Rich or featured snippets are positioned above the top ranking position and can steal a lot of traffic. So, how can we get featured as a rich snippet? There are three main factors:

1. The keyword itself must feature a rich snippet. Tools like Ahrefs can show keywords with rich snippets opportunities.
2. More than 99.5% of rich snippets are from pages that already rank on the first page for the keyword.
3. The page is properly formatted with structured data markups, which is essentially assigning attributes and properties to all the elements on your page.

Find opportunities for rich snippets, and optimize your page accordingly. This guide by Backlinko might help you further in this aspect.

4. Link Profile

The fourth step in developing a robust SaaS SEO strategy is building a strong link profile. Getting high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites in your industry is required for this. This can be accomplished by creating high-quality content that will naturally draw backlinks, like comprehensive guides or infographics. You can further improve your link profile by contacting influencers and relevant websites about collaborations or guest posting opportunities.

SaaS SEO is not only about backlinks—or inbound links—, as there are three key components of your site’s link profile:

• Internal link: links within your domain from one page to another. A good internal linking structure will allow Google an easier time indexing your site, among other benefits.

• Outbound link: Links from your site pointing to other sites. This will help Google in perceiving your authority over a certain topic/niche, as well as helping with overall indexing.
• Inbound link: backlinks coming from other sites to yours. The more backlinks coming to certain pages and content, the more relevant the content is.

However, it is true that backlinks remain one of the most important ranking signals in any SaaS SEO campaign, and here are some effective tactics in getting more backlinks:

1. There’s no shortcut to actually having good content. Good content will naturally get linked, and bad, irrelevant content will have a hard time just getting one link.
2. Remember that the quality of the inbound links matters more than quantity. Build relationships with relevant sites and influencers of your niche. Guest posting is the common—and still effective— approach here.
3. Building backlinks—quantity-wise—is still an effective SaaS inbound marketing tactic. We just have to be careful in getting backlinks from spammy websites that can be counterproductive for your SEO results and can compromise your SaaS SEO strategy. Integrate all your content promotion tactics with getting backlinks. That is, besides aiming to get more traffic by promoting your content, aim to also get links. For example, when implementing influencer marketing, you can also ask the influencer to link your content.

5. Voice SEO for SaaS

The fifth step in developing a robust SaaS SEO strategy is optimizing for voice search. Getting your website optimized for voice search queries is essential, especially with the rise in popularity of voice assistants such as Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa. In order to do this, you must comprehend how users formulate voice search queries and include long-tail, conversational keywords in your content. You can also increase your presence in voice search results by concentrating on local SEO and making sure your website is listed in relevant directories.

More and more people are using voice search today, where more than 40% of adult users perform one or more voice search every single day.

Source: AdsTriangle

It is worth noting, however, that most voice search queries are done in searching for local businesses, and it can be hard to implement this in the SaaS environment.

We can, however, still find opportunities for voice SEO for SaaS by targeting conversational search queries or Q&A queries, and there are three important factors:

• Google tends to feature voice search results from content that already ranked in the top 3 spots, so follow the usual SEO optimizations
• For keywords that also feature-rich snippets, generally the rich snippet is also featured as the voice answer
• Focus on questions that are commonly asked in your niche, and include this question in the content (as a subheading or in the middle of the content). Attempt to answer this question better than your competitors, and aim to get featured as a rich snippet.

End Words

To reiterate, your content quality and quantity remain the most important factors in building a successful SaaS SEO strategy. This is even more true in the SaaS environment where content marketing is already a very important aspect. So, work on your content game, and the rest of the SaaS SEO strategies will be far easier to implement with better results.

The post SEO for SaaS: How to Create an Effective SaaS SEO Strategy appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

You shouldn’t fret, because every business that works with SEO is bound to have questions sooner or later. What kind of questions do you have about some of the most confusing aspects?

Take a look at some of the most common asked SEO questions we’re seeing this year. All have answers that may surprise you if you’ve had other impressions about how each subject works.

1. Should You Only Do Blogging for SEO?

When you first started doing SEO, did you start a blog to improve your search engine rankings? While creating a blog never gets old and is still effective, don’t just do this alone. In fact, a standalone blog won’t help your SERPs much without having domain authority on a website first.

This is why so many people place internal blogs on their websites, though only after gaining clout. Domain authority was created by the website Moz with a scoring system of 1-100 to determine how well your website ranks.

How do you go about improving this to assure your internal blog gets read? You’ll want to take this seriously since there isn’t any point to writing a blog if nobody can find you.

A few steps to earn your domain authority:

• Moz looks at social signals to see how much content from your website is getting shared on all the popular social channels. Make an effort to post your content on social media and promote it with hashtags.
• Focus on choosing a good domain name. The easier your domain name, the better so people remember it easily. Make sure it stays active for several or more years.
• Optimize your on-page content and provide linkable content. All of these give legitimacy to your site and help you rank higher.
• Remove all bad links on your site while making your site friendly for mobile devices.
• Work to get your website pages to load faster since mobile users won’t have patience with slow load times.

2. Should You Optimize Just for Google, or Customer Pain Points?

One fault businesses make with SEO is an assumption they only need to mechanically create keywords to rank high on Google. Just optimizing for Google shouldn’t be your sole prime directive, because it can take away from targeting specific demographics.

Your best path is to address specific pain points of the people you’re trying to attract. Don’t look at SEO as cramming in keywords and thinking it’s enough. You have to think about what your prospective customers really need and build your keywords based on this.

A few tips:

• Base the customer pain points on customer intent and what they’d realistically search for on textual or voice search engines.
• You’ll discover pain points differ among all your customers. Research each pain and integrate each point into your keyword campaign.
• Work on creating customer personas to further delve into customer pain points you might miss.

3. Do You Need More Than Keywords to Rank High?

Don’t always think of SEO as being solely about keywords. If you’re still learning the basics of SEO, you might form the initial impression that focus on keywords is everything. Without knowing the purpose behind keywords, they become overly mechanical as in ignoring above pain points.

As Neil Patel notes, Google Hummingbird changed the approach to how keywords get used in SEO. However, it also led to a misconception about keywords no longer mattering.

They still do, though it forced those doing SEO to think about how keywords affect the end user. In other words, it’s now about unique value over unique web content.

Creating unique keywords is the real secret to ranking high. As Brian Hughes of Huffington Post points out, it’s all about authentic viewer engagement over stale keywords and gimmicks.

4. How Do You Create Quality Content Using Competitive Keywords/Phrases?

Now that you know quality content is the nucleus of effective SEO today, how do you go about creating content with value?

You’ll want to do this using competitive keywords and phrases lining up in a conversational way. This can still turn stale if you merely throw in keywords popular in common search results.

What’s key is to do some research first on potential keywords you can realistically use. Long-tail keywords are very important here, usually with more than four words. Broad-based keywords are already competitive, and they’ll likely have domination from big companies.

Once you create unique long-tail keywords that apply to customer pain points, what moves should you make to stand out from overly basic content?

Keep these tips in mind:

• Create unique content that applies to a particular niche and helps solve problems for your customer base.
• Find a problem you need to solve for your customers and solve it better than your competitors. The whole premise of your SEO brand falls apart if you can’t create content based on solving a common issue.
• Come up with less competitive keywords and write content around those. If you dig deep into your brand, and know what your customers generally search for, you’ll find more unique, non-overused long-tail keywords.

5. Are Meta Tags Really All That Important?

You’ve probably worked with meta tags in your past SEO efforts, though maybe slacked off worrying about them. Some SEO experts floated the idea meta tags no longer mattered when the Hummingbird updates occurred on Google.

In truth, meta tags are still very important. You just have to use them correctly if you want to make any search engine impact.

There is truth to the idea meta tags don’t always help boost your search rankings. Meta tags have evolved into giving search engines an idea of what your site is really all about.

You can look at this meta tag evolution as providing a preview of your content’s quality. It gives a fast indication to those doing searches you provide something unique. Overall, it’s just one piece of the algorithmic pie in convincing places like Google your site should rank high.

6. Is SEO All About Being #1 on SERPs?

One of your obvious prime goals is to get yourself to the top of SERPs on more than just Google. However, is pursuing top ranking on SERPs really the only goal you should have in getting your content found?

The answer to this is a resounding “no.” If you just pursue being #1 on Google, you’re going to miss the point of increasing traffic, upping engagement, and bringing conversions.

These three aspects are what you should truly aim for rather than just going for the #1 position. Even if you’re not immediately #1 on the SERPs, you can still achieve the above goals with attention to making the content useful.

It’s worth noting 70% of traffic on Google doesn’t come from an initial organic result. Ultimately, you have to prove your content clout to eventually build to #1 SERP position.

7.  Does Mobile Optimization Require More Than SEO Basics?

This question is perhaps top of mind for you lately due to mobile continuing to become the preferred way most people find fast information.

Answering the question comes down to eliminating any notion doing basic SEO is enough to create effective rankings. You need to think about more than just creating keywords since Google looks at a bigger picture when it comes to mobile SEO optimization.

A few things to think about when optimizing your website for mobile:

• The speed of your mobile pages now plays a major factor in your Google ranking factor. Finding ways to speed up all your mobile pages is imperative to avoid any Google penalty.
• Design your mobile pages for multiple mobile screen sizes, or you’ll frustrate many first-time customers and create more bounce rates. It doesn’t take long for high bounce rates to start affecting your ranking status.
• Make the design of your site easy to use for a mobile screen, especially with interactive elements. Google takes this seriously as much as page speed, giving you a stronger advantage. Keeping your design simple helps eliminate any downtime having to fix problems later.

These answers to today’s most important SEO questions should give you a good start on SEO. Many of these are going to stay relevant. However, Google’s continual evolution on SEO may impose all new questions before the next decade arrives.

The post Seven Questions You Might Have About SEO appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Yet, more often than not, startups don’t recognize SEO as an important part of their early marketing strategy. There are many reasons for this: SEO is a long-term game, SEO is difficult to apply or simply not believe that SEO is a valid strategy in 2025.

SEO can be a really effective way to get ahead of the pack, especially in the tough competition of startups. While it’s indeed a long-term game, SEO can act as a strong building block for your startup’s inbound marketing strategy onwards.

In this guide, we will share several effective tips on how to implement SEO for a startup company. Before we begin, let’s discuss the benefits of SEO services for startups.

The Benefits of SEO for Startups

1. SEO is About Content, And Content is King

Your website is the modern-day equivalent to storefront, and is a really important promotional tool for your business. Now, in this competitive, content-driven world, a well-designed website won’t bring you much value without comprehensive, engaging content.

The most common misconception for startup SEO is that we are only optimizing the contents for search engines, while in fact, optimizing for human readers is equally, if not the more important aspect of SEO.

So, by practicing SEO, you will also optimize your content, one of your most valuable marketing assets.

2. SEO is Cost-Effective

Compared to other forms of digital marketing for startups such as PPC advertising, social media marketing, influencer marketing, and others, SEO for startups is a relatively more affordable option, especially in the long run.

SEO might not have a similar short-term impact as with social media or paid advertising. However, it will be a great long-term foundation for your startup’s online presence. Controlling the budget is always one of the most important aspects of a startup, and investing in a startup SEO campaign is one of the very best bet to grow your startup.

3. Search Engine Has More Market Share Than Ever

We all know that more and more people are searching for reviews and information before deciding on virtually anything nowadays. Google now processes more than 3.5 billion searches daily, and that number continues to grow.

So, skipping on SEO for your startup means you are passing out on this huge market potential. Don’t forget the fact that even more people are going to spend most of their time on their mobile devices. Search engines will be an even bigger pillar of our lives, and without organic SEO, your potential customers will have a hard time finding your business.

The three reasons stated above are not the only ones, as there are many more benefits of practicing SEO for your startup businesses. We could probably even argue that SEO is no longer a luxury marketing strategy for startup businesses, but a necessity.

So, how can we apply the best SEO practices to a startup? For the rest of this guide, we will discuss the steps you will need to take to develop an effective SEO strategy for startup businesses.

Implementing SEO for Startups: The Right Mindset

What’s the first thing that comes into mind when you heard the term ‘SEO’? It can be different for everyone. But many people still think that SEO is about cheating Google and the other search engines to rank higher.

While it may be true in the early 2000s when blackhat SEO is still prominent, it’s actually no longer the case nowadays.

Nevertheless, there are still many misconceptions about startup SEO, and before we begin, we must address at least some of the important ones:

SEO is not a get-rich-quick scheme to cheat the search engine

There are, indeed, black hat SEO tactics that can give you short-term results. However, they are very risky and can get you penalized by Google, even got banned from ranking altogether.

Instead, you should change your perception that SEO for startups is a long-term, organic strategy. You might need to invest at least 6 to 12 months before seeing any results, but the results will indeed pay off.

SEO is not always about ranking

Too many startup SEO practitioners are too fixated on getting high search engine rankings, and solely that. Yet, being the first-ranked site won’t mean too much if you don’t get your investments back in the form of traffic, and ultimately, conversion.

But isn’t getting ranked high the way to get traffic? Yes, but not always. There are high-ranking sites with high bounce rates, and so they are losing potential leads. There are also sites with enough traffic, but nobody’s actually buying their products or services.

So, when you set up your startup goal(s) for SEO, avoid fixating too much on ranking, it is just a vanity metric. Instead, focus on your end goals: traffic, conversion and revenue.

SEO is NOT dead

Ah, this is also a common misconception. Almost every year, you will most likely stumble upon an article or two proclaiming the death of SEO, and quite often they are tied to a certain Google algorithm update or another.

Guess what? SEO is still living and breathing, and some might even argue that SEO is stronger than ever. There is, however, some truth in that statement, that SEO is always changing. So, a strategy that works in 2024 might need to change in 2025 and beyond. However, the good news is, as long as you are following the SEO strategy outlined here, you won’t need to worry about doing major changes every time an algorithm update is implemented.

In short, as long as you do SEO best practices, you are fine in the long run.

Step By Step Guide to Implementing SEO for Startups

Step 1: Defining Your Objectives

As discussed above, SERP ranking shouldn’t be the only goal of your startup SEO campaign, as most of the time, it can be misleading as a vanity metric.

Defining a clear and proper SEO objective is very important so you can adjust your priority in implementing the SEO campaign – which as discussed, is a long-term game. Knowing your SEO objectives alone can significantly save time and resources while maximizing ROI.

The general principle is that your SEO objectives should align well with your marketing goals and your startup business’s overall objectives. While the ideal objective(s) might vary depending on many different factors, here are some common SEO goals to consider:

1. Increasing organic traffic: more visitors to your website would equal more opportunities to convert them into prospects and customers.
2. Lead generation for startups: your content should be focused on how you can encourage as many people as possible to submit their contact information (email address). Lead generation should also be a part of your startup customer acquisition strategy.
3. Brand awareness: pretty self-explanatory, getting more people to know your brand by  attracting them to your content
4. Sales: especially if you are an eCommerce business performing direct sales on your site, with this objective you can focus on driving relevant traffic to maximize transactional sales.
5. Customer service: targeting individuals that might need specific help/solution with your content to provide value.
6. Reputation management: ensuring your startup company ranks on top of branded keywords to maintain a positive reputation and ‘bury’ negative content.

Define your objectives, and make sure your objectives are clear, specific, and measurable so you can integrate these objectives in the next steps.

Step 2: Keyword Research

The next thing you will need to work on is finding your target keywords. There are several different approaches to achieve this: you can do a bit of competitive analysis, and look at the keywords your main competitors are targeting. You can also target keywords based on your customer’s behaviors, or other approaches.

Nevertheless, work on your keyword research, and make the full use of the available tools.

In general, there are three main principles in performing your keyword research:

1. Your target keyword should be relevant to your target audience. This is mainly done by measuring the monthly search volume for a specific keyword.
2. The target keyword must be relevant for your brand/product/service. Not all keywords that are popular for your target audience are going to be relevant to your startup business
3. Depending on your available budget and timeline, the competition for this target keyword must be realistic. The more popular the keyword is, the more competitive it would be. It might not be financially feasible to focus on overly-popular keywords.

Step 3: Content Planning

Next, plan your content based on your target keywords. There was a time when ‘content’ for SEO is just stuffing the keywords into an article, but that is no longer the case. To succeed, you will need to deliver content that gives value to your audience.

Content marketing for SEO is now about the consistent publication (both in quantity and quality) of your content. If you can consistently publish high-quality content, Google will perceive your site as credible and trustworthy and will recommend your content to rank on their SERPs.

It’s very important to understand that although we are developing SEO content, we shouldn’t blindly focus on ‘pleasing’ the search engine, for example by including too many keywords in our content. Instead, the focus should be to provide value for your human readers.

Although content marketing for startups can be a tough subject to discuss, here are some important principles to follow:

• Obviously, the main optimization here is to include your target keywords in the content, and there are two key things to understand:
  • Include your keywords naturally. Again, focus on making the content as comprehensive and natural as possible for your target audience
  • Pay attention to the potential search intent of the keyword, and develop your content to satisfy this search intent
• Do a quick Google search of your target keyword, and check the top-ranking pages. Your aim is to either create better content than these pages or cover the topic from a different angle and create something really unique.
• Optimize your content’s structure both in the eyes of human readers and the search engine’s algorithms. That is, optimize the readability of each content, and maintain a good internal linking structure. Also, implement structured data markup to help with indexing and for your content to be eligible as a rich/featured snippet.

Step 4: Technical Optimization

The next step is to optimize the technical aspect of on-site SEO for startups, and there are two main objectives of this step:

1. To  make sure Google (or the other search engines) can index your site properly and recognize all the different elements on your site correctly
2. To improve the readability and user experience of your content and website in general, with the goal to keep your visitors as long as possible on your site.

Allimitedly, optimizing all the different technical factors can be overwhelming, especially for beginners. You can check our previous guide of technical SEO checklist here, but on this occasion, we will list the important ones you will need to focus on:

• XML Sitemap: Having the proper sitemap is essential so that Google can properly index your site. There are several tools available to achieve this and don’t forget to submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Central.
• Title Tags: Include your focus keyword in your title tags, and make it interesting enough for your user to click. Remember that every single title tag must be unique.
• Meta Description: Meta descriptions are not a direct ranking signal. Yet, it will improve your click-through rate (CTR) which is a ranking signal. So, your focus in writing meta descriptions should be your human readers. Make them interesting and unique.
• Heading and Subheading: Not only using proper headings will make the content easier to read, it will also make it easier to sparse by search engines.
• Page load speed: According to Google, if your page loads in more than three seconds, more than 50% of your visitors will bounce. Analyze your site using Google’s PageSpeed Insights, and optimize load speed as much as possible.
• Mobile-friendliness: it’s no secret that nowadays, Google prioritizes mobile-friendly/mobile-responsive sites to rank on their SERP. Make sure your site is mobile-responsive, and test in as many devices as possible.
• HTTPS: If you haven’t already, make sure to migrate your site to HTTPS rather than HTTP (SSL certificate). Google may block your site in Chrome if you aren’t yet using HTTP.
• Crawl Errors: Use Google Search Console to analyze your site and fix any existing crawl errors.

Also, unless it’s absolutely necessary, avoid using sub-domains in your startup’s website setup. Google might recognize your subdomains as separate entities, and thus will require separate optimizations. It’s better to use subfolders in this case, if you still need the organization’s purpose.

Step 5: Link Building

Now that you’ve done the basics of on-site optimization, it’s time to start moving your focus off-site. Think of it this way: on-site SEO is, essentially, creating content with the right focus keyword and proper structure. Off-site SEO for startups, on the other hand, is putting your content out there and getting people to endorse your content in the form of backlink.

A backlink can be thought of as a vote of confidence on the internet: when a sitel links your page, they are saying that the content on this specific page is trustworthy. However, it’s important to understand that today, the quality of backlinks is more important than quality: a backlink coming from authoritative sites that are relevant to your niche will be worth more than a link from a brand new blog that is totally unrelated to what you sell or do.

However, obviously getting these high-quality backlinks can be easier said than done, but here are a few link building tips you can try:

• The main principle is to create high-quality content: if your content is valuable and well-promoted, you’ll get these backlinks sooner than later. Promote your content using all available marketing channels while aiming to get backlinks in the process.
• Give them a reason to link your content, which can be something like:
  • Unique information/data not available anywhere else, for example in the case of original research report, etc.
  • Data roundup posts where you list a lot of useful data/statistics in a page
  • Aesthetically-pleasing content, like a well-taken photo or infographic
  • An original, attractive story
• Collaborate with other websites on your niche/industry, the more influential they are, the better.
• Be active on your social media channels, and frequently link to quality contents
• If you are a brick and mortar startup, build your local citations and reviews. Check the detailed guide on link building for startups and my SEO services for startup companies.

Step 6: Evaluate and Re-optimize

The last (but not least) step here is to evaluate your SEO progress so far and make the necessary adjustment.

Since, again, startup SEO is a long-term project, then monitoring your progress is a very important thing to do, and most likely you’ll need to make adjustments and re-optimization along the way. Especially evaluate the following metrics:

• Ranking: pretty obvious, even though you haven’t reached the top spots or even the first page of SERP yet, you should check if your page is moving upwards the SERP gradually
• Organic traffic: in general, your site’s organic traffic should go hand-in-hand with your increase/decrease in ranking. If, for example, your ranking goes up but you have a decline in organic traffic, then you should check the other metrics for possible issues
• Conversion rate: the ‘conversion’ here would vary depending on your site, it can be email signups, form submissions, or even transactions.
• Link profile: check for new backlinks and referring domains, also check you competitors’ link profile to find link building opportunities and possible gaps in your strategy
• Local metrics: if you are also implementing local SEO (i.e. if you are a brick and mortar startup business), then you should check metrics like Google Maps ranking, number of local citations, session location, and so on

Adjust your strategy based on the evaluation, and don’t forget to check the latest startup SEO trends and updates, especially algorithm updates. Don’t be afraid to update or even revamp your content if necessary, for example if you can include more up-to-date information. In fact, Google tend to prioritize fresh content in its SERP.

End Words: Do’s and Don’ts

Implementing SEO for startups might not be a simple task, especially if you are completely new to SEO. However, by following our step-by-step above, you will have a strong building block on your journey ahead. Choosing the right SEO service is just as important as selecting the best LLC service. Each is the foundation of your online business.

To close this guide, we will share several do’s and don’ts as you start implementing your SEO.

Do’s:

• Track your progress, and pivot when necessary
• Put professional SEO consultant in charge of your strategy, or outsource it to an agency
• SEO is always changing. So, keep yourself up-to-date with the latest tactics and knowledge base

Don’ts:

• Duplicate content, or keyword-stuffed content
• Never pay for links, ever
• Never build links with spammy methods: forum comments, blog comments, posting on low-quality sites

The post The Step-By-Step Guide to SEO for Startups appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

More websites and blogs are being published every single day, people spend more time on social media and Youtube than going to websites, and Google with its featured snippets and infrastructure tend to hoard traffic to its own platforms.

On the other hand, website traffic is very important. We can’t convert visitors and prospects unless we actually have a steady—or preferably, growing—website traffic to convert. Too often, we put too much emphasis on maximizing the conversion rate but knowing how we can get traffic and maximize it should be the first priority.

SEO used to be the most prominent way to get and grow website traffic, but as mentioned, due to the changes in Google’s algorithms and especially the zero-click search phenomenon, our approach to SEO must also change.

Here, we will discuss and learn about how we can grow website traffic through SEO in 2025.

The Anatomy of Google SERP in 2025

Google’s SERP (Search Engine Results Page) has significantly evolved since its launch in 1996.

Back then—as with everything else on the internet—, Google SERP is very, very simple: it’s just paid search ad placements on top followed with organic search results below it. Ranking on the top spots of these organic search rankings back then (for the right keywords, obviously), would translate into guaranteed website traffic.

Nowadays, however, it’s not that simple. Let’s take a look at the current search result for “when is black Friday”

As you can see, it’s no longer that simple. There’s now:

1. A “featured snippet” box to inform us about the date
2. The knowledge panel on the side featuring a result from Wikipedia
3. The “People Also Ask” box with 4 different questions
4. Video results

Only after all of these, we are presented with organic results.

In short, ranking on the top spots of these organic ranking spots is—in theory—not as valuable than back then in the early 2000s. It doesn’t however, mean that these organic rankings, and SEO, are totally worthless in relation to website traffic,  considering several different things:

• There are keyword opportunities that don’t involve featured snippets and have high organic CTR.
• Not everything can be answered with a featured snippet. For example, the “what is SEO” query might be easily addressed with a featured snippet (answer box), but queries like “SEO strategy” would require in-depth content as an appropriate ‘answer’.
• We can certainly optimize our content on Google’s platforms and properties (YouTube, Google Maps, Knowledge Panel, AMP, Google IMages, etc.) to maximize exposure.

To summarize, SEO to optimize our site/page to rank on Google SERP’s organic results is still relevant in generating and growing website traffic, it’s just, we have to be smarter than before, as we will learn together below.

However, let us first discuss the important SEO ranking factors in 2025.

SEO Ranking Factors 2025

SEO, is in essence just a series of optimizations on our website, or pages of our website to align better with Google’s preferences, that is, to deliver more reliable and relevant information to the human audience.

So, to rank higher, we simply need to meet these Google’s preferences, which we often refer to with the term ‘ranking factor’. Google, however, utilizes a highly complex algorithm and can take account of 200+ different factors to rank a website.

Also, with each and every year, the ranking factors have always changed according to the changes in Google’s algorithms, so it’s very important to keep ourselves up-to-date with the most recent ranking factors.

With that being said, here are some of the essential Google SEO ranking factors in 2025:

1. Backlinks from relevant sources: backlinks, or inbound links, remain the most important ranking factors in 2025. It’s important, however, to understand that the quality and relevance of the backlink’s source is more important than quantity.
2. Quantity of direct links: the total number of domains and pages that link to your site (link quantity). However, getting too many links at any given time can be considered fraudulent link-building activity, and can get your site penalized by Google.
3. Mobile-friendliness: since 2015, Google has prioritized mobile-friendly and/or mobile-responsive sites to rank higher (and can even exclude non-mobile-friendly sites from SERP). You can use Google’s test tool to assess your site’s mobile usability.
4. HTTPS or SSL Certificate: a site that uses HTTPS is more prioritized to rank than a site that does not. In fact, if you are still sticking to HTTP, Google might warn users that your site is unsecured if you are using the Chrome browser.
5. Site load speed and user experience metrics: the longer you can keep visitors on your site (higher dwell time) and lower the bounce rate, the higher your site will rank. Your site’s loading speed, on the other hand, is a very important factor in determining the bounce rate.
6. Page category: a page that is placed and structured in a relevant category might be prioritized in SERP ranking.
7. Site Structure: overall site architecture. The more optimized and well-structured your site’s architecture is, the easier time Google bots can crawl and index your site. Without indexation, our site wouldn’t get ranked, period.
8. Page Layout: Google now utilized the Page Layout algorithm to recognize—and penalize— sites that abuse distracting pop-ups and misplaced, obstructing ads.
9. Internal Linking Structure: simply put, links from one page of your site to another page of your site. A proper Internal linking structure is mainly useful to tell Google which of your page(s) is the most important, but also provide other SEO-related benefits.
10. Content-related optimizations: this one can be pretty broad, ranging from the overall quality/comprehensiveness of the content, optimizations of the images, content structure, Keyword usage in page URL and meta description, and so on.

Again, these are not the only factors that will affect SEO ranking—and thus, your website traffic— in 2025 and onwards. Yet, they are among the most important and should be the core focus of your B2B SEO strategy, as we will discuss below.

Step-by-Step SEO Implementation To Grow Website Traffic

Let us first begin by having the right mindset: what should we consider as a positive SEO result?

It’s very important to understand that ranking high—even ranking on #1 spot— on Google SERP is not the end goal of SEO, and it’s often considered a vanity metric for several reasons:

1. We can certainly get ranked higher on keywords with lower competition
2. We can get ranked on popular keywords but we don’t get enough SEO traffic to our website for one reason or another
3. Even after people clicked on our top-ranking search results and visit our website, they might bounce right away for one reason or another.

You get the idea: SERP ranking is not the end goal of SEO, but a means to an end for the ‘real’ goals which is website traffic. Other results, like brand awareness, lead generation, and ultimately purchase conversions, all began from getting organic traffic.

So, here is the #1 mindset: we should focus on ranking on keywords that:

• Can generate organic traffic (has high organic CTR)
• The organic SEO traffic generated should consists of your ideal/target audience

The #2 mindset we should have, is to remember that Google’s—and the other search engines’ — mission is to provide relevant and valuable content for the human audience. We should remember that the objective of SEO is not to please the search engine’s algorithm but to provide value for our human audience.

So, when we discuss the step-by-step SEO strategy below, keep in mind that the core is to provide valuable, high-quality content for our target audience.

Finally, let us begin with the first step:

Step 1: Define Our SEO Objectives

As we have discussed above, remember that SEO—as a strategy—, is not a method to beat the search engine algorithm, but to reach and attract your target audience.

With that being said, the first step here is to define the objective(s) of your SEO strategy. As we have established, SERP ranking is not and should not be the end goal of SEO. Instead, here are the common SEO objectives you can follow:

• Organic SEO traffic. It should be an objective even if it’s not your end goal, since you can’t achieve anything on your website without traffic. In essence, this one is about getting more people to click on your SERP result and visit your website in the process.
• Lead generation: convert some of the organic traffic into (qualified) prospects.
• Brand awareness or presence: get people to visit your website and consume your content to improve awareness and perceived credibility.
• Sales conversion: especially for eCommerce sites or sites with affiliate marketing objectives.
• Maintain a positive reputation: online reputation management purposes, for example, to drown negative content and reviews by ranking higher on branded keywords.
• Customer service purposes: pushing content that can provide useful information and educate them about your product/service. Useful in building engagements and encouraging customer advocacy.

You can choose more than one objective, but it’s important to define KPIs and/or metrics for these objectives. For example “x% increase in organic traffic”  or “20% increase in sales conversion”, KPIs in brand awareness, and so on.

Your goal(s), however, should follow these principles:

• Achievable: it’s better to have a realistic and achievable goal to maintain your team’s morale. Break bigger objectives into smaller milestones if necessary.
• Specific: that is, well-defined and comprehensive
• Measurable: the campaign’s performance in achieving this objective should be measurable by monitoring specific metrics or assigning KPIs.

Make a list of your target SEO objectives. Remember that no matter what your primary goal is, getting more website traffic with SEO should be a part of it. For the next steps, our focus is to develop a working strategy to achieve this objective.

Step 2: Finding Keyword Opportunities With High Organic Traffic

SEO today is no longer solely about keyword optimizations, but proper keyword research is still the core of a working SEO strategy—although our approach might be slightly different compared to a decade ago—.

Here are some important considerations when conducting keyword research to find keyword opportunities:

• The key to successful keyword research is to properly understand your target audience, and especially their search intent. Understand your audience’s needs, pain points, and behaviors by conducting proper market research.
• Always go back to your SEO objective(s) when finding your ideal target keyword. Remember, however, that these keywords must have high potential organic traffic. For example, if your main SEO objective is to generate leads, you might want to look for keywords that are geared towards informational intent. Similarly, if your objective is sales revenue, then you should try to find opportunities to target keywords related to transactional intent.
• There are several key considerations when trying to find keyword opportunities:
  • The keyword must align with your target audience’s intent, as discussed above. In general, we can target keywords with high enough search volume.
  • The keyword must be relevant/valuable for your business. Fairly obvious, not all queries that are popular with your audience are going to be valuable for your business.
  • As mentioned, the keyword must have the potential of generating organic SEO website traffic, and you should be able to expand the keyword into proper content.
  • Based on your timeline and resources, the competition of the keyword must be manageable. If you are using a keyword research/SEO tool like Ahrefs, you can evaluate the keyword difficulty metric for this aspect.
• There are various keyword research tools that can help you, from free ones like UberSuggests to competitive analysis tools like SpyFu to all-in-one SEO tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs. Use as many as you can (depending on your budget), and explore all of the possible keyword options.

Make a list of your keywords and define their priorities. If necessary, also divide them by user intents and objectives.

Step 3: SERP Analysis

As established at the start of this guide, Google’s SERP has significantly changed, mainly due to the inclusion of featured or rich snippets.

More than 40% of total search queries now have a featured snippet in the SERP page, positioned above the top organic spot. There’s also the knowledge panel on the sidebar, and the “People Also Ask” boxes that are also positioned above the organic results.

Being featured as this rich snippet—as also mentioned—, might not guarantee a generated traffic to your site. However, it might be a good branding opportunity and can help your overall SEO campaign.

Some featured snippet opportunities might help in achieving your SEO objectives. For example, if you are a local business, then optimizing Google My Business and being featured in Google Map results (a type of featured snippet for local queries), can significantly help with store visits and conversion rates, which might be your goal in the first place.

You can use keyword research tools like Ahrefs to help find keywords with a high potential organic click-through rate (CTR). There are cases where organic CTR is still relatively high even when there’s a featured snippet. These should be your main target keywords.

Step 4: Competitive Analysis

Next, analyze your target keywords to find out about competing sites. You can do a quick Google search for each keyword manually, or you can use various keyword research tools for this step.

Check out the sites that already ranking for these keywords (including sites that are ranked as a featured snippet), your main goal here is to beat these competitors by:

1. Developing bigger, better, more in-depth content than these competitors
2. Take a unique angle and cover the keyword with different content than your competitors

In most cases, being unique is generally an easier approach, but there’s not always the opportunity to do it. Why? Because if it’s a very competitive keyword, being just slightly better in most cases won’t cut it. Also, others might simply publish even better content and ‘reset’ the cycle.

For example, let’s say the target keyword is “best digital marketing tools”. The first page of Google SERP might display pages/sites discussing 10 to 30 different digital marketing tools. If, for instance, you publish another “top 10” or “top 20” content, in most cases it’s going to be really difficult to rank. You’d need to create a really big guide covering, for example, 50+ tools or a really, really good content.

With that being said, if you can find a different angle to cover the keyword, go for it. Being different usually will translate to a higher chance of getting this content shared and linked (which are important ranking factors).

Step 5: Content Creation Plan

The core of SEO is content, period. This is even more true with how Google’s algorithm is getting better in recognizing content quality and relevance.

That is, there’s no shortcut in getting SEO results besides actually publishing high-quality content that is relevant and valuable for the target audience. So, creating a content marketing plan will significantly help in your whole SEO campaign.

From the previous steps, we have gathered all the necessary data to create a proper content plan, and here is how we can create a content plan:

1. Decide upfront who is going to be responsible for the content creation process for each content (i.e. if you have a content writer or several different ones)
2. Check your target keywords list, and expand them into a topic (or a working title)
3. Decide where you are going to distribute the content (i.e. which channel):
   1. Your blog
   2. Guest post on other sites
   3. Medium.com or other similar sites
   4. YouTube or other video streaming platforms
   5. Email newsletter
4. List when you are going to publish the content (and how frequent, if it’s a repeated/serial content)
5. Create a working editorial calendar by listing:
   1. Content publication date
   2. PIC (creator/author)
   3. Working title
   4. Keyword
   5. Description
   6. The objective of the content
   7. Distribution channel(s)
   8. Call-to-action
   9. References/ideas
   10. Status
6. Monitor and evaluate the content marketing plan when it’s executed. Review elements such as:
   1. Whether the content is performing well according to the content objective(s), SEO goals, and overall marketing objectives.
   2. The tone of the content, the overall quality, and whether the content is better than the ranking competitors
   3. The execution of the content marketing plan and the editorial calendar

If necessary, adjust the content strategy based on the evaluation, and especially whether the content’s SEO performance is up to expectation. It’s important to remember that SEO content in 2025 is no longer about keyword optimization: include your target keywords naturally, but focus on publishing relevant, valuable content for your target audience.

Step 6: Link Building in 2025

As we have established at the start of this guide, nowadays the quality of the incoming backlinks is significantly more important than quantity.

A backlink’s quality is, in general, directly related to the authority of the source website. You can use various tools (free and paid) like Moz’s Domain Authority checker, among others to check for site authority.

The secret to getting high-quality backlinks, however, is the quality of your content. If your content is good and contains useful information, someone will link you sooner or later. On the other hand, no tactics can help low-quality content to get backlinks (at least,  legally).

So, the tactics we’ll list below are just means to amplify the performance of high-quality content:

• Include something linkable in your content (the ‘link hook’)

The most common reason for adding an outbound link is to back-up any information mentioned in our content or to provide indirectly related information to our content that is too long to discuss. For example, in this SEO content, we might need to cite another page that discusses topics like “backlinks” or “ranking factors”.

Another common reason is to add data references to give the information presented in the content with some authority. For example, when we claim that 10% of the total population are babies (just an example), we can link a source that provided similar (original) claims.

With that being said, we can include these types of data in our content, the link hook, such as:

• Data roundup, like this, can generate a lot of backlinks when properly done.
• Original information/data like an original research report, case study, datasheet, etc. are always very valuable
• Visually-pleasing assets like infographics, images, and beautiful photos are often linked. Optimize these images properly so Google can properly index them.
• Unique content (how-to guides, actionable tips) can often attract backlinks.

• Content promotion to get website traffic and backlinks

We have mentioned how the quality of your content is very important in generating backlinks. However, no matter how good your content is, it won’t bring any value when nobody knows about it.

Content promotion is just as, if not even more important than the content creation process with two-fold benefits.

1. Getting more organic traffic to your website (which is the main focus of this guide)
2. Getting more backlinks in the process. This, in turn, will improve our ranking on the SERP and further. generate more traffic to the website.

Promote your content using all the possible channels, and always aim to get backlinks/inbound links in every possible opportunity. Building relationships with business partners, influencers, press, and relevant websites are very important here.

Also, the good news is that you don’t really need to be too aggressive in building your backlinks. In fact, getting too many links too fast can get you penalized. In general, you ‘only’ need to get 2-5 high-quality backlinks for each page per month.

Step 7: Website Optimization

There are three core aspects of achieving SEO success:

• The first is to make sure your content is valuable and relevant for your human audience—as mentioned above—.
• The second is to make sure your site performed just as intended (optimal user experience). User experience metrics like dwell time and bounce rate are now accounted as ranking factors
• The third is to make sure Google can properly crawl and index your site. Not indexed means not ranked, period.

This step is about optimizing your site for the second and third aspects (with the first aspect already covered in the previous steps). On-site optimization is a very deep subject on its own, and we won’t give it much justice discussing it here. Yet, here are some of the important factors to consider:

• Your site’s loading speed. More than 50% of visitors will bounce from a website if it loads in more than 3 seconds.
• Mobile-responsiveness of your site. You can use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool to check your site’s current condition.
• You can follow this guide to make sure your site is indexed quickly and properly by Google.
• Implement structured data markup properly. This will allow your site to be viable for featured snippets, and also provide Google with more information to properly index your site.
• Optimize the website’s interface (navigation menus, layout, etc.) to maximize dwell time.
• Optimize your content’s structure, including images and videos.
• Test everything regularly on as many different devices as possible.

Step 8: Evaluation and Continuous Optimization

This last (but not least) step is to ensure there’s a system in place to help us monitor and evaluate our SEO progress.

This is important since SEO for SaaS is a long-term game where we would generally need to spend 6 to 18 months before we can see any significant results.

Schedule a regular evaluation of your SEO progress, and re-optimize your content according to its performance.

End Words

To reiterate, the goal of your SEO activity shouldn’t be ranking on Google’s SERP, but to get more website traffic to achieve other objectives like getting more brand awareness or generating more leads.

As we can see from the guide above, however, SEO is not a secret tactic to ‘cheat’ the search engine algorithm, but to align our site’s and content with Google’s mission to provide more reliable and relevant information for the target audience. If you need help with growing your organic traffic, hire a professional SEO expert to work on your on and off-site optimization.

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

Yet, SEO is a very complex process with a lot of misconceptions. So, just simply getting started might be a daunting task for many business practitioners and digital marketers.

So, In this guide, we will cover a step-by-step guide on SEO. Not only to clear the confusion but to actually help you get started planning and executing your SEO strategy. Without further ado, let us begin with the first step.

Step 1: Getting Your Mindset Straight: SEO Is a Long-Term Strategy

First things first, we will need to understand that SEO is not a get-rich-quick scheme. But instead, will require a long-term and consistent process. Yes, it is technically possible to use aggressive SEO techniques to increase your page rank quickly, a thing we know as Black Hat SEO. However, black hat SEO strategies are always targeted by search engine’s (and especially Google’s) policy and algorithm updates. So, black hat SEO is often penalized and on worst-case scenarios, banned. Black hat SEO can work if you are only looking for a few grand really quick. When the website is banned, you will start over with another. This business model is not sustainable and is actually very tiring. You will always need to come up with new ways to dodge the policies and algorithms. And, you can often get banned very fast before the website makes any money, leading to long-term losses.

Most of us will want a sustainable, long-term website, and in that light, you should avoid doing Black Hat SEO practices. The key difference? Black Hat SEO focuses solely on optimizing your content for the search engines, while long-term or White Hat SEO focuses on your human audience besides the search engine. As we continue with the next steps of our SEO how-to tutorial, keep in mind that we will be focusing on White Hat SEO strategies.
A great strategy starts with the right mindset so that you can also make the right preparations and plan. Before we continue with the next steps, let us discuss some preparations you can do for a successful SEO strategy.

Preparing Your SEO Manpower
As we have discussed how your SEO strategy will be a long-term investment and effort, obviously you will need enough manpower to do the job. In our previous article, we have discussed that there are generally three options you can choose from:

Building Your In-House Team
If you have the budget and digital marketing (including SEO) is an essential part of your business, building your in-house SEO team gives the most control and versatility.

Outsourcing to An SEO Agency
Hiring an outsourcing SEO agency is generally the most affordable option. However, not everyone prefers an agency environment, where you wouldn’t have much flexibility and time to communicate.

Outsourcing To a Freelancer SEO Expert
This option is quite similar to outsourcing to an agency. Professional SEO experts like Mike can be hired as an outsourced consultant, and they generally take fewer clients than agencies. So, you will generally have more flexibility with a freelance SEO outsource.

Set Goals and Plan Your Budget
SEO is not only a long-term investment, it is also not cheap. So, you will need to plan your budget to make it works. To plan an effective budget, you will first need to set a realistic goal. For example, your goal might be to have a 5% monthly increase in sales, which can translate to a 20% increase of lead generation from SEO. With those goals in mind, you can plan your budget accordingly.

This is a very nice guide from Forbes for planning your SEO budget.

Step 2: Understanding Off-Site and On-Site SEO

SEO Strategies can generally be divided into two main components: on-site and off-site strategies. As the names suggest, on-site SEO is how you optimize your content and generally will account for a total of 20% of your success. On the other hand, off-site SEO refers to other variables outside your own site such as backlinks, social media statistics, the competition in your industry. Off-site SEO will account for 80% of your success, although not all off-site factors are in your hands.

Although off-site SEO, on the surface, is more important, it can only be optimized when your on-site factors are already optimized. So, you will need to focus on both aspects equally. This guide from DigitalMarketingPro will help you understand the two aspects better. In the next step, we will first focus on the on-site SEO aspect.

Step 3: On-Site SEO

Now that I have covered the two main aspects of SEO and their respective importance, this step will discuss the on-site SEO strategies. There are three key factors in on-site SEO:

1. Site Structure
Just as it is hard to sell a house with bad architecture, it will also be hard to optimize a badly-designed website. Website architecture can be really technical so fast. However, there are a few simple concepts you can understand -and do- to improve your site SERP.

Crawl Friendly
Your page rank is mainly determined by the spider bots that ‘crawl’ your site. So, the first thing you should consider about your site architecture is that it should be easy to index. The general concept is – the thicker your links between pages of your site, the easier it is for the spider bots to crawl all of them. You can easily improve this factor by creating an XML sitemap. If you are on WordPress, you can also use plugins to make your life easier. To learn more about this step, you can check MOZ for the detailed guide.

Mobile Friendliness
More and more people are exclusively browsing on mobile devices, and Google has recently updated their algorithm to focus more on mobile-friendliness. So, make sure your website is mobile friendly at all cost.

Loading Speed
We all value our time, and so it is important to maintain good page speed to avoid bounce rates. Besides, page speed is actually an important factor for a Google Ranking. Use this PageSpeed tool by Google to test your current load speed, and aim to improve it if necessary.

2. HTML
Again, discussing HTML can be really techy. However, there are four key factors you can focus on to improve your page rank through HTML optimization:

Title Tags
Every page should only have 1 H1-tag to make the title clear to search engine.

Meta Description
Optimize your Meta Tags, not only for the search engine but also for human readers.

Schema
Schema is basically a subset of HTML tags, which can improve your page ranking.

Subheading
Keeping your h2, h3 and further subheads structured will not only contribute to search engine ranking but will make the content more appealing to readers.

3. Content
The last and the most important part of on-site SEO is content. The common misconception about SEO content is that it is only about keywords, which can’t be further from the truth,
As we have mentioned, you should focus on real visitors and readers instead of stuffing your articles with keywords to please the search engine. Here is a complete guide to optimizing content by Search Engine Land, which will help you tremendously.

Step 4: Off-Site SEO

When discussing off-site SEO tips and strategies, it can easily take days before we can agree on which plan to execute. Off-site SEO is definitely a very broad concept with a lot of tactics and techniques involved. So, it is important to understand the three most important factors of off-site SEO to base your strategy upon:

1. Trust
Before we focus on anything, we have to make sure that our site is trustworthy by the outside world, which is determined by its TrustRank. There are four key factors in building trust for your site:

Authority
The overall authority of your site is determined by your domain authority, which is how well known your domain name is, and page authority, which is the quality of your content. You can check your website authority here.

Domain Age
The older your domain, the more trustworthy it is. Yet, old domain names can be very expensive, and we definitely can’t cheat time. If this factor is a no-go for you, don’t worry. You can simply focus on other factors and steps on this guide.

Brand Identity
It also takes time to build a brand. Yet, brand building is not only beneficial for SEO purposes, but for your business in general.

Maintain Your Bounce Rate
Simply put, bounce rate is the measure of how many people view only one page of your website before moving on. The quality of your content, the load time, and attractiveness all play their factors here. So, again, focus on attracting your human audience.

2. Links

Many people think SEO is mainly about link building, and it is true that backlinks are still a very important factor in SEO. Remember, though, never buy links from anyone, and work your link building slowly but steadily. Focus on building just 2 to 3 high-quality backlinks each week. Building your links too quickly can result in a penalty, so always remember that it is a long-term process. Here are few SEO tips from Quicksprout for healthy link building strategies.

3. Social Media

We can’t underestimate the importance of social media and other social factors for SEO anymore, with so many people always connected in social media every single day. For SEO, we can get more links through social shares and direct linking. On the other hand, social media can indirectly improve our marketing success through PR boost. There are generally two things you can focus on with social media:

Number of Shares
Landing a viral hit is obviously beneficial, although there is more to it. You should also consider your consistency with shares and engagement, and more importantly: the quality of your shares.

Shares Quality
As with backlinks, who shares your content also matters. Google can recognize when a big influencer shares your content instead of just nobody. So, always try to engage with influencers related to your industry or niche. Give them a heads-up before you publish a great content, include them in your article or interview them.

Bottom Line

Although SEO is still a very complex process with a lot of efforts, by understanding the basic concepts and baby steps, you can make it manageable. I certainly hope this SEO tutorial can help you do more with your SEO strategies, and can also help you fix your SEO mistakes in the past. Remember, the first thing you need to do to achieve success is to commit your first step and get started!

The post Basic SEO Guide: On and Off-site SEO checklist appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

SEO as a marketing channel consists of many different tactics and activities, and on the other hand, it is a very flexible channel where different businesses might require different strategic implementations.

Thus, planning an SEO strategy for an enterprise company can be easier said than done, as we’ll need to consider many different variables to plan many different elements.

With that being said, in this guide, we will discuss a step-by-step guide in planning an SEO strategy, and by the end of this guide, you’ll be ready to execute a well-planned SEO initiative in no time.

Let us begin.

Step 1: Keyword and Topic Research

It’s fairly obvious that keywords are the core of your enterprise SEO, but finding the right keywords for your business can be easier said than done.

First, before we can define our target keywords, there are important things we’ll need to consider, namely:

• What are the objectives of your SEO campaign? What do you want to achieve by ranking higher on Google (or other search engines)? Is it simply to generate more traffic, is it to get more sales revenue on your eCommerce site, is it to help maintain a positive online reputation?
• Who is your ideal audience? The answer here should be closely tied to your SEO goals/objectives, namely, what are their related search intents in relations to your SEO objectives.
• What are the keywords included in these search intents? Now your options are going to be more specific (meaning, it’s relatively easier to choose).

After we’ve answered these questions, there are two main approaches we can take in defining target keywords. The first is to decide on specific topics where you can capture the audience’s attention.

For example, if you are a tech SaaS company selling productivity software, then you can decide on “productivity tips” as your main topic. Then, you can use keyword research tools (like SEMRush or Ahrefs) to find keywords related to this topic that also have high enough search volume.

The second approach is to research the keywords first, and then determine a topic based on these keywords, so your work backward.

In our opinion, you should combine the two approaches together and try to find the best possible topic that can benefit your business, based on three main principles:

1. The keyword must be relevant to your ideal audience, based on their search intent. Mainly signified with a high enough search volume.
2. The keyword must be relevant to your business and must help your SEO objective.
3. The competition for the keywords must be manageable, based on your available resources and time.

You can use various tools from the free (and useful) Google Keyword Planner to premium ones like Ahrefs, SEMRush, and Moz Pro to find these target keywords and topics, but the principles remain the same.

The next step is to find long-tail keywords based on these target topics.

Here’s the thing: with the latest Google algorithm updates, topic expertise is a ranking factor. Meaning, a site that regularly publishes about SEO is more likely to rank higher than another site that publishes one really good, very optimized content about SEO.

So, the idea here is to develop a “layered” enterprise content strategy to establish topic expertise, as we will discuss on the next step.

Step 2: Layered Content Planning

Due to the various changes to Google algorithms, how Google rank websites have also changed dramatically.

To tackle this issue, we need to focus on establishing topic expertise while planning and executing our content marketing.

We do this by dividing our content marketing into two “layers” for each topic:

1. Creating one, general content to cover the main topic. For example, if our main topic is “digital marketing”, we might create a lengthy content discussing the basics of digital marketing, along with the channels included within digital marketing (SEO, social media marketing, etc.)
2. Creating a cluster of content pieces to target the long-tail keywords related to the topic. With the same example, we create shorter, but more focused content pieces to target “social media marketing”, “SEO”, “influencer marketing”, etc. All of these content pieces are linked to the “main” topic page.

This approach has two-fold benefits:

• As mentioned, this can establish your credibility and expertise for the topic, which can significantly affect your SERP ranking
• The specific “cluster” content can effectively capture a specific audience with specific needs—they are more likely to convert into leads—
• You can generate more backlinks with these specific content pieces, while they can also generate traffic to your main topic page (via internal linking)
• Since these cluster pages are targeting long-tail keywords, it’s (fairly) easier to rank, and this will boost your site’s SEO performance in general

Step 3: Build Pages for Each Main Topic

These pages for the main topic(s) should be your main concern.

Do thorough research for this topic, and especially research the top-ranking competitors’ content for this topic, and keywords related to this topic.

Your objective is to rank higher than these competitors, and there are only two possible ways:

1. Create something really good, that is significantly better, more in-depth, more up-to-date information, and more everything that these ranking competitors. You have to be better both in the eyes of your audience and according to Google’s algorithms.
2. Take a unique angle and discuss the topic in a different way. While on paper this is the “easier” approach, it can be easier said than done, as finding something really unique and different—but still engaging and interesting—, can be very difficult.

How you will approach this content creation process is up to you, but here are some best practices you always need to keep in mind:

• Above anything else, your goal is to provide value for your human audience. According to Google’s mission statement, it’s about delivering the most reliable and relevant information.
• Based on that previous principle, don’t over-optimize for keywords. Mention your target keywords and semantically-related keywords naturally throughout the content. Maintain the readability and comprehensiveness of your content.
• Use short sentences and paragraphs. No more than 150 words in each paragraph, and create new subheadings every 300 words or so. Use a lot of white spaces to maintain readability.
• Use appropriate images, embed videos, and so on to maintain engagement.

The idea is that this “main” content page targeting the main topic should be very optimized, and should be the centerpiece(s) of your website.

Step 4: Content Clusters To Support The Main Page

While we have discussed that the “main” content should be your central focus, it doesn’t mean these clustering content pieces targeting specific long-tail keywords won’t be important.

However, with these content pieces, we’ll need to take a slightly different approach, namely:

• Here, consistency and regularity are keys. Remember that you are building “clusters”, so the quantity is also important.
• Always link these blog posts from the main content. Use appropriate anchor texts for this purpose. Create an exact section on your main page that can smoothly introduce this subtopic.
• Similarly, link out to the main page from these cluster content pieces. You can do this naturally with an anchor text, or use tags in your CMS.
• Include the long-tail target keywords naturally, and no more than four times throughout the page—assuming the content is 1,000 to 2,000 words long—. As always, focus on maintaining readability and value for your human readers. For long-tail keywords, it’s a little more sensitive, as exact keyword matches will be very obvious. You can easily get penalized for keyword stuffing, so be extra careful when including these long-tail keywords. Avoid exact matches, and use semantically related keywords naturally.

Remember that there are three main purposes of these pages:

1. Generating specific traffic that is specifically searching for information related to these long-tail keywords—and convert them into leads when possible—
2. Establishing a consistent and credible online presence, so the quantity of your publication is also important
3. Build connections between these pages and the “main” content, telling Google—and other search engines— that there’s a relationship between these long-tail keywords and the topic you are trying to rank for.

With these pages, consistency—both in quality and quantity— is key.

Step 5: Generate Backlinks

Backlinks are still the most important ranking factor in enterprise SEO. Think of backlinks as the online “vote of confidence”: the more backlinks—or inbound links—pointing to your content, the more credible and relevant your content is assessed by Google, and thus you’ll climb higher.

With that being said, link building is the main focus of enterprise SEO experts.

It’s important to note that nowadays, the quality of your backlinks is more important than quantity. In fact, getting too many low-quality backlinks at any given time might get your site penalized if Google suspects you from practicing unnatural (grey-hat or black-hat) link buildings.

So, our main objective is to get these high-quality backlinks. Just 2 to 3 authoritative and relevant backlinks in any month are sufficient, and if you can, aim for 5-6 backlinks for each page/month.

However, getting these backlinks can be easier said than done, but here are some important tactics you can implement:

1. Don’t overcomplicate things. Good and relevant content will always get linked, and on the other hand, no amount of tactics and efforts can help low-quality content.
2. Build relationships with as many relevant parties as you can: business partners, loyal customers with an online presence, press/media, influencers, etc. Relationships are often the most reliable source for high-quality links.
3. Create linkable content—unique data/information (research report, case study, etc.), “resource” type of content, visually pleasing infographics/images, current up-to-date events/new, etc. Give them reasons to link your content.
4. Link building is quite often, an area where working with SEO experts or consultants can help. Consider outsourcing this process to a credible enterprise SEO agency. They can especially help with their existing relationships with reputable businesses and content publishers in your niche/industry.

There are certainly many other approaches you can try in link building, but these four principles above remain the most important.

Again, consistency is key, but don’t be overly aggressive with your link-building.

Step 6: Optimize Your Site (Technical and Non-Technical On-Site SEO)

If content strategy—as we’ve discussed in the previous steps—, is essentially about attracting and engaging your human audience, here our focus is to please the machine side of SEO—Google’s crawlers and Google’s algorithms—.

Our main objective here is to make sure our site is crawled, indexed, and understood properly by Google—and the other search engines—, so it can rank accordingly on the SERP.

While this is a pretty broad subject, and you might want to check out our previous guide on technical SEO checklist here, here are the important factors to pay attention to:

Non-Technical Optimizations

• Include your target keyword in your URL, but make sure the URL is readable and keep it as short as possible
• Use your keyword in your H1 (Title) tag. If possible, put the keyword upfront.
• For H2, H3, etc. tags, use keywords when you can, but always prioritize readability and natural inclusion rather than forcing to include these keywords
• Optimize images and include keywords in the alt tags
• Improve your internal linking structure

As you can see, most non-technical optimizations are about including your keywords naturally without sacrificing user experience.

Technical Optimizations

Technical on-site optimizations are a little more complex, but here are some key areas to prioritize:

• Improve your site’s load speed. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights and other tools to assess your site’s current speed, and optimize.
• Mobile-friendliness or mobile-responsiveness of your site
• Check for crawl and indexation errors using various enterprise SEO tools, and fix the existing issues
• Find and fix broken links
• Migrate your site from HTTP to HTTPS if you haven’t already

This is obviously not an all-inclusive list, and there are many more technical optimizations you can implement. However, the main principle remains the same: make sure your site is indexed and perceived correctly by the search engine’s crawlers but also maintain your site’s user experience.

Probably the most important—and relatively simple—process to maintain, is to properly compress and optimize all embedded media before you use them in your content and upload them on your site.

The bigger the file size is, the slower your website will be. As your website grows, you’ll have more of these images, videos, and audio files, and their compounding size can significantly slow the website down.

There are various tools that can help compress images in bulk, for example, Google’s Squoosh (free). Protect your site’s optimal speed, but don’t sacrifice quality and user experience.

Step 7: Monitor, Evaluate, Re-Optimize

It’s no secret that enterprise SEO is a long-term game.

If you do all the steps properly and if all the other factors went right, you can expect to climb to the first page of SERP (from the 5th page) in 2 to 6 months. Then it’s another 6 to 12 months until your page can climb into the top 3 spots—or even better, the #1—.

The key to success in all these months, however, is consistency. It’s important to measure the progress of your SEO efforts, and here are some key areas to evaluate:

• Your performance in SERP ranking (you should climb up the ranking steadily—albeit slowly—)
• Increase/decrease in organic traffic
• User experience metrics especially bounce rate and dwell time, but also other engagement metrics
• Organic reach and impressions
• The content’s conversion rate—if it involves CTA—
• Your site’s technical factors (as discussed above), especially the site’s load speed and mobile-friendliness
• Link profile

Evaluate your overall SEO strategy and content performance according to these metrics, and re-optimize your content and the site accordingly. Update non-performing content, and focus on optimizing for local search and Google Maps to drive more local visitors.

End Words

While there can’t be a “one-size-fits-all” approach in implementing an enterprise SEO strategy, the steps we have discussed above can be a good foundation in building your own strategy—according to the needs and objectives of your respective businesses—.

The main principle in a good SEO strategy for B2B and B2C company is to focus on delivering value to the human audience, and not solely focusing on ‘pleasing’ the search engine’s algorithms.

Maintain consistency, and you’ll see your site climb the SERP ranking steadily by implementing the step-by-step strategy above.

The post How to Develop an Enterprise SEO Strategy to Drive Leads and Revenue 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.

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