But there are plenty of nuances to keywords, and SEO as a whole, that are impossible to cover in this list alone. Once your content is published and ranking in search results, your job isn’t done. See how successful your content is, so you know what’s working for you and what isn’t. On-page SEO isn’t the only kind you need to make sure you get right to rank for keywords.
Mobile-Friendly Website Design: Why Your Local Business Needs It
If you’re new to SEO, you should absolutely make sure your website is friendly to search robots such as Googlebot. You can do this easily with online tools such as Hubspot’s Website Grader or Moz’s On-Page Grader, for example. When done correctly, your research up to this point should help you create a page that thoroughly satisfies a user’s query through complete content. If we wanted to rank for this keyword, we would be wise to create content that delivered on these elements. We would learn even more from diving into the individual pages themselves. Google’s job is to give people web results that satisfy their questions, so if you don’t satisfy intent, you’ll likely not rank very well for very long.
Sort Data but Keep Blank Rows in Excel and Google Sheets
You can export data and create reports, ensuring you have a clear picture of your rankings and site effectiveness. Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) play a pivotal role in how users find information online. SERPs display organic results along with paid ads, featured snippets, and local listings. Understanding the layout can help you optimize your content to better fit these formats. A higher ranking means more visibility, leading to increased organic traffic. Understanding your SEO ranking helps identify areas for improvement.
Optimize for Prominent SERP Features
To maximize your chances, write blog posts that are long-form in nature. Definitions of “long-form” content vary widely, but most people would agree it means writing at least 1,000 words, and more like 1,500 or more. Blog posts under 1,000 words are much less likely to rank highly—see more in my guide about how long a blog post should be. Of course, it also makes a lot of sense to include your website in your bio – and to post links to your blog’s content. That way, you’ll hopefully get some people clicking through from social media to view your website.
Using keyword themes presents us with much larger opportunities. Instead of ranking for a single Holy Grail keyword, a better goal is to rank for multiple keywords focused around a single idea. It’s meant as a framework for newer SEOs to build their own work on top of. This basic process has helped, in one form or another, 1000s of pages and upwards to millions of keywords to gain higher rankings.
Although you can do this for free by searching on Google, it isn’t usually reliable. This is because factors like location and search history can affect where you see a page ranking. Using a rank tracking tool like Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker is much more accurate. For example, let’s say we want to build links to our beginner’s guide to SEO. If we search Google for competing pages with the Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar installed, we’ll find that one has links from over SEO Anomaly 14K referring domains. For example, our site has two very similar pages about meta keywords.
But fortunately, Google is actively fighting that and is trying to stay as neutral as possible – and thus creating a better user experience for us, the end-users. Use catchy, keyword-optimized title tags and meta descriptions. Above all, make sure your content matches search intent and is helpful to users. How hard it will be for your small business website to establish brand presence via Google search depends on several factors.
If you’ve implemented the previous steps correctly in our downloadable checklist, this should be pretty straightforward. Before moving to the next step, it’s essential that your content is structured and formatted correctly. This might be the most important step in our downloadable checklist. Here are some real examples of content that is currently ranking in Google’s AI Overviews.
It’s not that cultivating a brand is a ranking factor, but rather that cultivating site users leads to stronger search signals. It can also be worthwhile to turn your blog posts into scripts for YouTube videos. Once the article is written, adapting it doesn’t require a lot of work. Creating videos can increase your reach and help build on your site’s authority, leading to more sales. The purpose of a content plan is to write down which keywords you want to be found with, and how often you want to write blog posts. It doesn’t have to be a fancy spreadsheet; simply write down your keywords, what you want to write about, and how often.
- Remember to promptly update data if there are changes to your address, phone number, or other details.
- Shortly, we’ll explain how to pick keywords well and how to plan your content so you reach quality goals.
- Most of the top publications have been around for years and have hundreds, if not thousands of pages, articles and web visitors.
All of the content produced brought in organic traffic and backlinks. This eventually contributed to high domain authority, meaning that now Google knows this domain is trustworthy and will rank it faster. Backlinks and links from other websites to your site remain a significant Google ranking factor. Fixing broken links and page experience is another necessary element of an off-page SEO checklist. Firstly, from a technical SEO perspective, many broken links can signal to search engines that your site is not well-maintained, potentially leading to lower rankings.