Content is king and consistency is the key to mastering SEO.
First of all, distinguish between Onpage & Offpage Search Engine Optimization. SEO is not SEO. Both areas tackle different aspects that impact your overall SEO score.
What is Onpage SEO?
Onpage SEO is rather simple since it is related to technical stuff like meta tags, structure, and content. Check out tools from Google like https://web.dev/measure/ or https://pagespeed.web.dev/. Both tools cover Web Vitals - an initiative by Google to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web.
The current set for 2020 focuses on three aspects of the user experience—loading, interactivity, and visual stability—and includes the following metrics (and their respective thresholds): Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift.
Another third-party tool I can recommend is Seobility. But there are dozens of others out there, e.g., Moz, Ahrefs, or Sistrix.
Of course, once your score is quite well, it does not mean your SEO is done! New content will be created, new products are covered, and so on. Third-party tools like the above can help to check keywords for pages and track progress regarding "organic" traffic / ranking. And that is not only for your page also for your competitors if you like. So you can gain an insight into which keywords need to be enhanced more or what page needs to be more optimized. Another handy feature they provide is to schedule a run for an SEO audit automatically. Once you add new pages or update the content the changes will be considered in the next SEO check and sent to your email inbox right away.
But just to be clear: Those SEO tools do not give you any guarantee that your page will rank first on search engines! Those tools ensure your page content fulfills the minimum overall technical requirements based on the SEO audit providers (#opionated) common-sense SEO strategy. (Nobody knows how search engines work precisely, keep that in mind!)
What is Offpage SEO?
Offpage SEO on the other hand is rather tricky since as the name already says, the optimizations take place off the page itself. One possible shortcut: Ads. In other words: Pay-to-Rank. But this goes with a huge downside: Once you stop ads, your "paid" traffic is plummeting. Ads should be used only as a jumpstart (for certain pages, products, features, keywords—you name it). And also not for everything at the same time forever, except your SEO budget is limitless. 😉
Here we are mainly talking about link building - the so-called "Link-Juice". Better said: Relevance. This covers the areas such as ...
Visibility on Social Media
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or wherever your target audience is. Also, the mentions on those platforms. Keep in mind that posts that work on one platform might not work on another - the audience might be too diverse. But that is another topic.
Good Reputation
Here we are talking about Trustpilot, Google-My-Business, Yelp, etc. If a search engine uses related entries, we do not know. IMHO I think this applies especially to Google-My-Business entries for Google´s search engine, but there is probably an impact for other search engines as well.
(Juicy) Backlinks
This refers to external backlinks from "relevant" related external pages to yours. Rule of thumb: The more traffic goes through one page that refers to your page the better. There are also tools that mainly focus on website traffic, for instance, Alexa or similarweb.
The Final
Now, the overwhelming task: Doing both at the same time. SEO is not a project that is done someday - SEO is a process. Always make sure your content is crawlable and provides important meta information, also for the Open Graph protocol which is important for Offpage SEO (esepcially Social Media). As referred to in the title:
Content is king and consistency is the key to mastering SEO.
Good luck.
I have worked as an SEO for some time now, approx 22 years, for just about every type of business out there, so may be able to add to this discussion.
A key point missing here is to clearly map out how SEO fits into your overall marketing program.
For instance, if you are a plumber, serving a local area, then you will want to rank for a handful of terms that may generate leads. Typically, plumber near me, plumber location, service + location etc.
You will also want good reviews and a website that turns clicks into customers.
But, the strategy is simple.
With an app or a new product the strategy is often not so straightforward.
You are not a local business so you are tiny fish in an ocean of competition.
People may not directly search for what you provide either, or be aware of your category so the strategy needs to be clear.
Generally there are two parts to your overall SEO strategy. The first is what you do. The second is the content marketing piece that is typically answers to questions that either help prospects solve problems or achieve goals.
You then have to think how this SEO traffic will help with your goals - how do the articles you create connect to what you sell.
Also, is there some supportive marketing needed to nurture those clicks into customers.
Typically this takes the form of:
I would also suggest that your SEO strategy is built on your business strategy. That is to say, have a niche, really niche down, become a bigger fish in a smaller pool. Make the fight winnable. Don't go after keywords like "productivity app" - niche down.
Then, when you have this SEO strategy and content in place, it probably still won't rank and you will need to promote it (links).
Of course, then targeting page features like People-also-ask, OG etc can then help.
The last bit of guidance would be to get a good SEO philosophy in place. Google just wants to return the best answers to questions. Be the best answer.
Give Google that content to serve and Google will give you traffic.
Reciprocation. Give and you will receive.
No quick wins. No dirty tricks.
It is a long road ahead, but, with time and effort can be a powerful channel.
Hope this helps.
Thanks for adding those points @Mac46uk. This truly shows how comprehensive SEO is.
Would be great to read a post about how to start niching down correctly.
The part of developing an SEO strategy that continues to intimidate me is balancing it with time spent on product development. I have yet to launch, but I imagine that once it does, marketing + maintenance/bug fixes + new feature development will be a difficult balance to strike. Is this something anyone here has done before? I have an opportunity to order https://mtpremium.net/ and do development, what do you think?
Hi @phamvan, to find the balance is always the most difficult task. There is no overall SEO strategy to follow. One SEO strategy might work for one product/business but will fail for another.
Personally, I do not like such services since they promise a shortcut. They might help with traffic, but I doubt the long-term results and the quality itself. (Never used those services.)
Nice post, I especially like the links to the SEO tools - super useful. Thanks for sharing!
thank you for sharing this
The part that continues to intimidate me about building out an SEO strategy is balancing it with time spent on building the product. I have yet to launch, but imagine that, once launch happens, marketing + maintenance/bugfixes + new feature development sounds like a hard balance to strike. Is this something anyone here has experience with?
That is a valid point! I would not overthink the strategy too much and try to find a natural balance while developing. So doing SEO audits parallel and fixing issues along the way. Most of the tools out there will always show something to do.
Great post, thanks. Can you elaborate a little bit on the open graph protocol? Why and how do you account for it in your SEO process?
Thanks @TheMusician and sure. I guess you will agree with the claim "A picture says more than 1000 words"!? ... And that is where I see the power of Open Graph. Just imagine you are sharing a link to your website on your favorite messenger, e.g., WhatsApp. What will be more engaging?
I think it is the second one. The other attributes are copy & paste or at least I did not see a reason to define a different
<meta property="og:description" content="...">.So mainly I focus on the OG:image meta-tag:
I would not spend too much time with OG yet, even there might be a lot of potentials. Start with the basic OG metadata and experiment with optional once to see what works and whatnot.
Thank you very much Manuel. I was not aware that this is a thing. I owe you one :-)
Maybe for other people who have the same lack of knowledge, here is a nice article which adds even more pictures to the... picture :-)
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/what-is-open-graph-and-how-can-i-use-it-for-my-website/
Fascinatingly. This morning only - I wrote an article explaining this in the simplest possible way...
Do have a look: https://veonr.com/blog/og-tags-explained-with-examples
Nice overview, but be cautions with relative paths for
og:imageorog:video. I would recommend to stick with absolute paths here.Makes sense actually. Thanks for this!
Great points! Once you start working on it you really get to know how much work there is to be done - and as you've said, you never really finish it.
Thanks. Exactly. Just think about those Google Algorithm updates that are performed from time to time. Every time something "new" to work on.
How do you think the organic promotion is still at the top? I heard the opinion that SEO is no longer relevant
People are saying this since I started SEO, so around 15 years ago.
SEO is dead, Social will kill SEO, etc. etc.
The truth is that SEO done by below-average "experts" will do nothing to your site.
The truth is that SEO takes time and organization.
And the truth is that there is no "quick trick" there - so other methods might seem more attractive because they are providing short-term results.
The thing is that SEO done right is by far the cheapest traffic/lead generation method. It's SEO, then nothing for a long time, and then everything else.
I'm working with technical founders (usually SAAS and Ecommerce owners) through https://developersvsmarketing.com/ and I often hear this - SEO is done, SEO is dead. No, it's not, but like with everything, it requires a lot of skill to do it right.
What do you mean exactly by "organic promotion"?
I heard those rumors as well. I think this is due to the out-of-the-box Onpage SEO solution of website builders or CMS, but this mostly covers a fraction of overall SEO.
I mean blogging, keywords and so on.
Blogging is a very interesting part since your article can target a niche topic that is somehow related to your main content. For instance, I have a tutorial on my blog that has more organic traffic than my homepage. I am not sure if this is good for me, but it is definitely good for my domain since it shows Google / Search engines some kind of "relevance". Also, this phenomenon did not occur right from the start - it took a long time. So patience will pay off later I guess.
Thanks for sharing. SEO is like black magic to me... The backlinks is a very good tip, I learned about it in my interview with the SEO expert Roberto Robles too. But still after doing all that I don't see a lot of traffic.
You´re welcome @tiagorbf.
Which tools do you use for SEO audits? One of the above?
this one: https://www.seobility.net/en/seocheck/
Content is king and consistency is the key to mastering SEO. What Google wants is that your website has relevant, high authority content.
Google also wants that your website has consistent content. If your website has nothing but “great content”, Google doesn’t think that your content is relevant. Google also thinks your content is outdated. Google also thinks that your content is spam. Google also thinks that your content is duplicate.
Google also thinks that your content isn’t relevant because it doesn’t contain the keyword or keyword phrase that your customer is looking for.
Google also wants that your website has consistent content. Google wants that your website has the same content on every page. Google also wants that your website has consistent headings. Google also wants that your website has the same image on every page.
Google also wants that your website has consistent meta data on every page.
Google also wants that your website has consistent sitemaps.
Google also wants that your website has consistent robots.txt.
Google also wants that your website has the same tag.
Google also wants that your website has the same meta robots on every page.
Google also wants that your website has the same canonical link text on every page.
Google also wants that your website has the same meta description on every page.
The way you described everything in your post is amazing. I do agree with your post. Recently, I saw this website https://fastlabourhire.com.au/ and they are doing amazing work. Website is well optimized and content is also unique.
Thanks @maxmarrie. Anyway the website you shared has a lot to do to be well optimized in my opinion.