SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the action of optimising web pages and websites to surface and appear more prominently across search engines such as Google.
Briefly here is how you can evolve your SEO content through a SOP Standard Operating Procedure with a client. This is a cycle to follow indefinitely and ensures that your content stays fresh and to a high standard.
We will assume there is a content ‘piece’ Also, we aim to have rich content- videos graphics etc maybe also interactive elements which are engaging for the user.
The loop is a continuous cycle with the following stages:
Review Piece In the initial stage, thoroughly review the existing content. Understand its current performance in search rankings and user engagement. You may be looking to optimise for a specific keyword. Or you may have such a piece that is too far away to evolve and a faster route is to scrap it! This is by far the most complex step and will require a deep understanding of SEO and AI. Identify specific goals for your content. Are you aiming for higher visibility, improved user engagement, or conversions? Based on these goals, suggest changes that can help you reach them.
Suggest Changes to Achieve Specific Goals As an agency, we don’t own the content and we won’t be the only interested party. Often there are trade-offs with other stakeholders. So the changes need this stage of approval.
Create Changes Once the changes are agreed then make them! Implement the changes you’ve suggested. This could involve optimizing keywords, improving readability, adding multimedia elements, or any other content enhancements.
Measure the Effect of Changes After implementing the changes, closely monitor the impact on your content’s performance. Use tools like Google Analytics or SEO software to track changes in search ranking, organic traffic, and user interaction. How quickly changes will happen and to what degree is difficult to say but it doesn’t now take much longer to see initial change. You would see some movement within 10 days- often less. Note this is different to waiting for Google core updates which happen less often which the changes in the loop will be designed to combat.
Remember, the key to success in iterative development is continuous monitoring and adjustment. Your ‘content’ should emphasize the importance of this ongoing process in achieving and maintaining high search rankings. SEO shouldn’t be thought of as a one-shot job. We are way beyond the simple 3 kings of domain, title and headings. Or simply sprinkling the keyword in the content. By all means, if you are doing a DIY SEO then go for it. Those elements DO need to be right. This iterative development cycle is to combat harder to rank for topics with serious competition.
Such is Google dominance in the search market we are very familiar with using it as a verb- to ‘Google something’ two words shorter than saying ‘search on the net’.
Before Google however we used Yahoo, Alta Vista, Lycos.
We get confused between search engines and browsers too, Google entwined the two and also took a massive share of the software cake too. Microsoft isn’t good at knowing or caring what people want. It focuses on what made it a giant – the corporate business. Something Google is managing to get some of through it’s cloud based infrastructure. So Google came in with Chrome and innovated where internet explorer just continued to annoy.
What is Netscape, Go.com, Dogpile, Ask Jeeves..
We get the point
Is Google going to dominate the market?
Can you classify ChatGPT as a search engine? The important thing is be the tool people reach for to get information online. Bing with it’s AI tool got a rare head start on Google with it’s Bard. And ChatGPT has revolutionised content creation to the point where many writers must be somewhat worried. Sidenote- I had an online content battle with someone who refused to acknowledge that AI could create. We need to accept it can. Music Graphics, weird graphics!
So are things yet to shake up again.
Google has been carving up it’s top 10 real estate so that even occupying spot #1 leaves you down the page. Advertisers rule, money rules hey Abba. Makes the world go round. But Google is triallng SGE Search Generative Experience firstly through it’s labs and it seems a lot like the Bing AI search experience.
Did you know that Google tried to index every book ever written?
They did.
They fought the law and the law won. Thanks to a few god men and women.
It occurred to me that they are getting companies writers and SEO professionals to create the worlds content! They can through showing them the gaps where content is missing but people search. Low hanging fruit SEO pros call it. Create an article that has good volume but which lacks decent solutions.
It struck me that this was like their attempt to digitise the worlds books. Making libraries and books obsolete in a sense. When Google shows the answer to a search which is text from a website to a person and the person doesn’t need to visit the website even, it seems the same. SGE, Bing AI and ChatGPT and others can interrogate the internet your website , mine his and hers. But can we assume that Google WILL be the dominant force in a decade. No. I don’t believe it is sure at all. Having seen big fish flop (Myspace, Yahoo etc.) and feeling the same way when I first used ChatGPT made me feel like the first time I used Google. We would flip showing little loyalty.
So what, my SEO peers- and you others, do you think? Search has to evolve and AI is here to stay.
As head of marketing, you realise you are losing some market share to SEO. Maybe you have been doing PPC Advertising but on key terms and missing out on a good chunk of longer tail keywords that PPC wouldn’t work for.
Assigning budget to marketing channels I am no expert at however I do know that data is used to back up decisions. The point being there was data showing you need to up your SEO game. And you realised that you got sold a bum deal on all that SMM which promised the moon and delivered little return.
Budget likely removes the option of having a dedicated IN HOUSE SEO for many after you work out all the costs of having another employee. The bigger companies may also cover various roles within SEO. It is rare to find a good technical SEO guy if they happen to be good at SEO however it is way easier to skill up any technical SEO guy as the skills for a technical SEO are far greater than those of SEO. However, I should give a nod to the SEO who has been around a long time and has the instinct. There is an art to it. And some Dev Ops experience Technical SEO dudes will lose out on that front.
The Considerations
In many respects, a smaller website can be technically fixed up and optimised and then the job is done- at least for a while. So this favours hiring a good technical SEO Freelancer and then hiring a good SEO Freelancer for the rest. An agency will of course have these skills inside and that is their key strength. Being able to draw on senior SEO staff for bigger questions. Running a whole SEO team in-house must be more expensive than hiring an agency. So small and medium-sized businesses can bring their SEO up to scratch by getting a reputable agency. I say that like it’s easy. Finding a good agency isn’t trivial.
Hmmm, why is it that Freelance jobs are rare? I really don’t get that. Again maybe the difficulty in finding good ones and hiring a bad one is pretty big. Still, you have to apply the same risks to in-house and agency searches anyway. Seriously consider finding a great SEO Freelancer.
I believe that Social Media was not the solution it was purported to be, I also feel like Content Marketing isn’t either. Don’t get me wrong you need content but some of you are going nuts and it may need a clean-up in aisle 5 down the line. So what does continuous SEO look like?
Well, you need to be linkable and create link-worthy assets from within the market and industry.
Have some off-site campaigns within tight guidelines. No, I am not talking about buying links.
Keep an eye on technical SEO and performance-related stats.
Keep an eye on the day-to-day SEO tasks.
Have a content strategy in place that is right for your business and just not as much as we can spew out. Seriously the spewing needs to stop.
So SEO Freelancers may be the best value way to get that SEO performance back.
How to find a good SEO freelancer?
A good SEO freelancer should be able to rank for some decent traffic terms right? Their website should be optimised for indexing and show all the good things you need. Good speed and good UX. Be wary of clicking on an Ad at the top of search result pages. All this does is show that they know how to create a Google Ad unless they even hired a Google Ads Agency. Be wary of freebies you work in marketing cmon! Look for good SEO case studies with modern examples. Old charts are no good for today’s tougher search algorithms.
How to find a good SEO Agency?
Meticulously going through their cases studies and talking to them is a starting point. My expertise on hiring an agency is zero. I just know SEO. Good luck.
I always get emails from those link traders who sell links- duh! Well, they send you an Excel sheet or Google Sheet with a bunch of attractive DA urls and some metrics. I’m hoping you know what I mean so you’re the right audience for this SEO post about backlinks.
Are backlink gigs on Fiver any good? NO.
It concerns me that I see the same kind of rubbish for sale on Fiver. Worse than the 5-star reviews roll in- more on that later. You are actually better off just throwing your money down the toilet or sending it to me because I will spend it better.
What are you missing? Those of you just trying to jump on the SEO bandwagon which isn’t a great bandwagon but I suppose for scammers it is. This is especially for you. Learn about indexation and how to see if a page can be indexed.
View a pages source code and check for the following:
This meta tag tells crawlers who obey robots such as Google (bad bots don’t care) that this page will be followed and indexed. In fact, the default is follow and index so you don’t even need these directives. So what you need to search for on the page’s source code is “nofollow” and “noindex”. If you find these or either one by itself, the page is not good for links.
A non-indexed page is not thought to be counted because of the likelihood of not being crawled and the importance of the page is low, so noindex is bad.
A non-followed page discounts all of the links- in terms of passing link juice however there could still be some benefit for these links in the sense of a diluted vote. We simply don’t know how Google treats them. The nofollow vs follow conversation is one to watch. It is beyond the scope of this rant.
What the links are missing is a key point of INDEXATION, and therefore TRAFFIC. These pages where your links turn up are typically profile pages the high DA sites like sony.com (it doesn’t matter who) allow anyone to create. These member pages or similar are blocked from being indexed to save SEO for the domain. If they were indexed then Google would see the ‘Link Farm’ which these pages become. Do you pay for links on Facebook or on Twitter? NO for the same reason. There could be a social effect if they were influential pages but not an SEO benefit.
When a page isn’t indexed the links are worthless. Google is maybe allowed to crawl the page (if the crawl budget ever allows it) but it isn’t going to assign any value to these links.
Stop buying these kinds of backlinks. And absolutely stop rating these providers 5 stars on Fiver.
This is why people invest in guest posting on blogs and websites with traffic in relevant niches. I also like link insertions into articles that already have traffic through being indexed and known by Google and other search engines.
Link building is time-consuming and therefore expensive. So better to aim for a few links drip-feeding alongside onsite SEO and get your site technical SEO approved too. The rate at which you build links should appear natural. Another reason why getting even 10 links all of a sudden is a red flag. It’s easy to spot.
Once upon a time a good and bad system would be designed that SEO people would try and exploit for ever after. The Google ranking algorithm in the early days worked out that the better websites worth showing could be easily identified by the number and quality of the links pointing to it. Link Building- When the SEO community reverse engineered this and found it out an industry was born; Link Trading. Things have changed but links remain still an important ranking factor for websites.
Don’t buy or obtain links the wrong way. This article will hope to show you the best way to go about getting backlinks.
Buying Links
Previously to Google’s Penguin algorithm update in 2016 buying links worked. I will say that if you know which links to get it still works. But all of a sudden spammy low grade links have been neutralized. If you want to see what junk links are then go to Fiverr and spend some a small amount of money. The cheaper the better- Cheap Backlinks!
I have actually hired these service providers to see the state of affairs..
Most all links were on non indexed pages and worthless. They would have zero effect as the page was not even on Google’s radar since the page was also not crawlable. At other times the list of links was stuffed with non existent pages or the link was missing.
The scary thing was the amount of glowing reports and how professional these people look! You are really seeing the equivalent of the car salesman. Either the reviews were fake or people really didn’t know what they were doing and thought the service was actually good.
You get what you pay for!
Think about Negative SEO, how easy it would be to buy bad links to your competitor websites. This is a problem for Google to solve too.
The good news is that you might not need backlinks to rank these days, it depends on your competition. But sadly if you want to rank in a tough neighbourhood then you will need to get links (and not only do this). Buying links is unlikely to work to get you the right link anyway. But do try and get them naturally.
It is better to work out the SEO aspects you do control first. Then see how your website ranks through free tools such as Google’s own search console. Get your technical SEO in order first, which is giving Google the best and easiest way to view and index your site. Then make sure to optimise and write great content.
What is a bad backlink
I am going to mention that this list includes links which aren’t bad just don’t have any effect too these will be marked with (null)
Links on non indexed pages (null)
Links on pages without traffic
Links on pages which have hundreds of other links
Links which have certain targeted anchor text in a high percentage
Links from unrelated topical pages
Links from websites with a bad link graph
What is a good backlink
Links on pages with traffic
Links on pages with good authority (Page Rank,PA, DA etc)
Links on other domains about the same subject (topical links)
Links at the end of an article for further resources
How To Build Backlinks
So you came here for this right! I am going to show you a different way that is more likely to work than all the tired ‘methods’ which don’t work such as HARO or outreach with lame emails to website owners.
Competitive analysis is now easy using tools such as Semrush where you an find who links to your competitor that don’t link to you. This is fine but do better outreach for goodness sake.
“I was reading your wonderful blog on travel and I just have to congratulate you!..do you accept guest posts with links?”
Make it STOP.
Think about how links get inserted into a webpage. There is nothing NATURAL about link creation. It requires a small amount of technical knowledge yet we are to believe it happens like a weed on my patio. What the SEO community means of course is a non paid for link.
You allow the link to be created without you even knowing about it.
Most links get inserted because people search for a related article of high quality to link to. So if you get sucked up into page 1 and have the best looking SERP you will attract good ‘organic links’.
Here it is. Build the best most linkable content. Content that isn’t already there but using different words. Content that hasn’t been discussed in the depth or at the unique angle you can do it at.
“Different has no competition.”
Unknown
Think about farming, how does a farmer go about growing a targeted crop? He has the seed but still needs to create the right environment for the seed to grow.
As an SEO you need to take that website into the linkable zone. Target some long tail keywords if you don’t rank at all. Create some interesting content that is in depth with data and shows some insight that bloggers just need, and want to link to.
What happens when an SEO video shows (on link building) to 75k views telling people to do something? That something may have worked but it’s going to stop pretty quickly. Stop following and start to inject your own personality in your work. Sure get some ideas and that’s where creativity is at it’s best hey Lady Ga Ga?
Outreach aka Link Building Campaigns
Take the time to build a rapport with content owners and website owners on social media. Down the line you may be a true friend and you will may be surprised to get a free backlink. In other words network.
Link Farms & Content Farms
I have owned sites in my long ago past that people paid me to put links on. Yes I did it! These sites then evolved into content farms. Medium and other sites allows authors to create their own articles thanks to web 2 and insert their own links. These links though nofollow can be beneficial in the PR sense. nofollow links do have value. Authors now reach out with articles tailored to fit which encapsulate backlinks to client pages. Agencies prefer these kind of grey hat SEO techniques and will generally not directly buy links. They also will have campaigns with PR pieces designed for industry leaders to share and generate a link building environment.
If you are wondering in what order to focus your SEO efforts then this Technical SEO article is for you. With just the right amount of information debunk a few myths and get your website on a solid base for further SEO growth.
Auditing is the process of taking an entity or body of work and analysing its fitness for purpose through checking and reporting. In the context of a website a technical audit looks at the technical factors associated with a website. A technical audit checks the website against a checklist which results show a landscape view for analysis. A website audit could also be about the technology stack, used to identify technical debt or future roadmap planning. We need to specify the audit in our case to relate to technical factors which influence our SERPS. These factors need to positively influence our websites ability to appear in search engines. SERPS is the industry term we use to mean Search Engine Result Page/Position essentially showing up in the pages of popular search engines like Google and Bing, Duck Duck Go etc.
Another way of putting it; Technical Analysis Of Things Which Influence Google Crawling and Indexing our Website.
It is worth noting that an SEO Audit alone will change nothing about your websites ability to rank. It does however, tell you what you need to fix!
Get an SEO Tech Audit to hand to your website team or agency to take action on.
What is an SEO Audit
An SEO Audit is a check (through a checklist) that your website is SEO friendly, and has everything it needs to be able to be shown to web researchers (people online). This is not limited to Technical SEO alone, however this article scope is just the technical stuff. Just know that there are other areas you will need to look at to truly rank well. Keyword research and promotional activity link building would be two significant checks you can make. Another would be the actual content of your site. This is one of those cases when technical SEO crosses over into general SEO. Is content technical? For me no.
Tooling
A technical seo audit tool free is pretty much only Google Search Console and Screaming Frog at this time. The latter allows you to examine a website and 500 URL’s with many limited settings. But you can find immediate technical issues with your website. We will revisit GSC or Search Console as we call it later on.
Paid solutions include Semrush, Sitebulb and Ahrefs for example. These crawl and analyse your website and provide reports on the technical aspects holding your site back. One solution which is fantastic for speed and usability is page speed web dev. This provides insight into speed issues and what is causing them and also checks metrics that Google decided are important to the web consumer public. For a list of Free SEO tools check out this continuous resource.
Technical SEO Checklist
A website technical audit checklist can contain around 80-100 individual items. However largely grouped into 4 categories you should include these factors affecting your website. You can consider and adapt it for creating your own tech audit template. The overall groupings are:
Crawlability
Indexability
Speed
User Experience
Crawlability is the ableness of your website and pages to be found and crawled by bots e.g. Googlebot and Bingbot. The web is huge and getting ever bigger daily. This presents even the likes of Google and Bing with difficulty to visit your new pages and check them out. So don’t make it hard! Sitemaps and internal linking are the keys within this section.
Indexability is the settings that tell the search engines if a page should be kept in their index. Think of the index as the list of pages on the web- you want to be listed. If you aren’t indexed by Google then you will never show up as a potential match.
Speed has long been a factor in ranking but only so far as a tiebreaker situation all other things being equal. However this is changing. You should anyway not let anyone wait more than a couple of seconds to get first meaningful content.
User Experience or UX in the industry is how user friendly your pages work. Inside this category we look at how different devices view your content and how well it works.
Summary
We can finally answer the question: why you need to do a tech audit?
A tech audit is necessary to understand how well and capable your website is to be able to rank. It is a fundamental pillar of SEO. If you fail to get this right then all other endeavours can be in vain.
About the author
Calvin
I have been building and ranking websites for 2 decades now. I know how the internet works at every ‘touch’ point. Having been a developer for much of my career gives me an ability to excel at technical seo in particular. I have performed SEO for large corporates in the UK and smaller business here and abroad. The web is truly international like me at heart. I enjoy talking to web owners and learning about their businesses. Chat to me today about helping you get your website foundationally correct for more traffic and purpose.
