Before making any optimizations, it’s important to realize what we want to achieve with them. Any website has a goal, if the user of the site fulfills this goal, we say it was converted. Conversion rate measures how well a website copes with its duties. It can be tracked in Google Analytics. By defining a conversion goal we can measure conversion rate of the traffic sources. It’s beneficial to identify sources with a high conversion rate and expand them. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is responsible for “Organic Search” source.
Google analytics allows us to roughly estimate the conversion rate of a search phrase for a given site. If you segment pages by a conversion rate, you will get pages with most conversion. Conversion rate is a number of page views divided by the number of conversions. Google analytics hides organic search key phrases for this page. But we can get clues from Google Search Console, which give us all key phrases for a given page. Knowing number of visitors for each phrase and knowing conversion count we can get conversion rate for each phrase.
We want to expand traffic for high conversion phrases, either by creating similar phrases or by making our website appear higher for a given phrase in search results.
If we know high conversion phrases we should expand them (see 1. Keyword research). If not, we have to decide what phrases directly describe our website activity. If the end goal of the website is to sell services. Then the phrases should target this intention. For example, for a book store it would be “buy books” and not “find books”, because “find books” is ambiguous and covers “find books for reading”, “find place to sell books” as well as “find place to buy books”. Let’s say our ideal phrases will be:
We have to determine keyword frequency as well keyword complexity. Where frequency — number of searches per month, complexity — number and rank of the competing websites for this phrase.
There are special tools that can do these for us. These tools usually come as part of toolkit on SEO dedicated services (like ahrefs or moz). Those are great services, but they are not free and have a subscription system (although they do have a trial period to give a try). There are also free alternatives.
Google Trends can give approximate keyword popularity for a given keywords. It’s approximate, because it gives us the percentage of searches and not the direct number. But it also gives GEO distribution and similar searches. They are useful because this data helps us evaluate keywords from sub-step 1), as well as modify them. We don’t want keywords without searches, or keywords that only popular in a non targeted area.
Google Keyword Planner can give search frequency range and ads competition level. Another tool that can be used is Yandex Wordstat. It gives an exact number of searches, but since Yandex is rarely used for English language searches, it is less relevant. Combining above data with trends information, we receive a rather accurate estimation of frequency and a hint on complexity.
We can give more accurate estimate of complexity by analyzing web requests directly in the browser. For example if we google “Find classes for kids online” in incognito mode (we have to use incognito to eliminate google recommendation system results). We can see that the 1st place (after google ads) is occupied by “outschool.com”. We can see how reputable this site is by checking it with Alexa (the site, not the device :). Alexa gives a rating of 31446. If we check our site, it gives a rating of 506136. So this is about 16 times higher than our rating. On the other hand if we check websites by request “Book classes for kids”, 1st place is occupied by “hisawyer.com” with a rating of 148180, which is only 3 times higher. We can conclude that the former phrase is more complex than the latter. We can do the same for the first n positions of results to be more specific.
This solution is not ideal because a) Alexa rating differs from Google rating and b) search results depend on GEO location of the client that issued search. But can give a us an good estimate.
When we get keywords we want to rank for from step 1. We can start internal optimization. Internal optimization consists of optimizing website for a particular phrase. Most of the time we want to optimize for website for multiple phrases so we have to optimize separate web pages on the site for each phrase.
In the past Google looked at tags like keywords or description and used them as ranking factors. Nowadays it gets necessary information from the page content, so these tags won’t affect ranking (but can be useful nonetheless). Title tag is the header of the web page in search results. Description is the excerpt of the page in search result. Although google may decide to use its own excerpt generated from page content, it’s still advisable to keep this tag up to date.
From July 1, 2019 Google uses mobile-first indexing for ranking. That means it will crawl a web page as a mobile device and later use this snapshot for ranking. That is why it’s advisable to have Viewport tag defined for all pages. All other tags are less important for SEO.
Ideally all the content of the page should be correlated with search phrase. Or in other terms, the content of the page should fully answer the question, user asks in the search query. In practice what that means is all of the keywords should be in the title of the page, ideally the exact phrase. It should be in the description of the page. It should be found in the body of the page from 3 to 7 times, depending on the length of the text. There are different tools that can estimate how SEO friendly the text is for a phrase (like content analysis).
Search phrases should be found in the url, ideally in the domain name. The less symbols between domain name and key phrase the better. It’s not advisable to have dates in the url, because information could be considered as stale. Words should be separated with hyphens (%20, _ could not be handled well by all search engines).
If we take for example the phrase “Find classes for kids online” there should be a text describing how exactly users can find classes online, what the classes are, where they will take place, how much it will cost and so on. The text should be organic (and not just key phrases inserted in), ideally have paragraphs or emphasis. If we want to optimize the web page for this phrase and we just have a list of classes on the page, Google ranking algorithm might not understand how the search query correlates with the page content. I.e. there might not be keyword “classes” in class description, there might not be “for kids”, there might not be “online” on the page content at all. Or if they are, they might not be in the same order as query, which is better, but not optimal.
All content besides text should be correlated with search phrase. The ones that are worth mentioning are: images alt attribute and microformats. The biggest advantage of alt attribute is that it is searchable through Google Image Search. Website creators rarely update this attribute, so it’s a good opportunity to gain first positions on Image Search. Microformat is a subset of html language that Google understands and uses to customize the view of a search result.
It’s useful to know how a website looks in Google index and how crawler parses it. This can be checked in Google Search Console. Before optimizing web page it also makes sense to check if the page already searchable in Google results for a particular query. If it is, it might be more efficient to update current page, than creating new one.
When we have a web page with optimized content, that we checked in Google Console, we can optimize linking for this page.
When Google started, they introduced a PageRank algorithm that was ranking pages based on authority of that page. The simplified version of which is a sum of ratings of inbound links divided by the number of outbound links. This means that to improve the authority of the page we need to either increase the number of inbound links, their authority or decrease the number of outbound links.
So if we want the web page to rank well for a particular phrase we want to maximize the number of authoritative inbound links and minimize the number of outbound links. We also want these links to have appropriate text. For example with page optimized for “Find classes for kids online” phrase we can do this by:
We often come to situations where we want to optimize a web page with a list of items, like search page (or shop, or blog). We can use a Proxy technique for this. We create a page optimized for a particular phrase, increase the number of inbound authoritative links, decrease number of outbound links, and leave a single link in the text of the page that links to the desired page. This way we transfer all the authority of the Proxy page to the desired page. This technique is used when we can’t optimize a desired page directly (for example if we don’t want to clutter it with unnecessary SEO information).
Google highly ranks websites with new content. The more frequent the new content published and the more it is correlated with search terms, the higher the rank of the site.
If a website does not have new organic content or lacks text content, it’s often practical to have a blog under the same domain that has frequent articles. Articles should have links to the desired pages increasing their authority (see above).
Google switched to mobile-first ranking. It means that all SEO information should be accessible from mobile devices. It also means that mobile view should be easily readable and has minimum obtrusive elements (some elements may be good for desktop experience but harmful for mobile). Mobile view errors can be traced in Google Console.
All of the contents should be served through secured protocol. It’s possible to see mixed content errors in Google Console (where some of the data on the page is served through HTTP).
It’s not certain how this criteria affects search ranking today. But it’s advisable to have a website that loads fast on 3g connection. Loading time can be measured in Google Console or by Google Insights.
Sitemap allows Google to quickly crawl and update links. New sitemaps can be uploaded directly through Google console. After initial crawl google will automatically re-fetch sitemaps.
External optimization consists of acquiring links to desired pages (page optimized in step 2) from external resources. Link should have a proper keyword, be from an authoritative source (see rules from 3) Link optimization) and be inside a relevant content. Link should not have the nofollow attribute. nofollow attribute tells the search system to omit this link from ranking.
There are multiple ways we can achieve this. The simplest way to find a medium (such as a thematic blog for example) that will allow us to write an article about our website and leave do follow link to the desired page. Content in such articles should be relevant to the page you are optimizing for (see 2) Content optimization).
We can also ask content creators to write articles for us and leave the link on their website. It would be a good option if the website is relevant and has the authority. Another option is to ask SEO service to write articles and leave the links on their network. This option is less favorable, because we have to be sure that the article is relevant and that resource has authority, which is harder to do with SEO service.
Restrain from buying links from marketplaces and exchanges. Such links usually do not carry relevant context. They also do not follow principles of organic link distribution and may negatively impact the ranking. E.g. exchange could create/remove multiple links at once, a pattern common for synthetic links, but not for organic.
The good practice is to know backlinks that point to your site and their anchors. Backlink anlysis allows us to do it. You should also be aware about backlinks that point to competing sites.
When we define our key phrase, made inner optimization, made external optimization, we need to track efficiency.
It can be done as simple as checking the position of the optimized page in the search results for a given search phrase. We write down the initial position of the page before optimization, and check its position every 2 weeks after optimization. Google usually makes 1 big ranking update every month and 1 minor update every 2 weeks. On practice it makes much more updates, the frequency depends on many factors, but these updates can be unstable (meaning after 2 days website goes down to 5 positions, next day it goes up to 10 and after another 2 days it reverts back to the original position), so it’s sufficient to make checks every 2 weeks.
Such a solution can quickly become tedious with the increasing amount of key phrases. It also may not give an exact result (see 2) Analyze the keywords). In this case we can use an SEO tool (like ahrefs) that will take a list of phrases and will do it for us.