Having spoken to hundreds of business owners & marketers during this time, one common theme is raised time and time again, when discussing specific KPIs & business objectives: “I want to rank on Page 1 of Google.”
While this may be a common and mutual goal for many business owners alike, when discussing expected SEO KPIs, we have formulated a winning SEO philosophy, containing six main foundational pillars of focus, that can help ensure your SEO strategy is on point to climb the search engine results page (SERPs).
Technical SEO
To win at SEO, you firstly need a well optimized website. Creating a strong technical SEO foundation for your website will not only satisfy your users, enabling them to find what they are looking for with greater ease, but also allow search engines to crawl your site easier, which will help to prioritize your site over others.
Focus items may include taking a closer look at the overall architecture & HTML of your website. Ask yourself the following questions and seek to answer them through some below free resource tools I have included:
Architecture
- Crawl – Can search engines easily crawl pages on your website?
- Devices – Does your site perform well on all device types including mobile?
- Speed/Performance – Does your website load quickly?
- URLs – Are URLs properly structured, so search engines can easily read?
- HTTPS – Does your website use HTTPS to provide security to visitors?
HTML
- Page Titles – Do your title tags contain the right keywords you are looking to rank against & are they formatted correctly (i.e. Primary Keyword | Secondary Keyword | Brand Name)?
- Descriptions – Does each webpage have a unique meta description to entice users to click through to your site directly from the SERPs?
- Headings – Are you properly using headings to structure the content on each of your pages for greater readability?
Useful Tools: Google’s PageSpeed Insights, seoQuake, Detailed SEO Extension
Content
Content is king when it comes to SEO, period. You need content that is greater and better optimized than the top ranking results listed within the SERPs. It may be great that you have a technically sound website, however, if the content does not accurately match a user’s intent when browsing the web for similar products/services your business may offer, you face a significant gap.
Google’s algorithms are constantly evolving in an effort to provide users with the best possible results that match their search intent at any given time. Google’s mission since day 1 has been to; “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Therefore, understanding the type of inquiries users are searching for, and the top results displayed against these search inquiries at any given time, will go a long way in aiding your business to map out a supporting SEO content strategy.
Julia McCoy from searchengingejournal.com says it best; “If you want organic visibility, rankings, and traffic, you have to commit yourself to the grind of consistently creating optimized content.” Start off by conducting some preliminary market research to determine possible content opportunities based on the inquiries users are searching for in relation to your business.
Useful Tools: Google Keyword Planner, Aherfs Keyword Generator & SEMRush’s Keyword Magic Tool, SEMRush Topic Research Content Tool
Backlinks
Backlinks or link building, has been a crucial part of SEO since inception. While my colleague Alex Belanger, has written a previous article specific to The Evolution of Link Building, backlinks in general build business credibility and support the expertise that your business claims to have acquired. Think of it this way, a backlink is similar to one website providing a recommendation to another. Therefore if you have highly reputable or authoritative websites referencing and pointing users back to your site, you are now not only claiming to have business expertise within a particular topic/field, but rather you have other websites reinforcing this claimed expertise of your business as well. Useful Tools:Majestic, Whitespark, HARO
