When approaching an SEO project, it’s very important to equip ourselves with a methodology that helps us take the right steps to achieve our online ranking. This approach to the project, and the overall SEO process, will depend largely on the type of website we’re working on, as well as its status; an e-commerce site with hundreds of items isn’t the same as a corporate or local SEO website. Nor is a project already created and running the same as one started from scratch.
Steps for an SEO Project
Initial Project Study
As we mentioned before, the first step in determining the steps to take is to understand the type of project and its current status. This will determine how we approach the project for the first time. As a key differentiating factor, we must mention the SEO Audit. This step isn’t necessary for projects in their initial launch, but it will be essential when we need to improve the positioning of an existing website. In fact, the audit will not only give us an overview of the website’s status and some actions to be taken, but it will also serve as a guide and reference throughout virtually all stages of SEO. Through this study, we can gain insight into information such as:
El tráfico estimado de la web
Its loading speed
The link profile
The number of indexed pages
How the web is crawled
The keywords for which it ranks
The state of your content
And much more…
Given its importance and the number of aspects to consider, conducting an SEO Audit will be addressed in a dedicated article on this blog.
Our Target Audience: the Buyer Persona
The type of people we consider our content to be relevant to is very important when defining, organizing, and writing it. Different population groups, due to their demographic characteristics or their activity, behave differently when trying to find what they’re looking for online.
As a clear example, we can cite the difference between a consumer’s search for a specific item and an end-user’s. For an end-user, which could be you or me, the search for a specific light bulb might be “low-consumption warm light bulb.” While for an electrician, the same light bulb might be searched for with the term “B22 base light bulb 40W 230V Reference 94-060.”
Likewise, the way we express ourselves based on age or other characteristics that define us may vary.
All these considerations will ultimately define the target type of person we want to address, and therefore, the way we should do so. This will also affect the way we organize our website.
Sector and Competition Analysis
Once we know who we want to target, it’s very important to know what we’re working on when positioning a project. This requires having information about the sector and the main websites that occupy the positions we want to be among.
To conduct this analysis, it’s very useful to take some of the most generic keywords for our business and check the results they show in the SERPs. This will give us an idea of several things:
What types of companies or projects occupy the top positions.
How difficult it is for us to compete with them.
This is key when defining our strategy. Whether our sector is highly mature and competitive for both generic and more specific keywords is not the same as seeing poorly developed websites or those with which we could compete.
Determining whether a website is highly mature for a given sector depends on many factors. In general terms, we can mention the following:
Number of keywords for which it ranks
Number and type of inbound links
Quantity and quality of content
By studying this, we can get an idea of the strength of a given web project. Furthermore, studying these factors can support us in future SEO tasks. For example, studying competitor links will help us know which of these competitor links we can replicate, since it is very important to be where our competitors are.
Keyword Research to Know Who We Are and What We Want
Once we’ve defined who we want to target and what environment we operate in, it’s time to start specifying how we want search engines, and therefore, users, to find us.
From this point on, Keyword Research deserves special mention. This study, which must be carried out carefully and skillfully, will present us with the universe of terms and concepts that we must somehow include in our content so that they create a common thread between the user and our website.
The work should not begin without completing this stage. Although this keyword research may be modified and expanded during the course of the project, it is very important to have a well-selected and organized database of terms from which to begin working.
Properly implemented keyword research should serve as a basis not only for content-related SEO but should also provide guidelines for the type of web architecture the website will have. It’s very common, especially in online stores, that during keyword research we discover terms with enough searches and interest to make the elements they represent part of the web architecture, for example, in the form of a category: 150 memory foam mattresses.
To further develop this important aspect of SEO, I’ll be writing a dedicated article soon. In the meantime, here’s a guide from my colleague Marius Marketing, “How to Do a Quick and Effective Keyword Analysis.”
Defining Web Architecture
Once we’ve conducted the industry and competitor analysis, as well as keyword research, it’s time to organize the information. As we mentioned previously, the way we organize our content is critical. The importance of good web architecture impacts two key aspects:
The user’s usability of the site
SEO positioning
Regarding website usability, it’s key that it’s intuitive and that users feel comfortable navigating it.
But also, and related to the above, it’s very important that the way we organize the information on the website takes into account the information that’s most relevant to the user. That is, the information that has the most searches..
Once we’ve conducted our keyword research and obtained a list of terms, their search volume, and perhaps their level of competition, we’re ready to decide how much importance we give to those terms in our information architecture.
There will be a part of the architecture that directly derives from the nature of our project. Let’s take an e-commerce store, for example: it will have a home page, the typical corporate pages, the online store organized by product categories, and perhaps a blog. So far, so normal. But perhaps, while conducting keyword research, we’ve realized that there are user search terms that can be included as a featured category: “cheap summer shoes,” for example.
Likewise, we’ll also need to carefully organize the entire network of categories and subcategories in the store. A category that’s just a few clicks away from the home page doesn’t receive the same authority as one that’s many clicks away (or a lot of depth).
On the other hand, Google highly values thematic units whose elements (products, blog articles) have a related meaning, and the way these elements are related. These are what are called “clusters.” In this sense, it will be very important to consider the different possibilities for organizing and interrelating this content, since the way we do so will greatly influence both user usability and how Google views us.
Internal Linking
Here we begin to delve into perhaps more advanced aspects of our SEO positioning. Internal linking will help us, first and foremost, develop the information architecture we’ve defined, allowing us to connect different areas of the page with each other.
But perhaps more importantly, internal linking allows us to work on “PageRank Sculpting.” If we understand PageRank as the authority of a website or a set of URLs, PageRank Sculpting is how we distribute this authority across the website through links. This is very powerful, as it allows us to assign authority to those URLs we’re most interested in ranking, whether because they’re the most relevant, the most profitable, etc.
An internal linking component will be provided by menus and typical linking elements on the website (although this can also be optimized through link obfuscation). However, we must carefully consider another aspect of internal linking to, as mentioned, enhance priority areas and distribute the authority of the pages where appropriate.
I will discuss this aspect, which is so essential for a website’s SEO, in more detail later.
Content Strategy
“Content is King.” A frequently repeated phrase in the world of web and SEO, it highlights the importance of original, quality content when it comes to ranking our page in search engines. Good content serves a dual purpose: on the one hand, it meets the demands of search engines; on the other, by satisfying user needs, it will be more likely to be linked and shared.
This content, in addition to being original and high-quality, must reflect what we have obtained in our keyword research. In fact, this keyword research will determine not only the content we write about, but also the structure of those posts. This is true given the need to place the most relevant keywords in prominent places within the publication, such as titles and subtitles.
Content strategy is often closely associated with blogs, but a strategy can also be implemented on corporate and service pages, product categories, or even product sheets.
The content of a page is so important (under normal conditions) for a website’s ranking that we may even consider blocking Google access, or not indexing, or placing canonical tags on pages with little or duplicate content.
Technical Optimization and WPO
This aspect of SEO is becoming increasingly important. This is no coincidence; the importance of its optimization depends on the importance given to it by the main search engines, especially Google. On the other hand, there is the need for the user experience to be as satisfactory as possible.
These technical and WPO (Web Page Optimization) configurations encompass numerous actions that must be performed. It involves, let’s say, fine-tuning the car in the workshop so that all the driving and racing strategies we implement later are built on solid foundations.
This fine-tuning involves addressing issues such as:
Correct server configuration
Clean code and an optimized database
Website with secure SSL certificates
Limiting redirects
Controlling bots that can access the website
Correct configuration of the robots.txt file
Absence of broken links and 404s
Responsive design
Website loading speed
Validating Rich Snippets
All of these points, and some that are missing, are the necessary adjustments to get the machinery ready to start positioning for keywords. There’s no point in investing resources in content, links, social media work, etc., if we haven’t done this work. It’s very likely that our efforts won’t get the best response if we don’t address this.
Strategies for Getting Links: LinkBuilding
The Internet is made up of interconnected pages: links. And in light of this, major search engines, like Google, give links paramount importance. You can rank without links, but under such exceptional conditions that, as a general rule, they must be taken into account.
A link can be considered a vote. This is because the value of a vote depends on the importance of the website that casts it. A link pointing to your website from a government website or an important newspaper is not the same as a link pointing to your website from a small blog that hasn’t been published for a long time.
These links can be obtained naturally or through link building strategies (“artificial” links).
To obtain natural links, the most important thing is to publish interesting content that is likely to be shared and linked to, due to the value they provide. These types of links are usually very valuable, both qualitatively and quantitatively.
While we have this type of content, and given the importance of links, it’s important to begin designing and implementing link building strategies. These strategies will be based on defining the type of links to be placed, the rate at which those links are published, and even the relationship between them.
There are several places where we can place links:
Buying links in newspapers
Posting on related pages
Buying links on blogs
Guest posting on other blogs
Commenting on forums
Business directories
Etc…
All possible link building actions should be purposeful in order to achieve maximum efficiency in the investment of resources.
In a more detailed article, we will discuss how to develop these strategies and how to combine different types of links to obtain the greatest return.
I hope this article has helped you gain a perspective on the components of a general SEO procedure. Each part of this procedure represents a broad area of study and application.
