SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is a digital marketing strategy that focuses on your website's presence in search results on search engines like Google. The most important part a website should have to rank #1 on google is proper SEO management. SEO marketing is in very trend now. When you understand how SEO works, you can use different tactics to increase your visibility (or how high you rank) in search results.
Hey are you an SEO beginner? Well perfect, because in this article I'm going to share with you exactly how to rank on the first page of google step by step. And I'm going to prove that how 99.9% of people do this one SEO action completely backward. Okay, so let's dive right in towards the article.
So, the first question we need to tackle is what is SEO? SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization which simply is the process of improving rankings in Google's organic search engine. And there's one reason why SEO is by far the best inbound marketing channel and that's intent when someone searches Semrush free trial the intent is clear they're towards the bottom of the sales funnel. And they're getting closer to becoming a customer. More on that in a second but intent is why SEO is the most popular inbound marketing channel?? and if we see the data, it proves this to be true. For example the keyword SEO gets double the amount of searches compared to other marketing channels like facebook ads or even social media marketing. But that's not all according to semrush rank three out of the top five most popular websites in the world are search driven youtube is the most popular video search engine. Amazon is the most popular e-commerce search engine. And as you know google is by far the most popular traditional search engine. In fact according to statistics google owns 87 of the search market share as of 2021. So now that you know the opportunity that exists with SEO how do you actually do it?
well let's dive into it so the proven SEO process, I'm going to tell you that can be broken down into four pillars.
so, let's talk in brief about these four pillars one by one:
1. Keywords
The pillar one is keywords, so keywords are the foundation of any successful SEO campaign. Because they are what searchers use to find solutions and answers to their problems and the goal is for your website to show up for keywords that your ideal customers are searching. For so with that said the first part of the keyword research process is to find keyword opportunities. Now how you go about doing this will depend on, if your website has existing organic search traffic or not. So you can google search semrush enter your domain into the search bar and go to organic research and look under keywords if you have existing keywords then that's where you want to start. Because it indicates that you're already doing something right in this case what you'll want to do is identify what I call low hanging fruits.
So while in semrush you'll also have access to all of your low hanging fruit keywords and these are the keywords that you need to prioritize. Because with some simple optimization and possibly some backlinks you can push those rankings up and you'll see a big spike in organic search traffic. In fact according to a study conducted by Backlink generally the number one spot gets approximately 31% of the total clicks for a keyword. While the number five spot only gets 9% of those clicks. That means if you go from position number five to number one it will produce huge traffic gains and that's why you should focus all of your initial effort on these low-hanging fruits now you might be wondering how do you improve the rankings for these keywords??
Well I'll be tackling that in a second now what do you do if you have no organic keywords? Because you haven't done SEO or you have a brand new website. Well here's what you need to do go to semrush and go to the SEO section and click on keyword gap enter your domain and then enter a few of your top organic search competitors domains. If you aren't sure who your top competitors are in organic search. Then go to keyword research and keyword overview and then enter a keyword related to your industry. So, you can see which domains have the most search traffic. While you can also go to the competitive research section enter your domain first and then copy and paste one to four competitors from the previous section into the keyword gap tool. Let me tell you the truth anyone can find keywords, but the real magic happens when you know how to filter through these keywords and select which ones are actually worth targeting. When trying to select keywords number one what is the intent you should always prioritize keywords with transactional intent that are towards the bottom of the funnel and the best way to understand this is to know the five main categories of intent. Which are informational investigative comparison transactional and navigational and every strong SEO campaign will target keywords at each stage of the funnel.
So let's say you're building a keyword strategy for semrush so at the top of the funnel would want to target keywords with informational intent like learn SEO or how to build backlinks these keywords are broad. And will drive the most traffic. The next phase of the search journey is to target keywords with investigative intent, like SEO tools or best SEO tools. Now notice that this is much more relevant to what semrush offers so now at this point the searcher is likely brand aware. Which means they know about the big players in the SEO tool market like semrush and that means they'll likely begin searching keywords with comparison intent like semrush. And as you can tell the searcher is getting very close to making a decision and they're weighing their options. And now we've arrived at keywords with transactional intent which in this case would be semrush free trial and the conversion rate for a keyword like this will be sky high. And the final type of intent is navigational. Which is just semrush or semrush login and you won't need to spend too much time on these. Because the brand should automatically rank so with that said you should always start at the bottom of the sales funnel and work your way up.
now the next question you need to ask about your keywords is number two can you actually compete for this keyword?? now the good news is that you can use semrush's keyword difficulty tool to quickly filter through all of your keyword opportunities. So just enter your target domain or a competitor's domain into the search bar and go to organic research. Then click on positions and go to the kd filter start with very easy and work your way up these are the keywords you want to attack first. Because they won't require as many resources to rank. So, just to review prioritize keywords with high transactional intent and low competition.
So these is all about keywords research. Hope you got it. So now let's move towards second pillar of our SEO marketing topic which is technical.
2. Technical
So you may have found some awesome keywords. But your site won't rank without optimizing for technical performance. Once think of technical as the foundation of a house it alone likely won't help you achieve first page rankings. But it's a requirement to get there. However let's cover some quick wins right now, so first go into semrush and look under on page and tech SEO and click on site audit click. Add new project and enter your domain and the project name now before you change the site audit settings if you google, in this example I'll use semrush.com they have roughly 55,000 pages indexed so I'll select a hundred thousand from the limit of checked pages drop down. You can keep all of the other settings the same and click start site audit now. Once the audit is complete you might be a little overwhelmed because semrush provides an enormous amount of data and different opportunities. Now in a perfect world you could pursue fixing everything and long term you probably should however you need to prioritize because some opportunities will have a far bigger impact on performance than others and at a high level you need to optimize three core categories to achieve optimal technical SEO performance.
first you need to make sure your website is crawlable and indexable and there are many factors that impact crawlability and indexability. But some of the biggest include your website architecture more on this in a second your page experience your robots.txt file and tags like no index which could prevent google from crawling pages on your website now. While in the semrush audit section, click on issues look for the category and then select crawlability semrush will then show you all the possible issues that could negatively affect crawlability. Then repeat this same exact process except change the category to indexability once again you can see exactly what could hurt your indexation tackle these items asap. Because if google can't crawl your pages then they won't be indexed. and if they're not indexed it's impossible to rank. Second, you need to optimize for user experience or UX for short one of the most important UX factors is page loading speed.
In fact google recently stated that core web vitals is a ranking factor. So you need to do everything in your power to improve loading speed and page experience so while in the overview tab on the audit you'll see the new core web vital score from semrush you'll see the exact pages you need to improve and the cool part about optimizing your site for core web vitals is that most changes will have positive effects on a site-wide basis. meaning you won't need to go page by page optimizing for core web vitals for most of your pages.
3. Content
Now the third technical pillar you need to optimize for is your site architecture or in other words internal linking. Now there are a few core tenets of internal linking first your pages shouldn't be more than three clicks deep into the architecture. Otherwise, it could potentially hurt crawlability and indexability. So go to the crawled pages tab in the semrush audit, click on more filters, select crawl depth and then select four plus clicks and now you'll know what pages you need to push further up into the architecture. the second part of optimizing your site architecture is to identify pages with poor internal link coverage. And the fastest way to find these pages is to use semrush's internal link rank in the audit. So first while still in the crawled pages, select internal link rank this is a proprietary score mechanism created by semrush which gauges how much authority and link equity a particular page has. So, if a page has many internal links from pages with many backlinks the ILR score will be high and a low score is an indication of poor internal link coverage. On the second drop down you can select less than 10 and then you can see some pages that need more internal link love so that is just a preview of how to optimize for technical SEO.
So you've identified solid keywords and your technical performance in first two pillars. And now you need to optimize your content. So I follow a simple process when trying to optimize a page and here it is,
Number one is there keyword cannibalization. So keyword cannibalization is when you have two or more pages targeting the same exact keyword phrase and it's deterimental to your SEO performance. Because it forces google to decide which page is best for that keyword and you don't want google making those decisions it's our job to direct google.
In fact John Mueller the search advocate at google said this about keyword cannibalization we just rank the content as we get it. And if you have a bunch of pages with roughly the same content it's going to compete with each other kind of like a bunch of kids wanting to be first in line and ultimately someone else slips in ahead of them. Personally I prefer fewer stronger pages over lots of weaker ones. Don't water your site's value down. So the quickest way to identify keyword cannibalization is to use semrush's position tracking tool. Go to keyword research and click on position tracking then click on new position tracking to start a new project enter your target keywords and once the scan is complete open up the project and then click on the cannibalization tab. This will show you instances of keyword cannibalization for the keywords you've specifically entered.
The next content check is simple, number two does the page need to be upgraded your SEO driven pages should be different and better than what exists plain and simple.
Number three is the page optimized well at the most basic level your primary keyword should be in your url title h1 tag. First sentence and last sentence. But to take things up another notch I recommend using semrush's on-page SEO checker go to the on-page and tech SEO section click on the on-page SEO checker and start a new project click on import keywords. And then select your preferred option, in this example I'll use manually enter your target url and the exact keyword phrase you want to rank for and then click collect ideas. Semrush will then show you how to optimize the target page from a strategy content semantic technical UX and even link building perspective so make sure you benchmark your performance today and then execute on these recommendations.
The next point to tackle is number four does the page have enough internal link coverage. so go back to the audit and see if your target page is getting enough internal link coverage.
The final checkpoint is number five does the page need more topical authority. If you find that the page doesn't have much internal link coverage then it likely doesn't have much topical authority. Either in other words you need to create more keyword driven content to support that primary asset.
4. Backlinks
And now moving on to the last and fourth pillar of the SEO marketing process which are backlinks. So I've been doing SEO consistently since 2020 and one thing has stayed the same backlinks are still the number one ranking factor and this isn't just based on my experience alone. According to a ranking factor study conducted by semrush they found that the more backlinks a domain has the higher its position on the top. Now the key is to remember that not all backlinks are created equal. In fact some backlinks can wreck your rankings and get you penalized. Now, before you attempt to acquire new backlinks you first need to audit your existing backlink profile. Open up semrush go to the link building section and click on backlink audit tool create a project and then run the audit semrush. It will then give you an overall toxicity score and if you have a high percentage of toxic domains there are a couple ways to handle it.
First work to acquire higher quality backlinks to offset the low quality backlinks and then second if the backlinks are really nasty then you can attempt to get them removed through outreach and if outreach fails then disavowing with google should be the final option now keep in mind that disavowing backlinks can have a negative impact on your SEO performance because you may decrease overall website authority so that's why you need to be actively working to acquire new backlinks. For now you should aim to acquire backlinks on websites that have the following three characteristics,
Now there are many more qualifying factors but for now those three will work so the cool part is that you can run any backlink opportunity through semrush. And quickly see at a glance if it has organic search traffic. If it has authority and if the backlink profile is high quality.
Conclusion
All right so you made it all the way to the end and we covered a ton of ground so at this point you know the four pillars of proper SEO marketing. If you just followed above steps properly, I think there's an high chance your website will rank higher and hope you'll get success.
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Vrushal,
(Freelance Writer and Web Developer)
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