SEO for 2024: The Complete Guide

I'm going to show you how to develop a complete SEO plan for 2024 and I'll walk you through each part of an effective SEO campaign from beginning to end this is normally what you'd pay an SEO consultant or agency thousands of dollars to do for you but today I'll be sharing it for free so just follow my process and you can improve your SEO performance on your own websites or your clients websites I'm Nathan gotch the founder of gotch SEO Academy and the author of The SEO entrepreneur I've LED hundreds of successful SEO campaigns over the last decade and my work is featured on semrush HRS and search engine Journal so please like this video to show me you're excited and let's get into it let's go ahead and start building the keyword database so go ahead and copy your domain and we're going to go into atrs you can use semrush you can use Moz whatever your preference is doesn't make a difference but in this case I'm just going to be using ATS so we're going to go on the site Explorer we're going to paste the domain in here and what we're going to look at is we're actually going to go to organic keywords okay and what I recommend doing is I recommend actually exporting the entire list of keywords okay don't don't filter these out just try to export all of them because we're trying to we're trying to find everything that we can every opportunity that exists okay now if you have a massive list of keywords then you may want to start to go into the filtering mechanisms and making some adjustments but in the case of about 16,000 I would go ahead and just actually export everything so click export and then I'm to do all 16,000 and then we're going to click export okay so I've imported all the data from HRS and so typically when people see this data they they just probably feel a sense of overwhelm uh but I promise you it's it's really not that difficult so you're going to notice that there's something here that isn't included in the hr's sheet and so normally with my templates that I actually use for my campaigns and inside the academy this is much more organized and a lot of this stuff gets categorized automatically but I'm just going to show you how to build this from scratch so one of the things I added here is this importance column okay so when you have a huge list of keyword we're talking about we got roughly 16,000 key wordss how do you go through and actually you know prioritize these keywords so there's a few mechanisms we're going to use I'm going to be walking you through the various mechanisms but most importantly we need to have an importance column okay doesn't matter what you call it just it we need some way to actually put these keywords into buckets and we're going to be using a a bunch of different criteria to determine what the level of importance is okay so I did critical High moderate low none so to do this yourself you just click on the cell and then right click and then just go to drop down and then you'll see this and you can just add your own little filtering mechanism okay so we'll be using this later on but for now I kind of want to walk you through everything you're seeing here because I know this is a lot to chew on so we're going to go through each thing here just so you know every opportunity that exists all right so obvious in column A I'll go ahead and zoom in here so we can see this better but in column A these are just your keywords this is every keyword that your website is ranking for in the top 100 okay so there's a lot here right if you have a website that's already got some momentum you've already got some keywords there's going to be a lot to digest here there's also a massive amount of opportunity and most people don't take advantage of their existing keywords most people just start thinking about how can I create new content when in reality there's a you're literally sitting on a gold mine when you already have keywords in the top 100 okay so this is just our general keywords then one here is a surf features all right this can be pretty overwhelming because there's just a lot to digest here and a lot of kind of nuanced stuff but for the most part gener generally if you see a lot of Sur features okay a high quantity of Sur features that's an indication that your organic CTR is going to be lower okay so you just need to accept that that that is typically going to be the case so what we'll want to identify are all of the keyword that have a lot of surf features because we know that even though the search volume may show let's say you know over a thousand search volume for HVAC marketing we know that because of the high amount of Sur features that the CTR is going to be largely affected on this so although let's say there's a thousand searches a month and let's say typically at number one you get 30% CTR well because of all of these surf features which there are many maybe that gets cut in half down to 15 okay that affects how much potential traffic you're going to get so you have to consider that it is a a very important consideration the other thing too is just looking generally at the types of C features that are showing up okay so we see that there's an image pack here very interesting because if there's an image pack we know that it's probably going to decrease our CTR because what will typically happen is if we look up something like blue houses you'll see that this is what an image pack will typically look like and what it does is it pushes the traditional results below the fold okay and this this can obviously affect our CTR in a negative way but it also indicates that we also need to try to rank in the image pack itself okay so it CH it kind of changes our strategy a little bit for that keyword another thing here is looking at specifically people also ask okay so we can actually just take this and if you want to filter through and see we just go over here and then we can go to text contains and we can people also ask okay and now we're going to be able to see all the keywords that have a people also ask surf feature and the reason why that's important is because we can go to each of these keywords and we can identify additional supporting keywords just by going in and and looking at the search result so for example let's look at uh this one here vid IQ verse two buddy okay so we'll open up incognito window and we'll take a look and just like HFS told us there's clearly a people also asked so all of these little ideas here we can use to either increase the relevance of our existing content or we can create new assets to support that main page the reason why this is so valuable is because Google's literally telling you this is what people are searching right this is like quantifiably what people are searching that's relevant to your core idea here so this core idea of vid IQ vers2 buddy clearly people are also searching these other things so that means that there's some gaps in what I'm doing that I need to fulfill right I need to be trying to rank for all of this stuff to properly build topic Authority right so you can do this with everything and you can also build a whole list of supporting keywords just by doing this um and you and the funny thing is with these types of keywords you won't really find a whole lot of search volume right if I if I took this idea and I slapped it into HRS uh there wouldn't be a whole lot of search volume there just wouldn't okay uh but that doesn't mean that people aren't searching it and that's why search volume is very deceptive right we can't just just purely rely on search fing we have to use our best judgment and Common Sense and we know that if people are you know if this is showing up in the serfs people are absolutely searching these things so we need we absolutely need to attack them if these ideas are important to what your business sells or what your business offers all right so one quick thing on that on that point actually I'll be showing you later on how to extract those keywords and we'll be building a list of them uh so we'll we'll talk about that later but for now you can you can see all kinds of opport unities here okay so I would highly recommend you know you know really looking at the Surs and understanding these different elements a lot of them are ad driven some are featured Snippets once again a featured snippet can dictate your strategy right if you see a lot of a lot of keyword that have featured Snippets right we'll go in here text contains featured snippet and if you see that that means that you're going to have to make sure that the way that page is structured is a way that we can actually try to steal that featured snippet from the competitor okay that's what we're trying to do so we'll look at what the competitor's done with that particular keyword and then we'll try to reverse engineer what they've done okay so uh so like for this one is SEO good career we'll go and take a look at this one and see uh okay well Le let's just say let's just say it wasn't me and it was someone else what I would do is I would copy the exact word count here okay copy the exact word count and then I would try to place this in a similar way that competitor has so you click through copy the word count and then just see how this has been placed all right so we look at this and it looks like it wasn't even at the beginning of the content it was actually placed kind of towards the middle of here so it actually took this section of the content and turn that into a featured snippet okay so what you would want to do is you would just want to try to reverse engineer what that competitor is done obviously in your own unique way okay so this is why understanding these surve features is so important cuz it can really change your overall strategy um another thing too is not to get too crazy with C features but I just think it's really important uh is also videos okay so when you see that there is videos in here there are videos what you want to do is we want to actually we'll take let's see here let's take a random one we'll do uh sell back links okay so when you see there's a video pack uh that's really important because what we want to do is we want to try to occupy as much serp real estate right these are search engine result Pages that's what Ser stand for and what we want to do is try to occupy as much real estate as possible so based on this right now obviously there's a high amount of advertising going on lots of businesses that want to sell backlinks so this is a very important keyword um and so what you could do is if if you sold back links and that's what you offer which I don't but that just something I've talked about uh you could obviously do some Google ads that would be the first thing because that would occupy one part of the real estate for this keyword okay next one is you'd want to try to land in this featured snippet okay you want to try to steal this featured snippet that would be number two then you know we have people also asked so we'd also want to be trying to show up in for all of these different questions right so now that's number three that's three different spots potentially you know up to five different spots already that you could occupy and then in the traditional results right so we're up to maybe six different spots that we could occupy and finally to the last one which I'm talking about which is the video pack okay so you would go on to YouTube you would Target this exact keyword on YouTube and then you could also rank in Google but not just rank in Google you can also rank in YouTube search and that's just one key word right this is we need to think more not just about like singular Focus page singular Focus key we you think more broadly about like how can we dominate this topic across Google and YouTube and all of these different platforms right and the more you can do that just the more visibility you're going to get for your brand and ultimately the more sales you're going to make as long as you're going after keywords that actually support driving conversions and driving sales okay so back to this so SEF features definitely mess around with this look for opportunities here make notes it's really important okay um and once again you really don't need to worry about this until you start to get into the kind of strategic side of targeting but for now it is it is super valuable to go and just kind of see all the opportunity that exists okay so now let's begin the process of filtering through all of these keywords so we have you know 16,000 keywords that we need to get through and so there's some quick ways that we can tackle this and once again this is going to be dependent on your business so you're going to need to of course know the business that you're working on and if it's your own business then you'll easily be able to do that but if it's someone else's business that you're trying to help you're going to need to know their offers and ultimately the core things that they sell okay and when we look at this you know most people doing SEO I'll be honest they just go like this and they sort it by search volume okay this is a massive mistake right this is just that is not the way you do keyword research search volume is one of the least important metrics that we're going to be looking at okay what matters most is looking at the keywords and assigning value based on the likelihood that it's going to actually lead to making more money okay that is what we're trying to do so whatever increases the likelihood of generating more revenue is what we should focus on the most so I'm going to do this in the context of my business which sells an SEO training program so it's going to be quite simple here right so I sell two things an SEO training program and an SEO book all right so anything that's related to that is something that I want to pay attention to right so what you can do is actually go and highlight this entire column and then you're going to go to uh we're going to go to conditional formatting all right and what you're going to see is I've I've specifically added a bunch of rules here that will highlight things that I think are important okay so right here you'll see training you'll see course learn and gotch okay and actually I'm going to add one more in here and this will be uh so we'll do text contains we'll change this to green and I'm actually going to add book in here as well okay because we do sell a book so I'd rather have this up here now these are all related to kind of the broader offer that's non branded and this is important because these are all things that are directly related to what I sell all right uh got is a navigational keyword okay so anything with gachan is a navigational keyword and usually in most cases you you'll rank number one for those pretty easily but occasionally you'll find a a branded keyword that you're not performing well for so it's definitely something you're going to want to tackle right you're going to want to tackle that keyword whether that's ranking on your own website or going and building out some sort of asset on another website to rank for it that we can get into that discussion But ultimately want to make sure that we're highlighting these keywords that that are most important to your business okay so in green then these other ones here are in yellow which are what are specific to my topic as a whole right so not necessarily what I sell but more of like the broad topic that I'm attempting to become an authority in okay so that's what matters so if you were selling creatine monohydrate then your broader topic would be building muscle right or Fitness or strength training or weightlifting like you'd be able to figure out that broader topic that you need to become an authority on which then you can offer creatine as a solution to improve those things right so in the case and for what I do uh I talk about SEO and I help people learn SEO and do SEO but if they'd like to elevate their game then we can talk about a training platform where they can take it to the next level okay just the it's kind of the The Logical process process but always start at the bottom of the funnel and then work your way up okay and then I also have YouTube here I do talk about YouTube a lot as far as YouTube SEO uh and just some random Youtube stuff it's not super important to my business because I don't sell technically uh an individual YouTube program I do have a YouTube SEO program in my main platform but it's not something I ever promote so um so this is what you need to do I would do it in basically three categories right critical like super super important highly relevant to your offer uh highly relevant to your topic and then ones that like maybe aren't super important but still you'd like to pay attention to them okay now once that's done we can actually go through and what we should do is we're only going to filter by the most important ones so green all right we're going pure green on this one now what you're going to find is we need to we need to sort all of these key wordss based on importance okay and the important in this case is going to be based on what is the likelihood for a keyword to convert simple as that so in the case of SEO training that's a very broad key word but the likelihood that it's going to convert for my business is very very high it's is is high as it could possibly be so it gets the highest score which is critical okay now we'll look at some of these we'll look at kind of the differences so you'll see all these are marked as critical are directly related to the the core thing that I sell okay notice I'm not talking talking about volume or any other metrics I'm just looking at what is relevant to my business okay once again brand branded keyword in here navigational keyword also critical all right now let's look at let's look at some that I would consider to be uh high value okay just high value now these These are if someone searches how to learn SEO they're not necessarily ready to buy a training program they're not ready to invest in a training program quite yet but they're they're in the the wheels are in motion right the wheels are in motion they're clearly they have a learner's mentality they're trying to learn how to do this so to me I need to show up for these types of queries because you know when they're ready to take their game to the next level I'm going to be the one that they're going to think about okay so once again all kind of that you know secondary broader topic that we're going after now let's look at uh we'll look at moderate all right it's kind of middle of the ground type of stuff and now you'll see the ones that got marked here in this category uh are all free okay and so typically when people are using the word free they're not ready to buy anything I think it's pretty clear that they're not trying to make big Investments uh in you know in in a program so that's why it goes to that moderate level just because it has that modifier of free okay it it it gets lower on the ladder as far as what I'm going to focus on okay then let's focus on we'll look at low all right and now these are interesting because what you're going to see is a lot of these keywords they are other brands okay so you see atfs you see Google um you see you know Cora and then you know a bunch of other ones and then there's just some that are not specific to SEO so like digital marketing like I'm not going to focus my effort on that when I've got all these other keywords that are way more relevant okay so they get an importance of low and then the final category here which is none which means just just totally ignore these cuz they're just not even worth it uh you know gotch okay yeah that's my last name but what is that going to do like ranking for that isn't going to do anything for me Russell Brunson courses yeah I could technically rank for that and then like offer my training as an alternative but the problem is it's not specific like someone searching that could be looking for any type of course right so it's too ambiguous for me to go after these are specific to a brand these are navigational queries so I I don't really want to rank for those uh and then there's just some other random stuff so all of these keywords are not relevant right so we would just keep these filtered out they're not important okay um now we're going to select all we're going to remove blanks and we're going to remove none and that way now we're just left with our best keywords uh in this instance and in fact I'll actually remove low from this as well all right so now we're left with a set of roughly 200 keywords that uh we should try to optimize for all right so once you've done that now you've actually got a place to build upon all right most people don't do keyword research like this they just you know it's kind of a just guess and hope it works um but what we're doing is we're making sure that we're starting from the bottom of the funnel we're building our whole strategy around these critical keywords are actually going to drive us Revenue okay so 200 like that's a lot of key wordss right and we we have 16,000 key wordss and in our in our database here and we've broken this down to about 200 now from here what I recommend doing is using the metrics all right so now we can sort these sort it by volume and we can sort it by KD and all that good stuff now for me anything that has more than 100 searches per month gets marked in green okay that's just because I know that if it's if if it gets more than 100 searches the likelihood that you know it's actually going to drive traffic is pretty high okay um and obviously it's a riskier proposition to go after some that don't have uh a lot of search volume right because you just don't know if people are searching it so it's more of a you're more of rolling the dice right but what I want to see really is I want to see good volume and good KD okay if I can find both of those that's the best of both worlds so this one here is actually really great because it's my personal brand so that one's good uh which is good and then looking at this we'll try to find one that is not my personal brand okay is SEO hard hard to learn all right so you know this is a good these are good keywords to go after is SEO hard to learn and how long does it take to learn SEO now technically these are not in my critical category but they're still on the high and they have good you know good metrics um and they're probably worth pursuing okay so this is just a matter of trying to prioritize right and you don't need to overthink this once again I would almost have you just ignore a lot of these metrics because regardless you need to make sure that covering these topics um and the question is is like do you create separate pages or do you try to rank these on the same page right now that is a question based on intent right and um so we can look at the current URL that's ranking relative to the keyword and see is that the appropriate URL for that keyword but before we do that one other thing you can do here is on the position change all right so you can go actually go to the conditional formatting and you'll see that I made it so that any cell that has lost uh or any cell that is less than zero will get marked in red so you can actually go and you can filter this by the color and then we can actually see Pages or keywords that we've dropped really hard on okay so we'll take a look at a couple here and let's see some of the ones that have really fallen off here so that you know completely lost you know so uh and we want to see if there's any critical ones that we've lost so in this case online SEO courses we've lost that completely so we've basically lost all these keywords so we need to probably create a dedicated page for it or we need to uh figure out why why it fell off now in the case of advanced SEO course I know I don't have any URL targeting that so I would need to create a dedicated URL to attack that okay now looking at some of these other ones though let's see the ones that have dropped the hardest okay so SEO training Philadelphia well makes perfect sense that it fell off because this is the URL that was ranking which is an SEO jobs page right totally makes perfect sense like there's no reason this page should rank so it's an indication we can actually go and look that we need to actually build out a dedicated page for this specific keyword okay so SEO trading Philadelphia I don't believe we have a page on our site for this uh so we're going to need to create a dedicated page all right so this will be one that we can certainly attack and we'll be able to rank pretty easily okay cuz it's not super competitive another thing here too is just looking at some of these other ones what I'm looking for are just intent Miss matches all right so once again here's another one a clear intent mismatch so we have a page at one point uh that was ranking for SEO training San Francisco but it's literally a paginated page that's popping up so clearly if we create a dedicated page for it we're probably going to do a lot better than the page that isn't even a real page all right um same thing here with where to learn SEO once again you know yes this is a page about learning SEO but it's it's a broader page that targets that and if we really want to rank for this we're going to need to create a dedicated page specific to where to learn SEO because we want to get really granular with that intent all right so this is the process that you need to go through and just keep finding those miss those misses as far as intent because what it does is it's telling us that we need to create more content that's more specific to these keywords right it's as simple as that um nothing nothing super complicated and this is this what you'll realize is when you go through this process you're going to start to realize that there's just so much work to do right there's so much work to do on just your you know your most important keywords and like I said there's about 200 in my case like think about all the work I have to do just to get these going let alone thinking about the other 16,000 keywords right so spend your time getting this right like spend your time getting all of this squared away and even when you look at this this is just a set of 200 keywords we're looking at this 38,000 search searches per month 38,000 all right just from this set so just imagine what can happen if you just improve the performance on these and most of the positions on these are not great right I've got a few that are ranking well but for the most part the average position for these is 50 okay so if we go from 50 to hopefully 10 then we could really start to make some serious ground on keywords that are actually going to drive real revenue and I'm going to be showing you specifically how to do this but it's more just thinking more about how we go through and we prioritize this stuff now I personally don't believe that you should try to do anything outside of this until this is squared away I I'm I'm pretty extreme about this I think you should just focus on these keywords that matter and build around them but what you can do too is you can actually use the people also ask section to get more Intel to build more Authority around these topics now I'll be showing you kind of how to develop a Content strategy here in a sec but for now what we need to do is we need to just identify what are the core keywords that we know we absolutely need to go after okay um and in some cases some pages are already good right so like best books to learn SEO best SEO books it's pretty good right we're not going to need to create a new page for that that the the intent is pretty clear there but it's more of the ones when we start to look at these lower positions we're going to start to find some stuff that we're going to need to really up our game a lot more so the next phase of this process is actually to narrow this down and start to pick core keywords that we want to go after and sometimes that's a matter of optimizing for those keywords on the same page that already exists and other times it's for creating new assets okay so the next step is to Simply go through your keyword list and start to select the keywords that you're actually going to go after so typically what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to pick keywords with different intent right so SEO training SEO course are very close so we'll have to look at Google and see if there's a huge difference but what I'm looking at is more of so we'll sort this actually by volume we can see but you'll see if we look at SEO training and how to start an SEO business and how to get SEO clients like those three things are all different all right uh SEO course for beginners once again different intent uh a local SEO course SEO specialist certification technical SEO training is SEO hard to learn you get the point so I'm trying to identify topics that are different because more than likely if it's not performing well as I've already mentioned before we probably need to create a dedicated asset right and we look at the ones that are not performing well it's usually I mean there's a lot of reasons why they're not performing well but one of the reasons typically is because there's an intent mismatch so like you could try to optimize that page all day but if the if the intent is off it doesn't matter intent matching is the most important thing like matching the keyword to the page is the most critical part of SEO if you don't get get that right nothing else matters uh the only people that can get away with that are with are like huge Authority sites right they're the only ones that can but as far as us regular people we have to actually get very very specific so this one here how long does it take to learn SEO with my learn SEO post it's just not going to do the job right I need to create dedicated post just for this so what we're going to do now is I'm actually going to show you two different things that you need to do with this point as far as your content and I'm going to give you two real life examples first one is I'm going to show you how to optimize an existing page okay and then the second one is I'm going to show you how to create a new page but to optimize an existing page we have to go through a process and that process is what I've coined the ranking diagnosis okay and this is a you know I I hate to use the word proprietary but the truth is I created this I built this ranking diagnosis checklist and it's been tested and it's currently on the second version and if you want access to it you can actually get it if you go to the SEO entrepreneur uh if you get the book there is an option to also get the ranking diagnosis so if you go in here you can get it uh right here you can add it to your order okay it's 37 bucks normally I probably sell for 100 bucks or more I think it's worth well beyond that I think it's worth you know a couple thousand but the point is that it's really really valuable because you can take any keyword any URL here and you go through this process never once I'm and I'm not exaggerating I've never had a URL or keyword that's not ranking number one that has passed every single one of these these metrics it's never happened not once and I guarantee even posts that are doing well you're going to find all kinds of opportunities so I'm actually going to walk you through this with a a specific keyword and you're going to see even with good content you're still going to find lots of opportunity okay so I've already completed the ranking diagnosis ahead of time but I'm going to walk you through a few of these key points so this is broken down in the you know the appropriate order that you need to go in and I don't recommend kind of skipping around I recommend kind of going through this whole process end to end and of course you can do this however you want these are just certain variables that I like to personally look at and I like to look at these different categories so obviously crawling and indexing is critical because if your if your page isn't crawlable it's not indexable and if it's not indexable you can't rank so all of this stuff after doesn't even matter if you can't do that so what we can do is you just need to use the detailed Chrome extension and we can quickly basically knock out a bunch of these checkpoints within a few seconds so with detailed a couple things here we want to see that the page is actually indexable so you'll see you want to see either that this is index follow or there's just nothing here at all what we don't want to see is no index okay if we see that that's a problem so that is quickly we can quickly see that and then now what we can do is we can see is the keyword in the appropriate spots so it is in the title it is in the descript meta description and there's a variation in the URL if you want to get really specific you could argue this is not the correct variation but more than likely it's not going to be a big deal breaker but I will still mark it as a fail on the ranking diagnosis okay next one is headings want to make sure that we have the the primary keyword in the H1 and then typically you would have a variation in the H2 but honestly at this point it's not really going to matter cuz I'm going to be redoing this whole thing so those are the basics of putting the keyword in the appropriate places now if we go back here there's other things we also need to look at which is going to be on the user experience side now I'm not going to go through all of these but just at a very high level we just want to make sure that we're doing things that make it a pleasant experience for the users okay so I'll show you real quickly with page speed insights you'll see I ran it through here and what we want to see is that we're doing well on both mobile and desktop okay I put an 80 so anything below an 80 uh would would get a fail all right so that's what we're trying to go for making sure it's mobile friendly making sure it's up you know uh the design is modern and updated this one is and then the other one that's really important is the engagement rate so we actually just need to go back to the audit and you can see I filtered this out just to show the one URL and there's a couple problems here just based on this alone so we know craw depth we got a failing Mark here and engagement rate is lower than what my averages on my site so for this checklist I do put 20 but for my site specifically the engagement rate is lower than what are averages so I'm definitely going to mark it as a fail okay we've already looked at the keywords making sure the keywords in the right spots and then content once again you know you can go through each of these items uh and you can use these various tools to do it but what we want to look at here is grammarly and Surfer okay which we had failing marks on so if we look at grammarly you'll see it scores about of 93 once again I'm going to be redoing this whole thing so this is you know this will end up being P pass but for now it is a fail given the current content now we'll go to Surfer and we're going to see the same situation all right on Surfer we'll see that you know I haven't really hit all of the successful NLP keyword I did hit the appropriate word count but you know we've definitely some room for improvement on the NLP side okay so I'll be showing you how to take advantage of this here in a second so on the qualitative cont analysis that just means like your subjective opinion of these metrics so you can actually take this copy it and then put it into chat gbt and paste your content there and just ask it to analyze your content based on this or you can do it manually so in this case I did it manually I know my content and uh the biggest issue here is this one so is the content up to date this is the biggest problem and when I show you this is the main thing that we have to fix this content is just old so we go and look quickly you you know sometimes it's hard to tell if a piece of content's old because people just update dates like myself but if we look at the images sometimes you can get some Intel and this is 2022 and we'll keep going down we'll look for some older images we'll look at this one this one's 2019 okay so we're talking almost four years old right so this thing's getting a little stale it's not it hasn't been updated in a long time so it it it's time for an upgrade it's time for an update okay that's what we're going to do another thing here is on the product review side this isn't a product revieww but you can still do these metrics uh this is all for Google eat uh expertise you know clearly showing that it's written by a subject matter expert so down here and then uh at the top we'll also look you'll see that it's written by a subject matter expert trustworthiness making sure that it has all kind of your basic pages about contact uh terms and then lastly on the technical side which I already identified uh we're going to need more you know internal links and we're going to need to push the just further up into the architecture now that's basically it this this page doesn't have a lot of issues but the biggest page the biggest issue it has is that it's old right so we need to fix that the other thing too is you also want to look at the search results so when we look at the search results we actually go over here and we'll search how to start an SEO business and we look at the search results we just want to make note of anything that we see here in the search results so we have a featured snippet we have a people also ask it keep going down here we have a video pack and it looks like we have some related searches but not a whole lot of ads or anything else like that so this is just important to know because it can kind of dictate what we're going to do with our SEO strategy so we want to rank in the traditional organic results but when we see a video pack we're also take advantage of this opportunity and also rank in YouTube as well so I actually have a video from 2019 that's ranking in this video pack so once again a very old video about four years old so I could certainly create a new video to occupy this which then what we're trying to do is occupy as much Sur Real Estate as possible now another thing on this uh this is not to get too advanced here but just to show you I also have another property here that I can rank okay I have an I have an Amazon listing and with this Amazon listing I can start to promote this I can start to drive links to this this page and I can also rank this page on the first page by tapping into Amazon's Authority this is a lot of people refer to this as parasite SEO but really what I'm doing here is I'm just trying to uh you know blanket the first page with as many results as possible so theoretically if I do this the right way I could have one organic result I could have one video result and I could also have the parasite SEO result or the Amazon so I could occupy you know three spots on the first page if I execute this well okay so this is really what you need to be thinking about about when you're attacking your keywords don't just think in you know singular kind of narrow ways you got to really expand out further okay so based on this we have all these failing marks that need to be tackled so what do you do with this so what you need to do is you need to take this information and put it into an actionable format okay so you're going to go over here and what I do is I just use a little SEO action plan okay and I put what I want in here and I'd actually actually add another one in here um okay so what I do is I just add the most important action that we need to tackle okay so based on this these are the things that we really need to do update the post that's number one nothing is more important than that and that will actually you know we're trying to find that lead Domino this is the lead Domino that will knock all the other failing marks down uh create more supporting content so looking at the supporting content here these are all ideas that I just extracted from the search results and extracted by looking at my existing keywords on this this URL so if we go to the incognito window we can see we have a people also ask section here so we can keep expanding this and keep getting ideas from this that are highly relevant to our core idea the key here is to make sure that we're only targeting keywords that have different intent so how to get SEO clients has different intent than how to start an SEO business uh is an is SEO business profitable once again that's a very specific question that's different than this broader concept so it could warrant having its own dedicated page and so you'll notice all of these supporting content ideas all have different intent so I extracted them from the people also ask and I also extracted them from the URL itself okay so you can see these different ideas that pop up in here like how to get SEO clients all right so what we're trying to do is just build a nice base of supporting content hopefully you know five to 10 different pages that we can build around this page to really ultimately build that topic of authority to the fullest extent okay next one is build more internal links so once we build all this supporting content we'll take care of this right away because we're going to be able to just build internal links between all these different posts because they're all in the same cluster okay now this one here is not entirely necessary but what I'll want to do is not just acquire new backlinks to our new asset but also start to acquire links to other assets within that cluster so then we can really build this strong cluster uh and ultimately build as much Authority as possible within this single cluster and then lastly execute the parasite SEO campaign with Amazon all right so basically five really big actions and when it comes to doing SEO it's the big actions that produce results like you can certainly tweak little things and add little keywords here and there and update your titles and do all that small stuff those little micro actions but the truth is what really makes a big difference are the big actions the things that are difficult to do are what produce the biggest results just you know that just anything else in life right the things that are most difficult to do typically produce the best outcomes okay so that's what we're going to be doing here we've got our action plan now from here what we're going to do is now we're going to start to build out our outline for this content we're going to build out our content brief and we're going to build this content from scratch this new piece of content I'm actually going to walk you through creating this entire piece of content and you're going to see this content go live on my site you're going to see how well it performs after it's gone live uh and I'm going to be basically just doing this on the spot okay so the first thing we want to do is you want to build the initial outline using NLP keyword so what I like to do is I like to export these NLP keywords from Surfer and then I paste them into a nice little tap here just to make it easier so what you can do is you can actually just start to build the outline based on the the keywords that are most frequently used among the competitors okay you can do that or you can take these keywords and put them into chat GPT and ask it to write an outline for you okay okay so you put them in and then say write me an outline based on these NLP keywords and it will put together a decent outline for you it's a good starting place now this is definitely not going to be uh you know all you should do but it's a great place to start so what you can see here is I actually put the outline here to start with now what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to go back to the NLP keywords and just to inject these different ideas into these different sections and of course add my own unique elements to it as well but this is just to get you a good starting point you can do it really in a couple of minutes so like I mentioned this outline is not very exciting you're not going to really win any awards with this type of content here that chat gbt is going to give you okay so you do need to bring your own unique perspective into this content if you really want it to stand out and for me you know my I don't really talk too much about the philosophy or the techniques that I use in my content very often but usually my strategy is to introduce uh really personable stories and really make my content really feel like I'm having a one-on-one conversation with someone um and I try to address things up front so whenever I'm building out a new piece of content and remember I'm I'm this is for this particular example I'm going to actually be writing this okay so I just want to show you what it's like when I do one from scratch and so what you're seeing here is the intro I always start with the intro because the intro is really going to lay out the road mapap for the entire piece of content okay and for something like this that is a very big topic like how to start an SEO business there really this is no joke right I need to make sure that the intro is very very strong like if I was doing something like you know is an SEO business profitable I could probably get right into it right and just get right into it but something like this where it's there's so many layers to this topic I need to make sure that whoever is reading this that they can trust what I'm about to show them okay so let me walk you through a few things and and this is just a draft by the way this is I'll probably retweet this and make it different but I just want to show you what this looks like and I'll show you this let's see how long this actually took me uh so I started writing this I'll show you real quickly all right so I started writing this one at about 21 and then at about 250 it was fully written so you know almost you know little less than an hour just to write the intro okay um and there was obviously some interruptions in between there but let's just say give or take 40 minutes okay to write this intro and you know most people may spend 40 minutes on their entire piece of content so there to put that in perspective when you're trying to create content that you really want to rank you want it to try to be the best that it could possibly be so the more you invest in it typically the better it will be all right so couple things here you'll notice obviously we've got the core keyword in here which is very important so we want the main keyword I've got the main keyword in here again in the first sentence okay once again we want to make sure that's in there and then from here my entire objective is just to be super personable and just make this super casual and normal right I'm trying to Stand Out by by just being myself right that's kind of my my big secret when I create content is I don't try to be anyone else I just try to be myself and I try to write in a way that um I think is easy to understand so first I'm trying to set the expectation of what's possible here and then talking specifically how it actually helped me as well uh establish some credibility up front and then explain what they're going to actually see in the content now this is this may seem simple but there's a lot of thought that goes into this and what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to create a lot of open Loops in the content so that when they read these they're naturally going to want to go and close that Loop so they're going to have to read the content to be able to close that Loop and it's really it's a really powerful thing that a lot of TV shows do right they they like for example Breaking Bad which is one of my favorite uh uh TV shows every episode just is open loop after open loop and it just keeps you hooked right and that's what we're trying to do we need people to consume our content so what I'm doing here is I'm creating different hooks to get people to actually consume this content because we do know that Google doesn't necessarily know how to gauge the quality of content but what Google can do is it can measure user experience and it can see user signals uh especially when you're on Chrome right so it's going to use all that data to its advantage to understand is this a piece of content that we should be showing to Searchers for this keyword right so user experience is key and the key to to generating positive signals is to get people to actually consume your stuff right so these are all just hooks to get people in notice they're not like crazy keyword rich or super SEO optimized but they're really designed to be hyper relevant and and as interesting as possible okay then here at the end uh before we actually dive into it I I address the elephant in the room once again like talking about why I have credibility to write about this topic and this goes back to Google's eat guidelines right we're looking at experience expertise authoritativeness trustworthiness so what I'm trying to do is establish that you know a I have expertise and B um I also can be trusted to talk about this topic because I have a lot of experience in this topic and I'm going to be linking out to the various uh citations just to prove that uh at least to the best of my ability prove that I should be someone to be trusted and this information should be trusted because I've actually done it okay so that's what we're trying to do is establish that credibility and then you know just get right back get right into the content so as I mentioned the size of your intro is always going to be variable based on the topic if it's a very deep topic you should have a deep intro if it's a very minor topic a micro topic you don't need a massive intro so in this case you're going to notice that we are going to do this and I'll show you a couple other examples with keywords that aren't as intense uh but this is this is the type of thought that you should have when you're building an intro for a very deep asset okay so as I started to go through this content I I definitely saw that there's a lot of opportunity to upgrade a lot of section but also at the same time I was looking at the existing content and honestly there's a lot of things in this content that are good that I can still kind of Leverage so I think when I'm really looking at this we just really need to do a you know upgrade a few sections update them and make them more current based on you know maybe my new philosophies or anything that I've learned since writing this content so what you'll see here is when I when I write content I'm B I'm basically doing a brain dump okay so what you're seeing here this is more of kind of like you know this is what it will look like usually with my the way that I personally write but this is more what it looks like when I'm just like pure brain dump and what I'll do is I'll just brain dump everything in and then I'll start to clean it up okay so I don't view this as like Final in any way this is more of just like I'm trying to get everything out and then usually what I'll do is I'll end up just cutting like I'll cut a ton usually I'll cut you know 30 to 40% of this out uh once I go through the editing process so you know as they say in writing like the magic is in the edit it's not in the first draft it's not what you create you know the first thought that year comes to your mind right so as you can tell this is really ugly and that's by Design because what I'm doing is I'm just trying to get a lot of things out so that I can you know start to upgrade these various sections okay so just to show you real quickly when I do this like for example I'm already starting to you know integrate the new content in here you'll see I've already added the new the new intro section and all these little details in here and it's not quite done but this is what it will start to look like here now the next section I want to replace is this one here all right it's a little thin doesn't get super deep into this so what I did is I took the block of text that I've already done here and I throw it in grammarly okay and you'll see when I throw it into grammarly it's a huge mess cuz I don't I'm not caring about spelling or grammar when I write at this point I'm just trying to get my thoughts out then I can clean all that stuff up um so what I do is I'll do a clean a real quick clean up with grammarly get everything squared away and once that's all done now it's out of 99 okay I've cleaned up all the obvious issues but now at this point I have to literally go line by line sentence by sentence and start to figure out like you know what to keep what to eliminate uh what to improve right so this is what the iterative process looks like when you're really creating content yourself and it's no joke like it is really serious and I'm talking about when you're creating trying to create the best content that you can this is what like writers will do right um and it's it's really the Magic in this process is in the edit so I would recommend using grammarly to do this okay next thing is is since we are going to be updating this post okay you're going to see that this is the last time I well I have honestly I probably haven't updated this post in years I don't even remember when I published this it was many many years ago um and I do like update the date uh every year but as far as like the content itself it's been stale for a really long time so we're going to freshen it up but whenever you do something like this the best thing that you should do to make sure that your work has been effective is you can manually track the performance so you can go into ATS or a rank tracker and just see how it's doing um but one thing you can do too is you can use seot testing.com which is I which I use for all my testing so what I'll do is I'll actually go in here I'm going to grab this URL and we're going to do a single test okay and we'll go ahead and put we can just put like you know how to start an SEO business okay we'll put that in there and then we're going to go to we're going to make sure we do just page and we want it to equal so we're going to do specifically this page and then we can choose a testing period so I like to do really long testing periods I you don't technically need to do this long but I just like to get as much data as possible so I can make really an informed decision sometimes I'll run the test and I'll know the answer within maybe a week or two weeks but I still want to at least run it for as long as possible so I have maximum amount of data um so what I'm doing here is and you can write a little description like you know updating uh Slash upgrading post okay and what this will do is when you run this test it's going to it's going to it's going to measure the traffic at its current at this current moment okay so you're going to see the traffic from Google search console you'll see your impressions your clicks your positions all from Google search console and it will measure that directly then once you publish this like once this test goes live then from that point forward it's going to look at those same metrics and compare the new per period against the old period okay and you're trying you're obviously trying to beat uh you know the previous metrics okay so what I recommend doing is running this test as soon as you go live with your new asset you're going to run this test and then you can really measure the performance I would also personally this is just my preference I will also track the individual keyword rankings as well so but this is more of me to look kind of like at a broader level of how this upgrade or uh update to a post is done I can tell you from experience nine times out of 10 updating and upgrading produces positive outcomes okay I I just see it and it's and when you do it the way that I'm describing which is like really not just tweaking a couple words but like actually you know revising whole sections uh it it really makes a big difference okay so the first thing you should do right away because this is going to take some time is you should start a screaming frog crawl so if you don't know screaming frog is just a desktop application that'll actually crawl your website and then we're going to use all of this data that it identifies to ultimately make better SEO decisions so you could just crawl your site just as is but I don't recommend that what I recommend doing is integrating these different apis okay so you're probably going to have to go to these various platforms and get the apis and connect your stuff but I'll just show you real quickly the ones that really matter is Google analytics 4 so if you click on the little gear icon you can see here you want to connect your ga4 analytics here and then go to date range and make sure you do the last 12 months that this way we have as much data as possible and then you can also go to the metrics and choose specifically what you want there's a few that are really important so the one that I really care about here is sessions engage sessions engagement rate and average sess session duration okay these are really important because it's going to help us identify pages that just aren't doing well from a user experience perspective which can affect SEO okay so go through make sure you have all these setting these are the P the settings that I personally use and you can you can choose obviously based on what you're interested in uh I don't actually do Revenue cuz I don't have uh e-commerce on my site uh and then just these really important ux metrics okay so put those in there then after you've done that connect Google search console okay another very important tool where we can use it's all free by the way this is all free data that we can use go to search analytics and once again do the past 12 months and then I would also recommend doing page speed insights okay you're going to need an API key so you can actually just click on this and then you can see how to get your API key it's not super easy the first time doing this but once you've got it you can use it pretty much forever and then from there go to and you're going to have to connect one of these link tools so Majestic HRS or mods in this case I'm just going to use HRS and same thing we're going to connect the API and then what you can do is a couple things number one I would make sure you have backlinks and referring domain selected and then go down and make sure you select key words and traffic okay so what we're doing here is we're just making sure that we have a lot of data that we can work with and that way we can make really educated decisions about the pages that are on our site okay because we're not just going to be thinking about how do we improve rankings on one individual keyword we're going to be thinking more holistically about the site as a whole and how do we make our website better from an SEO perspective okay so we don't want to guess we want to make sure that we have data to make these decisions so this is this is the way that we can make really educated decisions so connect all these apis and then couple other things is we want to also go into the main spider settings so you can keep all of this stuff selected but I personally just think it really drags the crawl down so what I do is I actually get rid of images CSS JavaScript and this uh swf I just don't really want to do any of that and I just get rid of anything else that I don't think is going to be really necessary based on my particular website so uh HF laying is more for international so I I don't need that and then all these other things once again uh just not super relevant okay internal hyperlinks is fine external links and canonical I'll keep all that uh crawl all subdomains we definitely want that in there uh and then we'll go to extraction and once again you know you can pick what you want here but I typically will just try to uncheck as many things that I don't think are super important or that I won't probably use so hash value page size probably not forms uh text to code ratio you know probably not uh readability I I'll keep that one in there and then the rest I I'll keep meta keywords I don't use met keyword so I can get rid of that uh response time last modified yeah actually we can keep this in here that's not bad uh because this will help us see like when the last time that that page was updated so that way if it's out of date we can actually go and update that that post okay uh and everything else in here I would probably keep okay all right limits all good there rendering good Advanced uh no we don't need to change anything there preferences once again we're all good on this uh there's some other you know kind of more advanced stuff in here that you can get into content area like if you want to get super Advanced you don't need to though um enable near duplicates this is one that I think is super helpful this will help you find pages that are very very close which means you probably need to make one of those pages uh have more original content okay spelling and grammar I do recommend adding these so this is actually really useful because you're going to be able to at scale find all kinds of grammar and spelling issues across you know every page on your site and just a general good thing to go and fix okay um and then everything else you probably don't need to mess around with so those are pretty much all the settings that you need to have and once again do what you want to do with it but the most important thing to do is connecting the apis okay nothing is more important than that connect the apis because that's going to give us all the data that we need and so for this example I'm actually just going to be using my own website because of course I can't show client data and more importantly I didn't want to pick a random website because I wouldn't have access to all of their data so this is just a better real life example so you can see ultimately how to develop an an SEO plan the right way using all the data at your disposal so once you've got all your apis connected put your website in here and then just start that crawl okay so while the screaming frog crawl is going you also want to set up a sight liner crawl so sideliner is a really really powerful tool cuz it's going to help you identify any type of duplicate content or any content related issues that exist and it's just it's one extra check just to make sure that our site is as high quality as possible Right you could just use screaming frog and you you could totally be fine with that but I would still recommend using sideliner just to make sure you've covered all your bases so you'll probably need to buy some credits but it's definitely worth it because you're going to want to crawl your whole site using this tool and you can actually just put your site into here and then just start the scan okay so now once the crawl is done all you need to do is actually export all of these results now there's a couple kind of nuance things here when you export you can obviously export everything that's here but personally what I like to do I typically would just export only the HTML if you're really trying to get super in- depth you can obviously look at these other elements but for me I really just care about the HTML so I will export that out that way this report is not so incredibly massive okay and that will export almost everything that you'll need but you can also go up here to reports and there's some other specific reports that you can export but one I really like to do is redirect chains okay this is really important because redirect chains are a huge technical SEO opportunity so go ahead and Export those as well okay so I've imported the entire crawl from screaming frog into a tab here and I've also added the redirect chains into a separate tab so we can tackle those separately but let's go ahead and walk through this crawl so there's a lot of stuff here to digest all right there's just a lot you can do do here and obviously I could spend many many hours talking about this but I I'll just kind of go over some of the most important parts so couple couple key things whenever I'm looking at this this crawl I'm not just going to try to look at everything I'm going to kind of break it down so first thing I want to do is I want to look at non- indexable content so the first thing you can look at and not to get overly technical about this but you could definitely look at 301 redirects and just make sure that those are actually good 301 redirects sometimes what will happen is you know you may change a URL and then and then push a 301 redirect and maybe that wasn't the best decision right sometimes it's not the best decision and actually when you change URL maybe it actually hurts SEO performance more than it helps it so you can look into that and see like you know look at the previous performance of that old URL and then look at the new performance of the of the new URL and see is there a huge difference between them and you can always revert back to the old URL if it's performing better okay so don't be afraid to do that because what happens is sometimes when you change a URL if it has existing trust existing backlinks any positive signals when you when you shift over there's no there's no guarantee that those positive signals are going to transfer over to that new URL and Google is likely going to treat that new URL like a new URL right it's not going to have all that those good signals so I would definitely be careful doing that now we can look at a couple examples here so we'll just take like this one here uh in the case of HRS right so this is an old URL that I used to have okay so what I did is I took this original URL make sure you do exact URL inside of sem rush and then you want to see how well was this performing at its peak okay before the change so uh we could say you know you could obviously look at the peak and see where it was so it had 470 keywords okay then what we're going to do is we're going to look and you could obviously just document that here so you could just add a little column and you could just add like 470 just to just to keep a note of that then what we're going to do is we're going to go to the new URL okay so we'll look at the new one and we'll see how well the new one's doing so let's go and take a look at this one so we're actually looking at roughly 611 total keywords so this URL is actually outperforming the old URL so in this case you probably just want to keep it as is so if you want you could actually just mark this as green knowing that this one is good to go we don't need to touch it and you could theoretically go through every single one of these and make sure that these three one redirects for the right decision okay so it's not a bad idea because I've actually reverted URLs back to their previous state and performance has been regained okay so that that can happen um so I would just I would go through and maybe analyze those just to be on the safe side um and then the other thing too is if you have 301 redirects that just don't have any utility right so one thing we can do is we can actually close all these up and we'll look specifically at 301 ones that no longer have any positive signals at all okay so in links these are unique in links this is the uh the amount of internal links that a page has okay so in this case the internal links that a redirect has which indicates that there is a redirect chain that we need to resolve okay now going back here keep going through all this and then we're going to look just at some of this data all right so we'll do sessions and we'll get rid of some of these other ones uh impression we'll do clicks and Impressions we'll hide that we'll also look at backlinks so what I'm trying to do here is I want to see do these 301 redirects like do they have any utility uh that we need to continue to work with all right so what I would do is I would actually change start to change some of these to zero or you can actually sort them if you want to but basically what I'm looking for is looking for pages that don't have any traffic don't have clicks don't have Impressions don't have links okay um so we'll we'll go ahead and take a look here let's just look at those that don't have any links all right so these four pages don't have any Links at all but what they do have is they have traffic okay and because they have traffic you don't want to remove this 301 because what's going to happen is it's just going to go to 404 page and that means that that those visitors are going to just hit a 404 right and we don't want that so 404 just to be clear this is what a 404 looks like all right so they would land to something like this and then they would need to basically navigate their way back to you know your website which is not good so ultimately you just need to make sure these 301s redirect to a relevant page that way the user uh you know is is treated appropriately so yeah in this case there's not a whole lot I can do and if the if this situation was different like if I had zeros across the board and that redirect has been sitting for at least a year then I would probably consider removing the 301 redirect and the reason is because 301s actually do put a load on your server so they actually make your website slower at scale so I would actually consider removing them if they don't have any metrics uh or any reason to keep them alive okay so now I've refiltered and I have everything back on non- indexable content so we can actually filter out the 301s now that we know and then anything that's a 200 status code means that the page is fine uh you know just make sure that whatever you have here that's no indexed is actually should be no indexed all right so funny thing is I actually have a new series on my website uh called SEO bytes and some of these would be applicable for for that situation so what I'll do is I'll actually probably Mark these as red and the reason is because I know that I could actually use this content in my new series all right and originally I know indexed them just because I didn't know how they fit into the site but now I'll probably use this this this content and actually add it to a specific indexable page all right so these are the things you need to be thinking about uh as far as privacy policy you know it doesn't really add a whole lot of value so you can keep a no index it doesn't really matter Google's not going to penalize you or anything like that doesn't make a difference whether it's indexed or not I just chose to make it no index um but I don't think that's necessary in most cases the other thing too here is this one here is a lead generation page so most lead generation pages I don't I usually keep them out of the index just because I I don't think they add a lot of value so I just keep them no index um and just for the reason I don't they don't have a lot of content okay so that's it that's what we're looking at as far as non- indexable content obviously there's a 404 here as well uh so if you have a 404 you do want to go ahead and look at some of the metrics and make sure that that 404 doesn't have any positive metrics okay so looking at this uh it looks like it does have maybe One internal link here so we'll want to go in and find where that is then we'll go over here and we'll see if it has any data uh it actually does over the last year have traffic so that's not good uh it has engagement it's got a couple conversions uh it's got clicks it's got Impressions over the last year and it actually has backlinks right it has some backlinks as well so overall this is probably not the best decision for this w404 we should either you know rebuild it and republish it possibly or we could of course 301 redirect it to another asset okay so but because it has this data we definitely don't this isn't something that we're going to want to ignore like we're going to have to do something about this okay so that's just at a very high level as far as looking at non- indexable content this is extremely variable right this is just my site every site is different every site's dealing with its own unique challenges but in the case of my site these are just a couple of things that I was able to identify just looking only purely at non- indexable content and like I mentioned if I was going to get really crazy about this I'd also be examining my 301s which I probably will right I'll go on a page by Page basis and look at those 301s okay so now it's time to talk about indexable content so I filter out the non- indexable you're probably shocked that I spent that much time on non- indexable content but believe it or not a lot of people ignore that stuff and there's a lot of opportunity so what we're going to do now is we're going to start to dig into this stuff that is actually indexed in Google and we're going to want to you know try to improve these pages to the best of our ability using real data okay um so a couple of things here we you know you you can look at high level looking at the titles and meta descriptions and all that that's all great um but for me what I like to do is I will go over here to the actual data and start to quickly identify opportunities all right so with word count you can just sort this from a to to Z and what we can do is we could you could argue anything that's below 400 words is probably what would be considered be considered thin content okay so one thing you can do is you can actually just go ahead and Mark all of these you know with red if you want to do it like that or what you can do if you want to do it faster is you actually go over here in the format go to conditional formatting and then we could do uh anything less than or equal to 400 and what it will do is we just mark it as is red and then within seconds it will mark them all okay so lot faster than just kind of manually doing it and you can do that across every single column and that way we can get a nice kind of color coding going based on uh you know based on these opportunities now you could even argue that anything below a thousand words might be something you want to look into as well um but just remember word count is not a ranking Factor just words alone is not a ranking Factor but it is typically an indication of pages that are very very thin right and we can look at some of these we'll go and hide them so we can see and you'll see that some of these are like specifically designed to have low word counts so I'm not concerned so like a newsletter page we'll look at this um you know I actually mentioned before that with no Index this but in the case of this one I'm keeping index because there's a possibility that people could link to it and whatever else so I'm keeping it indexed you know another one here is paginated Pages you can you know it's hard to say whether they're going to be detrimental or not I think in most cases Google knows how to handle these so don't think it's a big concern um and then this one here this is more of a branded Series so I absolutely want this to be index because I want first of all people to link to this right but I also want to flow that link Equity to all these different bytes that I'm creating okay I want to flow that to the site as a whole um so it's important and then these other ones these are are uh alumni pages okay once again uh this is very important for my business this is not necessarily an an SEO initiative although there are some SEO elements but it's it's pretty thin right it's a pretty thin thing but at least there's a testimonial Gary has earned his certifications but what this does is actually on our alumni page and if you want to you know kind of investigate what I'm doing here uh we have this alumni page which uh is you know gets people to want to link to this page who are members um so they can showcase their skills but then at the bottom I actually have a section where I show them how to um actually embed their badges on their website okay and that will link back to their uh their alumni page or this alumni directory okay just a little link building tactic in there we'll talk more about link building later uh but go through these and make sure that like there's a good reason that they have a low word count okay and if there's not then you can put that in the pipeline to improve the performance okay but what we're doing is we're just identifying things at a high level right now now one thing you want to look at here is in this crawl depth okay craw depth is how many clicks it takes for Google to get to those pages okay really really important so and the reason is because it just helps with with crawling and it helps with indexation and the better your pages get crawled the better they get index the easier they're going to rank okay so we'll do Z to A and honestly anything that's above three click should get marked so I would just add conditional formatting again we'll do uh greater than we'll do greater than three and we're going to Mark those as red okay so now we should have all of them that are greater than three marked as red okay perfect so all of these Pages need to be pushed further up into the architecture and I'll talk about how we can do that once we get more into the execution side of this but for now we're just identifying opportunities next one is unique in links these are just a fancy word for internal links okay so everyone's got their own unique criteria for this but for me if if there are less than five internal links hitting a page I think it needs more internal link coverage so once again I'll add another rule here and if it's less than five then I will mark it as red okay and that's just once again indicating to me that a page either we need to go and find internal link opportunities or it's an indication that we just don't have enough content to support whatever page uh is not getting enough internal link love okay so some of these Pages once again are alumni pages so it's to be expected but there might be some pages in here that need some some more internal link gloves so we'll be talking more about that okay a lot of this other stuff uh isn't super relevant so you can probably skip past most of it um spelling errors and grammar errors once again if there's a lot of them then you know I I would probably consider marking them pretty much every single page on my site has spelling errors and apparently every page pretty much has grammar errors too so this is all stuff we'd want to go through and clean up right but more than likely when we go through and do our page upgrades and page updates all this stuff will get tackled okay uh all right we'll keep going here and now we're at the fun part right we can start using data to our advantage and um you I've already probably showed you a lot and you're probably this is like you know super intense but this is going to be the part that's a lot of fun right cuz we're going to use data to our advantage we're going to use data to make informed decisions okay so now you're looking at a sea of red and so trust me this will all make sense I promise I know this looks pretty scary but really the red here is just so we can see patterns and ultimately be able to make informed decisions based on the URL so couple of things I I highly recommend as I I mentioned previously using the formatting so conditional formatting you just can highlight a whole row like this and then you can ultimately filter through this information much easier so a couple of things is on a couple of these metrics like engagement rate so ga4 engagement rate and this is essentially uh it's a mixture of different metrics But ultimately you want this to be as high as possible so a lower engagement rate indicates that people are probably not really liking your page very much or the page is not really designed to drive great engagement okay and I'll show you some examples but what I want you to do this is really important is when you when you want to categorize this or you want to prioritize certain things always look at your engagement rate for the average on your site right so like the engagement rate on my site is going to be different than another site so what you can do is you can actually just go ahead and highlight the row and then if you look over here in the right hand corner you can see your average okay so 60% now this is important because when we do the formatting we're going to go to conditional formatting you'll see that I'm only looking at pages that have less than what my average is okay so if it's less than 60% I want to see what's going on because that that's below the average engagement rate which means May indicate you know some some sort of issue going on okay and do the same thing for all of these you can get you you know your average session duration we know that my average is about 2 minutes and 28 seconds so anything lower than that I'm going to Mark okay and you can do that for pretty much all of these all right so I would recommend doing this and this is the reason I'm not telling you like specific numbers is because it should be variable depending on your unique website okay um now there are some obvious ones like on in the case of links we certainly want to Mark anything that does not have a a lot of backl links so in this case I just did five so any any page that has less than five referring domains I'll typically Mark as red okay because a lot of these things are working together and what you're going to find when you start to highlight this data is you're going to see that you know a a page that is not performing well typically has many problems it's never just one thing where it it's performing poorly it's usually like you know 10 20 possibly even 30 problems which I'll be talking about how to you know find those very very specific problems but at a high level we can use this data to ultimately inform us okay so let's look at a few that are really not doing well so I'm going to filter this actually by Impressions and these are Impressions specifically from Google search console okay and honestly if a page doesn't have a lot of Impressions it's probably not going to have a lot of good metrics across the board okay just just in general now keep in mind these are Impressions that are based on SEO driven cont content right so if the content is not SEO driven it's not designed to rank organically in Google then you shouldn't expect a lot of Impressions and you need to obviously adjust based on that but we're looking at this in the context of SEO now let's see what page has you know these are all my lowest impression uh pages so we'll go down this looks like row 35 so everything row 35 and up okay so let's take a look at a few of these so number one here once again this is one of those alumni Pages all right so I'm not concerned about this page right this is not something I'm concerned about because this page is really designed uh for the members it's designed more bottom on the funnel type of content so I'm not concerned about this this is more of a Content marketing piece which I don't mind that it doesn't have a huge engagement and doesn't have a lot of organic traffic I would not expect that okay uh these here very obvious these are all page inated Pages you you know to be expected they're not going to have good metrics so they should honestly I'll probably just no index these all together um but once again it's not going to make a huge difference either way right Google knows that these Pages exist they're not anything out of the ordinary um another one here is my new series okay so any content that's new is typically not going to have great metrics out of the gate right and especially the way that I've designed this content it's very it's bite-sized content hence the name so it's going to have probably a lower s session duration um and it's not going to have you you can't really measure this type of content against one of my longer form assets right it just it just would not make sense so in fact we can look at this this is a short form asset and we'll look at the metrics okay so you know word count is low only 371 words but clearly that's intentional right that's intentional so I'm not concerned about that right it doesn't bother me because it's all contextual right you can't just look you can't just say low word count is bad right that doesn't make sense because it's always going to be contextual to the to that we site situation so in the context of my site a low word count in this context for this post makes a lot of sense okay uh crawl depth is good uh unique in links once again it's a new post so it doesn't have a lot of internal link coverage that will change now spelling errors and grammar errors that's something that needs to be resolved uh it's it's starting to get traffic but once again it's new and it's not really targeting anything super specific so I don't expect it to get a ton of traffic um and then obviously engagement rate okay these are are once again these are going to be somewhat different just because of the nature of this content and then there's some other things like if I wanted to improve this page more I could certainly improve the loading speed here to elevate it and then of course looking at referring domains right so like I said make sure you're looking at this on the basis of your website or your campaign specific to that campaign um it's always going to be super relative uh in that regard all right now going through these once again nothing concerning all of these are my my uh smaller posts that are designed to be small and then uh these are these are alumni pages okay so nothing concerning now let's take a look at this one this one's targeting Kirkwood SEO company just to give you another example which is slightly different now this one is designed to rank um for a local keyword okay so trying to rank for you know SEO company uh in Kirkwood Missouri so we can go ahead and look at that and we'll just search this and we'll see if it's popping up okay so I'm in the local pack and then if the organic ically it is ranking here okay so it could be ranking better it's not doing great um so you know that's something we could certainly improve right looking at this though this keyword SEO company Kirkwood Missouri or SEO Kirkwood Missouri is a very very low volume keyword there's not going to be a ton of search volume so you know I don't expect it to do exceptionally well but there's a few things that I'm looking at that I are problematic so number one crawl depth okay it's very deep into the architecture so that's something we could easily fix just push that further up in the architecture if it's a really important page okay um obviously spelling errors and then sessions are low which once again this is really going to be dependent on the keyword right if you have a a low volume keyword you should not expect high traffic it just common sense right uh engagement rate is actually good on this and then the sessions duration is actually low on this which means probably the page needs to be improved which looking at it it's not a great page like I it definitely needs to be improved this one was just basically thrown up just to rank real quickly um and then CTR once again is relative because the CTR is going to be bad because it's not ranking as well as it should if it was in the top three and had bad CTR then I'd be concerned right so the point is is you have to look at these things from a from a lens that it is completely dependent on the type of page dependent on the type of keyword and very ious other variables so it's never just straightforward that you know you have bad metrics therefore the page is bad right you have to there's a lot of nuance that goes into this um so maybe let's instead of looking at ones that are clearly not great let's go ahead and take a look at one uh that might have let's say higher volume okay so we'll look at one with higher Impressions okay so one with a lot of Impressions you'll see typically we'll have less problems right just naturally you you're going to see has less problems so uh we'll look at this one specifically and see what this is okay so HRS let's not do a branded one let's do like let's do this on page SEO checklist one so this one here crawl depth is only four so immediately we know we can improve that just by improving crawl depth it's got a lot of spelling grammar issues once again easy cleanup right this isn't always a like Monumental changes that we need to make sometimes it's just cleaning some stuff up all right uh engagement rate is only a 4 9% which is actually below my average so I'd want to see why that you know what's going on there uh session duration is good and impressions are good and CTR is low but it's not ranking as well as it should uh and then of course it has a lot of backlinks right so it's doing things well it's got a lot of good stuff going for it so when I see this that it's got good metrics it's got good backlinks uh or at least at least got the quantity of backlinks we need to look at the quality of the backlinks as well and it's got pretty good good engagement maybe just needs to be some adjustments then it's a matter of actually looking at this post uh from a qualitative perspective and seeing okay why is this not performing as well as I think it should now it could just be the fact that this is a very competitive keyword and I just simply do not have enough links to rank okay it could be as simple as that it could also be that the content's just outdated right and I know that it is I created this content I know uh the current state of it so if I inspect this image here we can see what the true date of this is 2018 okay so this content is old like it's old it needs to be updated it needs to be refreshed um and we're talking you know this is almost 5 years old so I shouldn't expect to rank on the first page of Google for my primary keyword with a page that's 5 years old right there just not things don't work like that anymore so although I have updated the date the content itself is still pretty much all original from its from its previous PR previous state okay from 2018 so it's about 5 years old so what I would do in this situation is I would put this on the workflow to do a complete upgrade right like a complete rebuild from scratch and when I do a rebuild from scratch um the URL is not going to change it's just the the structure of the page we're going to inject just tons of freshness onto this page and that's not necessarily going to get you to number one it's not necessarily going to get you to your ID ranking spot but I almost guarantee that when you do a complete upgrade a complete refresh that that content will certainly outperform and I have proof of this as well right I'll show you real quickly we'll go to a page here which is SEO benchmarks okay and this is a very specific exact URL here let's actually get the full URL so this is one that was really old like the original was from 2015 okay and I let it just kind of get stale okay and you can see here originally uh 2017 it was doing well it got peaked up here in 2018 and then basically it just kind of died off all right and what you'll notice here is you see the difference here is this thing was basically dead like this post was just completely dead and then I refreshed it and when I say refresh I literally rebuilt this thing from scratch I did not I did not keep any original element from the previous post okay completely fresh using new data using new screenshots new content just everything is new okay and then I republished it and shortly thereafter performance is there okay and obviously it's fluctuating that's normal but for the most part when we look across the board this this post has performed much better just from an upgrade right and I think it's acquired a few links as well so um but for the most part we can clearly see see the difference here is not the links it's the upgrade right we've upgraded that content and of course Google doesn't know necessarily quality of content per se from a subjective perspective but it certainly can see that there's been a a change made to that page uh and that creates that Taps into Google's freshness algorithms okay um and then from there when you promote it and it's a fresh page people are probably engaging with it better right so now we've got more positive user metrics on that post right so there's just a whole variety of things maybe not necessarily always direct but a lot of positive things that can occur just by upgrading so I'll be I'm actually going to be doing this kind of live in this video so I'll actually show you how to upgrade uh a post from scratch I'll be upgrading one also be creating a post as well this is this video is no joke like we're getting into it I'm showing you real stuff here how you can actually use okay so the point is is when I go through this I start to just look for opportunities Okay so I would Mark just something like upgrade what you want to do is you need to go through and start to analyze everything Based on data okay simple as that right we're just using the data to our advantage and we're making decisions and just honestly you don't need to overthink this either like don't overthink this don't think because you have all this data you got to become like a data scientist all right you don't need to do that but what you can do is keep it really simple and in in most cases upgrading and updating your content is going to be benefit icial okay like very rarely does it hurt you to make your content fresher like it just I I haven't seen a situation where it doesn't work well okay so that's kind of one element of this is on the content side we'll be getting into this more but the point is use this data to your advantage and then one other thing you can do if you just want to get a really quick overview of all of this information that you have from this crawl you can actually just go here download the whole document as a CSV okay then open up chat gbt and you can actually upload that CSV and there's just say Analyze This SEO data and give me a plan okay and what it will do is it will it will actually analyze that data and give you a decent plan right these are this is not going to be like you know hugely successful just doing this but at least it can give you some ideas and at least some some areas to start so if you're just looking for a very quick analysis this can certainly do it for you uh but it's not going to replace the Deep level analysis kind of what I've showed you where we're getting deep into the Weeds on this stuff and now the final step since you've made it this far is to apply for the number one SEO training program gotch SEO Academy what you've seen today is just a taste of what I teach inside my program in fact every single part of my process includes proven templates stepbystep instructions and video demonstrations to show you how to do every single thing but I won't put you super hard because the numbers don't lie we have over 55 star Google reviews hundreds of testimonials and a 9.7 MPS score you're in good hands but all you need to do today is submit your free application by clicking the link below and it takes just a couple of minutes and if we think we can help you you'll get booked for an enrollment call there's no tricky upsells or aggressive sales tactics that's just not our style so just click the link below to apply now and thank you so much for watching

Channel: Nathan Gotch

Views: 25,581

Keywords: seo 2024, search engine optimization, seo

Id: 8YDUP-RH_4g

Length: 90min 10sec (5410 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 05 2023