A crash course into SEO and what moves the needle with scalable processes

Editor's Notes

1. Disclaimer, a lot of the things I show are using ahrefs because it’s what I have access to. You can probably find similar features and adjust processes I show to use whatever tools you subscribe to.
2. Quick wins might be redirects to reclaim links to your site or adding internal links, long term projects things like content creation
3. this is available right in excel. You just need topic > subtopic > volume
4. What is driving value to your competitors
5. Successful content in a whole niche
6. Pivot table view
7. Links to pages that may not get much traffic
8. The purpose of all that research is to figure out what kind of content to create
9. These are what we considered good pages, not spam
10. A couple million keywords
11. How do you be one of those few %?
12. I went through an example with wines which I know very little about and tried to group them in ways that made sense to me
13. Maybe fruit should have been a taste also
14. Burgundy, but it was a region
15. It’s a bit beyond the traditional informational, navigational, transactional
16. As a local company I may think I couldn’t compete for wine, but there are maps and even a couple local intent SERPsIf you don’t think you can compete for one intent, go after another Or go after a SERP feature like videos Google shows a mix of results to satisfy most users because they want different things. If you look at popular searches you’ll usually find those intents as well
17. Clearscope, marketmuse, frase, surfer, ultimatekeywordhunter.com
18. Pages are going to rank for things they talk about
19. I had varietals classified as origin. Again I’m not an expert, I didn’t know the right terms but I had found this in the data. Now after seeing it on a site it makes sense.
20. Data or tools to guide you. Lots of content tools like clearscope, marketmuse, frase, surfer, etc.
21. The world isn’t perfect and we don’t have unlimited resources for all of these. I’m not saying someone can’t fill more than one of these but it’s situational.Again this is where content tools may help to fill in the gaps somewhat
22. Has some issues with facts
23. You have to make some decisions. Usually if you have 2 results in normal searches it’s because they serve different intents.Do you combine these into one stronger page, try to get the other one to rank?
24. Look at what you used to rank for that you don’t rank well for now.Update / refresh this content if it has value Add internal linksFocus on it in general and see why you may not be ranking now
25. Congratulations! You still have opportunities
26. This is basically a pagerank calculation that takes into account both internal and external linksPages with more traffic tend to have more and better linksCorrelation does not equal causation
27. Whatever you see
28. Sort by target URL or Target Keyword, or Source page if you want to see all opportunities for a page you’re working on
29. They form clusters or page groups where they’re related
30. You should verify the status code. You can also check others that are already redirected and see if there’s a better match. Check acquisitions too or old websites to see if your redirects could point to better locations
31. this is where I live and breathe
32. Making sure pages are indexed that should be is priority #1. Without being crawled and indexed you can’t rank.
33. Just like you’d crawl a live site, except there may be some access restrictions
34. CI/CD pipelines, automated tests
35. Content king
36. It’s on the edge, so it changes content before it’s served to users and bots.Middleware Search PilotA/B testing systems like Optimizely Performance Edge. You can sell any “fixes” as an A/B test.