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How do you do SEO step by step? Can I do SEO on my own?

Rich Keller • Dec 12, 2020

How do you do SEO step by step?

Build Your SEO Strategy Step by Step

Step 1: Find the "Right" keywords

Before you do anything you need to find the right keywords to optimize your website for, so when your new customers are searching for your service or products in Google, you'll show up in the results. Keywords can be chosen based on your branding, products, and services, or from what your competition is currently ranking high with. You need to find out what the popular searches currently are given your industry or niche. There is no sense at all in optimizing your website for words or phrases no one ever types into Google. Search volume is the main target, however, you also need to choose keywords you can win with. You'll need to sort and score the keywords you want to use by popularity, against the most achievable keywords. What's an achievable keyword? Well, it's one that you think you might have a chance of getting ranked for. The SEO landscape is riddled with websites that get zero traffic from Google because they tried to optimize for a keyword they have zero chance of ranking for.

Step 2: Become a Content Machine

People go online to find information and shop. Make sure they find your information with some fresh strategically written content. Google simply wants to index the content people click on the most. Showing up in a Google search result is no fluke. Chances are the website was optimized specifically for that phrase and keyword. Writing good content is extremely important when it comes to SEO and it can be very tricky to find new content topics. The best way to generate new ideas for your website or blog is to identify the content your ideal customers are consuming on Google, Twitter, and YouTube. Then create the same type of content.

Step 3: Analyse the Competition

Review everything your competition is doing to find new ideas for your SEO strategy. The place to start is when they beat you on a given google search. Determine why they are beating you for that particular phrase and beat them at their own game. You'll need to find out exactly what keywords they are ranking for (re: Step 1), how much traffic they typically receive, and if you can find out, where their traffic comes from, what backlinks they have, and what blog content they currently rank higher than you for. The only way to beat the competition is to know where they are currently beating you. Is it content, backlinks, page speed, or all of the above?

Step 4: Local SEO Local SEO Local SEO

The old brick-and-mortar saying "Location, Location, Location" was the classic anecdote to running a successful business. Now the saying is Local SEO. In a nutshell, to be found locally you need to make sure your "Google My Business" listing is up to date and continually updated. Getting found in local searches, usually on a phone, for your product and service are a critical factor in getting traffic. The most important optimization to perform is making sure your address and contact information is up to date. Then you can add products and services, images, posts, and collect reviews that will be shown with your google search result. Great for converting the tire-kickers into customers.

Step 5: Pedal to The Metal

Nothing destroys the customer experience more than a slow website. WordPress sites are inherently bad for this with up to 3-6 seconds of lag or blank screen before any text or images start to appear. A fast responsive website makes the user experience so much more comfortable and seamless keeping the user on your site longer. Guess who caters their entire company around user experience? You guessed it, Google. If your site is slow and makes people bounce, Google will detect that and will instead show the website of your competition that has a better user experience. Don't go through all the work of optimizing your website, and writing great new content only to see everyone leaving within seconds due to a slow website.

Step 6: Track Everything!!!

Follow your site onto page one of Google! Track your position for every keyword you selected in Step 1. You can easily track performance with many tools over time to identify exactly where you appear in the Google results. You should track on both an international and local basis. What people see in your home city, could be different than the next city.

There's an easier way to do that!!!

You could achieve all these steps on your own, and spend time trying out all kinds of software and tips and tricks from across the search land, but I've already done all of this work for you, and have consolidated it all into one simple SEO tool.

You can achieve SEO perfection by using my SEO Service. Punch in your domain, and the keywords you want to go after. If you don't know what the best keywords are, my tool will suggest the best ones for you. Then you get an easy step-by-step action list of things to do to conquer the top google search results position.

Start now for free by running a free SEO Audit on your site. Your score will be ready in minutes, and you will see how easy it is.

Free SEO Audit

Tackle Your SERP

SEO Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide for 2020 - Guess how many blog posts people publish each day. Any ideas? Well, WordPress users alone publish over 2 million posts every day. That comes out to 24 blog posts every second. That means that users published around 216 blog posts while you were reading these five sentences. And that's only counting ... (neilpatel.com)
WordPress SEO Made Simple - A Step-by-Step Guide (UPDATED) - Want to improve your WordPress SEO? Here are all the WordPress SEO best practices, tips, and the best WordPress SEO plugins that you need to know about. (wpbeginner.com)
A Simple 7-Step SEO Tutorial for Beginners - SEO isn't hard; it's just that most so-called beginner's guides use too much jargon. Learn the basics of ranking in Google in easy-to-understand language. (ahrefs.com)
SEO Basics: Beginner's Guide to SEO Success - SEO isn't as difficult as you might think. Learn how to start growing organic traffic to your website in five easy steps. (ahrefs.com)
19 Steps to Proper New Website SEO - The best time to start thinking about SEO for your website is when you're just starting out. If you're in the early stages of building a website, follow these tips. (hostgator.com)
7 First SEO Steps to Take After You Launch a New Website - SEO is a longterm process and results are rarely immediate, but the first steps you take after you launch a new website can have a big impact on the website (digitalmarketinginstitute.com)
SEO is Not Hard — A step-by-step SEO Tutorial for beginners that ... - Note: This one of one of the chapters of Secret Sauce: A step-by-step growth hacking guide. Secret Sauce breaks down every channel just like this one, so if you think this is valuable check it out… (medium.com)
The Ultimate Guide to On-Page SEO in 2020 - Discover how on-page SEO can help your website rank higher, bring in more traffic, and convert more visitors. (blog.hubspot.com)
WordPress SEO Tutorial • The Definitive Guide • Yoast - This is the ONLY tutorial you'll need to hugely increase your search engine traffic by improving your WordPress SEO. Want higher rankings? Read on! (yoast.com)
Ecommerce SEO: How Online Stores Can Drive Organic Traffic - SEO is a great investment for ecommerce websites. Read our in-depth guide for strategies to help improve SEO for your online store. (bigcommerce.com)
How to Create an Effective SEO Strategy In 2020 - Learn how to create and implement an effective SEO strategy in 2020. This in-depth guide covers keyword research, on-page SEO, content, link building and more. (backlinko.com)
How To Rank On Google: 25-Step Master SEO Checklist - Moz - How do you actually rank a webpage? Follow this step-by-step SEO checklist outlining requirements and what to look out for in order to optimize your chances of ranking higher in search results. (moz.com)
How to Do Keyword Research for SEO: A Simple Step-by-Step Guide - This six-step guide will get you started with keyword research the right way and help build a solid foundation for your SEO campaigns. (searchenginejournal.com)
Squarespace SEO: How to Optimize Your Site - 2020 Update. Need to get your website ranking? Hoping to reach more customers? This in-depth Squarespace SEO Guide covers on-site optimization tips to get you ranking. (collaborada.com)
Your SEO Checklist: 4 Steps to Optimizing Your Website - If you're looking to increase the number of people who find you online, use this four-step process as your primary strategy in the SEO wars. (entrepreneur.com)
Beginner's Guide to SEO [Search Engine Optimization] - Moz - New to SEO? Looking for higher rankings and traffic through Search Engine Optimization? The Beginner's Guide to SEO has been read over 10 million times. (moz.com)
The Ultimate SEO Guide - Everything You Need to Get Found - The Ultimate SEO Guide is here to dispel all SEO myths, and give you everything you need to know about SEO to show up in Google and other search engines, and ultimately use SEO to grow your business. (weebly.com)
11 Steps to Successful SEO for Your Business - I wrote in November a long article for my website about the necessary steps for a business to successfully engage in organic search engine optimization. (searchenginejournal.com)

Headers

Headers used across top search results, grouped by topic:

2. Use Google Analytics to measure organic traffic and engagement metrics.
Set up Google Analytics and add your website to Google's Search Console
7.1. Set up and integrate Google Analytics
Ultimate WordPress SEO Guide for Beginners (Step by Step)
7.2. Set up your Google Search Console account
1. Claim your Google My Business Profile.
Add Your Site to Google Search Console
Step 8: Review Google Search Console.
Choosing the Best WordPress SEO Plugin
Using SEO Friendly URL Structures in WordPress

Questions

Questions used across top search results, grouped by topic:

How to Do Keyword Research for SEO: A Simple Step-by-Step Guide
How To Perform Technical SEO Audits For Ecommerce Websites
Want to learn how to build your own WordPress site?
How do I optimize my website for Google?
How to Create an Effective SEO Strategy In 2020
How to perform an update and optimize your SEO:
How does Google work?
Are you wondering how to rank your Squarespace website in 2020?
Curious about the WordPress block editor?
How Google Works

Statistics

Factual sentences referenced across top search results:

The reason is that something like 90% of SEO often revolves around keyword selection. (neilpatel.com)
Over 54% of Facebook users access the network exclusively on their mobile devices. (neilpatel.com)
Their research shows that “the probability of someone bouncing from your site increases by 113 percent if it takes seven seconds to load.” And based on their findings, the average loading time was over 22 seconds. (neilpatel.com)
I first saw the power of this when I saw a 47% traffic lift after translating my site years ago. (neilpatel.com)
The vast majority of online experiences begin with a search engine, and nearly 75% of searchers start their searches on Google. (neilpatel.com)
And 90%+ of these backlinks cite a specific stat from my post: (backlinko.com)
Which led to a 70.43% boost in search engine traffic compared to the old version of the post: (backlinko.com)
These guides are designed and coded 100% from scratch using WordPress. (backlinko.com)
You might have read about the time that I used The Content Relaunch to boost my organic traffic by 260.7%: (backlinko.com)
An 62.60% organic traffic boost to that page: (backlinko.com)

External Links

Pages that search results are linking to (excluding internal links):

moz.com

google.com

support.google.com

searchenginejournal.com

developers.google.com

wordpress.org

backlinko.com

yoast.com

WordPress SEO Tutorial • The Definitive Guide • Yoast

Other Trusted Resources

SEO Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide for 2020 - Guess how many blog posts people publish each day. Any ideas? Well, WordPress users alone publish over 2 million posts every day. That comes out to 24 blog posts every second. That means that users published around 216 blog posts while you were reading these five sentences. And that's only counting ... (neilpatel.com)
How to Create an Effective SEO Strategy In 2020 - Learn how to create and implement an effective SEO strategy in 2020. This in-depth guide covers keyword research, on-page SEO, content, link building and more. (backlinko.com)
WordPress SEO Made Simple - A Step-by-Step Guide (UPDATED) - Want to improve your WordPress SEO? Here are all the WordPress SEO best practices, tips, and the best WordPress SEO plugins that you need to know about. (wpbeginner.com)
A Simple 7-Step SEO Tutorial for Beginners - SEO isn't hard; it's just that most so-called beginner's guides use too much jargon. Learn the basics of ranking in Google in easy-to-understand language. (ahrefs.com)
Your SEO Checklist: 4 Steps to Optimizing Your Website - If you're looking to increase the number of people who find you online, use this four-step process as your primary strategy in the SEO wars. (entrepreneur.com)
SEO Basics: Beginner's Guide to SEO Success - SEO isn't as difficult as you might think. Learn how to start growing organic traffic to your website in five easy steps. (ahrefs.com)
19 Steps to Proper New Website SEO - The best time to start thinking about SEO for your website is when you're just starting out. If you're in the early stages of building a website, follow these tips. (hostgator.com)
7 First SEO Steps to Take After You Launch a New Website - SEO is a longterm process and results are rarely immediate, but the first steps you take after you launch a new website can have a big impact on the website (digitalmarketinginstitute.com)
SEO is Not Hard — A step-by-step SEO Tutorial for beginners that ... - Note: This one of one of the chapters of Secret Sauce: A step-by-step growth hacking guide. Secret Sauce breaks down every channel just like this one, so if you think this is valuable check it out… (medium.com)
The Ultimate Guide to On-Page SEO in 2020 - Discover how on-page SEO can help your website rank higher, bring in more traffic, and convert more visitors. (blog.hubspot.com)
11 Steps to Successful SEO for Your Business - I wrote in November a long article for my website about the necessary steps for a business to successfully engage in organic search engine optimization. (searchenginejournal.com)
How To Rank On Google: 25-Step Master SEO Checklist - Moz - How do you actually rank a webpage? Follow this step-by-step SEO checklist outlining requirements and what to look out for in order to optimize your chances of ranking higher in search results. (moz.com)
Squarespace SEO: How to Optimize Your Site - 2020 Update. Need to get your website ranking? Hoping to reach more customers? This in-depth Squarespace SEO Guide covers on-site optimization tips to get you ranking. (collaborada.com)
WordPress SEO Tutorial • The Definitive Guide • Yoast - This is the ONLY tutorial you'll need to hugely increase your search engine traffic by improving your WordPress SEO. Want higher rankings? Read on! (yoast.com)
Beginner's Guide to SEO [Search Engine Optimization] - Moz - New to SEO? Looking for higher rankings and traffic through Search Engine Optimization? The Beginner's Guide to SEO has been read over 10 million times. (moz.com)
How to Do Keyword Research for SEO: A Simple Step-by-Step Guide - This six-step guide will get you started with keyword research the right way and help build a solid foundation for your SEO campaigns. (searchenginejournal.com)
The Ultimate SEO Guide - Everything You Need to Get Found - The Ultimate SEO Guide is here to dispel all SEO myths, and give you everything you need to know about SEO to show up in Google and other search engines, and ultimately use SEO to grow your business. (weebly.com)
Ecommerce SEO: How Online Stores Can Drive Organic Traffic - SEO is a great investment for ecommerce websites. Read our in-depth guide for strategies to help improve SEO for your online store. (bigcommerce.com)
Top 20 Topics
Topics sorted by frequency across top search results:
google
how to
search engines
keyword research
meta description
on page seo
blog post
search engine optimization
google search console
user experience
wordpress
link building
reader
search intent
customer
https
e a t
search traffic
option
title tags
Headers
Headers used across top search results, grouped by topic:
2. Use Google Analytics to measure organic traffic and engagement metrics.
Set up Google Analytics and add your website to Google's Search Console
7.1. Set up and integrate Google Analytics
Ultimate WordPress SEO Guide for Beginners (Step by Step)
7.2. Set up your Google Search Console account
1. Claim your Google My Business Profile.
Add Your Site to Google Search Console
Step 8: Review Google Search Console.
Choosing the Best WordPress SEO Plugin
Using SEO Friendly URL Structures in WordPress
Questions
Questions used across top search results, grouped by topic:
How to Do Keyword Research for SEO: A Simple Step-by-Step Guide
How To Perform Technical SEO Audits For Ecommerce Websites
Want to learn how to build your own WordPress site?
How do I optimize my website for Google?
How to Create an Effective SEO Strategy In 2020
How to perform an update and optimize your SEO:
How does Google work?
Are you wondering how to rank your Squarespace website in 2020?
Curious about the WordPress block editor?
How Google Works
Statistics
Factual sentences referenced across top search results:
The reason is that something like 90% of SEO often revolves around keyword selection. (neilpatel.com)
Over 54% of Facebook users access the network exclusively on their mobile devices. (neilpatel.com)
Their research shows that “the probability of someone bouncing from your site increases by 113 percent if it takes seven seconds to load.” And based on their findings, the average loading time was over 22 seconds. (neilpatel.com)
I first saw the power of this when I saw a 47% traffic lift after translating my site years ago. (neilpatel.com)
The vast majority of online experiences begin with a search engine, and nearly 75% of searchers start their searches on Google. (neilpatel.com)
And 90%+ of these backlinks cite a specific stat from my post: (backlinko.com)
Which led to a 70.43% boost in search engine traffic compared to the old version of the post: (backlinko.com)
These guides are designed and coded 100% from scratch using WordPress. (backlinko.com)
You might have read about the time that I used The Content Relaunch to boost my organic traffic by 260.7%: (backlinko.com)
An 62.60% organic traffic boost to that page: (backlinko.com)
External Links
Pages that search results are linking to (excluding internal links):
moz.com
10 Illustrations of How Fresh Content May Influence Google Rankings (Updated)
Google’s Direct Answers: How to Keep Visitors Coming to Your Site
google.com
Google Search Console
Google Search Central (formerly Webmasters) | Web SEO Resources
support.google.com
Google Images SEO Best Practices | Google Search Central
Keep a simple URL structure | Google Search Central
searchenginejournal.com
Google Issues a Warning About Guest Posting to Build Links
The Right Way to Do Scholarship Link Building
developers.google.com
Structured Data Testing Tool
PageSpeed Insights
wordpress.org
Google XML Sitemaps
Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin
backlinko.com
Google’s 200 Ranking Factors: The Complete List (2020)
Keyword Research for SEO: The Definitive Guide (2021 Update)
yoast.com
WordPress SEO Tutorial • The Definitive Guide • Yoast

The inverted pyramid framework is commonly used in journalism, and looks like this:

Here is how to use this framework for Featured Snippet Optimization:

The target question: choose a question that isn’t very easily answered. This will prevent you from competing directly with Google’s Knowledge Graph. For example, don’t try ranking for a question like “when did Columbus discover America?”. Use Frase’s Question Ideas to identify long-tail questions with meaningful search traffic.
Lead with the answer: keep in mind that featured snippets usually take the form of a paragraph (up to 300 words), or a list. Prove that you are a subject matter expert, and provide a direct answer, but leave the finer details for the next section so the searcher is encouraged to learn more.
Details and data: if the answer was interesting enough to drive a visit, this is where you have to back it with well-researched details and data. Show your reader that your answer is credible and authoritative.
Sub-questions: find related follow-up questions that complement the main question. Each of these sub-questions may represent internal links within your website in case you want to expand on them.

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Rich Keller • Dec 12, 2020