11 Essential SEO Promotion Stages For Your Website
Just like everything else in the world, SEO promotion doesn’t have one single all-purpose algorithm of success. This algorithm may vary depending on a country where you are promoting, a specificity of the promoted site and others. But there is still something every SEO should include in any promotion strategy. In this article, you’ll find 11 stages of SEO promotion that no webmaster can miss.
Stage 1. Analysis of the site, niche, and competitors
When the SEO specialist gets access to Analytics and Webmasters, he/she conducts the primary analysis of the goods and services of the project, and also gives an overall assessment of the website. It’s needed to determine what to do with a site, and to build the future promotion strategy. These are the exact steps the webmaster should take:
- Check website’s position in SERP for the keywords of different search volume
- Conduct a competitor analysis to find out what exactly to focus on in this niche
- Analyze the structure and backlinks profile of the top websites within the niche
- Make suggestions to optimize the site.
- Analyze the demand and seasonality on the basis of SERPs data
All these are needed to define whether the site needs global changes.
Stage 2. Keyword research
At this stage, the specialist collects, clusters and checks the search volume of the list of queries that people use to find your site. This is necessary to form the structure of the site, generate meta tags, write texts for landing pages, create internal links and conduct the off-page optimization.
While researching, the SEO specialist may collect a couple hundred keywords. The process of compiling a qualitative list of keywords is long and can take up to several months. Therefore, the promotion strategy must be composed in such way that this task is being worked on, other SEO tasks could also be performed.
Stage 3. Creating a broad structure of the site
Search engine algorithms are being improved the whole time to provide users with the most relevant information in SERP.
If you’d like your site to appear at the top of the search results, you have to focus on creating an expanded structure. Thus, every group of keywords should have its own optimized landing page.
At the same time, it is important to remember that for super-low frequency queries (the ones that were searched for less than 5 times in a month) it is better to optimize the particular product cards, since they will only interfere with the promotion of important pages, taking away from them a part of the internal static weight.
Сategories are usually created for the high-frequency and middle-frequency requests, while low-frequency requests are used to create filter pages and intersections of filter pages.
How might you get fresh ideas for creating the new landing page?
- Analysis of the SERP
- Analysis of competitors
- Internal research on the site
- Analysis of the products/services range
For large stores/bulletin boards/marketplaces targeted on different cities, as well as the companies with branches, the number of landing pages in the structure should be multiplied by the number of cities. And it’s still to keep the content of such pages unique.
But it is a complicated and lengthy process that in larger projects may take more than a year to cover in its entirety. However, if you want to get the desired effect faster, the bulk of the work on expanding the structure of landing pages should be done very early.
Stage 4. Drawing up an on-page SEO task
At this stage, it’s mandatory to do the following:
- Creating the title and description meta tags for the h1 header
- Creating a friendly URL
- Optimizing the filters, making up the rules of URLs and meta tags creation, and links visibility
- Speeding up the server response and the site loading
- Deleting duplicate pages, redirects, canonical pages, internal noindex and nofollow tags
- Creating the XML map of the website
- Setting up the multi-language if necessary
- Optimizing the pagination pages
- Adjusting micro-markup of reviews and information on the product cards page
Stage 5. Setting up internal site linking
Frequently, lack of inner Page Rank for landing pages is the cause of the site poor ranking. Let me explain what it means.
You have not only to create landing pages, but also set up a cross-linking between them. In such way, both users and the search robot will easily find and pass to other pages. Otherwise, some pages may not appear in the search engine index.
Stage 6. Content optimization
The webmaster should optimize text and pictures and the whole content on the site. He creates a unique title, description meta tags and h1 headers. Also, it is at this exact stage when the previously collected keywords are distributed all over the website. It is crucial to do this carefully so that the text doesn’t look spammy. Spammy text not only annoy readers, but also search engines have long since learned to distinguish them. And this means that unnecessarily stuffing your articles with keywords can land you with a penalty.
Stage 7. Optimizing the Crawling Budget
The Crawling Budget is the number of pages which the robot can scan on the site at one time. This number is limited. If you don’t close irrelevant pages on your website from indexation, some relevant ones may remain unindexed in the search engine.
By irrelevant pages I mean, for example, pages of useless filters, for which there are no requests or very few of them. Or pages with different sorts: by price, rating, number of products per page, etc. Not closing such ones from indexing is a bad mistake. The Crawling Budget is a delicate matter, and it’s probably important that only experienced specialists should work with it.
Thus, at this stage, experts are closing the “irrelevant pages,” created only for the convenience of users, from indexing, and leaving only the necessary filters, prohibiting robots from circumventing “irrelevant pages” by closing the links to them.
Stage 8. Improving the website usability
Clearly, one of the most important ranking factors of any website is user behavior. It’s good when users stay long on your site because if they don’t, and almost every visitor closes your site in a second, Google will understand that it contains irrelevant information.
Of course, black hat methods like using robots to artificially wind these indicators may help. However, it’s only a matter of time before Google reveals such practices and penalizes you. So it’s better to improve it in a natural way, by creating useful content and, of course, using the right keywords.
So, at this stage, the specialist will give recommendations on how to:
- Reduce the bounce rate
- Increase the duration of users stay on the page
Stage 9. Off-page SEO
After the off-page SEO, I mean good old backlinks profile building. Links to your website from other sources are crucial as this is one more way Google understands that the information on your website is relevant. Sure, in some fields with low competition, you may not be able to pay considerable attention to links. But let’s be frank, how many such fields are left in 2017?
So, the more respectable websites are referring to your site, the more your own site’s authority is growing. Checking things about your backlinks profile and your authority in Google’s eyes is simple if using special backlinks analysis tools. For this purpose, of course, I use Serpstat.
Stage 10. Increasing your Website’s Conversion
You are launching a new eCommerce site, have promoted it by SEO or PPC, yet aren’t get much in the way of results? Apparently, your site requires change. Here’s what a specialist can advise at this stage:
- Full redesign of the site – for example, expansion of the site structure, adaptive layout, indicating the sum for free delivery, the ability to enter a discount coupon, improvement of the structure of the blog, and so on
- Improving the quantity and quality of the photos of goods on the website
- Improving the quality of descriptions, characteristics, information about the product while adding tables with technical characteristics, and creating ample opportunities for filtering goods, etc.
- Adding reviews on the store and product reviews in a prominent place on the site
- Adding the “similar goods” block (“goods in the same price category,” etc.)
- Launching of online help on the site
- Setting trigger personalized newsletters
These are only a tiny part of the improvements which increase the conversion of the site. In fact, even such seemingly minor changes as changing the colors of the elements of the pages can provoke an improvement in the conversion of your site.
Stage 11. Step-by-step page optimization
Work on the site extent, on content, meta tags, internal linking and backlinks profile is almost an endless process. In addition, the algorithms of search engines are updating all the time, and therefore you often have to make changes to the promotion strategy and constantly improve it for both users and machines.
You must understand, that no quick results are available in SEO promotion. It might take a couple of months to first notice your website’s moving ahead in SERP, but it’s totally worth it. SEO promotion gives reliable results for a long time.
If you don’t hire a specialist, and carry on SEO yourself, don’t neglect the use of special tools aimed to facilitate and automate this process. To my mind, the best choices are the all-in-one tools like Serpstat and Ahrefs.
Did You Find This Helpful?
We hope you found this article helpful. Certainly, there’s a lot to take in, and few people can do it all themselves.
If there’s any aspect of this that you would like to read more about, please let me know. Perhaps I can answer you in the comments, and maybe something warrants an article of its own.
All comments are welcome.
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Eleonora Zolotaryova
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