I just got back New York from a week-long SEO workshop, which was the second one in less than 4 weeks. Although I added quite a lot of new materials and updates, such as YMYL, E.A.T, Featured Snippets, the fundamentals are still the same. I figured it would be a great recap for me and my fellow SEO friends to go over some basics. Let’s start with SEO Copywriting.
Step 1: Validate Search Volume
The very first thing to do in terms of writing a piece of content (especially SEO friendly content) is to identify proper keywords to target. Better off, topics or searcher intents. One of the most important criteria is the keyword Search Volume. How many people are looking for those keywords on search enignes? Depending upon which industry you’re in, the number varies. So it’s your job to find that sweet spot: the cut-off monthly search volume. Few things to keep in mind here: Competition, Match Type, and Conversion Rate.
Step 2: Keyword Research
The next step is to do your keyword research. There have been no less than hundreds of KW research tools over the years but I suggest one should always start with 3 basic ones, 3 Google tools/features because at the end of the day, we are optimizing pages for Google and there is no better place than finding keywords, keyword ideas directly from the Big G! They are Adwords Keyword Planner, Google Suggest, and Related Searches.
Step 3: New or Existing?
After narrowing down a list of keywords to work with, we need to find a place where our potential visitors (from search engines) can land. That requires SEOs to identify proper URLs from your website as the landing pages. whether you decide to go with optimizing an existing page or develop a brand new one, the key is to make sure you are aware of the potential duplicate content issue and are able to assign the targeted keywords to the one with the highest SEO value.
site:example.com “KEYWORD”
Step 4: Optimize Content
Once the landing page is located or created, we will need to get the page optimized for both on-site and off-site. There are 16 on-site/on-page components for you to watch out including, metadata, HTML elements, headings, keyword selection & positioning, etc, which I will do a separate post to discuss in detail.
Step 5: Get Internal Links
To finish up the newly optimized content properly, let’s add some links within our own website in order to:
1. Get the content re-crawled, crawled, and indexed quicker
2. Direct Google bots and point them to the page we would like to get the highest ranking for a given keyword.
That’s it! Now you have it, a quick 5-step content development strategy as a reminder and a cheat sheet for those who just started.