There are two major factors that you can put in every SEO plan for every SEO project. The factors are (1) research, planning, and on-page SEO and (2) off-page SEO. If you get on-page and off-page SEO right, you should get quality results. Research and planning are with on-page because they are so integrated. Much of the initial work in any project is essentially working on both at the same time.
Technically, there’s a 3rd category, Engagement, that comes into play sometimes. I have discussed SEO engagement a bit more here.
Keyword Research and Planning
When it comes to their keyword research, most people will put a search phrase or two into the Google Keyword Planner, which will tell them how much these things are getting searched. They take the top maybe five to twenty search phrases and just go with that. That is the extent of their research.
Then their planning is also just as simple — they focus on the top search phrase exclusively or nearly exclusively. As a result, they miss out on 70%+ of the total traffic out there. There is a good time to slow down take a step back.
I like the SEO project to get results from a wide range of searches for years to come and it pays big time to do a thorough job of research here for most industries, but not all.
Maximizing the value from keyword research involves finding all the different things that your market is typing into the search engines. Then, to get maximum benefit from the market research, we want to structure it in a way you can build your site in terms of what pages to make and how to interlink them. This is absolutely critical, and so few people rally do this. It is not that complicated.
What you want to do is make sure only the most relevant pages are linked to and from the other most relevant pages. So many people have done so little keyword research that they do not have a road map or enough information or data to really build a detailed site structure, a road map of all the different pieces of content, all the different pages in your site, and how they are going to be interlinked.
Site structure is essentially an implementation of conceptual hierarchy. of All searches your market is typing in one. An example of a conceptual hierarchy is macys.com. For many years they have had many categories and sub categories you can see that are structured in their drop down menus. There is a big mistake they are making with this structure, but they still rank well because they have so much overall authority. They would rank better if they fixed this 1 simple mistake to fix. They essentially dilute each section of pages’ relevancy by linking every sub category to every sub category. Massive sub-menu drop downs hurt the relevancy boost you can get.
What each page links to and what pages link to it are important to show Google what you are most relevant to, and what each individual page is relevant to. There are a lot of ways this is done wrong, despite the fact it is actually not hard to understand or technically implement.
There is an extra piece to this puzzle, something that helps amplify everything, and that is to create quality, engaging content. I find the content is much, much better when the client creates it. So, I don’t recommend outsourcing your content creation to a 3rd party that doesn’t spend all day every day interacting with your market and your business.
So, if you were to call me, I would want you to make it. I have made it for clients in the past, and it is okay. In a pinch, that could be done, but ultimately it is a lot more expensive and doesn’t convert better than even a small amount of content from the client. I do show clients how to do create content that is inexpensive and easy.
Highly engaging can help your SEO, but more importantly it helps with converting website visitors into leads or having them enter the 1st step of a sale funnel. It turns a higher percentage of your traffic into buyers. Then the value of how I showed you how to build the site structure on your goes through the roof. Quality, engaging content can even help your off-page SEO.
Off-Page SEO
The second major piece of a quality SEO Project Plan is off-page SEO.
Despite what a lot of people might think, there are ways to do high quality (and poor quality) off-page SEO that extremely safe and long term. I don’t recommend using spam anywhere near any. It has been years since I even considered it. I do think white hat, black hat, gray hat, and all of that stuff is a little bit of a red herring. Some people have very different opinions on the reality of the hats of SEO, but ultimately high quality SEO has to do with the safety, trust, authority, and relevance. These 4 are the focus of all my off-page plans.
An analogy for how I do off-page SEO…in general, we are building a complex system of systems that do help pass trust, authority, and relevance to your website.
If you structure your site right and you get enough quality links to where you are a highly trusted, authoritative and relevant site for your target market, then you will generally drive traffic (in varying amounts).
Off-Page SEO Metrics
DA stands for domain authority. This is a nice metric. It is an exponential scale from one to one hundred. The average site that I encounter is about 20 DA. 40 DA sites are more powerful than 99.999% of the sites out there.
However, DA is a very flawed metric created by a company not name Google – Moz. Moz’s crawler is the slowest in the business. The DA calculation is good, but their crawler misses lots of links and takes sometimes months to find the links it does eventually find. It also really only looks at authority, but completely ignores trust.
It is possible to have lots of authority, but very little trust. In fact, this is generally a bad situation to be in since it would be an indication of low quality links (aka “spam”).
Trust Flow (TF) is a metric created by the people at majestic.com. It is a far better measure of trust. It is also on an exponential scale from 0 to 100. Having high DA and high TF is infinitely better than just high DA. Actually, TF is harder to manipulate and, therefore, it is a more reliable metric of a site’s overall off-page quality.
When your TF and DA both go up at the same time, you generally will see an increase across all rankings. Amazon is so powerful of a domain that it can just put up a page and sometimes rank on the 1st page (or even high on 1st page) immediately for whatever is in the title of the page.
It is even better, but not always required if you can get relevance from your links. For example, if you run a plumbing site, getting links from other sites and/or pages about plumbing will be better than if the sites and/or pages are about non-plumbing topics.
If a site get great TF, DA, and relevance from its links, everything else with SEO becomes far easier!
Local SEO
An additional action set that fits into both the on-page and off-page factor for some sites local SEO. Think about local businesses than have Google’s Maps embedded in the search engine results pages.
Let’s say I search Plano dentist. There are ads, then 3 Google maps result immediately below the ads in the 1st organic spot, then the regular organic results begins. Getting ranked in the maps has become more important over time as Google has pushed the maps results into more search results AND made the maps have fewer spots on the 1st page AND each maps spot takes up more space than it used to.
Working on ranking your Google Maps should definitely be a part of any business’s plans if they see the Google maps results in any of their search results.
Summary of a Great SEO Plan
Thorough research and planning a hierarchical site structure interlinking + critical single page on-page actions, Local SEO, trust, authority, and relevance from off-page over a significant period of time (4-12 months usually depending on many factors) = The Winning SEO Fomula.
Any plan put forth by an SEO company that is missing parts of this winning formula has a significantly lower chance of producing results than a plan that includes all these pieces.
Thinking of hiring an SEO expert or company for your next SEO project? I suggest you read my another article telling you how to hire one first.
