Content-level SEO is the compliment to technical SEO (i.e. software level implementation and considerations for managing crawl budget and ensuring your content avoids negative quality signals).
While SEO can be complex, the three items below are the most important. They are like fruits, vegetables, and exercise. Even if the research/news in health seems like it’s changing all the time, these things are always a good idea:
- Good, content-rich landing pages
- Clean internal site structure
- Quality mentions and links in other places around the web.
Am I realistically competitive?
When embarking on an SEO engagement, it’s important to ask ‘Is my investment within an order of magnitude of the competition?’
Below are the type of metrics we report (on this occasion taken from Moz.com’s reporting engine). In this case, the client and their competitors seem to have relative parity, making them a good candidate for on-page optimization.
| Metrics | www.joincake.com | www.gyst.com | |
| Domain Authority | 27 | 27 | |
| Spam Score | 5% | — | |
| Total links | 4,571 | 9,402 | |
| % of total links, external + follow | 11% | 16% | |
| External, followed links | 520 | 1,546 | |
| Internal, followed links | 3,780 | 7,269 | |
| External, nofollowed links | 240 | 217 | |
| Internal, nofollowed links | 31 | 370 | |
| Total linking domains | 240 | 228 | |
| Followed linking domains | 176 | 175 |
What do I want to rank for?
The first thing we need to determine is the pool of potential target keywords (phrases someone might enter into a search engine to find your site). This process starts with examination of Google Analytics and Search Console data and takes in any ideas you might have about what your target market might be using.
From an SEO standpoint the ideal keyword:
- Is highly relevant to your offering and represents a good chance of conversion.
- Isn’t too competitive to be achievable.
- Is specific enough that you know exactly what the searcher wants.
- Uses the language that your market is searching in.
Data mining tools we have built from scratch help us extract maximum value from past Google Analytics or other organic search data, and from the language used on client sites and their competitors.
