Digital Lab

Everyone overcomplicates SEO…

That’s not to say that it is easy, but it doesn’t have to be complicated.

Let me explain.

The 3 Parts That Make Up 95% of SEO

1. Content Creation & Optimization
2. Backlink Generation & Offsite Optimization
3. Technical Structure & Performance

If you do these three things your websites presence in Google and AI platforms will steadily grow.

How well you do them and at what pace will determine how quickly you grow.

I’m going to break down each one, the fundamentals, how you can get started, what requires ongoing work vs one-time, etc.

Side Note: You may think what you do is “fast-pace” but if your competitors are pushing harder than you are, you will still not grow. Sometimes marketers fail just because they aren’t doing enough.

Content Creation & Optimization

When most people think of SEO, this is what comes to mind.

Articles, blogs, service pages, product pages, meta-titles, meta-descriptions, keyword optimization, keyword research, and so on.

In simple terms; Content Optimization is the strategic selection of the language used on your website to better communicate to customers in their own language.

For example; a boutique accounting firm might be tempted to say that their flagship service is “account tracking & alignment” because it sounds cooler than “bookkeeping”.

An SEO professional would quickly correct them to focus on using the “bookkeeping” term and more supporting phrases to help customers better find and associate their company with the service.

When a user places a search in Google like “best bookkeeping service near me” Google is working to try and show that user the most relevant answer.

By using the same language that the customer uses, you increase the likelihood that Google identifies you as a match.

This is the most basic form of SEO every website should do.

Aside from this there are many more aspects of importance like:

• How clear is it that your content is written by an authority figure
• How you structure your page (headers, images, lists, etc)
• How concisely you provide the reader what they need
• How often you internally link pages to one another
• How readable your text is (attractive formatting)
• What history does your site have on the topic
• What dynamic text formatting you use
• How frequently is content updated
• How long the page content is

And much, much more.

The best way to start content optimizing your site is to:

1. Run an audit – tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz can provide you a detailed analysis of your sites optimization status.
2. Make a short list – most egregious issues and tasks first. Start with the pages with the most potential.
3. Start writing – unless you really know what you’re doing, don’t use AI. Default AI outputs are punished by Google and will not help you rank.
4. Submit to Google – use Google Search Console to submit your updated page for indexing.
5. Repeat 1-4

Optional: hire professionals who do this in a fraction of the time & effort.

Backlink Generation & Offsite Optimization

This is an equally buzzy part of SEO.

Depending on who you ask, many might describe this as the most important part of ranking in Google.

While this can be a huge growth lever for a well established site, smaller sites often struggle to grow when focusing on this alone.

So note, this is best invested in when the other 2 areas of SEO are already in good shape.

“Backlinks” are fundamentally links from other websites that point to your website.

This could be things like:

• A publication mentioning you in an article
• An interview you were in linking back to you
• A directory for local businesses
• A report quoting you

Or a dozen other ways of getting mentioned.

Google see’s these links as a signal of relevance and authority.

“Well if ____ thinks this page is relevant then it must be worth showing people.”

A growing number of backlinks indicates that your website (and what you have to say) is popular.

But, it’s not only about the number of links, it also matters who is sharing them.

Higher authority websites are worth more in reputation than lower authority sites.

For example, Medium.com (a popular blogging site) doesn’t provide links as impactful as Forbes.com.

This is because Google holds the content on Forbes in much higher esteem than Medium.

So if you are linked to from Forbes, Google will associate that with a high degree of importance.

More links = good

More good links = exceptional

The best way to start building backlinks is to:

• Make sure your business is present in every relevant local directory and linked to your site
• Make sure all of your social media profiles are claimed and linking back to your website
• Start participating in public conversations (interviews, podcasts, guest appearances)
• Trade links (ask other business owners if they’d like you to link to them in a trade)
• Write guest posts for other private publications in exchange for a link on the site
• Pay-to-play (many large publications will link to you in exchange for $)
• Submit content to open publications (Medium, Reddit, HARO, etc)
• Create infographics that visualize an idea (these are link magnets)
• Create quotable resources that get linked to online

Optional: hire a team of link builders or pay per publication in bulk for a shortcut

Technical Structure & Performance

This is the concrete that the rest of your metaphorical house is built on.

Without a good site structure and page speed performance, no amount of links or content will help you escape SEO mediocrity.

The technical performance of your websites determines the basic truths like:

• Can Google even read your website?
• Do users enjoy being on your website?
• Does your website appear to be well maintained?
• Is your website designed in a way that is mobile-friendly?
• Does your website load fast enough for shrinking attention spans?

All of these things are a basic (yes / no) checkbox for Google.

If it thinks that sending people to your website would be a bad idea for any of the reasons stated above, then it simply wont.

It doesn’t matter how well your content is written or how many times you were mentioned in the New York Times.

This is the part of SEO that gets a bit technical.

I tend to see the non-devs in the room taking a step back or nodding along (even if they don’t get it).

I’ll try to break this down into basic parts that anyone can understand with some step-by-step processes to make improvements.

The parts of technical SEO that matter most are:

• Speed (do your pages load in less than Labeling (is your website content labeled neatly for Google to read)
• Health (do you have errors that would prevent Google from navigating your site)
• Mapping (does Google have a map of your website it can easily follow to find all your pages)
• Connectivity (does your site structure smoothly link to all the pages on your website)

Here’s how you can start to address them today:

1. Run an audit – tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz can provide you a detailed analysis of your sites health, connectivity, mapping, labeling, and speed.
2. Analyze your audit – the results of your audit may surprise you, start with what you feel most confident executing but enlist a developer if you get lost.
3. Sitemap & Speed – having a sitemap setup and having a load time of less than 3s on both mobile and desktop devices should be your top priority.
4. Schema – implement schema markup to label elements of your website for Google’s crawler. This will help you rank for more things as well as more dynamic placements.
5. Clickdepth – make sure that all pages on your website can be reached in less than 4 clicks from the homepage. This makes it so that Google’s crawler doesn’t have to work very hard to find and index your content.

Optional: hire a professional dev team to implement all necessary changes. (30 days for a good team)

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