Or use them as seed keywords and pop them into a keyword research tool. This is a way to get high-quality backlinks WITHOUT having to grind with outreach. Most keywords are competitive for the simple reason that there are LOTS of sites trying to rank for them. For example, this post was targeting the keyword “how to get more traffic”. When I first got started with keyword research I’d focus 100% on search volume. Today you’re going to learn EXACTLY how to improve your site’s ranking in 2025.
Before committing to any agency, ask if content development services are offered and, if so, how these services are priced. When choosing an SEO company, it is best to know what you are looking for and what goals you have in mind to help you grow. Do you want to focus on organic growth only or will you need other services like paid ad management as well? Make sure their team is communicative, and spend time digging into reviews of their services by business owners who serve in industries like yours. Be wary of SEO companies who promise HUGE results in very short amounts of time, and do not overextend your budget without full transparency about how your metrics will grow. Effective SEO is crucial for driving quality traffic to your website.
What is Google Panda?
For national SEO, Straight North starts with an audit of your website to determine what needs to be done, like most SEO services. Then your account manager performs keyword research, optimizes your pages and creates an overall content strategy. They also create backlinks, ensure your technical SEO is up to snuff and monitor the progress.
Add the keywords that matter most for your business, and the tool will track your rankings daily. Links from other websites to yours (called backlinks) are like votes of confidence that can lead to better rankings. A URL is the address of a specific webpage or file on the internet, and it can help search engines understand your page better. With advancements in AR technology, it’s important for businesses to keep up with optimizing local listings and collect reviews. This could involve virtual tours or interactive maps that help potential customers find their way to local businesses. Google has shifted to mobile-first indexing in recent years, meaning that the mobile version of a website is prioritized for indexing and ranking.
Common SEO FAQs
Additionally, achieving a high ranking in Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) automatically enhances the credibility and authority of your brand. This is because people trust that Google makes significant efforts to display only the best, most relevant, and high-quality search results. So Zapier’s app landing pages allow for a CGC (company-generated content) programmatic SEO play where they launch over 14,000 pages that rank in Google. And because they are leveraging the equity of other brand names, people naturally discover them for the first time when searching about other tools.
It helps you meet the search intent and answer what readers actually want to know. I’ve created hundreds of reports in Clearscope over the years, and I’ve watched it evolve into a powerful, all-in-one SEO content tool. As both tools are free, it’s worth trying both to see which one suits your needs best.
If you do a lot of link building, you know that finding niche-relevant link prospects is not always easy. For example, this post of mine about link building has done really well. Broken link SEO Anomaly building is one of my favorite link building strategies. For example, let’s say you were going to publish a blog post optimized around the keyword “best mattress”.
- One way to determine intent is by reviewing the top-ranking pages for a keyword (also called doing a SERP analysis).
- Page experience is used as a ranking signal for mobile and desktop rankings.
- Read over 10 million times, The Beginners Guide to SEO is the industry’s leading resource for learning SEO.
- SEO analytics is about tracking how well your website performs on search engines and understanding how users interact with it.
- You’ll see detailed info on traffic that comes from Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines.
Set up a blog.
Below, I go over some examples of what this looks like in practice that you can use as inspiration for your own processes. Also, tracking indexed pages, conversions, ROI, and your rankings on SERPs can help you recognize your success as well as identify areas of opportunity. It’s worth considering the use of a compression tool to reduce file sizes before uploading images, videos, and gifs. Sites like TinyPNG compress images in bulk, while Google’s Squoosh can shrink image files to microscopic sizes.
Networking and partnering with other local businesses and influencers can significantly boost your local authority and visibility. Use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to analyze your competitors’ backlink profiles. Identify their link sources and assess the quality of those links to see if it would be worthwhile to pursue the same. A survey of SEO professionals by Brightlocal found that GBP optimization is the most valuable local SEO service, followed by creating content and web design. These tools provide a wealth of content and keyword gap information, which will be used for much of the analysis outlined below.
The difference between SEO and paid advertising is that SEO involves organic ranking, which has to do with Google’s algorithm and how websites naturally appear to users. Most businesses will hire an SEO specialist or digital agency to help them. There may be some costs involved in effective SEO—hiring a writer or buying a blog, for example— but it’s not as high as paid advertising.