SEO Services

The Beginner’s SEO Checklist

Whether you want to take a stab at SEO for your business before hiring an agency, or are curious about the basic components of a successful SEO strategy employed by SEO firms, this section will give you a bird’s eye view of the introductory steps to effective SEO practices. 

1. Remember that SEO is a Marathon, Not a Sprint

The more sophisticated Google and other search engines become and the more competitive markets are, the longer it takes to implement a successful, profit-driving SEO strategy. In the earliest days of SEO, earning results that drove most of a brand’s sales could be easily generated easily within a 6-month window, sometimes sooner depending on the industry.

Now, the practice can take as many as 18 – 24 months to deliver comparable results. However, the reward is even more worthwhile than it used to be. Even in the earlier and simpler years of SEO lore (20 years ago) the industry’s leading expert on the subject at the turn of the millennium, Rand Fishkin, said it took him years to earn a top-ranking slot on Google for competitive keywords in the SEO training services industry for his company, Moz.

2. Understanding the Crux of SEO: Keywords

You’ll see that the bulk of this SEO checklist involves keywords. While this may seem one-dimensional, keywords are the primary mechanism by which search engine bots organize, index, and make sense of content and represent it accordingly in the SERPs, which is integral to the actual searchers’ experience. 

Keywords are also as important to SEO as your keyboard is to using the internet. Without the input of language, using the internet and its search engines, becomes an impractical time-waster, since even voice search SEO technology relies on keyword data. 

Know Which of the 2 Primary Keyword Strategies to Choose

There are 2 primary keyword strategies SEOs can choose from – branded keywords or generic keywords. While an effective SEO strategy sometimes involves targeting both (which can happen even with one keyword), we recommend brands start with one or the other to keep things simple. The strategy you choose depends entirely on the keyword difficulty/competition, query volume, and lexical keyword map of your business’s respective industry and or product suite. 

Generic Keyword Emphasis

Generic keywords don’t involve the use of brand names. In using the solar industry to illustrate this, the term “solar panels for sale,” is a generic keyword because the searcher’s intent doesn’t revolve around finding a specific brand from whom they can buy these solar panels. Rather, it involves an emphasis on the product itself. Another way to describe these queries is as “brand-agnostic.”

Branded Keyword Emphasis

Unlike generic keywords, branded keywords involve the use of brand names. A branded keyword in the solar industry like “Tesla solar panels,” reveals that the searcher’s intent couples a particular solar panel brand with the solar panel itself. Unlike generic keyword SEO strategies, using SEO to rank for branded keywords is usually necessary in markets where one or two players own most of the query share for major search engines. Moreover, understanding the basis for brand-specific queries is vital to learning about target customers’ preferences, which can be parlayed into many other facets of product marketing. Sometimes branded keywords have more demand than generic terms. But this is rare. In summary of these 2 keyword strategies, effective SEO isn’t about ranking number 1 on Google. It’s about ranking number 1 on Google for the correct keywords. Make sure you pick the correct keywords, and stick to them steadfastly.

Know Your Long-tail Keywords

Once you’ve organized the correct assembly of generic and or branded keyword lists from as many different keyword research platforms as possible, it’s time to begin finding the long-tail keywords in these lists, because they should comprise the bulk of your content topics. 

Long-tail keywords have more than 4 words, and have a higher click-through rate given the clarity and specificity of what’s revealed in their searcher’s intent. In contrast, 1-3-word broad-match keywords are better suited for SEM budgets and PPC-driven marketing strategies.

When you rely on long-tail keywords, the odds of hitting your target increase dramatically, because you’re aiming right at your target. You may have the greatest, most engaging content in the world, but if it isn’t targeting the most relevant, transactional, and long-tail keywords with the correct assembly of branded or generic keyword strategies for which you want your website to rank, your SEO efforts are useless. 

Long-tail keywords are 70% of all search engine queries. Therefore, while these are harder to find and identify than their simpler broad match countertypes, there’s more earning potential in mastering them. Additionally, a monstrous 20 percent of queries punched into Google are completely unique and original, meaning they have only been searched for once – this means you have to think critically about which long-tail keywords you’ll target to get the best bang for your buck, and you’ll have to rely on your understanding of your target customer in these instances before resorting to keyword tools for assistance. 

Educational vs. Transactional Keywords

Now that we’ve covered long-tail keywords, we’ll further split keyword types into educational and transactional camps. 

Transactional Keywords

Transactional keywords are typically the most competitive queries in major search engines for a particular product or service. They include words like “buy,” “hire,” and other monetary terms indicative of purchase behavior, therefore oftentimes yielding a high cost per click for paid advertisements geared at these keywords. 

Educational Keywords

Unlike transactional keywords, educational keywords indicate a potential customer is not yet in the purchasing stage of a sales funnel, and is still exploring their options. However, that doesn’t mean these keywords shouldn’t be part of your strategy. In fact, relying on them to  produce content designed to nourish your leads into sales is critical for employing an effective SEO strategy. Once you rank for educational keywords, the funnel to the intended purchase behavior just needs to be longer, deeper, and ultimately spanning several more pages and clicks than what’s necessary for transactional keywords. 

Once you have a large list of long-tail keywords, create broader categories of content clusters around them, and generate unique ideas for your editorial/publishing calendar (this is also a great way to create your website’s blog categories and subcategories).

However, don’t let the breadth of your findings detract from the depth of your content: Publishing exhaustive content on one topic increases your topical authority to both searchers and search engines alike, garnering greater visibility and trust for your website. When all else fails, have the empathy to put yourself in the customers’ shoes and enhance their user experience from that perspective. This, above all else, will always be what delivers value to Google and other major search engines and, therefore, value to you as a marketer practicing SEO. 

3. Use Your Keyword Research Tools Appropriately

The first step to an effective keyword research strategy is to use a spread of different tools to corroborate your findings. Many of these great SEO keyword research tools are free. However, with low-cost tools comes required expertise in how these tools are used.

For example, if you elect to use Google as a keyword research tool, be sure to put your browser window in “Incognito” mode before punching in broad match terms in the search engine to yield their long-tail keyword stems. The Incognito Window allows you to use Google as a user with no collected search preferences in your cookies and cache, making your findings more objective and relevant to your potential buying base. 

Target Keywords with the Right Degree of Competition or “KD”

A common abbreviation for “keyword difficulty,” KD usually falls on a scale of 1-100, and is made available to SEOs on various keyword research platforms. Don’t target product or service-related keywords that are too competitive and that you do not yet have the budget or traction to invest in.

Avoid Keyword Cannibalization

Keyword cannibalization involves 2 or more pages on one website targeting the exact same keyword. This isn’t just confusing for searchers on your website; it makes it difficult for the search engine bots to crawl and index your pages.

In order to avoid this problem, make sure you have an editorial calendar with updated information about the pages you’ve written and the keywords for which you’d like them to rank. If new information emerges about a topic upon which you’ve already published a blog post or landing page for, simply update the page instead of creating a new page covering the same keyword. An additional benefit in avoiding keyword cannibalization is that updating your content into a single page on one topic makes your content longer and more in-depth, enabling website visitors and search engines to view you as an authoritative source on the topic. 

4. Avoid Over-Optimization Like the Plague

Don’t over-optimize your content: While you want search engines to crawl, index, and have the capacity to interpret your pages, creating content as if it is written only for the search engine bots crawling your web pages will hurt the user experience and detract from your organic rankings. Examples of over-optimization include keyword stuffing or directing all internal links to top-level navigation pages on your own website. 

5. Don’t Rely Too Much on AI Content Generators to Improve Your SEO

Furthermore, avoid using AI-generated content for SEO Purposes. Google penalizes AI-generated content, stating explicitly that it’s against their Webmaster guidelines. These guidelines, as the canonized standard after which all search engine ranking factors are modeled, are paramount in establishing a profitable SEO framework for your business. When it comes to AI for SEO copywriting in 2022, work with the tools, but don’t expect them to do the work. 

AI-generated content used to write blogs, articles, and other forms of online SEO copywriting designed to help websites, products, and services rank in the top results of search engines are still leagues beneath what a master SEO copywriter produces, and this is unlikely to change within the next decade, perhaps even longer.

As marketers shoulder greater burdens of responsibility, work longer hours, and are forced to stay abreast of ever-proliferating technologies and tools claiming to simplify marketers’ jobs, it makes sense that even some of the savvier marketers fall prey to the belief that they can hire a cheap AI bot to produce written content that helps them rank in search engines. Visit our blog post on AI content writing tools to learn more about this aspect of SEO. 

Remember, this is just a basic checklist without the more granular and advanced details of practicing SEO. If it all sounds overwhelming, you can hire WordWoven to help: with more than a decade of experience in helping organizations with various SEO tactics and strategies, an investment in SEO with WordWoven is a cost-effective way to ensure results.