A brief introduction to the SEO process (4 steps)

Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the practice of increasing website traffic from natural search results. Here are four general steps in the search engine optimization process:

1. Solve your technical problems-make sure your website is crawable and indexable.
2. Find a target keyword-the theme of your page and the main source of organic traffic.
3. Create an optimized page-both users and Google want useful and interesting content.
4. Build links to the page-links are one of the most important ranking factors.

in this article, I will use some of the SEO strategies used by Ahrefs to grow into a 9-figure SaaS company to explain and demonstrate how this process works.

1. Solving your technical problems well

technical factors will affect your ranking and may even prevent your site from appearing on Google’s search results page.

to rank your content, Google needs:

1. Find and crawl your content-if your content is inaccessible to Google, you won’t have a ranking (probably because Googlebot is not allowed).
2. Index your content-We are talking about the main list of all the pages saved by Google in order to display them for related search queries. If Google believes that some pages are not the main version of the content (see canonicalization for more information), or if Google Robot is blocked, it may not display those pages.

in most cases, unless you specifically instruct Googlebot not to crawl and / or index your site, your page is ready to be displayed on the search engine results page (SERP). Keep in mind that it may take some time before Google indexes your content. The easiest way for

to solve technical SEO problems is to get SEO audit tools and fix any problems they feed back to you. The two tools we recommend for

are Google Search Console and Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (they are free). If you want to monitor your performance on Bing, you can also set up the Bing webmaster tool.

for example, find the sitemap problem in the Ahrefs webmaster tool:

1. opensSite Audit
2. to enter theAll issuesreport, scrolls to theSitemapcategory
3. and clicks on the problem found to see the affected page. You can also see the recommended solution

2. 0. Find a target keyword

in order to get traffic from search engines, you need to create content about people’s search.

, for example, the content on our blog alone brings us about 2.569 million organic visits a month. This is because the content we create is designed to rank keywords with search needs.

this is the role of keyword research tools, such as Ahrefs’s Keywords Explorer. With the help of this tool, you can easily find hundreds or even thousands of keyword ideas.

, for example, enter “SEO”, the main focus of our blog, into Keywords Explorer and you will find more than 395k keyword ideas.

395K keywords may be a little too many, difficult to manage, and may not be suitable for all keywords. Therefore, when determining the priority of keywords, we should consider the following points:

• Search traffic potential-search traffic potential (not to be confused with search volume) tells you how much traffic you are likely to get from a keyword.
• Business potential-A theme with high business potential can turn a large portion of your visitors into customers. The topic of low business potential will make it difficult to reflect your products / services.
• Ranking difficulty-the more backlinks the top web pages have and the higher the awareness of competing brands, the harder your ranking will be.
• Search intention-the reason behind the search. Usually, it’s one of three things: find a specific website, learn something, or buy something.

, here’s an example. One of the keyword research methods we use is to find the search needs of a specific niche or industry in our business area. To do this, we filter keywords that contain the word “for”.

, for example, highlights those that show considerable traffic potential (TP), have no extreme ranking difficulty (KD), and have high business potential for us. It is ideal that keywords in all four cases of

can be selected, but this does not always happen. In most cases, SEO and content marketers need to compromise, for example, by targeting a keyword with high business potential but low traffic potential.

3. Create an optimized page

the content of a page is something that allows Google to “connect” you to the searcher.

the more interesting and useful your content is, the better. This is because high-quality content is what users expect and what search engines need to provide. In fact, Google acknowledges that content is the most important ranking signal. It’s a secret exactly how

Google ranks content. But they actually provide a hint of five things that determine which results a particular search query will display:

• Meaning-how well a page matches the searcher’s expectations.
• Relevance-whether a page contains relevant information, such as words, phrases, or even pictures and videos related to what the searcher is looking for.
• Quality-content also needs to be helpful. To determine the quality of the content, Google will consider factors that occur on the page (for example, E-E-A-T, clear and organized form, freshness) and factors that occur outside the page (backlinks, which we will discuss in more detail later).
• Usability-if your page is the same as your competitor’s page in other ways, Google may assign higher rankings to pages it considers easier to access (for example, mobile-friendly, SSL-guaranteed, fast load).
• Context and settings-Google may customize search results based on users’ search history and their current whereabouts.

, let’s look at an example of optimizing a page for search.

in the case described below, the search intent seems to favor list articles with the keyword “free SEO tool”. Because of this, although we provide free SEO tools, there is little chance of ranking on our product landing page. Therefore, we decided to use a content type that is more in line with the search intention to locate this keyword. It now ranks first, bringing about 13000 organic visits a month.

has many technologies used by SEO and content marketers to follow Google’s guidelines-not much can be explained in this short article. If you want to take some time to learn about them, please watch the video below. Otherwise, let’s move on to the next issue: building links.

added a note. Not all SEO jobs are designed to achieve higher rankings in search results. Some of the optimized elements are not ranking factors, but are visible to users and can increase the chances of the site getting clicks. For example, meta-descriptions, schema tags, and so on.

4. To create related links

you need two types of links: internal links and backlinks. Both are ranking signals, among which backlink is one of the main signals of SEO.

internal links

internal links are links from other pages on the same site, for example, from one article to another on our blog. The main role of

in SEO is to help search robots crawl pages more effectively and pass linked assets from linked pages.

for the above reasons, you may not find an article on our blog without at least one internal link to another article or product landing page.

through internal links, we can create a situation where pages with a large number of backlinks can give newer pages a much-needed boost.

here is an example of interlinking tactics. Include a link to our SEO guide in the blog’s navigation, which automatically creates an internal link from each blog post to the guide to help it achieve higher rankings. The internal backlink report in

Site Explorer shows different articles linked to the SEO guide, some of which come from the navigation of the site.

backlinks

backlinks are links from external websites. They play the role of voting. The more votes you get, the more likely you are to outperform your competitors.

backlinks affect ranking, ranking affects traffic. So, in general, the more backlinks you get, the more organic traffic you can generate. The difficulty with

here is that you don’t have complete control over backlinks. You can earn them naturally (waiting for people to find you and link to you) or build them (asking people to link to you). Let’s look at the problem in more detail.

in the picture below, you can see examples of our case studies, which continue to obtain backlinks in an organic way. Publishing original and unique data is one of the best ways to attract backlinks. The Best Link growth report in

website browsers allows you to see what people like to link and / or the goals of current link-building activities (useful for competitive research).

here is an example of content created specifically for promotional activities. Unlike the previous example, it does not require any original research: 70+SEO statistics. Our process is that

1. studies the most cited SEO statistics in the top articles.
2. looks for and includes their latest version in our article.
3. requires people who link to sites with outdated statistics to link to our articles instead (this is the outreach section).

gets so many backlinks in this article mainly due to outreach activities.

with regard to backlinks, it is important to know that not all links have the same weight.

generally speaking, the best links you can get are “follow” links in the main content, as well as links from relevant, authoritative websites.

if you want to learn more about backlinks and link building, please go to the guidelines listed below.

the good things you need to know before you start

before you enter the process, it’s best to have a realistic expectation of the time and money it will take to successfully do SEO.

when it comes to results, SEO is usually a long process. We know from more than 4,000 respondents that it usually takes 3-6 months. When

talks about the time involved in this process, there are a few things to know: it can take Google from days to weeks for

• to crawl a page (source). Therefore, there seems to be a “natural delay” in SEO, which comes from the technology itself.
• according to our research, only 5.7% of web pages rank in the top 10 (at least one keyword) in less than a year.

as for the cost of SEO, the lowest cost option is to make your own SEO-. All you need is the time to study and experiment and the tools that suit your budget.

in addition, you can consider hiring an organization, a freelancer, or a consultant.

Summary

monitors your results regularly because search engine rankings tend to change. To do this, it’s best to use a tool to track your ranking history and show your rankings with your competitors (for example, see our Rank Tracker).

and, due to changes in rankings, be prepared to review step 3 regularly to improve your content and make more links in step 4. (via ahrefs)