Here we'll discuss the next steps in properly setting up your website for proper SEO.

1. Do you have Google Analytics set up?
2. Are you tracking your primary keyword phrase?
3. Is your website crawlable?
4. Is it indexable?
5. Are you targeting the right keyword phrase?
6. Have you already targeted this keyword phrase?
7. Does your website satisfy the identified search intent?
8. Is your primary keyword phrase in the meta title?
9. Is your meta title click worthy?
10. Can you add modifiers to your meta title?

In the last post, we discussed the first 4 steps above.  In this post, we'll cover the next 6 steps.

In step 5 above, we talk about targeting the right keyword.  What makes a keyword phrase "right?"  To determine the Keyword Difficulty (KD), you can use a tool like Ahref's Keyword Explorer tool.  Most websites need to target keyword phrases that have a KD of 50 or less.  Anything higher than that will be very difficult for most websites to be able to compete.

Once you've found a keyword that meets the above qualifications, you want to compare your website against the ranking competitors.  Compile a list of their Domain Rating (DR), Backlinks count, Total Linking Root Domains (export from Ahrefs Keyword Explorer) and each website's Word Count.  You can use a tool like this one to perform a word count.  Now you have a basic roadmap of what you’ll need to do to compete for your target keyword phrase.  Get to work!

In step 6, you need to determine if you're already targeting that keyword on other pages in your website.  It's best to focus on one single page per keyword phrase, and not try to do it on multiple pages within your website.  Just keep improving that one single page that you're using to target a specific keyword phrase.

For step 7, you need to find out if your site is satisfying the keyword's search intent, you must know there are 4 primary categories of search intent:

1. Informational – “What are backlinks”
2. Transactional – “Buying backlinks”
3. Comparison – “Semrush vs Ahrefs”
4. Navigational – “Florida Creative SEO”

Understanding the intent behind your target keyword should dictate how you structure your page.  Depending on the person's search intent, they may not be ready to buy or make a decision on the basics of their search.  Build your page with this in mind.  If your targeted keyword is informational in nature, build your page to provide info, and perhaps add a way to let your visitor submit their info to get more info.

Step 8 is a pretty easy one to figure out.  If your keyword phrase is "buying backlinks," make sure to put it in your page's meta title.  Another good tip is to do some research on pages that are ranking high for your keyword.  Compare their meta titles, and also do a word count to see if there is any correlation on ranking and title tag word counts.

Step 9 is also concerns your page's meta title.  Google uses the words in your title tag to understand your page. There’s another side of meta title tags you need to understand, and that's the Click-Through Rate (CTR).  You can find your website’s CTR performance in Google Search Console when you click on Performance.  You must make your title as click-worthy as possible.  It's one of the easiest ways to get more organic search traffic without creating any new content!

The last step in our post is about adding "modifiers" to your page's meta title, and it's simpler than it sounds.  By adding a modifier to your title, you can snag some additional long tail search traffic that you wouldn't normally get.  For example, by changing your title from "Car repair shop in South Tampa," to "Best car repair shop in South Tampa in 2022," it will still provide the same traffic from the unmodified example, but additional traffic when someone types in more detail, like "best" or the year.

That's it for our FIRST 10 STEPS in our SEO AUDIT, and there are about 70 more steps we take when we build a website for a client, or when we analyze an existing website's SEO.  Please bookmark our website, and follow us on our social media channels for more great tips about websites and SEO.