You want to know a secret? SEO tools are a dime a dozen. Really. Whether you have Yoast SEO, All in One SEO, SEOPress, or any of the other on-site SEO plugins – or whether you have subscribed to SEMRush, Serpstat, Longtail Pro, Ahrefs or any of the other subscription services – the value is not in the tool itself. Just like a quality hammer doesn’t make you a good carpenter, or great pots and pans make you a great chef, or a great camera make you a great photographer.
These are simply tools. To profit from them, you must either invest the time and energy into learning how to use them well, or hire someone who already knows what they’re doing. Winging it can cause you more trouble than you’ve bargained for. Not to mention, these are not inexpensive tools!
What kind of trouble can you find yourself in? Here’s some of what our clients have encountered:
- An SEO plugin creating redirects from one URL to another automatically, which then gets redirected to another URL, resulting in a redirect loop and a page not found error on your website.
- A false sense of accomplishment when the icon goes from red to yellow to green in Yoast SEO because you’ve successfully optimized for a generic word like ‘video’ or ‘success.’ Just because the icon turns green doesn’t mean you’ve made ANY progress.
Real SEO requires strategy, a roadmap and research.
What do you want your business blog post or web page to accomplish? What are people searching for? The intersection of those two questions is the starting point for the SEO for each page.
How do you know whether or not your SEO efforts are gaining you any ground?
That’s where tracking comes in. And that’s more than looking at the Google Analytics report or the Search Console. Again, these are useful tools, but first there’s a learning curve.
What’s the best thing you can do for your on-site SEO?
Stop confusing Google and/or your reader. You confuse Google when
- your content is all over the place,
- there are few, if any links, between similar pages,
- you have the exact same categories as your tags,
- you have 20 categories – each with only one post apiece. Honestly, that confuses your readers too.
But what confuses readers even more is when you write for the search engines and your actual reader struggles to get through your text.
Write to your reader, for the benefit of your reader – on a topic that will benefit your business. Use punctuation and paragraphs and an image or two. Wherever it makes sense to do so, add sub-headings to break up your text. And always add links back to other blog posts or pages on your website.
Bonus tip: It’s not necessary to continually churn out NEW content.
Go back through your old blog posts to see what could be improved or updated. I guarantee you can improve your linking and categorization. If your have dates included in your URL, you’ll need to redirect the old post to the new and improved one. But if your URL doesn’t include dates (as in [yourdomainname.com/blogpost]), simply update the publish date within the post and voila – what was old is now new.
Coming Soon
We’re putting the finishing touches on our new and much improved Zero To Sixty Marketing website. It’s so close to complete and I’m anxious to take it live and share it with you.
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