The task here is to take top-ranking pages for your keyword and look for the dominating type of content among them. The top three ranking pages and SERP features (People Also Ask box, featured snippet) will be most impactful here. To get a quick overview of the ranking difficulty of a keyword, look at the number of unique domains linking the top 10 ranking pages. The more linking domains, the harder it will likely be to rank because backlinks are still one of the most impactful ranking signals for Google.
Low-quality or suspicious links — for example, ones that Google would consider as built deliberately to make it consider a site more authoritative — might reduce your rankings. Add them to make sure your page doesn’t start appearing for irrelevant searches. The alt tag, on the other hand, is the text browsers will display instead of an image for visually impaired visitors or if the image doesn’t load. However, since ALT tag resides in the image code, search engines use it as a relevancy signal as well.
Next, navigate to the “Prospects” tab to see a list of suggested prospects for your link building campaign. Use Semrush’s Link Building Tool to run a winning link building campaign. This tool lets you plan, manage, and execute your link building campaign from a single interface.
Violating Google’s spam policies can lead to a penalty that harms your search visibility. The term “SEO” can also refer to a person, such as a “search engine optimization expert” SEO Anomaly or similar. It’s natural to add links to old blog posts in your new blog posts, but you should also go back into old blog posts and add in links to new posts. If search engines literally can’t find you, none of the rest of your work matters. This chapter shows you how their robots crawl the Internet to find your site and add it to their indexes. Search generates 68% of all web traffic, and first-page Google results earn 27.6% of clicks for relevant searches.
If you’re not quite sure about taking on SEO yourself, consider delegating the work to a team member. If you have a person interested in growth marketing, development, or even web design, this would be a valuable skill to help grow their career. But as I said, getting caught often results in a site being completely wiped out from search listings. Often, they also include a company’s phone number or website address. Now, if you’re still here with me, you’ve just discovered what’s responsible for your site’s success in search.
Best tool for technical SEO
Semrush also offers a suite of other tools that make it the all-in-one companion for on-page SEO. This can fast-track a lot of the key aspects of on-page optimization. Well, it’s 10x easier to hop on a podcast than pitch, write, edit and publish a guest post.
This is super useful for quickly understanding the structured data setup of a competitor without running it through a dedicated schema tool. Or for troubleshooting international SEO issues on a client site. Detailed shows technical SEO elements that may affect a page’s performance, like schema markup and hreflang attributes. I use Detailed when I want to get quick page insights without opening separate tools or tabs. I always integrate Google Analytics (GA4) and Google Search Console (GSC).
Get SEO Insights as You Write
- Once you rank well, you can get consistent organic traffic without paying for visitors.
- Google uses the quantity and quality of links like this as a signal of a website’s authority.
- “White hat SEO” refers to SEO techniques, best practices, and strategies that abide by search engine rule, its primary focus to provide more value to people.
- It also enhances the user experience by providing a clear hierarchy.
Link building is something is something that preoccupies the SEO industry. To give you an idea of how this works, here’s a quick overview of a few popular backlink building techniques. If you’re an Ahrefs user, you can also use the Indentify intents AI feature to see the type of search intent that gets the most traffic. These are important questions to answer before you start creating content because Google evaluates content relevancy based on how well a page serves search intent. SEO works by creating high-quality, relevant content with good UX about things people search for, and then proving to Google it deserves to rank.
As you implement these suggestions, you’ll see green lights next to them. So you can see exactly what you’re doing well, and what you need to improve. Yoast SEO helps you improve your WordPress site’s on-page and technical SEO. While there is a paid option, the free plugin is perfect for a lot of beginner SEO needs.
“This seems to be true even if the websites that are selling backlinks have Google rankings themselves,” Rubright says. However, that’s possible only if you rank for the keywords those people would use when searching. And that’s even if your website appeared at the top of the search results.