The Basics of SEO: Conclusion, and What I Said Was Coming (2019 Archive)

Recorded in July 2019 and published as part of a dated historical record. It reflects how search worked then, not current advice.

Why do most SEO plans fail?

Those are a few ideas — a few things we do for some of our clients, and some of the real basics of SEO. We've talked through on-page work, keyword density, H1s, descriptions, calls to action, and then taken it on to social, link building, engagement, reviews — all of those sorts of things.

The hard part — the really hard part — is knowing what to work on. Where do you start? That's often why a lot of SEO plans fail: because there is no plan. The problem is there are absolutely hundreds of things you can work on in SEO; I've just given you a flavour of a few. And you need to allocate an amount of time — an amount you can commit, and you do need to commit on a weekly basis, to work on your site.

If you can say "we're going to put a plan together to increase the rankings on a particular set of keywords, this is the content we're going to build to achieve that, and this is the route we're going to take" — well, that's why most people come to an agency like us. But here's a basic plan for you.

What does a basic SEO plan look like?

If you've got a site at the moment: start with your research. What phrases and keywords am I going to target? Let's call that the keyword bible, like I did earlier. Then use it to see where you currently rank — there are plenty of tools. One we use that I like is SEMrush; it's quite an expensive one, and there are lots of free tools too.

Then: where do we want to be? That's a difficult question — that's where setting realistic expectations comes in. What's the competition per term, per site? And it all has to hang on the end benefit. What's the result? Work backwards. If we achieve all of this, is it going to be worth the effort we put in? Because there's nothing worse than the search volume not being high enough, or getting loads of people to the site on irrelevant search terms with no sales. Does it work?

So let's say we've got our keywords, we've got a reason to do it, and we know that if we do it we're going to make money.

How do you build the content plan and keep the site healthy?

We're going to start on the site with a content plan. What content do I need? What have I got? What can I already utilise? "Oh — we speak to tons of customers, we've got hundreds of testimonials, they're just not on our website." What have you got that you can already use? How can we shortcut what we're going to do?

We're also going to remove any site errors, and that should be something you commit to month in, month out: site speed, broken links, missing alt tags, all of that. It needs to go on all the time, because you need the site health to be — well, we try to aim at 85% at least. I've seen sites at forty or fifty percent, and they've got no hope of ranking whatsoever. Do you have SSL installed? Have you got all your social linked up? Are you posting social, making video, writing blogs?

How much time does SEO honestly take?

At this point you need to decide how much time you're going to dedicate to all of this. Even if you say "this is an hour a month" — say we're going to make some videos every month, three hours a month doing that. How many blogs do we write? Don't just blog for the sake of it — write something interesting. But ideally, if we're going after a serious piece of content, probably eight a month; that might be eight hours minimum. We're then going to look at the keyword density on each of those — probably another hour per blog.

You can start seeing that we're already at somebody's full-time job before we're doing much actual strategy or anything off-site. Providing we're making video, we're going to do subtitles, links — and ideally live; most people won't bother with the live, but this has to be done. Then we're going to share what we make into social. And the most important thing is we want people interacting with it — so we're also going to promote that content. Are we promoting it organically on social, or are we paying? That's PPC.