Onsite SEO Checklist: Onpage Guide for Google in 2024

Summary

This video script offers a comprehensive 45-point checklist for maximizing organic traffic on Google through onsite SEO. It explains the difference between onsite and offsite SEO, emphasizing the importance of the former in improving website ranking. The guide covers keyword research, technical SEO, content optimization, internal and external linking strategies, and the impact of website design on mobile user experience and page speed. It also addresses the significance of E-A-T and schema markup, and provides tips on enhancing readability and avoiding over-optimization penalties.

Takeaways

• 🚦 Onsite SEO is crucial for website ranking, alongside offsite SEO like backlinks.
• 📈 The 'Evergreen Onsite SEO Guide' is a constantly updated resource for SEO professionals.
• 🔍 Keyword research is the foundation of onsite SEO, guiding content creation and optimization.
• 🛠️ Technical SEO involves fixing issues that affect website performance and search engine indexing.
• 🌐 Ensure website mobile-friendliness and fast load times for optimal user experience and search rankings.
• 📝 Quality content should match search intent and be easily understood by Google's natural language processing algorithms.
• 🏆 The 'Three Kings' (title, H1, URL) are critical elements for on-page optimization.
• 🔗 Internal and external linking strategies can enhance SEO, but must be natural and relevant.
• 📊 Use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console for tracking and improving website performance.
• 🛑 Avoid over-optimization and spammy links to maintain a good standing with search engines.
• 💡 Schema markup and other structured data can help search engines better understand and display content.

Q & A

What is the main focus of the 'Evergreen Onsite SEO Guide'?

The 'Evergreen Onsite SEO Guide' focuses on providing a comprehensive and constantly updated playbook for onsite optimization, detailing strategies and techniques to maximize organic traffic on Google in response to algorithm changes.

What are the two main components of SEO according to the guide?

The two main components of SEO are onsite SEO (also known as OnPage SEO), which includes everything done on the website to improve its ranking, and offsite SEO, which involves actions taken outside the website to increase traffic, primarily through link building.

Why is onsite SEO considered important in the context of SEO?

Onsite SEO is important because it is likened to a car in a race to the top of Google. Without a well-optimized website, even the best backlinks (fuel) cannot effectively improve the site's ranking and traffic.

What does Google look for in terms of content quality?

Google, as a robot, looks for specific signals to determine content quality rather than human-like absorption and understanding of content. It seeks certain indicators that a content is good enough for higher rankings.

What are the key onsite SEO factors mentioned in the guide?

The key onsite SEO factors include keyword optimization, copywriting, design and user experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, and conversion optimization.

How can you determine if your article is targeting keywords within your difficulty range?

You can determine this by assessing your website's domain authority and comparing it with similar niche websites. Using a content gap tool with these websites can reveal keywords that they rank for and that you could potentially outrank.

What is the purpose of a rank tracker in SEO?

A rank tracker is used to monitor your keyword rankings over time, allowing you to measure your progress and manage your SEO strategies effectively.

What are some technical SEO issues that Google Search Console (GSC) can help identify?

GSC can help identify issues such as Google manual action penalties, index coverage issues, 404 errors, schema markup errors, mobile experience problems, and website speed issues.

How can you ensure that your webpage is crawlable by Google?

You can ensure crawlability by using a tool like httpstatus.io and checking that your URL returns a status code 200, which indicates that Google can access your page.

What is the significance of the 'three kings' in onsite SEO?

The 'three kings' refer to the title, H1 (heading title), and URL, which are the three most influential elements for onsite SEO when optimized correctly, as they significantly impact rankings and user experience.

How does the structure of headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.) contribute to SEO?

A proper heading structure contributes to SEO by providing a semantic outline that makes it easier for Google to understand the content's main topic and subtopics, thus improving the content's relevance and clarity.

Outlines

00:00

📈 Introduction to Onsite SEO and Its Importance

The video introduces an extensive 45-point checklist for maximizing organic traffic on Google, building on the 'Evergreen Onsite SEO Guide' which has been widely adopted by SEO professionals. The guide is kept up-to-date with Google's algorithm changes. The video aims to clarify what onsite SEO is, distinguishing it from offsite SEO, and emphasizes the critical role of onsite SEO in the competitive landscape of search engine rankings. It also addresses common misconceptions about onsite SEO and outlines the key components that truly influence rankings, such as keyword optimization, copywriting, design, user experience, and building trust and authority.

05:00

🔍 Keyword Research and Preparation

This section delves into the first set of onsite SEO checks, focusing on keyword research. It explains the importance of targeting the right keywords and avoiding 'keyword cannibalization'. The video suggests ensuring content aligns with the main topic of the website to maintain 'topical authority'. It also discusses the importance of tracking keyword rankings and traffic using tools like Serpfox and Google Analytics. The segment highlights the significance of technical SEO and introduces Google Search Console as a tool for identifying and resolving technical issues that can impact rankings.

10:01

🛠️ Technical SEO and Optimization

The paragraph discusses the technical aspects of SEO, emphasizing the need to make webpages crawlable and indexable by Google. It provides practical steps for checking if a webpage is accessible and indexed, and suggests using tools like httpstatus.io and Google's URL inspection tool. The video also covers the importance of having an SSL certificate for secure browsing. It then transitions into optimizing the 'three kings' of SEO: title, H1, and URL, providing specific rules and examples for each element to ensure they are effectively keyword-optimized.

15:01

📝 Content Optimization and Structure

This segment focuses on the optimization of content, starting with the meta description and its influence on click-through rates. It explains that while meta descriptions don't directly affect rankings, they can impact how often users click on a search result. The video then discusses the importance of a clear heading structure, using H1, H2, and H3 tags to outline content in a way that's easy for Google to understand. It suggests using competitor analysis and Google's 'People also ask' feature to inform the content outline and FAQ sections. The paragraph also touches on the significance of word count, search intent, and natural language processing (NLP) in content creation.

20:02

🎨 Enhancing Content Quality and Readability

The video script emphasizes the importance of high-quality, well-researched, and up-to-date content. It advises against lengthy introductions and recommends breaking up content into digestible paragraphs. The script also highlights the need for a high HTML to text ratio, the use of high-quality and unique images, and the optimization of media elements like videos. Additionally, it stresses the importance of grammar and spelling, readability, and the use of entities to satisfy Google's E-A-T requirements. The paragraph concludes with advice on authorship and the use of schema markup to enhance content understanding for Google.

25:03

🔗 Link Optimization and User Experience

The final paragraph discusses the intricacies of internal and external linking, emphasizing the need for relevant and varied anchor text to avoid over-optimization. It advises on the proper use of internal links to enhance crawlability and the importance of mobile-friendliness. The video also covers the significance of outbound links, the need for 'nofollow' tags on affiliate links, and the avoidance of broken links. It addresses the impact of spammy inbound links and the importance of maintaining a natural link profile. The script concludes with a discussion on the balance between monetization and user experience, cautioning against intrusive pop-ups and excessive ads.

Keywords

💡Onsite SEO

Onsite SEO, also known as OnPage SEO, refers to the optimization of various elements within a website to improve its ranking on search engines like Google. It encompasses content creation, design, technical setup, and ensuring that the website is search engine friendly. In the context of the video, onsite SEO is likened to a car in a race, where the car's quality and setup determine how high it can rank, thus how visible it is to users on search engines.

💡Keyword Research

Keyword research is the process of identifying and analyzing search phrases that users enter into search engines. It is a foundational aspect of SEO and is used to guide content creation. The video script highlights the importance of optimizing content for specific keywords to attract organic traffic. It also warns against 'keyword cannibalization', where a website has multiple pages targeting the same keywords, which can confuse search engines and lead to lower rankings.

💡Technical SEO

Technical SEO involves the use of various techniques and tools to improve a website's technical aspects that impact its search engine rankings. This includes website speed, mobile optimization, indexing, and ensuring that the website is accessible and crawlable by search engines. The video emphasizes the importance of fixing technical SEO issues as they can lead to quick improvements in rankings.

💡Content Optimization

Content optimization is the process of enhancing web content to increase its relevance and visibility to search engines. This involves keyword usage, readability, and structuring content in a way that is easily understood by both users and search engine algorithms. The video script provides guidelines for optimizing titles, H1 tags, URLs, and meta descriptions, as well as ensuring that content is well-researched and matches the search intent.

💡E-A-T

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These are Google's criteria for evaluating the quality of a website's content. Expertise refers to the level of knowledge and understanding demonstrated in the content, Authoritativeness pertains to the credibility of the source, and Trustworthiness is about the accuracy and reliability of the information provided. The video emphasizes the importance of satisfying Google's E-A-T requirements to improve rankings.

💡Schema Markup

Schema Markup is a form of structured data that helps search engines understand the content of a webpage more effectively. By adding schema to a website, publishers can provide search engines with additional information about their content, which can enhance how it appears in search results. The video script discusses the use of schema markup to satisfy the E-A-T requirements and make it easier for Google to understand the content's context.

💡Mobile Optimization

Mobile optimization refers to the process of designing and coding a website to ensure that it is accessible and user-friendly on mobile devices. With the increasing number of searches being conducted on mobile, Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites in its rankings. The video script stresses the importance of a website's mobile compatibility, including fast load times and a responsive design.

💡Internal Linking

Internal linking is the practice of linking different pages within the same website to each other. This helps search engines discover and index more pages on the site and can also pass on 'page rank' or link equity to other pages, potentially improving their rankings. The video script provides guidelines for internal linking, such as ensuring relevance and prioritizing pages that the site owner wants to rank higher.

💡Outbound Links

Outbound links are links from a website that lead to external websites. Including outbound links can enrich the content of a webpage by providing sources for the information presented and can also be seen as a best practice by Google. The video script advises including outbound links to enhance content and, if they are affiliate links, to ensure they are marked as 'nofollow' and open in a new window.

💡Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that measure the user experience of a website, focusing on aspects like loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability. Google considers these vitals as ranking factors, emphasizing the importance of a fast, responsive, and stable website experience. The video script mentions using tools like Chrome's Lighthouse to assess and improve core web vitals.

Highlights

The video provides a 45-point checklist for maximizing organic traffic on Google.

The 'Evergreen Onsite SEO Guide' is a constantly updated resource for onsite optimization.

Onsite SEO involves optimizing your website's content, design, and technical setup for higher Google rankings.

Offsite SEO focuses on link building and increasing traffic through backlinks from other sites.

SEO is likened to a race where onsite SEO is the car and backlinks are the fuel.

Google, as a robot, looks for specific signals to determine content quality, not the author's nobility.

Onsite SEO includes keyword optimization, copywriting, design, user experience, and building trust and conversion.

The video's checklist can guide the creation of new content or the improvement of existing content.

Keyword research is the first step in onsite SEO, akin to having a map to the destination.

Avoid 'keyword cannibalization' by not writing multiple articles on the same topic within the same website.

Focus on 'topical authority' by consistently writing about a specific topic to establish expertise.

Target keywords within your difficulty range based on your site's authority and backlink profile.

Use tools like Serpfox and AccuRanker for tracking keyword rankings and Google Analytics for traffic analysis.

Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool that acts as a technical health dashboard for your website.

Ensure your webpage is crawlable and indexable by Google to be considered for rankings.

Optimize the 'three kings' of onsite SEO: title, H1, and URL for maximum impact on rankings.

Meta descriptions do not improve rankings but can influence click-through rates from search results.

Heading structure with H2s and H3s helps Google understand the content's main topic and subtopics.

Content should match the search intent and provide the type of information or action Google expects for a given keyword.

Write content that is easily understood by Google's natural language processing algorithm for better rankings.

Transcripts

- In this video,

you're gonna get a 45 point checklist of everything you need

in order to maximize your organic traffic on Google.

In 2014, I wrote the "Evergreen Onsite SEO Guide",

an always up to date,

definitive playbook on onsite optimization

that's been downloaded over 143,000 times

by search engine optimization professionals worldwide.

It's called the "Evergreen Onsite SEO Guide"

because it's constantly being updated

in response to Google algorithm changes.

And in this video, I'm gonna lay out the whole guide for you

in checklist format.

Plus I've added in a ton of new key onsite SEO changes

that are critical in today's Google environment.

But before we get started, let's answer the question,

what is onsite SEO?

To simplify things, SEO, search engine optimization

can be broken down into two halves.

On one side,

we have onsite SEO, also known as OnPage SEO.

This is everything you do to your website

in order to get it to rank higher on Google.

For example, your content, your design,

and your technical setup.

This all falls under onsite SEO.

On the other side, we have offsite SEO.

This is as you guessed, everything you do off your website

to increase Google traffic.

This mainly boils down to link building,

getting other sites on the internet

to backlink to your site.

Now, why is onsite SEO important?

Oh boy, think of it like this,

SEO's like a competitive race

between people trying to get to the top of Google.

In this race, your onsite SEO,

your website itself is your car, backlinks are the fuel,

fuel is important,

but even if you have the best gas on the planet,

if you have a crappy car,

you're not gonna be going anywhere.

The problem is there's a huge misconception in the industry

on what onsite SEO actually is.

Some people think that it means quality content.

And that's no surprise, according to Google,

there's over a 190 million articles

talking about the importance of quality content in SEO.

But take a step back and think about that,

is Google a human?

Can it really read,

digest and absorb content like a human would?

How does it even figure out what quality is?

The truth of the matter is that Google is a robot

and it's looking for certain signals

to figure out if content is good enough.

And trust me,

being written by a noble author is not one of 'em.

It also keeps them on your pages longer,

which is a ranking factor in itself, but it's a small one.

I'm gonna show you the onsite ranking factors

that really matter.

Onsite SEO includes keyword optimization,

copywriting, design and user experience, expertise,

authoritativeness and trust, and conversion.

It's the intersection of these facets

that gets you to the top of Google, but at the same time,

keeps your readers on your pages longer by building trust,

which ultimately encourages them to convert

so your website's goals are met.

That's what this video's checklist is all about.

Now bear in mind,

this video's checklist can be used in two ways,

if you're about to write a new piece of content,

you're in a perfect position as this onsite checklist

will steer you in the right direction.

Or if you've already written an article and are wondering

what you can do to improve its traffic,

here's where you figure that out.

Now, before we get started,

there's one thing that you can help me figure out,

it's how to get this like button to change colors.

With the simple tap of your finger,

you can help this video reach new people,

which will in turn,

get more light button taps and the cycle will continue.

Plus you get digital confetti

(soft cheering) and you can

complain about that.

Thanks.

The first set of onsite SEO checks

falls under the umbrella of keyword research.

A keyword is another word for a search phrase.

For example, if you search for the phrase,

"how to shave a cat",

then how to shave a cat is your keyword.

Pretty weird one with that.

Every piece of content should be optimized

for a particular set of keywords.

Going back to our car race (indistinct),

keyword research

is like having a map to your destination.

If you don't have a keyword plan,

then you're just writing

and praying for the random chance to get traffic,

which happens never.

The first thing you wanna check is,

has your article been written about before on your website?

There's this concept called "keyword cannibalization".

Google does not like it when the same website

tries to write an article on the same topic more than once.

Otherwise you'd Google something like,

"does Justin Bieber shave his chest?"

And you'd see Wikipedia for every single answer.

In the event you do actually write on the same topic twice,

the articles compete against each other

and none of them will perform.

So don't do that.

No, sometimes this happens by accident.

You write two articles

that are on completely different topics,

but Google thinks they're the same by accident.

There's a protocol for getting unstuck

from keyword cannibalization

in the downloadable onsite SEO guide,

so I left a link in the description so you can grab it.

Next, does your article

fall within the main topic of your blog?

If your website is about surfing

and you write a new article about surfing, that's great.

Google likely thinks your site is relevant to surfing,

so your new article should do well.

But if you decide to randomly write

an article about scuba diving on your surfing blog,

don't expect it to perform.

There's a concept called "topical authority".

The more you write about a topic,

Google starts to think you're an authority on that topic.

So make sure you're always focusing

on one topic at a time on your website.

Your articles perform much better if they're in your lane.

Next on the list is your article targeting keywords

within your difficulty range?

There's two main factors

that determine what kind of keywords you can conquer.

The first is the amount of topical authority

you have on a subject.

If you already have a mega blog on surfing,

you can tackle the hardest surfing keywords on the planet.

The second is your backlink authority.

The more links you have to your website,

the better it will do, period.

There's various tools out there that will attempt to assign

a difficulty score to keywords.

To be straightforward, they're all rubbish.

(loud thump)

(screen swoosh)

Here's a direct way to find keywords

that you can definitely rank for,

toss your website into a tool like HS

to find out what its domain authority is,

also known as domain rating or DR.

This example website's DR is 41.

Now find three other websites in the same niche

with less domain rating

and plug it into the content gap tool.

This is gonna give you a list of keywords

that these other weaker websites rank for,

that you easily could.

Nice.

The next checklist category we'll visit

is the preparation category.

Now that you got your map, your keyword research,

let's start prepping for the trip.

Make sure you track your keyword rankings in a rank tracker.

Business guru, Peter Drucker said,

"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it."

A rank tracker will show you your progress over time

for a given keyword.

Without tracking, how are you supposed to figure out

if you're doing the right things or not?

My favorite rank tracker for beginners is Serpfox,

which gives you 10 free keywords to start with.

Once you level up, you can use AccuRanker.

The link in the description gives you a free 14 day trial,

and by using it, you help support the channel.

After that, you wanna start tracking your traffic,

and the best tool for that is Google's own free tool,

Google Analytics.

Install Analytics by going to analytics.google.com

and following the steps to connect it to your site.

You'll then get a deep dive into all your traffic stats

so you can make sure the actions you're taking

are getting you to the top of Google.

Next we move on to the technical SEO category.

I always recommend

prioritizing the discovery of technical issues first.

Finding technical SEO problems can be a good thing

because when you solve them,

it makes a quick and profound difference in your rankings.

The best place to find technical SEO issues

is Google Search console also known as GSC.

GSC is another free Google tool,

which basically acts as a technical health dashboard

for your website.

You know when you take your car to the shop

and they plug it into a diagnostic computer?

It's like the same thing.

Now the list of issues that GSC checks for is quite long,

but some of the ones you wanna watch out for are,

Google manual action penalties, index coverage issues,

404 errors, schema markup errors,

which we'll get to later, mobile experience problems,

we'll also get to that later and website speed issues.

You know what?

We'll get to all this stuff later.

Next, you wanna make sure your webpage is crawlable.

In other words, is it possible for Google

to even find your page in the first place?

Take your URL URL and plug it into the free tool,

httpstatus.io.

You're looking for a status code 200,

which means everything's cool, Google can access your page.

Now that you know Google can find your content,

make sure they can index it as well.

Oh no, not more technical jargon.

No worries,

indexing means that Google has not only found your page,

but it's added to its algorithm

and it's counting your page in the rankings.

To figure out if your page is index,

go to the Google search bar, type "site:", then your URL.

You should see a result come up like this.

If you don't, it means your page isn't indexed,

it doesn't exist to Google.

If you're not indexed,

here's a list of things you should check,

make sure you don't have this

freaking discouraged search engines

from indexing WordPress setting turned on,

that will completely block your site from being indexed.

Make sure you've actually published your article

and it's not in draft mode.

Make sure your article is in your site map.

Check your HTML

and make sure you don't have a no index tag set.

The GSE URL inspection tool will tell you as well,

and make sure you're not blocking the page from indexing

in the "robots.txt" file.

After you checked all that,

use the URL inspection tool again to request indexing.

The last technical check you'll wanna do

is make sure you have an SSL certificate

set up properly on your site.

You'll know it's set up correct

if you see a padlock next to your URL

when you load it in Chrome.

A handy command that you should add to your mental archive

is to run a site colon, domain name minus "inurl:https".

This is gonna tell you what non-secured pages

are still indexed by Google, which is a bad thing.

The easiest place to get an SSL certificate

is through your registrar,

the place where you registered your domain.

Now it's time to check how well your article is optimized

by looking at the three kings,

that is your title, H1 and URL.

I call them the three kings because of the three spots

that have the highest chance of influencing rankings

when optimized properly.

To check your three kings,

have your keyword research on hand.

I'll walk you through the process by using my keyword

research for the term "diy vitamin c serum",

make sure it's sorted by high search volume like I have it.

Let's start with title optimization.

Your title is what's displayed as the clickable link

on Google's result page, and as you can imagine,

it can influence your click through rate

if it's written well.

You fill it out with your typical SEO plugin,

like all in one or Yoast. (swoosh)

Here's the rules for creating a perfectly optimized title,

try to get each single word of the top phrases in there.

Keep the top phrase together and towards the front.

Don't repeat any words,

this just creates unnecessary over optimization.

Keep it about 65 characters.

And if there's space at the end,

you can add some click bait,

but prioritize keywords unless you're on page one of Google.

Oh yeah, and ideally you only want one H1 per page.

I'll talk more on this later.

So for this DIY vitamin C serum keyword research,

I'd use this title tag.

Notice how each of the rules was followed.

Next, we have the H1, also known as the "heading title".

The H one is typically the large font title

that is displayed at the top of your article.

The great thing about optimizing H1's

is that it's super easy.

You simply copy the same thing you use for your title tag.

It used to be the case

where you'd want these to be different,

so you could cover more keyword area, so to speak.

But ever since Google started rewriting titles,

I've changed my advice.

Back in 2021, Google started rewriting titles

to what they think is a better version of it.

A lot of the time, they don't do a good job

which can affect your click through rate.

When you make your H1 the same as your title,

the chances they rewrite it are greatly reduced.

The last of the three kings is your URL.

The URL is the most impactful of the three kings

so make sure you optimize it carefully.

Here's your rules, like with the title,

get the single words from the top keywords into it.

Don't repeat words again and make it short and sweet.

A maximum of three to four words.

For this set of keyword research,

I'd make the following URL,

"website.com/diy-vitamin-c-serum".

A little side note of advice,

if your URL isn't optimized properly,

seriously don't bother changing it

unless it's absolutely terrible.

Changing URL structures after they're created

can do more harm than good.

For more examples of three kings optimization,

make sure to download the guide.

Next on the checklist,

we have meta description optimization.

Your meta description

is what's displayed here at the bottom of the search result.

And just like with the title,

you fill it out using your SEO plugin, like all in one.

Now despite popular belief,

putting keywords in your meta-description

does not improve rankings

(crowd cheering)

That said your meta description does influence

how many clicks you get from the search result.

Here's your meta description optimization rules,

add your keywords and Google will bold them,

which will draw eyes and clicks.

You can even use capitalization

to draw the eye to trigger words,

be persuasive, inspire curiosity,

and lastly, keep it to about 156 characters.

Here's what I'd use for the meta description

for the DIY vitamin C serum article,

notice a cliffhanger which encourages people to click.

Now we move on to checking one of the most important items

on the onsite checklist, which is the heading structure.

You already know what the H1 is,

I'll explain the H2's and the H3's and so forth.

Google likes your content to follow an outline.

Your main topic is the H1 here at the top.

And that main topic is broken down into H2's,

which are the subtopics,

and those subtopics are broken down into H3's,

which are the sub, subtopics.

Similar to how you might have created an outline

for an essay in grade school.

This kind of semantics structure makes it really easy

for Google to figure out what your content is about,

and if you're addressing all the subtopics

that are required to answer the main question.

As with this example here,

you can't write an article about losing belly fat,

unless you talk about exercise.

But where do you actually figure out the ideal outline

structure for your content?

From your competitors.

Open them up one by one

and look at their heading structures.

This Healthline article says

you should also mention eating fiber

in your belly fat article.

So add that to your outline.

You can use a free tool like the detailed SEO plugin

to download all the H2's, H3's in one shot.

Another essential item for your heading structure

is an FAQ section.

Google your keyword

and go down to the "People also ask" section

and start clicking around

to get some awesome ideas for an H2 FAQ section.

And it's H3 question and answers.

And there's another free tool called SEO Minion

that can download "people also ask questions"

for you in one shot too.

(swoosh) Now we get into

the meat and potatoes of the checklist,

which focuses on your actual content.

First, if you wanna check the word length of your article.

Old SEO common practice used to preach that longer articles

will always win on Google.

That advice is outdated.

Google knows that an article on how to tie your shoes

doesn't need to be 10,000 words.

To determine the target word count for your article,

Google your keyword,

and take the average word length of the top articles.

Still not convinced that word count matters?

Check out my video where I deleted 1000 words

from an article and it went to number one on Google.

Next, you wanna check if you got the search intent correct.

There's basically four different types of searches,

informational search queries

represent when people are just looking for information,

such as how to guides on how to do this or that,

like how to tie your shoes.

Then we have navigational type queries like Twitter login

or Matt Diggity contact.

Then transactional,

like buy crypto online or car insurance quotes.

And lastly, comparative,

such as what is the best crypto exchange

or Coinbase review.

Depending on your keyword.

Google's expecting a different type of content.

If you get it wrong, you will not perform well.

For example,

if you Google the keyword "best wireless router",

all these articles are listicals listing out router reviews.

If you don't make your content the same

and match the search intent, you will not rank.

Another example, if you wanted to rank for buy CBD oil,

Google is expecting to see eCommerce pages.

Your content needs to be eCommerce format as well.

Google your keyword

and match what's already ranking on page one.

Next, you wanna make sure you're making Google's

natural language processing algorithm happy,

also known as NLP.

According to IBM,

NLP refers to the branch of computer science and AI

that gives computers the ability to understand text

in the same way humans can.

So basically it's Google's way of reading your content.

This is an extremely difficult challenge for Google,

as you can imagine.

So what you wanna do is write content

that is super easy for Google to understand,

and they'll reward you for it.

Make sure that somewhere in your content,

you echo back the main search query.

Add the word "is" then give your answer.

If there's any units associated with the answer,

tack them on two.

So for the search query,

"what's the best temperature to brew beer?"

Have a sentence like this in your content,

"the best temperature to brew beer is 60 degrees Fahrenheit"

period.

That makes it extremely easy

for Google to know that you answer the question.

And when you make life easy for Google,

they make life easy for you.

In fact, I use this tactic

and they gave me the number one featured snippet ranking

for the keyboard organic SEO services.

Next, are you using Google synonyms in your content?

Watch what happens when I search for the phrase,

"how to sell an automobile online?"

See how Google bolds the words "car" and "vehicle"?

This is Google's way of saying

that these words all mean the same thing as automobile.

So sprinkle them in your content for some extra Google love.

After that, make sure your content is well researched.

Sure, I showed you how to research your competition

to figure out your heading outline, but there's more to it.

If you're writing an article

on whey protein versus pea protein,

you should actually know the research behind it,

or at least know where to find that information

so you can add it to your content.

Similarly, is the information in your content fresh

and up to date?

Google's Search Quality Raters Guidelines

stresses content freshness multiple times.

Periodically revisit your content

and update anything that's become aged or inaccurate.

Next, I got a bunch of checks for you

that have to do with copy.

How well your content is written and displayed

will keep your readers on your page longer.

Plus more importantly, it will get them to convert

to whatever your article's goals are,

such as signing up for an email list or buying a product.

You should have a strong introduction paragraph

that hooks the reader.

If someone Googles, "what is the best juicer?"

Don't start off with something like,

"juicers are incredible machines

that allow you to extract juice from fruits."

They already know what a juicer is,

they wanna know which one is best.

So get to the point.

Instead, talk about the amount of research you've done,

how many juicers you've reviewed

and how one of them stands above and beyond the rest.

Do you see how much more interesting that hook is?

Next, you wanna avoid walls of text.

This is a wall of text, an intimidating block of content

that no one in the right mind is excited to read.

Instead, break up your content into bitesize

one to three sentence paragraphs.

This article on writing readable paragraphs

delivers it perfectly.

You also want to have a high HTML versus text ratio.

This means that you have a lot of decorative elements

on the page in comparison to the amount of text.

Check out my guide on content for conversion.

Notice how there's lists that break up the content, images,

large text callouts, there's always something on the screen

that'll keep the eye entertained.

Speaking of images,

you wanna make sure they're optimized as well.

First and foremost, use high quality images.

Don't skimp out on grainy images

that will turn off your reader.

Also when you can, create unique images,

maybe that requires you to hire a designer

to create unique graphics,

or maybe you need to take some photos on your own.

Unique images go a long way

in establishing credibility for your brand.

You also wanna pre size your images

before adding them to your page.

If you have huge 20,000 pixel images

that you fully load on the page, but shrink down later,

that's gonna kill your page load speed,

which is something we're gonna talk about later.

Lastly, remember to fill out your alt tags.

You can find this in your WordPress settings

when uploading an image.

I always set my alt tags

to describe whatever's in the photo.

The actual use of the alt tag is used by screen readers

to describe images to blind people

who are visiting a webpage.

So a real description of the image is best.

If it's an image of a kid with a baseball,

then kid with a baseball is your alt tag.

Another media format not to be ignored is video.

Adding video to your content

will increase the amount of rich media on your page,

which Google likes,

but it'll also keep people on your page longer,

which Google likes even more.

There's tons of video formats out there,

but the best to embed is YouTube, Google's baby.

Just copy the embed code for many YouTube video

and plunk it down in your WordPress editor

and you're good to go.

Next, you wanna bust out the high school teacher in you

and check your article for grammar and spelling mistakes.

It's never been admitted by Google.

That grammar and spelling are ranking factors,

but you know from common sense that it's important to users.

You're likely to get more people leaving your page

if it's chock full of grammar mistakes,

and time on page is a ranking factor.

If you want a tool

to help with your grammar and spelling checks,

Grammarly is the industry standard.

But free Google Docs isn't bad either.

Next,

you want your content to be readable by eighth graders.

Seriously, throw away your fancy Harvard vocabulary,

it's not welcome here.

It's all about making your content readable

to as many people as possible.

If your readers can't understand what you're talking about,

they're gonna leave.

Choose from a variety of free

Flesch-Kincaid readability tools

to see how your content stacks up.

Next is time to optimize your content for entities.

What is this fancy word, "entities"?

Google's natural language processing algorithms

breakdown content into entities.

Think of them as the nouns, the people, places,

and things of your content.

If you're writing a piece of content on DUI law,

Google' expecting to see certain words coming up

in your content, words like court, trials, suspension,

and they're expecting

to see them come up in certain frequencies in your content.

Another term for this is "keyword density".

Here's a story,

I had a website that ranked number one on Google

for how to brew beer.

You had a ton of traffic for this keyword,

but for some reason,

I ranked number 60 for how to make beer.

How could that be possible?

You can't make beer without brewing it,

you can't brew beer without making it.

They're one in the same.

When I loaded my article

on the content optimization tool surfer,

it told me that I'd written the word "make" on the page 300%

more than the other sites on page one.

I was outside the norm

of what Google expected to see for this entity.

Once I fixed it, I went straight to number one.

Definitely check out Surfer,

save my more times than I can count next.

Now that your content is written,

it's time to make sure Google knows who wrote it.

It's time to satisfy Google's E-A-T requirement.

E-A-T is an acronym.

The E part,

expertise requires your content to be above and beyond

typical information that people can find on the subject.

A, authority requires your content

to be created by a credible source.

And T, trust requires

that content should be factually correct

and backed up by external sources.

Now it's pretty obvious that Google

isn't gonna break into the UC Berkeley archives

to figure out if your author went to school there,

but what they can easily check for

is a complete lack of authorship on your site.

Here's what you should do,

if you have a blog section on your website,

make sure to include who wrote each article with a byline.

Add a short author bio

to any informational articles on your site,

including evidence of the author's expertise

within the subject, such as qualifications,

credentials, et cetera.

Add links to their social media profiles

and make sure to include all the stuff,

plus contact information on the about page of your website.

Remember when we talked about,

if you make life easy for Google,

they make life easier for you?

Google loves when you do this

by adding schema markup to your website.

What is schema?

Schema is code that you put on your webpage

that makes it super easy for Google to figure out

exactly what your content is about.

If you write content that's a how-to guide,

then you just tell Google straight up,

this is a how-to guide.

You can also add review stars to your articles,

which display in the search result as well.

But at the very least, you wanna add author schema,

which will help satisfy the whole E-A-T requirement.

To get started with schema,

use Merkle Schema Markup Generator.

Open it up and start filling the stuff out.

The title of your article, the author, all of it.

You'll see your schema code

getting generated here on the right.

When you're done, copy it to your clipboard.

Then you simply paste it into the HTML editor

of your WordPress page.

Make sure to check for errors

using Google's free structure data testing tool.

Over 50% of global search traffic is on mobile devices.

So for Google,

it's extremely important that your website loads fast.

My favorite tool to test load speeds is Pingdom.

Ideally,

you're shooting for a load time faster than two seconds.

Anything longer than four seconds

is an issue that you wanna get fixed.

Some of the checks to improve your load time include,

presizing images as we discussed before,

setting up a content delivery network,

remove any extra JavaScript, improving your host.

If you want someone to take care of this for you,

I recommend WP Speed Fix,

use coupon code dignity, 10 for $10 off.

Along the same lines as page speed,

you need to look at your core web vitals.

To check your core web vitals,

you can use Chrome's free Lighthouse tool.

Open up your webpage and right click inspect,

or Ctrl + Shift + I.

Then find the Lighthouse tab and the menus.

Make sure performance and mobile are selected,

then generate report.

Here's what your report looks like,

you'll want a "First Contentful Paint"

in less than 2.5 seconds,

time to interactive, less than 100 milliseconds

and accumulative layout shift, less than 0.1.

I've left a link in the description

to a full video on core web vitals.

Check it out after you finish here.

Next, you wanna take a look at

how your website appears on mobile devices.

As you know already,

mobile search is very important to Google.

Run your website through Google's mobile friendly test tool.

It's gonna let you know if you have any issues

that you need to fix, but don't stop there,

load up your site on a smartphone and navigate around.

Do you see images bleeding off the page,

are fonts overlapping each other?

Your website needs to look as good on mobile

as it does on desktop.

You can also load your website in Chrome,

right click "Inspect",

and then select various devices to simulate your website on.

For our next category, we're gonna look at internal links.

These are the links you have going

between various pages on your website.

Make sure that your page has a crawl depth

no greater than three.

Huh?

The way Google finds pages on the internet

is by crawling through links one by one.

You wanna make sure that the page you're auditing

is no more than three jumps away from your homepage.

You can use various tools

like the free version of Screaming Frog

to check your site in bulk.

How do you figure out which pages should link to each other?

I generally use two simple rules for internal links,

rule number one,

link to pages that are relevant to each other.

If you wanna link your protein powder page

to a page on muscle gain, that makes sense,

but don't link a protein powder page to golf content.

Rule number two, link to pages that you wanna rank,

or should I say,

link more to pages that you wanna rank more.

When you link from one page to another,

you're sending what Google likes to call

"page rank" to the receiving page.

The relevance in link authority that one page gathers

can send that sweet Google love to another page

just by linking to it.

So make sure that your priority pages

are linked to from relevant content.

There's also various interlinking configurations

that you can use, such as the top down recycle,

the reverse silo and the serial silo.

To learn more about internal linking,

check out my video on SEO silos after you finish this video.

How about the anchor text

that you use in your internal links?

Are there any rules here?

There certainly are.

Anchor text is a highlighted text

that creates a link from one page to another.

If you have an article trying

to rank for something like best wireless router,

do not make every link go into this page

have the same anchor text, "best wireless router".

This is called over optimization.

Instead you can indeed use keyword-rich anchor text,

but vary it up, "recommended router, wifi router.

My favorite wireless router", et cetera.

I have a specific ratio I use

for internal anchor text optimization

in my downloadable guide.

Next, let's take a look at the outbound links category.

That is links

that are going from your articles to other websites.

Make sure to include outbound links to other sites

to enrich your content.

If you reference another website's data in your content,

it's not only polite, but you get a better result on Google

if you provide a link to your reference.

Many SEOs debate if this is a ranking factor or not,

I encourage skeptics to actually run their own SEO test

and let data do the talking.

Like this single variable study from Reboot

on outbound links.

If you have outbound affiliate links on your site,

you have two things to check off your list,

first make sure they're marked as no follow

with the "rel=nofollow" tag, and second,

make sure they open in a new window with a target blank tag.

Not only is nofollow the recommendation from Google,

but I've seen massive gains at my agency

by just nofollowing all the affiliate links

on new client sites.

Next, make sure you have no broken outbound links.

That is links that are going out to places

that don't exist anymore.

You can use the Ahrefs free broken link checker

to scan for broken outbound links

and incoming broken links as well.

That's other websites linking to your pages

that don't exist anymore.

Both are no-nos.

Speaking of inbound links coming from outside sources,

let's dive into that category as well.

Make sure you audit your site for spammy inbound links.

Google's penguin algorithm is one of the most severe,

penalizing your site for having too many links

coming from untrustworthy places.

Here's a list of link types

that Google often thinks are spammy,

blog comments, form links, low quality press releases,

hacked links, bookmarks, directory submissions,

and automatically generated links.

Start by downloading your inbound links

from a tool like Ahrefs

and sort through them one by one.

Ask yourself, does this link look natural to Google?

Would I consider this a quality link?

If the answer is no, take care of it with a removal request

from the site's webmaster or disavow.

If you want a service to take care of this for you,

Authority Builder's link audit service is really good.

Another way Google's Penguin algorithm can attack your site

is if you have over-optimized incoming anchor texts.

If you have an anchor text profile

that is predominantly target rich anchor text,

Google knows that would never happen in the real world

so they'll assume you're manipulating your link building.

You should instead look at each page on an individual basis.

The anchor texts come into each page

should have a natural blend of target brand,

URL, topical and miscellaneous anchor text.

Check out my webinar

on anchor text optimization to learn more.

The next category is all about monetization,

or namely, are you monetizing your website to such a degree

that you're ruining the user experience?

First look out for overintrusive pop-ups on your page.

Pop-ups are okay, but if they're aggressively covering

a majority of the screen, Google is gonna slam you for that.

Also look out for aggressive ad placements.

If your site looks like this,

where 90% of what people see is ads,

Google hates that.

If you wanna take a deep dive

into any of these onsite SEO checklist concepts,

including step by step solutions on how to fix these issues,

make sure to download the full guide.

Link the description.