5 Must-Dos For SEO Beginners

Although it is possible that you may disagree, but I see SEO as both art and science. You must be creative in the approaches that you take in order to please the search engines, outsmart your competitors, all the while applying solid research based upon data from analytics.

In order to do this, you will need to use several different techniques and tools. Unfortunately, many people only do what they know how to do without expanding into something new. This can be very dangerous because SEO is constantly evolving, causing what is displayed at the top of the search results to change on a regular basis.

Here are some significant – but often forgotten – levers that you can maneuver in order to improve your search engine optimization efficiency, something that might be done by a competent New York internet marketing company.

Keyword Grouping

Keyword Grouping is a term that refers to clusters of keywords.

Ones that focus on the architecture and information of your website, can help optimize your landing pages and are able to target potentially profitable areas where you can develop opportunities.

However, organizing your keywords into groups is somewhat difficult, even if you have been doing this for years. There are different tools for SEO that use many different approaches, but I find that putting keywords into these clusters, allows pages to show up in the top 10 results.

If you have a landing page that you are working with, it could be a difficult task to properly optimize and manage it when using SEO techniques. If you have a keyword landscape, however, you can monitor the changes and develop solid strategies to compensate.

What are the benefits of keyword grouping?

This type of grouping allows your PPC workflow, as well as your search engine optimization strategies, to help you understand which keywords are the most profitable for you. It also helps with on-page SEO optimization, topic selection, copyrighting, and with your website architecture. You can prioritize your landing page, something that will be based on what appeared to be the most promising keyword groups.

There are many webmasters that will use AdWords editor, or Excel, in order to group all of the keywords in an organized fashion to make sure that mistakes are minimal when working with large amounts of data. Special tools for doing this type of keyword groupings, such as Wordstream Keyword Grouper or SE Ranking

Keyword Grouper – will help you speed up the process while maintaining efficiency and quality. Like any other tool, it’s not going to be perfect. You will still need to use your skills with this spreadsheet to organize everything the right way.

Page Change Monitoring

A new tactic that I have been using is monitoring page changes, and I find it absolutely critical to do this when using SEO. There are page change monitoring tools, ones that will actually deliver results if there are any changes after you have done your optimizing. Small business owners who are monitoring their own pages, this isn’t something for you. However, it’s invaluable for those that work with agencies in large marketing teams that are working on several different projects which are accessed by clients, marketing experts, and webmasters.

Monitoring pages can be helpful in knowing when a webmaster or client has made changes that have impacted the rankings – which will allow you to make adjustments before the website is penalized or the rankings drop. We will always know with minor changes have had terrible consequences, so it’s important to make the adjustments before they are indexed by the search engines. You can use different tools for this including ChangeDetection.com and VisualPing.

SE Ranking’s Page Change Monitoring can help you scan and track, as well as analyze, the changes that occur. If you have a website that has been hacked, there is a feature that can help you detect any type of malicious code or even bad links, and you can monitor virtually any page including your clients pages, your own, or even your competitors, especially when working with a New York internet marketing company.

Competitor SEO Research

If you want to succeed, being aware of the competitive landscape is absolutely critical for marketers and those that do search engine optimization. You need to keep informed, looking at your competitors and their marketing activities, observing new content, links, and where they are ranking on the search engines. This is something that a search engine optimization agency NYC company can help you do every day.

There are many tools that can help you including ones that can help you find competitor keywords. SpyFu, BuzzSumo, SEMrush, and Ahrefs are some of the best in the industry.

As mentioned earlier, a tactic that is often overlooked is monitoring, or what many call spying, on the changes that your competitors are making on their website. This will allow you to figure out what they are doing to generate their traffic, and you can use different strategies to outsmart them with this information that you find.

Competitor Research Via PPC And SEO

Long-tail Keyword Variations

A very important strategy related to keyword research is using long-tail keywords that rank well in the organic listings, especially on websites like Google. These keywords are often neglected because they do not get as much traffic, but if you can find enough of these terms, you will get excellent results over the weeks and months to come. That is because people searching for these terms – people looking for very specific queries – represent the exact audience that you need to attract.

It can be challenging to do so, as well as find profitable long-tail keyword variations, those that are specifically related to your website. Fortunately, there are many tools that provide this type of feature which is actually much more well-known than the Keyword Planner offered by Google or the free keyword tool from WordStream.

Mobile Rank Tracking

You really cannot ignore how impactful mobile devices can be for people every day, and that is why mobile metrics are so important.

Google has not ruled out any type of mobile first index, but it is coming. Mobile friendly algorithms, however, are already working. For many reasons, you will want to keep a close eye on mobile rankings, and also monitor any fluctuations as they occur.

If you are using the Google Search Console, you can check mobile rankings. You can compare mobile and desktop rankings, check the different time frames, clicks, impressions, essentially doing mobile rank tracking.

You can compare mobile and desktop rankings too quickly identify any problems before you actually do your first mobile index roll out. If a page, for instance, is ranking much lower on mobile, try to figure out why it is not mobile friendly.

There are many SEO platforms that can provide you with this information, so consider utilizing some of these when you are targeting mobile search. You can also import information from these tools into one location to centralize all of your data.

Local Keyword Ranking

Another thing that you can do is target geographical areas which are perfect for local searches. Additionally, you can target people that constantly have their smartphones with them on are doing searches on the web which is why local search – like mobile – is becoming so important.

The challenges that you have to identify a key factor in the local search rankings which can differ depending on the people who are making the searches, and the places where they are located. Essentially, you need to employ different tools that can gather this data and then process it appropriately.

Additional possibilities include using SERPs’ Keyword Rank Checker (which allows you to input local parameters) plus you can also use a free localized ranking tool called BrightLocal. These are some of the things that a search engine optimization agency NYC company can help you do as you are trying to improve your positions on the search engines.

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