The Ultimate SEO Checklist (for 2025)

I'm going to show you the ultimate SEO checklist which will help you achieve results like this this and this I'm Nathan gotch and I've LED hundreds of successful SEO campaigns for over a decade and I'm also the founder of gotch SEO Academy and rankability so let's begin by focusing on your website as a whole and then we'll focus on each individual page and that brings me to number one which is are you tracking SEO Performance so before you ever think about doing SEO you have to make sure that you are actually tracking your performance so

there's really only a few tools you need to do most of these are free and if you want to use the paid tools that certainly can elevate your efforts but at the at the base level you need Google analytics and this is ga4 Google analytics 4 and you're going to need Google search consoles so and definitely install ga4 and Google search Console these are like bare minimum that you need to be able to do SEO the right way and plus both of these are going to be integrated into screaming frog SEO spider when you run

a crawl on your website and you do an audit so you're definitely going to need both of these and they're pretty comprehensive and I'll be talking here in a second about what kpis really matter in these tools but you have to get this data so set up Google analytics set up Google search Console and then if you want to go to the next level I would also recommend having a tool like semrush to be able to measure a total organic keyword growth and I'll be talking about that here in a second and if you want

to go to the next level uh you may want to consider using a tool like agency analytics okay this is a tool that I use for my campaigns and for uh other campaigns that we're working on and it's a way to have a dashboard to show all of your metrics in One place so like for example I can go to YouTube I can go to really any platform that I'm working on and I can see these metrics at a high level okay so this is not mandatory and and as far as individual keyword rankings you

can track them inside of semrush but at a bare minimum like must have is definitely Google analytics and Google search console number two are you tracking the right SEO kpis so there are two categories of SEO key performance Indicators or kpis for short the first is leading indicators so these are actions that you're going to take today that are going to produce an outcome in the future which is a lagging indicator so what are some leading indicators that you could track well there's a few number one you want to track the total number of pages

optimized so this is how many pages you're actually going to you're upgrading your optim izing them you're improving them also tracking the Number of new pages created for SEO okay we want to see that that is slowly growing over time there should be a consistent flow of new SEO content so you can capture more keywords in your particular Niche number another one here is the number of Outreach emails sent this is specifically to promote your website promote your brand promote your content with the intent of either getting some visibility on social media by having people

share share your Content or the biggest goal that we're hoping to achieve is getting backlinks which brings us to the final leading indicator here which is the quantity of backlinks acquired so there are more leading indicators but if you can just track these you're going to be in pretty good shape and these will really determine the success that you're going to have in let's say three to six to potentially 12 months down the road you just have to remember when it comes to SEO the metrics you're looking at today are simply the byproduct of all

the work that you already did so if you want to improve your performance in 6 months from now you have to start with today and this is what leading indicators will help you achieve next are lagging indicators and this is the end goal of you know what we're hoping to do with all this work is get more organic search traffic which we'll track inside of Google analytics 4 we're also want to Improve the Impressions or our total organic keyword footprint which means we're ranking for more keywords in the top 100 we want that to grow

over time you can track that inside of uh Google search console and you can also track that inside of agency analytics and finally I still track individual keyword rankings and this is not because I'm just focused on like one primary keyword but it is good to have kind of a set piece so you can focus on and be able to Track that performance over time but you really should be focused on the total amount of traffic to a page like we're trying to grow the overall traffic to one page but the kind of beginning stage

of that is to make sure we're building pages around one primary keyword phrase I'll be talking more about that in a second so now that you're tracking your SEO performance it's time to get into the actionable stuff first I recommend running a screaming frog crawl because You'll need the data for several parts of this checklist here's how to do it okay so open up screaming frog now what you want to do is go to the API section and you're going to want to connect Google analytics 4 Google search cont cons page speed insights is optional

but I would recommend it and then also atfs or whichever tool you're using for link analysis um and these are going to allow us to have all the data that we need to properly analyze this website that we're About to run a crawl on so once that's all done it's all connected you just go ahead and throw the website URL in and then just click Start and now let's move on to number three which is is your website crawlable and indexable so to quickly see if a website or page is crawlable and indexable just go

onto the page and then click on the detailed Chrome extension and go to the robots tag section and what you want to see is either index follow or just nothing at All what you don't want to see is no index if you see no index that's actually going to be a problem number four is your website mobile friendly you can actually run this analysis directly on the website uh without leaving it so if you click on the lighthouse button up here you can see it's going to be basically a very very similar analysis as page

speed insights but ultimately you just want to make sure that this page is actually mobile friend friendly And you don't really need to run an analysis to know this if you just look at the site you can tell that this site is definitely mobile friendly it's it's got a responsive design not anything to be too concerned about what's more concerning is the you know the loading speed number five does your website load fast so now what we're going to do is we're going to test loading speed so just enter your url into the page speed

insights tool and this will run an Analysis for both mobile and desktop and what we want to see is that we're you know we're getting good grades on all of these and this is you know clearly room to improve so ideally at least try to get into this orange range which is between 50 and 89 that's really good but ideally like try to Max it out try to get as fast as you possibly can because there is no downside of having a website that's too fast there's only downsides to having a website that's too slow

Number six do you have an SSL certificate and is it properly working okay so to make sure that a website has an SSL certificate you can actually just go up to the browser up here and just click on the address section just make sure that they actually have the https in there that means that they're using an SSL certificate but the other thing too is actually to see if the SSL certificate is set up correctly so there's actually this free tool you can Use that is going to test the SSL certificate just run it through

and it will take a minute to to kind of do this analysis but you just want to make sure that you get passing grades on all of these number seven is the website designed modern and updated this is what a modern design looks like so they definitely would get a pass on this but what I wouldn't want to see is a website like this I would not say there was a massive investment in design which they Would actually benefit a lot more if the design was upgraded people do judge a book by its cover so

do not underestimate this element because if a Searcher comes to your site and because of the design they don't trust the website that's actually going to hurt SEO performance cuz you're going to get Negative user signals on your site which then Google is going to be very suspicious of what's going on and therefore you're probably not going to Perform Super well so you have to remember user signals are actually a part of Google's algorithm this has now been proven number eight is your website using aggressive interstitial popups okay so an interstitial popup can come in

many different forms it can be in the form of what you're seeing here where it's basically just some sort of pop it popup that's instructing you to do something uh sending you to another page or it could be some sort of you know Email optin or lead Magnet or something like that it's some sort of popup that disrupts your experience now when it comes to SEO this can be very damaging so the reason especially the way that uh this website has structured this uh when a when a Searcher lands on your page we have one

job as as an SEO and that is to make sure that they get what they came for so if I come to a website and I'm trying to learn about uh let's say a SEP IRA I'm trying to figure out what that What that retirement account is all about I'm there to learn right and if you don't help me learn and you disrupt from that experience you should expect your SEO performance to fall and if you look at the best websites online online they don't disrupt experience when you go to a page you get exactly

what you came for so like and this is something I try to practice on my own website right so like if we go here and you go to something like best content optimization Tools like if you landed here from Google I'm not going to start hitting you with popups right I'm not I don't have ads and things popping in your face and all these other things like I'm I'm giving you exactly what you came for and this is what you should try to do on your site give the searcher what they want and if you

give the Searcher what they want you might be able to get what you want whatever your objectives are whatever your goals are but give these Results in advance give these give the value upfront and don't don't distract them with a bunch of nonsense and in particular when you look at this one the reason why this one is so damaging in particular is cuz when you click on this it actually sends them to another URL so what you've done is you've actually sent a negative signal you decreased dwell time on the page that uh you're trying

to you know get to perform and you're sending a signal to another page so You're basically saying don't don't consume this page consume this other one when you know SEO is one uh one battle at a time you are fighting one individual battle for one individual keyword at a time so you have to make sure you're you're putting all all of the the the cards in your favor right you want to make sure that you're setting yourself up for Success so any variable that's going to distract away from that is just one extra variable Where

you know a competitor might exploit number nine does your website use aggressive ad placements this is the type of experience that you don't want on your website you have to keep in mind that advertisements are designed to extract your attention they're designed to to pull you away from what you're doing so you click on them so a lot of them are very welld designed they're designed to you know to to actually drive clicks and as a result that means The attention to your content is no longer there we want to have full attention on our

content because if we have full attention on our content that means that Searcher or that person is consuming it and if that person consumes our content we can actually get the goal that we're going for number 10 does your website have trust pages so trust pages are just the standard pages that every website should have and so there is a privacy policy terms of service uh maybe An income disclaimer just those types of pages like those are just standard pages that every website should have and so when I look at a website I want to

make sure that at least we have that base layer of of trust pages so looking at this site it's not abundantly clear that those exist so we can actually go to do a site colon search and see what they have now they do have a contact page that's definitely good uh every website should have a contact page but aside From that there really isn't any other trust pages on this website so this is a very easy thing that can be done in a you know 30 minutes you could square away all your trust Pages get

them published uh and that can help just it's not like it's your rankings are going to fly from doing this but it's one little small micro variable that could certainly help build some trust or at least increase the perceived level of Trust on your website I actually wrote a Very extensive guide on this topic which is uh focusing on trustworthiness which is the T in Google's eat guidelines there's a lot that goes into the trust element as you can tell but there is a few things which is there's certain pages on your site that you

know certainly make you look more legitimate right so I have a bunch of them here about page you should have an about page uh if we look at this site we'll see they do have an about page so they pass That test another one here we'll go down a team page uh we'll go to this one and see if they have anyone about the team and it doesn't look like it right so we don't even know who works at this this company okay uh so there small elements like this team company history mission statement core

values you get the point all this stuff that really shows that you're a legitimate business you're not just some uh you know sketchy Fly by Night lead generation website you're Actually a legitimate company uh and so if you look at any big business you'll see that they have these things uh and in fact a lot of these Pages actually attract backlinks which is another thing people don't consider so aside from those like big ones there's also some kind of let's call it micro variable ones that you can add as well that are like designed to

protect your user but you'll see all these different examples I have um and I studied you know several Hundreds of of the best websites on the internet and a lot of them have these these various trust Pages uh you don't need all of these but as many as you possibly can number 11 does your website have detailed author bios you'll see a website like this where you know they're talking about you know first of all talking about health talking about economics so this is not only uh your life but it's also your money so they've

they've entered into both categories um And you have to be really really careful if you're going to write about these topics and as you can tell there's no way to know who wrote this right there's no clear author and if we scroll down we'll try to find the author here and it looks like this person who's a seasoned Financial expert and we'll look at uh you know who they actually are we'll go to the we'll go to the author page and more than likely we're not going to find out a whole lot about this person

Because it doesn't look like they're a legitimate individual based on this the stock photo I'm seeing so the point is this is what you don't want to see okay okay you don't want to see this you want to see actual qualifications and proof of qualifications number 12 do you have Pages de indexed that shouldn't be okay so open up the screaming frog crawl and go to the indexability column and then just click and make sure you have a filter on the top row and then click on The filter and then go to non- indexable so

we're just going to look at non- indexable content you know what we're looking for is to see if there's any issues where we could ultimately 31 redirect some of these Pages now what I would look at at is the fact that there's a bunch of pages that actually do have backlinks and a significant number we've got about 156 referring domains going to these pages that uh are actually not even indexable so I would Consider you know 301 redirecting these Pages if possible uh and trying to fix this particular issue so this is a lot of

people ignore these pages that are non- indexable but there's actually a lot of opportunity here so I would just recommend anytime you do a crawl of your website make sure you look at those pages that um currently aren't being in indexed by Google and just verify that that's actually what you want to be happening and of course use the data to Your advantage number 13 is your website bloated and what I mean by bloat is there's just a lot of pages that exist on the website that probably don't need to exist at all and there

is a problem with this because it's actually going to influence crawl rates it's going to send link Equity to pages that you don't really want link Equity going to um and it's just going to make your site heavy so we want to make our site lean and efficient and so what we're going to do Is we're going to use data to our advantage to make some educated decisions so pretty much all of these things we can ignore for the most part so I'm basically going to get rid of all these with the exception of unique

in links so first we're just going to look at pages that have zero traffic okay then we're going to go over to the clicks and Impressions and under Impressions we're actually going to look at those that are also have no Impressions okay and this is from Google search console and then we're going to go over to the backlink section and we're going to look at referring domains and we're going to do blanks and zero so now we're left with are only pages that have no traffic they have no Impressions which means these pages are not

ranking for any keywords in the top 100 on Google and then number three they don't have any backlinks okay so these are really Pages uh that need something Needs to change okay and there's a few options when it comes to Pages like this when it comes to pruning there's there's complete deletion so that's number one is like should this page even exist okay because you don't want to waste a 301 redirect if if it doesn't have backlinks so you need to be very deliberate with this group of pages and we're talking like there's a significant

amount of pages here it's about 800 pages on this demo website so 800 pages that are Subject to pruning so your options are delete uh another option is redirect uh and that would mean finding a relevant page on the website and 301 redirecting it to it uh another option is to consolidate so take some of the content from one of these pages and consolidate it um onto another page uh and those are basically your only options so delete redirect consolidate or you could also upgrade and improve the existing page you know that that is an

option like Let's say you you built a you built a page and uh it is targeting a keyword but maybe it just didn't perform well for whatever reason you could try refreshing it and and changing that publish date to get Google to reindex that page again and see if that pushes it up but most of the time you know these types of pages just have no positive metrics whatsoever are the ones that you should really consider maybe just getting rid of they're not helping Your website at all um and a lot of the times the

the websites that uh tend to be uh to to object to this idea is because they've become romantic about their content and they're suffering from sunk cost fallacy okay they think because they created all these pages that you know they invested so much time and effort into them that therefore they should keep them which is just a fallacy right there's we can't be romantic about our websites we need to be ruthless About our websites and only keep what is actually working um and so don't don't don't keep all this fat we got to trim the

fat okay number 14 does your website have bloated pages okay so I showed you how to find website bloat but you can actually have bloat on each individual page as well and the good news you can see this on on a sitewide basis so once again add a filter up here from the screaming frog crawl and what we're going to look at is a very specific Colum which is under word count okay and we're going to sort this and you I don't even really need to look at a particular website to know if this is

happening okay I don't need to really dig in too deeply to know because nine times out of 10 if you have word counts of this size and you have it consistently across many many pages and we're looking at like we're looking at a lot of pages with significant word counts well number one this is an indication that this is Likely not human written because the amount of effort and resources and capital required to create this many words is significant significantly High okay um if we just put in this perspective like if I just took let

me just take a small segment of the amount of words here let's say just just the pages that have 5,000 words and above okay we'll just start there so this is about 2 million words okay so Just a conservative estimate with a low with a very uh low grade type of caliber writing okay so this is about two over two million words just say for 10 cents a word okay so that's going to be $216,000 uh to create those words okay $216,000 just to create this set now if I added everything up we're going to

it's going to get up into the range of maybe $500,000 just for Content Creation with a very very um Le let's say junior type Of writer we're not talking expert level writer if you want to talk about an expert level writer which can often be uh you know about let's see 168 812 which can be as high as 50 cents a word to as high as $1 per word so at $1 per word we're looking at a $2 million content investment for expert level writer okay but let's just say it you know 50 cents we'll

see what that looks like and you know that puts it at well over a million dollars in content Investment okay so the reason why I know this is just not that's just not happening okay I I just know the budgets of a lot of companies and no one there are many people putting that much money into uh you know content and So based on this my conclusions without even looking at the content which I'll show you how to find AI content here in a second but I just know for sure that there's bloat going on

right these pages are bloated full of AI content that's not human Written um and you think about it that's scaled out over thousands and thousands of pages you start to send off some signals to Google that you know maybe there's not a lot of quality on this website now the way to really see this is of course at a high level you can see like why does this page have you know 10,000 words right you can just look at it from a qualitative perspective but you can also use a tool like rankability and just put

a keyword in that they're Trying to rank for so like I put an example here and then look at the word count that they have relative to what's expected for this specific keyword so for this keyword the median word count is between 1,00 and 3,400 words meaning when you look at the competitors you know there's a wide range you've got some with smaller word counts some with bigger word counts but generally the median isn't here so if you're 2,000 words above what's normal that better be Really really good content content like that better be exceptional

content if you're willing to go above that range but I very rarely find a situation where a website goes above the word count range and the content's better right typically the only reason why they go you know the excessive word count or blo occurs it's an attempt to make the pages seem higher quality and more in depth but in reality it actually isn't longer as in more words does not equate to Better content content and I think that's one thing that's gotten lost in the mix with skyscrapers and various techniques that's not like more words

is not better content so be very very careful with this and practice brevity when it comes to your content and focus on the median word count that way you're not you know excessively just looking for ways to pad your word count number 15 does your website have thin content so now what we're going to be doing is Looking at the inverse of a bloated page which is having too many words and now we actually want to look at pages that have too little words and so just word count alone does not NE necessarily signify that

the page is thin but it is a good place to start so really if you see any pages that have word count probably below I would say below a 100 that's probably something you'd want to take a look at now there are some pages that deserve to have low word counts and It's totally normal but that's why you have to you know you have to make sure that there's uh contextual analysis on these but for the most part like if you see a lot of low word counts this is something that you should at least

investigate and see if there's an opportunity to upgrade or improve that page number 16 does your website have outdated content so there are two ways you can find outdated content first you can just go right into Google and do a Site colon search and then just enter a bunch of years so typically I'll go you know four to five years back but you can go you know many many years back you can go all the way back to 2010 if you wanted to but in this case I just did The Last 5 Years and you

can see this website here there's a bunch of outdated content you can also just go into the screen frog crawl and go to the title section and start searching for the years as well so we could just do Something like 2019 and see if anything pops up and right away we find four pages that uh are optimized for 2019 so this means this is completely outdated you can see that the year is actually in the URL so that's just an indication that we need to go in there we need to upgrade that page and likely

redirected to a more Evergreen page if we were going to do you know best data visualizations we wouldn't want the year in there we'd want to eliminate the year That way every time we upgrade that page and update that page we it's going to stay Evergreen and all that link Equity is going to continue to hit that existing page without it having to redirect every single year number 17 does your website have pages with an engagement rate of less than 20 so to find pages with low engagement rate just go to the screaming frog crawl

and you're going to scroll over until you find engagement rate over in the Google Analytics section here okay so you can see this column I'll go ahead and highlight it and what we want to do is we want to sort this so we see the engagement rate that is the lowest okay so obviously ones that don't have an engagement rate isn't super helpful so let's look at the ones that do and what I'm looking for is anything below 20 but honestly if it's my website I'm probably going looking at anything that's you know below 50

and remember the this Number if it's low is actually not good it's the inverse of Bounce rate so bounce rate was the old metric you would use with the previous version of Google analytics and if that was low that was good thing now with engagement R we don't want to see a low engagement rate this means users are not truly engaging well with this whatever these pages are and that essentially means that they're not scrolling and it means they're typically not visiting a second page uh So some sort of action is not really taking being

taken on these pages so you want to address that we want to make sure that our Pages have as high engagement rate as possible number 18 does every page on your website have one title tag and one H1 tag so to see if a website has a title tag and 1h1 what you can do is you can actually go to that screaming frog crawl that we already did or you can just go directly to the website or the page you're trying to Rank so and then click on the detailed Chrome extension and what we're looking

at here is to see that there is a title in place ideally it's going to have that keyword in the title but we just want to make sure they actually have a title tag you can also go to view page source and just see if you're you know if you don't want to use uh a particular plugin like that you just go ahead and search for this and we'll just search title and we want to see that that actually exists in Here and they do they have a they have a title tag in here which

is perfect and then you can tell they're using yoast so that takes care of that now what we want to see here is that do they have one H1 tag once again we can go into the page source and we can just search H1 and we'll be able to find that H1 tag now with detailed you can actually see this over here so you see the title and then go to the headings and you can see the heading structure now keep in mind they Actually have three H1 tags which is not ideal we really only

want to have one H1 tag per page so this would need to be restructured number 19 does your website have many spelling and grammar errors in general we want to see you know sitewide if we see a lot of spelling errors we see a significant amount of grammar errors this is something we definitely want to address once again this is probably not going to be a massive variable as far as your performance but It is something at scale that it could be it could be somewhat damaging to user experience if it's really excessive so like

I have you know one URL on my website that has you know 99 of these issues uh 99 spelling errors and 66 grammar errors according to screaming frog so I'd want to do a manual analysis and see what's going on with that page and and try to improve it so I can just get rid of these and overall like across my site I've got over 3,000 spelling Errors uh and I've got over you know 500 grammar errors so there's a lot of room to improve here so this is the type of analysis you should do

for your own website because just think of this as this is a a something that determines quality okay it's not just about the the words that we create it's also the experience that the users have and poor spelling and poor grammar certainly may not help uh as far as driving the best user Experience possible number 20 do you have pages with backlinks but no traffic all right so I showed you how to find pages that just have no positive metrics whatsoever but the next type of pages you want to find is actually a little bit

different so we're going to keep all these filters in place but we're going to change one thing we're actually going to go over here to the referring domains and we're actually going to only look at pages that have existing backlinks okay So very similar to the previous example these are pages that have not performed well from an SEO perspective okay they just haven't for whatever reason they haven't performed well um but what they have done is they have attracted backlinks okay so just to put it in perspective this website that has these pages with no

traffic and no positive kpis they have a significant amount of backlinks going to these pages okay so in this scenario you wouldn't want to Delete these pages right you don't want to delete these pages but what I would recommend doing is looking for an opportunity to either upgrade and improve them if that's a possibility because you want to leverage that existing Authority and see if that can help you improve your performance or I would look for an opportunity to do a 301 to redirect so find a relevant page on your website and then 301 redirect

each individual page that's what I would Recommend doing because what you can do is you can consolidate all of this beautiful link equity and authority to some of these other Pages uh that that you're actually trying to improve okay because right now it's just wasted right this is all just wasted backlink Equity that's just going to pages that users aren't seeing and you're not getting any benefit from so you really want to take advantage of all this beautiful link equity and send it to a place uh to a Page that you know you really care

about number 21 do you have 4 or4 pages with backlinks we've got at least 11 11 pages that have existing backlinks okay and these Pages have about 300 referring domains 300 referring domains that are just going straight to 404 pages so what we're going to want to do in this scenario is find an opportunity to 301 redirect these pages to a a a published page on the website so we can recapture that lost Link Equity 22 are all of your Pages less than three clicks deep into your architecture so to find the crawl deck go

to your screaming frog crawl and once again we're going to sort this from Z to A and we're going to look at all the pages that have a crawl depth of greater than three okay so in the in the context of this particular example there's a ton there's a ton of pages that have a crawl depth greater than three just this just means how many clicks does it take a user to get to This page uh and in general we want this to be uh as minimal as possible because the more clicks that there are

the harder it is for Google to crawl the website it it's harder for Google to crawl that page and index that page so the deeper it is into the architecture the more resources that are required for Google to get to it and we don't want to make Google's job any harder than it needs to be so we should push those further up the architecture now there's Ways to to do this right the most obvious way I'll show you is like you know with you're dealing with an e-commerce website so like Pottery Barn for example they're

dealing with thousands and thousands of products well in this situation you're probably going to need to Leverage The sitewide now navigation so you'll see they're using sitewide navigation beautifully they do a very very good job and this is basically a requirement to be able to Get proper coverage on their site and to ensure that every page is no more than three clicks deep right so this is a this is a strategy that you can use with a big website now if you have a smaller website you know having this kind of aggressive sitewide navigation just

might not make a lot of sense like on my website I don't really need that I don't I only have a few hundred pages so I don't need to have some like aggressive site Navigation um and I'm selling only basically one product on this on this website so I don't need like all this coverage like they do but there are ways that you can give better coverage so one of the techniques that I often use on my site and other campaigns that were're working on is I will use the sticky feature inside of Wordpress so

if you just go to Quick edit and you can you can make the post sticky and we'll do this for posts that are um really really Important right the ones that we you know are are important for the business so you'll see if we actually go to the blog I'll show you real quickly we'll go over here and you'll see that a lot of these posts that are at the top these are sticky so like these two are sticky this one is sticky like a lot of these are sticky these are like my you know

basically my best content is all stickied because I want to give it as much visibility as possible right that's That's the key here so giving the ones that I think are most important as much visibility as we can and more importantly it's only one click deep into the architecture so that's really what we're going for is you know ultimately one technically two clicks deep into the architecture but still the point is this is very high up and then on top of this if you have it stickied any internal links that you have here are also

going to get really good Coverage from this page okay um and then one other thing you can do if you're really struggling to come up with a way to to push those pages further up into the architecture you can create what's called a hub page so this is an example of just a very simple hub page this is not really designed to rank to be totally honest it's more designed to give coverage to these relevant topics so in this case this would be YouTube SEO so these are all YouTube SEO related Uh blog posts and

this post as long as it's high up in the architecture is going to give the the coverage that these Pages need when you have really good internal linking structure you can send link Equity to all of your most important pages and so when you use a service in particular like search intelligence what they do is they actually build backlinks a lot of their backlinks will be built to your homepage and so if you Don't have a really good structure in place all of that beautiful link Equity that you're building through PR and uh and just

traditional link building techniques you're not going to be getting the full benefit because what you really want to have happen is when we go to a website like Pottery Barn you'll see that if they get a link to their hom page from you know one of these really high quality sources that search intelligence will build well you Want that link Equity to not just hit the homepage you want it to flow to all of these other important category pages and that way it can lift the whole website a rising tide lifts All Ships so that's

what we're thinking about we when we acquire links to our site we want to lift the entire website and so it is very natural to get a lot of backlinks to your homepage and when you look at the biggest websites on the internet the large majority of their links go to Their homepage so that is absolutely a natural thing but to be able to get the most out of that you have to make sure you have good internal link structure and good architecture so that's the cool part about working with search intelligence they're going to

get you these like insanely powerful links they're going to help you not just power that one you know homepage asset that you're trying to lift but it'll actually allow you to lift your entire website so Just check them out I'll have a link below this video 23 do your pages have enough internal link coverage so craw depth and unique in links are closely related because unique in links are the quantity of unique internal links going to a page okay so I always like to sort this from A to Z and the reason is I want

to see are there pages that have very poor internal link coverage and so for me you know anything less than five in my opinion would would fall under That category as poor internal link coverage and if we put in the opposite side you'll see like you know some of these other Pages have 12,000 internal links so there's some pages are getting tons of preferential treatment and then others that are getting no love at all and so if it's a page that you really want to improve the performance of you should definitely be improve like looking

for opportunities to drive internal links to it so you know you can Go like for example if I want to drive more internal links to this post I would go into my post section I would start looking for things that are related to this particular topic so I'd search something like content and then I would try to find posts that are highly relevant to this one topic about content optimization tools so looking through here and and looking at these opportunities say is there a way that I could inject an internal link uh on These posts

okay and when it comes to internal linking just really focus on uh diversifying your internal link anchor Tex don't use the same internal link anchor Tex every single time but in general you you really can't go wrong with more internal links especially in the body of your content those seem to carry a little bit more weight than links that are you know let's say in a sitewide navigation so definitely take advantage of that and if you see you Know if it's if it I would say if it's less than three definitely do it but for

me I like to go a little bit higher and go kind of less than five and I'll talk more about if you can't find opportunities for internal linking then that's actually a symptom of of another challenge I'll be showing you here in a second 24 are you leveraging your most powerful Pages for internal linking so I showed you how you can go into your post and look for Relevant pages to add Internal links but another thing you should do is definitely take advantage of your strongest pages from a link building perspective or from a backlink

perspective so go into sem Rush go to backlink analytics and click on indexed pages and then sort this by domains and this is going to show us the pages that have the most websites linking to the pages and ultimately the goal here is to is to add internal links to these Pages because you know they're your most Powerful pages and so this is a way to take advantage of all this beautiful link Equity that you have to boost up whatever page you're trying to rank 25 does your website have redirect chains okay so Define redirect

chains go into the reports section in screaming frog and then go to redirects and then you can do all redirects or just redirect chains and this will create a report for you and then you're going to be able to see all of these opportunities now just To give you a quick idea of what a redirect chain looks like you can look at this little quick video here and you can see we we are looking at a page a is redirecting to page B page B is redirecting to page C and this could go on for

multiple levels so essentially what we want to do to fix this is we simply just need to take page a and we need to 301 redirect it to Page C so that way we can skip this middleman and that way all of the pages are only There's only one redirect between each page 26 does your website have duplicate content so in addition to screaming frog I do recommend running a seliner report as well and so I do recommend purchasing some credits it's very very cheap but you'll be able to crawl your entire website and be

able to find Pages where there's clearly duplicate contents when you're looking at some of these elements for example when you see like the the navigation here this is fine like you're Going to see duplicated navigations that's not a big deal but what you don't want to see is huge duplicated sections like this across multiple pages so this just shows that there's kind of boilerplate content on a lot of pages and ultimately that just means that these pages are thin they're not original they're not adding anything new to the equation and to Google you're just bloating

the index with a bunch of templated cookie cutter content so you Don't really want to have this and ideally you know each page on your website should have some original content some unique content uh otherwise you're just kind of you know I I hate to use the word spam but to a certain extent it is spamming by just publishing a bunch of pages uh that are not unique in any way because it's actually not beneficial for the user either because imagine a user lands on a page and the the content exactly the same it's going

To be very very confusing so I would use seliner to go in and identify these pages that just have a very high percentage of duplicate content and and a lot of websites do suffer from this 27 does your website have a significant number of broken links and so another cool feature with sight liners you can actually go to the broken link section and identify pages with broken links so like this website here doesn't have a ton of them but just another opportunity To go in here and fix these broken links broken links are a very

very tiny variable and doing this is not going to have a massive Improvement on your performance but you really have to think about every little SEO action you take has a Compound Effect so this on its own as a direct ranking variable is going to be very very minor but it can influence user experience anything that can negatively influence user experience is something that you need to tackle 28 Does your website have a significant amount of AI content so similar to how you ran a crawl with screaming frog and S liner you can actually run

a crawl with originality doai as well to scan your entire website to identify AI content so in general you know I've talked about this in the past but just using AI content is not necessarily the problem but we do want to at least have a pulse on the pages that have a high percentage of AI content so that way if They start to underperform we can start to you know maybe consider improving that page upgrading that page adding human written content whatever it may be so a lot of these pages that are on my website

I would flag these as having a high percentage of AI content and it's not because I'm necessarily going to go in there and change them it's just so that I know that if performance starts to decline I can go back and improve them and upgrade them so at this point You'll likely already have a ton of SEO work to do but it's now time to focus on each individual page so pick a page that's already targeting a key word you want to rank for and use the following checklist to improve it and this brings me

to SEO checkpoint 29 which is is the H1 tag above the fold so to see if the H1 tag is above the fold you are just going to have to do some some subjective analysis here so just look at the website and see is this H1 tag actually Above the fold down here and the reason we want to do that is because this is this actually doesn't have a lot to do with SEO this actually has to do more with user experience and it's basically ux 101 it's like a standard principle that you want to

have the headline above the fold because you always want the user to know where they are at any time on your website so this is effective here but if you actually look at their site and we go like to the services page You'll see that now it's starting to get you know kind of push down below the fold and remember on mobile this will probably get worse right so we really need to focus on pushing this stuff up above the fold and often times you know an image like this it might support what you're doing

but more than likely it's actually not helping uh because you can actually have like I the way this is structured I would actually prefer that it was more like this right this is a Lot better start with services and then you have the images here that kind of visually demonstrate what you're talking about but just having this kind of you know pixelized lowquality image above the fold isn't serving really any purpose uh and it's the same with a lot of these these pages okay so we really want this to be pushed up above the fold

that way the user can see right away okay I understand where I'm at and of course you know people are pretty Intelligent but this is just to make it easier for the user to navigate your site so always as a standard rule just put that that headline that first heading that the the user can actually see put it really really high up on the fold number 30 are heading tags structured correctly go up here to the detailed Chrome extension quickly see the headings tag and as a general rule of thumb uh Google has said that

you can use multiple H1s but I don't recommend It because the H1 has such heavy weight to it that I would really isolate that H1 for your best most important keyword to put that in the one H1 on that page that way Google fully understands okay I understand what this page is actually about then in a logical order begin to put the the appropriate headings okay so there's one title tag per page which you can see here one title tag and then one H1 tag aside from those two tags everything else can be used multiple

Times so but those two just I would use them just once and this there's some really rare circumstances so you can see the heading structure here is uh needs to be Consolidated and improved uh another thing is to don't waste a heading tag for something that's kind of generic so you know welcome to stratum structural systems you could have just you know used a paragraph tag that's styled with CSS right don't don't waste your headings uh when you're trying to Get maximum M of your performance like your headings are really really important 31 is your

primary keyword in the URL so their target keyword is foundation repair St Louis now I'm picking this one in particular because this is a unique scenario because their homepage is targeting foundation repair St Louis so therefore it's not going to end up in the URL and so in a situation like this you you can kind of discount that one variable but keep in mind that Is a big variable and often times you'll get beat by someone else who has a more specific URL so if we look at this we'll go ahead and copy it and

we'll look at foundation repair St Louis and we'll actually take that little part off and more than likely the people that are beating us at least in the organic are going to have some very very keyword Rich domains or at least keyword Rich URL structures so we'll look at them and these we'll look at that you know the Top three here actually look at top four and more than likely you know we have St Louis Foundation repairs so very very keyword Rich domain going to be nearly impossible to beat them with a branded domain uh

these guys they have foundation repair actually in the URL slug they don't have St Louis but they do have foundation repair which is more than the example site that we're looking at and then these guys St Louis foundation repair once again very very Specific domain name and then of course Ang you know they have St Louis in the URL and they have foundation repair so all four have some sort of some parts of the primary keyword in their URL and so if you're trying to compete for this keyword and you just have you know they

do have repair but they're missing some of kind of the the focused elements of that keyword in their URL it's going to be very difficult to rank you can certainly pull different levers but That's going to be one area where you know it's always going to be kind of hanging over your head a little bit is as far as performance 32 is the keyword in the title tag go up here to the detailed Chrome extension and we see foundation repair St Louis it actually is in the title so they pass that test 33 is the

keyword in The Meta description and once again go to the detailed Chrome extension and we'll see it looks like they have St Louis experts In foundation repair to me this would be sufficient uh you know you don't have to have the exact keyword in the description because the metad description isn't as important so at least have some variant in here and to me this would get a pass gr 34 is the key word in the H1 tab we're going to go to the detailed Chrome extension go to headings and then you're going to see here

we want to see that foundation repair St Louis is in the H1 and it is In the first H1 they have foundation repair in St Louis that's perfect 35 is the keyword in the first sentence if this was structured the right way I would have this this headline above like this and then I would actually have the sub headline below here where I could put the primary keyword in that sub headline which would really function as the first sentence of the page age 36 is the keyword in the first H2 we have basement repair contractor

that's that's Pretty close to what we're looking for which is foundation repair in St Louis uh this is a variant so that might that might work fine um but remember the H2 does not have to be the exact keyword you're going after it can be some sort of variant so I think this one probably would be okay 37 is the content greater than 50% original so let me start by saying that using AI content is not necessarily A Bad Thing but what is a bad thing is using generic AI content That doesn't really add anything

new to the conversation so what I always like to do is run the content through a tool like originality originality doai there's also some free tools out there but I've tested this thousands and thousands of times at this point over the last couple of years it's pretty accurate for the most part we've run uh human written content we've run uh AI content through it so you know at the end of the day we should really be Trying to you know muddy the waters as much as possible as far as our content being AI uh there's

a great debate as whether Google can detect AI content I personally believe that it can detect at least lowgrade AI content meaning content that you just went in chat GPT or any large language model and you just had it autogenerate that content and then you slapped it on your website I think it can certainly recognize that type of content but if you have any Level of editing to it it's going to become much more difficult so we like to run it through and if I see that it's you know above 50% we're probably going to

have a human come in here and improve it a little bit but there are some exceptions to the rules so like you know rh1 tags a Google ranking Factor this is a study that that I conducted and this whole piece of content is AI okay and if you if you ever want to have fun on my website you can go to gotbot author here Okay I clearly expressed that you know when it's AI written you know okay so if if my if my name is not there I did not write it okay the AI wrote

it so but the the point is is that this content here if we took it like let's go ahead and take this and we can almost guarantee that this will come back as AI content okay so we'll run this through okay so as you can tell this particular piece of content came back as 100% AI so you're probably thinking well if you wanted to Be 50% AI why did why did you let this one be 100% well the reason is because this is the exception to the rule which is this content is actually very unique

so although it is written by the AI the findings and the information in here is unique to my website no one else has this data because I actually went and created this data I found I did my own independent study and then I had the AI analyze all the data and give me the findings okay and this page performs Well it performs well and Google it's performed well for well over a year or so through many many Google updates um and so it's not whether you use AI or not it really matters the originality of

that content and originality doesn't just stem from the words it stems from the actual subject matter it stems from what the content's actually about so you can see like this is very specific data to my one case study so it doesn't matter that I used AI to write it Because I'm still sharing unique information so this is the one exception to the rule where you can certainly use AI content to to create this for you but what you don't want to do is create you know some informational piece of content like for example if you

wanted to go after we'll go after look one of these keywords here that you know maybe I'm going after like you know best SEO tools for agencies if you went to try to go after this keyword and just do a bunch Of generic AI content you're probably not going to do super well it's just not going to work so and keep in mind this whole page is unique like I manually wrote all of this content so there's a big difference um and the more competitive the keyword is the more likely you need to use a

human wrer or subject matter expert to create that content for you so the point is though if you're going to use AI content and it's more for informational it's not Adding necessarily anything really new to the table which I I do recommend trying to do that I would at least try to get it to 50% 38 is the content 100% unique outside of the domain use copyscape and run your url through here and this is going to scan the Internet and try to see if there's any other websites that are using your content now this

is one of those things where it's it's not a guarantee that this is going to be a problem but in general like if You want to make sure that your content is 100% original over time there is a tendency for other websites to copy your content or in some cases maybe the website you're working on copied someone else's content and so we don't really want to see other situations or other pages that have basically the same content because this is just an indication that you know we need to go through and clean up the content

39 is the content 100% unique relative to Other pages on your website and so what we see is there 's a several Pages where the content is virtually the same or very very close as far as matched so we would want to go through and once again you know this page needs to be a unique entity among other pages on your site and other pages that exist on the internet you want it to be a completely unique page because that's basically a way to ensure that you've done everything you can to rank number 40 is

The word count sufficient so when I talk about the word count being sufficient that means that it's in the proper range it's more in the median range of the competitors that you're up against for that keyword so to give you an example like this keyword here St Louis SEO consultant this asset is about 1,700 Words which fits perfectly within the optimal range which is basically meaning that we're in that kind of median range for word count and it means that we're Not being excessive with our word count but we're also not having it so little

words that we it doesn't give us the ability to build a highly relevant piece of content okay so you definitely want to be in this range now on the opposite side of the spectrum you don't want to be excessive right so like here's an example where you know this was basically calling inside of rankability calling for 1,000 to 3,400 words but this particular asset did 5600 words so And very very rarely does going that excessive actually help the user more it's usually just an attempt to beef up the pages in an attempt to manipulate Google

and so this does not produce better results anymore it used to it actually used to produce better results when you would build out basically the longest piece of content or asset that exists for that keyword that actually did work for a long time but it doesn't work anymore so youd better to be in That kind of safer optimal range uh than you know being super excessive in fact you'd probably be better off being on the low end than being on the high end 41 does the content have a 95 plus grammarly score so if you're

going after a really competitive keyword I would recommend editing your content with Hemingway but if you're not going after a super competitive keyword and regardless we do this anyways we always run it through grammarly and the goal is To be above a 95 so this one's sitting at a 93 you know we're in range right it's in range is sufficient but I would definitely aim to get above a 95 if you can and this just ensures that there aren't a bunch of grammatical or spelling errors that could ultimately disrupt user experience 42 is the page

optimized well for NLP so when I talk about a page being optimized well for NLP which is natural language processing that just essentially means that the Page has hit on all the important topics for that keyword phrase so what you're looking at here is for Content optimization tools and you can see that this page is really really optimized like to the fullest extent and what this score indicates is how well you've covered all of these topics in this content now the one thing that you need to keep in mind is when you look at these

topics over here in rankability the these like use the word topic don't Use the word keyword because when you start thinking about keywords you you'll there's a tendency to want to inject keywords into the content and that's not what we're doing here like good content optimization is not about just injecting keywords randomly it's about looking at these ideas and create and and using these ideas as seeds to create something really unique right and to cover that actual topic so you can see here like for example content brief is a very Important topic for this particular

keyword so I have a section completely dedicated to creating an SEO content brief I don't just like jam it into the content somewhere I actually cover that particular Topic in full right and then content outline of a dedicated section to content outline so notice like there's a lot of green here but there's also a lot of white right and this means that there's a lot of context being added there's a lot of content to Support these ideas and there's not just keyword injection going on okay and this is what you really want to see you

want to see this kind of clean kind of clean content here where you've you're hitting on all the topics but there's also a lot of white space indicating that you're bringing something new to the table you're you're creating original content this is the key to using these tools the right way 43 does the page satisfy the intent so if there's anything you get From this training it's this and it's understanding how to optimize for search intent this is a a very very very important skill as an SEO because you have to understand you have to

get into the mind of a Searcher get into their mind and try to figure out how can I create a page that properly answers whatever this query is so you can look at the keyword and sometimes have a pretty good idea of like the type of page you should you should create but For me my the place that I always go is to Google now keep in mind Google uh the results that Google shows are not always perfect it's not always going to show necessarily the best results for that keyword because Google is not perfect

right it's not it's this definitely isn't but what you can do though is analyze the first page and get a ballpark idea of the type of page that would likely perform well okay so the example I'm showing you here is best SEO Books and when we look at this content we see that you know Reddit is ranking here we see that there's a listic go basically from Amazon uh we see this featured snippet showing a bunch of books we see uh another listicle here about the book lots of listicles right so to me that type

of format that type of uh content framework likely will work in this scenario okay so you would you know you would it makes sense to use a listicle Now the question is is should you just do exactly what everyone else has done well then we'll start talking about differentiation but for the most part you want to look and see what's that kind of type of content that seems to perform well now what I did here is a little bit different right I saw that it was a list of and I also created a listicle except

I went a little over the top with this and instead of just you know going to Amazon And creating a bunch of generic content I actually went and purchased these books and actually read them okay and then I shared my findings from Reading those books okay and so this is you know when it comes to effort this is the type of thing that you you really want to have in your content is you want to be able to demonstrate effort in your content so but the point is is like study the first page of results

and get a good idea of what it looks like to Satisfy the intent properly so those checkpoints apply to any page on your website but now let's get more specific here's some points for a blog post targeting an informational keyword which brings me to number 44 does the content strategy or angle add unique value relative to the competitors aside from understanding how to satisfy the intent for a keyword the second biggest thing that I highly highly recommend you you study you analyze you learn is how to Differentiate your content when you decide upon a keyword

so what you want to do is you want to have this fine balance between satisfying the intent we want to satisfy the intent but we also want to create something unique for that keyword so when we look at the search results you want to go ahead and see like okay I see the general framework that's been proven to work so I see the general framework so in this case I know that alytical has been proven to work so I don't want to I don't want to rock the boat too much by changing the framework that's

been proven to work but what I want to do is identify a particular angle that no one else has attacked so in this case it was pretty easy because I just looked at the top ranking results and I saw that most of them are pretty generic right they maybe they went to Amazon and you know picked the best best books uh on Amazon and then just made a list that was essentially it so to me I Was like well the way that I can differentiate is I can actually just go and buy these books right

buy them uh actually read them and then be able to you know actually give some nuanced information that no one else can really give because I actually read them right so just to show that and then also show visual proof right as well that I actually did in fact purchase these books okay so just one simple angle and it was there's different angles you can Pull sometimes it's more effort sometimes it's more in depth sometimes it's more research there's a lot of different things you can do but in this case I just used I just

pulled the effort e uh lever on this one I just I I just decided I'm going to put in more effort for my particular piece of content compared to the people that are ranking in this one uh similar situation when I looked at this keyword originally and I started ranking for this around 2016 and I basically continued to rank uh but when I look at these results it was basically a bunch of generic posts about you know the best cms's but there was no like data proving why it was the best CMS for SEO it

was just a bunch of opinions so I I was like all right well why don't I actually get some data to actually prove what are the best cms's and so that's what I did and I did the First Data study in 2016 and then I did another study uh in 20 2024 and you can See now I have this kind of historical data that no one else has right so there's the lever I pulled on this one wasn't something that was longer uh it didn't have more words it wasn't super indepth per se but I

pulled the uniqueness lever and I the data lever and as a result I have a very original piece of content that that's going to be hard for someone to compete with because they'd have to go and just you know they could certainly go and collect more data Than me but that's not really a unique angle right because so once you can collect that once you get that angle it makes everything easier because not only uh does Google recognize um The Information Gain that occurs on this particular page and the originality on this page Google does

recog recognize that by the way but also when you're in the Surs and you have a post that's wildly different than everyone else that's adding something new to the Equation people are much more likely to link to it right and as a result the more backlinks you get the better your website's going to perform so this is another big benefit of creating this kind of Epic informational content because it acts as a vehicle to attract backlinks and at the end of the day we should be creating content with the intent of it of getting traction

from uh from other websites we want links from other websites we want people to share Our content we want people to digest our content that's the goal right and this is why focusing on quality over quantity is a much better strategy long term so and you can see this historically in the SEO industry like Brian Dean who doesn't even you do SEO anymore basically he sold his website but like he still ranked for Google ranking factors and he's literally beating Google for it like this this page has been ranking forever forever and it's because no

one Even dares to try to beat this page it's too good of a page and that is the type of content you want to create you want your content to be so good that people like you know what I'm not even going to try for this keyword let just move on to a different one uh and that's how it should feel right and this is this is the type of content this is the type of caliber that you should be aiming for okay and one other thing you can think about is like how do I

become like the Mr Beast type of uh situation in my particular industry right I'm not saying you need to go and bury yourself alive but just thinking about how do I differentiate how do I how do I take my content to a level that no one else has done for this one key word and always keep in mind whatever keyword you're going after this is you this is one individual battle so you just have to win one battle at a time so when you look at your keywords like think about No I just need to

win this one battle about the best CMS for SEO right don't worry about all the other battles focus on this one battle first and really try to win try to build a moat so that people can't really beat you long term unless they have to put in a significant amount of effort or uh a bunch of other things so think about it that way and that will help you really create content that will you know stand the test of time 45 is the content up to date so one Of the best ways to improve your

existing content is to Simply make it more up to- dat and so I showed you previously how to find outdated content across your entire website but you also want to drill down to the page level and start to look at these pages that at least on the surface appear to be outdated so we look at this page in particular you see it was posted in 2020 so we're talking four going on almost eventually here 5 years of old content And so over time content will Decay and it's not because you're doing anything particularly wrong it's

just that more than likely there are new competitors who are trying to Target those keywords and Google is getting fresh inputs and Google wants to show the freshest and most up-to-date information for any keyword so this this is a huge advantage that you have because if you were ranking at one point uh during you know let's say in 2020 you were doing well And now you're not you can simply upgrade this page improve make it up to date and republish it with the current date that's the key you change the publish date to the current

date because now you've updated this content and that often can give you a big boost now one little Nuance here I want to show you so I have this this post that's SEO for roofers okay a very very specific post here that ranks now this post in particular was falling it was starting To drop in rankings so I went and I refreshed everything now here's the key all of these images I'll show you you'll see that they are now at 2023 so I did this up this upgrade in 2023 but prior to this point all

these images were showing you know 2022 2021 so all I did was I I saved these images re-uploaded them for the current year which was last year and that as a result not only did I update the content itself like the copywriting but I also updated all the Images every single thing on this page got updated now when you are updating an asset that is what you have to do don't just update the words also update all of the assets as well so for example if I want this post to continue to do well it

would make sense when 2025 hits that I go and start to upgrade a lot of these assets right and re-upload the assets maybe add new visuals whatever it is just to keep that freshness in place it's a very very important ranking Factor 46 is the page readable scannable and easy to digest so one highly underestimated user experience variable is just the overall readability and structure of your content so you could technically have the best content in the world adds so much value do such a great job on every other element but if you make it

difficult to read and digest users just aren't going to consume it and you have to remember people on the internet they have a very very short Attention span so you need to make your content very easy to consume so what I'm showing you here are two different examples the left side is content that I believe is very readable very easy to digest and notice they're not using massive paragraphs okay couple sentences sometimes one sentence they're using headlines to break it up there's not huge enormous paragraphs very they're practicing brevity right a lot of brevity here

and ultimately breaking That content content up in a way that makes it easy to actually consume we want it to be easy now on the other side we see this particular piece of content and it's not easy right it's on a kind of green background it's hard to read General ux 101 it's best to have if you're going to choose a particular uh Style on your website when it comes to informational content it should be black font on a white background that is just standard as far as ease of reading that Is the number one

type of combination that works the best so the way that Healthline has it set up is exact exactly how it should be done okay and I do the same thing on my website notice it's black font on white background it makes a huge difference for readability okay but when you do something that's abnormal like this green background it really can throw off just before you even get to the words it's already you know hard to to to digest uh but then You look at this and there's a bunch of ads breaking it up not anything

that's adding to the content there's no headlines the paragraphs are huge uh and there's just it's just not super readable right and this is a pretty example but I just want to show you the kind of contrast between really exceptional readability and one that has a lot of room to improve 47 does the content have 100% unique highquality images and videos to break it up so in Addition to using headings and short paragraphs and short sentences that's just one technique for ultimately making this more readable but another thing you can do and Healthline doesn't really

do this a whole lot they don't really add a lot of visual assets because I don't believe it's entirely necessary based on the context of their content but for other types of businesses it might make more sense to add more visual assets now here is the key okay you should never Add visual assets unless they actually add value to the content itself so a lot of the time people will add visual assets that don't actually add any value they're just there for decorative purposes and those types of assets in my opinion I think they're just

wasted space I don't think they add a whole lot of value to the content okay so but when you look at this content for example you'll see this is a pretty long piece of content and they're talking about Things that definitely have some visual components so it would be nice to see some examples here to break it up so people can visually see some of these challenges that you might be facing when installing an egress window okay so when we look at a few of these sentences so for example these windows not only provide a

necessary Escape Route in cases of emergencies but also bring natural light into otherwise dim basement spaces making them more livable And inviting okay so you could show an image right here showing natural light coming into a basement verse the basement that has no natural light at all so you could show before and after you could put a nice little visual in here to demonstrate what is being said in this content so you need to kind of think outside of the box here to come up with good visual assets but once again the visual asset or

the videos or whatever you add here should should Bring more value Val to the content so this is why when I spend so much time uh coming up with visual Assets in my content you'll see like if I say something about some sort of Step they need to take I need to visually show them what that looks like I can't just say this without showing a visual explanation right so it's explaining and then showing a visual explanation and just doing that over and over um and one thing for me is in my in my particular

Content I'm always trying to create Unique Images in here even if I've talked about this before which I've talked talked about these exact things a million times I still will take unique screenshots so it's specific to this one piece of content um and this is the key and so like even a small example like showing a picture of Rand fishkin like I'm talking about Rand fishkin maybe people have seen him before but they don't really know his name or something So what I'm doing is I'm I'm presenting that and then I'm also showing Visual Evidence

of that individual right and that's the point we're just looking for ways to break it up and notice there's a lot of breaking up that's going on and even the use of of videos too I will try to find any opportunity to add a relevant video If it makes sense so there's many different ways to to break up your content you have to be creative but there's a few weapons at your Disposal number one short paragraphs short sentences lots of headings uh using tables when it makes sense uh using Unique Images using videos and there's

some other tact tactics but overall if you just use those you're going to be doing way better than the average website 48 is the content helpful for it to be helpful it should add some sort of unique value it should ultimately fulfill the intent and at the end of the day a a page to me is helpful If if someone searches for this keyword and they get what they came for so if there it's to educate you educate them on that topic if it's to entertain you entertain them on that topic so as long as

it does one of those things that the Searcher came for that to me is helpful content it has nothing to do with the length of the content has nothing to do with uh the the the advanced copywriting elements it's more about did this page When the person landed here from search did it helped them or did they need to go back to Google to get a better answer so if they have to go back to Google to get a better answer then that's a very dangerous place for your content to live so the goal should

be to fully fully fulfill the intent of that keyword and if you do that you can definitively say that your content is helpful so looking at these two assets again this post here about you know high cholesterol is very Helpful you get to see the foods that are high in cholesterol that's very helpful for someone that's interested in this and then also the ones uh the the ones that are good and the ones that are bad that you should avoid okay and then talking about what it is and you know all these various FAQs to

really help you be educated on this topic and also giving you you know sources so you can go and explore this more if you want to this is helpful this is what a helpful Piece of content looks like and I don't need to get into this piece of content like maybe there's some helpful elements in here but this is funny because even the presentation of the content the overall design of the content um actually stops from someone from discovering if it actually is helpful right there might be helpful stuff in here but it's so hard

to consume that you know most people are going to bounce off so this is why Readability is so critical because you you want to make it so easy to consume so they can actually get the value that they came for 49 is the content original so for content to be considered original it essentially needs to bring something new to the table for that Target keyword so if it's just someone goes onto the first page of Google for the keyword and they basically just regurgitate what already exists and then puts it into an article that's not

that's not original Content that's not bringing anything new to the table so you need to bring something fresh and new and that's what can make it original so if you look at Healthline you see they do a really good job of this to add their own unique research and data and they clearly have put a lot of time and effort into building very very quantifiable studies to support all of their arguments so there's a lot of work that goes into this content on the opposite side of the Spectrum not to keep picking on this site

but this is an example of not a whole lot of new information being added here you can basically find all this information just by using chat gbt or just going on the first page of Google and just kind of like building some type of uh curated asset right and at the end of the day we should be adding unique value and it should be original now of course you you can just take either of these content assets I took this one ran It through original. a and this is clearly created by a large language model

so it's very obvious but just to kind of confirm that it is and then on the opposite side of the spectrum looking at Healthline comes back as 100% original meaning it was written by a human okay it was actually written by a human meaning that there was effort put into this content to make it as original as possible so this is not very complicated like if you want to get Better results from your content then you have to invest more time and effort into making it original 50 is the content accurate so trying to figure

out if if content is actually accurate is a very very challenging Endeavor because unfortunately on the internet anyone can publish anything and this is a you know part of the problem on the internet people will read something and even if it isn't true they might believe it because they don't do any additional Research so you know when you're dealing with certain claims you should be able to cite the sources of those claims so when we're looking at Healthline it's a fairly trusted Source because a lot of the time they're not just saying things without any

evidence they are presenting actual studies and they'll give you even the source to where you can go and look this up yourself now of course if you don't trust the entity that is providing the information then of course you could Dispute this but for the most part like if you if we're under the assumption that you trust the entity then it's very likely that at least what they're saying here is accurate according to this Source okay and that's really what we should be looking as like is the is what they're saying here accurate according to

the source that they've been that they've given that they've provided okay um now if they just said something like you know if they just said one of these Statistics and they didn't provide any citation how would we know that it's accurate right we're just assuming that it's accurate but we don't have any proof that that's actually legitimate so this comes down to just really doing your research and trying to find is objective sources of information that you can find to support your information and if you don't if you don't can't find data then you can

also create your own studies right now of course depending on The industry it's going to be very difficult like doing a you know a controlled study in the food industry is a wildly difficult process but you know for me doing a study about the best CMS for SEO that's not as challenging I could certainly you know pump that out and have some unique data to kind of support whatever argument I'm trying to make okay so looking at accuracy is really really important and once again again looking at this content you know It's not it's not

making a whole lot of um presumptions here but at the end of the day it's not it's not making a lot of claims all right but it says right here this eliminates the need for Central authori such as a bank to validate transactions making the process faster and more efficient well how do we know that the process is faster how do we know that the process is more efficient uh why does it eliminate the need for a central Authority how do we Know that right so these are like to to confirm the accuracy here we

the accuracy we need actually proof or even this one here talking about the size of the market but there's no citation there's no citation of this just a huge number that's been presented and then there's no additional um you know proof of this claim so just cite your sources that makes a big difference in the accuracy claims 51 is the content safe so it's usually pretty easy to tell if a Website is safe or not so for example I'm looking at a streaming website where you can download various streaming services if you want to watch

UFC or NFL I'm not I'm not saying you should do this I just want to give an example of this these types of sketchy websites that if you're not careful could potentially you know like you see what's happening right now trying to infect my computer uh this is what would be considered not safe okay you go on this Site you click on something like this and then something all kinds of sketchy stuff starts to happen Okay this is not what would be considered safe okay the opposite side of the spectrum you know looking at a

a government web website you know clearly there's a certain feeling that you get when you're on a website like this there's clearly evidence that this is going to be a safe experience they've got an SSL certificate they've got all these Disclaimers and various things helping you to ensure that you're on the right website uh there's all kinds of various other things proving that it's a legitimate entity so you know it's pretty obvious how to make your site very very safe uh and you know most people are not going to have sketchy sites like this but

General you should look at some of the safest sites on the internet and model A lot of the things that they're doing because that actually Can increase the trust for users and if users trust your site more that could potentially help indirectly with just general user experience on the site 52 does the content demonstrate a high degree of effort so the algorithms don't know typically how much effort you put into your content but users know how much effort you put into your content and if users are the first point of contact as far as how

our content is going to perform perform or how any SEO Driven assets going to perform then we should always just focus on what's best for the users because if you focus on what's best for the users the search engine traffic should come right so start there because that's really what matters the algorithms are just reacting to all of the things that are occurring with the users with the market feedback it's responding to signals the algorithm doesn't really know a whole lot it's just trying to understand what it should Rank based on who has the best

signals so we need to create those signals now effort is one of those things where you know when you read uh you know an asset from Brian Dean in particular there's no doubt how much effort was put into this content you don't look at and say you know what I wonder how much time he spent on this because it's so abundantly clear that so much effort was put in to try to find all of these different data points all of these different points Throughout this there's just so much Clear evidence on the surface you don't

have to read it you can just tell by skimming that so much effort has been put into this okay uh and then there's also the external signals that prove this as well he just got blog comments and social shares and not to mention all the backlinks that this particular page has so there's overwhelming evidence even outside of just you know Google crawling the content that that there is Proof that there was a lot of effort put in this because the market has proven that there is now on the opposite side of the spectrum a page

like this there's no evidence um of effort right now you know maybe it's long it's got a lot of words but there's no you know it doesn't have any social signals it doesn't have blog comments it doesn't have backlinks it doesn't have any external Market validation that this is a good piece of content okay so it's not like Google's Algorithm is going to sit here manually and say well I think this one's better subjectively like the algorithms don't work like that they can't work like that at this point but with the large language models there

might be a time where they can actually you know study the content and and have a better understanding actually come up with their own opinion uh as to what content is best now we're we're ways out from that it's probably more guessing than Anything than actual objectively being able to do that but the point is is always just approach from the perspective of I'm putting in a lot of effort into this content because I care about getting the best feedback from users and feedback from the market 53 is the content written or fact checked by

a subject matter expert you at least want to have someone who has some experience in whatever industry you're going to be writing in so it it doesn't need to be Like the top 1% but you know when you're talking about things that are in the your money your life type of Arena you should have someone who has the credentials to write about those topics right but if you're writing about funny C pictures of course you don't need like traditional educational requirements to write about that but you should at least demonstrate that you are the the

expert on funny cat pictures you've you've digested and seen thousands and Thousands of funny cap pictures and you were the master okay it's so easy to create expertise and experience so the every website should do this in my opinion every website doesn't matter whether it's in your money or life or it's not you should always have people who are bylined that actually have either the experience in that topic so like let's say uh Dave poroy who's tried tons of pizzas there's no formal education for pizzas trying right There's no formal education for that but he

has a massive amount of experience because he's actually gone out there and tried like hundreds and hundreds of different pizzas so that gives him credibility so we're just looking for what is the reason why we should trust this individual who is creating this content and just make that really really clear 54 is the prominently displayed so this is a very simple check that you can run on any website and just go to the Website and go to the content and see is there a subject matter expert that is clearly stated right at the beginning of

the asset so Healthline once again you know they are really the great model for this and above the fold you have multiple qualifications of people that are involved in the content creation you have someone who medically reviewed the content and you have someone who wrote the content who also has the qualifications to write about this topic So overwhelming evidence right away without even going any further look at you know the website over here there's no we don't even know who wrote this content we don't know if they're qualified WR about this topic uh and it's

just not clear it needs to be clear at a glance once again this is not a direct ranking Factor but this is an indirect factor that could influence experience 55 does each author have a dedicated and detailed author page so if You're creating informational content it doesn't matter whether it's funny C pictures or personal injury or health or whatever it is it could be your money or life or something completely silly you should have dedicated Pages for each author to explain why they're qualified to write about that topic and this is not necessarily a direct

ranking Factor but this is more of a trust signal for users and if users trust your site more they're going to consume your content More which is likely an SEO Factor okay so these are things you have to keep in mind a lot of these things that I'm showing you are not necessarily going to be those direct factors but they do influence performance in an indirect way okay so this is an example on Healthline of a dedicated author Pages as you can tell very very qualif ifed person to write about these topics they've got a

LinkedIn profile and a and a Instagram profile and they actually even have a Website as well so highly qualified to write about what they're talking about and 56 are all sources of information cited so not to uh bring you back to college writing 101 but one of the most important things when you're creating content online especially a Content where you're dealing with your money or your life you should site your sources so if you make a claim try to link to a credible Source about that topic so Healthline once again does this Tremendously well you

can look at this and they're linking to you know usda.gov which is a highly trusted entity on the internet okay and all of these are highly trusted entities that they're linking to all of the time okay so that's what you should be doing always try to link out to the most trusted entities in that particular industry so in the context like back Linko he does this really well and you'll see he links out to a Google Patent that's on search Engine Journal okay so honestly I probably would actually linked to the patent itself as opposed

to linking to search engine Journal but it's still the same kind of outcome because it is that is a trusted entity so not to uh be you know belabor the point here but if you make a claim just site your sources and now if you're doing any type of product review or affiliate content you have to ask 57 does the content demonstrate firsthand experience so if you're going To be doing product reviews or affiliate content then you really these days need to focus on getting firsthand experience and so the two examples here uh art uh

arings or ratings whatever you want to call it uh is a perfect website to model because they do extensive basically scientific level analysis of these products and of course you know to be able to do this they have to actually purchase those products and do this this uh datadriven quantitative analysis of Of these TVs and various technology products so it's very very clear at just at the surface you didn't have to do like much additional research to tell that they've actually put a lot of effort uh and they clearly have a lot of experience using

these products okay same on the Le hand side over here where you see they just based on the subject line alone we can tell they actually tried these uh you know tried these frozen pizzas and it looks like they Even took a they have Visual Evidence that they actually tried it as well so just looking at the content you're going to be able to see that they actually went through and they tried each of these uh frozen pizzas okay so that's what you're trying to do if you're going to be doing product reviews you're going

to be doing even a lytical if you're going to do like the you know the best SEO tools for example like I did the best SEO tools uh for agencies and you'll see that for this particular piece of content um I didn't just like create some random listicle I actually use all of these products I use every single one so when I'm writing about it it that comes out in the writing naturally and you can see there's certain Nuance because I actually use these right and I know how to use them and I use them

all the time and so you can't really fake that you Can try to fake it but you really can't you can't fake the Nuance uh that comes with experiencing a particular product so it's not just about these individual kind of focused reviews it's also about any listicle that you uh create you should really only be talking about things you have real experience in 58 does the content demonstrate R in the field experience so whenever you're talking about products in general you should be able to prove that you have Experience with that product but another thing

that can really elevate your content to the next level is also demonstrating in the field experience now this is not uh going to be applicable to every situation but like in the case of let's say SEO it makes sense for me to show proof of in the- field experience actually fighting battles in Google okay that's in the field experience which is different than just experience you gathered from uh you Know studying a product like you're showing experience that clearly shows that your you have some levels of expertise uh in this industry based on you putting

in a significant amount of hours and effort to try to uh become better at a particular skill right so for example if you were learning how to dribble a basketball from Steph Curry you would know you wouldn't need to like see his qualifications you would just pretty much know that he's going to Teach you something really really good because he has tons he has thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of in the- field experience you're not going to ask Steph Curry if he's read books about how to dribble a basketball that just doesn't make

sense so there's a big difference and I think this can help elevate your content too when that starts to come out and you're you have people creating your content who have that real life experience under their Belt 59 how well does the content share a personal experience perspective or feelings on the topic so one of the reasons why I suspect that Reddit has really benefited from all of these recent updates other than uh maybe their relationship with Google if we push that aside uh you know one of the one of the elements I think has

helped them a ton is a lot of these threads that are ranking have a ton of just subjective opinions about these various things so This this particular thread ranks for best frozen pizza and you can tell it's like a lot of subjective opinions about what they believe is the best frozen pizza okay so I think Google wants to show a lot of uh you know varying insights about these topics and I think Reddit is you know kind of the place that does this really well there's lots of people giving opinions it's one of the most

popular kind of community-driven websites on the Internet so it just kind of makes sense especially when you have a thread that's this long it has about 1,700 comments so there's just a lot for Google to work with here and it obviously adds a lot of uniqueness that you know a traditional asset can't add number 60 how well does the content speak from a first person perspective they are really focused on giving like subjective opinions about these topics right they've got Visual Evidence and they're actually rating Each of these you know four out of 10 and

they're talking about you know this is the piece I was most excited about and it's the one I always wanted as a kid it's very very personal it's using a lot of first person uh in the content and this is this is really really important when you're doing type of when you're trying to create an objective type of review 61 does the content demonstrate that it was produced with some degree of experience such as actual Product use visiting a place or communicating with a person who experienced it so all this is really referring to is

just that there's Visual Evidence outside of just you saying that you've done something to actually prove it with Visual Evidence uh that that that's actually the case so for me what I did in this particular piece of content is I took pictures of you know the actual book that I had but just to take it to the next level I took this Picture showing the whole stack of books that I was holding specifically and this isn't like you know you know those YouTube uh thumbnails are like they'll like add a hand pointing and it's not

even the person's hand it's not this I actually like am holding all of these uh holding all these books you can check my Amazon history like I actually did it okay uh so this is visual proof you don't have to do any additional investigation to ultimately see because Now I have I have visual proof at the surface and then I have you know the content supports that visual proof it's the same thing with this one they said they tried the cheap frozen pizzas well before I even read it I can tell there's actual visual proof

that they took a you know they made the pizza they cut off a slice they put it on the napkin and clearly they actually tried this tried this pizza so that is the visual proof that you need to actually uh create a Highly trusted piece of content and now the third type of page you'll need to optimize is a commercial page like a category page on e-commerce or a service page on the local level this brings us to number 62 is the page page built for goal completions so if you have a commercial page you

have to optimize for goal completions so so it doesn't matter whether it's a transactional page like this on the local level or an e-commerce category page or product page any page That's designed to drive a conversion you really have to make sure you're you're using conversion rate optimization and ultimately optimizing for user experience so what I'm looking at is I just want to make sure that it's really easy for someone to convert on whatever page we're trying to rank and so right away this one here just a you know random example I picked you know

they have a nice phone number above the fold they have uh they have calls to Action throughout and as we go here there's a there's another uh another form here there's another phone number there's a lot of opportunities to convert here a lot of opportunities to actually complete a goal okay so I really like this uh you know this setup here there's definitely some things I would I'd probably shift around a little bit like having all the social media icons above the fold kind of a dangerous game to play because you can send people Off

of the site which then could increase conversion rates but for the most part you know this is this is the type of design um that you would want to have is to really focus on driving conversions and now 63 do you have user tracking software installed so you already know that with Google analytics 4 you can see engagement rate and that's something you should absolutely be tracking and that's a free metric that you can track but if you have a little Bit of budget I would recommend investing in a a user tracking software like Mouse

flow there's also hot jar there's a bunch of other ones but this is the one I've been using for a while there's basically two things that you really want to use with this number one is the session replays so this will actually show a recording of how this person interacted with your website and you can see like if there's certain areas that they're getting held up on You can go and improve those areas uh you know on a kind of onetoone basis like that but I also recommend using the the heat map technology okay so

with the heat map technology you can see so much and see how people are interacting with your page so what we're looking at here is this is the clicks so where are people clicking on the homepage well uh you know to No Surprise they're clicking on the main call to action that's right here okay they're also clicking on the Reviews they're clicking on various other things I can also see the other calls to action that they're clicking on which to me is important because if I see a lot of people are clicking on things about

starting an agency that's an indication that there's a lot of demand for that so maybe I should create more content regarding that and the opposite side if no one really ever clicks about systemization maybe aren't that interested in systemization right So I can I can glean insights from looking at this data um and there's so much you can learn from this uh and I I just can't express it enough especially like looking at the different types of products that I offer and seeing where do people like to click what are they actually interested in okay

that's what matters so you can use the click data to your advantage you can also use it from an SEO perspective which is where are people clicking on your on your page and If they're not clicking why why are they not clicking you can also look at the movement patterns see where they're kind of you know their their cursor tends to go um you can also look at the scroll data so you can see how far people are actually consuming your content and so in the context of SEO if you see like most people aren't

getting pasted above the fold that's an area where like maybe you should try to improve it so now we're at the home stretch which brings Me to the next checkpoint 64 is the page using correct schema markup so schema markup is a very very small rank Factor if at all but once again it's one of those factors when compounded with everything else can certainly help you and you do need schema markup to get Ser features in Google which can actually improve organic CTR which is a direct ranking Factor so there's definitely a benefit to implementing

it on your pages now what you want to do is download the Schema uh extension here on Chrome and that way you can quick get a quick glance at any particular page and see how it's marked up so like this one's marked as a movie and you can click on the markup and you can see specifically how they mark this content up now we're in a really cool time where you can just go into chat gbt and have it create this schema Mark for you so I'll show you a quick example if we look up

the uh detailed SEO extension review which is a Post on got SEO that I have and you'll see I've got this kind of review schema here and it creates a uh a serp feature here that can help me increase CTR now how did I do this well here's how I did it so first I'll show you we'll actually go we'll open up this particular URL and I'll show you how this works so if we open this one up you can run the schema again and you'll see it's going to have that you know it's going

to have that uh product review schema so you see the Schema mark up here and it shows you know when it was published it gives my review you know little quick uh explanation and then because I'm using generate press uh it makes this a lot easier so uh and you can you can download any plugin to be able to do this but I'll just show you in the context of my website I go over here and I go to elements um and then what I can do is I'll go over and find the specific schema

that I have for that page and You'll see all I did is I pasted the schema in there in this little uh little section and then I made sure it shows in the wp head and then I go to the display rules and I make sure it only shows on this one particular blog post and so one of the mistakes I see with people doing schema is like put the same schema across every single page this is a very like hyperfocused strategy that you need to make it relevant to each individual page that you're using

it on 65 are There any other pages on your website targeting this exact keyword or in other words keyword cannibalization so to find keyword cannibalization my go-to tactic is just to go into the screaming frog crawl and I'll look under the title so if I start to see some evidence of some potential keyword cannibalization I will start to do some some some searches here now um I've got some formulas built in here so basically any duplication will show up but really when when you're when You have issues with keyword cannibalization it may not be as

evident uh as you might imagine so let's say for example I felt that there was cannibalization for some sort of YouTube query well I would just go in here and I would start to search things that are specific to YouTube and I would verify that every single one of these pages is targeting a complete completely unique keyword now you might say looking at uh some of these like you know the the uh Subscribe buttons on YouTube these are all very very close some people would say oh this is bordering on you know keyword cannibalization but

I actually disagree because each of these has different intent so if we go and look specifically free black subscribe buttons for YouTube okay we'll go and look at this search query and we'll see how well it's doing and it's here okay because if I tried to create one piece of Content to hit on all those different colors it actually wouldn't perform as well compared to just having one dedicated page that specifically hits on all these different colors right that's always going to be way way more effective um and so you can see that it's just

going to make a significant difference and it's the same thing we can take any of these we'll do you know the same exact kind of query but for blue and it's like I said it's a very Very close key word but once again the blue page is ranking because this page is the most relevant option for this keyword that is the goal of our content be the most relevant and of course I link to the other colors to give the user what they're looking for okay so this is not keyword cannibalization it would be keyword

cannibalization if I had another page about black subscribe buttons for YouTube If I had like two three four those pages that's where Things start to get dangerous but other than that as long as it has different intent it can have its own dedicated page 66 does the page have five plus internal links excluding the navigation so I showed you previously in this video how to identify Pages across your entire website that don't have a lot of internal link coverage but sometimes we have to look specifically at an individual page and see if maybe that's something

that's holding that page back So what we're going to do here is we're actually going to hide these columns and we want to look at this unique in link section and so let's say I wanted to improve my performance for this Santa Monica SEO page okay well right away I see it only has one internal link so before I even do anything else the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go and try to find any other pages that are relevant to Santa Monica SEO so that location plus that main topic and

if I Don't have any pages that are relevant to that then that's actually a signal to me that I need to create more supporting content to support this particular asset so that would mean may be creating a page about uh local SEO services in Santa Monica maybe creating a page about local service ads in Santa Monica right so building that support around that page will give me that opportunity to add an internal link 67 is the internal anchor text optimized well go down to The internal anchor SE section under internal links and so I'm looking

at a page here where I can look at the internal link anchor text for this one page and you know to determine whether it's optimized well we just want to make sure that it's relevant and diverse okay that's what we're going for we're going for a lot of diversity and a lot of relevance so in the case of this these are actually highly relevant it doesn't use the exact match keyword but it uses Some variants of that keyword so this would be considered more of a partial match anchor text and in my opinion I think

the best way to do internal linking these days is to really diversify that that anchor text as much as possible because you don't want to be overly aggressive and slam the page with the same exact anchor TCH every time my advice on this has changed over time I used to believe that was okay and the only um you know the only issue is with The external links the back links coming in you need to be safer with those but now I'm actually on the side of you should be safe with both types of of links

so both back links and internal links you should probably lean more towards uh just a lot a lot of diversity that seems to be the way to go these days 68 does the page have as many internal links as the top competitor so I've talked a a lot about internal links and really just focusing on your own Website but one thing you'll definitely want to consider is when you are competing you should look at your your competition and see how much they're using internal links and so this example here is looking at new movies for

20124 and you can see that Rotten Tomatoes I mean they have a massive amount of internal links going to this page that's ranking really really well for this keyword okay it's ranking exceptionally well it's got a decent amount of Backlinks but has a significant amount of internal links which is likely influencing performance but when you look at a competitor that's not ranking as well you can see very very little amount of internal links going to that page so essentially what what the signal that's being sent here is that this is a very important page for

Rotten Tomatoes and what it's saying for this website is that it's not that important to Google right and it's that that's the signal That we're giving off and so if you want to improve the performance of this page you would likely want to prioritize it more and based on the quantity of internal links here this is definitely in the navigation somewhere so you know you may want to model kind of what they're doing 69 is the page no more than three clicks deep into the architecture what you want to look at is have we at

least fixed the crawl depth issue and this is an issue that can be Fixed very very easily so for example I have this kind of you know Silly piece of content here about should I delete Instagram and we'll we'll check the performance and we'll see it is ranking number three Okay so So based on this I know I don't even need to touch this content right now so all I need to do is I need to prioritize this particular page better in the site architecture so you know there might be another challenge I don't have

a lot of content About Instagram so I may not really be able to put this in really any other page on my site because just not going to make contextual sense but this is also a signal for me that maybe I need more content about this specific topic to support this particular ular asset okay so you can use this as a uh kind of as a seed to help you discover that okay maybe we actually need more topic support for this and if you can't quickly find internal linking Opportunities that's usually a signal that uh

you need more content and finally number 70 does the page have at least five supporting assets so let's say I wanted to improve our performance and build more topic support around this one page that's about how to get 4,000 watch hours on YouTube well first thing I can do is I can go right into Google search console and I can look at all of the data that exists and I can ultimately be able to see are there Particular topics that we're just not covering well and you can only cover so much on one given topic

so when we look at this you know we're seeing all the keywords that we're doing really well for and that's great we want to do you know continue to do well for those but we want to build more support around this page so what I do is actually filter this by position and then I can start to see the topics that are going to be definitely warrant their own Dedicated page so for example I can start to look at these how to get 1K views on YouTube very different than the topic of that page this

needs its own dedicated page okay and we keep going down here uh another one here which is uh best YouTube video length for monetization that's a very very specific longtail keyword that would require its own dedicated page here's another one about buying watch hours on YouTube I could look at this keyword and create a Reverse kind of angle with this one and say why you shouldn't buy watch hours on YouTube right a dedicated page specifically for that and I just keep going down the list and what you'll find Is On Any Given page that is

already ranking pretty well you're going to be able to find at least 10 20 sometimes 30 ideas to build topic support so people really underestimate this and they really look at this at way too broadly you got to really drill down to the page Level level so you can start to find these opportunities and there are opportunities everywhere everywhere like there's unlimited content ideas just and I'm just looking at one page imagine if I did this for every single page on my website how many ideas I would have so ideas are everywhere okay this is

just one tactic you can also look at you know someone who's doing this really well or website's doing this well as Healthline they are ranking really well for high Protein foods well it's no coincidence because they have tons of pages that are built to support that one topic like if you look at this they have 102 pages that are specifically linking with the anchor Tex protein right 102 we're talking about hundreds of pages that they have built to support just this one page and you can actually do a site colon search and see this with

your own eyes you can look you know look at the Domain and then look at that one little Topic they're going after and look at how much content they've written just about protein there's an overwhelming amount and so a lot of people don't you know don't go to this level when they talk about really just dominating one particular topic one particular um Point here and so this is this is the level you need to go to if you want to take your website to the you know to to the highest level possible another thing you

can do is inside of rankability this is A little cool tactic you can use is if you go and run an analysis for a keyword like this link Building Services you go in here and look at the keywords that are being mentioned you know a lot of these topics you should be you should be hitting as many of these topics as possible in the content itself but a lot of these topics require their own dedicated pages so for example link building strategy well that's very different than link Building Services Link Building Services is more about

you know what of the best services that we can invest in to do this work but a link building strategy is very different that's about trying to formulate a particular strategy that's going to help you beat your competition so that would require its own dedicated asset okay and then looking at these other there's tons of other idas here backlink profile you create a dedicated uh you know asset about how to how to build a really high Quality backlink profile or what does a high quality backlink profile look like you keep going down the list and

there's just endless endless opportunities and so I often use the NLP to my advantage because I'm looking at this and I'm not just thinking about how do I get these topics in this content but I'm also thinking about oh wait a second I could use some of these topics to create additional assets so like niche edics n Niche edits for example I create a Dedicated asset for that I create a dedicated asset for private blog networks and broken link building and Link building tactics and guest posting Services I mean it's this all the information we

need is right here this is all the information we need to properly build real topic Authority in these really small Pockets so that's all I have for you today please like this video And subscribe if you got any value because it'll help support the channel Thank you so much for watching