Hello mate,

Whoa – what can I say… So many of you want SEO lessons. We’ll start right away.

​​Another thing.

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Our Pro plans are great value-for-money and your purchases help us serve you better. When you buy a pro plan, it’s a win-win for both of us!

I’m going to share an idea that may surprise you in next week’s email.

For now, let’s jump into SEO!

SEO Step 1: What is so?

Consider that a search engine (Google) assigns 100 points to each site. If the site has five pages, each page gets 20 points. If it has 100 pages, each page gets one point.

When someone searches for some “keyword”, the search engine finds all pages matching those keywords and sorts all matches by the score. Showing the top ten on the first page.

The search engine then tracks a lot of other numbers – how many people clicked on what results, how much time they spent on that site, how many pages did they view, how many – and what kind of – other sites are linking back to each page, the kind of content on the page etc. The search engine keeps adjusting each page’s score ongoingly.

Now think about these questions…

Q1: What would happen to your 100 points if your site has five very good pages, but twenty pages without much value. What will be the impact of low average score per page on good pages?

Q2: What would happen if ten pages on your site targeted the same keyword. How could the search engine pick one with so much competition from your own site?

Q3: What if many pages on your site were duplicates – referring to the same content in one way or another – like a blog post, then archives by tags or authors had the same excerpt and link?

You’re getting the drift already right?

The quality of each page is more important than quantity. Shallow content, duplication, broken pages and internal fights (for a single keyword) are not good.

Just to be clear – search engines don’t really start with a 100 point kitty for each site – but this direction of thinking helps us improve a site quickly. So let’s run with it.

The first step to improving SEO for your site is to properly assess the current situation.

There are lots of tools – mostly paid – that can audit your site and provide suggestions. For now, I’m sharing a simple method to get present to what’s working and what’s not working on your site.

Here’s what I want you to do now.

1. Open Google Analytics, go to “Behavior – Site Content – All Pages”. You will see your top pages and their page views etc.
2. Change the date range to last six months – or a year if you wish. It will update the list.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the grid, you will see the total count of pages. Change the “Show rows” count to be more than your total pages. This essentially loads all your site pages in one long list.
4. Observe the list. What do you see? What do you learn? What pages are working? How long do people stay on a page?
5. Now, scroll up and find the “Export” option – just above the date selector. Export the results to an Excel file or a Google Sheet as you prefer.
6. Add a new column after the URL – call it “Action”.
7. Go through your list of pages and decide whether you want to Keep, Delete or Improve each item. You may also choose to “Redirect” to another page if it’s a duplicate. Fill in the “Action” column with your decision.
8. Make sure you save this file! We will continue working with it!

Once you’ve processed the list, you will have a list of low-traffic / non-working pages you want to delete or improve. Plus a list of pages that are working and you want to keep them as is. Or maybe they’re working, but you see potential for improvement so you’ve marked them with “Improve”.

You can also go to Acquisition – Search Console – Landing Pages within Google Analytics, and find a list of pages that are showing up in search results. Not all your site pages may show up here – and that may also give you an indication about what pages are present on site, but not appearing in search results at all!

Take your time to review and re-review this list. It’s a treasure trove of insights!

We’ll discuss your sitemap next time.

A writing prompt

✍

Look out of the nearest window and write in vivid detail what you see starting from left to right. Imagine you are telling someone who is not tall enough to look out of the window, use as much detail as possible.

From around the web

🌎

• From 0 to 70% market share: how Google Chrome ate the Internet
• Firefox is the only alternative (since Chrome ate the Internet!)
• Modern for Wikipedia – a new look
• OpenAI has opened GPT-3 access , so you can try it yourself
• What is first principles thinking and how it drives non-linear outcomes

Stopping it here as I really want you to go ahead and do the SEO / content analysis I suggested above.

Do reply and share what you observe…

More goodness next week.

Take care.