There is no “secret sauce” or tricks to rank higher on search engines. If you’re looking to achieve success with your SEO campaign, then your campaign should include:

Strategic On-Page Optimization
Technical SEO Audit
Quality Link Building

To be successful with SEO, you need a perfect combination of every crucial element of SEO that matters to search engines. Rather than doing any guesswork, having proper on-page optimization, technical SEO and quality link building will position your site high on SERPs while improving your authority in your niche.

If your SEO campaign doesn’t include these strategies, then you know why your site is not generating enough organic search traffic. It also clearly indicates that you’re not getting the fundamentals right.

The sad truth is that most SEO agencies are completely focused on resolving the current situation of search engines without having a plan to future-proof their client’s ranking and traffic.

We are aware of Google’s ranking factors and we have an in-depth understanding of Google’s main goal of providing their users with the best results to fulfill their search intent. So, it is important to satisfy both users and search engines.

Here’s how we get started with our SEO roadmap…

Business Analysis

Do you think SEO is right for every single business?

No.

Although SEO provides the highest ROI compared to other digital marketing efforts, you need to analyze and evaluate whether it is suitable for the business. During the business analysis phase, you’ll be able to find out whether SEO is the right digital strategy for your business.

Your primary keywords might not have enough search volume, and you may need to compete with the big boys in your industry. Moreover, other digital marketing channels might have greater potential in growing your business online.

Once you analyze your business, you’ll know whether SEO is the right one to focus on. When you analyze your business and industry, you’ll get to know:

The amount of time required to get results
The cost involved in getting results
The most effective digital marketing strategy

If SEO is the best digital marketing strategy for your business, then you should proceed with the next step.

Competitor Analysis

To come up with an SEO strategy that works, it is important to find your competitors and analyze their online marketing activities. Gathering crucial information about their digital marketing activities will help us develop an effective SEO plan that delivers results. There are three pillars of competitor analysis for SEO which are:

On-Page SEO

When you perform on-page analysis, you’ll be looking at the quality of their content and how they optimize their on-page elements by conducting:

Keywords / Keyphrases analysis: check the keywords they are ranking for, the pages getting the highest traffic from search engines, the level of difficulty to compete with the keywords they are ranking for and opportunities for featured snippets.
Content Analysis: Identify and evaluate the type of content that ranks on the SERPs and find the content gap. Go through ranking content and check the quality you’ll need to compete.
Conversion strategies analysis: Find out how your competitors are converting their visitors into leads, sales and subscribers. Do they have CTA’s in the content?

Technical SEO

You want to know how organized your competitors are when it comes to technical SEO. This is the foundation that makes or breaks a site’s long-term SEO efforts. These are the important components that you need to check:

Site Architecture: Check how your competitors organize their content across their sites and analyze their user experience.
Site loading speed: Evaluate their site loading speed across desktop and mobile devices. Use GTMetrix to do it
Responsiveness / Mobile-Friendly: Check whether their sites are responsive on all devices, especially mobile devices. Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test

Off-Page SEO

In this section, you want to check your competitor’s strength with their backlink profile. You need to look at the following elements while analyzing the off-page SEO:

Link analysis: Check the referring domains and their quality. Use tools like Ubersuggest, SEMRush, or Ahrefs.
Linkable content assets: Find the types of content that are getting the most links.
Link building strategies: Identify the link building strategies they’ve implemented to their sites; PBNs, guest blogging, event sponsorship, etc.
Backlink gaps: List down the sites that your competitors are getting links from

There are very few reliable competitor analysis checklists available online. These are some of the resources that you should check out:

Website Audit

After having a good understanding of your top competitors and their SEO activities, you should analyze and evaluate your website.

A complete website audit will help you analyze all the pages on your website. When we work with our clients at Magnes Marketing, we have a comprehensive checklist to see what is lacking with their website and how to improve it.

You don’t want to assume things about your site. You want to get enough information to back your claims of your site’s quality and compatibility in terms of SEO. To do that, you need to perform a thorough website audit that will help you:

Evaluate the quality of your website from the search engine’s perspective.
Identify and fix pages with low performance.
Focus on improving the quality and performance of your top key pages.

Google looks into many aspects of your website to determine whether your site deserves to be on top of SERPs. If you fail to fix your website, you will face challenges in improving your SERPs and authority.

Your goal is to improve the quality of your site and show that it’s worth ranking higher on search results pages.

Keywords Audit

When we talk about building a solid SEO strategy, keyword audit is the most crucial part that you should never miss out on. There are many factors that you need to consider to get in front of your audience.

The process of keyword audit will help you understand your target audience and focus on providing solutions to their problems. (people usually search for solutions to their problems)

The only drawback is that there will be hundreds to thousands of keywords your site may be ranking for, so it will be extremely difficult to navigate each one of them. However, you can always focus on the keywords that matter most to your business and implement the right strategies in improving your rankings.

For keyword audit, you can use Google Keyword Planner, Google Search Console, SEMRush or Ahrefs.

Let’s go through the full process with a step-by-step guide:

Stack up all the URLs of Your Website

Before implementing any new SEO strategy for your website, we need to check how your current content is ranking for your target keywords. You need to gather all the URLs of your website along with their metrics like backlinks, internal linking, and more.

Once you get all the necessary information on your keywords, it will be easier to analyze what you should focus on to improve your search rankings.

Identify Your Primary and Secondary Keywords

Did you perform keyword research before writing your content earlier?

If you did, then you should have identified the main keywords for each page and blog post you’ve published.

If you haven’t, decide what keywords are suitable for the pages you’ve published. Although most of the time, you will end up targeting generic keywords with huge search volume and high competition, try to incorporate long-tail keywords that are relevant to your pages.

~~As for the secondary keywords~~ we can call them LSI keywords. Remember that, LSI keywords are not synonyms to your main keywords. They’re terms that are closely related to your target keywords.

For example, the main keyword is “workout”. The LSI keywords will be “cardio”, “weight training” and “HIIT”. These LSI keywords come under the same topic cluster as your main keyword. So, there is a high potential for your page to rank for multiple keywords.

**We do not suggest using LSI keywords anymore. This is because the term “LSI keywords” is not mentioned in any of Google’s algorithm patents. Moreover, the recent article by Bill Slawski debunks the myth of LSI keywords.

You may want to check the blog post here: What Are LSI Keywords

You should avoid stuffing keywords into your content. Add them strategically and make them look natural. Moreover, you don’t have to waste time creating new content for related keywords.

List Top Performing Pages of Your Competitors

We often focus only on 5 main competitors and make comparisons. For example, we compare the same type of content against the competitors when we try to rank our client’s page. If it’s a product page, then the comparison will be only against a product page.

This is to make sure we are providing the right type of content for the user’s search intent. Google provides the best results for users based on their search queries. So, if the user is searching for a product or service, Google will show pages that showcase the products or services. This is how Google works in offering the best results without compromising on user experience.

Before optimizing your site’s on-page elements, you need to be clear with the content that works best for your audience’s search queries.

Your competitors should be ranking high on search engine result pages if they are top players in your industry. If your site is performing better than your competitors in terms of Domain authority, quality site architecture, and perfectly optimized on-page signals, yet not ranking high on search engines, then it should be due to content type.

Analyze your competitor’s content and the content on the first 5 spots of the search results page (you can do 5 if you’re in a competitive niche). Plan on creating content better than the existing ones to stand out!

Keyword Gap analysis

Keyword gap analysis is the process of identifying a list of keywords that drive organic search traffic to your competitors that you’re not ranking. Keyword gap analysis will help you find keyword opportunities to increase your organic traffic.

Once you identify the keyword gaps, you’ll be able to improve your overall search engine presence and build authority in your niche.

So, how to perform keyword gap analysis?

We’ll show you how.

Collect Your Competitor’s Keywords

You need to target at least 5-10 competitors to get the best result from this analysis. Get a list of keywords they are currently ranking compare it with your keywords and remove irrelevant keywords. There may be keywords that are trending in your industry that you’re not aware of.

Use the right tools to gather more keywords

You don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to rank for more keywords that are closely related to your niche. You will have a hard time finding the relevant keywords if you choose to do them manually. Using tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs can help you gather potential keywords effectively.

Filter your Keyword List

There will be hundreds of irrelevant keywords with typo errors, duplicates and brand mentions. You need to filter these keywords and remove them from the keyword list.

Analyze user’s search intent

You need to ask these questions regarding the keywords you’ve gathered:

Why are people searching for this keyword?
What is their search intent? Finding information about products and services or looking to make a purchase?
Which part of the buyer’s journey does the keyword belong to?

Once you find out the search intent of keywords, it will help you determine the priority of creating new content for the keywords.

Keyword Clustering

We’ve mentioned earlier in keyword research that it doesn’t make sense if you want to create separate content for each keyword. Your site should be ranking for a cluster of keywords. What’s the point of creating content that doesn’t bring the value that you need? You shouldn’t waste your time creating content that does not semantically relate to your primary keyword.

So how should handle this situation?

Look at the search engine results page. Find out where the keywords in your list co-exist. It will be easier for you to create keyword groups that can rank for the same content. If the keywords in your list do not rank together, then you may need to create separate content for those keywords.

Google is your friend. As long as you understand how it works, you can improve your site’s ranking by targeting the right keywords.

Prioritize the right keywords

Now you’ve got a list of keywords that have been filtered, clustered, and categorized by search intent. These keywords will help you create future content for your site.

On-Page Optimization

We’ve completed all the important tasks in the SEO roadmap from competitor analysis to keyword gap analysis. In this on-page optimization section, we need to assess your top pages and blog posts. We need to check every aspect of on-page optimization and implement the necessary changes.

These are the on-page SEO tasks you should prioritize:

Google Analytics and Google Search Console setup
SEO plugin installation (Yoast SEO or Rankmath) if using WordPress
Check the sitemap or create a new one if it’s not available
Check robots.txt file
Use short URL
Write an attractive and compelling title tag and description
Use headers in your content
Focus on both internal and external linking
Include descriptive alt text to your images
Add schema markup
Make sure your primary keyword is included in the page title, meta description and opening paragraph
Add your business to Google My Business Page
Check your CTA and make sure relevant to your content

Once you optimize the on-page elements of your web pages, you’re on the right route to getting your site ranked on SERPs.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the process of improving the technical aspect of your website with the main goal of improving organic search rankings. Even if you have the best content, you’re not going to rank if you don’t get your technical SEO issues fixed.

Following are the technical SEO tasks you should perform:

Indexation check
Crawl budget
Check on XML sitemaps
Check on HTTP status code
Make sure your website is responsive / mobile-friendly
Check SSL certificate for your website
Implement breadcrumbs if you’re running an eCommerce store or having a site with a huge number of categories
Check for broken internal and external backlinks
Focus on page loading speed
Check for more issues on Google Search Console

SEO Metrics

For the past 8 years, we’ve worked on hundreds of SEO campaigns and the success of those campaigns relied on improving some of the important SEO metrics. These SEO metrics should be analyzed and improved for long-term SEO success.

You should focus on the following SEO metrics:

Click-Through Rate (CTR): You’re ranking high on search engines for your targeted keywords but you’re not getting enough organic traffic. This is due to a lower click-through rate. People look at your results on the search engine result page but do not click on your link. You need to optimize your title and meta description to increase your CTR. The higher the CTR the better your rankings and organic search traffic.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): Conversion is the most important metric for any business. Your SEO campaign’s main objective is to drive organic traffic and convert the traffic to paying customers. So, you need to understand and analyze your potential customers’ behaviour on your site and make changes to increase the conversion rate. Heat map tools like Hotjar and Crazy Egg will provide a graphical representation of how your users are navigating through your website and the actions they’re taking.

Other SEO metrics: Some SEO metrics revolve around user experience (UX). For example, bounce rate, dwell time, average pages per session, and exit rate show how your users are navigating your site. It also shows whether your content is valuable in providing the information they’re looking for. Although Google has not officially mentioned that they’re using these metrics to rank websites, it still matters if you want to provide the best user experience for your visitors and encourage them to visit your site again.

You should focus on providing what your visitors are looking for. If you’re providing the right content for your target audience, your rankings and organic search traffic will start increasing and you can see exponential growth in 12 months.

Link Building

The last part of the SEO roadmap is link building. Link building may look easy but it is one of the hardest SEO tasks today.

There is no trick or secret recipe for link building. You need to put in hours of effort and adapt to the system to build quality links for your site. The most common link-building tactics for beginners are:

Guest posting
Resource link building

We don’t emphasize on PBNs (Private Blog Networks) as they only provide short-term results. Although there are many SEO service providers use PBNs to build links, there is a huge risk moving forward. As you know, Google is consistently updating its algorithm and their machine learning system is getting smarter and PBNs can get busted anytime.

There are many ways to build links for your site. It just requires patience. If link building was easy, everyone would be doing it right?

If you’re in a low-competition niche, you don’t have to rely on building links as getting your on-page SEO and Technical SEO right will help you dominate your niche easily.

Check out the following resource to find more ways to build links for your website:

Ultimate Guide to Link Building – Ways To Build Links

Measure and Improve SEO performance

SEO is not something that you can set and forget. Even if you’re done with the main SEO tasks, you need to monitor the performance of your website. Google constantly improving its algorithm to provide the best results for its users.

You need to make some tweaks here and there to stay in the game for the long term. It’s common to see fluctuations in your rankings every time Google rolls out its major algorithm updates. Understand the algorithm changes and take the necessary actions to maintain your rankings and organic traffic. Following are some of the top SEO metrics you should monitor:

Organic search traffic
Site’s position on SERPs
Conversion
Bounce rate
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Page loading speed
Crawl errors
Core Web Vital (UX)
New links and referring domains

Final thoughts

We have covered all the important parts of an SEO Roadmap. Now you know the importance and benefits of an SEO roadmap. You don’t have to completely follow our SEO roadmap. You can customize it based on your needs and goals. Just use it as a reference to build one for your website.

What’s your thought about our SEO roadmap?

Please share them with us by commenting below.

SEO Roadmap: Ultimate Guide for 2023

Business Analysis