Step 1: Analyze Your Current Website Setup

Before you begin, you need to know basic information about your website. Here are the things you need to look for when analyzing your setup:

What is your website platform? – You need to know if your site is based on a modern or outdated platform. A modern platform, such as HubSpot, is fast, secure, and much easier to optimize. It is also more flexible when it comes to design and making small changes to your website. If your platform is outdated, I would strongly suggest switching over to HubSpot, or another more modern platform like WordPress or Marketo. It is sometimes cheaper to migrate platforms than to pay someone to optimize an outdated, confusing platform.

Do you need to change your current design? – It can be a tough decision deciding whether or not you need to change your website design. You may be totally attached to your current design, but it may not be the most user-friendly, well-designed website for SEO purposes. If you are changing to a new platform, this can be an easy process because you can usually just change it to a new theme and customize it how you want it.

If either of these issues exists, it is imperative that they are taken care of before the optimization stage. If your website is poor, out-of-date, or not user-friendly, an SEO campaign is going to have a very little effect. You need much more than just a good keyword and optimization strategy to succeed.

Step 2: Keyword Research

Keywords are still really important parts of search marketing and SEO. However, the way you go about researching and optimizing around them has changed. You can thank Google’s Hummingbird and RankBrain for that. These two algorithms are focused on interpreting the context of words used in a search query and what the purpose behind a query is. It’s how Google figures out if your search involving "apple" is about computers, records or a fruit.

In SEO, this context is known as search intent. There are three main categories of search intent:

To learn more about a topic: As you probably guessed, these people want to find more information on a topic, the answer to a question or the solution to/cause of a problem. Long tail informational keywords usually include words like "how to", “do I need” or “what is”. Head keywords are typically informational keywords.

To evaluate their options: These people already know the something about the topic those first searchers were looking for and are now weighing their options. They’re deciding which product or solution is right for them. These keywords typically use phrases like "review", “top 10”, “best” or “comparison”. They also use words like “cheap” and “deals”, which are great indicators that they’re about to flip from this category to the next.

To complete an action: Whether it’s making a purchase, signing up for a service or creating an account, these people know what they want and are ready to make it happen. They expect to achieve their goal directly on the landing page. They typically have lower volume but higher conversion rates.

The great thing about this development in keyword research is that search intent helps inform you where the searcher is in the conversion funnel.

Step 3. Publish Awesome Content

This is the part in which you need to put as much work as you can. You need to write awesome content which will be uniquely used for your visitors. You should avoid any coping from other sites or competitors.

Try to focus on writing long content, the perfect article is around 2000 words. This is hard to complete in one day in most cases, but be sure if you do that you will see a sufficient impact in your rankings later on the road.

This is the main tactic which we use to rank our websites, for example, where am i which we rank on the 1st page in less than 90 days.

Many gurus say that content is not key for success, that is partially true but in 90% of the content of the case works.