SEO can be a deceptively long process.

Few of our customers feel like success is right there for the taking – just some magical tricks away.

They can picture their content and ranking at the top of Google for the most competitive keywords in extremely competitive industries.

Kaspar Szymanski once compared SEO to fitness – and it is a great analogy.

There are no shortcuts to game the system (i.e., your body) unless you’re OK with taking serious health risks.

You need to have a plan and stick to it. That means to do exercise, eating right, and pushing yourself to constantly improve naturally.

So I was a little surprised recently on a monthly call to learn that someone of my large clients was impatient with the SEO process.

How should be someone so successful – and one who can typically follow a procedure for the promise of more customer and cases – not understand love and respect the SEO process?

You can’t do the promise without going through the process.

SEO (and most forms of digital marketing) is a process that, with patience and plan, will bring you to the promise of new traffic, leads, clients, revenue, and growth.

To understand the process you have to make a plan, have a new and different policy, and know all the steps are involved in the process.

1. Audit

The Process

Our process always starts with a technical and/or a content audit.

• Technical Audit

A technical audit looks at absolutely every element on the site that can impact your SEO performance.

One of the most important of all these elements is speed.

There are lots of websites put a large video introduction on the homepage that takes far too long to load.

The result?

You have a high bounce rate and have lost a potential client or customer.

If only they have done a smaller version of the video or moved more relevant content above the fold, then speed and conversions would be much better.

A technical audit should be very deep and take weeks to complete, depending on what’s wrong with the site.

Content Audit

If we have a huge website with thousands of pages of content, then it’s definitely worth doing a content examination.

During this process when we can recognize whether we need to remove, repurpose, or rewrite your content to get a major benefit.

We’ve worked on websites that reduced by 50 percent and it’s very useful to the site.

You will likely see a drop in traffic, but that’s our idea – to reduce non-relevant traffic.

Over time, we’ve likely written about topics that make traffic, but those visitors don’t actually convert into customers or customers.

Good riddance.

A content audit makes sure all your content is relevant to your target audience. And once Google indexes all your new and improved content, you should see more conversions.

The Promise

By going through the process of a technical assessment, content audit, or both, you will a complete thoughtful of everything that needs to be fixed in order to rank well in the whole search.

It is the first step. But the first step can be sometimes the hardest.

Now it’s time to build upon that momentum.

2. Technical SEO

The Process

When it comes to technical SEO, there’s a lot to think about, including:

• Index status.
• Crawl budget.
• Crawl errors.
• Internal links.
• Sitemaps.
• Site/page speed.
• Redirects.
• Broken links.
• HTTPS.
• AMP.

Fixing any one individual thing on this list won’t help any more than choosing another.

You should improve all things!

Everything should work together.

A house needs an establishment, electrical, plumbing, walls, and a roof. If you don’t have all these things, you don’t have a house. You have a shell.

The same is true of technical SEO. You need to get all of these elements right to have an optimized website.

The Promise

If you increase the speed and functionality of your website and web pages, then you’ll also likely increase the number of conversions.

Based on the conclusion of a technical SEO audit, we recently made fixes to a site in the brew industry.

When fixed all the errors, this company saw a 1,100 percent increase in traffic.

That’s the promise of technical SEO!

3. Keyword Research

The Process

Keyword research remains incredibly useful.

You have to understand how people search, what they search for, and how search engines use keywords to serve results.

We highly recommend reading Roger Montti’s excellent guide, How to Do Keyword Research for SEO: Everything You have to Know.

The Promise

As I explain in 4 Pillars of a Successful Legal Content approach, keyword research helps you find out which keywords are most valuable to you.

Optimizing your content around high-value keywords is what you get in front of your possible clients or customers when they need you most.

If people are not able to find you when they’re looking for a service or product you offer, then they can’t buy from you. It’s that simple.

4. Location Demographics

The Process

If you are doing SEO for a local business or a client who offers a service in some specific region, you may know the importance of location.

Same in buyer personas, you need to understand how people search for local businesses and service providers, and who they are.

That means you have to ensure you have an accurate NAP (name/address/phone) all information and content that references your service area, whether it’s a state, city, or neighborhood.

Claim and optimize your Google My Business listing.

For more about this topic, see Bill Hartzer’s excellent post, How to Be a Local Content Machine.

The Promise

Your website should speak to your potential clients. Make sure you speak their language.

Google also rewards websites base on factors such as significance, distance, and prominence.

The signals and accurate data we can provide Google, the better we will rank in time.

5. Content Strategy

The Process

You need to make a content strategy. This following strategy has worked for many of my legal clients:

• Foundational content: This is your unique content that targets your main keywords and topics. Create content that is about your services or products. You can further improve this content by writing about all the relevant services and products you offer and any relevant long-tail keywords.

FAQ content: Create a page that answers common questions your audience is likely asking using Google. Make sure it has an SEO-friendly URL, you use breadcrumbs, and it is more complete than any other page on the topic.

Authoritative content: Let your customer create content to demonstrate their expertise and authenticity.

• User experience: Think about ways to improve your content, your website routing (e.g., linking to other relevant pages on your website), and calls to exploit (e.g., free consultation; make an appointment, content download).

The Promise

Creating content with a purpose will attract the people you want to become your customers or clients.

Make it easy to help people to understand who you are, what you offer, and find exactly what they’re looking for.

You will be rewarded with more leads and conversions!

6. Content Writing & Editing

The Process

Your customer may want to write their own content, or they may want you to do it.

Either way, the content has to be optimized.

Always think about the people or personas first, but without neglect SEO best practices.

You want to write content that people will engage with and ultimately, it’s about moving the audience toward a conversion.

If you have not already, make sure to read Ron Lieback’s 47 tips to master SEO writing.

The Promise

Content is how to build and demonstrate authority, relevance, and trust.

Good content that has been thoroughly proofread and edited is one way to do that.

On the flip side, weakly written and badly edited content will do the accurate opposite – it will send them running to your competitors!

7. Ranking

The Process

OK, you cannot control Google or any search engine’s rankings.

However, we absolutely can understand how search algorithms work. Which helps? But there are never guarantees.

That said, there is only one process that can work.

Be excellent at all of the previous points we have discussed so far and you need to see SEO success.

Know your audience.

Create great content for your client.

Provide a good website experience for your audience.