FLEXIPLE, INC
The Ultimate Guide
To
Search Engine
Optimization (SEO)
SEO intimidates so many, but frankly, the concept is
quite simple. So to make it an absolute breeze to
understand we have collated the ultimate SEO playbook
with real-world analogies and descriptions. This guide
covers everything you need to know about SEO.
Author:
Karthik Sridharan,
Co-founder, Flexiple.
Contents
SEO Explained Simply
06
Why SEO?
11
SEO In Real Life
17
Intro
18
Domains
Keywords
18
25
Content
29
Links
Templates
35
38
52
Explaining the SEO process
53
Where should I start?
57
Tutorial 1
64
Tutorial 2
70
Okay, now let's find you keywords
72
Tutorial
77
How to optimize for a keyword?
83
Tutorial
91
What next?
88
Tutorial
91
Tracking metrics & growth
94
Tutorial
96
General terms
Contents
SEO Strategy
101
A 5 stage process
102
Keywords & competitor research
105
Show me the tools
108
01
CHAPTER ONE
SEO explained simply
SEO explained simply
I absolutely love SEO - it is possibly the most reliable and consistent marketing
channel. Yet, it intimidates many while others consider it to be a "traditional" form
of marketing that holds no relevance today. They couldn't be more wrong.
In growing our startup, Flexiple, to $3 million in annual revenue, SEO was the 2nd
most important channel (first being repeat customers). It drives a traffic of ~300,000
each month to our website. So, ignoring SEO is not a smart move.
What's the fuss about SEO?
Inbound > Outbound: Among the various indisputable truths, such as the
Earth being spherical and not flat, is that people don't like being sold to. That's
why you get super irritated when the credit card salespersons call you.
Huge volume: Next, 3.5 billion - that's the number of searches on google. Not
every year or month, but every day. Picture this: by the time you read this, a few
million new searches would have taken place. That's why we have a popular
saying: "Don't ask a question before Googling it. Don't answer a question as
'Google it'".
Higher intent: Also, each person searching on Google does it with a certain
intent. That intent is expressed in the words they type. All you need to do is to
figure out what your potential customers might type to express their intent. The
process of listing those phrases and ensuring that when customers type those
phrases, your website is what they see in results, is the entire game of SEO.
So, let's explain SEO to you like you are a 5-year old.
The logic behind SEO is frankly quite simple. The goal here, therefore, is to ensure
that you understand its fundamental functioning. Let's go
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1. The characters involved
👩‍🦰 Librarian = Google
📚 Books = All websites
🧔Person searching for a book = Your potential customer
I'll connect it all in the end!
2. Potential customer searches Google
This is equivalent to the 🧔person coming to the 👩‍🦰librarian and asking her to suggest the most
relevant 📘book on say "Photosynthesis" ('cause I'm a nerd :P).
3. Google has to show search results
The 👩‍🦰librarian now has to decide which 📚Books to recommend from a sea of books.
So, she does this by setting certain parameters to rank the various books.
Which parameters?
4. Google ranks results using a first set of parameters
The first set of parameters help the 👩‍🦰 librarian understand if a particular book is
relevant to the topic being searched. Here are the proxies she will use to evaluate
that:
1. Does "photosynthesis" appear in the title of the 📘book?
2. Does it appear in the 📄chapter titles?
3. How many times is it mentioned across the content 🔢?
5. Google shares final results using a final set of
parameters
The final set of parameters help the 👩‍🦰librarian ascertain the reputation of each book.
For any particular book, here is how she gauges the reputation:
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1. How many other 📚books cited this 📘book as reference?
2. Did any of those 📚books also recommend this 📘book?
3. How credible are those other 📚books?
6. Google finally shows the results
Attaching various weights to these parameters, the 👩‍🦰librarian shares a list of 10 📚
books that the 🧔person should consider.
She has a longer list, but the person doesn't care about the books beyond the top 10!
7. Connecting the analogy!
Step 3.
"Photosynthesis": Is what we call a "Keyword"
Step 5
"Book title": Is the Page Title of your webpage
"Chapter titles": Are H1, H2... tags
"Mentions in book content": Mentions in body content
These are called the "on-page" factors
Step 6
"Citations by other books": Are "Backlinks"
"Their recommendation": Is a "Do-follow backlink"
"Their credibility": An unofficial factor (not shared by Google called "Domain
Authority or (DA)"
These are called the "off-page" factors
08
8. So, how do you appear in Google's results?
1. Choose a keyword your customer likely searches
2. Write an article & infuse it per "on-page factors"
3. Distribute it so that websites link back to it
4. Preferably credible ones that give a do-follow backlink
That's it! 🚀
Get started with SEO to drive traffic to your website
Of course, like any subject, there's a lot more nuance than just the above
explanation. However, frankly, from a concept perspective that's all there is to it.
Now you just need to start executing.
Your next steps should be:
Making a list of keywords
Optimising your existing pages for those keywords and/or creating new pages
Getting backlinks to your website
Surely, you don't need more convincing to get started on SEO. Let's kick-off then!
09
02
CHAPTER TWO
Why SEO?
5.6 billion searches are performed daily on Google with definite intent!
Clearly, SEO is the unequivocal answer to bring relevant visitors consistently to
your website and to convert them into your customers.
Of course, you already know that given you are here. It is clear that you believe
SEO is important.
But let's give you more clarity. So that the next time someone in your team or
maybe even your investor asks you, hit them with the above video & article.
Why SEO?
1. Inbound > Outbound
Well, let’s get this straight — sales is super important. But reaching out cold is NO
fun. Lack of reply on mails, rude replies to your cold calls, who wants them?
People just don't like being sold to. It's one of those indisputable truths like the Earth
being spherical and not flat. That's why you get super irritated when the credit card
salespeople call you.
So, it's always better when your customers find you themselves and can peacefully
evaluate whether they want your product or service. That’s the beauty of inbound.
Channels like email marketing or cold calling rely on your ability to constantly
nudge people to buy your product. Plus, you end up irritating many of your potential
customers.
But with SEO, you provide value and people organically find you & your product.
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2. Huge opportunity
Next, 5.6 billion — that's the number of searches on google. Not every year or
month, but every SINGLE day.
Picture this: by the time you read this, a few million new searches would have
already taken place. Pretty mind-blowing right?!
That's why we have a popular saying: "Don't ask a question before Googling it.
Don't answer a question as 'Google it'".
So, SEO presents a HUGE opportunity to present your product in front of your
potential audience.
Next time, just remind yourself that there are just so many customers you are
missing out on by not making the most of SEO.
3. High intent
Not only is the opportunity huge, but each of us searching on Google wants an
answer to something.
In the world of SEO, this is called "searcher intent". Basically a fancy word for what
you have in mind when you search for something. And we express this intent in the
words we type.
Now, as a startup or product owner, all you need to do is to figure out what your
potential customers might type to buy your product or service.
Naturally, you'll list down search phrases and ensure that when customers type those
phrases, your website is what they see in results. That's it. That's the entire game of
SEO!
You do well in it and you get highly-converting customer leads :)
12
4. Brand
Sure, not all traffic will convert. But what's important is that your content talks to your
target audience.
So every time your customers read your content, think of it as a conversation. And each
time that conversation helps the customer, it is a positive deposit in their mental bank
account.
Over time, this buildds a recall in their minds about your brand.
Then, the next time they think of searching or buying something similar, they will
possibly think of you first.
So, don’t think of SEO only from a direct conversions point of view, but also from a
brand building perspective.
5. Traffic forever
Now, every piece of content you write has a life. Your goal is to keep it alive for as long
as possible.
The life of almost all tweets or social posts is a few days at best. The life of a newsletter is
a week or a few weeks at max.
With SEO, you invest once and you get traffic forever!
Well, almost.
Sure, you need to track your pages and regularly update the content to keep it fresh, but
that effort is super minimal. There are articles that give us consistent traffic today that I
wrote a few years ago — that’s the power of SEO.
Now, compare that with even a viral tweet or a post — you get traffic for a couple of days
and then pufff.
13
6. FREEEE
So Ahrefs tells us that is what we'd have to spend on Google Ads if we were to generate
the the organic traffic we get today.
$40,000 every month! I know, it's crazy.
Now, as a bootstrapped startup founder, a monthly ad budget of $40,000 is almost
unrealistic. But, SEO ensures that we get all of that for almost FREE.
Of course, there is a one-time fixed cost to write the content, but over a long period of
time, it becomes insignificant in comparison to the value generated.
And connect this with our previous point, this is FOREVER!
7. Validate your startup idea
Now, this is the lesser used area of SEO — you can validate your startup idea.
How? Well, we have already concluded that most of us go to Google when we want to
search for something we want.
So, checking whether potential customers search for what your future startup might cater
to, is a good validation of the market and of the positioning & messaging needed.
⇒
What's more, if there's an existing large competitor, you can check how many people
search for the phrase " alternative". Tells you how many people are unhappy with your
competitor and want to move on.
14
Companies that have mastered SEO!
Now that you're super sure that SEO is the real fuel to your startup's growth, let's look at
some companies, large & small, that have aced the SEO game.
Quick note, before you delve in — The case studies that follow cover specific SEO
concepts and you may find it difficult to grasp everything right away. Worry not, we'll
cover all of these concepts in the upcoming chapters, and you can revisit these case
studies later.
1) Adobe
Adobe has complex products with tons of features. So their product pages get crowded
with the list of features.
Solution? Adobe's CC Express created a network of product & feature pages, which
brings 7.5M monthly traffic for a single product!
Link: Adobe's SEO strategy to get 7.5M traffic
2) Windsor Store
When a 100-year old fashion store does SEO right, there's surely a lot to learn from them.
In the fashion industry, people buy what they see. Windsor store caught onto this quickly,
and optimised for Image SEO heavily.
Of course, Image SEO is something you can apply beyond fashion as well — Google
Images holds 2nd place in the US in terms of search volume.
Link: How a 85-year old fashion business got 2.4M organic traffic
15
3) Walmart
Walmart is world's largest company by revenue, and they made $43B in online sales in
2021. Of course, they have cracked SEO like no one else, getting 250M monthly traffic!
Their website is amazingly well organized into departments, categories & sub-categories.
Google absolutely loves this!
Link: Walmart's SEO strategy to get $43B in online sales!
4) Typeform
Typeform is a startup valued at $70M, and nobody buildds website authority as well as
Typeform! They have accumulated a crazy 106M backlinks!
I also talk about how we've also implemented a version of the smart technique they use.
It's one of the best way to buildd links to your website at scale.
Link: Typeform's SEO strategy to get 106M backlinks!
5) Remote Tools
It's only apt that we share our own experience as a case study. With Remote Tools, we've
grown to 1M+ monthly visitors, and we achieved this in less than a year!
So, I break down how exactly we went about figuring what to write and how to optimise.
This one's filled with lots of short tips!
Link: How we scaled our startup to 1M monthly traffic!
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03
CHAPTER ONE
SEO in real life
Intro
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
1. Domains
2. Keywords
3. Content
4. Links
5. General terms
6. Template
Domains
SEO is really technical and filled with tons of jargon. It can easily get overwhelming for a
newbie to just wrap their head around all the terms.
So before we get into actually executing SEO, it'll help to quickly run through all of the
SEO jargon.
Of course, we won't bombard you with boring definitions. Rather we'll take a real
example, that of our own website, to explain all the terms you need to know. Think of this
chapter as an interesting glossary that you can keep referencing when you're in doubt.
Let's get started!
First, let's begin with terms related to your website as a whole.
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1. Domain Authority
This is basically the reputation of your website in the eyes of Google.
Now, Google doesn't reveal this number directly nor the exact parameters & weights that
lead to this number. But, independent websites like Ahrefs & Moz, have come up with
their own metrics trying to mimic this number.
Ahrefs calls it Domain Rating (DR) and uses only the number of links or votes you get
from other websites to compute this. While Moz calls it Domain Authority (DA) and uses
a mix of links & traffic to compute the number. Both the numbers are a score from 0 to
100.
Taking the example of Flexiple, our DR is 55:
Of course, for a new website, you start with 0 and as you get links or votes from
other websites, your DR moves up.
A DR of 20-30 is considered average, and a DR in the range of 50-60 is good. DR is
measured on a logarithmic scale, which basically means that it's easier to grow from
0 to 10 vs. growing from say, 20 to 30.
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2. URL Authority
While domain authority is your entire website's reputation, URL authority is the
reputation of an individual page or URL. Each page on a website has different
number of backlinks, so their URL rating is different
Again, Google doesn't directly show you the authority for any page, but tools like
Ahrefs & Moz have their own metrics for this.
On Ahrefs, this is called URL Rating or UR for short.
If you look at the image below, you'll see the top pages on Flexiple in terms of URL
Rating.
Of course, the best way to increase the authority of specific pages is to get links or
votes from other websites.
That's why when you get links to your website, it's always great to get them for
pages whose UR you'd like to increase.
20
3. Backlinks
Backlinks are nothing but links from other websites to you.
A website may add multiple links to your website, and each such link is called a
backlink.
For instance, in case of Flexiple, we have only 1 link from Business Insider &
Webflow, but we have 24 links from Substack, and a whopping 763 links from
Product Hunt!
Now don't get excited, it doesn't help us that we have 100s of links from Product
Hunt, but just the one from Business Insider.
In fact, it works the other way. Product Hunt gives out links generously to every
website, and so, its vote is extremely diluted. Whereas a website like Business
Insider would give out links selectively, so their vote would weigh more compared
to Product Hunt.
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4. Referring domains
This is the list of all websites that have linked to you at least once.
So for Flexiple, these are the top websites that link to us:
5. Subdomain
A subdomain is a sub-part of your domain or website, and is a prefix for your
domain name. Let me explain with an example.
For Flexiple, "flexiple.com" is the
".flexiple.com" would be a subdomain.
domain
and
"blog.flexiple.com"
or
Now, Google treats subdomains almost as separate websites. So for SEO purposes,
you shouldn't have content sitting on your subdomain.
Why you ask?
Well, you'll put in all the effort to buildd your website's domain authority and hope
that the goodness gets passed on to all the pages on your domain or website. But
with a subdomain, you'll not get this benefit since Google will perceive your
subdomain as a separate website.
22
6. Subfolder
Again, a subfolder is also a part of your website, but it's the suffix that gets added to your
domain name.
For Flexiple, "flexiple.com/blog" would be a subfolder.
Now, here's where things get interesting. If we are to put your blog on "flexiple.com/blog"
instead of "blog.flexiple.com", we'd end up getting all the goodness from the authority
we've built for flexiple.com.
Effectively, we'll have a higher chance of ranking on Google by using a subfolder vs. a
subdomain.
7. Pagespeed
This one's quite self-explanatory. It's the speed of the pages on your website.
Now, as the name speaks for itself, pagespeed is a number out of 100 given to every page
on your website.
Google shares this number publicly through their tool, PageSpeed Insights, so that you
can improve & make your website fast. After all, Google wants its users to have the best
experience. Now, this is how the pagespeed score and details look like for Flexiple:
23
As you can see, Google also tells your score on specific parameters and how you can
improve on each parameter.
You'll also see separate scores for mobile & desktop. And given most users browse
internet on their phones, optimizing your pagespeed for mobile as well, becomes
critical.
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Keywords
Everyone in the SEO community is obsessed about "keywords". But what exactly is a
keyword?
Well, put simply, a keyword is just a bunch of words that conveys the key idea or topic
of an article. For instance, when we wrote a detailed guide on freelancing on Flexiple,
some of our keywords were "how to manage freelance projects", "how to evaluate
freelance developers" etc.
A keyword is also what a user types on the Google search bar. So, our goal is simple,
whenever a user types these keywords, our website should show up as a result.
Typically, each article you write should target one main keyword. It signals Google
what the key idea of your article is. Along with this, you can also put in other keywords,
that align with your article's key idea but are also independent topics of their own.
Take this blog, for example.
Our main or primary keyword here is "life of a freelance programmer", and we
rank at the top for this. But one of our related keywords is also "freelancer salary",
since we talk about how much money freelancers earn.
25
Keyword difficulty
Put simply, keyword difficulty is a score (typically out of 100) that tells you how easy or
tough it is to rank for a keyword.
Again, Google doesn't share the difficulty score for keywords, but gives a broad range in
terms of low, medium & high difficultly, which isn't helpful. Ahrefs & other tools share
their own version of this difficulty score though.
In Ahrefs, the difficulty specifically tells you how easy or tough it is to rank in top 10 for a
particular keyword.
If you enter the keyword "freelance developer" in Ahrefs' keyword explorer, you'll see the
difficulty score is 50 and it shows that it's hard to rank for this keyword. We'd need ~84
links from high quality websites to rank in top 10 for this keyword!
Now, you'd have already guessed that we'd ideally want to target low difficulty
keywords, so that we increase our chances of ranking on Google.
Effectively, when you're just starting out, it's best to target low difficulty &
medium to high volume keywords. This process of finding the right set of
keywords to write on is called keyword research.
26
Of course, keyword research then becomes one of the most critical parts of your SEO
process.
Search Volume
Search volume is nothing but the number of times a user searches for your keyword on
Google. It is typically shown as an absolute number per month.
So when someone says that the keyword "freelance developer" has a search volume of
10,000, they mean that there are 10,000 searches for keyword happening on Google every
month.
Now, Google does not share the search volume for keyword directly. Instead, it tells you a
very broad range (ex. 10-5000) that isn't very helpful. So tools like Ahrefs predict the
search volume by going through millions of websites and observing years of search data.
Of course, you'd want to rank for high volume keywords, because then you'd end up
getting lots of traffic. But so does every other person. That's why high volume keyword
typically are more competitive and tough to rank for.
Search Intent
When you type something on Google, you already have a specific objective in mind. This
is called search or searcher's intent.
There are mainly 4 types of search intent:
1. Informational — user wants to get more information about something (eg: pros and
cons of hiring a freelancer)
2. Navigational — user wants to navigate to a particular website (eg: flexiple)
3. Transactional — a user with intent to buy (eg: hire freelancer on flexiple)
4. Commercial — user is comparing assets to eventually purchase (eg: top freelance
websites)
27
Now, even though two people type the same thing on Google, they could want very
different things.
For instance, if a user types in "freelance developer", it could mean that they want
information about freelancer developers (maybe how to become one) OR they want to
possibly hire a freelance developer.
Google, however, attaches a specific intent to every keyword or search phrase based on
years of observation of how people have behaved on Google.
Taking the above example again, there are 2 separate keywords, "hire freelance
developers" and "how to become a freelance developer" targeting different intent. But
"freelance developer" is also marked under the intent of hiring since Google has observed
that, it's what most users want.
So how do you figure out the search intent for any keyword or search phrase?
Simple, type those words in Google and see what results show up. Most results shown on
the first page will have a similar intent. That's the search intent behind the keyword!
28
Content
Now that we've covered website-related SEO terms, let's dive into the content
aspects of SEO.
1. H1
H1 is your article's top-level heading. Think of it as the title of your article.
Now naturally, you'll have only a single title for your article and hence, there should
also be a single H1 on any page.
Google makes a lot of inferences from your H1 and so it's important to include your
main keyword in the H1.
For this blog on Flexiple, here's what the h1 looks like on the article page.
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2. H2
H2 is your second-level heading and the next important after an H1. Think of it as
headings for individual sections in your article.
Of course, you'll have multiple sections in your article and hence, you can have
multiple h2s on your page.
Now, Google carefully scans through all your h2s to understand what the article is
about. So it's important to include your keyword & related keywords in your h2s as
well. But every single h2 on your page doesn't need to have a keyword.
For this blog on Flexiple, this is how h2 looks like.
3. Title
Now, you'd surely be wondering that if the H1 is the title of your article, then what
does the "title" mean here?
Well, for all practical purposes, you can use the H1 as the title of your page and not
worry about this much. But it's anyway good to know the difference between the
two.
30
Title is what shows up as the tab heading on your browser. Here's where you'll see it.
But more importantly, it's the title shown by Google in its search results.
The H1, on the other hand, is part of your article content and you'll ideally place it at
the start of your article.
Again, it's best practice to include your keyword in the title. The ideal length of the
title should be 50 to 70 characters, and if you have a longer title, Google will end up
trimming it.
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4. Meta description
We saw that the title is primarily used by Google when showing your page on search
results. But the title is also accompanied by a short description.
This description is called meta description and is used to give additional information to the
user so that they can decide whether they should click on your article to read it.
So meta description is kind of a short preview of your article. Now, Google doesn't give
you any bonus points for including keywords in your meta description, but it's a good
practice to see if the keyword can naturally fit into the text here.
Ideally, your meta description should be 50 to 160 characters in length. Again, if your
meta description is longer, Google will end up trimming it.
5. Alt tags
When you write an article, you'll naturally include a few relevant images. Now, you have
an option to include an alternative text for every image on your page. This alternative text
is called an alt tag.
But why do we need alt tags?
Well, here are a few reasons:
1. If the browser is not able to show the image for some reason (say, the user has a slow
internet connection), it will show the alt tag instead.
2. If the user is visually impaired and uses a screen reader, the alt tag is very useful.
3. Finally, the alt tag is also used by Google to understand what the image is all about.
So effectively, it's important for us to always include the alt tag for every image in the
article.
The alt tag should also have your keyword, but you should be cautious to not stuff every
single alt tag with a keyword.
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In the HTML (code) for the page, the alt tag is added like this:
<img src="<image url>" alt="Flexiple logo"/>
view rawalt-tag-code.html hosted with ❤ by GitHub
6. Word count
This one explains itself. Word count is just the number of total words in your article.
But why is this even important?
Well, Google loves in-depth content, and one of the proxies it uses is the length of the
article. So, when you're competing with other websites, Google would look at the word
count to partially decide which article is more detailed and deserves to rank at the top.
Naturally, you'd then like to write content that beats the existing websites in terms of word
count.
But also remember that Google factors in many other things to decide which article is
more detailed and deserves to rank. So, you shouldn't artificially bloat the word count of
your article just for the sake of beating your competitors.
You can quickly check the word count of all your relevant competitors using this free tool.
It also removes all surrounding text on the page from the word count and gives you the
average word count for all the links you enter.
7. Keyword density
Now, let's say you write an article targeting a particular keyword. You'd end up adding the
keyword at multiple places in the article.
The number of times your keyword occurs in the article is called keyword density. It's
usually measured as a percentage of the total number of words in your article.
So, keyword density = (no. of occurrences of your keyword)/(total word count) * 100
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It's ideal to have a keyword density of 1-2% for every article you write. It basically signals
to Google that your article is about that particular keyword or idea, and pushes Google to
rank you for that keyword.
We use a tool called Yoast SEO that checks keyword density and multiple other technical
parameters discussed below.
8. Keyword stuffing
Of course, the smarty pants in you would ask me, "Why restrict the keyword density to 12%? If I add the keyword in every single line, wouldn't that be a stronger signal to
Google?"
Well, Google is smart at figuring out such hacks. If you try to game the system by
artificially adding keywords, it's almost certain that Google will punish your website.
But even now, many people do this and the technique is called keyword stuffing.
The key takeaway here is that you should NEVER do keyword stuffing. The focus should
be to write high quality content, and optimise for Google.
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Links
Links is one most important concepts in SEO. So in this chapter, we'll cover everything to
get you up to speed with links.
1. Anchor text
Now, any link on the internet has 2 parts: a) link text b) link URL
For instance, the link shown below takes you to a different page on Flexiple's website.
And the text "published an inspiring story of Ankur" is called link text or anchor text.
In the SEO world, anchor text serves 2 purposes:
1. It gives your readers a preview or hint of what the linked is about. In the example
above, the reader knows that if they click the link, they would be taken to an
interview or story about a person named Ankur.
2. Compare this with another link whose text just says, "this link" or "this page". The
anchor text in such a case gives very little information about the linked page, and can
also be perceived as spammy.
3. More importantly, the anchor text is viewed as a hint by Google to understand more
about the linked page. So when you have a descriptive anchor text, you're giving
Google an additional hint about the topic of the linked page.
Now, if your anchor text contains your keyword or a variation of it, that's even a greater
validation for Google that the linked page talks about the specific keyword.
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2. Do-follow links
In the eyes of Google, every link is a vote or reference from one website to another.
For instance, the link below goes to an article on Flexiple blog, and the website (Smashing
Magazine in this case) has cast a vote saying it approves of this article.
By default, when you link to any website, you cast a vote and such a link is called a "dofollow" link.
3. No-follow links
But Google realised that at times, you may want to link to a website or article, but don't
approve of its quality. Maybe you're unsure or you just don't want to vouch for it.
In such a case, you can explicitly notify Google by using a special attribute called "nofollow", which literally tells Google that they should not "follow" this link. Such a link is
called a "no-follow" link.
Now, no-follow links may still have a very tiny weightage in the eyes of Google. After all,
you're still linking to the page even though you're not sure. So, getting a no-follow link
from another website may not be as good as a do-follow link, but it surely is better than
getting no link at all.
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4. Internal links
There's another simple way to classify links.
Consider the page flexiple.com/react. Now, if this page gets a link from another page on
flexiple.com OR if this page link to another page on flexiple.com, we call it an internal
link.
Basically, any kind of link exchange that happens on the same domain or in the same
website, is called an internal link.
5. External links
On the other hand, when you have links exchanged between different domains, these links
are called external links.
So if you have a link from flexiple.com/react to a page on a different website, it is called
an external link.
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General Terms
Firstly, amazing work that you've made it till here! By now, you've enough knowledge
about SEO that you can break down & analyse any website in terms of SEO 😎
Now, we have reached the final leg. This last set of general terms will cover all the
miscellaneous jargon you'll come across in SEO. So let's start!
1. Guest posting
As we saw earlier, getting links or votes from other websites is the best way to increase
your website's authority. But is there anything you can do to have people link to your
website?
Well, the best way to go about this is to write "guest posts".
Guest posting literally means that you write a post or article as a guest author for someone
else, that of course gets published on their website.
Now writing guest posts helps you in 2 ways:
1) When you write a guest post, you get a chance to link to your own website. You can
either link to relevant content on your website from within the guest post, or just link to
your website from the author bio. Naturally, this gets you a vote from that website and
boosts your authority.
For instance, this is how a link in author bio looks like:
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Now, each website will have its own set of guidelines for writing guest posts. These
guidelines will usually mention exactly how many links you can add, and where you can
place them.
2) Secondly, when your guest post receives good traffic, some of those readers may also
click your link and visit your website. So you also get some direct traffic to your website.
For instance, when I wrote this article on HackerNoon about side projects of popular
startups, and the story of our side project, Remote Tools, we saw a nice bump in traffic to
our website. Of course, we also got a link from HackerNoon :)
2. Branded keywords
Now, Flexiple ranks for 1000s of keywords on Google, but we also rank #1 for the
keyword "Flexiple".
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When the keyword you rank for includes the name of your company or brand, the
keyword is called a branded keyword.
So "Flexiple" for us is a branded keyword. We also have a side project called Scale (free,
high quality illustrations), and we rank #1 for the keyword "Flexiple scale" as well. So this
keyword is also a branded keyword for us.
Of course, you'd realised by now that Google will prefer ranking you at the top for a
branded keyword. So it's easy to rank for a branded keyword provided your brand's name
is unique. Goes without saying that people should also be interested to search for your
brand on Google :)
More importantly, when you're researching keywords or topics to write on, you should
consciously avoid using someone else's branded keywords. For instance, "indie hackers"
is a branded keyword for indiehackers.com, and it's not wise to target this keyword for
your SEO blog post since it's unlikely that Google will prefer to rank your blog over
indiehackers.com.
3. Featured snippet
Featured snippet is a special feature of Google results.
Consider these search results on Google.
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If you notice, Google shows a larger preview of the first result for this query. It basically
shows some information about the article upfront, in the search results page.
The entire snippet you see above is called a featured snippet.
Put simply, a featured snippet gives you more real estate on the first page, and the
following results are pushed further down. Naturally, given you now occupy more space
on the first page, there's a higher chance that users will click on your link. Effectively,
featured snippets will help to increase your click through rate or CTR.
It's important to note that a featured snippet is only shown for the top result. Plus, it's
Google's decision on whether or not to show a featured snippet for a particular query. So,
at your end, you can only aim to rank at the top and hope that Google gives you the added
benefit of a featured snippet.
4. Hidden text
In the HTML (code) of your page, there's a way you can mark text or any element as
hidden. This will effectively not show the content to the user.
Say, I want to link to 100 pages from the homepage of my website, but I don't want the
user to see all of those links, because it's not useful to the user. So, I can add all of these
links in the HTML (code) of the page, and mark them hidden.
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Of course, this is considered spam or deceptive by Google, and any such technique of
hiding text or content on your page to manipulate Google's rankings, is called hidden text.
Goes without saying that you should never indulge in such practices. While you optimise
for Google and aim to rank high in search results, you should never try to trick Google.
5. Indexed page
When you publish a page on the internet, it doesn't get noticed by Google immediately. In
fact, Google inspects or crawls pages on the web periodically and when it finds or notices
your page, it will mark it as an indexed page.
Effectively, an indexed page on your website means that Google has already seen the
particular page and documented all its findings in Google's database.
Now, there are millions of webpages published daily on the internet. Of course, it's tough
for Google to find or inspect them. At times, you page may not be indexed for weeks or
even months, especially if your website is new.
So, if you notice that your page has not been indexed even after a few weeks, you can
request Google to index it through the Google Search Console.
6. NoIndex tag
On the contrary, there may be some pages on your website that you never want Google to
discover. For instance, your admin pages that you only want your internal team to see.
In such a case, you can explicitly ask Google to not index the particular page.
7. Orphan page
When Google finds your website, it starts browsing your website through the links on
your pages.
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For instance, when Google lands on flexiple.com, this could be a possible pathway:
⇒
flexiple.com
/blog (list of all blogs on the website)
blog, which is linked from the previous blog
⇒ one individual blog ⇒ another
Now, consider you have a page X on your website which has no link leading to it. In other
words, no other page on your website links to page X. Such a page is called an orphan
page.
You'd have understood by now that there's no way for Google to reach this page if it starts
browsing or crawling your website from your homepage. That's why your website should
never have an orphan page. In other words, every page on your website should be
reachable from your homepage through at least one path.
8. Sitemap
A sitemap, as the term indicates, is a literal map of your website. It lists all the URLs or
pages on your website.
Sitemap basically helps Google understand what pages your website contains so that it
can plan how to travel through the website.
Now, you can generate a sitemap and submit it to Google through the Google Search
Console. But this isn't mandatory since Google would prepare a version of this sitemap
anyway when it travels your website.
However, when you submit a sitemap yourself, you're just making Google's life easier and
hence, it's considered a best practice. Plus, when you add new pages to your website, you
can revise your sitemap and submit it to Google. This serves as an update to Google
saying that your website has some new changes and that it needs to travel your website
again.
You can also generate a sitemap through code and write an automated script to share it
with Google regularly, say every day or week.
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9. robots.txt
The robots.txt is a special file you can add to your website that tells Google which pages it
can or cannot access on your site. So, instead of adding no-index tags on individual pages,
you can just add a full list of pages to the robots.txt file so that Google doesn't access these
pages.
But this file is not just restricted to Google. You can also inform other specific crawlers or
robots, to not crawl your website or specific pages on your website through the robots.txt
file.
It's not mandatory to have this file as part of your website, nor is it considered a best
practice. So you can add this file only when you actually see a use for it.
10. On-page SEO
By now, you'd have realised that there are certain things in SEO that are in your control,
while some other things aren't. For instance, you can control what content is written on
your website, how it is shown etc. But other websites linking to you, getting mentions or
shoutouts on social media etc. is not entirely in your control.
Now, anything that is related to or happens on your website is called on-page SEO. This
includes your site content, internal links, title & meta tags etc.
Naturally, on-page SEO is also the bucket of all the things that you can control.
11. Off-page SEO
On the contrary, anything that happens outside of your website is called off-page SEO.
This includes backlinks, external reviews, and anything related to social media.
Of course, off-page SEO is also the bucket of all the things that are not entirely in your
control.
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12. SERP
SERP or search engine results page is simply the page you see on Google when you enter
a search query.
All you need to know is that when someone asks you, "have you checked the SERP for
this keyword?", they mean have you checked the top ranking Google results for the
keyword.
13. Duplicate content
When 2 pages on your website have similar content, it will be marked as duplicate
content.
For instance, let's say you create 2 pages with the same content on the topic "how to do
freelancing", and just have different titles for the 2 pages. One title says, "A guide to
freelancing", and the other one says, "How to get freelancing jobs". Google will mark
both these pages as duplicate content.
But why do we care so much about duplicate content?
Well, Google marking your pages as duplicate content is like a penalty for your website. If
you do this consistently and get caught by Google, you'll end up getting punished for
good. So much so that Google may stop ranking any of the content on your website.
You should of course avoid creating duplicate content at all costs. But what if
unintentionally, you end up creating pages that look similar?
Thankfully, there's an easy way to such errors. You can do a site audit and find out errors
similar to duplicate content on your website.
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14. Site audit
A site audit is basically a technical review of your website. All popular SEO tools help
you with such a site audit. We use Ahrefs for all our SEO needs, and recommend the
same for a site audit.
15. Long tail Keywords
The best way to understand long tail keywords is through a graph.
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So you'll find only 1000s of keywords which have very high volume (in millions), but
billions of keywords that have low volume (in 100s or 1000s).
All those billions of keywords are called long tail keywords. You can almost see a tail in
the graph, and hence the name.
Now, these long tail keywords:
1. are longer in length, they'll typically have 4 or more words in the phrase
2. have a lower number of searches (in 100s or 1000s)
3. are huge in number (billions of such keywords)
But what's so special about these long-tail keywords?
Well, here are a few great things about them:
1. There's usually low competition for these keywords since they are very specific. For
instance, "freelance developers in Mumbai whose primary skill is React".
2. You'll find a HUGE number of related or similar keywords by tweaking just 1 or 2
words in the keyphrase. This means that while each individual keyword may not
bring you substantial traffic, if we combine all the related keywords, the volume can
be significant.
16. Inbound links
There's yet another simple way to classify links.
Consider the page flexiple.com/react. Now, if any website or page on the internet links to
this page, we call it an inbound link for flexiple.com/react.
It's what the term literally means. A link which is inward bound or inbound to a page is
called an inbound link.
Note that it's important for the link to come from a different domain to be called an
inbound link.
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17. Outbound links
Now, extending the same example, if I add a link from flexiple.com/react to any website
or page on the internet, we call it an outbound link for flexiple.com/react.
Again, a link which is outward bound or outbound from a page is called an outbound link.
And it's important that the link should point to a different domain to be called an outbound
link.
Finally, you'd have also realised that outbound links are the same as external links.
18. Canonical URL
Assume that you have 2 pages on your website with the exact same content. By now, you
know that Google will say this is duplicate content, and may also punish you for this.
But there's a way to tell Google that you intentionally created these duplicate pages and
that it should ignore one of the 2 pages. You can do this by adding the canonical tag on
one of the pages.
So, Google will now disregard page Y and assume that page X is the one that it needs to
consider for any rankings.
Now, you should ideally not encounter any situation where you'd need to use canonical
URLs. But there may be special cases where you want to use a custom URL, and just
show the content on some existing page.
For instance, your signup page may be located at xyz.com/signup, but you may want to
create a copy with tiny tweaks on xyz.com/subscribe to share it on forums & groups.
19. Broken links
Let's say you're writing a blog about freelancing and you link to a website that share a stat
about the freelancing industry.
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Now say, a few months later, the website you linked to shuts down or deletes the page you
were linking to. In such a case, if a user clicks the link you mentioned on your website,
they would see an error.
Such a link which doesn't exist on the internet anymore, but is mentioned on a page, is
called a broken link. In other words, a broken link is a page on the internet that cannot be
found or accessed.
20. Link juice
We've talked before about the "goodness" of domain or link authority getting passed on
from one page to another. This goodness is simply called link juice.
Link juice is a slang in the SEO world and is used to convey the power of a link that gets
passed onto other pages.
21. Link building
By now, you know that domain & URL authority are important for your website to rank
on Google. Of course, the best way to increase this authority is to get links or votes from
other websites.
When you work dedicatedly to increase your domain or URL authority, the process is
called link building. Put simply, you're working to increase the number of inbound links to
your website.
22. Click through rate
When you have a link anywhere on the internet, you'd ideally want to know how many
click on the link. If 100 people see your link, and 5 of them click on it, your click through
rate is 5%. It basically means the percentage of people who click on your link after seeing
it.
Click through rate = (Number of people who click your link)/(Number of people who see
your link)
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Click through rate or CTR is an important metric to track when you start ranking on
Google. If your CTR is high, it means more people are coming to your website. Google
also recognizes this, and may push you up in the rankings.
23. Spam score
The internet is full of spammy websites and Google is constantly trying to cut down on
spam.
It assigns you a score based on a number of parameters, to determine whether your
website is a spam website. Again, Google doesn't reveal this score, but a tool like Moz has
come up with its own metric called "spam score" to measure this.
Now, you'd ideally want to keep your spam score close to 0 or 1%, but anything below
10% is considered a low spam score.
24. Disavow
When your website is live on the internet, you may receive all sorts of inbound links
organically. Some of these links may come from spam websites.
Now, being linked to spam websites is one of the biggest factors in determining your
spam score. So you'd naturally not want to be linked to any such website.
In order to do that, you can disavow links you get from such websites. In literal terms, this
means you're denying any responsibility in this regard.
Google offers you this tool where you can disavow links that come to your website.
25. Keyword cannibalization
Now, imagine if you write 2 very different articles on the same topic targeting the same
keyword. Both of these pages would end up competing with each other on Google
rankings.
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This is called keyword cannibalization, and in effect, you're just competing with yourself
on Google.
You'd now ask me why is this even bad?
Well, here are a few reasons:
1. Assume that people like your content and want to link to it. They'd now have to
choose between the multiple articles you've published on the same topic. In effect, if
say 10 websites were going to link to you, the authority you get from them would be
distributed among the multiple articles you have.
2. More importantly, it's a huge waste of effort to write content twice or more for the
same topic. Everything including traffic, backlinks etc. gets divided between those
posts. You're way better off publishing content on new topics instead, of competing
with external websites.
26. Topical authority
Now, we've been writing a lot around "freelancing" on our blog since we started working
on Flexiple. Many of our blogs do well on Google.
Google naturally thinks that we have some expertise in the field, and has assigned us an
authority on the topic. So, the next time we write an article on "freelancing", there's a tiny
advantage we have over a random high authority website writing on the same topic.
This concept is called topical authority and is key to higher rankings on Google. If you're
consistent in writing content around a set of topics, Google will reward you with an
authority over a long period of time.
That's why it's essential to decide on a set of broad topics you're going to write on upfront,
and then stick to writing content on the same topics. Writing on a set of random topics just
because you find keywords is not only a waste of effort but may also confuse Google
affecting your rankings overall.
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SEO Templates
SEO is fairly technical, so naturally, it has a lot of jargon. In the chapters leading up to
this, you have read all about these terms. Now let's do some quick exercises to warm up!
Here's the complete SEO exercises notion template that you can easily duplicate and
work upon!
Chapter 1: Domain
1. 🔍 Exercise 1: Domain Authority
2. 🔗 Exercise 2: Referring Domain & Backlinks
3. ⚡ Exercise 3: Pagespeed
4. 📘 Exercise 4: Site Audit
Chapter 2: Keywords
1. 🗨 Exercise 1: Keyword Difficulty & Volume
2. 💻 Exercise 2: Keyword Density
3. 🔍 Exercise 3: Search Intent
Chapter 3: Content
1. ✍ Exercise 1: Title, Headings and Meta Description
2. 💬 Exercise 2: Word Count
3. 👥 Exercise 3: Topical Authority
Chapter 4: Links
1. 🌐 Exercise 1: No-follow and do-follow
2. 🔗 Exercise 2: Internal and external links
3. 🚫 Exercise 3: Broken Links
4. 🙅‍♂️Exercise 4: Spam Score
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04
CHAPTER FOUR
Explaining the SEO
process
In the last chapter, we fed you heavy doses of SEO terms. But, now that you are familiar
with these terms we can get into the real juice of things!
This part of the course is where we start learning about practical implementation.
You see, in building 3-4 of our websites we have very stringently followed an SEO
process that has reaped awesome benefits for us.
In this chapter, I'll reveal a brief outline of the main parts of this SEO process. So, let's get
into it!
Our SEO Process
Our SEO process basically has 5 independent parts:
1. Buildd Domain Authority
Before you do anything, you should first start building domain authority.
Domain authority is the reputation of your website in the eyes of Google.
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Now, when you've just launched a new website, you've basically not established a
reputation yet. That means your domain authority is ZERO!
So, ranking for any keywords on Google search is going to be nearly impossible.
To tackle this, a good thumb rule that we stick by is to first reach a domain authority of 30
before we start focusing on keywords.
Now, this rule is not carved in stone. But its something that has worked very well for us :)
2. Keyword Research
Once you have reached a domain authority of 30, you'd want to kickstart your efforts on
keywords and content. For this, you have to first identify the right set of keywords.
This is where keyword research comes in. We personally like to do keyword research as
early in the process as possible.
You'll basically encounter keywords that are:
1. High traffic, but low conversion
2. High conversion, but less traffic
Targeting a combination of both these types is a good starting point!
3. Write Keyword Optimized Content
Writing content on your website without optimizing it for SEO is basically a NOOB
move. We made the same mistake early on in our journey.
We started out writing a ton of content without keyword optimizing it. And, surely you
can guess that we get no traffic from them.
So, another rule of thumb we follow is to never write any content without optimizing it
first.
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Now, the tricky part here is to maintain the quality of your content without keyword
stuffing it.
I'll be explaining more about how to achieve this in the module dedicated to keyword
optimization.
4. Distribution & Internal Linking
Finally, you have your content all ready. Now, the next step is to distribute this content on
relevant communities, eg Twitter, Reddit, etc to get that initial set of visitors!
On top of this, you have to internally link all the pages on your website. The basic idea in
doing this is to flow the authority juice from high authority pages to low authority pages.
This will help Google to crawl all your pages easily. And, internally linking will also help
push low-performing pages.
5. Tracking Metrics
Now, you have invested quite a lot of effort into this SEO process. So that should
definitely generate some results.
Here's where the step of tracking metrics comes in. Only via tracking metrics will you
know if a strategy used is working or not.
Tracking metrics is not limited to simply tracking the traffic to your website. There are
quite a few parameters to consider here that will give you valuable insights on whether
you are in the right direction on not!
Following these 5 steps work as a fool-proof strategy to create a proper SEO engine that
churns results long term.
In the following modules, I'll walk you through each of these steps in detail. Along with
practical tutorials and tool suggestions on how to implement them. Let's go! 🚀
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05
CHAPTER FIVE
Where should I start?
Picture this: You write an amazing article for your brand new website and optimize it for
a good keyword. Now, two weeks after publishing, you see that Google just doesn't show
your article in search results.
Why?
Because your website lacks authority. Google does not know you yet, and so does nobody
else.
In an earlier module, I'd said that when you start a new website, the authority of your
website is 0 in Google's eyes.
Building on that, in this module, I will break down all the details you need to know around
domain authority.
Revision: What is domain authority?
Quickly revisiting the definition, domain authority is basically the reputation of your
website.
Your website builds this reputation when other websites recognize it by giving backlinks.
These in turn help you to buildd your domain authority.
How? Google looks at the backlinks you get to your website as a sort of popularity vote.
Every vote helps raise your website to a higher position.
When you get these votes from websites which already have a good reputation, your
credibility rises even further.
While Google hasn't revealed their exact parameters or numbers behind this reputation,
Moz's Domain Authority and Ahrefs' Domain Rating are generally used as a proxy. These
are both scores out of 100.
Moz DA: Computed based on links and traffic to your website.
Ahrefs DR: Computed based on links to your website.
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As a rule of thumb, we target an Ahrefs Domain Rating of at least 30 for our new
websites, before writing optimized articles. Below this, chances that Google will rank
your article are very low.
A higher value, say above 50, is a good Domain Rating score. It's much easier for your
website to compete with others on the internet, as now you have some credibility of your
own.
How to buildd domain authority
Right then, let's dive into how you can go about building your domain authority.There are
primarily 4 ways to do it.
1. Submissions to directories - Not recommended ❌
A popular way recommended for link building is submission to directories.
Let me tell you right away that this is considered spam by Google, and you should avoid
directory submissions at all costs.
But is there a better alternative?
Alternative 1: Submission to communities
There would be communities relevant to your offering. Say, startup communities.
You can share your website on such for initial traction. Especially in the early days when
your website's DR is close to 0.
Alternative 2: Social profiles
You can also create profiles on LinkedIn and other communities and add a link to your
website from these. This helps search engines discover your site, but aren't really amazing
for authority building.
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2. Cold outreach - Not recommended ❌
You might have received mails like:'I love your content, I read it regularly, I've written an
amazing piece of content for your audience', etc.
These emails try to get you to publish their post and sounds like a way you could also
adopt to reach out to people.
However, such cold outreach emails usually result in low quality backlinks and should be
avoided. A quality website will typically reject requests like these upfront.
So if these methods don't work, what does?
3. Write Guest Posts - When your DR <= 30 ✅
Writing guest posts is by far the best way to buildd your domain authority, especially
when you're just starting out. In the initial stages of link building, you have to put yourself
out there.
Find websites which are relevant to your offering and are accepting guest posts, and write
for them.
Adhere to their rules so that your content isn't rejected. Here, you are giving them value in
the form of a free post, and they are giving you a link back to your website. As a result,
there is good exchange of value.
You can add links to your website in the content you write or in the author details. A lot of
websites allow you to add your link in the author bio only, so that their readers are not
spammed via in-content links.
When reaching out to such websites, make sure that you will get a do-follow link. Dofollow links essentially signal to Google that you get a vote from the website. If you don't
get a do-follow link, all your effort is wasted.
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Now, researching about guest posts, writing content and then getting it published is a
tedious process. So, it's best done in the initial period till you reach a DR of 30.
Once you get there, you can move on to a more advanced process of link building which I
outline next.
4. Form Partnerships - When your DR > 30 ✅
Now that you've broken the initial DR barrier of 30, Google and all other websites treat
you as having decent reputation.
This is when you can start leveraging this newly achieved reputation, to buildd it even
further.
How? You form partnerships with other people or websites, and collaborate with them
regularly to exchange content.
Let me explain how this would typically work:
1. You share your content with your partners.
2. These partners write guest posts for websites, and usually have a portfolio of 20-30
websites they collaborate with.
3. When they see that your content is a relevant resource, they link to it in their guest
posts.
4. You get a link from the website they are writing for.
This eases up the load on you, and you can focus on writing high quality content on your
own website.
For partnerships, you can start publishing guest posts on your website. When people
approach you for this, identify if any of these requests come from people who would be
open to forming partnerships.
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Pro-Tip: Write Data-Driven content
People are usually looking to link to stats or data. So, when you write such content on
your website and it ranks well, there's a high chance people will link to you organically.
Here's how you'd typically do it:
1. Find a topic in your industry
2. Research on it
3. Conduct surveys
4. Collect & analyse data
5. Write an SEO-optimised post & distribute it.
Such content serves as a smart way of then continuously getting links to your website.
How we generated backlinks through data-driven content
A couple of years ago, we surveyed about 300+ experienced remote workers. We asked
them about their preferences, challenges faced, and some other insights. Then, we derived
insights from this data and put this into an extensive report. It showcased the State of
Remote Work at that time.
Some examples of insights included in the article:
1. Remote workers didn't really want to go back to a physical office
2. People were often working overtime, when working remotely
3. Work flexibility was the most important thing about remote work.
We had a tiny following at the time, but then when we shared it on Hacker News, Twitter
& Reddit, it got a lot of attention.
The page received backlinks from 141 unique websites! It has a URL rating of 38, and is
one of our top rated pages on Remote Tools.
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Finally, some key points to remember when building links
1. The DR/DA does not increase overnight. It takes time and effort, so you need to put
in efforts an be patient to see results. Typically, it will take you 3-6 months at least to
reach a DR of 30.
2. These numbers are measured on a logarithmic scale. This means it is easy to push
your DR from 0 to 10 but much harder to push it from 20 to 30.
3. Do not go for easy links from irrelevant sources. This is considered as spam and
Google will penalize you for it.
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Tutorial - 1
Resources for this tutorial
✍️Sample - Guest posts.
How to use the sample sheet - Tutorial
Now that you know what are the things you can do for building domain authority, it's time
to understand the details of doing them.
As I said, writing guest posts is the best way to buildd domain authority when your
website is new. Until your website has a DR of 30, focus your SEO efforts on guest posts
alone.
Now, while this doesn't require you to wreck your brain, it is a long process with quite a
few steps involved. Let's walk through them.
Finding websites to write for
Step 1: Use Google to search for websites
First, type '[your_topic] "write for us"' in the Google Search bar
Here, 'your_topic' could be anything you want to write about - social media, startups,
etc. Try to use keywords which are relevant to your offering.
The "write for us" is a Google syntax which searches exclusively for pages which
have these words in them. Guest post pages typically have 'write for us' or 'guest post'
mentioned in them, and you can use these words in your syntax.
Essentially, you're searching for websites which offer guest posts in your target topic.
For example, in the below screenshot, we are looking for startup related guest post
sites, which have included the words 'write for us' in the page.
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Also, go to the search setting and change the 'Results per page' to show you 100
results per page. This step is useful for the next process, scraping data.
Step 2: Scrape data using Ahrefs
Install the Ahrefs SEO Toolbar. It's available on multiple browsers, although
you'd need a paid Ahrefs account to use it.
After searching on Google as mentioned in the earlier steps, turn on Ahrefs and
click on 'Save SERP data' or 'Export SERP'.
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On doing this, Ahrefs scrapes all the results and combines these in a CSV.
Import these to a Google sheet and add a filter to the data.
Now hide all columns except the URL and DR column, so that the page isn't
cluttered. You can use this sheet as a reference.
Filter the results
Our first filter will be on the Domain Rating. Filter this column to contain only
values above 30.
This helps you target websites which already have a certain reputation. A
backlink from a lower DR website isn't going to move the needle much for you.
Add a column to identify if the guest post is dofollow or nofollow. Also check if
the guest post is paid, regardless of whether it's dofollow or nofollow.
As mentioned in our explanation, we will only be targeting dofollow backlinks
for link building. Nofollow and paid links may not be worth the effort.
Now, you can reach out to the websites in various ways
Reaching out over mail
Filling out a form
Directly submitting the article via mail/form
We shall call these ways as 'Process' and subsequently, the next column you
create should be 'Process'.
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These processes help you determine which websites to reach out to first. We
typically avoid direct submissions as it could lead to rejection of articles that
you've put effort into.
Collect data about the websites
Now, you'd have to manually look through each of these websites and fill in the data
in the sheet accordingly - the type of link, the process and any other details.
1. Always read through the guidelines before sharing data with any website. You
do not want to come across as a spammy website as it could lead to direct
rejection.
2. For example, if you suggest a topic on startups to a magazine only looking for
health related topics, that will lead to a direct rejection.
3. In your sheet, note down these guidelines that the website mentions in an 'Other
Details' column. When writing, you would have to adhere to these.
Identifying if a website gives do-follow links
The guest post guidelines may explicitly mention if they are open to dofollow
links.
If they don't mention this, you can check existing guest posts on the website. For
example, consider this guest post we wrote - https://mention.com/en/blog/hackproduct-hunt-launch
If you open it, and activate the Ahrefs plugin, you can go to the 'Links' tab to see
the do-follow links.
Now hide all columns except the URL and DR column, so that the page isn't
cluttered. You can use this sheet as a reference.
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Installing Moz's Chrome Plugin and clicking on 'Follow' also shows you all the
do-follow links.
If this doesn't work, ask them directly, but gently, about the type of link they
provide. You shouldn't come across as someone who's just looking for links,
though, so be subtle while asking.
Once you have this data, fill it into your spreadsheet. We will be reaching out to
those websites which:
have a DR above 30
provide do-follow links
do not ask for direct article submissions (you'll write an entire article, and they
may end up rejecting your submission. So, it's always better to align at every
step - topic, outline, draft etc.)
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Reaching out to these websites
We have shared a template in this sheet which you can use to reach out to people
you want to approach for guest posts.
Note that the outreach mails/form data should not be generic. It should include
details about yourself and also tell the website representatives that you will provide
quality content.
Mentioning that top websites have accepted your guest posts in this mail helps instill
confidence.
Also cover any points that they mention in their guidelines, as ignoring the
guidelines will lead to direct rejection.
Also followup to the initial mails if you don't receive replies. Most of these sites
receive 10+ requests every day, and for them, keeping track of every mail is tough.
For this, you can use tools like Rebump and Vocus to automate these followups.
If, in the guidelines, you aren't explicitly told who to reach out to, identify people in
the marketing team via LinkedIn. You may also find details on the team page on
their website. You can then reach out to them, as the marketing team would be
responsible for handling this content. For obtaining mail IDs, you can use tools like
Clearbit and Hunter.
Summarising the entire process
Use Google Search to identify the places you can reach out to.
Scrape the top 100 results using Ahrefs into a CSV.
Copy this into a Google Sheet, keep just the URL and DR visible.
Keep a cutoff of 30 on the DR.
Document the type of link - paid, dofollow or nofollow. We are targeting dofollow.
Document the process for reaching out to them.
Document other details about their guidelines.
While building the DR to 30-40 this way will take a few months, this is a very
reliable channel and is worth the effort.
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After writing the guest post:
1. Check the published post and make sure that the link is do-follow
2. Check if Ahrefs is indexing that page and the link is attributed to your website.
3. Now, Google doesn't check Ahrefs' rating of you, but other people are going to
use these tools (Moz, Ahrefs). So, you need to make sure that the link is
indexed. If it's not indexed after a couple weeks, you can reach out to Ahrefs
and ask them to index it.
Quick notes:
1. Note that all links are automatically considered as do-follow unless specified as
'nofollow'.
2. Nofollow links tell search engines to ignore the link. In essence, even if your
website is linked, and if it's a nofollow link, you will not get any credibility for
it.
3. This is how no-follow links are specified:
4. <a href="www.flexiple.com" rel="nofollow">Flexiple</a>
Tutorial - 2
Once you have a DR above 30, link building partners are the way to go.
For partnerships, you need to find partners who provide high quality content to share
your content with them. They also would need to benefit from you, so a partner
wouldn't want to form a partnership unless you have a good DR already.
They are great to keep building up your DR in a sustainable manner while focusing
on content you create for your website.
What to look for in a link building partner
1. You need partners who publish great content
2. Typically find those who collaborate with a portfolio of websites. These people
would already have 20-30 websites they regularly interact with.
3. These are typically SEO consultants and digital marketing companies
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To buildd partnerships, you'd have to first publish a guest post invite blog, and then
converse with the people who approach you.Below, I've listed how you can publish
a guest post invite blog.
Publishing a blog with guest post guidelines
1. Take our guest post guidelines as an example - https://flexiple.com/blog/guestpost-guidelines
2. We have optimized this for keywords such as 'Write for us' and 'Guest post',
which are typical keywords used in guest post blogs.
3. Mention the topics you are open to in this guidelines blog.
4. Mention the review and publishing process your website follows, too.
5. Also, state the benefits of publishing a guest post on your website.
Engage in conversation with the people who approach you
1. Once you have a guidelines post up, you will receive mails from people who are
interested in publishing posts on your website. This, of course, is assuming that
you've optimized the content well.
2. From the ones who approach you, identify people who are a fit in terms of
quality levels you wish to maintain for your content.
3. Next, work to keep in touch with these partners and regularly share content with
them.
4. This content could be newly published pages that you want to give initial
traction to, or older pages which you'd like to push up further.
5. Review the places where your link building partners insert your links, to make
sure they are high quality and relevant.
6. Your partners would also ask you to add links on your website. During such
exchanges, ensure that you do not link to poor websites and always give relevant
links.
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06
CHAPTER SIX
Let's find keywords
As you already know, keywords are basically the words that your customers are
going to search on Google to find a product or service.
So, the keyword research process is finding such keywords where you are more
likely to rank in the top 10 (or even top 3!).
But is it REALLY necessary to research keywords?
When we initially started writing blogs, we made the mistake of writing a batch of
high-quality blogs without any keyword research, expecting that users would
miraculously find us. But all that translated to ZERO organic traffic.
So, unless you don't want Google to send potential customers to your website,
keyword research is a MUST for all content pieces!
Now it's important to understand that creating SEO-optimised content doesn't mean
you write poor quality content.
Your potential customers are going to be reading all your articles. So, your content
should be high quality and always written for humans.
But for your users to discover that high-quality content, it is important to optimize
your content for search engines.
So, your goal is to create engaging content and ensure that it is found by others who
are searching for it.
Right then, let's get to the process of keyword research.
Keyword research can be done in many different ways. Each person will their own
way of going about it.
But we will only be sharing what worked well for us! Currently, our startup’s
website, Flexiple, gets 500K+ traffic and our sister website, Remote Tools, gets
more than 1M+ monthly visitors.
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So, you can be sure that this is a well-tested process :) Let's get to it then!
How to select keywords to write about?
The process of keyword research is actually quite simple. You need to identify what
people search for and how to rank for them in Google search results.
But if you publish a blog about digital marketing, there is a high chance that your
blog will never rank for such a keyword. So, how to select the right keywords and
drive traffic to your website?
Treat Google's search results page as your battleground
Now, before you get into the details of keywords, it's important to have the right
mindset for SEO.
SEO is a battle and Google's search results page is your battleground. Like in any
battleground, you have competitors.
When a user searches for a term on Google, every website wants to rank in the top
10 results for the keyword.
So above everything else, you should try to understand the likelihood of your page
beating these competitors or already ranking websites.
A good way to do this is to ensure that there is at least one website that has a lower
domain authority than your website. In fact, the more websites that have a lower
authority than yours, the higher your chance of ranking in the top 10 for that
keyword.
We will use this proxy of number of websites < your DR while shortlisting
keywords/topics to write content on.
Right then, let's get to keywords. There are 3 types of keywords that you can focus
on.
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1. Low competition & High Volume Keywords
When you first begin writing content, it's only natural for you to pick keywords that
everyone searches for. But chances are, these keywords are SUPER competitive.
For example, if you need to rank in the top 10 search results for the term “digital
marketing”, you would need 835 backlinks.
This is a herculean task, especially when you are just starting out.
So, your goal is to find keywords that have low competition, and ideally high
volume. Although the intent doesn't really matter at this point, it's a good practice to
ensure that it has a commercial or informational search intent. The main objective
here is to engage with your target audience and buildd a reputation.
2. High Intent Keywords
These are keywords where your customers are searching for terms which show that
they are planning to make a purchase. Such keywords are naturally very competitive
and you may often see paid ads on these results.
For example, “buy nike shoes” is a high intent keyword because the user is planning
to make a purchase in the near future. For such keywords, you should initially ignore
the competition or the volume.
So then, how do you ensure that you still rank for these keywords?
There's an SEO strategy you can adopt to increase your chances of ranking for such
competitive high intent keywords. It's called the hub and spoke model.
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In this model, you have 2 kinds of pages:
1. Page(s) targeting high intent keywords - This is your main page or the hub. You
ideally want this page to rank high on Google to drive high conversions on your
website.
2. Pages targeting low competition & high - These are sub pages or spokes. It will
be easy for you to rank these pages on Google since they are low competition.
Then, you'll provide links from these sub pages to the main page so that you can
pass on the link juice to the high intent page(s).
Eventually, your high intent pages should also start ranking given the link goodness
you've passed on through internal linking.
3. Competitor Keywords
Constantly battling strong competition in SEO is no fun. Imagine having a website
competing for the same search terms as the ones your website targets. It can be so
annoying!
But there's a silver lining to having competition upfront. You can analyse what
works well for them and replicate their strategy for your website. The main goal is to
not get distracted by them and instead use these competitors to get content ideas.
For instance, if you have a product that is competing against Zapier, you should
analyse how they get most of their organic traffic.
In the case of Zapier, 60% of their traffic comes from blogs written on the top apps
in a particular category. They've written blogs on the best URL shorteners, the best
note-taking apps, the best to-do list apps, and so on.
Through this research, you would be able to identify any unique strategies your
competitors use and apply them to your website as well.
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Tutorial
Resources for this tutorial
🔍 SEO Keyword Generator - Sample Sheet
How to find low competition & high volume keywords?
Step 1
Go to the Ahrefs keyword explorer tool and enter the seed phrase that is relevant to
your startup or business. Seed phrases are very broad terms that your users might
search on Google.
For example, at Flexiple, a good seed word is “Javascript” since our goal at Flexiple
is to primarily create helpful content for developers who are looking to learn and
read about technologies.
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Step 2
After entering the phrase, Ahrefs gives you insights into only the "Javascript"
keyword. But since we are trying to find all other keywords that contain the
keyword, we need to go to the tab called matching terms.
Essentially, this will give you a list of keywords that definitely have the keyword
"Javascript".
Step 3
Now, use the keyword difficulty filter to set at a maximum of 20.
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Step 4
Next, set the search volume to a minimum of 1000.
Step 5
If you don't get any results, then don't worry, you can enter a different seed phrase
that is related to your startup and repeat the process.
The filters that we have set can be adjusted depending on the keywords that you get.
For instance, if you are unable to get any relevant keywords with the search volume
set at a minimum of 1000, then you can change it to 800 or 500.
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Step 6
Next, you need to export and make sure to tick the include SERPs check box.
Essentially, this not only exports the keywords but also the top 10 search engine
results of each keyword in the list.
Step 7
Once you download the CSV, open the file on Excel or Google Sheet. The document
will have many columns that won't be relevant now.
So now, you need to copy and paste only the keyword, URL, Domain Rating,
Volume and Difficulty in this sample sheet.
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Step 8
Once this is done, you can switch to the output tab and enter your domain rating in
the highlighted field above the table.
Now, you can get the details about the number of websites that have a lower domain
rating than your website.
If your domain rating is lesser, you may find it difficult to get keywords. But this is
where you should buildd your domain rating to a certain level before you can start
this process.
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Step 9
Next, you can select the entire table, and then duplicate it to a different sheet pasted
by values.
Lastly, you can sort it based on the descending order of the no. of websites having a
lower domain rating than your website.
Now, not only are we targeting keywords based on our initial constraints of keyword
difficulty of less than 20 and volume of more than 1000, but we are also targeting
keywords that have more than 1 website with a lower domain authority than your
website.
Step 10
Lastly, we need to check whether the keyword is relevant or not. This can be done
manually to ensure that you only have the content that is suitable for your website.
This final list of keywords are the topics that can you can write on!
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07
CHAPTER SEVEN
How to optimize pages?
To optimize for a given keyword, all you have to do is mention it about a hundred
times in your content, right?
Sounds ridiculous? That's cause it is. While including a keyword at any place you
like in an article might have worked 10 years ago, times have surely changed.
Google will of course NOT rank your article, but it will also heavily penalize your
website for doing this.
At the same time, publishing an article and not optimizing it for any keyword is a
waste of effort. 7.5 million blog posts are published on the internet every day and if
you don't optimize yours, it's as good as going on a wild goose chase.
So how do those websites which consistently appear in the top 10 do it?
Optimizing a page for a given keyword is in fact not that difficult. In this module, I
have explained how to strike a perfect balance between including the keyword and
writing quality content.
1. Length of the content
It's a popular belief that to get your content to rank, you need to write upwards of
2000 words every single time.
Well, that's not true. We have articles which are 500-600 words long and generate
20k+ visits each month. But, you can't always write just 500-600 words and hope to
rank.
How do you determine how many words to write, then?
For this, we take the average of the length of the top 10 results, and try to beat it.
Remember that SEO is a battleground, so your content has to be 'better' than the
others. In this case, we aim for a better length.
You can use any tool on the internet to find this length. Here's one we use - Web
page word count checker.
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But just beating the top results in length might not be enough. You have to also ensure
that all content that is relevant to the topic is included on the page.
Also, don't keep your content too short. It's tough to properly address queries in a few
words and Google may consider your page spam.
2. Answer the query upfront
If your keyword is a question, try to answer the query in the first 100 words or so.
For example, if your keyword is 'how to build a table', then try to briefly answer this
in the first few lines itself. You can then elaborate on it in the rest of the content
body.
This way, the visitor can find answers to their query soon and Google also identifies
you as a relevant & good result.
Tutorial
Equipped with the knowledge of what to do, it's time to optimize your content.
Onpage optimization means infusing the keyword in various parts of your page to
get search engines to rank your content.
Through this, you tell Google how relevant your content is to a particular topic. So,
do not consider content as 'ready for publish' unless it's been optimized.
Here's how you can go about it:
Look through the top 10 results and calculate the average length of these results.
Your article should be a bit longer than this.
Next, finalize the various topics you'd want to include in the content.
After the content is written, you can make use of Yoast for optimizing your
content.
Copy your content to Yoast, and enter the focus keyword you wish to optimize
the page for.
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Also enter your title and meta description.
In the below screenshot, we've shown Yoast's rating for a keyword optimized page.
Here, Yoast shows the various places where the content has been optimized well and
where you might be lacking.
The various parameters such as keyword in title, subheadings, keyword density, are
explained quite well and in an interactive manner in Yoast. Try and get them all in
green.
Next, to optimize for readability, check your content in Hemingway App. The tool
tells you how easily readable your content is.
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Try to get a Grade 9 or lower on Hemingway. You'd have to modify your sentences
to do the same.
Here, ensure that you do not mess with the earlier keyword optimization when
modifying the sentences.
Lastly, use Grammarly to correct any grammatical errors in the content.
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08
CHAPTER EIGHT
What next?
Congratulations! After a long journey, you have finally reached a milestone!
Now, you know how to increase your domain authority, do keyword research, and
write high-quality SEO-optimized content. But, even after following all the steps to
a T, Google might still miss noticing your optimized & well-written content.
So, what do we do about this? Well, here's where distribution & internal linking can
help.
You can do this largely in 3 parts. Here's how!
1) Find Relevant Communities
The idea here is simple. No matter what domain your content belongs to, there is
probably a dedicated community for it in some corner of the internet.
The people in the community are now your target audience. And, your content
should ultimately be helpful to them.
So, you basically have to find places where your target audience hangs out, so you
can distribute your content there. The goal is, of course, to add value to the
community & not endlessly spam them.
A good example of this could be Twitter, Reddit communities, or even Discord
servers. If you write on startups or marketing, you know you'll find some hardcore
enthusiasts on these websites!
But, how exactly will distribution help with SEO?
Well, here's how:
1. By distributing your content you'll have some people visit your web page. This
is possibly one of Google's factors to see if people find your content helpful &
engaging.
2. This will give that initial push to your content & help with the initial SEO cycle.
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2) Maintain a robust internal links doc
An internal link is basically a link from one page to another on your website.
Here's a good analogy to understand the effect of an internal link. So think of a link
as a popularity vote to your web page. By linking to a page you're basically telling
Google that this page is important for your website (and that Google should index &
rank it :P )
Now, internal linking is not just an extra step in your SEO process, it is as important
as anything else you'll do.
Personally, we advise you to not randomly go about adding internal links. Instead,
you should create a proper process and maintain a robust document that tracks all
the links from one page to another.
This will help in several different ways.
1. Firstly, a proper process will ensure that any new blog you publish will receive a
set number of internal links.
2. By keeping track, you don't end up distributing too many internal links from one
single page.
3) Link from high traffic to high conversion pages!
Finally, we come to the last part. This step is basically a pro tip from us :)
You know all pages on your website are not created equal. On your website, you
probably have two kinds of pages:
1. High Traffic — Pages that receive a huge inflow of traffic
2. High Conversion — Pages that see more conversions of visitors into users
Now, these high-traffic pages are definitely performing very well SEO-wise, hence
the huge traffic. But, you definitely want more users to come across the high
conversion page.
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Internal linking is one way to push these pages. Basically, all you have to do is link
from high traffic pages to high conversion pages & the authority juice will flow
from one page to another!
This essentially supercharges these low-performance pages and in a way translates
the authority throughout your blog.
Tutorial
Resources for this tutorial
🔗 Sample - Internal Links
How add internal links - Tutorial
SEO can be unpredictable at times. And you'd want to do everything in your control
to ensure you rank on Google.
That's why internal linking is so important. It helps interconnect all the pages on
your website, so Google can:
Crawl and index all the pages seamlessly
And, the authority from high reputation pages flows to low reputation pages
What's great is that this is a low-effort, high-value investment. All you have to do is
buildd a proper process to add internal links.
Now, it's not a good idea to simply add links through memory. Here, having robust
documentation that tracks all the links becomes important.
We have created a very simple to use sample sheet for you, where you can begin
tracking your internal links.
Now, here's what the overall internal linking process would look like:
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1. There will be a certain number of links that each webpage gives out.
2. Similarly, the same page will also receive a certain number of links. We usually
cap this number to 5 links, ie. each page receives 5 internal links.
3. The links from page A to page B is exactly what you'll be documenting in the
sample sheet.
So, after keyword research, keyword optimization, etc, internal linking will also be a
proper step you follow.
Let's understand this with the help of an example. So, if I consider the first blog on
the sample sheet, you'll see that in the sidebar we link to some trending and recent
articles.
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Basically, every blog can link to 5 other blogs like this in the sidebar. Similarly, this
blog also receives internal links from the blogs mentioned in the corresponding
columns of the sample sheet.
Column K then calculates the number of internal links a particular blog receives.
The color of this cell will go from red to green depending on the number of links
you add. Your goal is to add links till the color eventually goes green!
As you consistently internally link all your pages, you'll eventually create an
intricate network where all pages are linked with each other!
Now, you can take this strategy a step further.
Every website mostly has 2 types of pages:
1. High Conversion Pages:
Landing pages that include CTAs (Call to action)
These pages mostly target specific search intent keywords that are probably
difficult to rank
But, they have a high track record of converting visitors to users.
2. High Traffic Pages
Eg. Blogs, tutorials, etc that receive huge traffic
These pages probably target easy to rank keywords that get a huge an influx
of visitors
But they are not ideal for conversions.
Now, to push your high conversion pages in rankings, you can add links to these
pages from high traffic that perform very well.
So basically, to push the conversion-focused pages to do better you can make sure
they get up to 10 internal links. While the non-conversion pages like simple blogs
can receive up to 5 internal links. The example in the sheet also reflects this pattern.
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09
CHAPTER NINE
Tracking metrics
You'd put in a lot of hard work if you've followed all the steps before this. And you'd
be keen to check the results now.
Generally speaking, tracking metrics is crucial for any marketing initiative. It helps
you measure your progress and you know where exactly you need to improve.
Basically, you can gain a better understanding of what is working and what is not.
So let's delve into how you can go about tracking your progress or results when it
comes to SEO.
Firstly, you have to choose the right metrics
When we have so much data at our disposal, it is easy to get lost in the world of
metrics tracking. There are some metrics that provide a real impact on your
campaign, while others are merely tracked for the sake of it. Picking the right
metrics to track is no easy task. But we have figured this out for you!
Initially, after you have published your content, don't start by tracking the traffic or
the conversions - these are lag indicators. Instead, analyse if your content is even
ranking in the top 100 results for the keyword that you have written.
When the content starts ranking in any position, Google agrees that the content is
relevant to the keyword that you are targeting. In fact, you can gradually see it
progressing from the top 100 to top 50 to top 10 and finally, in the top 3!
But which tools should I use for tracking?
The only tool that you need for tracking your SEO progress is the Google Search
Console. It's a free tool by Google and provides insights about your keyword's
performance on the search results.
Using the Google Search Console, you can find out about the keywords you are
ranking for, impressions, their average position and clicks.
In the tutorial section, I'll show you how to set up and use search console in detail.
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Finally, a word on re-optimization
Now that you have published a blog, you may think that your job is done.
Well, not yet.
When you write a blog, you write content for a specific keyword. But the blog will
not only rank for just that keyword, but also for a ton of other keywords.
For example, if you target the keyword "hire freelancers", there is a good chance
your content will also rank for "hire best freelancers", "hire freelancers online", etc.
Once your content starts receiving traffic, go through the keywords it ranks for and
see if you can re-optimize your content for those extra keywords. This is a nice way
to increase the traffic to your blog through related keywords.
Tutorial
Resources for this tutorial
🔢 Sample Sheet - Tracking Metrics
Learn how to track your metrics!
In this step-by-step tutorial, we will explain how you can use Google Search
Console to track the keyword metrics.
Step 1
Firstly, go to Google Search Console.
If you are using the Search Console for the first time, then you must follow the
instructions on the page to connect your website to the Search Console.
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Step 2
Once your website is connected to Search Console, go to the search results tab on the left
menu.
Here you can see the details of your website's search performance over a period of time.
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Step 3
On this page, you can also apply filters based on the time period, device, country, query,
etc. In this case, we will be analysing the data over the last 28 days.
Step 4
Click on the Export button to download the data.
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Step 5
Since the data contains a lot of fields, we have decided to keep it simple by using 2 input
tabs - the queries tab and the pages tab.
Once you have downloaded the Search Console export document, you can paste the data
into the respective tabs in the sample sheet.
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Step 6
Finally, on the output tab, you will get more details on how many pages and keywords are
ranking in the top 3, top 10, 11- 20, 21 - 50 and 51 - 100 positions of the search results.
The Google Search Console gives you the average position of all the keywords that your
page is ranking for.
Step 7
On the other table in the output tab, you can get an overview of your pages sorted based
on the number of clicks. Here, you can also view the total clicks that your website gets.
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10
CHAPTER TEN
SEO strategy
A 5 Stage Process
Now that you understand the SEO lifecycle, let me summarize the entire process for you
here!
Building Domain Authority
When you first launch your website, the most important step is to buildd the domain
authority of this new website. That's because, the higher the domain authority, the more
likely it will be ranked higher on search engine results pages. So, we explore some good
(and not so good!) ways to increase your website's domain authority.
🚫 Directory Websites
Directory websites are websites that list other products and services that users can browse
through. Don't submit your website to spam directories. They are not useful and Google
doesn't encourage them. However, you can submit your website to relevant communities
and on your social media pages.
🚫 Outreach
In this method, you reach out to other websites with a higher authority to include a link on
their page. But this process is not worth the effort since the return on investment is really
low. Also, most of the website owners ask for payments in return for the link. This is
again a practice that Google considers to be spam.
✔️Guest Post
In the early days, your website's domain authority would be quite low, So, the best way to
increase it is by guest posting. Guest posting means contributing an article to another
website or a blog. To build your domain authority, we recommend writing guest posts
until you reach a domain rating of 30.
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✔️Partnerships
Once you have a good website reputation, you can establish relationships with other
digital marketing agencies and SEO community members. They usually have a good
portfolio of high-quality websites where you can contribute content and get backlinks in
return.
Keyword Research
The main goal of keyword research is to find low competition & high volume keywords.
To find these keywords, you need to start with a search term and use the following filters
on Ahrefs:
Domain Rating < 20
Volume > 1000
SEO is a battleground. When a user searches for a term on Google, there are 10 results
that show up on the page. Every website competes on this search results battleground for
the top 10 positions.
So, in order, to rank in the top 10, not only should your content be great, but your domain
authority has to be higher than the others.
Now to start ranking in the top 10, your goal is to find at least one website in the top 10
search results which have a domain authority lesser than yours. Only then you must start
creating content.
Apart from this, you can also target high intent keywords by creating landing pages and
using the hub-spoke model for internal linking.
Keyword Optimized Content
After you have shortlisted the keywords that satisfy the above criteria, then the next step is
to create high-quality content that is also keyword optimized. Basically, this means doing
the following:
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Ensuring exact keyword match is present in the page title and the h1.
Ensuring partial keyword matches and related keywords are present in the h2.
Ensuring you have a combination of exact and partial keyword matches in the body
of your content.
Having keyword density between 1% to 2% in the body content. For example, a
thousand-word blog should contain anywhere between 10 to 20 keywords.
The word count of the blog should be more than the average word count of the top 10
results of that keyword.
Distribution and Internal Linking
Once you have written keyword-optimized content, you need to drive some initial traffic
to your page.
For this you can:
1. Distribute the content on relevant communities. Make sure to follow the guidelines of
the community and don't just spam links. Be helpful and try to provide value to other
members.
2. Add internal links. The various pages on your website are not created equally. So,
when you publish any piece of content, it will have low authority. Ensure to add links
from your best-performing pages to the new pages in order to provide the SEO juice
to these new pages.
Tracking Metrics
Now that you've put in so much effort, you'd be curious to know the results.
But you shouldn't immediately start looking at results in terms of just traffic. Traffic is a
lag indicator, instead look at some lead indicators.
For that, start tracking the progress of your keywords from top 100 to top 50 to finally, top
10. This also shows that Google considers that your content is a good match for the
keywords you targeted.
SEO is a long term game. But if you track the right metrics along the way, you'll know
early on whether you're progressing in the right direction.
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Keywords & Competitor Research
In the final leg of this course, we briefly summarized all the steps in our SEO process. We
took the example of our startup Flexiple to show you what an SEO strategy looks like.
But, how exactly can you visualize the content & come up with the SEO strategy for your
startup?
Well, it all comes down to how you do your keyword research.
What to do with a keyword?
Now, largely, your keywords can be broken down into 2 batches:
1. High Search Intent Keywords:
Very high search intent means the user is very specific & intends to come across
a particular result.
It's likely that these high intent keywords will have low search volume.
2. High Search Volume Keywords:
The high search volume keywords can be fairly vague and universal. Hence, they
are not high-conversion keywords.
For the first bucket of keywords, you should ideally create landing pages that are very
conversion-focused. While for high-volume keywords we usually write blogs to drive
traffic.
The intention behind writing blogs is usually to:
Interact with your audience
Create a brand presence
Increase brand recall
And, generally help your audience with their queries
But, ultimately we want to increase our conversions. So, here is where you can use the
hub-spoke model.
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In this model, all your conversion pages form a hub, and all the related blogs that drive a
lot of traffic will be spokes. The spokes will essentially have a good number of internal
links to your hub. This will help drive traffic to your conversion-focused landing pages,
AKA your hub!
This model is important because usually, it'll be tough for you to rank for high conversion
high search intent landing pages. So, you should ideally do everything to get all the help
you can.
Internally linking using the hub-spoke model will drive all the SEO juice to the hub. And,
is one way to give your landing pages a much-needed push!
How to come up with your startup's SEO strategy?
Now, in the previous section, we had already assumed we have a bunch of keywords,
right? But, how do you compile these keywords?
Well, there are two ways to do this:
1. Seed Keyword
2. Competitor Analysis
In the seed keyword strategy, you'll first have to think of all the possible keywords users
might Google that are relevant to your startup. Based, on these seed keywords you can
come up with a list.
But, another way to do this is to look at your competitors. Let's take a closer look at this
strategy.
Competitor Keyword Research
Almost every startup has a large competitor in the industry. In most cases, these startups
have done a great job on SEO and rank well for a number of keywords.
So, all you need to do is to analyze the SEO work that they are doing so that you can get
new content ideas and content verticals that you can explore for your own startup.
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While too much competitor research is just a distraction for your startup, it is important
from an SEO perspective to understand what keywords that they ranking for and what
type of content they are creating.
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11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Show me the tools!
Using the right tools can improve your SEO results greatly.
Here's a short story - when we first started playing around with SEO around 2018 or 2019,
we just used whatever free tool that had decent reviews for our use case. Turned out that
those free tools weren't accurate, and hence all our content efforts were literally wasted.
But worry not, we'll ensure that doesn't happen with you. After all, our learnings should
help you avoid the mistakes we did early on :)
Right then, let's get to the tools. I've kept the list succinct, with only the tools that we trust
and have used ourselves.
Building Domain Authority
Google Search
Use: To find the websites you can submit guest posts to.
Note: You have to search with the syntax - '[your_topic] "write for us"' or
'[your_topic] "guest post"', etc.
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Ahrefs plugin
Use: Scrape top 100 Google results
Note: You'd need a paid Ahrefs account for this.
Google sheet
Use: Data analysis
Note: There's a need for manual checking of each website in this stage.
Keyword research
1. Ahrefs
Use: To identify keywords that have a high volume and low KD
Note: You can use the free version to view a limited number of results. However, it's
advisable to use the paid version so you can comfortably view more results.
1. Google sheet
Use: Used to filter websites which have a DR lower than your own Note: You need to
also do a manual check for search intent at this stage.
Writing keyword optimized content
Word Counter
Use: Calculation of average length of the top 10 results.
Yoast
Use: Checks if the content - title, headings, images - have been optimized well. Shows
you places where you could further optimize content.
Note: Try to get a green signal on all parameters.
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Grammarly
Use: Identifies grammatical errors.
Hemingway
Use: Helps in improving readability.
Note: Aim for a grade of 9 or lower.
Distribution
Google sheet
Use: Keep a log of the links you receive to any page.
Screaming Frog
Use: Occasional site audit helps identify poorly linked pages
Metric tracking
Search Console
Use: Obtain accurate data on visitors via Google search
Ahrefs
Use: Interface is easier to use and gives faster results
Note: Traffic data isn't always accurate, Search Console is more reliable.
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About Flexiple
Our goal is to reduce your workload on hiring and make it super simple for you to work
with your dream engineer in 72 hours.
At Flexiple, we have developers across web & mobile technologies including JavaScript,
Python, Java, Flutter, React Native and many other programming languages!
That’s not it! What’s more?
1. Only the Best: With Flexiple you can be confident you are working with the absolute
best. We carefully curate our network and regularly update it to ensure that every
developer is a dream fit for your company.
2. Risk-free: You start absolutely NO risk, as we offer a trial period of 2 weeks to help
you assess the fit of the developer you are working with.
3. Dedicated success manager: At Flexiple, we partner with you, NOT sell to you. Your
success is the only goal and we will work with you to ensure that growth becomes
inevitable.
We collaborate with passionate companies every day and have done so for the past 6
years. Just click here to discover more about Flexiple and get started with a $1000 credit!