The steps to be taken in SEO

Google has long become a household word, and now no one will be surprised at referring to a smartphone with the phrase "OK, Google". Each year, the search algorithms become smarter and more user-friendly, but more demanding and complex for sites.

Today at Semseo agency, we're going to find out what currently affects the site's position in Search and how to promote your web page on it.

Google algorithms

Throughout the existence of Google Search, its algorithms have changed several times. Currently, Google launches one or more changes every day to improve search results. Most of them are invisible, but there are global innovations that are widely announced. The last "high-profile" algorithm update occurred in May 2020.

Like previous updates, the January 2020 core update focuses more on the quality of the site's content. Even Google states that:

"Creating compelling and useful content is perhaps more important for a site's popularity than any of the factors listed here."

In the Google's developers blog, the company also focused on content quality and offered a long list of questions to assist you when creating and publishing this or that information on the site.

Checklist of stages to optimise a website on Google:

All work can be divided into several stages:

Analyse the website and its competitors

The first step is to analyse the site's theme as well as the main competitors. At the same stage, a project promotion strategy is developed and a further work plan is drafted.

Search audit

The next step is usually a search audit. In the case of sites with thousands of products, work on the contents may be accompanied by other tasks. In this case, the process of content elaboration is divided into sections and categories and is carried out in stages. At the same stage, the analysis of the current site traffic is carried out, the traffic and transactions history from various sources is visualised.

Technical audit

One of the important points is the technical audit. At this stage, a robots.txt file is compiled, the presence of duplicate pages on the site and broken links, the availability of an adaptive version of the site, loading speed, a 404 page is developed, an xml sitemap is created, etc.

Analysis of commercial factors

The analysis of the site's commercial factors is also worthy of mention as a separate stage. User trust level depends on them, and search algorithms are guided by them when generating results for thematic queries. This includes information about the company and employees, contacts (phone, email, addresses, social networks, etc.), terms of sale and delivery, certificates, licenses, portfolio, customer service, reviews, FAQ section, detailed information about products (video reviews, photo, complete description), blogs, etc.

Offpage optimisation

The final stage is the work of external optimisation. It is necessary to check the current link mass of the site, select sites for placing links to the web, assess the site's behavioural characteristics and the effectiveness of the snippets, and also analyse the users' behaviour after all these works.