5 Sitemap Examples For Users And Bots: What Makes An Effective Sitemap Structure?
Intuitive navigation leads to better user experiences. Site visitors who get to the content they need fast get more value. The same goes for bots. That’s where sitemaps come in.
Sitemaps provide users and indexing bots with a clear overview of where vital pieces of content are on our sites. So, how do we create and optimize site maps? Let’s dive right in.
What are Sitemaps?
A sitemap is a file that helps Google index the pages on your site. Although part of technical SEO, creating a sitemap is simple.
Most content management systems (CMS) like WordPress or Wix automatically generate a sitemap for you. It contains your site’s page URLs, media, and files and how they relate.
Sitemaps can be generated manually. However, Google said the order of the URLs in a sitemap doesn’t matter.
What’s important is how the sitemap architecture is structured. Here’s what a sitemap looks like for Spacebar Collective:
Here, we have four separate sitemaps generated by Yoast SEO for key pages on the site. But this sitemap is made for the bots to crawl. There’s another sitemap that we need to consider.
Every Website Needs Two Types of Sitemaps
There are two main types of sitemaps present on most websites: XML sitemaps (like our example) and HTML sitemaps.
XML Sitemaps
Web admins leverage extensible markup language (XML) sitemaps to help search engines contextualize the contents of your site.
If your website’s pages aren’t indexed, check if there’s a sitemap file. You can also check Google Search Console and see if a sitemap is submitted.
HTML Sitemaps
An HTML (hypertext markup language) sitemap allows visitors to navigate your site quickly. These sitemaps are often found on the bottom of a website.
Think of it as a table of contents, providing an overview of your site’s essential pages. Creating a well-structured HTML sitemap reduces click depth, improving user experience.
HTML and XML sitemaps aren’t required for a page to rank. Google can still crawl your site through internal linking. But it makes Google’s job a whole lot faster. Let’s look at more examples.
Sitemap Examples to Take Inspiration From
There’s not much we can optimize for XML sitemaps, as our CMS already generates one. On the other hand, HTML sitemaps offer more leeway since the design is up to our preference.
Here are 5 sitemap examples to take inspiration from when building your website structure:
Ahrefs’ HTML Sitemap
SaaS companies like Ahref have products with a comprehensive list of features and tools. That’s why each sitemap must be categorized. Ahref does this beautifully.
Users can easily navigate and find what they need, from Ahrefs’ core tools to resources such as blogs, even with such a large site.
Venngage HTML Sitemap
Venngage’s sitemap stands out because it includes competitor comparisons immediately. They understand that users going to their site are thinking of getting graphic design alternatives.
The best part about their sitemap is that all the products are laid out whether you’re looking for an infographic maker or a presentation creator. There are even templates at the ready.
LeadGenera HTML Sitemap
Leadgenera’s sitemap takes a resource-centered approach. They included a summary of their main navigation bar (services, portfolios, about us pages) and highlighted their knowledge hub.
When users visit their site, they don’t have to go far to find resources related to their main service—lead generation. It includes the basics of lead gen, the tools, strategies, and guides.
How to Find XML Sitemaps of Any Site
Finding HTML sitemaps is easy since most sites have them at the bottom of their home pages. Some even have a “sitemap” in their navigation menu.
But how about the XML sitemaps? How do you even check if you have a sitemap yourself? Here are two simple ways to find basic sitemaps, especially those auto-generated by your CMS.
Domain Name + Sitemap
Finding the sitemap of a website generated from plugins like Yoast is easy. You just have to enter the domain name and either of the following:
/sitemap
/sitemap.xml
/sitemap_index.xml
Let’s try it out with Leadgenera.
Using Robots.txt
It’s best practice to include the sitemap in your website’s robots.txt file. We can use that to reverse-engineer our way into finding the XML sitemap of other sites as well. To do so, we can try entering the domain name + /robots.txt. Let’s try this method with Venngage.
Sitemap Best Practices
We’ve established the importance of having a sitemap for both bots and site users. So, if you’re planning on creating or optimizing your sitemaps, consider these best practices:
Prioritize Web Pages
You can edit your XML sitemaps and include a priority score (between 0.1 and 1) for each page. The higher the value, the more search engines will crawl it.
Does this really matter for your SERP ranking? Not really. But it does allow newer sites to have important pages indexed faster.
If you go this route, prioritize dynamic pages first (pages where new content is consistently published), such as blogs or product pages for an eCommerce site.
Categorize Content
Categorizing content helps crawlers contextualize your website structure. The standard practice is to follow a basic website hierarchical order starting from the homepage.
Categories, then subcategories follow it. Creating a content plan can help you map out the structure that suits your website best, especially during the planning stage.
Don’t Include Non-Indexed URLs
Sitemaps are there to tell web crawlers the pages that you want indexed. It won’t make sense for you to include pages that aren’t supposed to get indexed. All URLs in your sitemap should return a 200 status code (successful website request).
Leverage Sitemap Generator Tools
Automating your site map would only make sense as you scale your content velocity. Several tools are available, the most popular being Yoast, InSpyder, and Slickplan Sitemap Builder.
Submit Sitemap to Google
When revamping, optimizing, or creating a new sitemap, submit it to Google through your Google Search Console dashboard.
Key Takeaways
A proper XML sitemap structure is necessary if we want our pages to get indexed faster and more efficiently. HTML sitemaps make user navigation easier when they visit our site.
Both aren’t necessary for ranking. But they improve index speeds and the overall user experience. As a quick recap, here are some key insights you might’ve missed:
To find sitemaps, you can use domain + /robots.txt or domain + /sitemap
HTML sitemaps are typically found at the bottom of the homepage
Google and other search engines reward high-quality and valuable content. That will always be an SEO fundamental. However, it takes A LOT of TIME for content to gain traction organically.
With how competitive most industries are, time isn’t something we can spare. To keep up with competitors, we need content velocity at scale.
What is Content Velocity, and How Do We Measure It?
Content velocity is the volume of content you publish over a period of time. It can be measured weekly, monthly, or yearly—per word count, pages published, URLs, or blogs.
Measuring content velocity comes down to preference and what a business values most. Since we’re dealing with content velocity for SEO, we typically measure in terms of new pages.
We want to build topical authority through strategic content planning, not just word count. In short, focus on creating long-form content that makes sense for the topic and the readers.
How Fast Should Our Content Velocity Be?
There isn’t a universal benchmark for content velocity. We must consider factors such as our competitor’s content velocity, our own content library, and internal linking structure.
Let’s say your top competitor is publishing 50 articles over six months. That means they have a content velocity of 8.33. Ideally, you’d want to go beyond or match their content velocity.
But the amount of content published isn’t the only factor to consider in our overall SEO strategy. We still need to optimize our website for our content to be crawled, indexed and ranked faster.
The Importance of Content Velocity in SEO
For well-established sites with high authority, indexing can happen within hours after publishing a new page. For newer sites with no authority, backlinks, and a thin content library, it can take 3-6 months.
In a vacuum, data says that in a year, only 30% to 60% of your content can actually bring value to your business. But that’s the great thing about content velocity. The more quality content you produce, the more Google sees you as an expert.
Paired with the right link velocity strategy and solid SEO fundamentals, indexing time for new pages gets gut down significantly. So, how exactly do we scale our content velocity in such competitive markets?
How to Scale Content Velocity
If a site is optimized for SEO, all that’s left to do is to scale content production to match competitors’ content velocity. Here are five strategies that help you do just that.
Outsourcing Blog Writing
Blogs are the cornerstone for achieving content velocity. Remember, we want to achieve topical authority—blogs are the best way to do so.
Let’s say you’re a local contractor aiming to rank for “vinyl siding installation.” You could write the blogs yourself. But that would take hours of your day.
That’s time you could’ve used doing dollar-productive tasks. To save time and resources, you could outsource blog writing.
It removes the risks involved in keyword planning and content production (pitfalls such as keyword cannibalism), streamlines content planning and editing, and saves time and overhead (training costs, onboarding, etc.).
Plus, you can scale your content production based on your available marketing budget, allowing for a more flexible SEO campaign than locked-in, quota-based in-house marketing.
Creating an SEO Content Plan
If you want to keep blog writing or content production in-house, you must develop a solid SEO content plan. This involves:
Audience and competitor research
Keyword planning
Creating topic clusters (topical maps or keyword silos)
Establishing a content plan template
Creating a content calendar
Create your SEO content plan with clear goals in mind. This helps align your content plan to your content calendar, set benchmarks, and identify key metrics.
After executing your content plan, be sure to monitor your campaigns and update them regularly. It’s not a one-and-done deal. Content production will always be an ongoing process.
Leverage Content Writing Tools
Since we are talking about content velocity, it’s only natural to use tools for streamlining content creation—and we’re not talking about ChatGPT. It was exciting at first, but AI detection tools are catching up faster than you can write prompts.
Letting AI write entire blogs is possible, but it’s not the best idea. Instead, we can use it for creating content outlines, templates, or keyword clustering. Aside from ChatGPT, we can use the following content writing tools to help us write better content faster:
Grammarly: Grammar and spellchecker, eliminates typos, offers suggestions, and detects plagiarism.
Hemingway: Online writing assistant. Helps you create succinct, persuasive, and easy-to-read sentences.
Yoast SEO: WordPress plugin for optimizing SEO content. Helps reduce the risk of keyword cannibalization, highlights passive voices in sentences, and offers suggestions.
Front Load Initial Content Campaigns
Content takes time to mature and see organic growth. Front loading means publishing more volume during the initial campaigns, then sparingly once the initial blogs mature.
Here’s an example of that at play. I started creating content for this site in March of 2022. It had a thin content library, so I used the frontloading strategy and published 4-5 articles weekly.
After all the optimizations, such as a robust internal linking structure, Schema markups, and
It took about three months for the blogs to get indexed. Once they did, I lowered the volume to 2 weekly articles to avoid keyword cannibalization and still saw consistent growth.
Repurposing Content
If you’re front-loading content, you’d have to find a way to fill content gaps in your other channels/platforms. That’s where content repurposing strategies come in.
For example, a 2,000-word article can be chopped down to highlight certain topics you can repurpose as a Twitter thread, a short YouTube video, or an infographic.
It helps accelerate maturing long-form content, build lead magnets on various platforms, and engage your community.
Key Takeaways
Keeping up with the competition means matching or going beyond their content velocity or the content volume produced over time. To scale content velocity, you can leverage strategies like:
We write blogs to bring organic traffic to our website. But we must remember that “traffic” isn’t the goal—it’s conversions.
Our blogs are supposed to be conduits, guiding readers further down the sales funnel. However, web admins often stick with high-traffic landing pages with low conversion rates.
The solution?—Implementing high-converting blog features.
Here are 9 blog features you should be implementing today.
1. Simple and Intuitive Navigation
In most cases, a simple navigation design works best for a blog. For example, creating a category menu helps users find what they’re looking for faster and more efficiently.
Let’s use Spacebar’s own blog as an example. The layout is clean, easy to read, and has a category menu that aligns with Spacebar’s services—backlink building, content marketing, and SEO.
The navigation is designed so readers can quickly find everything they need about SEO-related topics. Jumping from one essential topic to the next only takes a few clicks.
2. Dynamic Related Blogs Widget
Once you get a reader hooked, you want them to read more. The more they read, the more your brand stays top-of-mind. Provide enough value, and you’re sure to get a conversion.
To keep readers engaged and wanting more, make jumping from one blog to the next as convenient as possible. A related blog widget on the side of a blog does just that.
You want to use a related blog widget that’s dynamic. Let’s say you’re reading about backlink building. The related blogs widget can show blogs within the “backlink building” category.
But this feature often depends on the plugins you’re using. More advanced dynamic responses might need advanced parsing methods or custom coding.
3. Email Subscription Fields
Email marketing has one of the highest conversion rates among all marketing strategies. That’s why including a lead capture form/email subscription field should be a no-brainer addition.
It can immediately turn blog readers into leads you can nurture through newsletters or other email marketing campaigns. Instead of cold outreach, you’re reaching out to warmed-up leads.
You stay top-of-mind and provide your readers with value, making them more likely to convert when you send promotional emails like discounts.
4. Security and Spam Protection
Your websites are susceptible to various malicious attacks, from spam to malware. The easiest way hackers can do so is through the comment section of your blog posts.
You don’t want your audience to see your blogs filled with spam links. This can greatly affect their decision to do business with your brand.
To keep your blogs looking professional, spam-free, and virus-free, precautions like security plugins must be implemented. The simplest way to protect your blog is to turn off comments.
Still, comments are a great way to encourage community engagement. So, the middle ground could be content moderation, which you can enable in your admin dashboards.
5. Search Box
If you have a large content library, your audience might have difficulty finding the content they need, even with categories/navigation. To address this, implement a search box in your blog.
But remember to set it only to show content in your blog. Users can enter a keyword or topic; the most relevant articles should appear. The search box can be placed on the homepage next to the navigation menu to make it more convenient for your readers.
It can also be in a static header. This allows it to be above the fold even when users scroll deeper into an article.
6. Author Bio
A quick author bio at the top of the blog or at the bottom conveys an important human element in your blog. According to a study, human photos on your site can improve conversion rates.
An author bio gives context to the photo and a sense of authority, especially if the author is an expert. This works well if you’re publishing guest posts from thought leaders in your industry.
If the author is trustworthy, your readers are more likely to trust the product/service that you’re offering. You can also add a dedicated author page with all their published content.
7. Table of Contents Plugin
Convenience plays a huge part in converting your audience. Let’s say you have a massive 3,000-word guide. If a user only wants to read about X topic, a table of contents plugin can immediately jump the user to that topic.
Remember, readers are often going to take a glance at your blog or scan through them first. Time even says you only have 15 seconds to grab a reader’s attention. With the table of contents, readers can quickly glance at large articles and see if any topic piques their interest.
8. Call-to-Action (CTAs)
Your CTAs guide readers toward an actionable step that provides value to your business. It could be signing up for a newsletter (similar to our email subscription field), buying a product, or downloading content from your site.
When creating CTAs, try to incorporate them with the overall theme or topic of the blog.
For example, if you’re writing about an email marketing software, instead of saying, “Try X product today!” you can write, “Start automating your email marketing campaigns today with X product!”
Create CTAs that align with what your reader wants to do and what you’re offering. Make them stand out. Use bold letters, a separate text box, or even bigger fonts for them. Just ensure that they’re not intrusive or, for lack of a better word, an eyesore.
9. Security
A blog with weak security measures not only puts valuable data at risk but also damages the credibility and trust of its readers. To keep your blogs looking professional, spam-free, and virus-free, precautions like security plugins must be implemented. Additionally, consider advising your audience to use reputable antivirus software, virtual private networks (VPNs), and free ad blockers while browsing your site. These tools can add an extra layer of protection against potential threats.
Key Takeaways
Blogs are your number one tool for getting organic traffic to your business’ website. But we don’t just want eyes on our blogs—we want to convert our readers into paying customers.
Leveraging high-converting blog features help you do just that. As a quick recap, here are the top features you should be implementing today:
Intuitive navigation features: category menus, search box, table of contents, dynamic related blog post widgets
Actionable CTAs: Email subscription forms, contextualized CTAs, or any lead capture forms
Spam and security protection: Security plugins, moderating comments, turning off comments
Human elements: Author bios and dedicated author pages
Ranking for a keyword and having your site appear on the search engine results page (SERP) isn’t easy, and keeping your position can be even more challenging.
Keyword rank changes or fluctuates; sometimes, you can get knocked off page one entirely. Why does this happen, and what can we do to maintain our ranking?
Why Does Your Keyword Ranking Fluctuate?
Search engines use algorithms to determine keyword rank. It considers content quality, what users value most, and several ranking factors we can optimize through SEO fundamentals.
These factors are dynamic. Algorithms get updates to improve the user experience. If you’re wondering why your keyword rank fluctuates, here are the factors to look into:
Core Google Algorithm Updates
Google consistently rolls out new updates for its search engine algorithm. As of writing, the latest core update was on November 2023, which boosted review-focused websites.
One of the most significant updates last year that affected thousands of web admins was Google’s “Helpful Content Update.” Traffic got decimated on a lot of websites.
But that’s the nature of the game. If you don’t get up to date with the following core updates, the keyword your business ranks for might take a huge hit.
Competitor Content Updates
The previous consensus was that websites should publish “evergreen” content that stands the test of time. But search engines will always value updated, fresh, and quality content.
If you have a blog that’s three years old, you’d want to keep it up-to-date. Competitors can do a quick keyword audit and find weaknesses in your articles.
It can include topics you haven’t discussed, adjacent keywords, or building a more robust topical map for the keyword you’ve been ranking for.
Search Engine Penalties
Google often hits websites with penalties if they’re caught breaking guidelines. For example, if you’ve been buying backlinks from link farms, you might get affected when Google does a PBN (private blog network) purge.
Site penalties often happen when you’ve been involved in black hat SEO practices. You might get a traffic boost in the short term. However, these practices are often unsustainable and can lead to detrimental results for your website.
Losing High Authority and Relevant Backlinks
Backlinks are one of Google’s most important ranking factors. If you’ve seen a significant drop in keyword rank, your website might’ve lost a high authority backlink.
That’s why it’s essential to do routine backlink audits. If you’ve noticed a lost backlink, contact web admins to see why your backlink was removed.
We can avoid these issues through consistent backlink-building efforts. The more your backlink profile grows, the more stable your keyword ranking becomes.
Keyword Cannibalization
Ranking for keywords doesn’t mean spamming them in every article or blog you publish. A solid content plan can resolve this issue.
For example, your content plan could involve creating a topical map for a specific keyword. This means exhausting all the topics related to the keyword.
Let’s say you’re writing about caring for an exotic plant. Your initial content could be a definitive guide on “Caring for X Plant.” Then, you can create supplemental articles that link back to your main one about “best soil for X plant” or “top fertilize.”
URL Changes
There are several reasons why a business would want to change its URLs. It could be a complete rebranding, a website update, or a technical issue.
The main thing here is that URL changes are dangerous for your SEO if done incorrectly. You can look at it as if you’ve changed your permanent address.
If you don’t redirect your links correctly, Google will have difficulty finding your new domain. Left unchecked, this will most likely lead to your keyword rankings taking a nosedive.
Removing Old Content
Indexing a page takes a lot of time. That’s why old content shouldn’t be purged—only updated. Remember, there could be a lot of backlinks pointing to that piece of content.
Instead of removing old content, you could actually repurpose content for a new audience or platform—essentially, breathing life back into it.
For example, significant takeaways from a 3,000-word article can be condensed into a 15-part Twitter thread, a downloadable PDF with updated infographics, or even a quick YouTube video.
Technical SEO or Backend Issues
A lot is going on in the background of our websites—plugins, CDNs, javascript, or themes. For example, updating a WordPress theme can conflict with one of your plugins.
Any number of issues could arise from this. Slower site speed, broken links, images not loading, and even error messages on the live site.
At best, you’d only notice a site speed decrease. Although this isn’t a hard ranking factor, it does affect user experience. Slower sites lead to higher bounce rates, which Google doesn’t like.
Sudden Trends/Seasonal Keywords
Trends come and go, as is the nature of the internet. This could be a positive for some sites and a negative for others. But just because trends come and go doesn’t mean they aren’t necessary.
Trends result in traffic surges. Google can use the data and identify which sites users prefer when looking up that season keyword.
So, as always, keep your content updated—especially in the weeks going into an expected seasonal surge. You could also ride the wave, which most news sites do during a significant event. The same principles apply to any news or big update in any industry.
Key Takeaways
Keyword rank changes due to several factors. To stay competitive, you must keep up with these factors, update your content, and implement SEO best practices.
As a quick refresher, here are the factors that can lead to keyword rank fluctuations in any industry:
Core Google Algorithm updates, search engine penalties, and backend issues
Competitors updating old content, trend changes, and removing old content
Losing high authority backlinks, URL changes, and keyword cannibalization
Niche edits help you establish a robust backlink profile. It’s easier to do compared to guest posts. And all you need is to find a great article and ask for your link to be inserted.
Here lies the issue—How do you present value? Unlike a guest post, all niche edits do is insert your link to an anchor text of an existing high-quality article.
We’re here to help you get those valuable niche edit links. By the end of this guide, you’ll be able to learn what niche edits are, how to get them, and the best practices to follow.
What are Niche Edits?
Niche edits are a relatively new approach to SEO and backlink building. It can also be called link insertions since all you do is link to an anchor text. Doing this requires two steps:
Finding articles for link insertions
Asking website admins for a niche edit
Sounds easy enough, right? It would be easy since niche edits kind of fall into the realm of black-hat SEO. All it takes is a transaction with a website admin, and you have a link.
That’s an incredibly risky approach. Google penalizes black-hat practices like buying links. But there are white-hat SEO strategies specifically tailored for getting niche edits as well.
How to Get Niche Edit Links
If you want to do niche edits, white-hat SEO strategies are the way to go. It protects your site from manual penalties, presents your articles as valuable link assets, and improves overall authority.
Link Prospecting
With a solid link prospecting strategy, you can consistently find websites to pitch your niche edits. Tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush significantly streamline this process.
Use Google to search for relevant websites if you want this done manually. Audit your content and see the best-performing ones. Then, look for sites that could benefit from your content.
Create a list of 10-20 of these sites daily and then find their contact info. The last step is sending your pitch to website admins. If you want this automated, here’s a link prospecting guide using Ahrefs.
Link Velocity
Link velocity is a metric that measures how quickly your site is building backlinks. The higher the link velocity, the more quickly search engines will view the site as authoritative and valuable.
Although it’s a metric and not a strategy for building links, following best practices for scaling link velocity ensures that your site consistently gets new healthy links from quality sources.
To measure link velocity, divide the number of links you’ve earned by time (in days). With a high link velocity, your likelihood of getting links significantly improves.
Broken Link Building
Fixing broken links is one of the best ways to get niche edits. That’s because you’re giving website admins immediate value.
Broken link building starts by finding them on websites using your preferred SEO software and offering website admins your link as a replacement. Broken links can negatively affect both the user experience and their SEO efforts.
This essentially makes this strategy a win-win situation. But how do you find these broken links? Check out our in-depth guide using Ahrefs.
Unlinked Brand Mentions
If you’ve built up high-value content like ultimate guides, original resources or data from case studies, there’s a high chance somebody mentioned them in their content.
There will almost always be cases when you’re mentioned within their content, but they don’t link to the original source material. It’s a relatively easy way to get quality niche edits.
You can set up a Google Alert for your brand name and URL to find these unlinked brand mentions.
High-Quality Resource Page
Resource pages can earn you quality niche edit links. All it takes is for your content to be featured as a “resource” on an external website.
Resource pages include the products, services, or tools bloggers or influencers use to sustain their businesses. Next, find the website admin’s email and send your pitch to get a feature.
To find these resource pages, use Google to look for [niche] + “resources.” Google will give you a list of sites you can use as potential prospects. You could also look for resource documents by searching for [niche] + filetype:pdf.
Be sure to filter them out and only include relevant sites with high authority that can gain value from your link. Now for the tricky part, sending your pitch.
How to Pitch Your Niche Edits
Every strategy we listed to get niche edits has a common theme—contacting website admins and sending them your pitch. This more often than not means sending a cold email. Here are some best practices to consider:
Personalize your email copy
Make a unique subject line (have fun with it)
Provide immediate value
If the website admin sees you bring tons of value, you might get a free backlink. But the reality is most website admins want $$$. So, try out an email pitch like this:
Hey {{FirstName}}
I’m {{YourName}}, {{Position}} at {{Company}}. I loved your {{BlogTitle}} on {{Topic}}! It really helped our team be more productive with our work.
I noticed that you mentioned {{AnchorText}}. We actually published an in-depth guide {{AddLink}} on it that I believe can bring a lot of value to your audience.
I’d love for our guide to be used as a source for your article. But I’d totally understand if you’re charging a fee for it. I’m willing to pay $ for a link.
Let me know if this is something you’re interested in.
Kind regards,
{{YourName}}
We’ve mentioned earlier that paying for links is against Google Guidelines and may result in a manual penalty if abused. While this is true, most of these penalties happen when you buy from link farms specifically designed to sell links. Most well-trusted publications will accept payment for backlinks, including major websites like Forbes, Business Insider and more.
What you want to do is contact reputable sites that are relevant to yours. Chances are they’d be willing to give you a niche edit link. But keep in mind that most website admins do charge a fee.
Key Takeaways
Niche edits are a great way to leverage your valuable content in exchange for a backlink. If you want to start a niche edit outreach campaign, remember:
Niche edits don’t require you to do a guest post. All you need is to link to an anchor text.
You can find niche edit prospects through prospecting, broken link building, and finding unlinked brand mentions.
The best way to contact website admins is through cold email outreach.
Finding success in search engine optimization (SEO) means more than creating content. Don’t get me wrong—quality content is essential. However, holistic SEO requires a proper roadmap.
Roadmaps act as guides. Each step helps us accomplish primary SEO objectives, resulting in better content, improved online authority, and higher ranking.
Here lies the issue—SEO is such a broad term. We’re here to break it down to the fundamentals. By the end of this guide, you’ll get a better understanding of the following:
Why we do SEO
The primary objectives of SEO
Key SEO metrics for success
Best practices to consider
Why We Do SEO
SEO can be categorized into three main disciplines: On-page, Off-page, and Technical SEO. Optimizing for these disciplines aims to get websites to rank high on search engine results pages (SERP).
But we don’t want to get tunnel vision. Here are the reasons why we do SEO beyond rankings:
Cutting Content Fluff
Google’s primary purpose is to direct users to what they need. On-page SEO guides you on how to cut the fluff to ensure content is relevant, informative, and worth showing on SERP.
This includes optimizing all content-related elements on a website, such as headers, metadata, visuals, and user navigation. The faster users can get to what they want, the better.
Improved User Experience
SEO teaches us that our audience should always come first. This shifts our focus from trying to rank first to delivering quality content and a better user experience.
We can achieve both by showing E-A-T and implementing technical SEO strategies like site-speed optimization, breadcrumb navigation, and mobile optimization.
Showing Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T)
More than rankings, SEO helps us become trustworthy and authoritative experts in our niche. EAT (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness) is one of the core ranking metrics.
This applies to the content, the writer, and the site’s overall content. Showing authority, however, can be difficult for newer sites. This is where link building comes in.
Building Links and Relationships
Great SEOs are content creators, developers, and marketers. Off-page SEO helps you forge relationships with webmasters and influencers in your industry to get quality and relevant links.
When reputable websites link to yours, it signals to Google that your content is relevant, valuable, and authoritative. It’s like an online vouching system.
Primary SEO Objectives
SEO is like an onion—there are layers to it. Each layer is more complex than the next. To find success, we need to break SEO down to its primary objectives.
Content Optimization
Optimizing for content means structuring content in an easily understandable way for both humans and Google’s web crawlers. Start with your meta titles, descriptions, and headers.
You want to use three main headers to help users navigate your content: h1, h2, and H3. Use h1 for the title or main topic, h2 for the subtopics, and h3 for subtopics within a subtopic.
Content optimization also includes keywords for our headers, metadata, and overall content. If we want to rank fast, analyzing what keywords to go for first can be one of our main objectives.
This requires keyword research and competition analysis.
Keyword Objectives
Finding relevant keywords for your site’s niche is fundamental to any SEO strategy. Our goal is topical authority—creating libraries of in-depth content branching out from our main keywords.
To help us find the right keywords, we use tools such as Ahrefs or SEMRush. Free tools like Google Keyword Planner can also give us a general idea of what to go for.
When looking for keywords, we consider their volume (how much traffic it gets), difficulty (how hard it is to rank for), and relevancy (how well it fits within the context of our business).
Most SEOs recommend newer sites to focus on low-hanging fruit. But with the right tool, you could find cracks in your competitors’ keyword profiles you can take advantage of.
Competition Analysis
Researching and implementing SEO strategies and finding the right one that fits your business takes a lot of time and resources. So, why not steal what works from the competition?
We’re not saying we steal their content. Instead, we look at their best practices. Aggregate the data, fine-tune it, and make necessary adjustments to fit our strategies.
To make the most out of competitor analysis, use SEM (search engine marketing) tools. These reveal keywords competitors rank for, what they don’t rank for, and where they get backlinks.
Link Building and Brand Awareness
Link-building is where SEOs become marketers and PR people. Remember, Google ranks authoritative and trustworthy sites. One of the best ways to show authority is through backlinks.
There are several strategies you can use for backlink building. Most of these strategies require outreach campaigns like cold emails or building relationships through social media.
Learn how to market your site on different platforms to build brand awareness. You can use link-building tools for this. The more quality links you get, the higher your domain authority.
Improving Domain Authority
Domain authority (DA) is a third-party metric that can be measured with tools like MOZ, Ahrefs, or SEMRush. However, each of these tools has its own factors to calculate DA.
Although DA isn’t necessarily a ranking factor, it shows you how authoritative your site is and how your link-building efforts have progressed. As with all SEO efforts, improving DA takes time.
But there are always things you can optimize in the short term that can result in long-term benefits. A prime example of these is the technical optimizations you can do on your site.
Technical Optimization
There’s a lot you can do when it comes to technical optimizations. Some require developer knowledge, and others you can quickly learn through watching guides or reading how-tos.
For starters, you can optimize your robots.txt file to help crawlers identify what they can or can’t crawl on your website.
Let’s say you have a live test page that isn’t ready for the public just yet. You can set your robots.txt file to ignore indexing on that page so it won’t appear on Google results.
Technical optimization also includes creating optimized URL structure, navigation menus, creating Schema markups, and improving site speed.
Improving Site Speed
Google uses site speed as one of its ranking factors. To test site speed, use Google’s Page Speed Insights tool. It runs a quick site audit, measures page speed, and shows you how to improve your metrics for both mobile and desktop users.
Common strategies include using plugins that boost site speed, optimizing images by converting them to modern file types like WebP, and caching. You want faster page speeds, especially on mobile.
Improving site speed improves user experience, boosts rankings, and reduces bounce rates.
Decreasing Bounce Rates
Disregarding how short-form media gutted our attention spans, slower page speed makes users more likely to click away from our site. But there are other optimizations we can do to decrease bounce rates aside from page speed.
We can structure our content better, improve navigation, and make our site easier to search. Doing so decreases bounce rates and helps improve our overall traffic and the time users stay on a page.
Boosting Traffic and Time on Page
Let’s say you have a keyword ranking high on SERP. Chances are, a lot of users are going to click on that page. You want to keep these users engaged now that they’re on your site.
Users who find value in your content stay longer, are more likely to share your content and are more likely to explore your site. We can aid them through optimized internal linking.
Optimized Internal Linking Structure
Internal links guide your audience on what to read next. Some concepts and ideas can’t fit within the confines of an h3 header or subtopic and need their own space to shine.
We need to choose quality anchor texts to optimize our internal link structure. These are words or phrases relevant to the page you’re linking.
For example, an article about “How to Take Care of Stray Kittens” could have an H2 header about “What to Feed Stray Kittens.”
The anchor text could be “best milk formula brands for kittens,” which directs you to a page with an extensive list of kitten formula brands.
Not everybody has a site dedicated to caring for cats. That’s why one of the most important SEO objectives is the creation of tailored strategies.
Tailored SEO Strategies
Search engines like Google constantly evolve to provide a better user experience. SEOs need to adapt. The best way to do so is through dynamic SEO strategies.
Here’s the catch—Google comes second. Your audience comes first. So, it would be best to tailor your strategies, especially content, to your audience and business model.
But SEO that works for other businesses might not work for you specifically. Fundamentals will.
For example, a site selling wet cat food might benefit more from local SEO strategies. However, a business in SaaS might need aggressive backlink building or paid Google Ad strategies.
Still, both sites need to have fundamentals like fast site speed, easy navigation, and great content. More importantly, both need to align SEO with business goals.
Aligning SEO with Business Goals
Aligning business goals with SEO helps you answer the question, “Why do you need SEO?” If you don’t know where to start, try strategies like SMART goal setting.
The SMART methodology helps you create specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals. Once you’ve set your goals, you need a way to measure success.
Interpreting Data: Key SEO Metrics for Success
The best part about SEO is its data-driven nature. With the right tools (Google Analytics, Search Console, or SEM tools), you get all the data needed to measure success.
We can use over a dozen metrics to measure our SEO campaigns’ success. But for most businesses, here are five of the most important metrics to look out for:
New Referring Domains
Building backlinks is one of the most important aspects of SEO, as it is a direct ranking factor. But backlinks from the same domain get you diminishing returns.
You want to build new backlinks from relevant, high-quality domains as you grow. To measure the success of your link-building campaigns, conduct regular backlink audits.
See where you’re getting your new referring domains from. Find similar sites. And continue building a healthy backlink profile through outreach and linkable content.
Keyword Rankings
A clear indicator of SEO success is keyword ranking. You want to rank high on “branded” keywords. These keywords include your business name or niche terms specific to you.
More importantly, you want to rank high on keywords relevant to your industry. For example, if you’re an eCommerce site selling sports apparel, you might want to rank for “men’s gym shoes.”
You can use tools like Google Search Console, SEMRush, AHrefs, Mangools, and a number of other SERP trackers.
Impressions
You get an impression each time you end up in a search result, even if a user didn’t click on your site. Impressions are an early sign of SEO success.
You’re not getting traffic yet, but Google already recognizes you exist. Once you hit the top of SERP, expect your impressions to balloon.
To track impressions, go to Google Search Console’s “Performance” tools.
Click-Through Rates (CTR)
CTR measures the ratio of impressions to clicks. Let’s say 1000 users see your article on SERP. If 100 users click your page, you get a 10% CTR.
The higher your keywords rank, the higher your CTR becomes. You get more clicks if you rank within the top 3 search results. If your keyword ranks 1st, it could get 39.8% of the clicks.
You could also track CTR on the Search Console’s Performance tool.
Organic Traffic
Every SEO campaign aims to bring more traffic to a site. If you see no improvements in organic traffic, underlying issues need to be addressed. Remember, an increase in organic traffic results from quality content campaigns, link-building, and technical SEO efforts.
For example, poor site speed can instantly cause users to skip your site, even with great content and backlinks. So, look at your data and identify what needs remedying.
Organic traffic can be tracked using Google Analytics or SEM tools.
Conversion Rates
Conversion rates are where SEO and Business goals align the most. We want traffic to convert into paying customers. This is where customer and content quality comes in.
Let’s say you have high organic traffic but poor conversion rates. The issue could be that you’re attracting the wrong customers.
The keywords you’re ranking for might not be relevant to the customers you want. Or, maybe the issue lies with your call-to-actions.
Experiment, find what needs adjusting, and iterate on what works.
Key Takeaways
SEO is a long journey. There’s a lot to do, and results are seen in the long term. However, understanding the 12 primary SEO objectives gives a clear roadmap for success. To make the most of this journey, remember the following:
Align SEO with your business goals
Optimize for content relevant to your niche, business model, and audience
Set keyword objectives and slowly build topical authority
Steal best practices from competitors through competition analysis
Learn basic technical SEO like site speed optimization to decrease bounce rates
Measure success with relevant key performance indicators (KPIs)
Get in touch with the team at Spacebar Collective if you’re looking to fast-track your SEO objectives!
