Tip: Everybody wants backlinks, but few provide real value first in their cold outreach. Get high-quality backlinks by giving candidates a list of broken links on their sites and providing highly-relevant alternatives.

Thread 👇

In the initial days of our startup, I had no clue about SEO.

5 years later, SEO is a crucial part of our marketing strategy.

I've built a robust 33-step SEO checklist based on my learnings.

Today, I am sharing it with you 🧵

33-step checklist over 6 categories:
1) Setting up (1-6)
2) Keyword research (7-14)
3) Content creation (15-18)
4) Publishing (19-23)
5) Technical details (24-29)
6) Link building (30-33)

Meanwhile, if you'd like to check out my

Part 1: Setting Up

1/ Set up Google Search Console

Google's free tool to help you monitor your SEO performance. Has the most accurate data.

Can help you:
- Monitor keywords you rank for
- Find website errors
- Submit sitemap

Frequency: One-time

2/ Set up Google Analytics

Google's free tool to help you monitor website traffic.

Pro-tip: Connect Google Analytics with Search Console to get access to deeper insights.

Frequency: One-time

3/ Create and submit a sitemap

Sitemap helps Google find pages on your website easily & effectively.

You can submit a sitemap manually through Google Search Console or setup an automated script to update & submit your sitemap regularly (recommended).

Frequency: One-time

I've been doing SEO for over 15 years and optimized 100's of websites.

Here are the best techniques you can use to rank higher in Google 👇

Answering the searchers' intent is key

Anyone who's doing a Google search wants 1 of 4 things.

1. Information
2. Navigation
3. Transaction
4. Comparison

Let's dive in all 4

1. Informational intent

These are queries like "turkey recipe", local weather and how-to's.

People are looking for help on how to get things done. They'll do it themselves. You just need to give them the right tools.

2. Navigational intent

People using these keywords are looking for something specific. A brand like "Hypefury" for example.

It's not hard to rank for competitors but you won't get a lot of traffic out of it. Focus on the comparison intent (which we'll talk about in a sec)

3. Transactional intent

This is used when people want to buy. The search results are littered with ads and it's pay-to-play.

It's really hard to rank high on these types of keywords AND get any meaningful organic traffic. This is where Google makes its money.

@curaffairs The author doesn't know enough about search to have written that article and the reason he's having those problems is AI algos like Rank Brain and Google's attempts to use natural language processing nothing to do with SEOs.

1/x

YMYL is not evaluated at the site level, but the query level.

Again this is on Google, not SEOs because they want to surface better sites.

And those devaluations are part of Core Updates which SEOs like me recover sites from.

2/

Featured Snippets are not optimized for - you can use certain HTML to be pulled in one but there is no definite use case where Featured Snippets are shown or that your site's will show for it. Also doesn't always come from the #1 result.

& that's Google not the SEO.

3/

Also there are many times when an SEO doesn't want their site in the Featured Snippet cuz it doesn't result in a click to the website. But we have no control over what Google pulls as Feature Snippets except to put in a meta tag to exclude us from them

4/

And Neil Patel is not an SEO. Most senior level SEOs see him as nothing more than a scammer because reportedly he's ripped them off by stealing their content and articles and passing them off as his.

5/

SEO helped me generate over $350k in the last three years (over $200k in 2020 alone).

Indiehackers that focus on SEO tend to have more success than those who don't.

I'll break down what makes it so valuable.

THREAD

1. Demonstrated Demand 🗣

If people are searching for a solution to the problem they have, there's demand for a product that solves that problem.

There's no guessing. You can see the search volume for different markets to determine its size.

People want what you're selling.

2. Search Intent 🔍

SEO is so different from social media, simply because the people typing in keywords are warmer leads.

If you're on FB and see a promotion, it's mildly annoying. If you're on Google, you're looking for that thing anyways.

They're ready to buy something.

3. Ownership 👑

You hear it all the time - people say to write on your own blog, host your own email list, etc.

SEO allows you to do just that. It drives traffic to the most valuable assets you have. You don't need other platforms.

You can do whatever you want on your website.

4. Traffic Value 💰

I pay ~$2.5k/month for 3k clicks using Google search ads.

I also get an average of 250 clicks/day through SEO, working out to be 10500 clicks/month.

That's ~$8750 in free traffic every month.

Last month, 250k people visited https://t.co/nkcmLxbhzC, mostly from Google search.

Here are some things I've learned about SEO:

1. Second-and-third-order consequences

SEO is a "mind game" of second-and-third-order consequences. The work you do today will not yield results immediately.

Write an article, publish it, and then get no results. This makes you think you "did it wrong". Most people quit here.

Just go in with the expectation that you won't see results for six months after publish.

Instead of getting discouraged, just write more and publish more. By the time you published your 20th article, you might start finally seeing the results of your first.

2. SEO industry is mostly BS

Try to avoid SEO experts and industry nonsense, they are mostly distractions.

*Examples of distractions*: Google algorithm updates, schema markup, page speed, meta tags.

Do you think you’re smarter than Google’s algorithm? Maybe today, definitely not tomorrow.

Write and publish compelling content that answers the searcher’s query. That’s it!

@Moz: