Best Bang for Your Buck: Prioritize Your Search Engine Optimization

Many people working with SEO seem to struggle with prioritization and starting in the right place. They tinker with the details endlessly while the things that actually make a difference are completely forgotten. Naturally, it can be difficult to know in advance what will have the greatest impact—but it’s certainly not impossible.

In many ways, SEO is a never-ending task. There’s always something more to do to keep improving—more and better content is always needed, more good links, and there’s an endless list of small technical tweaks. For some reason, it seems as though if you’re not constantly watching your site’s source code in the browser, it will revert to being non-SEO-friendly again. As if a website’s natural equilibrium is to be unoptimized and it’s constantly trying to get back there.

There are infinite minor changes one can make in SEO. In many cases, at least in my view, it seems that newer SEOs struggle to prioritize. If you run your own online store or are building your first money-making websites, it’s not really surprising. We in the SEO industry probably share the blame. It’s understandably hard to prioritize when we’re constantly presenting new and exciting changes from Google. And we often frame them as the most important thing in SEO. Take Mobilegeddon, for example—an update we hyped and panicked over to the point of giving it a doomsday-style name. In the end, perhaps thumb-nudge would have been more appropriate, because that’s about all it turned out to be (though there are rumors the factor may be gaining importance now).

Today, we’re not just going to point out that prioritization often goes wrong—we’re actually going to try and offer some guidance on how to prioritize in SEO. Of course, it’s difficult to cover every possible situation, and I don’t think we should aim to create a strict playbook for how SEO should be done. What I want to do is give some directional guidance in the hope that it will help you when making your own assessments.

Prioritizing SEO Efforts

If we start by prioritizing based on what provides the most impact for the least cost, we can use something as simple as a pick chart. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s essentially a four-quadrant chart where you plot tasks based on how difficult they are to implement and how much impact they’re likely to have. One axis measures how long the task takes or how many resources it requires; the other measures how much impact it will have. That way, one of the quadrants clearly shows you which tasks take little time and yield high results.

1. Google Must Be Able to Index the Site

If Google, for any reason, can’t index your site, nothing else matters. This could be due to anything from noindex tags to sites built with AJAX solutions that prevent Google from discovering pages. There are also various levels of indexing issues—Google might find the pages but not be able to read the content; sometimes, you’re forced to show a fallback version to Google, and so on. For this to be top priority, I believe the issue must be that Google can’t read the text. A fallback isn’t ideal, but it’ll do—for now—until we address more urgent problems.

2. Titles and Headings

Titles and headings on your site’s pages require very little effort relative to the impact they can have. They are the most important on-page elements when it comes to visibility in search results. You might feel overwhelmed if you have hundreds of thousands of pages on your site, but you could potentially handle it with a regular expression—or at least weigh it against the effort needed to create unique, well-written content for all of them.

3. Review the Navigation

In many cases, navigation isn’t ideal for SEO—but fixing it is usually straightforward once the structure is set. Designing navigation that works well for both search engines and visitors can be tricky, but once that’s figured out, implementing it is typically quick in most systems. A key rule here is that every page must be accessible through navigation. Another important factor is avoiding too many links on each page. Deep navigation is better than having hundreds of repeated links on every page.

4. Content—It Has to Be Good

When I say you need well-written, unique content on every page, you might recoil. “How on earth can he call this a small task?” But it actually is a relatively small effort, especially when compared to the results it can yield. The alternative—getting deep links from authoritative sites to every page—would provide roughly the same impact. But each of those links requires a site willing to link to you and an article at least comparable to the content you should have written yourself. And you’ll need several of them. That makes writing the content on your own site the “cheaper” option. The most common issue here is the countless product pages on e-commerce sites. Unique descriptions for each product is no small task—but start with your top products. Writing a unique, quality description for your best-seller isn’t a huge effort, and it’s very likely to improve your rankings. Then move on to your top ten. Still a manageable effort. See each product as a chapter in a book—surely it’s worth writing a page to rank higher for your best-selling product?

5. Find and Remove Junk from Your Link Profile

Building a strong, healthy link profile can take years. But identifying and removing the worst junk can be a fairly quick task—and one that could make a big difference. If you’ve got a lot of old baggage in your profile—maybe you submitted to link directories when it was trendy, or did careless link exchanges years ago—start cleaning that up. At least get rid of the most questionable stuff. It might only take a few days of work and could very well be the thing that boosts your performance.

A Simpler On-Page Checklist

Now that we’ve gone through five areas often representing the lowest-hanging fruit, I’d also like to share a simple checklist that you can apply to every page on your site. For large sites, it might be worth automating—if you’re not a developer, keep in mind that tools like Screaming Frog and Excel can help you do it with just a few steps.

To make life easier, we’ve created a really simple on-page checklist that we’ve shared with many of our clients. Take it for what it is—a significant simplification that still manages to cover the essentials for each individual page. A few things are worth pointing out: for example, we say the title should be fewer than 58 characters. That’s not exactly how Google measures it anymore—they now use a fixed pixel width. Titles with lots of M’s and W’s get cut off sooner than others. Still, in most cases, staying under 58 characters (or 57, or 56, depending on how cautious you are) is a good rule of thumb that makes things simpler.

Another example is the number of words on a page. Don’t focus on the number itself—we only set a threshold so we can clearly say “yes” or “no” to whether the page has unique content.

	Yes	Partially	No
Page in Google’s cache:	x			Visible via search: cache:site.com/page
Page content properly indexed:	x			Content visible when searching for text in cache
Page title is unique:			x	The title is unique to this specific page and doesn’t appear elsewhere on the site.
Keyword in Title:	x			The keyword we’re optimizing for is included in the Title
Title under 58 characters:	x			Title is not too long to display fully in search results.
Keyword in main heading:		x		The main and most important heading on the page contains the keyword.
Main heading tagged with H1:			x	An H1 tag has been used for the main heading.
Keyword in body text:			x	The keyword appears naturally one or more times in the body content.
Keyword or synonym in subheading:			x	Subheadings contain the keyword or clearly related words (e.g., a different plural form).
Page has unique content:			x	When searching for parts of the content (sentences), only this page shows up in Google.
SEO-friendly URL path:	x			The URL is clear and readable. site.com/the-path
Sufficient amount of text:			x	The page contains more than 200 words of unique text.
Page has static text:			x	The text on the page is not related to news, other products, etc.
Page is in site navigation:	x			It’s easy to click through from the homepage to this page.
Unique Meta Description:	x			Meta Description clearly describes what the page is about.
Keyword in Meta Description:	x			The target keyword is mentioned in the Meta Description.

In Conclusion and Summary

I’d like to leave you with a few final words: there are significant differences between websites. However, the things I’ve listed here are actions that very often produce a positive effect. Of course, there are special cases where you might benefit more from speeding up your site (if it’s extremely slow to load), or by uploading a sitemap to Google—but those are exceptions. In nearly all cases, it’s best to start here.

You probably have your own thoughts on some of these points, and I’d gladly welcome them—perhaps you’d even like to write a guest post about it?