When we talk about SEO and website performance, the practice of writing unique content needs to soul of your SEO practice. If you give yourself the liberty to do that, your website will not only have more visitors but also long-term customers.
However, this can be possible only if there are standard operating procedures that work in tandem with your unique content. If you ask why then you must know that these standard operating procedures uplift the practice of writing unique content from an SEO point of view and consolidate your SEO practice further.
With this article, we aim to lay emphasis on 5 such critical SEO tasks that should have Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that help you better your SEO practice. So, if you want to ensure your website performs better, here is what you need to do-
What are SOPs and what do they aim to achieve?
As mentioned above, SOPs are instructions for achieving SEO goals. In all goodness, SOPs simplify complex SEO processes into reproducible steps that can be performed by anyone. They are simplified to the extent that anyone who has minimal SEO understanding can also do it and learn better from these practices. Without SOPs in place, undocumented processes will be a wrong practice to follow in any SEO team or organization. Hence, it becomes imperative to list those tasks, follow them and practice them in a bid to achieve long-term SEO success. Bringing these into practice with your SEO consultant or managed SEO provider will keep you help things in place and track the performance of your website’s SEO as well.
Here is a breakdown of each to give you a template to that you can fit it into your set of best practices.
- Creating unique content and on-page SEO
As we said above, unique content is the foundation of good SEO and website performance. In order to write unique content, this is what the SOP looks like-
- Create a home for the post in a shared drive
- Update the title of the post
- Write the content outline
- Write the first draft of the topic
- Edit the draft of your topic
- Assign custom images and screenshots wherever necessary
- Upload the content after editing.
While writing content, do bear in mind some of these practices as well-
- Writing in first person (I/We)
- Using American English
- Avoid long and fluffy sentences e.g. If you have made a choice by choosing this web hosting, then you are at the right place, because for the last… etc., etc.
Don’t do this. Keep it simple.
- Use simplified language
- Keep one thought in one line.
- Keep three visible lines per paragraph.
- Keep it casual and no swearing.
By creating a document for this, you can ensure that your content remains organic, unique, and readable.
- Ensure internal linking is done well
Internal linking is essential when it comes to SEO because doing so helps pass the link juice from one page to another. Every single page on the website, except for landing pages, must have internal linking. Especially blog content. Here is what your SOP can look like-
- Include relevant links wherever you can think they can benefit readers
- Ensure that the internal link anchor text should be relevant to the content you are writing about and also the content you are linking to. For. e.g. if you have a product page on ‘cyber security plugin’ then make sure that is linked to a blog on ‘how to install cybersecurity plugins’ or something like that.
By doing so, you are passing link equity of one page to the other and thus, helping build the credibility of both pages in the process.
- Optimizing images
Your images are often overlooked by Google (and by users). However, it is easy to do and essential if you want to achieve that coveted first page. There are three steps to ensure proper image optimization:
- Have a proper title that describes the image (without keywords).
- The added alt text describes the image a bit more for those who cannot download and view the image.
- Using the correct file format and reducing overall image data size for faster downloads.
- Outreach for building links
Link-building activity is key for an SEO strategy to fly. It is one of the most important ranking factors as far as Google is concerned. Although the activity is not very straightforward and easy, it involves a lot of steps that require repetition. This is why it is a good SOP task, to begin with. Here are some key SOPs for link-building in general.
- Link building for guest blogs and promotional blogs
- Broken link building
- Fixing un-linked mentions
- Stealing links from competitors
With these, you can deep-dive into each and ensure that your link-building activity gains momentum and helps your SEO perform.
- Track your ranking and update it
Finally, we have something most SEOs love: watching your rankings (hopefully) go up.
While it is easy to check your Ahrefs account or Google Search Console account directly to see if your rankings have changed as a result of your efforts, there is a better way. Once you have an account, you can create an SOP to review daily, weekly, or monthly. Track all the changes you make on your page, e.g. metadata, add or modify content, update your internal links, and much more. Then, list the effects of these changes on your grades over time. By making the practice of running SEO tests like these and seeing their impact, you can see what works and what doesn’t, measure what works, and stop wasting time on something that works.
Conclusion
These SEO tasks with their SOPs can be replicated for other SEO activities too. However, you must ensure that they are done in a way that is self-explanatory and simple. If you already have a website and are looking at consolidating it with a blog section, then here is an article on how to set up a blog section for your website for SEO. You can follow the SOPs we discussed here as well.
Here is hoping you have enjoyed reading the article. In case of any questions or queries, please share them in the comments section below.
