Screenshot of SEO framework:
Transcript
Hey there. What’s going on? John Doherty from Credo here. So, today I want to talk with you about the SEO framework, SEO process that I teach to people that I’ve run at multiple companies, run for a lot of clients, ran in-house, ran when I worked at agencies. I want to present it to you, because I think it’s going to be helpful to you as you think about investing in search engine optimization and really building a holistic SEO program at your company to see results by ranking better in the search results, driving more traffic in that way. Then ultimately of course the goal is driving more customers, more revenue, more profit, et cetera.
But what I see a lot of people getting wrong is they talk about search engine optimization and they go, “Ah, we just need more backlinks, right?” Which backlinks are a part of SEO, that is absolutely true, but it’s by no means the whole picture. So, today what I want to show you is the three core pillars of SEO. To do that, I actually want to draw you a framework.
So, I’m going to go into that for you. So, you should be able to see my screen here. So, I’m actually going to draw this out for you here on my iPad. So today, as I said, we’re talking about the SEO framework, all right? So, what I want to show you is the three areas of SEO and what goes into a holistic SEO strategy.
So first off, I’m just going to draw three circles here for us. So, the three core pillars of SEO are, number one, we have tech, right? So, this is the platform on which you’re built. Number two, we have content. So content is obviously the pages on your site, the blog posts you’re producing, the white papers you’re doing, the big [inaudible 00:02:00] studies you’re doing, that sort of thing. Then number three is links/promo, right? So, promotion of said content to build links back to your site to be able to rank for the keywords that you want to target.
So if you do all three of these, you’re going to end up in here. This is where you want to be, holistic SEO. You’re going to rank, right? You’re going to drive traffic, you’re going to make money. That’s great. If you don’t, then we’re going to land here in the pink, right? This is not ideal, not ultimately where we want to be, and I’m going to show you why.
It kind of looks like a watermelon, so if that’s making you hungry, I apologize, but I want to show you what happens. So a lot of people talk about just having links, they’re like, “Well, we have great content and we have a lot of links,” but what happens if you have content and links, but your tech isn’t up to speed, you have a lot of broken parts of your site, et cetera, what you end up with is you still get low rankings, right? Frowny face. Low rankings, you’re not going to rank well, as well as you could otherwise.
Same with tech and content. If you have good tech, a lot of pages, pages targeting long tail keywords, et cetera, a lot of blog posts, that sort of thing, good stuff even, if you just have tech and content, you’re still going to have low rankings, bummer. If you have tech and links, but no content, you’re only going to have competitive keywords. You’re going to spend a lot of money down here on links in order to try to rank and it’s not going to be as effective as before, right? You’re not going to have as much traffic as if you have all three.
So, the question is how do we tackle these three, right? How do you tackle SEO in a holistic way so that you can rank over the long-term? Well, first of all, we start with tech. You have to build your website on a platform that Google likes, that Google understands, right? So, WordPress is great. There’s a reason they power [inaudible 00:04:20] the internet. Shopify is getting much better in the eCommerce world, Squarespace is pretty good. Pretty much everyone is pretty good at this point. Some are harder to update than others. Magento, for example, on eCommerce, is harder to update, but it can still work well for SEO if you do it right.
Next up is content, getting that content engine going. So producing blog posts, producing white papers, boosting stuff that’s linkable, obviously promoting it, and that’s the third part, but you have to have content as well that can rank. Obviously optimizing your features pages and your benefits pages and your many services pages, and your product pages and that sort of thing, whatever kind of business you are.
Then third is links and production, right? What I like to do, the way I like to approach it is do we have good tech that is going to help us rank or let us rank? Do we have good content that people are going to want to read, they’re going to want to share, they’re going to want to link to? Then are we building links? Are we promoting the site? Are we building our brand to link back to the content, right, because it kind of comes back here to link back to the content, so that that content can rank? Then the flywheel spins, we rank well, we drive traffic, et cetera.
So, there you go. That is the SEO framework that I wanted to talk with you about today. Tech, content and links. You need all three in place if you want to rank as well as possible. You can’t just have great tech and great content and no links, you can’t just have great content and great links and bad tech, and you can’t just have great tech and a lot of links, but no other content. Just two out of the three, then you’re not going to do nearly as well as if you have all three.
Think about SEO holistically involving your whole company with someone driving the strategy, than just going and telling someone, “Yeah, go build some back links, go do some guest posts.” You’re not going to be nearly as effective if you do that, as opposed to is if you follow what the framework that I’ve just laid out here.
Hope that helps. I’m John Doherty, founder and CEO here at Credo. We help great growing companies find the right digital marketing firm to hire to help you take your business to the next level. That includes SEO, PPC, Facebook Ads, content marketing, those sorts of things. So get in touch, go to our website, click the green get started button in the top right, fill out your need, schedule a call with my team, they’ll take care of you from there. Thanks, talk to you next time.
