Search engines provide tools to help you with the most essential SEO tasks:
- Competitive analysis
- Keyword research
- SEO site auditing
- Link building
Competitive analysis is the first thing to do when planning a website and is also a continuous process you will need to often return to when building and promoting your site. In order to get on top of SEO efforts for your industry, you should know who is ahead of you in SERPs. Competitive research can basically include (though it is not limited to) the following steps (all of which are handled with the help of search operators and tools described in the guide):
- Identifying how many pages in SERPs you are going to compete with for the given (core) term (i.e., the overall number of competitors)
- Determining who your direct competitors are (i.e., who to watch for, whose example to follow and mistakes to avoid)
- Evaluating the strengths of those competitors' websites: their site age, on-site SEO, and incoming links (i.e., your keyword difficulty), etc.
Keyword research is a complex but a very important process of choosing and implementing niche-related terms that comply with the following criteria: they have the highest relevance, low or reasonably high competition level ("difficulty"), and high conversion rates. While webmasters have a variety of valuable web-based keyword research tools, search engines and search-based applications can also be very helpful for:
- Finding relevant popular keyword phrases
- Expanding your keyword list with keyword phrases, synonyms, and related terms
- Evaluating your keyword competition
SEO site auditing is the process of evaluating how search-engine-friendly your website is and also of finding and correcting on-page SEO mistakes to improve the site visibility, reach, and accessibility. SEO site diagnostics include:
- Site architecture analysis
- On-page keyword prominence evaluation (title tags, internal anchor text, header tags, page content, etc)
- Robots.txt file review
- Header response analysis
- Website crawl and indexation rates
- Website canonical problems check
- Website possible internal duplicate content issues analysis
- Website internal power evaluation (finding most powerful/weakest pages)
Link building is the process of gaining inbound links to your website. Since links are the integral part of the Internet as they connect sites into a web, it is quite natural that they play the most important role in search engine algorithms and hence in building a successful, highly ranked website. The tasks wherein advanced search can be of major help include:
- Exploring your competitors' link building strategies and tactics
- Finding relevant websites and pages to get a backlink from
- Finding any site's most powerful/relevant page to get the most link juice from
- Finding relevant places for possible link baiting (e.g., relevant social media sites, discussion boards, and blogs)
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