Summary
To start improving your SEO, download your existing keyword profile using tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs. Understand what keywords are driving traffic to your site.
Perform a keyword gap analysis to identify the keywords your competitors rank for that you don't. Adding these missing keywords to your strategy can fill gaps in your authority on crucial topics.
Prioritize keywords by relevance to your business objectives. Focus on keywords that clearly align with the products or services you offer.
Use tools like conditional formatting in Google Sheets to quickly sort through your keywords and identify critical ones to target first.
Separate keywords into categories such as critical, high, moderate, and none based on how they will impact your business. Focus primarily on high-value keywords that will drive business results.
Identify intent mismatches on your site where the content does not match what the searcher expects. For example, if a page ranks poorly for a keyword, consider creating a dedicated page specifically for that topic.
When prioritizing which keywords to focus on, take into account the position, search volume, keyword difficulty, and cost per click. Target keywords with moderate competitiveness that show tangible advertising demand.
Filter out keywords that are highly competitive unless you have significant resources to tackle them. Focus on attainable opportunities.
Conduct a ranking diagnosis for your pages. Determine which factors are preventing your pages from ranking higher and address them.
To build backlink strength, consider investing in high-quality backlinks through methods like digital PR. Focus on gaining a small number of high-authority backlinks rather than numerous lower-quality ones.
For creating SEO content, use tools to develop outlines and first drafts but focus heavily on editing to ensure content is unique and high quality. Run content through readability tools to improve user engagement.
Conduct regular website crawls with tools like Screaming Frog. Integrate APIs from Google Analytics and Search Console to enhance the data you collect and understand how your site performs.
Address 404 errors by redirecting broken URLs that have links or traffic to relevant pages, and ensure all internal links point to live pages.
Monitor page content for thin content issues and consider if such pages serve a non-SEO purpose before deciding to remove or enhance them.
Ensure important site pages are not buried too deeply in the architecture. Pages that are more than three clicks deep can be improved by adjusting site navigation to make them more accessible.
- Monitor pages that receive no traffic or impressions, as these may need optimization or could be candidates for removal if they do not serve a useful purpose.
Video
How To Take Action
I would suggest starting by downloading your existing keyword profile using tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs. You can do this without spending a lot of money, as these tools often have free trials or affordable plans. Once you have your keywords, paste this information into a Google Sheet for easy access and organization.
A good way of enhancing your strategy is to conduct a keyword gap analysis. Compare your keywords with those of your competitors to see what they rank for that you don't. This will help you find important topics you might be missing.
You should prioritize these keywords by how important they are to your business goals. Group them into categories like critical, high, moderate, and none. Focus on the high-value keywords that will boost your business the most.
To make sorting through keywords faster, use conditional formatting in Google Sheets. This can help highlight critical keywords you should prioritize first.
Another useful action is identifying intent mismatches on your site. If a page isn’t doing well for a keyword, think about making a new page just for that topic.
When choosing keywords, consider their position, search volume, keyword difficulty, and cost per click. Aim for keywords that show moderate competitiveness and clear advertising interest.
For backlinks, it's better to have fewer, high-quality links than lots of low-quality ones. Focus your efforts on acquiring high-authority backlinks through digital PR strategies.
Regularly check your website with tools like Screaming Frog to catch any issues like 404 errors or thin content that need fixing.
Remember, consistent small improvements can lead to impressive results over time!
Quotes by Author
"Every position that you go up in Google It Gets progressively more difficult"
"You really want to start to just break that list down and get so granular"
"If we're already ranking number one we don't really need to do anything else"
"No reason that you shouldn't be using this data to your advantage"
"Use every weapon you have to keep the user engaged"
Full Transcript
complete SEO plan for 2025 and I'll walk you through each part of an effective SEO campaign from beginning to end and this is normally what you'd pay an SEO consultant or agency thousands of dollars to do for you but today I'll be sharing it for free so just follow my process and you can improve your SEO performance on your websites or your client's websites I'm Nathan gotch the founder of rankability and got SEO Academy and author of The SEO entrepreneur I've LED hundreds of successful SEO campaigns over the last decade and my work is featured on semrush HRS and search engine Journal so please like this video to show me you're excited and let's get right into it all right so the first step in this process is to download your existing keyword profile so just go into a tool like semrush or HRS and then go to organic research and in this case I'm just going to go to positions and then I'm going to go ahead and Export all of the existing keywords and really you want to try to export everything if you have a massive keyword profile like this is only about 10,000 keywords here I can export this pretty easily but let's say you had 100,000 or more you may want to start to mess around with the filters but for now just try to export everything so then just copy and paste all of that keyword data into a Google sheet like I've done here and I'll explain how we're going to filter through all these keywords and prioritize them but the next thing I want to do is actually do one more keyword research process which is doing a keyword Gap analysis so you can actually click on the competitors Tab and sometimes this is accurate for finding your true competitors but sometimes like in the case of my website I'm ranking for a lot of YouTube related stuff as well so you know these are not really my direct competitors so you may have to do some additional research but once you know who your competitors are go to the keyword Gap and we're going to go ahead and enter the top competitors that we're up against so in this case I'm just entering these competitors because they have the biggest keyword profiles in the SEO industry and I'm going to go ahead and just click compare and then once that's done click on position and then you're going to go to competitors and do top 10 so now at this point you're left with just the keyword where your competitors are ranking in the top 10 now we don't really want to look at the ones where we're kind of competing we want to look at the ones where they actually have keywords that we aren't even competing with at all and what this indicates is that we have a clear Gap in our Authority on these topics so what I'll do is I'll go ahead and Export these and then we're going to add them to the sheet okay so once you've downloaded the report just go ahead and paste the data in here once again there's going to be three columns that I've added and I'll be talking about what those are but just go ahead and paste that data in here and now we're going to go back to the existing keywords and we're going to filter through these first and then we'll move on to the untap okay so when you're looking at this data it might feel a little overwhelming but I can promise you it isn't we're going to use a few different techniques to filter through these keywords very quickly so the first technique that we want to use is relevance so how relevant is this keyword to the products or service services that we're selling or that our clients are selling okay so in the context of what we're looking at here at least for this example my business sells SEO training uh content optimization software and a book about how to start an agency okay so those three things are the the core ideas that I need to build support around and so I have to make sure that whatever keywords we prioritize map to those objectives very very well okay so there's a few ways we can do this number one we need to add a filter okay because we're going to be able to eliminate a lot of stuff very quickly so the first thing I want to eliminate is on the position column okay so we're going to look at this and if we're already ranking number one we don't really need to do anything else okay so let's just go ahead and eliminate anything that's number one all right so that helps us eliminate quite a few now the next thing I want to do is we're going to want to start to investigate keywords that are very specific to the things that we're selling so one thing we can do here is you can actually add conditional formatting so one way to make this process faster to to identify relevant keywords using conditional formatting is you can use a a formula to make it a lot faster so you can go ahead and just copy this and I'll have it below the video I'll probably have like a a bonus doc probably based on how many people like the video I'll release it but the point is is like you can just copy this and use this inside of your Google sheet so this template's very simple you just copy it and then you replace the keyword part with whatever kind of that that seed keyword is that we're going to be able to identify our products or our services with so and you can see here this is an example so I have training in here and I have courses and you can just go ahead and just copy this little section here and just keep adding comma do and just keep adding additional keywords so here's what that looks like so you can see over here I went back to the conditional formatting and I highlighted the column and you can see I put the whole formula in here okay so now I can just go ahead and have these highlighted very easily so within a few short minutes I was able to identify a really solid amount of keywords that are would be considered critical level as far as us targeting so about 35 different keywords most of them with different intent meaning they're going to require their own dedicated page or they already have a dedicated page page and so that's kind of the key here is you don't want to just haphazardly be selecting keywords you want to be pretty deliberate about it and notice that a lot of these keywords are very different so like SEO tools SEO books totally different topics require their own dedicated page SEO optimization you know you could argue could probably be in the SEO tools category but still something worth marking and then obviously SEO training is its own separate entity as well so a lot of these have different intent and that's really important because if it has different intent we should have a dedicated page specifically for that keyword phrase so just go through and identify those critical keywords and then the next phase of this process and once again don't worry about filtering through them quite yet what we're going to do next is now we're going to start to identify more supporting keywords so these aren't necessarily keywords that are going to drive Revenue directly but they're still going to be in this category of you know High moderate low and anything that's in the nun category we're probably not even going to focus on so we're just going to identify some good solid keywords to build topics support around our commercial keywords okay so once you have all your commercial keywords all squared away the next thing we want to do is think about how we can build support around these commercial pages so my favorite way to do this is actually to go over here and go to the URL column so you can actually collapse all of this and just hide it so we'll hide all of this up until position and then we're going to go to the URL column and we're just going to go ahead and sort all of this by URL all right so as I go through this process what I want to look for is what I call an intent mismatch so for example we're going to look at this URL here and we're going to see that this URL is about best SEO courses okay so it's a list about the best SEO courses and it's pretty broad pretty General but what I want to see is based on the position and the keyword so for example local SEO training well clearly this page is not re relevant enough to actually rank for this keyword hence why it's not ranking well at all it's you know position number 72 so for me I know for sure that for this one keyword phrase I can actually build out a dedicated page specifically for local SEO training so this aligns really well with you know the the core thing that I sell so it definitely would fall under that critical category but I don't have an existing page for it so we're going to have to go and build a new page and so what I do is I continue to look at these ideas that are directly related to this important URL and see is there anything here that we can actually build out new content for to build more support for this main page so once you've identified a nice solid amount of keywords the next part part of this process is to actually go through and use data to determine which keywords we should go after and in what order okay so I'm just going to focus in on these critical keywords and show you how I'd go about actually selecting what keywords to go after okay so first thing I want to do is obviously position is a very important one so actually hide this and you can basically decide based on a few different types of criteria you can go pretty far just by looking at position search volume keyword difficulty and cost click there are some other metrics that you can certainly use and I teach those inside of goach SEO Academy but I think you know as far as doing you know getting pretty far these four will help you be able to prioritize pretty well okay so the first one is certainly going to be position okay so what I want to do is I want to see the keywords that are ranking well because if we have a keyword that's let's say ranking in the number two spot it's much easier to lift this from number two to number one than it is to lift a page that's you know number 70 to number one right because we're just trying to go up one position now keep in mind every position that you go up in Google It Gets progressively more difficult so going from you know position two to number one can sometimes be not as simple as you it might seem you might need a significant amount of links but the point is you're doing something right here so what I like to do is I like to look at the page and see like okay what are some tweaks we can make and I'll be talking more about kind of the the strategy behind that but the point is like this bucket of keywords from 2 to 15 is where you should spend most of your time initially okay and you can see we've got a bunch of keywords that are ranking here you know in the top 100 but they're they're really not ranking well okay so they're going to be at the bottom of the list for me and it's basically going to go in this order so let's just look only at keywords that are uh from position 2 to 15 so we'll do uh less than or equal to 15 okay and what that's going to do is now we've cut that keyword list down and now we've been able to you know ultimately get more Focus here now the next one is looking at search volume so once again we're going to go here and we're going to look at the keywords that have decent search volume now based on what we're seeing here this keyword SEO books is probably going to be our best option already because first of all we're number two it has high search volume and the keyword difficulty isn't super difficult like it's definitely not easy but it's not insane where we're going to really need a significant amount of backlinks and it actually does have some cost per click okay okay so one thing we can do here is on the CPC front is just eliminate anything with a zero and the reason is because if if advertisers aren't willing to pay for that keyword there's a good chance it's probably not that valuable okay that's not always the case sometimes it could be untapped but for the most part when we're trying to filter through keywords you're probably better off sticking with keywords that that actually have quantifiable advertising demand okay so what we're left with is already just very quickly we're left about 11 keyword phrases okay so we got through those very very fast now what we want to do is start to look at you know some other metrics so like keyword difficulty you know some of these are really really competitive like to the point where it would be very difficult uh to actually rank so you know keyword difficulty of 81 that is way too high so I'm going to go ahead and do less than or equal to and I'm probably just going to since you know got SEO this is a unique situation that it has significant Authority but we'll just do you know less than 50 okay that's what we're trying to go for here and now we're left with the keywords where we can actually probably compete pretty well so you know as you can tell you can filter through very quickly we're left about eight eight keyword phrases so what I want to do now is see which of these are basically the same URL and then see you know what we can do to improve performance here now based on what I'm seeing we really just have a few primary keywords to go after we've got SEO books which is definitely a good one so we'll go a and highlight that and SEO content optimization tools also looks like a great one so actually go ahead and do that one as well and the other one here is looking at which of these keywords is best for this URL it looks like probably SEO agency software is a pretty solid pick okay um and then finally looking at this it looks like starting an SEO agency is also really good and St Louis SEO agency So based on this it looks like we've got you know about five keyword phrases and five unique pages that we can focus on like right away and we know that that we're going to get a really good return on investment um for you know these particular pages okay so that's how you go about it you really want to start to just break that list down and get so granular and remember at the beginning of this I had 10,000 keywords and now I broke it down to basically five and five unique pages okay and keep in mind this doesn't mean we're just only going to do these five keywords in five pages but this is this is how we can start to prioritize what we're working with so next thing we want to do is run what I call a ranking diagnosis so essentially what this is is a checklist that you can follow to determine what are those core variables that are holding this page back from being number one in Google okay because if you're not number one there is something that is wrong there's something that is off so I'm going to go through this checklist and then I'll show you kind of where this ended up all right so so far we have one failing Mark that we can go ahead and improve on and now we're finally at the most important section here which is on the backing front and this just another good example of showing that you can literally do everything right at least to you know from a let's call it a subjective and objective point of view using data and still not quite be where you should be and one thing to consider too is also like have you given this page enough time to actually get to the position that you want to get to so for example this page is relatively fresh it was published in September so it's you know it's certainly not brand new but it's it's still pretty fresh and if you look at most pages that are ranking well on Google you're going to find that most of them have been around for quite some time I think the the average page ranking on Google is like 3 years old so if you've only given your page about you know two months two or three months to get going you're not really giving it enough breathing room to ultimately perform so with that in mind though we definitely want to start to narrow some gaps so we've narrowed a lot of gaps here we've done a decent job but the the main thing we have to study now is the on the backlink authority level okay so what I do is I just go ahead into semrush search the primary keyword and you with semrush has a new feature where you can actually have them see your like potential rank uh and and according to sem rush like they claim I can never get Beyond position 10 which of course is not true but this is why you got to be careful with these these metrics all right so first thing I want to look at is the overall strength of backlinks going to the individual URL so you can see here there's domain and URL let's start with just the URL so what I'm looking at here is in the top 10 I want to see kind of like what's the what's the average what's the ball Park of of referring domains going to the ranking URLs and based on what we can see it's there's pretty it's quite a wide range so we definitely need to use a median referring domains because we've got you know one site here that's got 5400 and then we've got another site that has zero and then another one has 10 so it's a wide range but we can assume it's going to be pretty significant right so let's say you know maybe 50 referring domains give or take uh maybe even as high as a 100 if we were to get the median okay so between between 50 and 100 more than likely based on my very quick probably wrong math there uh but but the point is is like ballpark area okay so then we're going to look at us and see where we're at and we're only at 15 okay so more than likely we're going to need to acquire more back links to this specific URL if we really want any chance to actually perform here okay so I'm going to go ahead and Mark that as a fail and we're going to look at the one here which is does the page have enough high quality backlinks to rent so this is purely based on volume not based on looking at you know the individual the indiv individual backlinks and seeing the quality of them and which is a a totally separate process altogether but for now we're just looking at purely based on volume okay and what we want to do next is look at the overall domain strength all right so we're going to go back here and we're going to look at the Domain level and see roughly what we're looking at okay so once again getting a ballpark ID and seeing like are there any other competitors in here that are within our range okay so we have you know this site here that's actually ranking number two they're doing really well and they have a domain Authority score of 22 so they're not really strong at all and in fact if we look at our site we're actually at a 37 so we're actually winning uh at least against one competitor in here and that's a really good sign okay but that's just one and that's why we can't just look at one competitor we need to look at everyone and on average or even if you were to use median in this case we are losing okay so our site is simply not strong enough to rank for this okay so if we are able to rank for it it's actually going to be an anomaly more than anything because our site is just simply not strong enough so already I have enough information to to ultimately determine that we're just going to need more backlinks okay and I actually marked this as pass which was not correct these are all fails okay so it's very clear here that we're going to need to go and acquire more referring domains that's really really important and I'll be talking later on maybe in this video and I also have a dedicated video about this uh as far as link building but one of the things I would definitely be investigating to to narrow this backlink Gap is looking into a service for digital PR and this is a a new service from search intelligence and they before you know I think their minimum retainer uh was much higher so we'll go to search intelligence and we'll search for them and I I believe it was a lot more it was like 5K per campaign so this is actually a new service they just launched that's much more applicable for small business owners or even uh White labeling for agencies okay so definitely much more affordable um but still that same really high caliber of work that they do and these are the types of links that you really want to get because if you look at it like they get they're going to give you five links uh over the course of three months but you're going to get at least two dr70 links now just to put this in perspective a dr70 link is really really strong because to get a dr7 70 takes a significant amount of backlinks to build that level of authority so it's much better to get one dr70 backlink or one backlink from a dr70 website than it is to get like 100 dr20s okay like mathematically it's actually better just to get one so this is why I wouldn't view this as like oh no it's only five links because you're you're getting like insanely powerful links as you can tell based on their portfolio results so definitely recommend checking them out if you're trying to you know Nar any back Ling gaps that you have and I'll also be showing a couple techniques you can use here very soon in this video as well but if you're interested just go to digital. PR to learn more about their services all right so this ranking diagnosis process I just walked you through is really designed for an existing page a page that's already doing decently and you're trying to figure out what are those variables that are holding it back it should really be a page that has some age associated with it so even like this one here that's only a few months old I probably wouldn't have done this in most cas pieces it's usually best designed for a page that's let's say 4 to 6 months old and is still not in that number one spot okay that's really what it's designed for um and if you're you know obviously you could build this yourself or you could just actually make the investment and get my full sop and template I'll have a link below the video uh where you can get access to this entire thing this is the second version of this ranking diagnosis checklist um and it you know it keeps getting better every version but this is this is the current version so you can get access to it below but for now what I want to do for the rest of this process is I want to show you how to actually build an SEO piece of content from scratch okay so this one here is already done we're trying to figure out like what are those variables are holding it back but now I want to show you like we're going to pick a keyword obviously from our database here that we that we initially found and we're going to actually build that from scratch I'm going to show you that exact process from A to Z so you can see what that looks like so for this demonstration I'm going to be targeting the keyword why dentist should invest in SEO and I'm going to build an SEO cont content asset from scratch so let's Dive Right In so Step One is run the keyword through rank abilities content Optimizer so for the first draft just copy the NLP keywords for rankability and use this prompt in chat GB to create an SEO content outline then copy the word count from rankability and have't produce the first draft it'll produce something average at best and when you run it through originality doai it'll likely come back as 100% AI I don't recommend publishing this on your website so instead I'm going to show you a few different iterations of this first write a custom intro for the asset and your intro is one of the most important parts of your entire SEO content asset and it's time well spent making it as good as possible so just by changing the intro the content is already not registering as 100% AI but now let's go to the next level and rewrite a few sections at this point it's hard for the tool to detect Ai and you could theoretically stop here but I don't recommend that and I recommend focusing on getting maximum quality for your SEO content so now I'll rewrite the entire asset and to No Surprise it registers as 100% original because I actually wrote it so as you write think about ways to naturally integrate the NLP suggestions from rank ability and sometimes it takes rewarding F phrase or other times you'll need new sentences or paragraphs to cover the topic all that matters is that you cover the top topic and don't worry about how many times you mention a specific keyword then once you've hit the optimal rankability score I recommend running the draft through Hemingway Editor to improve the readability and after that it's time to upload and format the content in your CMS and this is actually where the magic happens because there's Art and Science to creating engaging content a few techniques you'll notice that I use are short paragraphs headings bullet points numbered lists Custom Graphics videos and patter interrupts with Statistics or quotes use every weapon you have to keep the user engaged so here's what the finished product looks like and just to show you the power of human written content developed with NLP here is where the page is already ranking within 7 hours of publishing all right so the next thing you want to do is run a screaming frog crawl so you have to integrate some apis I recommend doing the Google analytics API the Google search console API the page speed insights API hre's API and if if you want to learn how to do this as well would be one of the large language models so in this case open Ai and I'll show you what this kind of looks like so in the prompt configuration I've I went ahead and added a few prompts in here and basically what this is do links up with chat gbt or open Ai and it will work with you as it runs the crawl so I'm going to be looking at the intent of the page I'm going to be looking at the sentiment of each page and I'm also going to be running some eat standards for this page so I'll have this prompt here below the video and but this is this is like elevates your crawl to the next level okay so if you can do this I would highly recommend you will have to pay extra with open AI but the it's like really really minimal for credits now keep in mind if you're crawling an enormous website it's going to cost you probably a lot of money so just be careful on that front but if it's a smaller website there's really no reason that you shouldn't be using this data to your advantage all right so once the crawl is complete just go ahead and paste it into a Google sheet and there's so much to digest here and we're not obviously not going to be able to cover at all and I have a dedic ated portion to this whole entire process inside of gacha Academy but I'm going to give you some of the like really heavy hitting points here that we can attack and there's a couple things I want to look at number one is the 404s okay these are really really important because I want to see if any of these 404s have existing data associated with them so we're going to go over here and I want to see a few things number one do any of these 404s actually have internal links going to them okay so right away we see that these 404 Pages actually have 35 internal links going to them so we would want to go and find where those are and we would want to update those links because ultimately that just means that we have broken broken links on our site okay now we're going to go over here and we also want to see is there any data associated with these particular URLs and there is I got a few a few 404s that actually do have traffic and do have some events associated with them so uh definitely want to 301 redirect the ones that have data okay and finally want to see do any of these URLs have backlinks come to find out uh there actually is a significant there's about 54 referring domains going to these 404 pages okay so what that tells me is we need to find a home for these URLs we need to 301 redirect these somewhere to a page on our site basically all of them because there's data associated with all them so start here this is just classic you know it really the focus is 404 link Reclamation but I actually prefer just to look at it as like do these URLs have anything that's worth salvaging and if so we need to run some 301 redirects so the next column I would take a look at is the word count column so we can actually sort this from A to Z and we want to see are there any URLs here that are you know have very very little content on them potentially causing a a thin content situation and in most cases as long as you don't have significant scale of this going on on the site then you're probably going to be fine and I don't have a lot of pages on my site so there's not really going to be anything that's super damaging here and plus even a page that technically has a low word count is not necessarily a bad page per se because like we have this page here that's for Chris drer and you can see like this is based on he's a member of being you know in the academy so this is his testimonial and yeah it's very thin but it actually serves a purpose it's a bottom of the funnel objective so we wouldn't get rid of this page there' be no reason to do that okay so there is certain utility in having you know pages that are not just SEO driven all the time all right so don't just see low word count and assume that it's bad okay next thing is looking at crawl depth all right so we look we'll do Z to A and basically want to see is like if there's any pages that are more than three clicks deep then we need to do something about them and come to find out we've got quite a few we've got a lot of pages that are way too deep into the architecture so what this tells me is we're going to have to go and push these further up into the architecture because this will get Google to crawl and index these Pages at a higher rate and more more efficiently okay next one is unique in links this is the quantity of internal links that are going to any given URL so if we look at this we just once again we'll go A to Z and for me you know if there's less than five I'm probably going to mark it okay so if there's less than five internal links I'm going to go ahead and Mark it as red because what this implies is that these pages just don't have a lot of internal link coverage which is also sometimes a symptom of having a a weak topic Authority situation okay so maybe these URLs just don't have a lot of topic support so we need to build more support around them okay keep going down the list there's obviously many other things we can look at but I'm going to skip through a few of these the next one I want to do is look at the data all right so what we're going to do here is we're actually just going to sort this and we're just going to look at blanks and we're going to see pages that do not have any traffic and pages that do not have any Impressions okay and these are like Prime Time pages that we need to consider thinking about if we should do anything with them okay and you know in my situation I don't really have a whole bunch but in other situations you're going to find there to be a lot more okay so uh keep in mind that just because a page has poor signals it doesn't mean that it like necessarily needs to be deleted per se but it just means maybe it's not it needs to be re optimized so a page like this in particular I would probably highlight this whole row because you know we have this SEO job Seattle page and we need to figure out why this page is not performing well now based on what I can see right away it's probably just really outdated okay really outdated page needs to get a a little facelift a little upgrade and this should certainly get a help it get a lift okay so this is what we want to do you want to look at these pages and see like why are they not performing well um and then see if it's you know even worth attacking in the first place
