What Are The Steps To Optimizing a Page for SEO?

It’s a fairly standard process that applies to any piece of content (blog, case study, webinar transcript) that has been published without regard to optimizing for SEO.


First: Assess what needs to be done. Then, based on that assessment, typical optimizations include (in no particular order):


1. Optimizing Page Titles for click-through-rate (CTR)

2. Adding meta descriptions if none were created

3. Retroactively assigning focus keywords if content was created with no consideration of keyword strategy

4. Ensuring optimal keyword density and keyword usage in header tags

5. Ensuring correct header usage (# of headers, types of headers, keyword usage, latent semantic indexing keyword usage

6. Linking between pages of the content (if it’s multiple pages) and linking to and from other/existing site assets (ensuring proper anchor text based on focus keywords

7. Making UX/UI/design recommendations to improve time on page, engagement, “scannability” (readbility), etc.

8. Testing load times and mobile compatibility and relaying those needs to developers.

9. Building links to the page via manual outreach and/or strategic paid placements.  This is usually the most time-intensive of the steps. For a keyword designated as a “30” out of 100 on the Ahrefs “keyword difficulty score,” a keyword that gets about 800 global monthly searches, you might need backlinks from ~36 websites to rank on page one. A 5 percent response rate on cold email outreach is a great rate of return, so that’s 700 emails to relevant websites asking for links to your new asset.