What Do You Need To Balance When Doing SEO? 6 Things, All Quite Heavy…
SEO can feel like a tightrope balancing act.
Well, it doesn’t just feel that way. It actually is that way.
Lean too far on technical SEO while forgetting all about on-page SEO and content? You’re pretty screwed.
Lean too far the other way and incorrectly balance SEO strategies? Sorry to break it to you again, but… you’re pretty screwed.
How do you balance all the mechanics of SEO to make sure you make it to the other side of the tightrope?
This guide explains the 6 things you need to balance when doing SEO.
Contents
- Here Are The 6 Things You Need To Balance When Doing SEO
- The Balancing Depends On Your Unique Brand
- To Understand Your Unique Balancing Act, You Need To Understand How SEO Works (Briefly)
- Before We Get Into The Details of Each of The 6 Balancing Points, You Need to Understand Where You’re At
- Onto the 6 Different SEO Balancing Strategies
- Final Disclaimer: SEO is Complicated. These Balancing Strategies are Heavily Generalized
Here Are The 6 Things You Need To Balance When Doing SEO:
- Data
- New Content
- Optimizing Old Content
- Building Authority
- Technical SEO
- Conversion
Yep, that’s it. Article’s over!
Just kidding… It’s much more complicated than that.
The Balancing Depends On Your Unique Brand
The 6 things do not require perfect balance. It depends on your current SEO performance and goals.
For some brands, the balancing act might look pretty even:
For others, it might look like skewed towards building backlinks for domain authority:
And for others it might look like really heavy on new content creation:
How do you know where you fall in the balancing act? Keep reading.
To Understand Your Unique Balancing Act, You Need To Understand How SEO Works (Briefly)
Disclaimer! Nobody knows EXACTLY how Google’s algorithm works. Below is a pretty solid interpretation of roughly the algorithmic makeup.
Most important out of everything? You need content on your website.
If you want to rank nationally for a keyword like “construction software” but your website only has 1 page where the words “construction software” are never used? Good luck ranking.
At the same time, the second biggest chunk of the pie is domain authority. Your site needs relevance and authority (backlinks and niche expertise).
You can publish all the awesome content in the world about “construction software”, but if Google doesn’t trust your site? Again, good luck ranking.
Before We Get Into The Details of Each of The 6 Balancing Points, You Need to Understand Where You’re At
After going through these steps, you’ll know where you’re at.
Every website has a unique SEO situation and therefore every website will have a different balancing distribution of SEO strategies.
Once you know where you’re at, you’ll be able to build a proper “balancing” pie graph so you know where to spend your time, money, and effort. Every
Don’t skip this section!
Step 1: Figure Out Your Domain Authority
- Go to SEMrush.
- Type in your domain name in the Domain Overview tool.
- You’ll see something like this:
Your domain authority takes into consideration your backlinks and, in a way, your website’s relevance.
The higher the domain authority, the easier it is for your content to rank for competitive keywords.
Here’s how you know the quality of your domain authority:
- DA of 0-10: Very Low
- DA of 11-20: Low
- DA of 21-30: Decent
- DA of 31-40: Moderate
- DA of 41-50: Kinda high
- DA of 51+: High
So, that website above? Well, they’re our client and they JUST launched this business and website. It makes sense that their domain authority is so low.
Here’s another client – they’ve been around for 15+ years and have a super solid domain authority.
Step 2: Run a Content Audit & Ranking Audit
- Go to SEMrush’s organic research tool
- Put in your domain name
- See how many keywords your site is ranking for (and in what positions) – it’ll look something like this:
Again, this is the client that has a brand new business and website. They’re only ranking for 127 keywords but you can see it’s trending up over time.
4. Sort the keywords by those ranking in positions 5-20
If you’re ranking in positions 5-20, then you’re SO close to domination. But yet, you’re so far away.
Then, sort by volume so you can see the highest-volume keywords first. It’ll look something like this:
We see that they’re ranking for quite a few keywords in those positions, and some of the keywords have high volume.
This is an important exercise for one of the balancing components of SEO: optimizing existing content.
Why? Well, the content on your site is ALREADY ranking in positions 5-20. Can you improve the already existing content to boost rankings instead of focusing on new content?
5. Next, do a quick audit of how much content (both pages & blogs) your site has:
Do you have 3 foundational pages (home, about us, contact) and 2 blogs? If so, you’re running super low on content.
Step 3: Run a Technical SEO Crawl Audit
We use AgencyAnalytics to run our technical SEO audits. There are a lot of resources that can do this crawl (Ahrefs, SEMrush, and more).
Run the audit and, after the tool crawls your site, it’ll look something like:
If your site has more than 20 “Critical” errors, that’s a big problem…
If your site has more than 1,000 regular “errors”, that’s a big problem…
Don’t get too caught up in the minor “Warnings.” It’d be nice to fix those but, from an SEO perspective, they’re so minor that if you spent hours and hours fixing them, you likely won’t see much SEO benefits. Just focus on the big errors for now.
Step 4: Set Up SEO Data Analytics
You’ll want to make sure you have a:
- Google analytics
- Google Search Console
- Keyword tracking tool (AgencyAnalytics, SEMrush, etc)
- CRM (Hubspot, etc)
These will allow you to track important metrics.
Onto the 6 Different SEO Balancing Strategies
1. Data
How can you reach SEO goals if you can’t even track them?
This is the data analytics set-up stuff we talked about in the sections above:
- Google analytics
- Google Search Console
- Keyword tracking tool (AgencyAnalytics, SEMrush, etc)
- CRM (Hubspot, etc)
EVERY company should have these SEO analytics set up.
In terms of how data falls in what to balance when doing SEO?
Data will be a bigger chunk of your balancing pie if you’ve never set it up before and should be top priority on your list.
2. New Content
New content should be the biggest “chunk” of your balancing pie if the following applies:
- Your domain authority is 20+
- Your technical SEO is solid
- Your site doesn’t have much content
- You don’t have many keywords “stuck” in rankings between positions 5-20
At a domain authority of 20+, you have enough authority to (with the right content) start ranking for some low to medium level difficulty keywords.
If you can rank for them with the right content, why would you not be busting your butt to create that content?
3. Optimizing Old Content
Optimizing old content should be the biggest “chunk” of your balancing pie if the following applies:
- You have a lot of keywords “stuck” in rankings between positions 5-20
This is the MOST important one.
If you’ve got a couple hundred keywords just sitting in positions 5-20, then your domain authority is good enough to get you that far.
Therefore, it’s 100% worth looking at the pages that are ranking to determine if they can be improved. It’s highly, highly unlikely that those pages are perfect from a content perspective.
The pages might be…
- Thin on content – you need to add comprehensiveness
- Too keyword stuffed on content – you might need to clean things up and make it less spammy
- Missing trust – you might need to add more links to scientific journals or trusted sources verifying your information
Sure, there’s a chance that the content is solid and you’re stuck ranking in position 12 because your site isn’t authoritative enough. But, I bet you can find some opportunities to make the content better.
4. Building Authority
Building relevance and domain authority should be the biggest “chunk” of your balancing pie if the following applies:
- Your domain authority is less than 10
- Your site has a decent amount of content
How to build authority at a high-level:
Long gone are the days of buying backlinks. Some of the easiest ways to increase domain authority are:
- Getting on industry-specific podcast shows as the featured guest
- Writing responses to requests on Help a Reporter Out (HARO)
5. Technical SEO
Technical SEO should be the biggest “chunk” of your balancing pie if the following applies:
- You have tons of major SEO Critical Errors and regular Errors after running a technical SEO crawl audit
- Your site does not have many keywords “stuck” in positions 5-20
This is where you need to hunker down and start fixing all those issues.
6. Conversion
Conversion should be the biggest “chunk” of your balancing pie if the following applies:
- Your site is driving a high volume of organic traffic every month (this could mean 3,000 organic visitors or it could mean 30,000 organic visitors – it depends on your product/industry)
- You’re not getting many conversions/sales
This is generally straightforward. If you’re getting tons of traffic to your site every month and it’s not converting, then why would you spend time, money, and effort to get MORE traffic. First, you need to figure out your conversion problem.
Final Disclaimer: SEO is Complicated. These Balancing Strategies are Heavily Generalized
For example, #6 above…
What if you’re getting a ton of traffic for the WRONG keywords? And therefore thousands of visitors of the wrong target audience are coming to your site?
No matter how much you improve your conversion strategies, you can’t get the wrong target audience, a group of people who likely cannot be convinced to use your product for free let alone purchasing it, to convert.
Take everything above as the introductory steps.
You may need to go deep into the analytics to find the right balance to boost your SEO. Deep into the technical SEO (site architecture, internal linking strategies, etc) to crack the code.
Joey Randazzo
Owner & CEO of Portland SEO Growth
