In a previous guide, we wrote about what to do when you need to check the SEO of a page to optimize it or spying your competitors. 

In this article, you will instead discover how to optimize your website for SEO, why you need it to, and what factors you should focus on to make your pages ranking high within the SERP.

What do you need to do in SEO website optimization?

When you work as an SEO consultant, the most frequent thing you hear from your client is, «I get too few visits, and I don’t know why.» The first step is to have a look at Google’s search console and Google Analytics. Nine times out of ten, the problem is that they don’t get enough traffic from organic search or, even worse, they’re getting it from the wrong sources.

It means that something doesn’t work SEO-wise. But what? SEO is a vast subject, and it comprises various aspects: content-related and technical. It could take hundreds of hours to check everything, and a bunch more to create a comprehensive yet understandable report for your client. 

OK, there’s a lot of information to process, but take a breath. Instead of giving yourself to overwhelming despair, you can use the SEO Spider to have a full overview of the grade of SEO optimization of your website.

Use the SEO Spider for SEO website optimization

So, let’s suppose the New York Times asked you to improve its website SEO (lucky you!). You have checked the Search Console and Google Analytics, and you confirmed there are too few visits coming from organic search.

Now, it’s time to use the SEO Spider to see what the problem is. Sign in SEO Tester Online, go to the SEO Spider’s page, and click on the “Make a new crawl” button.

Then, enter the URL of the website you want to scan and click on the “new scan” button.

At his point, the SEO Spider will do what Google’s crawler does every time it finds a new website: it will explore every indexable page and scan every element in it.

It will take a while, so why don’t you have a look at our blog in the meantime? 

You can also click on the preview to access the analysis, even if it is not complete.  

Once finished, the tool will show your crawl among the active projects. To access the complete analysis, just click on Open.

How to understand the SEO Spider’s data to optimize your website SEO

Overview

The first thing you’ll see is the overview. Like in the SEO checker, you’ll see a graph with each category’s score you need to analyze. These are Base, Content, Structure, Duplicated, Social. On the right, you’ll see the preview on both desktop and mobile devices.

As you can see, it is doing not wrong, but there’s always room for improvement. Let’s see each area in detail. 

Base

In this section, you will find all the basics of both content and technical SEO. Here, you can check the Google Snippets of your pages, with SEO Titles and meta descriptions, the canonical URLs, and the correct localization implementation.

Here you can see, for example, in which pages you have an unoptimized snippet. In this case, 41% of pages haven’t an optimized Google Snippet. Clicking on “view all the issues” (or on preview > snippets on the side menu), you’ll see which snippets are not optimized and how they look. 

Here, you can also see which titles and meta descriptions need your attention. In our dedicated article, we mentioned, among other things, the importance of creating an SEO Title of the right length. If it is longer than 70 characters; Google will cut it out in the snippet, preventing the user from reading all its content. It means that she won’t be able to get all the information it contains. 

The same goes for a meta description larger than 160 characters or not optimized at all. In this last case, Google will use an extract of your text as a meta description that is likely to be truncated as well.

The same goes for the other entries. By clicking on “view issues” under missing hreflang or x-defaults, you’ll see the pages that lack the hreflang tag (indicating which pages are the translation of a given content) x-default attribute. You can also access this information from the side menu, under structure>languages.

Structure

In this section, you’ll find technical SEO aspects such as the compression, the presence of sitemap and robots.txt files, and the HTTPS certificate; if the images are optimized (have you read our dedicated article yet?); if it gets 404 errors (here’s our guide to the HTTP statuses).

Again, if you click on “view issues” under each entry, you’ll land on a dedicated page. For example, under “image optimization” or “ALT attributes oversized”, you can visit the same page you’ll get to if you click on content>images on the left menu. Here you’ll have an overview of all images on the website.

Finally, there’s Text/code ratio. If there are too few text contents, Google won’t look at your website favorably. Here you can see which pages need a bit more content.

Content

Speaking of which, we got an entire section dedicated to content. You can see which pages need a bit more content and what headings are missing or too big. Speaking of headings, have you taken a look at our guide to heading tags already? 

In any case, if you click on view issues… well, you must know that by now.

If you want to know more about content creation and SEO, we advise you to explore our dedicated blog section. 

Duplicates

Duplicates are one of the most penalizing factors for search engines. They can interpret a duplicate page or heading as an attempt to produce unoriginal – and thus not useful – content. So, you must pay extra attention. How? But with SEO Spider, of course!

Here you can know at a glance how many pages, SEO titles, meta descriptions, and headings are duplicated within your website. And, again, if you click on “view issues” you can see which ones. 

Social

Social plays a significant role in SEO. While they’re not a ranking factor, they’re still a social signal, as we pointed out in our section. 

In this section, you’ll be able to see which pages require optimized Opengraphs and Twitter Cards (they’re the “snippets” of your website that appear on Facebook and Twitter, respectively).

Once again, you can view which previews need improvement by clicking on “view issues”.

Report

Now that you’ve checked everything, it is time to send your report to the NYT management. We know what you’re thinking: it’s going to take you ages. Not at all, friend!

In fact, it will require you a few seconds. Just click on the +Report button on the top right-hand corner to create a standard or white-label report. We recommend choosing the latter, as it will add a more personal (and professional) touch. 

Customize the header with your logo and your info, then select the information you want to show. Then add some notes if you wish. 

Finally, click on download. You’ll receive your customized report in your mailbox!

That’s it!

Have you tried the SEO Spider already? How was your experience with it? Let us know in the comment section.

Hello there! If you’re here, there’s a good chance you’re an SEO Copywriter in becoming, so you’re asking what you should do to write an SEO friendly article. Well, you’re in the right place. What you’re reading is an SEO Friendly article (duh!) that will guide you through the art and craft of SEO-oriented writing with our SEO Editor tool.

We have already written a guide to SEO copywriting. There, you’ll find a small manual that helps you in writing compelling articles that will keep your audience reading and getting useful and well-designed information out of it. Remember that writing an SEO-friendly article means, more than anything else, to write well. 

Do keyword research first!

Now, let’s get to work! Have you washed your fingertips? Are you comfortable in your seat? Did you do your keyword research? No, really. You can write with filthy hands (gross, anyway) and sit on a nailbed. But you cannot write an SEO Friendly article without doing keyword research. 

If you’re missing this part, save this article in your to-read list and read our guide to keyword research.

Write SEO friendly content with SEO Editor

What are the components of an SEO friendly article?

SEO Title

• It must be under 70 characters
• It must be consistent with the rest of the article. Don’t try to write a catchy title to draw people to read an article dealing with a whole different topic. Your audience won’t appreciate that, neither Google.
• It should include your primary keyword.

Content

• The article must be at least 400 words long because it’s hard to produce useful content smaller than this. 
• It must contain links to other pages;
• It should include visual content, such as images. To learn how to use them in your content, read our dedicated article.
• It must deal with the topics of your primary and secondary keywords.

Headings

Headings are the primary way to organize content and help your readers to orientate within your blog post. We wrote a whole article about them. We advise you to have a look at it.

Other tips

Among other things, you should consider making your article more comfortable to read for both people and bots

• by highlighting the key-concepts (keywords and their synonyms) in bold and italics;
• by adding alt tags to images

Writing time!

Now, it’s time to write. Go to the SEO editor and click on the New article button.

Enter primary and secondary keywords

The first thing you have to do is to insert your primary keyword. As you start writing, the SEO editor will suggest to you which long-tail keywords you should choose with the volume and difficulty. It’s simplified keyword research that works great if you don’t need a structured editorial plan or are on the go.

Then, put in the secondary keywords you’ve found on your keyword research as related arguments.

Now you’re all set. The next thing to do is to start writing! 

Start your SEO Friendly article: writing title and content

The first thing to do is to enter the SEO title. As we mentioned before, it should include your primary keyword. 

Then, start to write your article, or paste it from your favorite text editor. Don’t forget to put your heading titles. You can choose the right format by the toolbar, under the paragraph icon (¶).

You may notice that, as you progress, your score on the right will increase. Now is 63, we have a good title but not-so-great content. Let’s see what we can improve. 

We go under content, and we discover that we should add links and some images.

Highlight a text portion and click on the toolbar’s link button to add a link. Then, we add our URL, and that’s it!

Now, it’s time to add an image. To upload a picture, just click on the add image button on the toolbar and add a URL and an alt text. 

And now we have both an SEO Friendly article with an image and a great score. Happy? You should be. But there’s still a bit of work to do.

We keep writing until we reach (and surpass) the 400 words limit; add some bolds and italics to highlight our content. Finally, remember to use your keywords often. But be wise: you have to use them naturally to avoid keyword stuffing. In this case, the general rule of thumb is that few are better than too much. 

How to prevent keyword stuffing? The SEO Editor will warn you!  In this case, we used the keyword “keyword research” too many times, and we need to cut some entries.

Modify Optimization

You may need to add (or remove) some keywords. How to do that? Just go to Edit>Modify Optimization.

In this case, we switch our primary keyword with “SEO Editor,” which has a greater volume. Of course, we also change our Title and edit our content to make our new keyword well distributed over our article.

Edit snippet and social cards

Now our article is ready to conquer the SERP, but it needs an appropriate preview!

On the top right-hand corner, switch from the text editor to the snippet editor. 

Here, you can edit the SEO title, add a meta description, and copy and paste your meta description tags to your article’s code. Then, you can do the same with the Open Graph and Twitter card.

Now you have your SEO friendly article to share and climb the SERP with. 

What will your next optimized blog post be about?

What you’re reading is a step-by-step guide that will help you conduct effective Keyword Research. In this way, you will improve your SEO rankings and attract more quality traffic to your using the SEO Tester Online Keyword Explorer Tool.  

What is Keyword Research?

Keyword Research is the activity of searching and analyzing the keywords that users look for on search engines (such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, or Amazon) to answer a question or to solve a problem.

It plays a vital role in your SEO strategy, and it can help you rank among the top results within the SERP.

Why is Keyword Research important?

Keyword Research is useful to find new topics to cover in your articles or products to sell on your website. It allows you to more scrupulously analyze your competitors and optimize conversions in your Google Ads campaigns.

Choosing the right keywords allows you to learn about your potential users and understand what they are looking for, allowing you to write useful and relevant content compared to your searches.

Also, it will help you write all the content you need, such as email, Facebook Ads, and Social Media.

Three Essential Concepts for Keyword Research

Before you start your first Keyword Research, there are three basic concepts you should know:

• Search Intent
• Search Volume
• Keyword Difficulty

Search Intent

Search intent refers to the goal that a specific search has, which is why a user looks for something on the search engine.

There are five types of search intent:

• Informational: when the goal is to know-how. These searches have high volumes but a low traffic value. In fact, the user searches for information on a particular topic or product, but it is not said that he will be willing to acquire it.

An example of information research is: “What is Crossfit?”

• Navigational: the goal is to reach a website or brand that the user already knows. These searches have medium-high traffic value and volume.

An example of navigational research is: “Nike shoe site.”

• Transactional: the user is willing to buy a product or service. Queries with this intent have a very high traffic value because the user is ready to purchase and the conversion closer. 

An example of transactional research is: “Nike Air Force 1 price”.

• Commercial: Similar to the previous research intent, it is characterized by an interest in a category of products or services. It is a search not directly aimed at immediate purchase.

An example of commercial research is: “Best running shoes.”

• Local: refers to research that aims to research local activities with physical presence such as restaurants, hotels, shops, professional studios, and many other similar types of business. No less than 20% of search queries have local intent.

Example of a search with local intent: “Gyms in Milan.”

If you have any kind of business with a physical location, have a look at our local SEO blog section.

Search Volume

That’s the average number of monthly searches performed in a country over 12 months. It is a useful metric for estimating potential traffic for a specific keyword.

The higher the volumes of a particular keyword, the more traffic you can get from it. 

Also, the higher the search volume of a keyword, the greater the effort required to rank high within the SERP.

However, remember that search volume is not the only piece of data to consider when you look for ranking opportunities. 

Not always a highly searched keyword is the right one. Think of all those queries with informational search intent.

On the other hand, you should think twice before discarding a keyword with a medium-low search volume (500-999 monthly searches).

You also need to consider other factors, including:

• Type of your business;
• Size and importance of your niche;
• Search intent;
• Keyword Difficulty.

Keyword Difficulty

Shows the difficulty of ranking in the top 10 results for a given keyword.

When it comes to Keyword Research, KD is a relevant factor in organic research.

Keyword Difficulty takes into account several factors, such as the authority of well-ranked websites and their backlink profile. 

It’s useful to know the difference between 2 particular types of keywords:

1. Short-tail keyword: usually formed by one or two words, they represent a generic search query;  
2. Long-tail keyword: They are more specific search phrases, with lower search volumes than short-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords have lower search volumes but also answer to more specific needs. For this reason, they are considered less competitive but also more profitable.

Read our guide on how to find long-tail keywords related to your niche. 

With these three basic concepts, we can now focus on the best way to do Keyword Research using the Keyword Explorer Tool.

How to make an outstanding Keyword Research

Ask yourself the right questions

To search for keywords for your customers or your project, you must first ask questions, which will help you clarify the current situation of your business and better understand your niche.

Create a new text file or get a regular notebook and pin the answers to these seven questions:

• Who does your business speak to?
• Who is your ideal customer?
• Which problem do you solve?
• Who are your competitors?
• What do they write about, and how they do it?
• What makes you unique compared to your competitors?
• What is the goal of your website?

These questions allow you to have a more linear view of the entire project, and by answering them, you will create a brief. A brief is a document that will guide you in the keyword search and in creating content for your site from an SEO perspective.

Keyword Research with Keyword Explorer Tool

Now that you have a clear picture of the basics of Keyword Research and you know what the questions are, you can start!

Generate Keyword ideas

First of all, sign in to the Keyword Explorer Tool.

Don’t worry if you haven’t subscribed to any of the SEO Tester Online plans. You can still use it for free a limited number of times every day.

As you can see, you have the option to start your search from a keyword or a domain.

Which one to start with?

If you just started, and you absolutely know what the most critical keywords in your market are, domain search is the best way to find out the keywords your competitors are positioning for.

So, for example, if you’re managing an e-commerce website that sells sports shoes or, more generally, sportswear, you can write the URL of your competitor’s site and press the button to start the search.

Within seconds, you’ll get a list of the most essential keywords your competitor is ranking with. That’s great, isn’t it?

If you already know the main keywords of your website, and you are looking for tips and new insights based on the key metrics of the keyword research, we recommend that you start with a keyword search.

To start, choose a short-tail keyword that identifies one of the topics covered by your site, select the country, and click on the search button 🔍.

On the left, the Keyword Explorer Tool will show a list of keywords and metrics that will allow you to identify new placement opportunities.

Besides the search volume and keyword difficulty, you’ll find three more metrics:

• Trend

Indicates how much the user’s interest in a given search has varied over the past 12 months.

This is useful if you have a seasonal or holiday-based business.

• Cost per Click (CPC)

It’s the estimated offer in Google Ads for a given keyword.

In other words, it’s the average price the advertiser has to pay for every click on a paid ad.

• Competition

It is the level of competition for a given keyword in the Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns. 

A higher level of competition results in a higher CPC for that keyword.

Filter your searches

With the Keyword Explorer Tool, you can further generate new keyword ideas using the functions:

• Related Searches
• Equal Terms

Related keywords are associated with the main keyword (the one you searched for) and are beneficial for intercepting potential users with similar needs.

Related research is defined as:

• Synonyms;
• Grammatical variations;
• Questions;
• Long-tail keywords related to the main one.

Imagine having e-commerce that deals with sneakers. The main keyword “sneakers” will likely have related searches such as “girl sneakers” or “men’s sneakers on sale” or “tennis shoes.”

Thanks to our tool, you can search for keywords through the use of different filters. They come in handy and will help you get even more accurate results.

You can decide whether to show results that include or exclude a particular word, set the minimum or maximum search volume to your liking, and also determine the values that interest you most in Competition, Cost per Click, and Keyword Difficulty.

Imagine you’re running a blog about nutrition; for the “diet” query. Set a Maximum Keyword Difficulty of 70 and a Minimum Search Volume of 1000, as in the screen below. Now, sort the keywords by KD to choose the ones that are right for you.

Create the Keyword List 

Now, it’s time to create a keyword list.

This will allow you to have them under control all the time.

If you are starting a new project, create a separate list that includes all the main keywords for your business.

It takes two clicks to create a new list.

Click on “My Keywords” When the window opens, click on “Create your list.”

Search for keywords related to your business again and filter them. Click on the checkbox to the left of each keyword. There, you can add the keyword to your list by clicking on “Add in List.” You can also click on the button to the right of each keyword.

Once you’ve created your list, you can view it by clicking on “My Keywords” and then on 🔍.

Have you saved the keywords you’re most interested in? Don’t forget to export the results and your list to CSV!

So, you’ve put your webpage online, and it is how you’ve always wanted. But something doesn’t add up. Why doesn’t it rank on the SERP (the Search Engine Results Page) as it is supposed to do?

There could be several reasons, too many to make a guess. That is why you need to do a thorough SEO Audit. In this article, you’ll find out what an SEO Audit is and how to do it for free with SEO Checker, the SEO Tester Online’s SEO Audit tool. 

What is SEO Audit?

SEO Audit is the analysis of your webpage made to assess the optimization of that page for search engines. You must perform it at regular intervals.

In doing a basic SEO audit, you must consider on-page SEO.

What are the factors that influence your ranking?

On-page SEO includes all those factors that influence your ranking and consist of both technical SEO and content-creation aspects.

To put it into another view, on-page SEO is about the ranking factors that you can influence by editing your webpage’s HTML code and content.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO encompasses the factors that influence the quality of the spider’s exploration when crawling your website. They concern your page’s HTML code and a few other aspects, such as:

• The page loading speed and performances,
• Sitemap;
• Robots.txt file and the Meta-Robot tag;
• HTTPs certificate;
• An SEO-friendly URL;
• Effective management of canonical URLs;
• “Positive” HTTP statuses.

Content creation

This one is more about the people who are going to read your comment.

Make sure it is going to be enjoyable for your users in every step of their experience. It means to give them useful information before they even click on the link within the SERP – through a rich snippet and well-designed social previews – and after, with useful content.

Then, when they click on your page link, they should find content that

• is well-written; 
• makes smart use of heading tags to give it a clear hierarchy;
• is rich in useful, well-documented, and original information;
• is the most complete around;
• has useful and fast-loading images;
• addresses specific search intents through the use of long-tail keywords.

There is a lot of stuff to check, isn’t it? It may require hours or even days to sort everything out. If only there were a way to obtain all the information you need in seconds. It would be great. Or is it?

How to do an SEO Audit for free with the SEO Checker 

SEO Checker is a fantastic free tool for the SEO audit. If you sign up, you can check up to two web pages for free every day. 

To start, just go to the SEO Checker page and type your URL (or your competitor’s) to perform up to 50 analyses on the page SEO.

Imagine that you’re managing a music store and want to check a product page of one of your competitors.

Overview

After a few seconds, here’s what you’re going to see.

The first thing you’ll notice is the SEO Score. At a glance, you’ll see how much the page is optimized. 

You’ll get both a numerical score about the overall performances and a graph that tells you which areas have room for improvement. Thomann’s product page could do better in this case: its score is in the yellow range. If it has scored better, the results would have been green. If things were worse, they would have been red.

The graph consists of five areas: Base, Content, Web Speed, Mobile Speed, and Social. 

By hovering the cursor on each dot, you’ll get the specific score of each section. 

Also, you can preview the website from both mobile and desktop on the right side of the screen.

Base

Now, go to the top menu and click on Base. Here, you can have a look at all the page’s main elements. Here you’ll find data concerning technical SEO:

1. Google Snippet;
2. Title, Meta Description;
3. H1, H2;
4. URL Keywords;
5. HTTPS;
6. SEO Friendly URL; 
7. Meta Robots; 
8. Robots.Txt;
9. Sitemap.

Each aspect has a score and a short comment that tells you whether you need to optimize that aspect, the preview of the specific item, and two boxes: Read the tips and What to solve.

By following the hints, you can improve your score and boost your chances of intercepting new traffic on your page.

With SEO Checker you’ll also be able to create an SEO report. Click on the “+ Report” button, follow the instructions, and get your report in your mailbox in less than 1 minute. 

You can also choose whether to create a Standard Report with SEO Tester Online design or a White Label with your contact information and logo.

Content

Google’s crawlers care a lot about technical SEO, but the content is gaining growing importance. Big G gave user experience the top priority. It wants people to find content that is useful, updated, and original.

In the Content section, you’ll get eight scores

1. Unique Keywords: it tells you if the crawler could suspect an attempt of keyword stuffing.
2. Title Coherence and
3. H1 Coherence: you will get a high score if your titles include the same keyword you use in your paragraph. It will tell the crawler that your article is consistent with them, and, thus, your content is useful.
4. Text/Code Ratio. If the score is low, it means that there’s too little text on the page; thus, your content could not contain enough information for the user.
5. Page Size. A too heavy page is slow to load, and users could abandon it even before seeing what it is about.
6. Images missing Alt: they make crawler’s job more difficult because they cannot learn what they’re about. And you don’t want to put yourself in the way between the spider and its content, do you?
7. Title on Tag A: same as the Alt tags, but for links. 
8. Microdata: they are pieces of content that help the crawler understand what kind of page it is visiting. We dealt with them in our article about rich snippets. 

As we can see, a lot of images on the page are missing the Alt tag. Also, the SEO Checker is nice enough to tell us which they are so, if you were the webmaster, you could take care of them in no time.

Speed

Speed is one of the most critical factors on a web page. Taking care of performance improves the user’s experience who wants to enjoy your content and the way the search engine ranks your website. On the contrary, a slow-loading page will increase the rebound rate.

On SEO Checker, you can assess the page’s loading speed both on Desktop and Mobile.

In both, you can find an overall score and no less than 38 specific scores and tips, each for every aspect that can influence a page loading speed. Here some examples

1. Remove unused JavaScript
2. Preconnect to required origins. 
3. Enable text compression, so your text will be faster to load.
4.  JavaScript execution time
5. Eliminate render-blocking resources
6. Remove unused CSS

They’re quite technical, so you should let your developer deal with them. Anyway, if you are on your own or you’re just curious, there’s a link at the end of each hint that you can visit to learn more.

Also, in the “what to solve” box, you will find the right tips to take care of all the issues.

Social

The last section is related to optimizing the content of the page for Social networks.

Open Graph and Twitter Card are not considered as SEO factors. Still, they’re considered ranking signals.

In the Social section you can find the analysis of 4 elements:

1. Opengraph;
2. Twitter Card;
3. Social Plugin, i.e., if the page has enough share buttons for social networks.
4. Popularity on Facebook, i. e., the number of times people shared the page on Facebook.

SEO Checker: Chrome Extension

You can get your page’s SEO Audit for free with just a click, thanks to our Chrome Extension.

If you download it, you’ll have a free SEO audit tool right on your browser.

SEO Checker Tool is currently one of the 5 most downloaded Chrome Extensions in the SEO category. More than 4,000 users use it, will you join them? Let us know in the comment section!