all the SEO tactics and think about why you’re doing what you’re doing, and more importantly, why Google is doing what it’s doing.

When you do searching online, you’re searching for an accurate answer, item, detail, date, image, address, or definition. And you expect your answer in a split second. Sometimes you want Google to read your mind. Your prospects want this too. Google delivers this and it’s pretty good at it. Think about it — if Google served up ten links that didn’t provide what you’re looking for, you’d take your business elsewhere. This is the simple psychology behind user experience on SERPs. Google is looking for you to provide the data your prospects are looking for. If you provide it and you do it better than anyone else, your data and content will be promoted to a better position.

First step: Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. Run a search query on Google using your best & relevent keywords and most common questions. Make a short note of who’s on the first page. Do you see the same organizations showing up in these prime spots? Make a quick note of any direct competitors who are claiming top rankings. It’s really important to understand what your prospects are experiencing.

Quick trick: Take three minutes to listen to one’s explain what happens when you do a web search. This video is dated, but most of the material is still relevant today.

Advanced tactic: Just Take a deep dive into how search engines work. Get an inside view of how Google determines its ranking and algorithm changes directly from Google. Watch time: 30 well-spent minutes.

Understand what questions they’re asking, how they’re asking, what their needs are, and what keeps them up at night. Your company is already solving their problems and fulfilling their needs or you wouldn’t be in business, right? Translate this on your website.

First step: Need to Understand your customer and prospect needs, start making a list. This is an essential step. You can’t focus on improving rankings untill and unless you don’t understand what your prospects and customers are looking for. Then, transfer this knowledge to your website. Translate the products and services that make your business a real success in a clear format using the natural language understood by your industry. Become a good resource for your clients and Google will reward you.

Quick trick: To find out what the most popular search terms are, just type your keywords and prospect questions into Google’s search bar. Google will show you a list of related searches. Use these terms to update your copy and inform blog topics. Free and easy!

Advanced tactic: Use one of the top SEO tools to research keyword alternatives and search volume. Select a mix of the most searched terms to use within your copy. Remember to do so in a natural voice — this will make content consumable and shareable, while keeping Google happy at the same time.

Content means more than just your blog. Content covers video, articles, webinars, live chat, lists, how-to guides, and much more. Content must be provided on your site and across the web on channels where your prospects hang out. Use different types of content to answer your client questions and understand their obtacles and provide solutions accordingly.

According to Ann Handley, “…be sure you know the purpose or objective of every piece of content that you write. What are you trying to achieve? What exact information are you trying to communicate? And why should your audience care?” Provide answers. Be helpful. Solve their problems. and Make your content relevant and rich. And when possible provide narrowed, niched content. Ensure your content has sharing value and gives your highest quality visitors what they’re asking for.

First step: Seek out the good leaders in your company and make friends with them. You might find them in the executive suite, in a biz dev cube, working remotely, in the manufacturing plant. If they have answers to your industry questions, sit down with them, ask them the questions, record their answers and turn it into a post. This is about progress not perfection. Get the information out there. Remember it’s digital so you can always revisit and refine.

Quick trick: Ask these internal thought leaders to forward their emails to you so that show the types of questions they receive from prospects and customers, and their helpful responses. Use these to formulate new content.

Advanced tactic: Consider sharing your expertise through video. According to Content Marketing Institute’s Joe Pulizzi, video is a top content format. And Mark Zuckerberg states, “…if you go back ten years ago on the internet, most of what people shared and consumed was text. Now a lot of it is photos. I think, going forward, a lot of it is going to be videos, getting richer and richer.” Take it to your heart. With users accepting delivered videos in an every-day quality/natural presentation format, making video part of the plan is a reality for many marketers.

 If you don’t have your page titles, URLs, image tags (alt-tags), and meta descriptions (yes, they matter) in place, you’re doing your SEO a disservice. These on-page SEO factors affect your individual page rank in search results.

First step: Please Locate your most popular web pages in search results. Review your meta description and compare to your competitors on the page. Does your title accurately describe the content of your page? Does your description encourage clicks? Consider upgrading your meta content using best practices.

Quick trick: Use HubSpot’s Marketing Grader to get a quick snapshot of your website. Marketing Grader will uncover on-site issues and advise you on next steps.

Advanced tactic: Download and run ScreamingFrog on your site. This is a free tool that will scan up to 500 pages. If you have a larger site a paid version is available. This tool scans your website and shows what on-page data needs your attention.

On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals.

If no one is linking you, why should Google? Backlinks (links from other sites back to yours) can be golden, especially if they’re from sites that Google respects. On the other side, links that Google recognizes as blackhat (unscrupulous search engine optimization tactics) can negatively affect your search engine rankings. A research study by Moz shows that there’s a direct relationship between quality backlinks and Google search rankings. The higher the quality of your backlinks, the higher your search rankings.

First step: Check your backlinks. You can easily run a report using the SEMrush Backlink Checker or Moz Open Site Explorer. Download your data and take a look at who’s referring to your site.

Quick Trick: Keep your track of social reputation and track your brand with a social monitoring tool. Receive mentions of your brand helps build relationships, a great place to start is Mention.

Advanced tactic: Check your competitors’ backlinks. See who’s linking to them and explore backlink opportunities. And don’t stop there – backlinking is just one tactic covered by off-page SEO.

Off-page SEO embodies all marketing techniques that happen outside of a website (i.e. off-page) with the potential to positively impact search engine rankings. “Link building” and exposure of your product/brand to relevant audiences are the two main building blocks of off-page SEO.

Company listings (called citations) on local, national and niche directory websites let Google and your prospects know where to find you. Consistent, authoritative, and up-to-date citations create more exposure for your business and improve Google rankings.

Doing business locally? SEO is critical for local business. Google serves results differently depending on your location. With the solid growth of mobile engagement, getting found means mobile searchers become your buyers. To positively affect Google rankings right in your hometown, there are a number of essential steps you can take to outrank your local competitors.

First step: Ensure your Google My Business profile is complete. Don’t just submit the minimum, take full advantage of all the opportunities to promote your business through this profile. Google is looking for images, hours of operation, and more. Take the time to get this done!

Quick trick: Create a local landing page for each physical location for your company. Remember to optimize the page with your city, state and zip/postal code.

Advanced tactic: Quality directory listings have an impact on your score and there are many quality directories waiting for your submission. Check out tools like BrightLocal and Yext to get listed on hundreds of recommended directories for a reasonable price.

SSL certificate: Google wants everything on the web to be travelling over a secure channel (https). That’s why in future your browser will flag unencrypted websites as unsecure. The good news is that this is a pretty easy fix! It only takes a few hours to get an SSL Certificate and get everything up and running on your site securely.

Page speed: Best-in-class webpages should load within 3 seconds. Any slower and visitors will abandon their journey to your site. Google uses this information in their algorithm. Use HubSpot’s Marketing Grader to check your page speed. if it’s loading slowly, check out this article for tips, then have a face-to-face with your tech lead.

According to Salma Jafri, “Spend 20% of your time creating. Spend the other 80% of your time expanding your reach in different formats and to more channels to reach a wider audience. See who it can help. Reach out to them. Share it on all your networks.” Don’t expect organic SEO to do all the heavy lifting. Let others know you have valuable content to share. Be creative in spreading the word. And remember, Google is watching.

First step: Make it easy for your visitors to share content by including social sharing icons on every post. In addition, make sure to include the most relevant social channels for your industry. Lastly, consistently post your content on your social channels. If you’re active in your social communities you’ll pick up a few shares. Thank people for sharing and always respond to comments.

Quick trick: Save time by using a social media management tool to manage posting for you. There are free and paid versions – find a social media tool that works best for you.

Advanced tactic: Mobilize your internal team and ask them to share your content with their social networks. Your business development team should be excited to help spread the word. If they’re doing social right, they’re connected to the people who will eat up your posts and insights.

Its Time to evaluate all your hard work. Tracking your progress will inform your SEO strategy and marketing tactics for ongoing strategy iterations. Alway Remember to track with a purpose. Not every number matters. These metrics should be based on your specific business goals. Here are a few of our favorite and most relevant metrics that point specifically to search engine optimization:

Keyword rankings – Check your rankings for the premium keywords selected for your business as a whole and the specific keywords that you’re targeting with each blog topic. There are free options available like serpfox and paid keyword tracking tools like Rank Tracker from Moz. Word of caution — track only your most valuable keywords.

Organic search traffic – this can be measured using Google Analytics.

Page visits (from organic search): Tracking your best-converting website page visits is a key metric. Understanding which blog topics are most viewed will provide insights and direction for future blog posts and topics. Your audience may respond best to “how to” type posts, comparison posts (“Type A vs. Type B”), in-depth articles, lists, or short copy with images assisting in telling your story. To measure this, list your top pages, then make note your monthly traffic. If you’re not seeing improvement month over month, revisit your SEO strategy and tune up the pages that are struggling to provide results.

Time on page – Clicks to your page are great but mean nothing if those visitors aren’t spending time on your page. Content engagement measured by average time on page is a key metric that can be measured using Google Analytics.

Backlinks: Quality and quantity – backlinks are among the most important factors that affect your search engine rankings. Track the root domains linking back to your site.

Visits: pages per session: This might not sound like an SEO metric, but ensuring that your content is on topic and relevant to your site should mean that visitors are interested in more than one page of your website. Adding internal links to your content will encourage your visitors to learn more and increase time on site! Use Google Analytics for this metric.

Returning users: For the same reason as pages per session, if your visitors aren’t returning then you’re either not providing relevant and useful content or you’re reaching the wrong audience. You’re getting clicks to your site, make sure you’re delivering on what visitors are craving so you become the authority they’re looking for.

Page load speed score: This is important to Google. They want to deliver quality. Your site needs to display quickly and appropriately.

Mobile bounce rate: Over 50% of web traffic coming from mobile devices. Make sure your pages load quickly and you’re giving your visitors all the information they came for. Then, keep an eye on your mobile bounce rate to make sure you’re not missing out on potential business.

Conversions: One of the most valuable SEO metrics. Increased conversions means your SEO strategy is working! You’re finding high quality visitors and delivering the right content that successfully encouraged them to take a next step.

Keyword rankings: Understanding which keywords are most relevant to your business, then keeping track of SERP rankings will let you know where you stand with the competition. Word of advice: track changes using a three-month rolling calendar. Focusing on week-to-week changes will (in most cases) cause unnecessary anxiety with the natural ebb and flow of search results.

Blog visits (from organic search): Understanding which blog topics are most viewed will provide insights and direction for future blog posts and topics. Your audience may respond best to “how to” type posts, comparison posts (“Type A vs. Type B”), in-depth articles, lists, or short copy with images assisting in telling your story.

Domain Authority and Page Authority. Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) are scores (on a 100-point scale) that predict how well a website will rank on search engines. These scores can be increased by improving overall SEO and providing excellent content. Tracking this score is easy with this free MozBar tool from Moz. Mark your baseline then check in on your score monthly, and compare to competitor websites. This score changes very slowly so be patient!

Social likes and shares: Like blog post views, your customers and prospects will let you know what they like by sharing it with their individual networks. You’ll know you’ve selected the right topics and keywords to resonate with your audience. With this data you can be sure to give them more of what they want.

And if you’re ready to dive into deeper measurement, these metrics will help you knock it out with your CXOs:

ROI: Depending on the length of your sales cycle this number may take time to track, but it’s necessary. Evaluating which tactics are converting to marketing qualified leads, then to sales qualified leads, and on to customers is what it’s all about. Measuring results from specific tactics will help you improve the bottom line and make your CEO happy!

Customer Retention Rate: New customer acquisition costs more than retaining your current customers. And if you like your current customers, this is a metric for you! Not only does marketing have a role to play in customer retention, your job is much harder if you have to keep replacing the relationships previously solidified.

Improvements don’t happen overnight, so the sooner you start the better off you’ll be. Put a plan in place, and use our SEO Checklist and SEO Tracking Spreadsheet to shine a light on your path. Need more help with your SEO or Inbound Marketing?