Improving SEO Metrics is important! Period! This is our two months journey and we’ll take you through our SEO tactics, the metrics that improved and what we learned along the way.
Running a website in competitive landscape while improving SEO metrics can feel like an uphill climb. Every business or personal website owner dreams of seeing the SEO metrics flourish in hope to reach broader audiences and rank higher in search engines.
SEO is not an easy task. Have to put a lot of effort and be patient till see the results
For this blog, NonCon Team decided to go on this journey head-on, deploying carefully crafted strategy and 10 blog posts over a two-month period. The result? Our Ahrefs website authority score jumped from 9 to 11, signaling some growth. Same with the MOZ metrics.
3 point rise over 3 months might not seem significant but SEO is a slow process and 1 point grow monthly was less then we desire. Achieving it was not easy though!
Had to spend at least 2 hours a day working improving the website SEO, compare metrics, search for link prospects, backlinks building, doing a keyword research, writing content (not so much) and a lot more. But it may pay off on long term.
This post is not about what we’ve managed to achieve but to show you what we have done and how we did it!
You can follow our steps and do the same, or not!
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It’s up to you!
Be warned, SEO is not easy and it is not exact science. It worked for us and should work for you too. So, you may continue to read or jump directly to the steps we’ve took:
- Do your homework
- Create a strategy and tasks
- Get hands dirty and get the job done
- Check and compare the results
1. The homework
To know what you have to do first you’ll have know what you want to achieve, research what has to be done, find the right tools and resources and make a plan.
Do your homework thoroughly
We’ve done it well. As a starting point we have an overview of the blog metrics as we’ve tested most of the technical parts and nontechnical factors that may influence its SEO rankings. But SEO is just a part of the blogging journey.
The ultimate goal of blogging is to get traffic! And monetize that!
More or less we are still at the beginning and monetization is not a priority. Yet!
From a technical aspect the blog looks nice, is reasonably fast, looks good on mobiles and doesn’t choke (too much).
With a descent quality content, long articles and appealing images that are not too extreme, the blog is doing just fine. But it need more… Subjects we cover are a bit broad but this is a concept we’ve decide to follow from the start. Concentrating on a tight niche may work, but biggest sites target a variety of subjects and categories in order to maximize audience. This is something they do not tell you!
When it comes to content creation following the trends works pretty well. Just have to check what is trending on social media and searches, do a quick keyword research and find some keywords that might work.
Keyword research is a No brainer, just follow the trends
Internal structure is fair enough and number of incoming links is slowly improving due to the effort put. Still have to work harder on getting more backlinks fast. Faster the better.
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Backlinks are important
Backlinks are the ranking factor since the beginning and crucial for your website. All the SEO uses number of backlinks for their metrics. Since Google page Rank back then, till Domain Authority and Page Authority now days.
Many will suggest a handful of quality backlinks will lead to better SEO ranking instead ton of links to your site from various places. Will you rank well with 5 backlinks only? It’s possible. Barely! Try link building and see your SEO metrics jump with 100 backlinks instead. Don’t forget internal linking and use every chance to link to another post on your blog and other parts of your website.
Internal links counts too
Certainly missed something about how to improve SEO metrics, but we’ve done our homework for sure. Next step is to create the strategy.
2. The strategy
With a little logic creating a plan is an easy task. Creating a strategy is another story.
To create effective strategy you’ll need to create a list, determine tasks and steps, tools and resources. Will have to plan a budget too. In short that would be all.
Not so fast. With some points skipped or deleted on purpose this is not a full blogging strategy with attention to rank on Google first page. Instead it is aiming to improve the SEO metrics only, not keyword ranking or traffic.
Gathering available resources
Assuming we have internet connection, few computers, cell phones and all the hardware and software with apps and services to run a website (on a shared hosting) we’ll have to make an inventory of what we have and what will we need next.
This simple list goes something like this:
- List of link building prospects (Leads) – we don’t have that back then but managed to compile one
- Set of free online SEO tools to check the metrics and see where our blog SEO stands – we just google it and found a few more then those we already use
- A to-do project management app – we’ve created one just for our needs
- Budget – no budget
- Google!
Determining the steps
Just few simple things to do before going to the next step:
- Write down and archive current SEO metrics achieved – we’ve done that already
- Backup
- Improve the site
- Create a tasks list
Improving the site
This blog was quite fast but we were not satisfied with the current theme and change it. It costs us 2 points fall to DA10 from DA12. Have to work hard to get back on the right path and still not there.
Meanwhile, experimenting with plugins and trying to improve page speed costs quite a lot of time to optimize till satisfied.
Also improving internal linking and writing few posts and gathering future post ideas drafts.
Creating a task list
This is a list of tasks that has to be made on daily basis.
- Checking traffic stats
- SEO metrics check: Domain and Page Authority. Also other metrics periodically
- Get link prospects – we have a list and will have to find appropriate relevant sites (link leads)
- Backlink building – using free and easiest white hat techniques
- Social media sharing
On a weekly basis:
- Internal linking opportunities – to interlink existing posts and improve navigation and visitors engagement
- Completing and drafting link prospects – we have create a script to make the process easier. It strips all necessary html and leaves only the list items <li> tags
- Check AHREFS SEO metrics if there is some improvements
- Get content ideas
- Write post topics and post drafts – the regular blogging routine
On a monthly basis:
- Improve the site further
- Create something else
- Run a side project
- Expand beyond blogging
While daily and weakly tasks are quite straight forward, a wider goal is to expand the blog and make it better. This require quite a lot creativity, time and effort to bring ideas into life and create new sections of an existing site that actually do something more then presenting the site owner thoughts.
You’ll have to think about improving SEO metrics for the new pages and sections and link building too.
3. Getting hands dirty
It is time to get the hands dirty and improve the SEO metrics.
Links list
When you’re up to link building, a list of prospects is a must.
Can’t build backlinks without a list
At the start we don’t have one and have to rely on a google search results displayed. This way will not came very far!
We need a list so instead of searching for a particular keywords we have related posts about, we’ve tried searching for keywords like “a list of sites that accept comments” or “list of article directories”, “100 SEO blogs” etc, till finally get something useful.
We can start building our backlinks now. But that may be not enough. We can build hundreds of backlinks with these lists (if not thousands) but would it be enough? The answer is NO! We need more.
Continued to search for and found far more larger lists, a database sets like lists.
We’ve done nothing particular, just searching for publicly available free lists of sites with certain criteria by using different keyword phrases till we found some. Actually we’ve found several. One of them was a list of one million top rating websites. One million link leads it is! Not quite. 90% of them are irrelevant to our topics, but Hey! 10% out of million is still 100.000 websites! And if we manage to get a backlink from 5% of them it would be 5K new backlinks to our site. It may worth to put an effort to sublime a list like this we thought.
From there we can categorize links by topics and niches, use in other project (or even sell them!).
Money is in the list, isn’t it!
Selling a list is not really a good idea after the effort put to compile one as such.
If you want to spare yourself of the trouble and willing to spend some money, you can sign up for the paid SEO tools and will get a much better lists for a monthly subscription there.
We don’t have a budget for that so we spared hundreds of dollars this way although it costs us a lot of time to draft the final list. None the less it worth the effort!
The list was a plain HTML, not CSV or excell file or any list friendly file format. Plain HTML files! 500 of them!
OK, no problem!
Have stripped unnecessary tags till only the list has left from some of the files. Not very well formatted and certainly overpopulated lists have need to clean up and leave only working links with relevant sites only.
Manually it would take months to do it. So with a help of ChatGPT a small script was created to load the html files with the list items, open the links in new tab, and right after each link in the list a button to delete that link and a drop down to choose a predefined category. When finished with checking links in the list a EXPORT button that rewrites the html list leaving only live links categorized. Later, instead of saving into HTML format, changed the script to export a JSON file instead. This way a more clear and usable list is generated with option to merge, copy and paste more lists in to a single Json file.
Problem solved!
Now we have a list big enough to publish several dozen volumes of Best of the web 🙂
Checking traffic stats
If want to know your site have visits must have some kind of analytics or visits counter.
Google analytics does it. It’s great! We’ve used it, using it and will continue use it. But, not for this site.
This blog uses a WP statistics instead. It is an obvious alternative and optional built-in solution for wordpress sites. Have used Google analytics too and maybe will use it once again in future. Current plugin have all that the necessary we need except a jump in the traffic not visible 🙂
Anyway, we have visitors and views though. A handful but constant flow.
Some other parts and tools running on the same domain as separate sections of this site has their own third party stats widgets and some even a simpler solution – a PHP counter. That is enough. All you need is to know visitors come, how many, how many pages they open per visit and how long they stay and where they came from (which site and country).
How often should check the traffic? Once a day, on couple of days or as when as you wish or feel necessary to see how you your site is doing.
Checking SEO metrics
Domain Authority and Page Authority are the simplest and most widely used SEO stats conducted by MOZ (along with few more). Checking MOZ SEO metrics is a breeze and quite accurate. It also shows Total number of backlinks, number of Quality backlinks, Percentage of quality backlinks, MOZ trust score, Spam score and Off-page SEO score. All the MOZ metrics in one free tool.
But Moz is not the only SEO services out there. There are many more and most of the tools require paid plans to get hands on the advanced analytics to check and improve SEO metrics.
One of the SEO metrics you can check for free is Website Authority by Ahrefs. It is similar to Moz Domain Authority but counts links quite differently (more like rest-in-piece Google PageRank).
Checking DA/PA daily becomes a routine although not always there are changes over 24 hours period. Ahrefs seems to update a bit more less frequently.
Backlink building process
The most significant factor above SEO metrics use are the backlinks. This proves that number of backlinks is a proven ranking factor. The quality of backlinks and their influence is still a bit unclear. To stay on a safe side and follow Google webmaster guidelines (recently renamed as Google Search Essentials), have tried to obtain backlinks from relevant sources, using white hat techniques only.
We have our list of links ready so we can start building backlinks right away.
Have to get hands dirty and start building backlinks manually. Link building is a tedious time consuming task so we have put all our effort (and time) into it. Well… Most of the time.
Backlink building requires to visit or contact the link prospects in order to acquire a link back to your site. This can be done in various ways (free or paid) but we’ve stick to the free ones only:
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Search engine submission
Submitting your site to the search engines manually or using an online service. It is free and has to be done only once. We’ve done this months ago when starting this blog.
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Pinging services
Notifying search engines, RSS feed readers and similar services to crawl your site. Used with caution only after publishing few new posts. It’s free so we did it couple of times. This creates links fast but not very significant for SEO.
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Directory submission
Link directories exist from the beginning of the internet. Basically a list of websites when you can insert a link to your site. Not very effective for SEO as search engines don’t like hundreds of links on a single page. This is a actually bad neighborhood for your link.
Tried to avoid them, but still submitted our blog to a few. If decide to do so, write a unique long description and hope your site to be listed after few weeks. Some link directories are free and if submit you’ll get a free No-Follow backlink that will last for a year usually.
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Classifieds
Free to submit. You’ll get your link right after you submit your ad (with a link to your site/service) and verify submission. Your backlink has a short lifespan of several days, week, up to a month. Backlinks from here are always with No-follow attribute meaning that have less weight then backlinks from some of the other techniques. We did a dozen just in case for testing their lifespan.
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Article directories
This actually works! Have found a couple in our list and submit an article there. One per directory. This is actually a sky-scrapper technique where you have a great post on your blog and in order to get a backlink from an article directory you write another similar article, a shorter one with much less information and put a link to your main article – your great post, on your blog.
Now days you can paraphrase and rewrite your existing post with AI within minutes. So don’t underestimate this technique.
AI can help
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Forum posting
Once you join a forum you set your profile (and add a link to your homepage). Can also put a link to your site in the signature. And if the forum allows you can put a link in a forum posting. All this is free, but we didn’t utilize it to the max and the reason behind this is once you join a forum your mailbox will start receive ton of replies, comment and similar junk (as with a social media). It is easy to find a related niche forums but their rules may restrict your posting (and putting links in posts).
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Q/A sites
Know Quora? There are at least 10 more Question/Answer sites like Quora out there where you can help people answering their request and solving problems while posting a preview of the full solution published on your site. Your answers should be thorough, meaningful and helpful in order to stay in existence or will be reported and deleted.
Completely free and effective, but don’t try to get backlinks to the same post over and over. Do it 2 or 3 times over one week period.
Have acquired several backlinks from Quora alone, and will do couple of more once we have more content and new posts.
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Blogging platforms
Blogging platforms e.g Web2.o sites are the places where you can register for free and write, post, comment (and put your links) doing so. Same as with social media giants: Facebook, X, Pinterest, Tiktok, Youtube, Instagram, Linkedin etc.
Different platforms have different rules and types of content on them. We’re sure you’ve tried at least half of them. But try not to overuse them.
Depending of the platform your links can have a limited lifespan and disappear quickly or last forever (like a link to your site you’ve put in your profile).
Problems with link building
Link building is a real PITA, terribly slow and time consuming process. Need to have a lot of nerves, time and discipline to do it your own. Fortunately you can speed up the process if have a plan, stay organized and follow a routine.
Stick to your plan
… And your link building strategy.
Fortunately, you can improve your website link profile by building an intuitive and efficient navigation menus, widgets and grow further just by linking to another posts on your site. It has to be done in a way to look natural and be meaningful.
While internal links counts (somewhat), the true value comes from other sites linking to yours.
If you bring value, others will be willing to link to your post you wrote about a subjects that is in their niche. … or Not!
Nobody will link to your site if they don’t know it exist!
Will have to spread the word. On social media, by using the techniques mentioned above that we used for this website till now…
Or go further and outreach other blogs and websites, ask to guest post on their site, do a reciprocal linking, ask them to review your site or even offer some incentives.
In marketing almost everything is allowed
If have a budget, start running paid ad campaigns on social media, outsource link building to a freelancer or a provider that offer this kind of services. Or even buy a link or two if it worth the money and fit your budget.
Offer incentives like a free ebook, a course or access to a useful tool that makes life easier. You can ask for opt-in and gather visitors email to put in your autoresponder and use it in your email marketing. If you think this is too intrusive, know everyone else is doing it and email marketing is still one of the best ways to bring traffic that works every time you send email to your subscribers in your list in a weekly newsletter delivered right into their inboxes.
Solving a problem is a best way to get noticed
We have done this several times before already out of necessity and it really work. What you create has to be useful or in some way interesting. Whether it a productivity tool, a prank app or something else that may be interesting to your audience will add few more visitors to your website audience and improve your SEO a bit. If you have something unique and useful your site will thrive.
Since last time we wrote about the subject, some 4 months ago there is some improvement in the
4. SEO metrics
Oh, there are some improvements here. Last time we’ve checked (some 4 months ago) MOZ stats look like:
- DA – was 11, now 13 (+2)
- PA – was 17, now 25 (+8)
- TB – was 58, now 218 (+160) new backlinks
AHREF metrics also has improved:
- DR – was 9, now 11 (+2)
- Backlinks – was 132, now 497 (+365) new backlinks
- Linking websites – was 38, now 65 (+27) new unique domains linking back to this blog
Yet it doesn’t look like a great improvement it took almost 4 months and a lot of work (3-4 hours each day) to get there.
Improving SEO metrics is not easy
But worth the effort on long term. How much? Will keep you informed!