How to Rank #1 on Google (SEO Checklist)

I'm about to show you my complete SEO process for ranking number one in Google and this isn't just Theory this is the exact system I've used to achieve results like this this and this even as Google's algorithms evolve I'm Nathan got and SEO practitioner with over a decade of experience leading hundreds of successful SEO campaigns so if you're ready to dominate Google hit the like button to show me you're excited and let's Dive Right In All right so the first thing I'm want to do is see if the page is crawlable and indexable so what

you're going to do is just go to the page and you need to install the detailed Chrome extension and so once it's installed we can quickly go into the website or the page that we're trying to rank and just click on this little icon and there's a few things you want to look at number one is we're just going to scroll down and we're going to look at robots tag and you actually do want to see that this is missing so if there's nothing here you're good to go that means there's nothing blocking this page

now if you saw no index here that would be a problem that would mean that you are actually attempting to block Google's crawler from indexing this page so we don't want that to happen so if you see missing you're good to go okay so the next thing I want to check is the robots. text file just I just do this just to see if there's you know a nice you know a little manual check here to verify there's no issues okay as far as I can tell it is interesting they're blocking Yandex which is the

Russian search engine and they're also blocking BYU which is the Chinese search engine the Chinese variation of of Google uh but but that's fine if they you know if there's some sort of crawling issues but for the most part everything looks good here and just to give you a counter example here's what the New York Times robots. Tex file looks like and you'll see it's pretty intense but notice a couple things here number one they're blocking a bunch of the large language models from crawling their website they're also blocking a lot of SEO tools but

they're attempting to block the large language models because they don't want these crawlers to come in extract their content and then use it in let's say chat gbt for example I actually think this is a massive mistake because if they're not allowing these large language models to crawl their site then they're probably not going to get a lot of visibility in these new large language models so I I think it's probably not wise long term but to each their own uh and so I just as a general rule of thumb when it comes to indexing

and crawling and indexing you want your page your website to be as easily accessible as possible and easily as indexable as possible cuz that gives us the best chance to suc seed in search engines and large language models so two other simple things you can do is just make sure you have a s map uh submitted here inside of Google search console and then do the same thing in bing as well because chat GPT is using Bing and it's also using duck ducko and it's crawling all of these results and then it's it's using it

for its search gbt function inside of chat gbt so once again you know go for total indexability because that is going to help you across the board because the goal is not just to rank on Google anymore we need to be also ranking in these different large language models so make it easy for crawlers uh another thing you can do now this isn't this isn't confirmed yet but there is a possibility that there there might be a new text file which is this lm. text which is specifically designed for large language models okay and so

you can go ahead there there's a bunch of plugins out there right now this is the one that I'm using and basically what it does it will produce this little file here very similar to the robots. text but it's specifically designed for large language models this is not like official this is not guaranteed uh this may not even work right but at least it's just one of those little checks you can mark up to say okay I do have it maybe it helps maybe it doesn't but at least we have it so that if if

it does it can certainly help us get as much crawlability and indexability as possible okay so number two we want to make sure that the page has good user experience so once you know crawlers can actually get to the page we need to make sure that when users get to the page they're actually having a good experience because no matter what you do from this point forward if users just absolutely hate the page your chances of ranking and and maintaining those rankings are are virtually zero so what we want to do is a couple things

number one just having good loading speed in general it's just a good thing to do it is it a ranking factor is it not a ranking Factor it doesn't make a difference because it is is a fact that a fast loading page is beneficial for user experience so anything that benefits user experience anything that improves user experience is something that you should do now there's some Nuance here and I do want to kind of show this so for example the the page that we're analyzing here I just picked a random HVAC business in St Louis

to do this for but you'll see that they're doing incredibly well as far as Google page speed insights right they're they're killing it it's fast really really fast passes all the marks okay but this is why this can be very deceptive because if we're chasing this score you may make sacrifices in other areas and so there is not there's likely no benefit at all because of the law of diminishing returns that if you go from let's say a 60 to a 90 that it's going to have a significant influence on your performance more than likely

if you're going from let's say you know the red zone between 0 and 49 to let's say average you might see a nice gain from doing that because basically if you're going from really terrible to just average you'll probably see the best gains at the end of the day but if you're going from you know already decent to exceptional it's going to be incremental if anything so the goal is just to not be terrible okay like which is a very low bar all right but if you can certainly go higher that's great but the thing

is when you do this what can happen is like a page like this that you see here that's really really raw right like it doesn't have a lot of design and we'll be talking about this here in a second but this type of page can load very very fast and it can score really well on these tools but is it a good user experience is this page actually helpful is this page actually going to drive conversions okay that's the question we need to be asking and I would argue no okay there's a lot of a

lot of room for improvement here so a couple things I'm going to look at for user experience number one we know loading speed is critical okay and I'll be talking more about the the goal completion element of this but a couple kind of like technical checks you want to make sure is number one is there an SSL certificate installed very basic but like if you just go up here into the browser you can verify if it's https we know it has an SSL certificate it passes the test next thing you want to do is make

sure it's mobile friendly so we can just take this and if you you can use tools for this but you can also just go ahead and collapse this and it will you'll be able to see if it's responsive okay and it is so it passes that test as well and then the next most critical part of this is the design modern is the design modern okay and I would say no so it would not pass the test here for me personally because this page needs to be upgraded and one of the most important things of

course this is my own subjective opinion and I'll show you how you can use data instead of just opinion but this page needs to to be structured to drive conversions it's a transactional keyword it's someone actually looking to get uh air conditioning repair in a specific City and someone like that is not looking to you know consume a lot of information especially general information what they're looking to do is figure out why this company is the best fit to fix their air conditioner and so what I look at here is there's a lot of information

here but there isn't a whole the page is not structured to drive conversions it's not structured to get me to act is and and we need social proof we need the page to be designed for conversions and so this kind of like General format here is not going to do the job okay and I'll talk more about that in a second but the point is is like there's just we need to make sure that the the design standards are keeping up and there is like design moves fast like your overall design greatly in influences you

user experience you know the old the old idea of like you know never judge a book by its cover well that is exactly what people do like online they will judge a book by its cover and so if your website looks extremely outdated you're you're already losing right you're not even get a chance to convert them because they're just going to bounce right off and so if I if this was you know my client for example first thing I would do and not even before I tell them to get a new site design first thing

I would do is I would install user tracking softare Ware because with user tracking software we can use data real raw data real quantitative data to make educated decisions instead of just saying hey you need a new site design because it's old right and of course I know this because I've done the work and i' I'm you know I have a decade of experience doing this but I will still use data to make that judgment okay and so what you can do is I use Mouse flow but here's a small example like this is for

one of our companies rankability and there's two things you can do in here number one you can do these click heat Maps these are absolutely so crucial you learn so much about about just how your pages are working but like I'll just show you on our homepage funny enough you know when we go and look at this data it's it's surprising but it's also not surprising at the same time and so like we'll just I'll just show you real quickly what this looks like so we'll look at the intensity all right so so you can

see really where like a lot of the actions taking place but but the funny thing is like to No Surprise most of the action is taking place above the fold your above the fold section is the most critical part of any page where you're trying to drive conversions and in fact of just any page in general like it's the most important part and there's so much proof of this because this is just clicks these are where people are clicking but as you scroll look the the clicks get real sparse real quick right so like a

lot of this stuff that we have down here that we think is so special uh it it does doesn't even get any clicks really at all okay because most of the action is happening above the fold that is not a bad thing it's not a bad thing for Action to happen above the fold what we want is action so it doesn't matter whether it happens in a split second or 20 seconds we want people to do stuff on our website so this is actually a really good sign people are watching the video uh people are

going to our bout and our you know our our navigation and of course they're clicking on the free trial option so a lot of good things are happening but what I want to show you is you can actually go to the scroll okay and i' I've studied probably thousands of pages at this point using data like this and even the best websites I'm talking like really welld designed really well structured the fallof is Extreme like you like if you look at the the drop off here it's not even above it's not even at the fold

yet and we've already lost 10% of people just gone now keep in mind this is not necessarily a bad thing it could mean that they actually clicked on the navigation they went to a second page so be careful with how you interpret this data but just look at how users drop off when we get to the fold we've lost 40% of users so you can see the drop off is Extreme and this is why you need to invest a lot of time thinking about how these pages are structured and ultimately cutting as much fluff as

you possibly can that's the key okay and so the point is we need this data to make good decisions and if you don't have this data you're just guessing right even for design like oh we want to do this you know this mockup and this beautiful design it's like okay that's cool but there's no proof that that particular layout that particular design is going to drive the actions that we want on that page and so even if you mock up a design uh as soon as you launch it you need to have this data so

you can immediately start collecting to see how well it's converting um and not just having this kind of click data and uh heat map technology but you also want to have session replays okay and so this what this does is it actually it's super creepy by the way but it it tracks how people are interacting with the website itself so like we could just take this one for example and we can go and play this and you'll see it's super creepy but we can actually see what someone is doing on our website which is so

invaluable because you would have to go and like you know watch your wife do it right and that's that's one way to do it but we can actually see like what this person did so this person was on the homepage they clicked on the pricing page they saw the investment and who knows what happens after this right maybe that was enough for them to make a decision I don't know but the point is like we can actually see how users are interacting with this which is really critical because if we see like okay we keep

watching these replays and they keep doing this one weird thing then you can fix that bottleneck you can fix fix that friction and make the the website better right so I I just cannot stress enough having this this type of data is invaluable to improve user experience on your site and improving user experience may not be a direct ranking factor in Google but it certainly is an indirect ranking Factor no doubt about it so number three have you placed your primary keyword phrase in the right spots on your page this is just on page SEO

101 and surprisingly it doesn't seem to get done very well a lot of the time and so I'm just going to show you real quickly how you can just do a quick analysis you just go once again use the detail Chrome extension and for this particular page this is a a small mistake that I see a lot in the local level is people will not add the state modifier and I'm a big fan of adding the state modifier because I think it builds proper relevance and so you can see here they do it actually really

well here afon Mo perfect they say it on the page so that probably helps inform Google about the location that they're attacking but you want that to be more evident in the most critical spots on the on the page itself so in your title tag you should have air conditioner repair or air conditioning repair or AC repair in afon MO right so that way we know for sure that we've got the core service offering and we've got that core location that we're targeting so those need to be really really clear and one of the main

reasons at least in the United States there's a lot lot of cities across different states that have the same name so like uh you know I live in Chester Field so in in the United States there's multiple Chester fields in the United States so if I don't add that state modifier Google's pretty smart because he uses NLP and other ways to understand and entities to understand what what are you know what the page is about and the relevance but still treat Google like it's a 3-year-old make it so incredibly clear because then you don't have

to worry about the relevance so don't don't be ambiguous is the point so get it in the title tag Get It In The Meta description make sure it's in the URL once again this one is aft and air conditioner repair it does have it so I would say that you could argue this is a pass but it's just not in the structure that I would prefer right that that's all so uh and then in the headings you want to see that's actually popping up in the H1 and it is popping up at least a few

times on the page as far as that core core service offering and that core location all right number four does the page cover the topic completely so to be able to do this the right way you're going to need a tool like rankability and so what you're going to do is go into the content Optimizer enter the keyword phrase I recommend doing the Service Plus the location and the state modifier then click import URL content and then you put the actual URL you're trying to rank and what this is going going to do is it's

going to extract the content from that page and then use it in the analysis and then make make sure you actually search for the city that you're trying to rank in and what this do this is really important because what's going to happen is we're actually going to pull the competitors from that City instead of just looking broadly across the whole United States and that means you're going to get the most relevant NLP opportunities okay so run that analysis and then what it's going to look like is this and what you're going to see is

how well this page covers this core topic so AC repair afon Missouri okay and so as we can tell here there's okay coverage it's not horrible it is hitting on a lot of the kind of core ideas here but there's also a lot of stuff missing okay and we can see there's a lot of area to make this page more relevant to hit on a lot of the core topics that the competitors are hitting on you have to remember that when we're building relevance there is a like a bare minimum level of relevance that we

need to hit so let's say for example if I'm writing an article about SEO if I don't talk about on page SEO or technical SEO or SEO audits or doing link building then it just looks like I don't understand that topic right and so what we want to do is make sure that we are hitting on all the appropriate entities which is just really a fancy word for topics and the the way that we're doing this is It's dependent on what the competitors are talking about so all of these recommendations are pulled from the top

competitors and you can actually click on this and see the examples of the context in which these are being used by the competitors so if we're not talking about the stuff that all the other competitors are talking about then we can't expect a rank it's just because there's just a certain level of relevance that we have to hit that's like bare minimum just a rank okay after that there's a bunch of other stuff which we be talking about but that's like just bare minimum that you have to do so what you want to do is

in if this was my page this was my client I would do a complete rebuild of this page with NLP in mind and so the good news is you can do this really quickly with chat gbt and rankability is actually coming out with the feature here soon where uh this will actually be done for you just when you run an Optimizer here and you click run Optimizer you actually be able to have ai create the content brief create the outline and create the first draft for you with basically just a click of the button and

it will match the intent of the keyword so it won't just you know spit out some generic information stuff it will know the intent of the keyword and it will produce content knowing that intent so if it's commercial intent it will produce commercial based content if it's informational produce informational based content so this is going to really streamline your content efforts but in the meantime you can just go into chat gbt and what I like to do is I'll go ahead and just copy the keywords here so you go up here you just click this

copy to clipboard and then you just want to create an outline first right so create an AO content outline and we go and zoom in so you can see this better but create an SEO content outline for the core keyword and then using these NLP keywords okay and so what you do is you put those in and then the last part of this is make it personalized to the company I attached I went to the company's about page like this and then I pretend like I'm going to print it so go like this and then

I save it as a PDF okay and then I upload that PDF now the good news is with deep research inside and I'll be using deep research here in a second to show you some stuff but with this deep research function here it actually can crawl URLs so you technically don't need to do this but I know the Deep research function isn't available for like every account so just if this is a workaround if you want to do that so basically what it's going to do is it's going to create a hyper relevant personalized outline

that's not just relevant as far as the topics and entities but it's going to be relevant specifically for this business and its unique characteristics so that means that this this page is going to be unique even if you use AI content because it's going to be specific to this one brand and their unique positioning okay so you can actually just run this through we'll just run this outline through and usually I'll do this just to verify that like it's it's well optimized and so we'll go in here we'll just basically paste this in and we'll

see how it did okay so that's great so it's a great out it's a great outline it's highly relevant it's in a good place okay and so you could certainly just take this you know go and share this you could hand this off to a writer and then you know have them actually go and create the content so you go in here and they would just go to content Optimizer and they'd have this outline that they could work from they don't even have to log in if you don't want um and then they can build

it from here okay that's certainly a possibility but you can also have ai Just Produce the first draft for you so you can see here I said now write the entire SEO asset optimal between 700 and 1400 words you can see I pulled that directly from rankability here and then we'll go ahead and just copy this and see how it did okay and one thing that uh and you can obviously just modify the prompt but what chat gbt tends to do is kind of bold the NLP keywords you obviously don't want to do that in

your content that just looks super spammy so you'd want to go through and kind of get rid of all the Bolding but you can see here just on the first you know very first draft we can see it's already at 78 so it's within range as far as relevance okay and so this is just the first draft okay remember that this is like even if you're using AI content it's still a first draft treat it as if it's not AI content and it has to go through quality assurance it has to go through multiple iterations

most AI content that we publish on any website typically goes between three to five iterations meaning three to five variations from that from this original draft to actually getting on the website so and that's just to ensure that it's actually high quality so we're going to have a human come through here we're going to have it clean it up but this greatly accelerates the speed at which you can put out pages and when it comes to these commercial pages on the local level I I just don't see why you wouldn't use AI content because it's

so fast it's honestly well above average as far as you know some Riders I've seen out there um and it does exactly what it needs to do it's it's fulfilling the intent of of the keyword okay so this is just a quick way that you can do this and at the end of the day this is we need to be thinking about is covering the topic in full that's critical because you could do all the other stuff pretty well but if you don't do this one part well you're really not going to be able to

perform at at the level that you need to okay so number five is your page high quality so we already know that we have to nail the relevance that's really really critical but once you nail the relevance what's the next phase of this process well the next phase is to ensure that not only is it relevant but it's actually High quality and so what does it mean to be high quality well the good news is you can certainly use your experience to kind of determine what is high quality and what that might look like or

you can actually just use the guidelines that Google has to determine what they believe is quality now what I'm about to show you are not necessarily ranking factors but they're more just good checks that you can use to ensure that your page is as good as it can possibly be so I have this checklist inside of my ranking diagnosis checklist which is available inside of gotch SEO Academy I'm actually coming up with a new version of it a 3.0 version because there's so much that has changed recently but these questions are pulled directly from Google

search quality evaluator guidelines and so what I did is you can do this in two ways number one you can manually just go through the page and kind of answer these and give it a pass or a fail or you can take these questions and take advantage of the deep research function inside of chat GPT so I'm using the Deep research and once again I don't know if this is available on all plan so bear with me on that you can also use Gro they also have deep research uh deep zek has deep research so

they pretty much all have it now but the one I've been using is uh the chat gbt version the way that it works is basically uh I upload the PDF of this page uh I also say that you know please research the page actually have it crawl just as a backup uh and then I just basically have it grade these you know these questions on a scale 1 to 10 now keep in mind chat gbt is a little it's pretty nice right it isn't it isn't highly critical it doesn't really try to give you like

hard rough like uh you know advice but it gives you a good place to start right and so when we look at this you'll see that it it goes through and it does the Deep research function you can see that the scores are pretty legitimate I mean does the does the page content satisfy the intent I would argue it does is it is it the best structure is the best content not necessarily but but it does satisfy the intent and they're not trying to be super informational in nature it's it's pretty commercial in nature which

does satisfy the intent so I actually do agree with that uh consensus you're not really going to see any issues with that for a commercial page on a local level uh and then this is the part that you know is the most concerning which is does the content strategy angle add unique value relative to the competitors this is a problem you see across almost all HVAC companies on the local level and just pretty much every local business uh they have a really hard time differentiating their offers from you know you know a lot of these

other companies that they compete against because it's highly commoditized so you have to figure out ways to make your pages unique and so when we look at this page there's a lot of opportunity to make it much more unique um and so I I would give this you know unfortunately a failing grade but it is still it's it's an opportunity right it's an opportunity to improve this page okay is it up to date seems you know pretty much up to dat uh is it readable scanable and easy digest I would argue no for this even

though chat GPD says that it is because yes it it does use short paragraphs yes it is kind of broken up pretty well but the thing is this this page structure is not designed for proper conversions okay so we would want to restructure the page to make it flow better to drive better conversions it's mean having a form above the fold having calls to action above the fold going left right format more visuals uh you know things like that okay so and then going down here you know just some other checks that we can go

after but the point is we can use this technology to really streamline our efforts here um and give us just some places to start keep in mind this is not going to be 100% accurate but it is doing pretty solid analysis and uh it can give you just some areas where we can kind of focus in and ultimately improve this page so the goal is to make this page as good as possible so the way that I would approach this is I would just take one of these ideas get hyperfocused fix that one Challenge on

on that page and then move on to the next one and so this is like you know basically we have a consultant that works with you now when you have this deep research you basically have a consultant at your side who's going to do that qualitative analysis for you and then you're responsible for going and fixing those problems now of course you just go right back in the chat gbt and ask okay uh you know how do we make like you go to one of the ones that didn't score well which is like you know

making it unique so we could focus in on this and say okay give me 5 to 10 ways that we could make this page unique compared to the competitors and then chat gbt will give you a bunch of options maybe five out of 10 of them are not great but you'll get five that are decent and then you can kind of double down on that okay so now for number six is your page prioritized in the site architecture and do we have enough internal link coverage so the way you want to do this is I

highly recommend using screaming frog so you do a screaming frog crawl and then you export the report like I've done here now the URL that we're looking at here is this one specifically and you'll see the air conditioner repair in afon and if you scroll over you're going to go ahead and see two columns that you really want to pay attention to here which is number one is the crawl depth column okay and so we want to see that this page is no more than three clicks deep okay and they've actually done a really good

job here it's only two clicks deep that's perfectly fine that'll the job the next thing I want to look for is unique in links column okay and this essentially is how many other pages are internally linking to this page how many unique pages and so they only have two and what that tells me is that there's an opportunity to drive more internal link coverage to that page now one way you can do this is just immediately go and look for other Pages within that a cluster so you can see here I found at least eight

pages that are in that one cluster and so those should all be internally linking to each other cuz they're all in the same cluster and so you can really help support each of those pages because if just one of those pages gets a backlink it's going to lift that whole cluster up so it's really really important that you you leverage internal linking because it's really the best way to basically get the most out of each backlink that you get squeeze the most out of each one so it's really important now on top of that speaking

of back links if we scroll over you're going to see if you use the hr's API you're going to be able to see if this page has a sufficient amount of backlinks just with this crawl alone I'll be talking more about backlinks in a second but the point is we can start to see these gaps for this website now what I want to show you is you know in addition to just that one page the the truth is you can rebuild the the site as a whole which then will improve the performance of each individual

page and so there's some sitewide issues that you need to be careful of and so I'll show you real quickly a site like this you know there they have a massive amount of pages and more than you would really expect okay so one of the things we can do is first we're just going to look only at indexable pages and what I like to do is I'll often sort this address column and what I'm looking for is starting to see some Trends with the types of pages that they're building so just real quickly I can

see they've got a lot of pages that are specifically targeting secondary cities in St Louis that's totally fine you can do that the only downside of doing that is it's really hard to create unique content across all those pages there's ways to do it but it just it becomes harder the more that you try to expand that out uh but the other thing I want to look for is there any are there any pages that can be pruned because one of the best things you can do when you immediately start an SEO campaign is just

thinking how do we clean the website up how do we take out the trash make the website leaner and ultimately make it more efficient uh and this actually benefits the site as a whole it makes it easier for crawling and indexing and more importantly cutting off all that junk actually could lift the other pages that you actually want to perform better okay so going through here I wouldn't actually get rid of the cluster pages I would probably just upgrade them these like City focused clusters I would just upgrade those pages make them better I wouldn't

get rid of them but what I would start to look at more is some of these some of these Pages here that are over optimized Okay so I'll go ahead and collapse this so you can see but looking at the blog section okay take a look at how the title tags are structur on all these Pages 10 facts you didn't know about your furnace St Louis HVAC tips okay so this has been attached to every single well almost every single blog post and so what we're doing here is we're having we have a topic but

then we're slamming on you know a key word to the end of it that's not relevant to that page and so you really don't want to do that I would get rid of this across all of these pages but honestly most of this content which I'll be talking about here in a second this is not the way that you want to build topic Authority okay this is not the way you want to do it because really these are just kind of General pages that broadly talk about the topic but they don't specify the city that

we're attacking okay so this is an opportunity to start cleaning some of this up getting rid of the stuff that's not performing well and the good news is you don't have to guess your way through this you just go and look over here back at the data and in a normal environment you would have Google analytics you would have Google search console and then you would also have the hre's data and then you can make informed decisions and what you're looking for is you want to find pages that have zero impressions in Google search console

zero traffic in Google analytics and zero backlinks with atress so if it hits all three of those and the page isn't very good that's an opportunity to make some moves typically deleting is one that we will use but if it is targeting a good keyword then we'll probably opt to upgrade that page make it better right and then in some cases maybe that page just needs more backlinks so it could be a variety of things but for the most part there's a lot of pages that likely could be deleted okay so just focus on the

pages that have no positive kpis and that can sometimes be a couple hundred pages that you can prune and clean up the site okay now going over here another thing you want to take a look at are just you know categories or paginated pages that just are just flooding Google's index with junk okay so when we look at this there's tons of category Pages here that are indexed in Google and all of these should just be no index if you no index these you're immediately going to clean up the index by a couple hundred Pages

just like overnight basically now it's going to take time for Google to recrawl that and reindex it all but the point is like this immediately can improve the site just by add you know slapping a no index tag on these categories uh it can make a significant impact and you can see they've got a lot they've actually probably got maybe even up to 400 or 500 of these Pages um and just getting rid of these alone is going to really really clean up their their uh indexation ultimately for this domain okay and then going down

here there's probably some other stuff here as well you know some paginated stuff that you could clean up so before you even touch the actual content itself just cleaning up the categories and the page inated pages is enough to just get get the ball rolling with pruning this website and making it more efficient so number seven is does this page have enough topical support are there other pages that are supporting and lifting this page up so there are two ways you can do this you can do this with this screaming frog crawl that you ran

and you can just go and start searching for the specific City that they're going after so in this case I just searched afon and come to find out they've got about eight or so pages that are highly relevant in this one cluster and that's a that's a pretty good amount that's better than most websites but you can also actually use chat jbt to do this now which is kind of cool is if you use the Deep research function you can find every page on the website that targets that one keyword phrase now of course this

doesn't really replace a screaming frog crawl because a screaming frog crawl is going to give you all the data and and there going be much more to work with but you can use this actually to find keyword cannibalization right you could have it crawl and look for instances of keyword cannibalization on this site and funny enough it finds basically every instance of afon on their website and it also talks about other pages that actually mentioning afon so you could actually look for some internal linking opportunities there as well so once again another powerful way to

use chat gbt but the point is we want to make sure that there's a lot of topic support and so when people think about building topical Authority they often think about informational content but you can actually build the relevance and the support even using commercial pages in fact I recommend starting there like if you're going to build out you know furnace repair or AC repair afon Missouri then what are the other commercial Pages where we can directly support that so you know might be air conditioner uh AC installation afon Missouri uh it could be emergency

AC repair right so there's other variations of that keyword that we can attack and then from there we need to start thinking about okay how do we build support around this idea of AC repair and in that location so what you can do is a couple things number one is I start thinking about link bait because on the local level you should really be trying to create as much linkbait and topically relevant content so essentially you want the core service offering and the location for each of those topics so I have a bunch of techniques

inside of goio Academy for building linkbait like this is my I really love this process of building link bait like like you basically what I think you should do is generate a 100 link bait ideas uh and I've got a bunch of tech techniques but just to show you how easily you can do this in chat gbt you just go in here and you say give me 10 link bait ideas for an HVAC company targeting St Louis that's relevant to the core location so you could also do afon in this case but I just did

St Louis to show you and within a couple of seconds we get some really really good ideas and they're not all perfect but they're definitely good ideas to start with good seeds to work with and then here's the cool part once you find a really good idea you can use the Deep research fun function to actually go into that research for you okay so we'll go back here I did another one that's more data driven so like give me 10 data driven ideas and it came up with a bunch of beautiful ideas uh but then

I used the Deep research function okay and it's still going here and you can see it's still building on the sources but basically it's going to do all this research specifically for this one topic which is the most common HVAC issues in St Lewis so it's going to go through do that deep research and this just saves so much time and I recommend using this basically for any type of content that you're going to be building like if you're just creating a informational piece of content you can have chat GPT or even you know you

can go to grock as well to do this research for you you just go in here and you click on deep search um and it will do the same thing for you right it'll do the same thing um and there's some other ones out there as well but the point is is like this is the type of thing that you want to do because what it's going to do is it's going to crawl most of the internet and find all of those sources then bring it all back to you and then you've got it's done

all that heavy lifting of research for you this is like I don't know if there's anything that's going to save as much time as just this alone research is one of the most timeconsuming elements of creating SEO content and just creating content in general so this is just so so important I cannot stress it enough but you can use it to actually build the link bait as well okay so it's just really really awesome um and I highly recommend taking advantage of it okay so it's it takes a long time it can take any you

know anywhere between you know 5 to 10 minutes sometimes longer but you can see now it's actually done here so we can go and look here right away and it's already started to develop uh a really good asset and the types of things that you know St Louis business or St Louis homeowners might might experience right and it's actually giving us data it's giving us all the citations so we can actually go and take all of this information and this research that it gave us and create a really lean jam-packed of value and data type

of asset and it will certainly be ex exceptional compared to what you see on the local level this would be you know incredible compared to what you often see on the local level so just take advantage of this it can really help you create awesome awesome content all right so now moving on to number eight which is does the page Drive some type of goal completion so one of the variables with the helpful content update and these uh the various updates that Google's launched recently that seem to attack a lot of affiliate based websites you

know one of my theories and there's many ideas out there but one of the things I think really played a big influence is uh you know affiliate websites versus actual brands that sell products and services and what I found when I did my analysis across many different Industries is the websites that did not get affected um and they didn't necessarily like grow during the updates but they just kind of either stayed flat or grew a little bit uh the only consistent correlation that I saw between those sites is that they actually sold something right so

either a product or a service they kept people on their website they didn't send people off of their website to Amazon or some sort of affiliate offer okay so the thing you should be thinking about is how do we get users to stay on our site and complete goals that we need them to complete and so when I look at this page there are a lot of calls to action but the challenge is we need to make it easy iier for for leads to ultimately convert on this site so to be totally honest we would

probably do a full redesign of the site just to make it more conversion Focus but in general like a good website is going to have a lot of great flow and a lot of good contrast so when we look at this site you can see there's just a lot of opportunity to improve but it's better for me to actually show you a really good example so this site here is just a really good example of what a conversion Focus design looks like uh this is and not saying you should go and just like copy this

business but this is just a really good uh good example to add to your swipe file so then you can take some elements of what they do to apply it in your situation so like even just the small little details of the contrast of the of the calls to action button look how they really pop in on this design but compared to this the calls to action blend with the menu and the text and there's just no contrast there's too much red and it's overwhelming this design which is going to make people not click on

the buttons okay and we need that to happen also uh you can easily call right here if we click on this we can actually call and immediately convert here this phone number isn't clickable right so the person would have to manually enter that into their phone conversions will die there okay that's just not going to work um and then more importantly everything is nicely spaced out we've got a nice call to action up here we've got a nice one here and another one here they're all spread apart they're nicely situated there's social proof above the

fold there's not a ton of clutter your eyes focus on the things that we need to do so it's very clear what a good design looks like and you can see as you go down it's built for conversions like every single section on this page has some sort of conversion objective we got a beautiful form here we've got once again another little call to action little section in here it's beautiful uh we've got services with more calls to action so you get the point this is what a great great conversion Focus design looks like and

they're shifting up their different ctas so it doesn't get much better than this this is like I would say like a 10 out of 10 as far as conversion Design This is beautiful so this is what we should be this is what we should aspire to do and most importantly don't use stock images look at how they're using Unique Images specific to their brand um it's just a really really good job so use like take this and put it in your swipe file and take little parts of it that you like and then obviously you

know personalize it to your to your brand so now for number nine does the website have branded searches and do they have a good reputation okay this is really important so one of the things you can do is you can just export all of the keyword data for a website like this you can use sem rush or atrs and you can pull all their keyword data okay and so what I like to do is I like to see do they have a lot of a lot of branded searches and so we'll go ahead and just

filter this and you're going to see here that they do they actually have a good amount of branded searches it looks like you know about 13,000 searches a month just around their brand okay so that's actually really really good and even if you know maybe it's not that high you can even cut in half let's say 5,000 is still a lot okay and so there this is a signal that either a they've got a lot of Word of Mouth which is really good it could also mean they're doing offline advertising to drive this branded search

and it also means that they're just doing General good marketing and so that will ultimately support the SEO performance as well so you really want to see this and once again going back to the possible variables that you know influence the helpful content update and all the sites that got hit another consistent variable is that a lot of the sites that got hit had no brand right they they they were completely riant on non-branded search traffic okay and so that is okay and that converts the best but you also need to have the brand search

volume coming in as well because it confirms your legitimate business right your legitimate business that uh people are actually interested in they're going to you know going to Google to learn more about you okay and so you can go and find this data inside of Google search console as well and you want to see that it's you know one of your most popular keywords should certainly be your branded keyword okay now what we want to do is also look at the reputation of this brand this will greatly influence SEO performance so the quickest thing on

a local level is just look at the local pack right and look at how they're doing with their Google business profile so without even any further analysis we we're starting to see some problems here uh you know a 4.2 and a 3.7 and a 3.7 on Facebook like the average here is could possibly get into the threes this is an area where we would really want to get hyperfocused so when I look at all the opportunities here this is an area where I'm like okay this is code red this is code red we need to

fix this ASAP um and so another thing you can do is like if you if you want to confirm how important reputation is for SEO just go to the search quality evaluator guidelines and just search reputation okay now 213 times it's mentioned in here 213 a ton it matters a lot and so you cannot underestimate the how important this is it needs to be a top priority uh and it's not just for SEO like this is a there's a casing effect this is a domino a lead Domino because when you improve your reputation as a

brand you are actually going to drive more sales and you're probably going to get better SEO performance in general so like there's so many other benefits to doing this outside of SEO just a no-brainer okay so another thing you can do is to kind of like get some further analysis is you can actually once again use the Deep research function for this and what I did here is I said perform objective research about the brand and the goals to measure the Brand's reputation and use use customer feedback reviews or other ugc to improve the company's

standing as a whole okay and so I said yes to everything and you can see here it actually went and analyzed every single thing about this brand and gave us all kinds of feedback about certain things that they're you know not doing well certain things they are doing well um and then at the end of this it actually gives some actional opportunities to actually improve their performance okay so you know en enance communication and followup prioritize existing customers during Peak Times Like These are actual practical things where you can start to build systems to improve

these little areas of friction in the business and the better you do this the more that you know the the ultimate reviews and the reputation and the sentiment will improve okay and that's what has to happen so do this kind of analysis on your own brand um and this is the cool thing about chat gbt it's going to just give you the facts it's going to be the facts it's not going to be you know fluffed up by someone who's uh has a lot of conviction in your business it's going to be just raw the

AI doesn't care right so it's just going to give you the facts here based on what other people are saying about that brand and so a lot of people don't think about this when it comes to SEO but it really can affect your performance okay now for number 10 is does the page have enough highquality back links okay so this is really important you can get the other nine steps right and do really well and see great performance gains but backlinks are the fuel on the fire we need them not only to the domain as

a whole but also that individual page that we're trying to in increase in performance now you can you know a rising tide does lift All Ships and that certainly can happen but sometimes to get to number one you got to hit that page directly with you know a few backlinks not typically a lot but just kind of depends on the competition so you once again with the screaming frog crawl I already showed you you can just go and see how many back links this one page has and they don't have any okay so already a

gap that we can fulfill it doesn't even matter how many of the competitors have because if we have zero it doesn't even make a difference so we know we need to acquire links direct we know we need to build support around that page drive back links to the informational assets more more should go to informational assets than commercial assets but sometimes you do have to hit direct okay um and so what we want to do is first look at this and then inside a rankability if you click on the competitors tab you can actually run

the URL through and just see kind of where they stack up uh as far as the overall domain strength so domain score is just a metric we're using to determine the overall strength of these websites from a link profile perspective and so they're at a you know 257 which means they're in range with a lot of the competitors like there's a couple that are a one that's a little bit stronger but for the most part overall domain strength doesn't seem to be a problem here so we can go ahead and you know chalk you know

eliminate that as a possibility and we know that it's probably one of the other nine variables that we've tackled today and if if we tackle all those other nine variables to like perfectly we execute them perfectly then we know it's time to drive links directly to that page it's just a fact because you've you've you've taken you've done everything else right so that's what we want to be looking at and so the question is how do we get links so couple of ways number one uh is you can Outsource it and so one of the

vendors that I recommend uh is digital. PR and these links that they're going to get a really really strong like super strong links occasionally they can get links to internal pages but sometimes they're going to be to the homepage as well because these links are so strong it it will still lift the entire website okay because you can get a lot of homepage links and it will lift every other page and so and it's also natural to get links to your homepage so they'll use a variety of techniques different PR techniques to L you really

really strong links and you can see here a minimum of dr50 Okay so normally to get a link like this on your own you're going to have to spend you know $400 to $500 just to get one link and they're actually going to get you a pretty decent amount for this investment uh and you don't have to even lift a finger right they just do it for you so highly highly recommend them if you're playing on Outsourcing this is definitely the service you want to use uh so just go to digital. PR and in addition

to Outsourcing I also recommend developing your own manual kind of inhouse Link building processes um I teach all of this inside of C Chio Academy I mean it's almost excruciating detail 120 page sop right here just for creating link bait finding link prospects link building techniques the whole thing 120 pages of sop uh and it's very in-depth but one of the things I want to show you today is just a real simple technique you can use and because of the deep research function it's made life so much easier so you can basically just go ahead

and put in uh an sop so in this case I did donation link building and then I told to find donation link building opportunities okay and I just specifically focus on a few cities but in this case maybe we would focus on just AF to get to tap out all those opportunities and then you know with just uh 9 minutes it went and found a bunch of donation link opportunities okay like good ones and then I said give me even more opportunities and it found you know 20 more so you know this is I'm telling

you I I've done this research myself more times than I can count like actually going into Google and finding all the opport unities it is so timec consuming it really is and now we can just put the SOP in let the AI do the work and now we can move on to the next link building tactic we just keep building us and then you know now link prospecting could probably take about a day instead of taking like a week like sometimes it used to take okay so once again take advantage of this deep research function

because it's going to help you be able to find these prospects and even help you develop uh some Outreach strategies to acquire these as well so that's all I have for you today if you want more help from me with your SEO and you want to grow your business or grow your agency then go to nathang got.com we got a little survey here takes just a couple of seconds and it will give you personalized help into what's the best solution for your current situation but regardless just use this video I gave you today and you

will get better results just by using this one video but if you want to go to the next level you want to get results faster obviously reach out you know reach out and let's see if there's There's an opportunity to work together so once again thank you so much for watching and please like this video And subscribe because I got a lot of other videos coming soon thank you so much for watching