As SEOs we all know we want to rank for some particular keywords or topics and usually we know what to do in terms of netlinking like the back of our hands. But when it comes to internal linking and on-page optimisations it’s often hard to perfectly know what to do.
That’s why you need a SEO masterplan. Here is a step-by-step guide to build the most efficient onsite SEO masterplan from Content marketing to Technical SEO
Spot your different types of content and get a perfect understanding of your content distribution
Are you sure you perfectly know your website? If you don’t use a crawler nor a log file analyzer, you might just be guessing instead of knowing. So the first thing to do is to get a complete overview of how your content is organized within your website. You can start to launch a crawl to get all pages available through your internal linking structure. This way you get a rough idea of your website architecture:
That’s nice, but definitely not enough to take decisions. That’s why we have built a mapper you can use to categorize your pages by group.
This can lead you to a more comprehensive view of your content because you will be able to enrich all the dataviz available in Oncrawl as well as to enable custom filters for any report. With a proper configuration of your page groups, you can quickly check which kind of pages are the most numerous and how your content is organized within your website.
You should care about the content distribution because all contents are not created equal. You have to make the right choice in terms of content distribution: put your “money pages” close to your home in terms of depth level and put your thin / not valuable content at deeper levels. In the above case,you clearly have a guy whose made a good work in organizing his web pages. The main question is: does it meet the business strategy? Think about the product pages, the top brands you want to sell, and thus make them rank well. You should ask yourself if they have the place they deserve on your website.
That is why you need to integrate your business goals as params of your SEO roadmap
I highly suggest you to start segmenting your content in three categories:
- Top third / highly valuable pages: these are the pages on top of your priority list. They can be popular products or brand pages if you are an e-commerce vendor, or the pages presenting Awarded Actors, and movies if you are IMDB. In most cases, these pages are trying to rank on very competitive keywords.
- Secondary pages: this group corresponds to secondary topics if you are a publisher, product pages you have a low conversion rate, or thin revenues.
- The rest: these are pages matching uncompetitive keywords, or pages with thin / not valuable content.
Once you’ve done that, add a more comprehensive layer to filter your data by grouping pages by categories (product, listings, brands, FAQ,… for instance). This way you’ll be able to zoom in efficiently into your data.
Check your active pages
Now that your categorization is all set, you can pay attention to your active pages. An active page is a page receiving organic traffic. At Oncrawl we love to ease your life, so that’s why we went with a pattern identifier that helps you understand what are the common metrics of your active pages. You have it when connecting your Google Analytics account.
For each group of pages, or a page alone you will be able to determine what are the ideal metrics to reach to make them rank: number of words, Inrank, number of inlinks, loading time…
The most important thing to do next is to evaluate your resources:size and team skills, budget, external ressources (agencies, tools,…). Now you should be able to write down your roadmap with reliable data and of course “Quick wins” to start improving your SEO performance.
