The single most important rule
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[00:00:00] Hi everyone. It's Olga Zarr from SEOSLY. Today I want to talk about something that I think is quite fundamental and very important, and if you don't understand this basic rule, because this is what I'm going to talk about, is a very basic, very fundamental SEO rule. If you are an advanced SEO, you probably know that very well, but if you aren't or if you are only starting out, If you don't understand that rule, and if you don't apply it in your SEO, you will never ever be successful.
[00:00:37] So I came, to realize that many people don't understand that when I started to work at SEO agencies and, one of the SEO agencies I was helping, I was like cooperating with, they had a lot of clients. And, the thing, the problem they had was that their clients weren't like ranking for anything.
[00:01:02] They had like clients with big budgets, but these were mostly like local SEO clients, but they weren't ranking, they were doing everything they, they thought they're doing correctly. They were publishing new articles, like I think every week, a couple of, times per week. They had content.
[00:01:22] They had great design. Of course, I don't think they, that great design is necessary for SEO, but on the servers it looked like they were doing everything okay, but their sites weren't ranking. They had like one, two. Daily visits from GSC for some random keywords, so was the SEO rule they were not aware of, and this was like basically their entire business was built upon that, because in addition to like having history of being an SEO director or s e o expert at agencies, I, I'm also.
[00:02:01] From time to time hired to kind of take a look at what the agency is doing and why they aren't successful. And it was one of those cases, so the thing they were doing wrong was that on the premise kind of. I don't know how, how it came to be, but that doesn't matter. , this was like a relatively small agency.
[00:02:23] I think they had like 10, 15 people maybe. But everyone was doing it wrong. So the thing they, they thought, , that should be done in SEO was that let's say they wanted to their clients to rank for, for like their top keywords, let's say this was like a dentist, and they knew that the top keyword for that dentist is, for example, I don't know, the best dentist in Los Angeles.
[00:02:54] Dentist in Los Angeles. Los Angeles dentist, something like that. Let's say They identified like five top keywords that are the best for, for that business. And they wanted the site to rank, obviously rank for those keywords and what they were doing. I was really astonished when I saw, what they're actually doing.
[00:03:13] They thought that they will simply optimize like. The entire sites for those like five keywords and if like they mentioned dentist in Los Angeles on every page, on every block post, that has to happen that the site will start drinking for dentist in Los Angeles. Right. That seems. That doesn't seem logical, but that was their logic.
[00:03:37] There strategy was that the homepage of course is optimized for dentist in Los Angeles. They also had blog. they were writing some relatively short blog posts, but I cannot say they weren't useful because they had some substance, to that.
[00:03:57] But they weren't written based on any keywords. Research. There was like one marketing, uh, . She was a copyright and marketing person and she was simply like thinking, okay, so what are some of the things we can write to this month? And she was like, out of their heads selecting the topics, which I cannot say they weren't interesting, but this was like coming from her head.
[00:04:21] And each of those articles was of course optimized for dentist . In Los Angeles and stuff like that. The result of that was like tragic. The site, some of their sites like. 1 of the sites I think even had like 2000 something pages overall when I was like auditing it and around one one 1,500 doesn't matter, blog posts and basically none of those blog posts was ranking for anything that made sense.
[00:04:54] Some, some ranked very highly, but for like totally random, irrelevant keywords that weren't driving business to the site in any way. Totally. So, This was like totally such a huge waste of time and money producing this content that doesn't do anything. And on top of that, they had a lot of, of course, technical SEO issues, that were preventing even Google from understanding what they want to write about.
[00:05:20] But since on the, like this fundamental level they were. Their optimization was totally wrong. Google couldn't like figure out what they should be ranked for, and the result was they didn't rank for anything so. The, the fundamental rule they were kind of contradicting here is of course, that they thought we need those five words.
[00:05:42] So we optimized the entire site for those five words. And this never, never works the way to do s e o, uh, and the way, the fundamental way to do s e o is. Is you need to think about pages and each page is a different topic. Subtopic. It can be a broader, broader topic. It can be a more narrow topic. This is like up to you and up to your SEO experience to decide like what's the breadth, what's the depth , of the topic you want to, cover in a specific page.
[00:06:12] But the most important thing is that one page is one topic, one set of keywords. Very similar, one you can even think about. One page, one keyword, keyword meaning topic. And of course this includes like similar keywords. , like I don't want you to kind of think about just keywords because we have entities.
[00:06:33] We have semantic, s e o. This is not just keywords, but that, let's stick to that, to make it easier for you to understand. So you have homepage. Homepage is a page on your site, and this should be targeted at one specific topic. So let's say one specific keyword. So let's stick to this dentist, dentist example.
[00:06:52] So you want to rank the homepage for dentist in Los Angeles, and you only optimize homepage for that keyword. Then you have, for example , service pages or like treatments. And then you do keyword research for how people refer to those specific treatments that the site is, offering.
[00:07:15] And you optimize each and every, service treatment page for that keyword, for that topic. And then you can, you have a, you stand your chance of ranking. The home page for that. let's say this main topic for ranking specific individual pages, service pages for those specific topics. And then of course, there is blog.
[00:07:35] And blog is like, can be a huge like addition. It is, I think in most cases, fundamental for those service pages, those treatment pages to help them . So the way I like to do it is, for example, , the dentist page, we have, you have like four types of treatments.
[00:07:53] You have those four, service pages, and you can also add four categories on the blog, which corresponds to those different types of treatment. Of course, you don't want, , the categories to cannibalize with treatments. , You can ensure that they're not cannibalizing, but I usually suggest one treatment page, one category page, and that's relates to that treatment.
[00:08:19] And in that category page, you explore, you talk about different, you publish different articles that talk about that specific treatment, answer people's questions, ag, and again, the same, you want each blog post. To be optimized for one specific keyword, one specific topic that is a subtopic of that treatment.
[00:08:40] Like how do I, what should I talking about like thinking about, Google search generative experience, . You may also like think more about, adding those question topics, which is fine. A lot of those question topics have a lot of surge volume and can really drive you a lot of traffic, so you can definitely use them, but again, you have to stick to the rule one topic.
[00:09:03] One keyword, one page one, one post, one, service page, depending on, the type of site and what want to rank for. And once you have, let's say, 20 high quality articles that talk about the specific like treatment from different angles, comparisons, whatever.
[00:09:24] Then it's usually a good idea to interlink them with one another using like keyword reach. Anchor text because you don't want to link them through, read more, learn more. And of course, from those blog posts, it is usually a great idea to link back to this service page. You want to elevate at the same.
[00:09:46] The same is true for location pages if your client has multiple locations in multiple cities, you can create different location pages, but don't. Don't create them in the way that you simply copy the entire content, the same content on all of them and just change the city. This won't work, but I am moving away from the main topic. So summing up, when you are like auditing the site, creating a new site, you need to do thorough keyword research. You have to have the list of all the URLs, the raw order will be creating, and you have to map a specific. You are a specific keyword to each url, keyword, keywords, topic, and then based on that, create the site or optimize the site.
[00:10:31] And rem always remember that. , you should interlink any topics so that are related because this will really boost your topical kind of relevance authority, topical authority. And never think about one keyword for the entire site. One page, one keyword, one topic. And if you stick that to that rule, you will be successful.
[00:10:54] But of course there are, like, there is just more to that to, to it than just making sure you map one keyword to a page. Of course there is on pages you, there are a lot of things you can do to really. Show Google that. This is the topic of this page, but this is like for another video. If you stick to that one fundamental rule you will be lying.
[00:11:15] the grounds for a successful SEO strategy, for being successful in seo and. In many cases, it should be you who determines what type of keyword you want to rank for. Sometimes you can do it, you can do it in different ways. One, one more example. For example, you inherit a site.
[00:11:34] You don't really know what, what was done. And you somehow have to match those keywords to pages because without having that spreadsheet with matched ros to keywords, you will be like walking blind. So that's kind of the fundamental thing you should do whenever you start a new site whenever you land a new client and you are creating an SEO strategy for them.
[00:11:57] But let's say you, you have a client, new clients, and you want to do that mapping. So usually you want to do keyword to research, you want to do some mapping on your own, thinking about what keywords they should be ranked for. But there's a huge chance that there are already ranking for some keywords, so you also need to do like thorough analysis of what they are ranking for currently.
[00:12:24] And there is a huge chance, maybe not huge, but there is a chance that some of their pages are actually ranking for some keywords that are worth, that are really like worth for them doing, that are, that have high volume, that they can really, that can really drive business for them. And your task is to identify those keywords.
[00:12:45] If those keywords are, like, for example, on the top of page one. Page two, three. You may think that, okay, so this is the keyword I want to map for that page. And then of course there is a bunch of things you can do to increase the rankings for that keyword. There's like , a whole ton of things you can do.
[00:13:04] Anyway, summing up. SEO fun. The fundamental rule of SEO is to have keywords. Topics you want to rank and have them maps to pages. You want to rank for those topics.
[00:13:18] Of course, when time goes things change. you may be adjusting that list. You may be changing some focus of some pages if you see that they're stuck or you will be coming up with new ways of elevating those pages. Okay, so that's it. , I thought. That would be a short rent, but it turned out as always a bit longer.
[00:13:37] That's all for today. I hope you learned a lot from this video and see you in the next one. Bye-bye.