Commonplace working procedures make your work sooner, simpler, and extra scalable. That is significantly true within the case of website positioning, the place a variety of the duties are easy and repeatable.
Issues like including meta tags, sustaining a correct URL construction, including inner hyperlinks, and optimizing your photographs are all simple to do… but in addition simple to neglect.
Recording website positioning duties in SOP paperwork means they’ll by no means be forgotten—and, as soon as documented, you may simply delegate these easy duties to others in your crew.
If you wish to develop your natural site visitors whereas working much less, you need website positioning SOPs.
Let’s dive into it.
At Ahrefs, our SOP for content material contains these eight steps:
- Create a house for the put up within the shared drive
- Fill in/replace the Notion card
- Assign the header illustration
- Write the content material define
- Write the draft
- Edit the draft
- Assign customized photographs and screenshot annotations
- Put together for modifying + add
After all, these eight steps are particular to our techniques and types. We use Google Drive and Notion to maintain monitor of every thing, have a header illustration for every article, and have a rigorous modifying course of to make sure high-quality content material.
Right here’s what that doc seems to be like:
As you may see, it’s a well-documented and easy-to-follow course of with examples and hyperlinks.
Inside this doc, we additionally hyperlink to our writing pointers SOP with much more detailed info on our precise writing course of.
This contains our model and writing pointers with precise examples…
… in addition to screenshots to point out, not simply inform.
And lastly, we’ve SOPs in place to cowl on-page website positioning, which incorporates the right way to correctly title photographs, add picture alt textual content, and set the metadata for every web page.
By creating these easy paperwork, you may make content material creation a lot simpler and faster.
2. Inner linking procedures
Inner linking is essential for rating extremely on Google. Each single web page in your website, except for maybe touchdown pages, ought to have inner hyperlinks. That is very true for weblog content material.
Your SOP can look one thing like this:
- You need to intention to incorporate a related inner hyperlink anytime it may profit the reader.
- Inner hyperlink anchor textual content must be related to the content material you’re writing about and the content material you’re linking to. For instance, DO hyperlink to “RV equipment” from “RV water pump patrons information.” DO NOT hyperlink to “van life builds” from “the right way to maintain your RV cool in the summertime.” Maintain it associated.
- Use Ahrefs’ Inner Hyperlink Alternatives software in Website Audit to do the work. Alternatively, you will discover inner hyperlinks by performing a Google seek for
website:[yoursitehere.com] “associated key phrase”to see all of the content material that accommodates that associated key phrase or phrase.
3. Picture optimization
Optimizing your photographs for Google (and for customers) is usually missed. Nonetheless, it’s simple to do and likewise vital if you wish to attain that coveted first web page.
There are three steps to making sure good picture optimization:
- Having a correct title that describes the picture (with out key phrase stuffing)
- Including alt textual content that describes the picture in a bit extra element for many who can’t obtain and consider the picture
- Utilizing the right file format and lowering the general information measurement of the picture for sooner load speeds
Comply with our information to picture website positioning for extra info.
4. E-mail outreach for hyperlink constructing
Hyperlink constructing is vital to website positioning technique—hyperlinks are one of the crucial vital Google rating components.
Whereas constructing backlinks isn’t precisely simple, it does contain a variety of repeatable steps. This makes it an ideal SOP activity. Actually, you’ll in all probability need a number of SOPs—one for every hyperlink constructing technique, together with:
Every of those procedures is completely different. So both flip your present course of right into a doc or observe one of many linked guides above and create a doc for it.
5. Monitoring your rankings and making updates
Lastly, we’ve one thing nearly all SEOs love: watching your rankings go up (hopefully).
Whereas it’s simple sufficient to spontaneously examine your Ahrefs account or Google Search Console account to see whether or not or not your rankings are shifting out of your efforts, there’s a greater method.
It nonetheless entails checking your Ahrefs account. However as a substitute of doing it with random pleasure like a child in a sweet retailer, you employ a methodical method that tracks your modifications and their results. In spite of everything, a variety of website positioning is trial and error.
First, in the event you haven’t already, join Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker. Our studies will present you your rating modifications over time with visualized information by means of charts and competitor studies.
You may monitor particular key phrases and pages over time as nicely:
After getting your account, you may make an SOP to examine these on a day by day, weekly, or month-to-month foundation. Maintain monitor of any modifications you make to your pages, resembling metadata, including or altering content material, enhancing your inner hyperlinks, and so forth. Then doc how these modifications affect your rankings over time.
By making a behavior of performing website positioning checks like these and monitoring the consequences, you may see what works and what doesn’t—then scale up what works and cease losing time on what doesn’t.
Remaining ideas
By documenting your website positioning processes within the type of SOPs, you may extra simply scale up your online business and rent others to carry out the simpler duties.
If you need your online business (and your natural site visitors) to develop, having SOPs is among the surest methods to do it. Study what works, doc the method, and scale it up. These 5 website positioning duties are just the start—you may have an SOP for each repeatable activity in your online business.