This post was sponsored by Cocolyze. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
SEO is all about priorities and figuring out what to do first.
When it comes to the various facets of a successful SEO strategy, consultants, experts, and tool companies often have different approaches and priorities.
Their recommendations will depend on their expertise and business.
Technical tool companies will tell you technical SEO should be done first.
Content writers will say “Content is king, so it comes first…”
You have all of these competing interests and priorities, but one thing is for sure – you don’t want to miss a step.
Successful SEO is a result of finding what works then applying it, again and again, to keep improving rankings and driving quality traffic.
That’s why we created the MAAC framework at Cocolyze.
MAAC stands for:
- Market
- Appeal
- Accessibility
- Content
It’s a structured method you can use to ensure you’re taking advantage of all of the SEO opportunities available to you, without forgetting anything.
A Reliable SEO Framework That Really Works
SEO is a combination of technical optimization and creative marketing. You can’t do just one.
Imagine how frustrating it is for the technical team to see creatives writing content on non-indexable pages!
Similarly, it does SEO as a whole no good to have thin, irrelevant content publishing on the most technically proficient site.
Following Cocolyze’s SEO framework will help you combine your marketing and technical efforts, plus your assets, so everything is working harmoniously together.
Step 1. Market
Start with keywords to avoid missing out on ranking opportunities.
Identify the keywords on which you’re already ranking. Using an SEO tool makes this quick work:
Next, you need to identify which keywords your competitors are ranking for.
Finally, organize the suggested keywords around a theme. Cocolyze retrieves the related searches from Google and classifies the keywords by their potential and theme.
Select Relevant Keywords
Targeting thousands of keywords is not always necessary. Or smart.
A relevant keyword is one for which you can create original content — that is, content that really meets the users’ needs.
Searchers are looking for a precise answer to each query. You can’t just get ranked on a keyword if your content doesn’t provide the user with an answer.
For example, a luxury brand cannot rank for the keyword “cheap clothes”. And why would it want to?
If you intend to get ranked on a specific keyword, look at the content proposed by the websites that are already ranked on that keyword. This helps you identify what exactly the users are looking for when they search for that particular keyword.
Even if you have content that may meet the users’ needs, you may discard the keywords for which you do not have original content to propose.
Identify All Your Real Competitors
Your SEO competitors aren’t necessarily your direct business competitors.
You can easily discover your main SEO competitors by analyzing which webpages are best ranked on the keywords you have targeted.
Tools You Should Use
To find relevant keywords and identify real competitors you can use Cocolyze’s:
Step 2. Appeal
Create “Click Appeal” in the SERPs.
You have one chance to make a good impression on a user in the SERPs. You do that by providing a click-worthy page title and optimizing for rich results.
Using an advanced rank tracking report can reveal rich results available on your keywords used by your competitors that are not used on your website.
Optimize for User Experience
Even if you provide high-quality, relevant content, visitors may quickly leave your website before they ever consume it.
Why?
Popups, permissions, notifications, layout shift, or other visual comfort criteria are among the biggest culprits.
Tools You Should Use
To boost your SEO appeal you can use Cocolyze’s:
Step 3. Accessibility
You can prevent indexing and crawling issues on your website by making sure it is “bot-friendly.” Optimize sitemaps, www, and HTTPS redirects, set up canonical URLs, and verify internal broken links.
Optimize for Page Speed
Page speed is one of the hardest parts of SEO.
You need to check for server-side issues that cause a long server response time and slow page loading.
A deep analysis of your page performance is required to find the most critical issues.
Make Your Pages Mobile-Friendly
Be sure that every page of your website is 100% responsive.
Check for long scroll and horizontal scroll issues.
You can use a site scan/crawler tool to check all your pages at once.
Prevent Duplicate Content
This can be a technical issue, a content issue, or both.
Having duplicate content, or even nearly duplicate content, can make it difficult for Google to figure out which page to rank for a certain keyword.
You don’t want Google or any other search engine to decide this for you! Your rankings, traffic, and conversions can suffer as a result.
Technical issues can make a page accessible from multiple URLs.
Check that each page has a valid and unique canonical URL and then verify if the pages have similar content.
Tools You Should Use
To optimize technical elements of your website you can use Cocolyze’s:
- Site Scan: A crawler designed for SEO, including JavaScript rendering.
- Page analysis: When working on a specific page (e.g., a product page or landing page), you can use a page analysis tool to work on the optimization of on-page aspects.
Step 4. Content
Optimized content is:
- Useful for, or helpful to, your target audience/market.
- Keyword targeted.
- Comprehensive.
- Accurate, reliable, and up-to-date.
- Nailing all the on-page SEO essentials (e.g., title tag, meta description, heading tags).
The length of content, and the keywords to be optimized, can be determined by analyzing the top-ranking pages for a given keyword.
Your top 20 competitors are automatically analyzed in one click using the Cocolyze Writing Tool.
The quality of the content is measured by the Writing Score based on keyword repetition and keyword usage, which helps prevent keyword stuffing.
Heading tags used to be used as ranking factors. Today, Google uses them to understand the content on the page.
Your H1-H6 tags as the structure of your post. Your H1 is your main idea or topic. H2 is a subtopic.
And any heading tags beyond that should be subsections relating to your H2.
So use these tags in a way that leads your visitors (and search engines) from point A to B to C.
Get Backlinks
Any backlink can help you. But it’s generally better to get backlinks from several referring domains than a single domain.
There are two main difficulties in optimizing backlinks:
- Getting new referring domains: An easy way to get backlink ideas is to compare your competitors’ backlinks and extract backlinks in common.
- Cleaning up your backlink profile: Disavow toxic links and check if all your backlinks are relevant to your business.
Tools You Should Use
Improve the optimization of your content and your backlinks with Cocolyze’s:
What’s Unique About Cocolyze’s Method & Tools?
Cocolyze is the only affordable SEO solution that will enable you to develop all phases of the MAAC framework.
Different from other SEO tools available in the market, Cocolyze is an action-oriented tool focused on results and return on investment – and all of this with a user-friendly interface.
This is a limited-time offer that includes the Essential Plan of $49.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Image by Cocolyze. Used with permission.
In-Post Photos: Images by Cocolyze. Used with permission.
