My New Approach to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Hint… Google cannot read!
Can Google read? That is the question that made me change my mind about search engine optimization (SEO), and now I rank more keywords than ever before.
I’m not the best blogger in the world. I restarted my blog in November of 2021, when I had to change my domain name and start from zero.
Why did I do that?
The reason was that I used a black hat SEO tactic. Google penalized me and I never recovered from it.
So, I had to start my blog from zero, despite having fifty posts. I thought that with a new domain I would rank more keywords more quickly than before, but that wasn’t the reality.
In my mind I thought that Google didn’t like my content.
The reality was that my knowledge of SEO needed to be updated.
I was scrolling through YouTube on a Sunday trying to find a video to watch, when I saw this title: How to rank for more keywords using semantic terms and advanced interlinking.
While watching the video I heard Kyle Roof say: Google cannot read!
Wow! That was mind blowing for me. Ever since I started working in digital marketing, I’d believed that Google always preferred quality content for the top spots of a search.
Later in the video, Kyle says that Google’s algorithm is made of numbers. The algorithm is powerful, but it doesn’t judge value. That’s why you can write a good piece of content but not have it rank, and then say that Google didn’t like it.
I saw SEO in the same way as an SEO plugin
When we pick up an SEO plugin, it’s because someone has recommended it, or because it’s “THE” SEO plugin at that moment.
To be totally honest with you, the SEO plugin I use is Rank Math, and it was “THE” SEO plugin at the time I started my blog.
Because of that I started to follow all of its best SEO practices, like writing a post with more than 2500 words, writing the keyword multiple times in a post, or writing a title that has a positive or negative sentiment.
Don’t get me wrong, Rank Math is a good plugin and its advice is good, but I wasn’t ranking. Let me say this to you: An SEO plugin is just a tool that helps your SEO efforts, and its recommendations are based on the way its creators see SEO.
A New Approach to SEO
After watching Kyle’s video, I realized two things:
- Google cannot understand text; Google isn’t human.
- Besides writing good content, I have to write in an “SEO” way.
Google cannot understand text; Google isn’t human
According to Kyle, Google only looks for keywords and their variations in very specific parts of a page or a post.
To prove this, he and his team made a web page for the keyword Rhinoplasty Plano, with the content written in Lorem Ipsum, but the keywords to rank the site were in very specific parts of the page. Google ranked the site, and within one month the site was in first place.
He and his team did this with a mathematical approach that lets them know where to place the keywords.
With that, years and years of believing that only good content ranks crashed around me in a second, and I needed to know this new method.
Besides writing good content, I have to write in an “SEO” way
After watching the video, I now have one thing clear: 60% of the SEO in a page or post is done by writing the keyword in the URL, in the H1 (the title Google “sees”), in the title, in the subtitles, and in the body content.
I think we all agree that the majority of people do this; those are the key places for SEO.
But what does it mean to write in an SEO way? For me, now I just write naturally, knowing where to place the keywords and their variants.
Also, I never used to structure a post before writing it. I just had an idea for a post, looked for the keyword, sat down and started writing.
Now I follow a Roman numeral outline:
I The title of the page or post (H1)
A. First subheading (H2)
1. Paragraph text, lists, tables, etc.
B. Second subheading (H2)
1 . Paragraph text, list, tables, etc.
Why do I do this?
The answer is simple. Now I know that I have to place keywords that are related to the main keyword in the subheadings.
How to do this?
Easy, you just need to search for your main keyword and then look for the related searches.
For example, if I choose to write a post about this keyword: social media marketing for a small business, I have to check the related searches, looking for keywords that Google “recommends” in page one and two.
The related keywords are the ones in black. The best part is that Google itself shows these keywords!!
In this case, I would write these subheadings:
- How to promote a small business using social media?
- A free social media strategy you can use for your small business.
- The best case study to learn how to use social media for your business.
The best part of knowing how to use this “trick” is to click on every one of these related searches, and look for more related keywords.
Like I said before, Google shows what people search for and what keywords they are using.
Right now, you might be saying that it’s a lot of work, and the reality is that doing it “manually” takes a lot of time, but luckily there is a tool that does all the hard work for you, and it has its own API.
PageOptimizer Pro: the second tool you didn’t know you needed
PageOptimizer Pro (POP) is very simple. This tool tells you where to place the main keyword, the related words in your page or posts, and how many keywords you should write.
Two things I like about this tool are that:
- It analyzes the page or post you already have.
- If you haven’t built that page or written a post, you can also analyze just your keyword to find related ones.
You start doing an analysis by just writing your keyword.
This is the result after I analyzed one of my posts.
The tool gives you a score.
The report looks like this:
POP tells you which keywords to use in the search engine title, the page title, the subheadings and in the body of your page or post.
The goal is to have a score of at least 80.
Be aware that this tool is not a keyword research tool; it is a complement.
What this tool does, based on your main keywords, is it analyzes the search results of your keyword in Google, and tells you which words are making those pages appear in the top spots of a search.
It also tells you how many keywords you should write.
Why is this important?
At first this recommendation to write more words was odd to me, because I’d thought that 2500 words per post was the perfect number. In an online conference hosted by Kyle, I got the chance to ask a question: Why does the tool tell me to write more words?
His answer was the following: “Because the more words you write the more chances to rank on Google you have, and you will not depend on backlinks to rank your page or your blog”.
That makes sense. Your page or post has to rank with only on-page SEO, with your own efforts, and not rely on off-page SEO.
With this tool, I now know how many keywords I should write for every single post.
Search Engine Optimization is like a game … sort of
In the video, Kyle mentioned that in order to rank more easily you have to look for your natural tier. This was a new concept to me.
The concept was explained by Chris Carter in this post: Ranking With No Resources.
Chris says: “These tier levels are basically where Google trusts your site to be within. You have to master the level you are at first before jumping tiers”.
For example, if you are a new blogger like me and you rank a keyword in the top ten results, that keyword might give you eight visitors per month. That is your tier.
To find out how many clicks you have per month from Google, you need to have an account on Google Search Console.
This is the chart made by Chris:
I am in Level 0, that is my tier.
If you are not a new blogger, please follow Chris’ explanation below:
“So to find out where you are look at your daily Google organic traffic. Look at the bottom (weekends) and top (highest volume days) — get the range and the average.
Let’s use simple maths, let’s say on a good day in the last 3 months you get 100 visitors a day, on a bad day, Saturday, you get 20.
The range is therefore 20–100. Doing the numbers, the average is 75 visitors a day for the last 3 months, you know you are in the 50–100 range.
Google trusts your domain enough to send it 20–100 visitors a day — that’s your power.”
After watching Kyle’s video and reading Chris’ article, I knew I had to change the way I did keyword research.
Because I now see SEO as a game with levels.
How to do keyword research?
This is my personal approach to doing keyword research. If you know how to improve it, please let me know in the comments.
- Go to your favorite keyword research tool
- Type in your keyword
- Look for the words that come up green; these ones are easy to rank for your page or post.
- Now, look at the Search Volume and look for the amount of traffic according to your tier.
I tried this approach, and this was my starting point.
March 20
(I remember sending this picture to the lady who helps me with the backlinks of my blog, saying: We are ranking!)
This was what my search console looked like:
I looked through my blog for posts with keywords that had a search volume of 0 to 10…
April 4:
…and my blog started to rank keywords within my natural tier.
May 24:
And my search console looked like this:
I know there is still a lot of work to do, but with this new knowledge my impressions went up and I started to get organic clicks.
I started my blog in September of 2019, re-started my blog with a new domain name in November 2021, and now I am seeing results.
If you are a new blogger, or you have a hard time ranking your posts, do not give up. I wish I had this knowledge back then, but I kept learning and finally I can see a light at the end of the tunnel.
If you want to know more about SEO, you can read my article here: Search Engine Optimization Tutorial for Beginners.
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If you sign up to POP using this link, I’ll earn a small but AWESOME commission.
