We start with plugins like Yoast and Smartcrawl. Yoast, for example, uses a traffic light metaphor, red, yellow (orange actually), and green to indicate how well your content measures up to google’s standards, but we’re not hung up on getting you to “green,” because it really doesn’t matter all that much.  There are a lot of good things about content analysis of this sort, it can help you organize your message more logically, it can help you tie in your focus keyword(s) and meta description, and by way of reminders, it can help you with headings and subheadings. But that’s about as far as it goes. If your content doesn’t show up as green after all that, it’s not a big deal. Rather than sacrificing your message for the sake of a green light, we will help you analyze your content in a way that your target audience will understand — and want more.

We use other plugins as needed, such as the SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant, which provides instant recommendations for content optimization based on the best-performing articles in the Google top-10.

Most SEO plugins are very good, some aren’t. We use only the most reliable ones. The best SEO plugins provide on-page optimization and the following useful features:

  • meta title
  • meta description
  • sitemaps
  • Open Graph metadata, especially useful for social media pages
  • adding content for RSS feeds, which protects you against content scraping. RSS feeds helps google know that you’re the originator of the content.
  • 301 redirect management. A 301 redirect makes sure a page that you’ve trashed, re-named and linked on another page is sent to the proper URL. Otherwise, you may get a “404” (page not found). Obviously, 404’s are bad for SEO.

Keep in mind that there are a lot of important things that SEO plugins don’t provide, including:

  • content quality. Yoast and others can help you organize your content, but if it begins to lose its punch as a result of their suggestions, you’ll need some word-smithing, and that’s where we’ll help. In addition to making your content sensible and engaging, we look at your site in comparison to other competitive or similar pages. SPI will help you with what we call “internal SEO,” sometimes referred to as “organic SEO,” i.e., helping you organize your content so that you can get the best possible listing on search results — without spending a lot of money.
  • domain authority, which describes a site’s relevance for a specific subject area or industry.
  • backlinks, which are a links websites get from other websites.
  • click-through rate. This one’s big. It’s the basic stuff of Google Ad Words (now Google Ads). Caveat: If you’re interested in setting up Google Ads we strongly suggest that you work with Google directly. There are far too many charlatans and rip-off artists on the web who’ll claim that they can get you to the top of the list, for a stiff fee. Don’t buy any of it.

We take full advantage of the best SEO plugins for your site. We also tailor content for domain authority, encourage backlinks, and with our analytics, we provide click-through rates, and more. But if you want to pay for ad space in search results, we suggest Google Ads.