How to improve SEO

Find your stage before you pick a task

Open Google Search Console and look at the Pages report and the Performance report. What you see there tells you which job is next. Writing new articles when your pages are not indexed does nothing. Building links when your titles do not match the query does very little.

The steps, in order

1. Confirm indexingSearch for your site with the site: operator and check the Pages report in Search Console. List every important page that is missing.
2. Fix what blocks crawling and speedLook for noindex tags left on after a redesign, robots.txt rules that block folders, redirect chains, broken internal links and slow mobile pages. Our technical SEO checklist covers each one.
3. Give each page one jobWrite down the search each page should win. If two pages target the same search, merge them. If a page targets three searches, split it.
4. Improve the page itselfAnswer the question in the first paragraph, show proof (photos, numbers, examples from your own work), and add what competitors leave out. Then fix the title, headings and meta description.
5. Connect pages with internal linksLink from strong pages to the pages you want to rank, using plain descriptive anchor text. This is the cheapest ranking lever most sites ignore.
6. Earn links and mentionsPublish something others want to cite, such as original data or a free tool. Ask suppliers, partners and local organizations that already know you.
7. Measure and repeatCheck impressions, clicks, average position and leads every month. Change one group of pages at a time so you can see what worked.

A worked example

Take an imaginary consulting firm with a 60-page site. Search Console shows 48 pages indexed, 12 'crawled, not indexed', and 9 pages sitting between position 11 and 20 for searches that match real services.

• Week 1: the 12 unindexed pages turn out to be near-copies of each other, one per suburb. Four are merged into stronger pages, the rest get a redirect.
• Week 2: the 9 near-miss pages get a rewritten opening, a comparison table, two internal links each from the homepage and the main service page.
• Weeks 3 and 4: titles are rewritten on the 6 pages that already rank in the top five but get few clicks.
• Week 5 onward: one useful resource is published and promoted to partners for links.

None of this needs a bigger budget. It needs someone to look at the data first and act in the right sequence. The numbers are an illustration, not a result from a Liftup client.

What to leave until later

• Hundreds of new blog posts before your core service pages rank.
• Schema markup on every page before the content is good. Add it where it helps, such as products, FAQs and local business details.
• Buying links. It is against Google's spam policies and the risk is yours.
• Chasing every score in a speed tool. Fix the issues real visitors feel on mobile.

Common mistakes

The most common mistake is changing many things at once and then not knowing what moved the numbers. The second is judging results after two weeks. Pages need time to be recrawled and reassessed, so give each change a month before you decide.

The third is optimizing for traffic instead of enquiries. A page that brings 500 visits from people who will never buy is worth less than one that brings 20 who will. Track form fills, calls and sales next to rankings.

If you would rather not run this yourself, an SEO audit turns the first two steps into a ranked task list. You get a fixed quote after a short call on the contact page.