How to do SEO: 11+ practical SEO examples for 2021 (2023)

The internet is teeming with SEO content.

You can read SEO articles for weeks and still only scratch the surface.

And at the end of the day, you might still have implementation issues – take all that theory and put it to work to get results for your business or blog.

Therefore, in this article we are going to address it.11 practical examples of SEOthat you can implement immediately.

Read to learn:

• How HubSpot Drives Over 5 Million Organic Traffic a Month With SEO
• How Backlinko uses the Skyscraper technique to build 100+ backlinks per post
• How NinjaOutreach used links to increase organic traffic by 40%

And more!

So let's start.

How do you do SEO?

SEO is a process.

Some people in our industry like to glorify it and claim to have some kind of "secret recipe". Others promote myopic "tricks" for growth.

But at the end of the day, successful SEO means following the same process day after day. It is a long-term investment. And it usually involves the same steps every time.

Shortcuts and tricks may work for a short time, but if you want to see serious results in the long run, you'll need to put in some effort.

The exact SEO process you need to follow to get 100,000+ monthly organic traffic is as follows:

1. Define your SEO and content strategy.Diving into keyword research and content creation before setting your strategy can be expensive. It can leave you disorganized and dragging you down the street. Make sure you have a clear understanding of your goals, objectives, and processes.
2. Make sure your website is technically optimized. Google needs to be able to easily crawl and index your pages if you want to rank. Implement technical SEO best practices to ensure this is the case.
3. Do keyword research. Keyword research is at the heart of your SEO process and can make or break your results. Decide which threads you will useReliable SEO Softwareto find precise dates and then prioritize your top keywords.
4. Create quality content.Once you have your target keywords well defined, start creating content for your highest priority keywords. Decide how to approach each keyword, hire great writers, and provide them with detailed outlines.
5. Optimize your content with on-page best practices.On-page optimization tactics make your site's topic and keywords clear to search engines. You can use tools likeYeastoRangMathto help it correct its on-page optimization.
6. Gana backlinks a tu sitio web.Backlinks (links from other sites pointing to yours) can really set your site apart and help you rank for even the most competitive keywords. Some of our favorite strategies include the skyscraper technique (we'll cover a great example of this below), building broken links, and creating link magnet content.
7. Take advantage of internal links. Internal links (links between pages on your site) help distribute link equity on your site and can help search engines better crawl your pages. Ninja Outreach increased their organic traffic by 40% simply by optimizing internal links.
8. Maximize your click rates.Reaching high rankings is only half the battle. The other half get users to click through to your pages. The biggest factor that affects CTR is your titles (the title tags that appear in search results). Write compelling, actionable and unique headlines and always monitor your CTRs.

We will now cover each step in this process, explaining what they entail and giving real life examples.

11 SEO Examples (for 2021)

#1. Example of SEO and Content Strategy

Clarifying your SEO and content strategy up front is critical to your success.

It all starts with attitude.clear goals and indicatorsso you can measure your progress.

Once you have clear goals, you need to determine whatthemes and keywordsYou will point out how the competition is and your plan of attack.

then comesContent.Set clear goals for how often you post and how much content you want to post each month. A good goal is between 10,000 and 30,000 words per month. This will ensure that you capitalize on your keyword opportunities and engage your audience on a regular basis.

After setting content goals, you shouldThoseSEO copywriters. Control how many writers you hire, where to find them, and how to manage them.

Finally, you need a plan forlink building. Maximize your time by defining your strategy up front (we'll look at a great example of effective link building later).

If you're looking for a great example of SEO strategy implementation, look no further than the inbound marketing giant.hubspot.

They established a clear SEO strategy early on in their rise and committed to one that ranked for over a million keywords and drew over five million search users to their site each month.

Of course, they adopted a content marketing strategy early on, first choosing topics that were relevant to their product and audience.

On each topic, they cover a ton of quality content, from broad top-of-funnel questions like "What's selling?" to hyper-specific questions like “How do I upload a large video file” and “Brands customizing”. So.”

They established and implemented a content and SEO strategy. There was no haphazard launch here, and its annual sales of $400 million prove it.

#two. Competitive Spy SEO Example

Competitive analysis is a crucial element of successful SEO and content marketing for two reasons:

1. You have to know what you're getting yourself into.It can be hard to break out of super competitive niches. Learn about the big players in the industry, what kind of content they put out, and how you can set yourself apart.
2. You can use the knowledge of your competitors to define your own strategy.Many of your competitors are much further along in their SEO journey than you are, so it would be naive not to look at what works for them.

We do not encourage you to copy their content, just learn from their strategy. A competitor with high rankings and traffic has clearly done something right. Find out what they explored and take advantage of it.

To do this, navigate to "Organic Search".SEMRushor "Organic keywords" inAhrefsand connect to a competitor to identify all your ranking keywords. If you don't use any of these paid tools, you can get similar informationUbersuggest Competition Reports.

Then analyze the main keywords of the competition and extract those that are relevant to your business.

#3. keyword search example

Keyword research is the foundation of your SEO efforts.

If you're looking for keywords that are very competitive or don't have search volume, you can post whatever you want, but the traffic may not follow you.

Instead, you need to target the relevant keywords that your audience is searching for and make sure they are realistic to rank for.

To make this as practical as possible, here are the exact steps we at Apollo Digital take to conduct keyword research.

first we goCreate our keyword list.

There are many tactics we use to get great keyword ideas. These are the two we trust the most:

• Get information from your competitors.We discussed this above. The gist of it is that you use tools to find out how your top competitors rank. Then analyze your rankings and extract relevant keywords for your own efforts.
• Using keyword idea tools. SEMRush, Ahrefs, and Ubersuggest all have features that will generate keyword ideas for you. Just enter a topic you want to cover or a seed keyword and get hundreds of ideas. Eliminate the most relevant ones from your list.

Once you have your list,Organize and prioritize our keywords.Make sure you have search volume and competitor data in your list. Depending on the tool you use, you will have a different metric. Ubersuggest is SEO difficulty, while SEMRush uses keyword difficulty.

Then prioritize each keyword as follows.

• Maximum priority:Our high priority keywords are those with the highest search volume and lowest competition (pages ranking for these keywords have low backlink counts). We want to create content for them as quickly as possible.
• Medium priority:Keywords with slightly lower search volume and some competition are medium priority keywords.
• Low priority:And those who have decent search volume and high competition or lower search volume have the lowest priority. We want to address them anyway, but they're not as important as the other two categories.

After following these steps, you should have a good keyword research worksheet to help you create content.

Want to see what this looks like in practice? You can checkour own keyword research worksheet here.

#4. Example of on-page SEO

On-page optimization isn't the most attractive SEO tactic, but it's a must if you want to see serious traffic.

On-page best practices include:

• Placing your target keyword in your URL (if possible)
• Use your target keyword in your title tag
• Incorporate your target keyword in your meta description
• Use your target keyword in your H1 title
• Incorporate target keywords in other H2 and H3 headlines
• Use target keywords and semantically related phrases throughout your text
• Image optimization with ALT text
• … is much more

Fortunately, you don't have to memorize all the best practices and pull them out of memory every time you post content.

There are some great plugins on the market that can help you quickly.RangMath, for example, provides information on the page directly on the WordPress site that you want to optimize.

Just install it, enter your page's target keyword and get your SEO recommendations.

If you don't use WordPress, Moz is greatValidator on the pagewhich gives you a score and suggestions based on your URL.

We recommend optimizing all of your content as it's published, but also reviewing your pages regularly.

A good example of on-page optimization in action comes from the Wall Street Oasis online financial community. They reviewed its content and found opportunities for improvement on the site. They made some changes to most of their pages:

• Expand content and use subtitles
• Optimizing your H1 titles for your target keyword
• Add an image or video to each page

These subtle tweaks to the page resulted in a 32% increase in organic traffic. you can read about themfull case study here.

#5. seo technical example

Technical SEO is another crucial (but often overlooked) aspect of SEO.

There are a number of technical aspects of SEO that you should be familiar with:

• robots.txt:Your robots.txt file tells search engines how to crawl your site. You don't necessarily have to have one, but if you do, you should make sure it's set up correctly to avoid ignoring large parts of your site. Learn more about robots.txt and find some examples therePosted by moz.
• Sitemaps:The best practice is to generate a sitemap and submit it to search engines to optimize crawling. You can generate a sitemap using tools like Yoast orXML sitemapsand send to GoogleGoogle search console.
• Site architecture:The way your site is structured has a huge impact on crawling. In short, the sites closest to your home page are more likely to be crawled regularly. Make sure your highest priority pages are a click or two away from your home page.
• Website Speed:We'll talk more about site speed in the next section, but simply put, pages that load slowly suffer in search results.
• Outline Markup:Schema markup helps search engines better understand your site. It can also be used to display rich snippets alongside search results. You can use Schema markup to tell Google what type of business you are, display reviews of specific products in results, and display FAQs in SERPs.

Brian Dean describes a great example of technical SEO in his articleguide. Bill Widmer of The Wandering RV blog saw an opportunity to beat the competition with schematic markup.

Its RV insurance pages have faced serious competition like Geico and Progressive. To keep up, he decided to implement FAQ schema markup (this google articleit will help you learn the basics of implementation, but you may need to involve a developer), making it an advanced snippet for the FAQ.

This technical optimization produced an easy15% more organic traffic to this page.

#6. SEO Site Speed ​​Example

We briefly mentioned page speed in our technical SEO section, but it's so important it deserves an example of its own.

A slow-loading website not only hurts the user experience, but it can also hurt your rankings. Google posted acore updatein 2018 makes page speed a major ranking factor.

Page speed can be a bit complex, but some of the most important aspects areFirst color satisfied (FCP) (which refers to the first time a user sees some content on the page) andinteractive time(which refers to the first time a user can interact with your page).

The best resource for checking your website speed isGoogle Page Speed ​​Insights. They provide an overall score for desktop and mobile, break down some key metrics, and provide some suggestions for improvement.

Our Apollo team made some big speed improvements to our site not too long ago.

Here are some of the biggest areas where we made improvements and how we did it:

• Image size and compression.Huge file sizes are one of the biggest roadblocks to page speed. Large images are not only slow to load, but often need to be resized using CSS or JavaScript. Loading images in the exact space they occupy and compressing their size can provide big speed improvements. If you use WordPress,WPSmushis a fantastic plugin that compresses your images as you upload them. If you don't use WordPress,TinyPNGis a great option for image compression.
• Resources are loaded too soon.Images or assets at the bottom of the page that load at the same time as the assets in the initial preview window can cause slow load times. You can solve this with lazy loading, which means that the displayed resources are loaded first and the ones below wait. There are several ways to achieve this. Our preferred method is viaWP Racket, another great WordPress plugin that helps with website speed. After installation, you need to enable lazy loading option in settings.
• Large JS, CSS and HTML files.If you're using any type of template or design for your website, chances are you'll have to load a lot of large files on each page. Shrinking these files can save a lot of disk space and page load time.WP Racketit's our tool of choice for that too. After installation, just check if you want to minimize these files.

So the good news is that even if you don't fully understand all aspects of site speed, you can see big improvements by installing a few plugins and configuring a few settings.

#7. SEO Content Creation Example

Don't take content creation lightly.

Many SEOs crush keyword research, have a great plan, optimize their site, but write really bad content. Bad content occasionally appears on the front page, but it rarely stays there.

dedicate yourself to createquality SEO contentWorth the effort.

Here are some tips for creating impactful SEO content:

Tip #1. Use Outlines

Whether you write it yourself or outsource it to an author, outlines are essential to creating quality content. Outlines provide guidance, direction, and keep you (or your writer) from getting off track. Include which keywords to target, headings, context for each section, and examples of similar pieces.

Tip #2. Write to your user

This is basic information, but a good tip to make sure you're focused on your user is to visitTo quote. Search for the topic you are covering and find the most frequently asked questions. Mention these questions in your article and provide an answer.

Alternatively, you can also rely on Google's "People Also Ask" panel.

But writing for your users isn't just about answering their questions. It also means:

• Give relevant examples
• Write in a way that grabs their attention.
• Use useful and attractive images
• Design and organize the content well.

Assemble content you would read every word of.

Tip #3. Include semantically related keywords

Using your target keyword throughout your content is great, but go a step further by using related keywords. You'll want to find other phrases and terms that Google associates with the topic you're covering.

Wikipedia is a decent source for finding related topics and terms, but you can also check out Google's auto-suggestions for more ideas.

So if you're writing an email marketing guide, you might want to include "email marketing tools," "email marketing strategy," and "how to email marketing."

One of our best performing content and a great example of quality SEO content is our.

It got 11,000 page views in the first month and is still driving traffic. And more than traffic, that's what drove itLeads and Profits (over $50,000 so far)!

This game turned out very well for several reasons.

first iscomplete, with more than 14,000 words. But its length is not what makes it great. It's great because it covers just about every facet of SaaS marketing you'd want to know about.

Second, is it reallywell designed and user oriented. In fact, the user can choose what types of samples he wants to see.

Third, it includes more than 40Relevant examples and case studies. It's not full of gossip, but full of useful and practical strategies for readers to emulate.

Is the blog post unranked?

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#8. SEO landing page example

Some target keywords don't work as blog content. If the intent behind the search is to buy a product or service, you need a landing page instead of a blog post.

For example, if you run workflow management software, the search term "how to manage my team effectively" would make more sense as an educational blog post. But "workflow management software" has a little more purchase intent and makes a lot more sense as a landing page.

Great SEO landing pages have a few things in common:

• They are well optimized for search engines.It goes without saying, but don't neglect on-page optimization for your landing pages. Use RankMath or Yoast to make sure you are targeting your keyword in the best possible way.
• They convert users.If someone searches for a keyword like "workflow management software," chances are they're pretty far along in the buyer's journey. Do not miss the opportunity to convert them.

Shopify gives us a great example of great SEO landing pages. Shopify is an SEO first eCommerce website platform.

Shopify ranks second for the keyword "online store," which generates more than 22,000 searches a month.

Your landing page does a great job of targeting the keyword and writing it in a way that converts users.

It targets the online store keyword to help with page ranking and encourage users to convert. To ensure conversions, the site also offers plenty of opportunities to start a free trial.

The site is also comprehensive, covering many of its features and giving users many ways to learn more about each feature.

#9. Link building example

Link building is often the factor that leads to significant growth in organic traffic.

Search engines rely on backlinks to measure a website's authority, experience, and trustworthiness.

While it is possible to rank well without link building, it can definitely speed up the process.

SEOs have long believed that backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors, according to a recent study.eric engeshows that there is still a direct correlation between ranking and relevant backlinks.

But how do you build backlinks?

Backlinko's Brian Dean coined the term "skyscraper technique" a few years back. This is a popular link building technique that (when done right) has a proven track record.

Here is the technique:

• Determine your topic and keywords
• Search the latest ranking results
• Create much better content
• Promote content and do public relations to get links.

Brian himself gives us a great example of his own technique.

In 2018 he published an amazing article on Google ranking factors. He made them longer, more complete, more up-to-date, and better than anyone classified at the time. He covered 200 ranking factors in this monstrous article.

So he started PR, not by emailing everyone he already knew, but by contacting the right people who would find the article interesting.

His method was to reach those who already linked to similar content. She used Ahrefs to find 160 solid leads and sent them the following personalized email.

That reach resulted in 17 authority links that catapulted their rankings, leading to a 110% increase in search traffic and many more links to come.

#10. Content Link Example

Internal linking (i.e. linking between your web pages where relevant) is important for several reasons:

• Help search engines crawl your website. Links are how search engines crawl the web. Linking to relevant content helps search engines crawl your site and make connections between topics.
• They help users navigate your site.Users also use links to move around your site. Giving them a chance to dig deeper into topics by linking to relevant posts can keep them on your site longer (resulting in better rankings).
• You pass the link equity through your website.Sometimes it can be difficult to get backlinks on landing pages. However, if you get links to blog content, you can give some of the link equity to your highest priority pages.

ninja scopegives us a great practical example. Not long ago, they optimized their internal linking strategy by reorganizing their site architecture and saw a 40% increase in organic traffic as a result.

They started by prioritizing all of their sites based on the best performing sites. They used three tiers, with Tier 1 containing pages built for their highest priority keywords and driving the most relevant traffic.

Level 2 pages generated relevant traffic, while Level 3 pages generated very little traffic or engagement.

To categorize their pages, they created a Google spreadsheet that pulled data from Analytics.

Once categorized, they made sure their tier 1 articles linked to the home page and every other major site. Tier 2 items were linked from Tier 1 items only, and Tier 3 items were linked from Tier 2 only.

This strategy prioritized their top pages for search engines, improving rankings and site traffic.

If you want to try a similar implementation, you can borrow the worksheet and the VLOOKUP formulaHere.

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#eleven. SEO CTR Optimization Example

Getting high rankings is only half the battle for organic traffic.

You also need to earn clicks.

When it comes to CTR optimization, your focus should be on the title (or title tag) that will appear in search results. Good titles should have:

• A catch:Use emotion in your headlines to grab your searcher's attention. Consider using strong, emotional words like incredible, amazing, or inspiring.
• A preview:Provide your researcher with context about the type of content you cover and what to expect. Is it a case study, list, quotes, history, etc.?
• A promise:What will your reader gain from reading the content? It will help them implement the theme, make them smarter, help them solve a problem, etc.

Expert Larry Kim discusses this and more in hisPosted by mozto achieve higher organic CTRs.

To regularly tweak your headlines, you need disciplined monitoring and smart testing.

It's not enough to find a low CTR and just change a word or two. Develop a hypothesis, implement it, test it, and optimize it further.

A good practical example of this comes fromTrustRadius, a software review website.

They ran a site-wide experiment to improve their CTRs for their review pages by updating their title tags. Here's how the experiment broke down:

• They left a control group of 20 URLs with their original title tags unchanged
• You have upgraded 1 test set of 20 URLs to the "Best [category name] [current year]" header format.
• They updated 1 test group of 20 URLs with the title "Top [category name] [current year's list]."

They tracked Search Console results by filtering titles that contained "Best" and titles that contained "List."

When it became clear that the "list of" title tag was outperforming the others, they implemented it on their site and saw a 22% increase in site traffic.

The central theses

Knowing SEO principles and successfully putting them into practice can be two completely different things at the end of the day.

We hope these practical SEO examples have given you concrete steps to take on your own website.

If you're still not sure how to proceed, looking up case studies or examples of other marketers implementing a tactic you're having trouble with is one of the best ways to get actionable ideas to implement.

And if you're still not sure what steps you need to take to achieve growth, consider working with us. We are a full-service marketing company specializing in organic SEO and content marketing.

We have helped many companies implement SEO strategies that have taken their traffic to the next level, including an HR technology company that grew from 1 million to 1.8 million monthly organic traffic.

Interested in working with us?Access here!