Getting SEO Right: Page Speed, Crawling & All 11 Critical Components
Getting the key elements of SEO right can help you win clients, conversions, and sales. Are there only 11 parts of SEO you need to know? Far from it. However, getting these important pieces right is a great start. It'll put you well on your way to implementing the best possible SEO strategy for you and your clients.
Your Audience & Industry
Your primary industry and its audience should be the number one consideration behind any viable SEO strategy. What industry are you in? Who are your top competitors? Where do the competitors primarily do business? How are the competitors primarily executing their SEO strategy? These questions and more will determine the next steps in forming your SEO strategy and these various moving parts will soon come into full focus as you nail down what to do next. Getting this foundational piece right sets the tone for everything that follows — skip it and you're guessing in the dark.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is necessary to pinpoint the best possible user intent to go after and find what the audience is searching for. But, not only that, what the audience searches for is just as important as how they search for it. Subtle shifts in keyword research can make or break an SEO strategy. And you better have a firm grasp of the norms in terms of industry market shifts, as well as buyer personas and how they impact the overall SEO strategy. The deeper you go, the better opportunities you may end up eventually uncovering — but going too shallow means missing the long-tail gold.
User Intent
User intent behind keywords is the next thing that is absolutely vital to the success of any SEO campaign. For example, let's say that the audience normally searches for "widgets that I want to put together" as a primary starting point. But, throughout the keyword research, you find variations for "widgets for sale," "DIY Widgets," and "widgets that get things done". Each of these variations results in at least a ten-fold increase in searches leading back to the landing page. It would be a good idea to integrate these into the overall SEO process, now, wouldn't it? If you hadn't done this keyword research and made adjustments based on market shifts in audience search behavior, you likely would not have found these deeper keywords that were worth targeting. It's all in how you approach how deep you want to go in keyword research.
Analytics and Reporting
Let's get real. Nothing is more important to an SEO campaign than accurate reporting. If you can't report on results that the campaign achieves accurately, then how can you expect to make the accurate adjustments that an SEO campaign requires? Let's also get real about something else. Some industries don't require adjustments by the day or even by the week to keyword strategy. Most industries don't even require adjustments every six months. But, if you're in a rapidly changing industry where the market shifts quickly, it may be important to integrate a quarterly or even bi-monthly keyword research task into the SEO process so that you know exactly what audiences are searching for next. How does this fit into analytics reporting? When you attribute keywords and landing pages, it is easy to see exactly what keywords and landing pages are primary drivers of the SEO process execution and the overall SEO strategy. By doing this effectively, it is possible to make adjustments properly and eventually find the next big thing in the market industry shift. This is why it is so important to get analytics reporting correct. If the analytics reports that you get approximately 6,000 visits a month in bot traffic, have you really been successful at all?
Mobile SEO & Core Web Vitals
Google uses mobile-first indexing: it primarily uses the mobile version of a site's content for indexing and ranking. Google recommends responsive web design as an implementation approach, but mobile-first indexing does not require a separate mobile site or a particular URL configuration. Make sure that the mobile version contains the important content and metadata you want Google to understand, and that Googlebot can access the resources needed to render it. (Google Search Central: Mobile-first indexing best practices)
Core Web Vitals are user-experience metrics, not a single page-speed score. Interaction to Next Paint (INP) replaced First Input Delay (FID) as a Core Web Vital on March 12, 2024. The current Core Web Vitals are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which measures loading; INP, which assesses responsiveness; and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which measures visual stability. (web.dev: INP replaces FID; web.dev: Core Web Vitals)
For a page to meet the “good” thresholds, web.dev specifies LCP of 2.5 seconds or less, INP of 200 milliseconds or less, and CLS of 0.1 or less, assessed at the 75th percentile of page visits and separated for mobile and desktop. These thresholds are assessments of user experience; they are not guarantees of rankings. Google says it uses page experience systems, but there is no single page-experience signal that determines ranking, and good Core Web Vitals scores do not guarantee top rankings. (web.dev: Web Vitals; Google Search Central: Understanding page experience)
Crawling
Crawling is the process by which search engine crawlers discover and fetch URLs. A site's internal links and crawlable URLs can help discovery; a sitemap can provide information about URLs on a site, but submitting one is a hint, not a guarantee of crawling or indexing. (Google Search Central: How Search works; Google Search Central: Build and submit a sitemap)
Robots.txt controls crawling, not whether a URL is indexed. For example, Disallow: / blocks crawling of the site's URLs for the matching user-agent; an empty Disallow: value does not block any URLs. A blocked URL may still be indexed if Google finds it through other links, so robots.txt is not a substitute for a noindex directive when the goal is to keep a page out of search results. (Google Search Central: robots.txt introduction; Google Search Central: Block search indexing with noindex)
Indexing
Crawling and indexing are related but distinct: Google must fetch a page before it can process its content, but crawling does not guarantee that the page will be indexed. A noindex directive can keep a page out of Google Search when Google can crawl the page and see the directive. The nofollow directive concerns links and is not an indexing directive for the page itself. (Google Search Central: How Search works; Google Search Central: Block search indexing with noindex)
A sitemap can help Google discover URLs, but it does not guarantee indexing. Canonical annotations help indicate a preferred URL among duplicate or similar pages; Google may select a different canonical based on its own assessment. Check redirects, internal links, and canonical tags for consistency, and use URL Inspection or Search Console reports to investigate indexing issues rather than assuming that trailing-slash variations will necessarily produce duplicate indexed pages. (Google Search Central: Consolidate duplicate URLs; Google Search Central: Build and submit a sitemap)
Technical SEO
Technical SEO includes work such as improving crawlability, handling duplicate URLs, implementing structured data, and ensuring pages can be rendered and used. Structured data must follow Google's documentation and policies to be eligible for supported search features; adding structured data does not guarantee that a page will receive a rich result. (Google Search Central: Structured data general guidelines)
Technical mistakes can affect how a site is crawled, understood, or displayed. For example, a large homepage slider may affect loading performance, while inconsistent canonical signals can complicate URL selection. Review implementation changes and test pages with relevant Google tools instead of assuming that a single technical issue will always produce a particular ranking outcome. (Google Search Central: Consolidate duplicate URLs; web.dev: Optimize LCP)
Content
Content continues to be one of the de facto standards by which SEO pros acquire links to help increase rankings to help create streams of traffic to a website. It is another example where, if it is not executed properly, content can end up being the bane of a website's (or author's) existence. Not all content is created equal. There's spammy content and non-spammy authoritative content. In general, if you manually write the content, you're in the clear. You don't have to pay attention to weird things like reading levels, complexity in sentence structure, or other things to create content that ranks well. But, and this is a big but: "just create great content" is a lie. It is this author's opinion that good content should be created in such a way that it also goes viral, that it resonates with the audience, and that it creates a lasting impact on people so much so, that they will want t...
Related Internal Resources
- The Hidden Architecture of SEO: What Google Actually Rewards
- How to Stop Chasing Every SEO Issue: A Practical Triage System
