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By the end of this course, you will be ready to apply your knowledge in your own project, business or career. So if you’re curious about how brands grow, how influencer get deals or how one ad can lead to millions in sales, you are in right place. Digital marketing is one of the most powerful sales today and your journey starts right here. So without any further ado, let’s get started. >> Social media marketing. So first you know before uh we start about social media marketing guys. So any kind of uh you know topic that you are listening to or if you’re trying to understand right. So you should always follow this kind of a framework right. So this is a formula that I always apply. So it’s all about what why and how. Okay. So always have this understanding of what why and how. Okay. So very clearly what does it mean is what is actually social media marketing. Okay. So we have to start with the fundamentals and then why should you invest time in social media marketing for business. All right. And then how are you going to shape the business with SMM? Okay. So SMM is nothing but social media marketing. All right. So that is what you know you need to be uh addressing and then understanding.

So most of the cases what happens is basically so when I say something called as social media marketing or when you hear about social media marketing everybody will start talking about Facebook, they start talking about YouTube, they start talking about Instagram, they start talking about uh Snapchat. So you know those are you know channels but technically what social media marketing is basically everybody might have their own definitions but you know you should understand this very clearly it’s all about utilizing the social media channels to create okay and inspire the audience to make sure that they are hooked to your brand. Okay, when I say your brand, the business. All right. So, social media marketing is all about utilizing all those social media channels to make sure that you know you create and inspire that audiences. Whoever is you know falling into that kind of a you know consumer set you have to make sure that they are hooked to your brand. They remember your brand for a longer period of time. Okay. So that is what social media marketing is all about. All right. So now to just give you a glimpse of it.

So everybody uh right now we are all a part of social media including myself. Right. But the only difference here is now we have to start acting like you are a marketer not a consumer. Right? Till now everybody have been the consumers. You guys have been actively using social media for your own benefit. Right? So the only benefit that you’re getting out of it is most of the cases entertainment. Right? So it could be YouTube, it could be meta, it could be Instagram, it could be uh Snapchat, it could be Pinterest, it could be Kora, it could be you know something else right. So once you get to know all of this understanding then basically you know uh this is then basically this is what you have to understand that okay till now I have been a consumer now I have to turn itself you know put yourself in the shoes of a marketer and then understand how this social media platforms can help me take this business to the next level. So how do I launch my own product on social media and make sure that everybody is you know trying to get to know about my brand or probably you know once you get to know about the brand you’ll eventually fall into that bucket of sales and all of that. Okay. So that is you know what you have to understand about social media. Okay. So most importantly you have to turn yourself into a marketer rather than a customer. All right. So that is what you know social media marketing is all about. Now why should you invest time in social media marketing for businesses is because of one simple reason called as audience size. Right? So you know audiences are widely available. There are millions of consumers, okay?

Millions of consumers are available and these uh consumers are very expressive. Okay, I call it as expressive audiences. So what do you mean by expressive audiences is basically you know they have some requirement they understand you’ll be able to know the market needs of it because they actively keep searching for something. Okay, all the consumers again you can think of your own self. You’re actively going there. You are there on Instagram. You are just scrolling your feed and suddenly you see something that you like and then you go follow it and then keep uh you know trying to you know purchase or follow the brand. Correct? So that is you know what the market needs is all about. And then very very very importantly social media is a huge network. Okay. So what is the kind of networks that you see is a huge network of businesses. It’s a huge network of advertisers. It’s a huge network of business development managers. Right? It’s a network of marketers. Yeah. It’s a network of marketers. It’s a network of sales guys. It’s a network of consumers and it’s also a network of entrepreneurs. Okay. So when I say social media marketing I’m saying all the platforms right so it could also include LinkedIn it could also include uh you know Facebook all the platforms that we have discussed right so you know all of these people are there the business people are there we have advertisers who are trying to promote their product there are business development managers who are trying to you know reach out to you know this thing right and then there is uh there are marketers who are actively trying to uh you know promote their own brand there are sales people who are trying to communicate with you saying that we have the product sir why don’t you buy it and then there are consumers who are actually a part of all of the who are actually the target for all of these people right and then there are entrepreneurs who are actively trying to understand how the you know uh social media works and probably see the space where they could launch their own product okay so that is where you know that is why it’s a very huge network just looking at meta itself just going to Facebook itself you will see a lot of audiences available there Right. And the other uh you know reason why you should invest is basically the reach is very easy and faster. Okay. Uh the reach is okay. Yeah. Sure. Diva. So once I’m done with this I I’ll reexlain the expressive audiences.

Okay. So reach is very easy and faster. Right. So when I say reach is very easy and faster. So if I had to reach out to multiple cities and multiple locations at once. So I can do it faster within you know the uh social media itself. Let’s say I wanted to promote a product called as uh let’s say rare rabbit. Okay. So rare rabbit is a brand which is into apparel industry which is into clothing. So if I had to promote a new launch okay new launch of my uh gear. So you know what I’m going to do is I am going to target you know Mumbai I’m going to target Bangalore and I’m going to target Hyderabad and Chennai. So all four regions I can instantly just go and then bombard it right. So all the four uh you know towns will be uh able to access this right. So that’s that’s the kind of reach that that I can do which is very easy and faster as well. If I had to use the traditional methodology then I had to you know look for the space for this uh commercial hing or uh you know all of this. So that is going to you know take a lot of uh time and effort as well and you know most importantly money right but you know that is not required here. So reach is very easy right now uh explaining again the expressive audience guys. So what does this expressive audience mean? So anybody online I I’ll tell you in a very simple and easy manner right. So the audiences are you know explaining themselves that I like this I don’t I don’t like this. Okay. So simple I I’ll give you an algorithmic explanation here, right? So every day you go to Instagram or you go to shorts or you go to you know these platforms and then whatever that you like you instantly hit that likes correct likes or uh you know the these uh reactions that you have correct. So when you are doing that as a process basically what is happening in the background is you yourself are giving a confirmation to the uh you know platform that I like this kind of a content right when you are doing this uh you know so when you are giving that expression of liking something commenting on something sharing something the value keeps on increasing right the more kind of likes that you you know have or that you do on certain uh content the more likely is what you see the similar kind of a content correct so that’s the reason why you know for example if I take few names here so for instance so let’s say you know Abhinav has his own feed right or Akshai has their own feed Anderson has their own feed and then Barat has their own feed Christina has a different feed dasha has a different feed and then you know Kavia will see an entire different uh feed so looking at all of this basically one thing which is very clear is no feed is similar to the other one correct so I’ll have a different feed altogether hersel will have a different field you know feed altogether dya will have her own feed right so nowhere it is a cross why is that happening is purely because of your own engagement right so based on that user engagement the users are unknowingly expressing themselves right on the social media with a simple click on that like. Got it? So that is what expressive audience means. This is this is stage one. Stage one is just liking it, right? In the news feed. Stage two is commenting something, right? When you comment on something saying that this is great, you know, I have never seen something like this. So some people will use these, you know, the Gen Z words. All of the genzi expressions right now that we have is LMAO, you have psych, you have you know different different terminologies like LOL, RO all of these things right the genzi abbreviations that we have or the millennial abbreviations. So all of this will give next level of impact. So when the algorithm detects that you are loving this kind of a content you know and when you are expressing it directly that you know this is you knowh next level I like it. So now algorithm tweaks it in a different uh you know uh uh manner right? So that is something that you should understand. This is stage two and stage three is basically sharing it right. So liking is basic uh commenting on it is okay to a next level. And then if you are sharing it that means you want this content to be shared to your own network of people. It could be in a WhatsApp status. It could be just a story. It could be you know sending it to your own WhatsApp groups right all of this now based on the activity that you are doing so all these are expressions only correct so without your own understanding only you are feeling it you are doing it you are actively pursuing all of these activities so all of this falls under this expressive audience so now you know based on these uh expressions basically so you will automatically understand how the consumers are you know looking for what are the consumers searching for right So what are the you know market requirements right now? So you know why do you think everybody searches for air condition during summers right? Why do you think everybody is searching for these hoodies during the winters? So it’s a you know market need that’s a requirement coming from the audiences right. So this is very basic you know this is you know the example that I gave is very basic in terms of uh you know uh uh when I say basic in terms of you know this regular stuff but you know some other market requirements saying that okay suddenly you have some other uh you know uh trend that is going on right now right so based on that trend you can create that you know a need for it. So simply to give an example you know let’s take uh soul store right it’s an apparel uh uh brand so which is purely into these uh fandom right so DC comics Marvel all of that they imprint Iron Man Batman they’ll do you know all these imprinting on the uh t-shirts and everything and then they they simply sell for it right so then people automatically you know one or the other way they start searching for similar kind for this thing right so that is where you can tap into the market needs but does anyone search for products on social media yeah yeah yeah absolutely so there is something called as marketplace so you know if you go to Facebook you will see something called as marketplace so there are lot of audiences who actively search for it right but I think probably you are comparing with Google search Google search is dominant Google search is the next level so probably Google search is 100 I am talking about social media searches which is basically probably you know 10 to 20% of what Google is doing. Okay. But still people go to that marketplace look for uh you know those kind of uh products or you know anything. So because of only one reason they might get something as an offer right and uh that that is you know what you get in the expressive audiences I mean get through the expressive audiences right. Uh how do we get to know which product that customer is searching on social media? So you will actually have all the insights uh deeply right. So basically you’ll have insights coming from social media. So there are a lot of tools also which we’ll be discussing on the go. I’ll explain uh you know very uh uh critically what are those things and what kind of tools we can use. How do we know what kind of products or what kind of uh you know uh searches are happening on social media. We’ll get to see all of that in the upcoming sessions. Okay. So I’ll explain that when the right time comes. Yeah. So you know that’s that is what you know we have with the audience size. And then you know basically other reason why you should invest time in social media is one of the reason. So basically what happens is when you are trying to use this as a business it is much more convenient compared to the actual marketing the traditional marketing methodologies right so that is why you have to make sure that you are understanding this thing right and you’re understanding the audience uh you know the type of audience that we are tapping into the kind of audiences that we are tapping into all of this is a part of the process right so that is where you need to keep an active you know time in terms of understanding the consumers more and the product more rather than uh you know the platform right so everybody does this in reverse so what people are doing is basically they are simply starting away with all the social media channels and then starting to create content and then they are trying to dump the content across social media right but what’s the point of you know doing it I’ll just give you an example right let’s say you know there is there are you know male and female you know who is a boyfriend and a girlfriend okay So a boy and a girl who are in love. So they are try I mean who are actually you know falling in love probably you know imagine that the boy has a crush on her right. So now when they first try to you know go on a date. Okay. So the boy approaches the girl and then he’s trying to you know impress her in certain way. Now when he’s trying to impress her in a certain way obviously there is certain you know there are certain rules that you know uh usually people follow right. I don’t know what Jenzi is following right now but at least you know when I was in college so we had certain you know take around that we used to maintain when we are approaching uh girls okay in terms of asking for a date right so you go you dress well you talk well you make sure that you are you know putting your proposal right you’re trying to impress her you do you know as as a boy you are trying to do that right at the same time you know the other person is also trying to you know accept it based on the kind of uh proposal that you are putting right now replicate the same concept here In business here in social media, right? When it comes to social media as well, you cannot go, you know, as you wish, right? You need to follow certain rules. You need to understand what the other person likes and based on that you have to make sure that you are giving your value in that. Correct? So when I know that you know uh the when I know that my crush you know likes these kind of things, I try to present her as gifts you know when I approach her. Correct? So if I’m not doing that, I mean that’s a way of impressing the other person. Correct? So now when you’re trying to do that on social media also, you have to have a similar kind of an approach. You have to treat your consumer like your girlfriend or boyfriend, right? So at least you have to think like you know you you have only you know few uh chances available and you have to take that chance in some in terms of proposing them. Right. Right. So the only discussion that you have is you know the limitation that you have is the product. You have to impress the consumer in all ways possible to make sure that the consumer is liking your product in the first place. Right? So you cannot take chances later right. So you know that’s that’s the biggest catch. So based on that you have to start looking at a social media slowly and steadily understanding the consumers right understanding the kind of audience you want and then start building everything from there you you are now actually looking at a different side of social media marketing altogether which you must have never seen before. So you know that is that this is the new way of approaching social media and this is the only way that you have to start looking at it right unless and until you see this kind of uh you know uh direction obviously you will go blind right this is just like you know trying to win an Olympics with no practice at all right so that is why you your approach towards social media marketing has to change all right so that is the reason why you know we are discussing this in detail and now we’ll move on to the next phase which is the how part right so how do we do it it’s all about the strategy okay we have to figure out the strategic ways to ensure the business goals are met okay so just by dumping the content you know with all those pointers is not going to help right so we need to make sure that we are figuring out all the strategic ways possible to make sure that we are reaching that customer you know we are trying to satisfy the customer right uh to a certain extent okay so those goals usually will be uh you know divided monthly so you will have monthly goals you know some businesses will focus on quarterly goals right yeah so monthly uh quarterly and then you will have halfearly goals okay and then annual goals All of this consistently you will have uh you know together. So you know these you know particularly basically u you know absolutely so you know this is something that you know we all should invest we all should understand very clearly. So not just this guys not just in terms of social media always apply this logic of what why and how. Okay. So you know when it comes to uh you know what why and how. So you need to make sure that you are understanding the logic of everything right. So it could be an interview right it could be anything. Okay. Now you know how are we going to uh you know shape basically we will start with the annual goals right but at the same time you also need to understand you know there is something called as a marketing funnel. Okay. So you can use it for digital marketing funnel also. So okay let me put it in digital marketing funnel. Okay. So what is this funnel basically is? So you know uh for any kind of a business okay so first and foremost what has to happen for any kind of a business or any kind of a product right so you als you always need to have to create awareness about the brand right so what do you mean by brand awareness is basically letting the customer know that this is my product okay so these are the benefits of the product. These are the reasons why you should use this product. Okay? And you know these are this is uh also I mean you can put all the reasons why you should use this product. You know that is where you have it. So you know you have to create that awareness to people right. So unless and until people get to know what you are, why would they even consider your product? Okay. So that is your next stage. Stage one is to create brand awareness. Stage two is to make sure that people are considering your product to uh you know buy from you. Right? So when I say consideration, so that means I am trying to uh sorry I’m trying to uh find all those people who are actually interested. Okay. So these are people who are consumers who are interested in the product guys. So there is a difference. Don’t get confused between the uh you know interest and the purchase. Purchase is different. Interest is different. I like the product but that doesn’t mean that I buy I buy uh the product. Got it? So the customers are interested in the product. So they want to you know know more about the product. I’ll give you an example then you’ll understand it better. So they want to you know get that detail. They want to know more about the product so that they make decision gets easier at this stage. Okay. So that is your consideration. So now once people get to know that okay now they are trusting the process that is where your conversions happen. Okay. Conversions are nothing but a sale coming from the customer after they have thoroughly understood the product and the benefit benefit they can get. Right? So that is what you know we call it as conversion. Right? And after the conversion also there is something called called as post sale experience. Okay. Post sales experience is basically they they trusted you. They bought the product. Now they are going to give you the reviews about your product. Okay. They are going to become your testimonial. They are going to become your referrals. Right? So that is your four stages. So this is what we call it as a funnel. So why do we call it as a funnel? basically is you know let me show you why that happens. So I I’ll give you a very simple example. All right. So let’s say there is uh uh you know a product. Okay. Uh okay let me write here itself. Okay. Let’s say so let me give you an example. All right. So first and foremost let’s pick up a product. Let’s say uh you know I wanted to buy um you know uh so there is this new brand called uh maybe you know let’s say Tata EV some EV vehicle. Okay. So this is the product. So this is a new product which is in town. So I had to create brand awareness about it. Right? So now what I’m going to do with this brand as a Tata as a company is I’m going to create you know social media post right. So now this social media post is seen by you know all the audiences. Let’s say this social media post is seen by 10,000 people. Okay. 10,000 have actually seen it. Right now out of this 10,000 people, do you think all of those will be trying to consider my product? Absolutely not. Correct. So just by you know showing this to 10,000 people can I expect all the 10,000 people to like my product to like Tata EV? Absolutely not. Correct. So everybody might not like it. Right? So out of that I am assuming that 30% 30% of uh social media post might be considering right. So that leaves me what is 30% of 10,000? 30% of 10,000 is 3,000. 3,000 people, right? So 3,000 people might consider might I am not 100% sure. I’m assuming that 3,000 people might consider that okay this product is good. Right now out of 3,000 people, do you really think you know uh these 3,000 people will become my consumers? I mean, you know, get converted to buying it again absolutely not. I’ll take 10% of it. 10% of you know this um uh considered audiences 10% of consideration you know that becomes 300 people who have chances of buying. Right? Now out of these uh 300 people 300 people who have that chances of buying there might be again 10% sale 10% conversion rate right so 10% of it is 30 so finally I might get 30 sales correct look at the numbers if 10,000 people see it there is a chance of 30 sales again 30% and you know 30% 10% these are all bigger numbers Right? So you see you know uh basically this is a funnel. So the awareness has to be created to this 10,000 people. So that is you know 30 that might lead to 30 sales. But if my you know conversion rate if I have to make sure that I’m selling 300 units then this has to be at least one lakh people. Got it? So that is what you have to think about. That is exactly what this is. So now people will you know come to you and then say that no no I directly want sales. I want conversions directly. So which is very bad. You cannot do that. You cannot create conversions unless and until you create this brand awareness and consideration. Got it guys? Clear everybody I repeat myself. Simple. If there are 10,000 people who have seen your product, out of that 30% might you know showcase interest in your product and out of these 30% of it 10% might consider your product and out of 10% who has you know considered your product only 10% might convert 10% of this one might convert into a sale might again this is also not 100%. Right? So because of this only you need to pro you need to follow a funnel right. So that funnel involves every kind of a product. Any kind of a product you know you has to go through these stages only for sure. Without these kind of a stages there is no way that you can surpass the you know point of making sure that the sale or a product marketing happens. Right? So all the thing that we are doing at these stages these two stages is all the social media marketing. Got it? So that’s why we call it as a funnel. Clear guys? Now I’ll show you visually you know so that you’ll understand much more uh uh easier. Okay. So digital marketing I’ll show you a visual explanation so that you will understand it much more easily. So this is how visually it’ll look like. So all the lead generation you know stage that you’re seeing right now this is technically the sales part of it. Okay. uh typically what happens is at this awareness stage you are trying to use all this content marketing, social media, all the SEO, SEM and everything here at this point slowly you know these guys will start getting you know little bit of interest over a period of time for them you will use a different tactics so you’ll have decisions and then you have the action being taken so it’s a universal model uh called as IDA so you create that awareness and then you drive them towards interest and then you try you try to you know ease their decision-m process and finally you let them take action in terms of buying a product right so all this process I mean you know all all of you also will have to this kind of a pro you will will go through this kind of a process at all stages right so uh uh everywhere you will see a similar kind of a you know model working only thing is you as a consumer will never know that okay so I’ll give you one simple example everybody must have gone through Amazon correct you must have at least you know at least recently Recently also you must have gone to Amazon. So you must have done that uh typical window kind of a shopping where you are just simply exploring a product right. So when you check the product you have gone to that product page you know checked the pricing checked the specifications and everything because of some reason you exited the Amazon application at that point of time you will exactly see the same product sometime later in a different website. Have you everybody gone through this? I’m sure everybody must have done this. Everybody must have gone through this kind of a uh you know uh same product seeing or following you everywhere. They’ll also follow you on YouTube. They’ll follow you on websites. They’ll follow you on Facebook. They you you’ll get this kind of a following everywhere. Right? So this concept of following you everywhere is basically a concept of marketing. Remarketing. Okay? We call it as remarketing. marketing again to the same person because I am assuming that this guy might uh you know like my product right so that remarketing happens at the interest stage right so this is at the you know second level which is which is trying to create more interest on the users coming back to our mind map and um just to give you a little bit of heads up so you have already learned this much till now the next stage you know the next uh you know bit that I’m going to explain is going to be much more interesting rather you know than this one. So which is understanding the consumer okay so consumer day-to-day life you yourself will be surprised what are you doing on a day-to-day basis okay so it’s going to be fun right so the one of the interesting aspect you know why you should uh consider uh social media marketing is basically let’s take a day-to-day activity of a consumer right so day-to-day activity of a consumer think of your own self okay so think of your own self what you’re doing on a day-to-day basis. Okay. Starting with on an average, I think people wake up at 7:00 a.m. in the morning. Yeah. So, I think approximately 7 to 7:30 a.m. in the morning is what everybody wakes up. The moment you wake up, guys, the moment you wake up, what do you do? You unlock your phone. Correct? That’s what you do. You unlock your phone and then instantly instantly what you do, you check the notifications. Correct? you drag that uh this thing right so instantly check that notifications and the first notification that you focus on is the WhatsApp correct so WhatsApp is always the first priority correct yes and then you know you go to the WhatsApp and then you probably check your messages and uh you know whatever that message basically is you you try to do that right if you have not if you have nothing then once you are done with WhatsApp then you you know probably move on to Instagram and slowly you maybe also look at uh Facebook or Snapchat right or you know you might go to uh YouTube as well correct and you know uh I I I mean you carry your phone everywhere you know this is you are brushing you are washing your phone you are going to wash you are taking your phones as well so this is basically what what everybody does right so I mean we are not we are no different right and then along with notifications there is also other thing that you might also notice which is missed calls right you’ll also check why did this guy call me somewhere in the night when you are sleep when you are asleep right so now if you take the overall time that is getting invested here so the average time on an average you know you will lose 30 to 45 minutes for sure yeah average time spent if I may call it as 30 to 45 minutes just like that it’s it’s just flu It’s just flows like uh you know water right so once this is done probably you know you try to you know get to your next level which is the 9:00 a.m. zone right so usually at 9:00 a.m. Basically you travel right? So either you travel uh to your office if you are a working uh individual or you know you are probably you know getting some course like this right? If you are going to office then basically you are looking for Uber or Ola or Rabbido right you’re trying to do that and in this process also basically you are checking the music apps correct you are you know either on Spotify you are either on Ghana yes you are checking that Wink or maybe Jio7 yes so at least if you are young you will definitely have this or else you will be on calls if you are technically above 35 or 36 then you know yeah podcast yes you know anything Spotify any of it so you’ll be on these things right so technically again you know here you will have that time zone that is there at 9:00 a.m. probably 9 or 10 all right and then 11:00 a.m. what happens at 11:00 a.m. You’re trying to have that breakfast. Huh? Now we have gone to office. I checked in. Now I am happy. So nobody’s going to question me. So you are having your breakfast or a brunch. Right? During this time also you are not keeping your phone aside. No, you’re having that reals or shots. Correct? You’re checking those reals and shots, right? Or you are actually checking your feed, right? You’re going again to Instagram or to Facebook or to X or to LinkedIn. Correct? You are definitely taking you know all of these things during uh you know that uh breakfast and all of that correct. So this you know technically you will have yeah match highlights everything all of that is going to you know consume that thing and then you know after this probably if you are in office you are working something or you are actually you know trying to be reach your friends or whatever acquaintances right and then if you take the next thing which is 2 p.m. right so you know 2 p.m. Basically the lunch time right even during your lunch times also what typically people do is they are checking the WhatsApp status right or they are doing a chat or they are doing that shopping thing right so they go to Myntra right they go to Amazon they go to Flipkart right I mean we all do this no on a regular basis if if they are if there are any working professionals who are actually in the uh session right now. You’ll definitely relate to this and uh you know you’ll also try to attend some calls. You’re checking your emails and then if there is nothing left then you are going to simply browse the internet. Okay, you are going to be uh basically you just be trying to you know go to that uh you know internet zone and there now I’ll tell you what people do what what people browse on internet okay I’ll just take an example of food okay so since Indians are bookuters basically so we try to browse the internet so I’ll tell you what people browse also how to reduce weight yeah so how to you know become like Ritik Roshan. Yeah. So there’ll be people who are searching for how to eat more and look thin. Yeah. Trust me, even my friends also do this and there’ll be people who are searching for makeup videos. Yeah, there are people who are uh searching for cooking videos probably on YouTube, right? And then you know they are also trying to do that uh DIY, right? So this is what people do and this is happening this is definitely happening on that uh you know uh during the lunch times for sure right and all of this technically you know easily it goes by 2 hours 2 hours for sure 2 hours is simply gone all right and then you know you go to that 5 p.m. uh you know section. So I mean after all of this done you are basically tired. No. So you need a break right? So everybody is now expecting this kind of a break. So you have that tea time. Now you are in a tea time mode. Yeah. Right. So the tea time mode basically is where you try to do or you know search for this workout or uh you know some kind of a sport activities. You are trying to do the chitchat right? So technically in the chitchat also you’re trying to gossip something right? somebody or whatever is happening you’re trying to explore uh you know travel or food order or sleep naps right so some people you know who have uh they also do the power naps right so they get little drowsy during those times somewhere around 5 p.m. That’s the that’s the reason why people go to that tea right they like to have a little walk right and then you know obviously googling if there is nothing left right so this if you see you know all the activities that that is happening on a day-to-day basis in any single individual life right and then finally you have only two time zones uh after this which is 9:00 p.m. time zone and then there is 11 p.m. time zone okay 9:00 p.m. you know we everybody will do you know what is happening so you are focused on that food ordering right or you are looking for some party to place uh party places right if it is uh Friday right right now we are we are on the Saturday evening right people must have done that right they’re looking for maps they are looking for next day plans okay what to do next day so I think pushpa 2 is released so everybody is on that havoc of you know watching that pushpa at least so you know everybody have their own plans and then there’ll be few couple of guys you Oh guys and girls who are actually you know trying to party it they are also searching for wine shops near me they are in this category also right so all of this is happening in a day-to-day life guys right so and finally they’ll end up at 11 p.m. Now they are trying to do the binge watching right Netflix or prime or probably Z. Now if you take a look at it the reason why I had to put down all of this in front of you is look at the time that user is investing in all the media. You get it? Now this is the serious part. All this is fun part but look at the serious part. Everybody is investing close to 8 to nine hours in their day-to-day life on digital media and that luckily involves a lot of the uh you know uh social media >> lot of social media media is involved very clearly. >> All right. So yeah the reason why I’m writing it down so you know look at it. So basically we are all a part of it not just you know this thing but everybody everybody is a part of this process right? So every day we are actually investing close to 8 to 9 hours on social media, right? So now you know basically you have to also again now this is a lesson for you guys. Now I’m not asking you guys to you know shut all of these things down you know that that is anyway not not going to happen. So only thing that you have to do is now you know that everybody is investing so much time into social media and all of this. How can you maximize that efforts right? How can you convert those audiences into something of value for your own business? That’s it. Right? That is where I am headed. That is where you have to understand what a consumer is doing. This is an easy way, easy gateway for you to understand. Right? So, let’s see. Pick up a simple idea. Every day at 9:00 a.m. in the morning, Zomato will, you know, send you a notification saying that ba, I know that you are hungry. So, there is a, you know, hot idli waiting for you. Why don’t you simply order? Correct. It comes at 11. It comes at 8:00 a.m. in the morning. 8 to 9:00 a.m. in the morning. It comes at 11 to 12:00 p.m. in the afternoon. And then 3 to 4 p.m. it’ll also wake you up regarding the snacks. And at 7:00 p.m. again, it’ll you know remind you with regards to dinner. Everybody is seeing this. Yeah. Swiggy and Zato are always on your back making you remember what to eat. Correct. And just by looking at that notification only you are not hungry technically but you will feel hunger at that point of time. Yes. Do you agree with this guys? Zumato and speaky does that right? And moment the moment you you know open YouTube during those times also you will see that instant 5-second ad hungry order now on Zomato. You will see that hot hot smoky air coming in that uh you know uh video correct. So you will have that craving for that mcd. You will have craving for that biryani. You will have craving for that ice cream. You’ll have craving for that uh you know uh chai in the evening. All of this is that only right? Uh okay. How do they decide which food to promote? It’s simple. I mean when you are in the you know mornings you will see the breakfast mode. If you are in the afternoon you will see the lunch mode. I mean it’s a basic sense right? So based on that only they’ll try to simply do it. And you know the kind of notification that you get it is all personalized right? When I say personalized, they know what you have ordered recently, right? So you know if if you know Zomato can understand what you know Hmon is ordering usually for breakfast and the most ordered on breakfast is Hmon’s favorite. No correct you guys get it guys whatever I order you know multiple times that indicates to Zomato you know it’s a simple data analysis. So that indicates to Zomato that Hmon’s like Hmon like this and so they’ll you know keep constantly sending me those kind of notifications only right hot sambar idli is waiting for you you know being in south India you’ll get to this masala dosa is waiting for you geek masala dosa will come you know that as a notification right and when it is lunch basically since I am in Hyderabad right now it’ll always promp prompt me to check for uh you know biryani over there right so Now you know based on this you need to understand the importance of what we can do uh with the social media very clearly and then make sure that everybody is uh uh you know cater to that business. All right. So yeah so moving on to the next aspect of it. So knowing that we now clearly know that there are lot of audiences on uh you know the uh platforms. So we are now trying to understand the network. Okay. So what are the options available for us? Right. So we call it as channels. So what are the channels that are available for us? Right. One of the uh first and foremost important aspect of it is Facebook like we already know. Right? So few of you might be thinking that uh sir you know we no more use Facebook at all. Right? But you have to look at Facebook as a very dynamic platforms platform because you know this is you know giving us u you know very critically two major aspects of it right. So though we might not actively use Facebook there is a lot of potential still even today on Facebook as well. Okay. So Facebook is offering that personal profile first. Okay. And then it is also offering for us to have our own dedicated business page. First and foremost, I think you know personal profile pretty much everybody knows about it. I’m not going to take too much of uh you know detail here. So where uh you know every profile has a dedicated profile picture attached to it. You can add your bio to it. Okay. So basically everybody you know uh doesn’t write anything at all. So you have to now start acting as uh the representative of a business. So you have to present yourself as a marketer, right? So you have to do little bit of uh you know cleaning right. So always try to write who you are and present about yourself. Okay. So I know what is what is there in your Facebook also. I can you know understand and relate what is existing on your Facebook. So in your Facebook basically you’ll have all that junk. Correct? So it’s high time that you clean your junk. Right? So you know why I’m saying this is guys basically this is very very important for everybody right so you have to make sure that you are you know cleaning your uh Facebook profile right uh so you must have liked everything all the nonsense on the planet at that point of a time probably I’m talking about five six years back so you have to clean that profile right why I’ll tell you the uh logic right u so basically what uh you know is happening here uh you know in terms of Facebook is I mean not just Facebook in all the platforms. So very specifically why I’m talking about Facebook more is you have to stop you know following all that junk, following all that likes, shares and comments and everything whatever that you have been doing. You have to start putting yourself in a different zone altogether. Okay. Why is basically till now you have been a customer you have been enjoying the entertainment uh you know for your own self but going forward you will be under a scrutiny when you are representing a company so technically when you are digital marketing for some product or a business so basically what’s going to happen is they are going to come after you they are going to look at your uh you know Facebook profile they are going to come to your LinkedIn profile they are going to come to your Instagram they are definitely going to get connected with you on these platforms right when they are trying to get connected with you on these platforms and if they come to your profile and then they see that you have shared some you know love failure YouTube song on your Facebook so you know imagine how awkward it look like it looks like correct so that is something that you should be very careful about right so never make sure never make yourself you know uh put in that zone of uh vulnerability right so people are going to instantly judge Hey, this person you know is not even looking like genuine. This person is not even, you know, being professional. So he says all the professional things over, you know, the other channel. But when I look at their Facebook profile, it’s very dumb, right? So you should not look like that basically. So you have to good, you have to make sure that you are cleaning all of that junk from your social media, right? Even if it is hard, you know, you have to do that. So there are two options basically. either you clean that junk or you can simply you know uh uh shut it down and then start creating a new one all together right so that’s really really important guys you have to make sure that you’re doing it okay so for SMM an old account will give a good lead generation or we can create a new account for SMM no old account will always have a a better value uh Shanmuga basically that’s the reason why I’m saying to clean it right so uh when I say clean it basically Facebook always you know puts older accounts into first preference right so uh you know I mean the more older your account is the more value your account uh value your account has that’s it so your account ad account will be activated your uh profile also has some weight uh I mean when I say profile has weight your constant engagement has to be there just being on Facebook is not going to create any value okay so you have to mind that right yeah now I I I’m coming to that point only um deeply so you know now all the things that I’m writing right now that is where you start cleaning your junk right so you start with your bio right and then after the bio the details right so what kind of details you should be focused on okay so try to put your study details your academics if it is comfortable with you okay and then make sure that your relationship status is straight okay so Don’t put into that uh in a depression mode. Okay. Don’t try to upload all of that uh you know content there. Right? And then uh along with that make sure that your photos whatever that they are available they are very decent enough. Okay. Try to you know create a folder and then you know to save all of that and then whatever that you are that you have liked all followed you must have liked uh or followed some meme content or any of it back then. So that is still existing right? Make sure that you are you know uh only keeping those things which you prefer to have in your feed right and then start you know focusing more on uh business celebrities influencers. So try to you know like or follow. So basically you are just you know making sure that everything is right. Right. So similarly in the uh profile this is what you should be doing. Similarly for business also you’ll have something called as um you know uh logo or page created. So for this you’ll have a logo, you’ll have a cover picture. All right. And then you should have a company bio where you mention what is the company all about and then contact details. You have to mention the website okay and the email address. So these are mandatory things guys. So if you already have run Facebook pages then you must have known this uh by uh chance but uh this is these are mandatory things. Website, email and mobile number. Website also you can still do it later but mobile number and uh email is very mandatory because uh you know now Facebook is also if Facebook gets any doubt right? So Facebook will will ask for uh authentication whether you are the uh you know person or not. So it might also ask Aadhaar card or any of the identity proof if needed. Okay. So make sure that you’re not goofing up. All right. And then content sharing is a must basically usually you know the content uh that goes. So when I say content people always think it is just the text part. No content. It is text, it is image, it is infographics. Okay. It is videos, it is articles, it is blogs, everything, right? All of that. Even the podcast also we can call it as content only. Okay? It can be an audio podcast or it can be a video podcast. Both of them are you know the podcast only. Got it guys? So don’t assume that content is only text. All right? So all of this even videos and articles, blogs, everything is what we call it as a content only. Okay? So for every business page you know you are also getting so this is what everybody knows that okay this is what we are getting uh in the Facebook right. One thing that people doesn’t know is Facebook is also giving that professional dashboard. Okay. So in this professional dashboard basically you will be able to oh sorry so you’ll be able to get the insights. Okay when I say insights basically you know you will get to know very clearly the demographics part of it where what age group is coming to your page from which location you are coming to your page. You can also track the likes comments and shares for uh individual pages. All right. And what kind of interests the audience is having all of that? Yes. Yes. Obviously um the community you can also get the gender right along with these things you will have metrics guys. Metrics is something okay what are metrics is you know things which are measurable right so we call it as measurable data right. So what is this measurable data is basically how many people this post has reached to right. So how many people have clicked on it? So how many people have messaged me? How many people have gone to WhatsApp from Facebook? How many people I mean I can literally measure from reach to clicks or from clicks to conversions. I can literally track all of this here. Okay. Simple to to make sure that you understand it very easily. So let me give you an example here. Okay. uh measurable data. Okay, let me give you an example here. So, basically let’s say you know you will see that boost post on Instagram, right? Have you seen that anything that you post on uh uh Instagram, you will see a tiny tab or a blue color button called as boost post. Yeah. Right. So that boost post right if you have let’s say for example you know there is um uh Lena okay so Lena has posted something. So Lena let’s say for example Lena owns this product called as u uh let’s say uh rare rabbit okay or zara for that matter okay so she’s uh owning one of the franchise called zara right so for zara there is one kind of uh this thing uh you know she’s trying to promote one new Christmas um apparel okay one one thing related to Christmas Right? So she is investing 100 rupees per day. Okay. On that post and then you know she is getting that uh 10,000 reach. I’m just taking a random number just for uh understanding right. So basically she’s uh you know now technically what happens is I mean everybody thinks this boost post is really working very well right but technically you know looking at this 100 rupees. So Lena will become very happy that already 10,000 people have seen my ad. Right? So basically what Instagram is doing is it is simply trapping you. Right? It is just giving you an emotional satisfaction that uh you know I have reached your post to these many uh audiences right but technically business-wise it’s nothing. It’s not going to give you any value unless and until you are like emotionally satisfied. Right? I have seen many clients who have come to me after they have failed at this terribly. They have invested lacks of rupees into just boost posting and then you know later they realize that this is of no use and then they started you know cribbing and then coming to me saying that sir can you help me out right so I have seen many startups and particularly women who have invested and then seen no result at all. Right? I have seen women who have worked on boutique industry. I have seen people who are fashion designers, people who are into uh you know healthcare dentists, people who are dentists, people who are general physicians. So all of those guys they have fallen into this trap right. So ideally you know uh what will happen with this is instead of you know simply doing this uh boost pose if you probably you know use the same 100 rupees. Okay. Where is this one? Yeah. So if you you know use the same 100 rupees per day. So instead of reach right instead of just focusing on that 10,000 reach. So now I’m trying to you know drive them towards an application right. So if I get you know 10% of this which is 1,000 clicks right. So which is taking me you know for an application. Okay. Application which has that uh address. Okay. So where you know out of these thousand clicks again the same funnel process out of these thousand clicks I’m assuming at least 100 people will add the uh product to the cart add to carts right so out of these 100 I’m assuming that 50 might buy the product okay 50 buys or at least you know out of that even if there is one dress sold also okay so there is a chance that I’m having at at least you know some x amount of money as a profit right simple understanding this is what happens this is what you know everybody does online so instead of you know all those people who doesn’t understand social media marketing they simply you know do this investment and then basically get business done but technically that’s not the way so this is something where you have to do that and this is possible you know all the way through uh Facebook ad manager technically right so you can use Facebook ad manager and then you can uh you know get this done. So I’ll anyway explain these uh there is advertising also in place. So I have to explain advertising anyway in the process. So I’ll do that not to worry. All right. Yeah. Boost campaign can be done to increase followers as well. Yes. So you know there is no direct uh relation to followers increasing but you know there is something called as profile visits deeply. So there is something called as profile visits where you can drive all the users to you know get to that uh profile. Right. So once you get to that profile basically I mean people obviously you know try to follow you. Yeah. The engagement tactic. Yes. A group. Correct. So that is what you have and uh you know apart from these metrics the next thing uh that you have uh along with the uh professional dashboard. In the professional dashboard only you’ll have that uh settings and privacy options. Okay. And then you have security options where you can you know you’ll have that email verification, two-step verification, two-step authentication. Okay, two-step authentication is basically I mean if anybody is trying to hack your uh Facebook page or something you can you know do some activity there right and then apart from this you have uh you know something called as ads manager which I was just saying. So where this ads manager will let you create those ad campaigns. Okay. So these ad campaigns will enable you to create certain ads specific to this thing just like your boost post only but which are very specific uh you know to uh all the meta platforms specific across meta platforms. When I say meta platforms, it could be uh you know all these Instagram, Facebook to a certain extent, WhatsApp and there is something called as audience network. All right. So apart from these things there is also messenger. All right. So these are the places. So now you know all of these four you know anyway. Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger. What is this audience network is? Audience network is nothing but basically an extended network. Okay. Where there are other other networks who are sharing the information with the Facebook. Okay. These are also similar like Facebook only. So these guys are running their own platforms in different different uh channels but they are also contributing uh you know to Facebook saying that okay boss I am okay if you share you know whatever that you want uh on my channel as well. That is what it is right. So this is what you have and u uh okay can we boost those posts which we did not intend to have or increase sale but uh just wanted more likes and comments on post and then after this we have something called as uh community groups. Okay. So, community groups we call it as Facebook groups technically. Okay. So, Facebook groups are very uh effective, highly effective I would say. Why? Because you know this is where you can bring along common perspectives people who have those common perspectives under one roof. Yes. So you know you can get all of these people under one roof and trust me this is highly effective. All right. So very very very effective. So we’ll get to see all of these things and on the go when we are actually doing it live. So not to worry about it. Right. And then there is also something where you can create Facebook uh events okay through uh Facebook event manager. Okay. So there is something where you can actually create if there is uh you know let’s say you wanted to host some uh Christmas eve right so you can use that uh as a Facebook events manager and then you can uh absolutely invite everybody whoever wants to you know join that party they will be absolutely joining you no worries at all okay yeah so that is what you know we have on Facebook guys similarly we’ll have you know uh like Facebook we have something on Instagram and then we we have uh LinkedIn the channels I’m talking about okay so we have LinkedIn and previously we call it as uh Twitter right you all know what uh this has been called as so you have X and then you have Pinterest right and then you have Snapchat these are all available along with that we have Kora right so these are pretty much there so Reddit you cannot call it as a social media platform so why because Reddit is more or less like a media right So people are active there but that doesn’t mean uh basically you have something which technically is you know there and uh YouTube yeah YouTube also is not uh a social media channel people assume that it’s a social media channel but it’s not right YouTube marketing is entirely a different uh you know platform altogether why because you know simply understand now you know looking at all of these wise why what why and how so it is not any kind of a communication channel. People don’t go to YouTube to talk to somebody. Correct? Yeah. But if you look at all of these platforms, people engage with brands. They talk to these brands. They communicate over these platforms, right? So they make friends over these platforms, but they don’t make friends on YouTube. So they just follow some uh you know content which is being constantly shared. So never consider YouTube as a you know social media channel. Right? So there are certain people who you know take it as a social media channel. But you know my perspective is very clear. So never make sure that never make uh YouTube as a social media marketing channel. WhatsApp for business is a you know you can call I mean you cannot call it as a social media but it’s a communication channel. Again that is also not a part of social media because WhatsApp business is basically just for communication. You cannot you know uh dump the social media post like you are doing it on Facebook and all of that. And you know also it is very personalized right you cannot send it to everybody correct. So if you see Instagram whatever that you post most of it is available uh you know for everybody I mean you can switch to be available for everybody. LinkedIn you post something it is you know for everybody. X for everybody. Pinterest for everyone. Snapchat for everyone. Kora for everyone except Instagram there is certain uh you know setting that uh everybody cannot see it. If it is a personal profile, if it is a professional profile, everybody can see it. But WhatsApp business, unless and until somebody else will text you, they’ll not know who you are. Correct? So, it’s absolute privacy. Got it? Yeah. So, yeah, WhatsApp channels, yes, channels again, they have to subscribe to your uh channel like we are doing it for the regular Instagram stories and all of that. So yes to a certain extent WhatsApp channels can be you know you can call them as uh uh uh social media channels only but again most of these channels are not communicative right I mean people don’t they cannot respond to you they cannot post something they they I think they can mostly hit those likes etc correct if I’m not wrong I I think mostly they can like your content but uh basically they’ll not be able to communicate saying that yeah this is great or something like that so telegram is that kind of a channel where you communicate and then you people also respond to you then and there right so but I didn’t mention telegram here basically because it’s a junky art so you know too much of privacy concerns too much of security issues so that’s why we are not using that as a promotional channel but there are lot of uh you know scamming things happening on ent on telegram only right all the scam is happening there there are a lot of cryptocurrencies being exchanged there are lot of bots being created then and there lot of code is being exchanged there So there are lot of channels there. So this is uh what we have with regards to the uh you know network of channels guys and uh very important importantly what you should also go through with all of these things. I mean we’ll be walking you through I’ll be walking you through all of these channels right now. So today just being an introduction I just gave you the theoretical explanation but uh starting tomorrow we’ll have everything live everything practice. Okay. So uh everything practical. So you will not have all of this theoretical gan okay coming from it. All right. So you know technically uh again make sure that you are understanding the social media as a platform right. Okay. If you don’t don’t understand the social media as a platform right then possibly the chances are uh basically you know you will do everything but it will not give you result. Okay. So one uh direction that you should clearly understanding is you know if you don’t understand the subject very clearly you no matter whatever strategy that you put in you will end up you know being having the same question was you are saying that you did all the social media marketing but where is the result I am not seeing any sale I am not seeing any engagement why is this not happening then you will realize and then you come back to the same question okay so to avoid that only I’m giving you all these uh you know processes very clearly where you start right this is where you should remember for everything not just 1 2 3 every part not just social media for any kind of a question go through the similar kind of a process okay yeah so coming to the next part of it guys which is the resources right first and foremost is uh search engine land or search engine journal okay uh search engine general is something that you should constantly follow and then follow HubSpot. Okay. And uh in HubSpot there is a topic called content marketing. I’ll tell you that later. Right? And then actively follow uh X and uh certain you know people and then there is um you know other than that there are few certifications from Harvard Business Review. Okay. So yeah, Sprout Social, Sprout Social, this is one thing uh uh this is something which needs to be uh you know very active guys. So Sprout Social is very very much there and then there is also something called as buffer. So digital marketing institute right this I I think to start with these are good guys >> just a quick info guys Intellipath offers digital marketing course in collaboration with iHub IIT Riy through this course you will learn complete digital marketing from search engine optimization search engine marketing to PPC analytics and social media marketing and much more from the IIT faculty and industry expert efforts. With this course, we have already helped thousands of professionals in successful career transition. You can check out their testimonials on our achievers channel whose link is given in the description below. Without a doubt, this course can set your career to new heights. So, visit the course page link given below in the description and take the first step towards career growth in the field of digital marketing. >> Now, uh before we talk about what is SEO, first we need to understand what is search engine, right? So, what is a search engine? search engine is Google is a search engine. Google literally has monopoly on search engines, right? Literally that that’s basically what it is. So, uh what we are going to talk about right now is I’m just going to quickly discuss um what uh is SEO overall and then I’m going to talk about what a search engine actually means and how it functions. So all of us know that a search engine helps us uh get results uh based on what we are searching for. But how does it do that? But as we all know in today’s world uh Google dominates the world of search. Even with AI, even with open AI, even with uh what Bing is doing with open AI, even then Google has majority market share. On desktop, Bing has about six six and a half percentage of market share. Yes. But um on mobile, Google is the one do that dominates and seriously speaking uh in today’s day and age almost uh I would say 70 to 80% of any uh website traffic comes from Google or sorry comes from mobile. So that’s big that’s a m major market share. So that’s what it is right. It’s essentially uh SEO is the practice of increasing. So what is SEO? So when it’s the search engine, so what are we optimizing with that search engine? So search engine optimization or SEO is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search results. For some of you this may seem uh like what am I even talking about? But basically what it means is uh having more people visit your website while ensuring that the people visit your website actually want to be there. So let’s say if you have a physical shop and uh there are like 10 people coming into the shop. Now out of those 10 people, if none of them want to make a purchase, that’s a bad quality of traffic. But if those 10 people, at least two of them are willing to make a purchase and the rest of them are just interested in the product or services, that is a good quality product, right? So that is basically what quality and the quantity means. So you want to increase the number of people visiting your website while also ensuring that they want to take the action that you want them to take right. So that’s what is SEO. So as I mentioned Google is having a big mon monopoly on it and uh literally Google is synonymous to search engine in today’s den world right like uh basically what happens is when someone wants to look up or find a website u they don’t they don’t say like okay I’m going to go and search for it on a search engine no one says that people say let me just Google it it’s a verb it has literally become a verb and the reason for that is because of how it functions and how it works. So now u I’m going to talk a little bit more about how Google is actually like one of the biggest uh monopoly in search engine and how it got there. But before that let’s try and understand how search engine in general works. So what is a search engine exactly? And this is true with every other search engines out there. So there’s Google, there’s Bing, there’s Yandex, there’s like all of these other search engine like duck duck go and uh yeah like I I think like there’s bunch of them but a lot of them are actually using the same algorithm of Google and Bing like Doug Doug actually uses Bing and all. Anyways regardless of talking about that the first thing that we should understand is how does a search engine works? Exactly like Ninad asked. So let’s get into that. So uh search engine essentially has a process around it and there are three stages, three different stages. So the first stage is that there’s a crawler. Second is that there is an index and third is there’s an algorithm. Now what does this mean? And uh Google is also one of the websites. How does it know that Nad’s website exists, my website exists, Intellipath’s websites exist or any different website in the world exists? The answer is there is something called as a crawler, right? So what is a crawler? A crawler is a bot like it is also referred to like a robot. It is also referred to a spider or a bot. But basically that’s what a crawler is. And what this crawler basically does is it follows links on the web and tries to find different websites and the different pages that exist on the website. And it does this around the clock. It doesn’t stop. every single second it goes to millions of different pages and uh like basically visits it and saves a HTML version of it. So what that what is that HTML version? Think of it like a screenshot of the website. So it basically saves what it sees and creates a record of it and once it creates a record it calls it uh like that’s like a database and that is called as the index. So imagine this right like uh imagine you are a photographer everyone like most of us have a smartphone we are taking like clicking so many pictures and all. Now what happens is uh as we are taking all of these images etc u like it becomes very tough for us to make sure that or at least go through them after let’s say a month or a year or so forth. So what do we do? We create albums and in each of those albums we create like okay this is what this means this is what this is for. Uh maybe there’s a a separate album or a folder for screenshots, something for uh maybe a trip that you have, maybe multiple different trips into multiple different albums, right? Uh maybe there was an event, a wedding, an anniversary, birthdays. For each of those we have different folders and uh all of those folders would have the screenshots of uh or the images that we want and that’s basically what is index. So crawler does that it goes to different websites it snaps the HTML versions of it and it creates like a huge database which is called as an index. Now this index is updated every time the crawler comes to your website uh and every time it finds like okay there’s a new revised version of it. So depending on how important Google considers your site and the amount of changes that you make the crawler will come around more and more often. Now there is obviously other factors as well like how important your website is based on uh uh let’s say authority how many people are linking and all but let’s not get into that right now at a basic level it’s uh the job of a crawler to create an index of everything that it captures right so that’s what the crawler and an index is uh so one thing one small thing that I want to say is uh like every search engine has their own crawler and their own bot. Uh Bing has a different crawler, Google has a different crawler. Uh for anyone who has heard about chat GPT, there’s a separate crawler of chat GPT that they themselves have created as well. So uh every big company who wants to collect data or wants to identify if you have a website or not will have their own crawler and their job is the same going to a website taking a snap and then creating an index out of it. Now so that’s where the data comes in. That’s where Google knows like, okay, uh, this website exists and, uh, this website is, uh, one that, uh, could probably, um, have the content that the users require. But how does it know based on what a user is searching for, which link or which pages to actually show? The answer for that is the algorithm right now. Uh this is like a simple illustration before I get into algorithm which shows like how a search engine spiders crawls to different websites captures all its pages. Uh it takes notes of your title, keywords, description, navigation, navigate everything, learn about your website, consolidates into different folders and then feeds that data back to the search engine. Right? So this is how it works. And this is something that I’ve just explained right now. Right? So the search engine uh uh sends the spider or the crawler, captures the data, collects it in an index and then goes back to the search engine and like make sure it has the data. But when it comes to that index website, what it does is that now that it is ready to show it, uh it will use its algorithm to decide which pages it would like to show. Now uh and that’s that’s not it like it also decides not just about the pages but it also decides which uh links or the which websites it should show first, second, third and so on and so forth. And the best part it does it in real time almost right like whenever we I don’t know how many of you not noticed it but whenever we do a Google search it will clearly say how long it took for them to get those results. It’s basically in 0 certain number of seconds. And the worst part is the way that algorithm works is a secret. So nobody actually knows how the algorithm determines which link should come first, which link should come second, which link should come third. No one knows that except for Google. Uh so in that case what are we even doing? What is even the work of an SEO? So what we as SEO do is we try to increase the success rate and the chances of our website being or becoming a part of those top website. Basically what happens is uh what the algorithm essentially does is it uh shows which links to show based on the keywords. Let me give you an example. So let me just open an incognitive window. Shoes online. So I am a user. I’m just searching for shoes online. So Google has already indexed like millions, billions of pages, right? So once I’ve made this search for shoes online, what does it do? It shows me websites where I can get shoes online. Now, how does it do this? It does this by using its algorithm. So, it already has a database of all of these websites stored with it. What it basically does is based on my keyword, whatever I have typed over here as a user, it will show the websites that are most likely to be relevant and uh show what I want. Now, how does it decide which website to show first, which to second, which one for third, fourth, fifth and all is something that its algorithm decides. And the worst part is that no one knows how that algorithm actually works. So but yeah it works because of the algorithm. Now uh what it basically does is uh what I’ve mentioned. Then how do we optimize for this and that is what SEO is all about. Now has Google laid out some best practices towards it? Yes it has. But at the same time uh the way that you succeed in SEO is going to be very different based on how you work towards it. Now think of it this way. Uh it’s very similar to um think of it like maybe uh some of those advertisements etc. when you actually show an ad, maybe a billboard ad or maybe a radio ad. Uh now based on that, do you know how many sales you’re going to get? Not really. But what you will still do is based on the information that is available to you, you would try to identify what is giving you the highest percentage of success. and uh that is what you will try to implement. So SEO is nothing but a bunch of geniuses, right? And this is these geniuses. It’s not like specific people, right? There’s like so many different communities of SEOs. All of these people together over the course of however long Google has existed have kept working on different websites trying to identify what can potentially bring them a higher rank. what can potent potentially help them beat their competitor. So let’s say if I’m working for Myntra I would be like okay how do I make sure that I maintain this so that Liberty Shoes does not overtake me. If I work for Liberty Shoes I would be working on identifying ways to beat Myntra and get that first spot. And how will I do that? I will do that based on a bunch of different tests and experiments that are likely to help me get there. And that that’s basically how it is. It’s like literally a black box and you’re trying to work with that black box by inputting some data, feeding some data or at least leveraging some of these secondary information or pieces of data that you have available based on tests that other people have run and using those you’re trying to find the best way to succeed. What does it mean? It basically means if you have a website and if you’re implementing some of these things, you have a higher chances of ranking up than without using it. So does that mean people who don’t use SEO techniques can rank? Maybe. But that’s very similar to saying someone who plays gali cricket will be the next Virat Kohli. So uh how can someone who likes cricket who’s a child uh become or get into the professional cricketing field? They can do it by learning by identifying different ways of actually achieving it by going through c certain things that are tried practicing it seeing the type of results that it brings and then improving themselves and that’s basically what SEO is. So let’s just imagine if you knew how the algorithm works. If uh the way to get the first spot is by making sure that you are like maybe that’s like a recipe right maybe you know that okay by using x amount of this y amount of this and zed amount of this you will get number one rank there are millions of website owners don’t you think all of them will try to do the same then how will algorithm know which one to promote so that’s the reason Google keeps it a secret because if Google tells everyone how the algorithm works. Everyone will know that everyone will use the same thing. Even if their website is of good quality or not, even if their website is actually helpful or not, everyone would do it. And by doing so, uh no one will actually work or sorry, no one would actually uh get the rank, right? And that is the major reason why Google keeps it a secret. That is the major reason for every one of us uh who wants to do SEO. Uh we have to identify by testing and continuously experimenting on what can give us the results. That’s basically what I want to say. Now obviously there are many factors that have been defined many different methods over these courses of years and that has created a structure. that structure what is what helps us understand two major aspects and things. So yeah uh that’s what that’s how search engine works. there’s uh the crawling indexation and algorithm right but let’s try and understand a little bit about Google given that it’s one of the not one it’s it is the monopoly in search engine right let’s try and understand a little bit about Google so over here what is the mission of Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful this is the mission of Google now for us as SEOs. Why is this important? It is important because if Google has a mission or a specific mission or agenda, we need to make sure that our website also aligns towards it or at least is communicating with Google’s algorithm towards it in a way which makes sure that our website is also of high importance for Google and that’s the reason it is important to know. So for them their mission is to organize. So they want to first thing is they want to organize. What do they want to organize? They want to organize information. Every set of information that you are aware of, every set of information that you have on your website. Now there’s like so many different pieces of information. So they want to organize it. If they get uh information that is already properly organized in the language that they want, there’s a high chance that they would prefer prefer your website. Now, in addition to that, if you make it universally accessible and useful, what that means is making sure that the data is easy to access. So, your website should be very simple. It should be easy. whatever information it is that you’re trying to share is something that the user is easily able to access it and is actually being helpful. It should not just be something that let’s say if you’re asking a specific question like maybe how many blocks are there in a rubric cube and there’s a website which says uh the number of blocks in a rubric cube dash. You are like okay maybe this website has the information. You click on it. You go to the website and it says if you want this information pay us 100 rupees. Is that actually accessible? No. Is that useful? You wouldn’t know. But definitely it’s not useful for the user. But if the website instead said like okay the number of blocks in a rubric is uh whatever that number is right. I think that’s about uh uh okay I’m not going to get into that but I think that’s about 27. So if that’s the answer then if it says that then isn’t it well organized? Isn’t it universally accessible and at the same time useful? Yes. And that’s basically what Google is trying to say with the statement. So let’s try and understand some of the fundamental questions to uh know what is the right approach for SEO. So the first question that you should be asking is do you serve highquality content to the users? Is your content fast and easy to access on all devices? Is my website showing up on Google? Right? So is my local business showing up on Google? Is my website secure? Now what are these questions? Some of these questions may seem like okay of course this is how it should be but the deeper we go into that the deeper we will understand that there is so much more into it. What does highquality content even mean right like okay at at surface it feels like okay it should be a content which is of good quality but what does it actually mean? Uh does it mean that it should have some amazing design? Does it mean that it should have uh good content? Uh so in the sense like maybe a lot of long content which has like thousands and thousands of words does it mean just like one sentence which gives the answer what does high quality actually mean? So that is something that you have to decide based on the question that your user is asking. If the question is um let’s say how do you create a regime? Now, if that is your keyword, if that is a keyword of the user and you want to create like a good tutorial of how to create a regime, that will probably be a highquality content because you’re essentially telling the steps that a user should take to create a regime. Now uh similarly if uh the keyword is how to create a regime and uh you’re like uh this is a regime you just copy it or you just make it based on what you feel is right. What does that even mean? Or maybe you all of a sudden write like a 5,000 words long essay around how to create a resume. Is that actually helpful? I I’m not going to read like paragraphs and paragraphs of content, right? So, uh do I serve high quality content? That’s basically what it means, right? Making sure that the content is relevant and it is simple and easy for users and it actually helps them solve their question or answer. Is my content fast and easy to access on all devices? What does this mean? It means making sure if your content is available on a website that it is easily accessible on a phone. It is easily accessible on a desktop and people can go through it very quickly and very fast. That’s that’s basically what it means. So your website should be technically strong. It should be in a server which is fast enough. And whenever someone is like loading the website, it should load very quickly. If it takes like 1 minute, 2 minutes, no one is going to wait for that. They’re going to click back to go to a different website from Google. Right now, is your website showing up on Google? Dan then was asking this, how does Google know? Yes, of course, there’s a crawler, but how will they actually get to it? So, are you properly indexing it? Are you properly making sure that your website is visible or not? Is uh your website’s site map submitted to Google or not? All of those things will make a difference if your website is actually showing up on Google or not. Maybe they your website was banned for some reason then of course it will not show up either right so making sure that your website shows up on Google is also an important factor even if you serve highquality content which is fast and easy if it is not showing up on Google then what’s SEO and if it’s a local business of course making sure that you have a business pro uh like profile Google business profile is important and that it is showing up on Google as well Google maps etc And finally ensuring that it is secure that it is using HTTPS that it is also like going through uh different parts of data. Uh right so that’s that’s essentially what it means. Let’s try and understand a little bit more around it. Right? Like now what do you need to optimize and how will you do it? Let’s try and understand a little bit around that. So I I mentioned if you guys notice certain things around the topic, right? But uh some of them must be like what does it actually even mean? So there’s if you if you guys noticed there was something that uh was highlighted in the very first slide about SEO. It talked about uh the quantity of traffic and the quality. So now let’s try and understand what it actually means. So first thing is all about your business. Now what does it actually mean? Let’s try and understand it from a different perspective. Uh now imagine a school and everyone of us have been a teenager at one or the other point. Right? Now in a school settings what happened is uh there are two different aspect which uh makes you popular. What are they? The first is what you are saying to others. So what are you talking about? What are you saying? Are you saying the cool and hip things that people care about? Awesome. That’s good. That’s the first step. But that alone will not help, right? Everyone can do that. So how do you actually become popular? You become popular by not just you yourself saying things but by others in the school talking about you saying that oh that’s the person that person is so good that person is so good in doing this maybe that person is so good in sports just as an example right now when someone does this what ends up happening everyone will start thinking that the person is actually important or you are important. Now, Google search kind of works in a similar way and uh essentially there are two parts to it. So, the first is what am I saying to Google? So what this means is what you as a website is communicating to Google search and the second is what do other websites say to Google search about you right so that is the two segments and that is what on page and off page is all about plain and simple on page. It’s on your page. Off page, it is off your page. It’s not something that you can directly control. You can influence it, yes, but you cannot directly control it. So, what am I saying to Google is on page? Basically, what your website is telling or communicating to Google is on page and what every other website is telling about your website is off page. There are simple words uh that will help you understand both of these things. Yeah. Uh so off-page versus on page, right? So think of on page as relevance. So what does it mean? So on page is like controlling since you are in control of on page what you can do is you can make sure that the content in onpage is as relevant as possible. right uh to your target audience and when it comes to off- page it’s all about authority and uh as Deepi you rightly mentioned authority is very tough since you have no control over it but you can still try to influence it a little bit so how can that work in a basic essence on page factors decide the ranking of your website that these include technical issues like your website’s code as well. We are not going to learn coding here by the way, but I’m going to talk about some of the things that you should be aware of in terms of your website and the textual issues like the structure of your site, the text and the use of the words and how it relays the relevance to the particular uh user. When it comes to off- page, these factors include links from other websites, social media signals, other marketing activities outside of your control. So, it’s all about building authority. All right? And that’s that’s basically uh the difference between the two. Let me explain. Right? So, basically in on page there are two parts to onpage. one is the content side and the second is the technical side. So when it comes to the technical side, you typically focus on if the search engine can access your website, which is what search engine accessibility is. And second is if the user is able to access your website and properly get a good experience of it. So maybe the website is loading quickly. uh the website does not have a lot of uh errors. it is uh security compliant which using uh by using SSL some of those things right these are technical SEO so that’s what search engine accessibility and user accessibility is all about and this is a separate subset of onpage SEO now uh that’s just technical aspect but what is make being made accessible what is the main thing that is being made accessible the thing that is being made accessible is the content which is the content SEO part. It’s the keywords and the content. So, uh what you’re basically doing is you’re trying to find keywords that are relevant to your business and making sure that those relevant keywords are uh also pro uh like being met with highly relevant content. So, that’s what content SEO is all about combined together. It’s about creating content that is highly relevant of good quality that high quality content thing that I talked about in some some of the earlier slides. And uh to do that you need keywords. So everything in SEO by the way revolves around keywords. If you don’t know your keywords in SEO you’re probably what are you even doing? So yeah that that’s basically what it is. So subset content technical in terms of content you’re looking at keyword and content content itself that is in terms of technical you’re looking at accessibility for user and the crawlers or the robots primary focus I want is going to be towards keywords. So uh when it comes to keywords, what we need to keep in mind is as I said it it is uh the core aspect of how you uh look at uh structuring your website, creating content for it, uh making sure that it is relevant, making sure it is accessible and all it all starts from keyword. So keyword is one of the most important things. So let’s talk about keywords. the building blocks of an effective SEO strategy. Okay. Yeah. So, what are keywords? When you search for something, the phrase that you’re using is a keyword, plain and simple. So, just today when I went on Google and I did this shoes online, this shoes online is a keyword. If I search for um let’s say SEO online, this is a keyword. SEO online is a keyword, right? So similarly, there are bunch of different keywords. We search for so many things online every single day. Uh who was Napoleon? Napoleon. I I I guess I’m getting Oh, I got the spelling right. Nice. So, yeah, that’s a keyword. Who is Who was Napoleon is a keyword, right? Now, what is this keyword? It’s anformational keyword. Um, nice places to visit around Bangalore. I’m currently in Bangalore. This is a keyword, right? And this is what drives or uh creates or helps you create your SEO strategy. And why is that? So as you all know SEO is a search engine. When people search for things uh they look at different websites and when they look at these websites they would click on that website and that is what you want people to do. They you want people to visit your website. But if you are a travel website, would you want people to visit from keywords like this or keywords like shoes online? Which is not even relevant, right? Like maybe you need shoes for traveling, but does that mean that’s relevant for you? That’s not at all relevant. If you’re a travel agency or someone who provides like maybe if you’re clear trip or make my trip or something like that in that case you would want to make sure that people who uh are searching for similar keywords that are relevant to your website are the one visiting it and uh to ensure that the first way or the uh the best way that you start is with a keyword. So the keyword should be more relevant. Now uh that keyword should be primarily relevant to your business. But basically that is what a keyword is. That thing that people search for is the keyword. So let’s try and understand a little bit more about keyword. What exactly does a keyword mean for someone who does SEO? So now of course this is when people search for a term or a phrase they should find your page. a keyword as you guys just saw shoe tra shoes shoes online or shoes is like what it’s like just couple of phrases and a keyword could also be very high places to travel to around Bangalore or something like that and very similar to the example here right a keyword can be a single word like travel or a phrase like best travel destinations in Goa right now the number of words that are used make your keyword context the context behind that keyword uh less or more relevant. Why is that? So in this same example that you can see on the slide here as you can see a single keyword like travel. So when you’re searching for travel and you’re anywhere in India what can that mean? It can mean anything. It can mean you want to travel to a specific destination in India or maybe you want to travel outside India. It could mean that you just want uh to buy some tickets or maybe you want to buy uh uh some flight tickets, bus tickets, train tickets, maybe you want to book a taxi, car, it could be anything, right? Or maybe you want to book a hotel. You maybe want to just research around it. just find out what are the good destinations or places to go. So because of that the number of people since there there could be so many multiple thousands and thousands of meaning towards it the people who are searching for that single word will also be very high in number. A keyword like this is called as a head keyword. It has a huge volume of people searching for it. Although it is very less specific, it is very broad in nature. It could cover multiple things but at the same time the number of people searching for it is also very high. And then there are keywords like best travel destinations in Goa. Very specific. This is like okay I know what I want and this is exactly what I want. Now what happens? Not everyone wants to go to Goa. So from the people who type travel if you consider the number of people who want to go to go is less than that right. Um and with that the volume or the number of people who search for it compared to travel is also going to be very less. And the second thing is it also mentions best travel destinations. There’s a clear context. It isformational. They want specific information. They want to know what are good places to go in Goa. And at the same time it is very long in size. Not everyone types so many words as well. Some some people are just like they just want best Goa. Maybe they’ll find something. What is best go? What does it even mean? But you get it right. like uh because of how long it is the number of people searching for it is also going to be low and that is how uh people in SEO bifurcate keywords into different segments. This is primarily the head segment, mid segment and the long segment. Uh it’s also called as head, midtail and long tail keyword, right? that that’s basically what it is. Okay, so let’s try and get a little deeper into these three things, right? What is head, mid, and long tail? So, a head keyword uh is the primary topic of the website, think of it as that. So, when you think of Amazon, what’s the primary topic of Amazon? Shopping, e-commerce, shopping online. That’s basically it, right? that that’s that’s the main topic and that’s the head keyword for Amazon. So when you probably enter the keyword shopping, there’s a high chance Amazon might show up. I don’t know. I have to check. Let’s check shopping. What shows up? Okay, so it shows up a bunch of places. Ah, okay. But yeah, see Myntra has shown up. Okay, online shopping Amazon shows up over here. But yeah, that’s the head term, right? Buy maybe buys buys too out there. But essentially, it’s the main topic of it. Amazon, I would say online shopping is perfect. Double ea vib completely agree. Vikas completely agree. But yeah, that’s that’s what it is, right? Like a shopping website online. So uh when it comes to most of the websites and blog uh the head term is your primary topic of that website. Uh Siraj completely agree. So u let’s say if it’s a mom blog it’s going to be about children and family. If it’s a food blog it’s going to be foods, restaurants, recipes, eating. If it’s a Moz blog for anyone who doesn’t know what MOS is, uh it’s it’s an SEO website like it has an good SEO tool and all and uh for them it’s going to be all about SEO and in fact they do rank for SEO related content, right? So that that’s what a head keyword is. It’s the primary topic which is very broad when you when you consider shopping that’s like such a broad thing. Shopping can be any single thing but uh Amazon comes to your mind because it actually has almost every single thing. Now we know travel is like a head keyword right or as a saying short tail keyword. Yes. But when it comes to midtail uh it’s more of an expansion of uh uh the head keyword. So travel packages, travel packages online, those are mid keywords, right? So uh typically they have about two three words. Uh again depending on the context. Uh sometimes by the way head terms can also have one to two words also but m typically has like two or three words in them and it is broad but not too broad while not being too specific. So for example when you look at travel packages it is broad it is definitely not something which is like very specific right so uh women kind of I would say given the search volume I wouldn’t call it mid uh because online shopping does have a lot of search volume but yeah maybe you can consider it as mid maybe depending upon different context right but it’s all about what uh uh the main thing that you should consider is it’s all about how it is relevant to your particular thing. So um now when it comes to travel packages the overall search volume for it will not be as high as travel and uh at the same time uh it would be not as low as something like let’s say uh best travel destinations in Goa. it is going to be somewhere in middle and uh even if your blog post about it uh you have to kind of optimize or make sure that you are ranking for it right so uh let’s say if you uh there could be different different variants of it so for example let’s say Goa travel packages Kashmir travel packages etc so all of these are midtail keywords and uh these can form your main category so if let’s say uh So your website is about travel. Your main topic of the website is travel. Uh your midtail would be the primary categories of your travel. So u let’s consider the same example of Amazon as well. Right? If Amazon’s head term is online shopping. So what would be a main category one of the main categories for Amazon? What is the one thing that we go to Amazon for purchasing? Online clothes shopping, online electronic shopping, online phone shopping, online smartphone shopping, buy phone online, buy smartphone online, buy electronics online. What are these? These are midtail keywords. Yeah. So that’s what midtail is all about. It’s like something that is a derivative of your head keyword. So okay. Anyway, so this is what midtail is, right? Then longtail as all of you know it’s like best travel destinations for Kra how to book a travel package more number of words even lesser search volume but the best part is longtail keywords are usually easier to rank for and that is why longtail keywords are very important when it comes to longtail keywords if your website is new you can essentially find uh these keywords s that still have some search volume so that you can quickly get started with it and still be able to maintain um and get some form of traffic. Now why should you do this? Why should get just a little bit of traffic? The reason is even if you get that little bit of traffic that is just a start. As I mentioned earlier SEO is a long-term process. So you can always start small and then build on top of it. Like once you are able to get traffic for the smaller uh search volume keywords with lower competition then you aim for a bit higher then higher then higher higher before you’re able to go for some of the bigger ones that there are big competition for as well. So uh that’s basically why it is very important to understand these different segments. So yeah uh so far that’s that’s what it is head mid long tail research consideration purchase uh your head is mostly used for research or information gathering midtail is primarily for consideration of different things and when people know that they want to make a specific purchase or when they want to make a specific transaction most of the time you would see longtail keywords. So uh as you can see at the end I’ve also mentioned over here the loyalty and the brand part right uh and this is also considered as a head term. So what it means is Amazon is a head term which is tied to its loyalty. When you want to search for or when you want to go to Amazon’s page you would just type Amazon the name of the brand. When you want to go to Flipkart, you would just type Flipkart. When you want to go to big billion day sale, you would type big billion sale as Leela mentioned. And that’s a part of loyalty. That’s also uh it’s not directly related to head term, but that’s a part of the loyalty segment. And uh when it comes to the customer journey, sometimes even those loyalty will help you get conversions because customers are specifically looking for you. when I want to go to Myntra’s website, I will be typing Myntra and if let’s say Tat Click comes up, I will not go to Tata Click. I will still go to Myntra because that’s the website that I want to go to. So uh sometimes and this happens mostly for uh let’s say established brands that uh while head keywords are typically your uh let’s say non-branded keywords like shoes online travel etc. uh brand keywords could also be head for those specific brands. So yeah that’s what uh the keyword or the different type of keywords look like. Keyword is something that users search for. You just try to analyze that search data. So that’s where we come to the next part. How to choose the right keyword? I’ve been talking about keyword so much, but how do you even select it? Is travel the right keyword? It’s kids try the right keyword as Arvin says. Uh but like how do you even choose it? This is this is a very big challenge, right? And uh this is what keyword research is all about. Let’s get into how do you even select those? How do you even select if it is going to be kids toys or how do you select the keyword that you want to focus on? Now there are three parameters for this. There’s volume, there’s relevance and there’s competition. Now volume makes sense. Number of people searching for it. Relevance of course it should be relevant. H but what about competition? How do you judge that? And that’s quite tricky frankly speaking. So let’s uh sort of understand a little bit around this on how you should even go about selecting keywords. U there are now one thing is there are tools out there of course uh Airu completely agree Google ads is a pretty good tool. uh but it also sort of start uh creates some confusion on how to get started because I’ve because Google ads wants to make money right so of course they want people to uh enter their billing information etc when you start their account but uh that doesn’t mean like you’re going to get charged for it anyways without getting into it as he said there are tools for it uh there are tools by Google like Google keyword planner that you can use uh which is a part of Google ads Yes, it’s a free tool. It’s pretty good. It’s pretty powerful. Uh and because it’s Google’s own tool, the search volume is also more relevant and uh much more accurate. Um now, when it comes to relevance, it’s all about making sure that the keyword is actually relevant for your business. Like I said, if you’re a travel agent, shoes are probably not that relevant for your business. But uh travel is definitely relevant for your business. And the third thing is competition, right? So uh how tough is your competition? Who are your competition and uh how difficult it is going to be for you to beat them? That’s what it’s about. And how do you get this information? Right. It’s it’s it’s a bit tough but we thankfully do have some tools for it right so let’s let’s look into that so what we are going to do right now is I’m going to explain a little bit about how you should be going about keyword selection um and even getting started with keywords in general and then I’m going to show like a quick small demo uh about how you can basically go around with using different tools to get the keywords that you want. So volume is nothing but the number of people searching for a keyword. Relevance is relevant to your business if it is relevant to your business or not. Competition is how difficult it is going to be for you to rank your website for that keyword. Volume is number of people searching for that. So typically uh the volume number that you’ll see is in a uh in a single month how many users are on average searching for a keyword. So let’s say travel for example probably there’s going to be lacks of people who are searching for it every month. Uh so uh that that’s the volume right. So how do you even get through with the business uh keyword selection? So when it comes to keyword selection, you need to make sure that it is the right mix. You need to mix the user intent and the business intent. So you may be um um the let’s say if you’re a travel agent, you may be having Ladak packages, the user might be searching places to visit in Ladak. But uh if you notice there’s a very distinct difference between that while the business intent is Ladak packages the user intent is places to visit the Ladak. The right mix over here is how to plan a budget trip to Lada or let’s say budget packages for Ladak or places uh budget places to visit in Ladak. Right? So it’s all about making sure if you want to select good keywords those keywords needs to be a mix of the user intent and the business intent. But in some cases you can also go with just the user intent as well to get some initial traction. Right? So that’s basically uh how you go about selecting the keywords. So uh as I was saying that is how you look at keyword selection. So once you understand a little bit around that uh what you should be doing is you’d be you should be looking at the user intent and the business intent and then coming up with the right mix around it. So it should be something that users are searching for. It shouldn’t be something that users are not searching for. Right? So based on that uh let’s look at this. So the first step is to come up with different ideas. So you should be asking questions like what services do you offer? Uh so basically put yourself into the customer shoes, right? So let’s say if you are offering uh uh air transport or if you are offering uh a specific air buses discount tickets or something like that, the user may not be searching for those. The user would be searching for something like cheap flights, discount flights, get discounts or flights or something like that, right? They will not be searching for a Airbus. They will not be searching for your air model or let’s say a specific thing. So that’s the first thing that you should be doing. You should be putting yourself into the customer’s shoes so that you know and be very clear that okay, this is probably what they want. Now once you do that you get something uh of at least a starter keyword right so like for example in this example cheap flights is your starter keywords if that is what you’re selling um if let’s say you’re selling tables so tables online cheap tables affordable tables computer tables those are your starter keywords now once you have these starter keywords. You can use different keyword tools that are available to find the search volume of it and then based on the list of keywords that you get from it, you can then start to categorize those. What am I talking about? What are the keywords that I’m going to get? And that’s the beauty of these tools. So, you need what are these tools? So there are multiple different tools like uh the one that someone was mentioning earlier about Google ads. Uh then there are also like other tools like ahs, semrush etc. I have the links uh available for it. I will be sharing those links with you guys. Don’t worry. But what you can do is by using these tools uh once you input your starter keyword you will get access to all the other keywords that are probably relevant or similar to your starter keywords that users are also searching for. And by getting all of those keywords, you can then try to identify or select the keywords that is going to be the most relevant uh that also has good volume and is probably low in competition as well so that you can actually rank for it. Right? So that’s basically how it works and that’s what we are going to do next. Uh so I know next slide says like log into Google ads and all and access keyword tool. I’m not going to do that uh directly right now because I also understand that uh uh sometimes just onboarding or getting into Google ads can be a bit difficult. Instead uh I’m going to try to use uh one of the free tools available. So there are a bunch of different keyword tools right like keyword tool.io, io Uber suggest. So I’m going to go with Uber suggest for now. This is what I’m going to ask from you guys. Okay. Um yeah, let’s go with masala powder. I somehow I’m intrigued by it. So let’s go with masala. That’s it. And I’m going to select India here. By the way, location is also an important aspect. Based on the location, the search volume will definitely be different. So I’m just putting a keyword. So let’s say I am doing SEO for MDH Masali. Everyone knows the MDH dada g. Uh so I’m doing uh uh SEO for them and I want to find good keywords that I should select from. So I’m like I just put the head keyword or the main product or the main topic masala over here uh with uh the location because I want to advertise in India and I’ll click search. One thing is Uber suggest only has one free search if you’re not logged in. Currently I’m not logged in so I have only one free search sadly and it’s also a bit limited but it is still pretty decent uh as it provides you some semblance of uh details. So let’s look into that. So as you can see using Uber suggest free version. Now the minute I search for it. Okay. Yeah. uh what you get is the first thing that you get is search volume. So people searching for masala there is about 60,500 people in India who search for the keyword masala and then there is something called as SEO difficulty. So this is your competition. What it means is from zero to 100 uh it uh it’s like almost 50 at a difficulty. So let’s say if 100 is like if if you are Google or if you are Amazon or something like that you can easily rank your keyword. But at 50 you need to have at least some traffic from SEO already. you should already have maybe uh thousands of traffic uh at least 50,000 one lakh traffic per month from SEO to be able to get through this keyword at a difficulty of 50. If the SEO difficulty is lower maybe around 10 20 in that case even if your website is new you can still somehow manage that. So typically when your website is new you should be looking for that. If your website is already getting traffic and good traction and is already ranking for some keywords, then probably you can go for higher difficulty keywords as well. Now everything over here is subjective. Even this SEO difficulty thing that you’re seeing is something that Uber suggests, this tool is measuring. It is not an actual difficulty number. Google officially does not have an difficulty number of how difficult it’s going to be. Every other tool out there will try to tell you that there is a difficulty and every other tool will say a different difficulty number. Then why use it? Because this at least gives you some under how difficult it is going to be. So this is just to be able to quickly understand if you should even go for the particular keyword or not and if you have the capability of going for that keyword or not. Uh paid difficulty. If you notice there are two different difficulties, right? So SEO difficulty is 50. Yes. But paid difficulty is two. So paid difficulty is for Google search. So sorry Google search ads. So if you are running Google ads in that case the difficulty for this is low and probably you may end up paying something like this SEM absolutely but we are not doing SEM. What we are doing is SEO. So why am I seeing the paid and SEO difficulty here? Why is it confusing me? The reason is because uh when you search for something online, you get both the results, the paid results as well as the organic results. While they are separate inventory, when I say inventory, in the sense the paid result works differently and the organic results work differently, they still show up in the same page and that’s the reason you get the information for both of these things here. Right? So now, okay, for this one keyword, I got to understand what the details are. But where are my other keywords? I’ll just scroll down a little bit and as you can see there’s something called as keyword ideas. So okay so looks like it has created some ideas. Uh the first one is masala dosa. Of course this is not what I’m looking for. There is masala chenna. There is masala oats. Masala puri. Masala Everest. Okay this is a little re relevant. Masala bhi. Masala box is a little relevant, right? But uh then I would if I click on this, I don’t think it’ll work. I’m I’m a little afraid of clicking on this because there might be some pop-up that shows up. So that’s why I’m not doing that right now. But you get the idea, right? This is the list of keywords that you would get something similar to this. So this is like a very simple free version or free way of you can Oh, you have done. Okay. I’m trusting you, Vibon. And it worked. Thank you. Okay. So, uh looks like it has some uh nice uh suggestions. And it’s like uh this is relevant. Yes. Uh masala box, not chat, not this. And as you can see, what am I doing here? What what is this relevant? Not relevant. What am I doing? If you noticed, it’s a combination of this. You’re looking at the volume. It is currently sorted by volume in fact, right? But at the same time, you’re also looking at relevance. If I’m selling masalas like MDH, Masala Everest is kind of relevant for me. Masala box is relevant for me. Uh but not these specifically. Now, this might be relevant for me. uh maybe if I if I’m selling like specific masala for that but yeah not very relevant right so what I’ll do is next I will try to search for the specific masalas right so I would be looking at specific different things like maybe pauh bhaji masala or let’s say uh paneer butter paneer masala Uh yeah, Ghirros masala any of those. Right. So that’s that’s basically what I would do and try to see if I’m getting more relevant keywords. Subzi masala. And what would happen with that is as I get these now there’s a question what is PD? What is SD? So I would basically look at these I would look at SD which is the SEO difficulty. So that’s what this says as well. And uh I would then based on the SEO difficulty decide u like the volume the SEO difficulty and the relevance I would decide if I want to pick this keyword or not. And that’s basically how keyword selection works. Right? So you’re not just selecting keywords based on something being relevant because that is not datadriven. So what if let’s say the keyword that you select has is is something that no one is searching for. So because of that you should be selecting keywords based on the volume the search volume based on the SEO difficulty and based on the relevance to the business and that’s what this says how to choose the right keyword volume relevance and keyword uh sorry competition first and foremost Google is the monopoly of search engines L literally even today when Bing is partnering with OpenAI and all of those things that it is doing u Bing uh probably has some decent market share in desktop but Google is still the majority player today most of the websites get uh over 80% of their traffic from mobile phones and Google has almost 98% of mobile phone uh uh traffic right market share and that’s huge. uh apart from that on desktop yes the market share of Google is a bit lower probably around 85% but that’s primarily because people end up using edge by default which has Bing as a default search engine right so that’s the reason why majority of what I’m going to talk about in terms of SEO is going to be related to Google search now does that mean uh other search engines does not get involved here. Not really. Uh there are other search engines as well. But fundamentally all of them work very similar to how Google search works. So anything that you’re going to learn about Google search and SEO, you can apply it to other search engines as well. Right? So now the first question is how does a search engine actually work? Because if we want to optimize our results for search engine, we need to understand how it works. So there are three things that a search engine does as you can see on the screen. The step one is crawling. So a search engine has a little robot right in the sense it’s virtual and all we cannot see it etc. But there’s like so many thousands of servers which host it and send uh that robot to your website. This bot can be called as a Google bot, a spider, a robot, a crawler, it could be any of those. that uh every search engine like Google would send their crawlers to your website and uh by doing so they are able to capture information about your website. So every time so just like we take screenshots on our phone right just like that every time a crawler visits your website and then takes a screenshot of your website and once it does that it stores or it collects like a folder or file of it and that is called as a database. So it basically creates like a huge data set about your website as it captures those snapshots and once it does that that database is called as indexing right so that’s the step two so first it goes to your website it looks at it and then it captures the data of your website that it saw and that is indexing so crawling indexing and the third step of how a search engine works is algorithm So yes, so they collect the data uh they capture the data. But how do they use the data? They use the data when a user is searching for something. So for example, when I go on Google and when I type a specific keyword, there’s an algorithm which checks the keyword that I’m typing in and then matches it with the database of index that is already collected and based on that it identifies what are the different web pages to show. Now this algorithm also does a second step. One is obviously it matches with the relevant pages but the second is it also identifies the sequencing of when to show which page. So let’s say for example when I type shoes online it would actually have this sequencing. As you can see the sequencing that it decided is Myntra should be first then Centro should be second then Flipkart should be third then Liberty should be fourth. So that’s uh how does it happen? It happens because of an algorithm and this algorithm based on the search query or based on the keyword. This is a keyword by the way. So based on these it matches the indexed database that Google already has which is like billions and billions of web pages and based on that it would show up these search results. That’s basically how it works, right? And if I come a little down, uh, okay, looks like I’m not able to see it over here, but uh, Google used to have this small snippet which shows like how long it took to actually show the search results, which is really, uh, just a few milliseconds, right? That’s possible because of how optimized the algorithm is. So anyways, that’s how it works. And uh u just FYI this is called as the ranking right? So Myntra has the first rank, Centro has the second rank, Flipkart has the third rank, Liberty has the fourth rank. So for this keyword u if someone asks what is the rank of Myntra sorry what is the rank of Flipkart you can say the rank is third right? Uh if I ask you what is the rank of Myntra what would you say? Yep it is one. Now the thing is a lot of people sometimes get confused about this and this is very common. So uh Google wants to uh make it a bit confusing. Yes, Adidas is an organization, data click is an organization, Ray Rabbit is one, Cult Sport is one, right? But uh if you notice this is sponsored. So what happens is and this is very important for everyone to uh understand as well. So there are two different inventories in Google search. So the first inventory that you always see is going to be Google ads inventory. So this all the results that you see over here are from Google ads inventory and organic results which is what we optimize for as a part of SEO is below the Google ads inventory. Right? So keep that in mind that both of these are separate and both of these work differently. Google ads works differently. The way that you rank for Google ads works differently. The way that you rank for organic search is also different. And that is what we are going to talk about. Right? So uh this is something that you should always keep in mind. uh uh as we are going to look at some of the keyword tools uh we would also notice that uh the way that the rankings work are different. Yeah, these are shopping ads. Correct. AU. Okay. So that’s what the algorithm is right now. uh when it comes to the way that the algorithm works or the way that you can uh rank your product, the way that it works is like broadly there are two different segments and uh someone already mentioned this but u the two segments are what you can communicate to Google from your side and the second segment is what others are telling about you. This is very similar to politics for example, right? So in politics um when you are let’s say fighting for an election or something like that, what do you do? You would have you would promote yourself. You would try to talk good things about you. Uh you would try to say what are the changes you’re going to bring. you’re going to probably write a manifest and publish that so that people understand like okay these are the agenda or these are the things that you would do if you win but what happens is uh people will not trust you directly right people will be like why should I believe anything that this person says and uh why should I even like go to this person or vote for this person etc and uh the way that that person increases that is by gaining authority. How does the person gain authority? By having others talk about him. So typically a politician like for example even when you hear about our current prime minister Narendra Singh Modi right he does not speak to you directly. There are other people who talk about him because of which you believe in the things that he says much more and that’s the reason he gains authority. Same goes for any political leader and same goes for SEO as well. So on page is you talking about good things, good quality stuff and uh sharing good content making sure that the things are relevant. Off page is about what others tell about you and how they talk about you and if they are talking in a positive manner how they are actually saying that okay if you are someone good or not etc etc and all of those things helps bring up your authority and that is off page uh so that’s basically off page right so on page is all about making sure that whatever you’re doing is around relevance Making sure that if you want to target a specific keyword, you’re more relevant towards it by providing highquality content by providing relevant content and ensuring that it is helpful. And authority is more about what other websites are telling about your website uh by the means of the type of backlinks that they provide. We are going to go deeper into what backlinks are, don’t worry. and the type of context that those links have. And that’s basically what’s the difference between onpage versus off- page. And that’s what relevance is and that’s what authority is in terms of SEO. The main important thing. So that’s what we did uh last time, right? So what is the main important thing? The main important thing is the keyword. Why is keyword the most important thing? Because that is basically what people are searching for today. A single person in a single month can search for hundreds if not thousands of different things. Just go to your own history and you will see how many different things you have searched for. Every single search is like a keyword, right? And that is the reason now every time you use a different keyword you will find different results. So for you as an SEO expert the main goal is identifying the right relevant keyword and making sure that you’re showing relevant pages on that so that you can get good uh uh potential customers for your business. Right now for example over here when I type shoes online you can see I got Myntra. Now if I look at shoes online u this has it says there’s about 5,400 searches in India for this. So that means in a single month almost 5,000 people search for it. Now, out of these 5,000, let’s say even if maybe 5% of them end up buying if they visit the first page, that’s still like 200 plus uh uh sales, right? So, that’s the main thing. And all of these sales are for free. So, because you’re not paying for these, you’re paying if you show up your ads or something like that, you would be paying for that. But for SEO, you’re not paying for anything. And that’s the reason uh the first thing or the first most important core of your SEO starts from keyword because uh identifying the right keyword and making sure that you’re able to rank for them is the most important aspect of your entire SEO strategy. Uh the relevance comes from your keywords. The relevance comes from uh the type of keywords, how you’re optimizing for it, what the what are the different pages you’re optimizing for it, how you’re working towards it, etc. All of it starts from the keywords, right? So, and that’s where we ended up with keyword research. So in keyword research uh the practice of identifying keywords that strike a balance between business relevance and user intent while ensuring it has enough search volume and competing ability. So we say sir similar platforms will use similar keywords then how to uh rank them. Yeah. So obviously like uh for example over here right myra flipkart central all three want to rank for it even flipkart doesn’t want to be at third position it wants to be at the first centra also wants to be at the first position but then why is myntra over here how do you rank over here the answer is by making sure that okay I would say all three of these actually have uh good content, good relevant content. So the minute I type shoes online in all of these three websites, I can buy shoes online and the content also says the same thing. So why isn’t Flipkart on the top? Why isn’t Centro on the top? The reason is because the algorithm of Google thinks that most people want to buy shoes from Myntra and that’s the reason it shows over there. And how does Google know that? It knows that because of authority, right? So it’s going to be a combination of multiple things. Now if you notice there are other aspects as well. uh Centro for example uh over here in Myntra you can see the shop rating is uh like 4.7 and then it says a pricing and then it also has some uh additional links right so these are uh your uh you can basically call them as site links and over here flipkart also has a shop rating it also has some additional site links and uh but if you notice central doesn’t have them then there is a good chance that if Centro also has these with their website u they might get some preference in ranking will that be enough to outrank Myntra no one knows that not even Google knows that because the that is how the algorithm works it is completely neutral right but uh it is worth trying and uh just like this there are a lot of other smaller factors there are Like when I when I think about uh ranking factors of SEO, there’s like hundreds of different ranking factors. Can all of them or implementing all of them help you rank? Not necessarily. But will implementing all of them uh improve your chances of ranking? Definitely. And that’s basically how it works. The these are one of the ranking factors. Yes. But that doesn’t mean like it is going to rank because of that. So for example if you notice over here Myntra says again this is an assumption Myntra says buy shoes for men women kids online India right but over here uh central also says shop latest footwear trend no there’s no no difference between the type of footwear but over here this one is just for men like men’s footwear that’s it so maybe because uh there isn’t a specific uh I would say a specific page that is just for footwear which was able to rank for this keyword. That’s the reason uh it is not ranking that well. Um it also has the link as men’s footwear. Uh while it does have shoes over here so maybe if there is like a shoe related page that was showing up over here that could have had a better chance. Yeah. Exactly. So uh that could be potentially the reason. Yeah, title is important, URL is important, description is important, the page is content is important, the rich snippets, all of these are rich snippets. These are important. Brand doesn’t matter Minakshi over here or authority matters. Authority matters more and your relevance matters more. As I said, it all starts with keyword research. So, shoes online, how do I know which keyword to work with? How does uh Myntra know that okay, this is the keyword that it should work or optimize towards. How does Flipkart know that okay, shoes online is a keyword to focus towards? Maybe Flipkart just did not want to optimize towards shoes online. Maybe they wanted to optimize towards men’s footwear and that’s the reason this page shows up, right? So, let’s see what happens if I type men’s footwear. And of course, Flipkart shows up, right? So maybe this is the keyword that they wanted to focus on more and that’s the reason this page shows up for this particular keyword. So that’s the reason that keyword research is very important. And uh as you can see uh this men’s footwear does have about 33,000 people searching for this keyword every month. So definitely way higher, right? So that’s the reason keyword research is more important. So what did I say in this sentence? The practice of identifying keywords that strike a balance between business relevance and user intent. Right? So now business relevance in the sense they are selling shoes but if you notice the page is all about men’s footwear is that related to the business yes but uh footwear as a industry is big thing typically they are selling shoes sneakers etc but it could be anything and flipkart itself is a e-commerce business it’s just like uh uh selling footwear online so u but you as you can see they are actually ranking or optimized for this keyword. So that’s what it means like it’s all about identifying a balance between the user intent. So the user intent may be searching for men’s footwear. The business relevance is obviously making sure that they people know that okay men’s footwear is available online and the mix of these is a good keyword like these and ensuring that these keywords have enough search volume. So obviously they would want to make sure that the search volume is decent enough and the website itself has the ability to compete. What does this mean? So again I’m going to take the example of cricket. If I’m playing gali cricket do I have the ability to compete in IPL? The chances are no. It’s even if I do like what’s going to happen definitely I’m I’m not going to be able to compete over there right and the same thing applies over here like uh if I’m playing gulli cricket I should stick to that. If I’m maybe into state level or maybe even the region level I should stick to that and as I’m progressing as I’m improving I can aim higher. Yes. Uh so that’s what SEO is all about and even the keyword research is all about. You need to identify a competition that you can actually beat and once you are good at that then you start to focus on higher levels keywords. Reach yourself over there then next go higher reach yourself over there go higher reach yourself over there. And that’s how it works. So overall u yes there is 33,000 volume over here but u there’s a high chance since flipkart myntra ago etc are ranking for this keyword that means that uh the competition is going to be super tough because every single company over here that you’re seeing rank on the top is probably spending millions and millions of uh dollars or crores of rupees to make sure that they are there and it’s not as easy right so u that’s something that you should always consider so how do you do that the best way is by striking a balance of three metrics which I’m going to talk about as a part of keyword research but before that something important to know are that there are three type of keywords so uh if you notice obviously the keyword that I use is just men’s footwear over here etc. Right? But keywords can be anything especially in today’s day and age with AI people are like typing sentences in the keyword field to get the answer that they want. So uh for us it is very important to segment them into different areas and that’s what this is. So there’s the head, midtail and the long tail. Head keywords are typically one or two tokens and overall u like a good example is travel as you can see over here. Right? This is very broad. Why? Because travel can have anything. It can have uh like from booking tickets to booking hotels to uh finding places, getting information, traveling for education, traveling for vacation, traveling for any single thing, right? And uh so it’s very broad. Uh it could obviously include websites, tickets, packages around the world. And uh obviously with that uh traveling accessories absolutely so it also has a very high volume because uh the number of people searching for it will be very high. So what does that mean? So uh just consider this if I just typed shoes and if I just tried travel over here let’s see what kind of volume we see for volume we have for them. So these are single token terms. These are typically head terms. It’s still loading. Yeah. So shoes as you can see the volume is 6 lakh 73,000 right? It’s a head term but obviously shoes can mean anything. Um and similarly if I look at travel it has 1 lakh 35,000 and of course it can mean anything. So uh these are as I said head terms which typically have a very high volume and along with that high volume you will also see a lot of competition. So shoes we see Myntra we see Edidas we see flipkart we see demons but yeah there is enough competition uh travel we see Google itself there’s make my trip there’s Wikipedia there is uh WTTC apparently uh but you get it right like it’s it’s a very high competition and the comp the people competing for it are crazy so uh can you compete in the same range if you have a good website which has a good authority maybe. Yeah. Uh then we have midtail. So midtail is u it is little specific but not very specific but not broad right. So midtail is essentially a few more details. So travel instead of travel it’s like travel packages uh travel packages Goa Goa travel packages and uh obviously the search volume will be much lower the competition will be like okay around so let’s say competition is typically measured from 0 to 100 and uh typically a high competition would have uh 70 80 90 100 uh as a competition Mid is something which would have a competition of somewhere between 40 50 60 somewhere around those ranges right and the search volume will also be conservative somewhere in thousands. So yeah, like that’s uh what a midtail typically has. And we can actually check that as well, right? So if I just type in Goa travel packages, uh it will load. I’ll give it a time to load. But yeah, uh that’s basically how it works. So we can see that make my trip, yatra, thomas cook, etc. ranking. Uh there are specific pages that are ranking of this. Um it looks like India 2 packages is ranking for some reason and uh as we can see the search volume is a much more modest uh than this one right so this is one lakh 35,000 this is much lower at 49 50,000 then we have long tail these are much more specific these are like okay cheap travel packages for Goa um very specific for travel packages uh but also So they have a lot lower volume and uh because they have lower volume the competition is also a little easier. So for example this one it looks like it has zero search volume. Obviously uh it is going to be much easier. Uh okay. So this is the uh plug-in or extension that I’m using. So uh in fact every single individual will see a different ranking. So when I typed in men’s footwear I saw these results. There’s a high chance or I wouldn’t say very high but there is definitely a chance that you will see a different list or different ranking sequence. So that is very common because uh one I’m logged in. So, Google also uses my personal data to identify uh what I should be seeing and does that mean uh what does that mean for you? Uh so that basically means that uh the ranking that you personally see may be different than what someone else sees but it will still be in the similar range. So that’s basically how keyword research works and what are the different type of keywords. So there are different uh uh let’s say keyword research parameters that you should be looking at. One is that it should be relevant to the business. Second is that there should be enough search volume and third is that there should be uh a competition that you can actually beat. So deeply initially if your website that you’re trying to rank u does not have a lot of authority or if it’s a new website aim for longtail keywords. If uh it’s a website that uh uh already has some authority, it already get gets some decent traffic from organic searches, you can go for midtail. And if it’s a big brand, decent size brand locally also if it is a good brand, you can also aim for uh the head terms. So these are the three parameters that you should be typically using relevance to the business, search volume and competition. Right? Now competition is there are two types of competition. So uh there’s organic and then there’s paid. So when it comes to uh the Google ads, so by the way, you can also get keywords from Google ads keyword planner. It’s it’s completely free to do so. You just need a Google ads account for that. Uh the challenge is the competition in that is your paid search competition. What is paid search competition? So this this is the paid search competition. So uh let me see if I have some let me try um let me try let me try um hotels in Goa. Hm. Yes, I got a paid search result, right? So, this result is not an SEO result. This is a paid search result. And uh the competition for this is going to be different and separate. This is going to be PPC competition or paid search competition. In Google ads, you get the competition for this inventory. But uh the SEO competition or organic competition is typically uh the ones for these results. How do you know it is paid? You can know it by looking at the sponsored. So if it says it is sponsored, that means it is a Google ads inventory. Part of Google Ads inventory. I think we can see another. Okay, there isn’t one. But yeah, that’s basically how it works, right? So this is a separate inventory and this is a separate inventory. So now let’s act uh do the keyword research part. So what is Uber suggest? Uber suggest is a keyword research tool. There are bunch of keyword research tools. So I’m going to show Uber suggest because I like one simple feature of it of how it shows like the PPC difficulty and SEO difficulty and obviously it does not need an account for me to do one search per day. So, let me just exhaust that one search for uh for it right now. I’m going to go with men’s footwear and I want to search for India as a location. Yep. Search. Okay. Men’s footwear. What does it show? What does it show? H. Okay. So, it says that the search volume is 12,100. By the way, the uh search volume numbers you will probably see a different number in different website. That’s because uh all of them just estimate what the number could possibly be. If you want a exact number uh you will never get that. But the closest one is going to be Google Ads keyword planner because that’s closest to Google search of course. So just keep that in mind. Uh does that mean the other tools are not helpful? No, they are helpful. It’s just that the numbers will vary a little bit and that’s very common. Uh so search volume it says 12,000. Good. And SEO difficulty it says 52. Paid difficulty it says 100. Right? And cost per click is again for paid. So I’m not going to go into this because uh that’s not related to SEO. What is related to SEO is SEO difficulty. So what this means is from 0 to 100 um it is like 52% difficult or 52 difficulty and uh this means if I have decent authority if I have some decent back links etc which again I’ll be discussing in one of the later sessions if I have decent relevance u I can rank or try to rank rank for this keyword which is men’s footwear in India because the SEO difficulty is 52. So uh if I scroll down I obviously get a few more suggestions different keywords etc. I can basically find more relevant keywords etc. But the main thing is that I just wanted to show you this. So when you are trying to identify new keywords, the best way to start is by inputting by using a key uh a keyword tool like this and uh then adding the keyword and once you have added the keyword you will get a list of different keywords. So if I go to let’s say keyword ideas for example I can see these are the list of keywords that it suggested to me. So, men’s footwear, uh, there’s Nike, men’s shoes, na white shoes, leather shoes, Jordan shoes, loafers, right? And it also tells me what is the number amount of search volume for each of those. Uh, what is the paid difficulty and what is the SEO difficulty? Search difficulty. U, and this is the one that I’m going to focus on. So SEO difficulty as I said it’s nothing but uh how difficult it would be for you to rank in organic search right so uh essentially how difficult it would be for you to rank over here or show your web page or website over here right so uh 52 means it is going to be a mid-level difficulty 15 means it is not going to be as difficult but I highly doubt that given that this is Nike um sometimes again are these number accurate the answer is these are estimates these are never accurate so um uh but this will give you a good direction to go with and good keywords to select with so you’ll have to use your own judgment you’ll have to use your own uh uh general sense of it but the three things that I mentioned was one is business relevance. Uh second is going to be your search volume and third is going to be the difficulty or the competition. So now let’s say uh my business is selling men’s sneakers right and I sell sneakers of uh my own brand. I don’t sell it off any other brand. based on that um what are the keywords that I can select from here that will have lowest search difficulty and uh decent search volume as well as be relevant for my business. These are the three parameters. So let’s say my brand’s name is nothing and I’m uh uh I’m selling men’s sneakers of nothing brand. Now uh with that the website is also new but I’m trying to find good keywords to go with. So in this list of keywords that you can see on the screen uh is there any keyword? So the first question is which keyword I would select. Second is if there is any keyword at all that I can go with from this list. So let me scroll down and maybe see like if there are some better suggestions. Doesn’t look like it. Nothing related to sneakers. So, uh, there’s Zara men’s sneakers, but again, that’s a no, right? Um, nothing related to sneakers. Of course, it makes sense that there’s nothing related to sneakers. Uh, because I’ve searched for men’s footwear, right? The challenge is that again, I cannot do another search unless and until I sign up. So, I’m just going to pull some neat little trick over here. Okay. So, let me let me do another search. Let me do a search for men’s sneakers and then maybe I’ll find some better keywords. Okay. Um, India. Let’s see what kind of keyword ideas I get. Okay, I guess I clicked on ideas too quick. Okay. So now uh you would So how did it start? If you guys noticed, I used men’s footwear first. I did not get good ideas. I did not get any decent keyword ideas because uh I’m selling sneakers. I’m not selling while while it is under the footwear category my main thing is sneakers. So that does not work. So that’s the reason I tried a different search and when I did that as you can see I got a more relevant keyword. So business relevance check uh from this. The second thing is search volume. Every single keyword of uh that you see over here have thousands of search volume. Good check. Search difficulty. All the keywords that you see except for a few have a good search difficulty. And since I’m a new website, probably men’s sneakers under,000 uh which has like 14 search difficulty is a good one to go with. And this is the one that I can probably go with as well. Right? So this is basically how you decide on these three element. Okay, so we talked about these things, right? We talked about u how search engines worked, how algorithm works, uh on page versus off- page, components of SEO, uh keyword and content. Uh okay, so this is something like there are four components of on-page SEO. Keywords and content makes the content SEO. Search engine accessibility, user accessibility makes the technical SEO. So keywords, building blocks. We talked about head, mid, long tail. We talked about uh uh how you should be choosing the right keyword basically based on volume, relevance, competition, uh how keyword selection works, putting yourself in the customer’s shoes. And this is something that we did together using Uber suggest. Now what I’m going to do is I’m going to talk about how you can do it using Google Ads keyword planner. Um uh that’s something that I want to show because uh th this is one of the much more easier or scalable way to do it uh while also making sure that uh uh this does not cost you a lot of money. So uh I I’ll show that but Uber suggest definitely you can use Uber suggest as well. There are other tools like keyword tool etc. Answer the public competition analysis you can use pyu for that. Okay. But yeah, again those are something that you can but let’s start with Google Ads keyword planner, right? Okay. So, first thing it says is create your first campaign. Uh looks like there’s no skip option here. Okay. I I was I was able to skip it by clicking outside. That’s good. Um, is there an option to skip? This looks like no. Okay. Test two. Let me just click I’ll just say uh I’ll pick one of the websites that I have. Carbon Lightning. You don’t really need like a website. You can also use like your own phone number here if you want. Oh, interesting. They have they keep changing this flow. I’m going to skip everything. I’m going to skip this. Skip. Leave campaign creation. Yeah, I’m going to leave these things as is. Continue. Okay, looks like I’ll need to enter some payment details. Um but yeah like after I enter the payment details it’s not like it is going to charge me anything. Uh I can just enter that. I can just submit it and then create a payment profile. I don’t want to create one. Yeah. So you just enter the details Mahesh. You have to enter the details. Looks like they they want to make sure that people do enter the details. So you can just enter the details. But since you will have uh no active campaigns, you can just uh skip this entire thing. So like you will anyways not get charged. So that’s the main thing. Just make sure there are zero active campaigns and uh that’s it. I hope that helps uh for anyone else who’s looking to create a Google Ads account. If if the main purpose is keywords planner, uh then that’s the way that you should go for it, right? So once you create an account, it will look something like this. Um and in the left side, you will see tools. So just go to tools, then there is planning and then there’s keyword planner. Right? Um so repeating once again once you get to this interface actually let me just make it a bit easier so that I can show the actual interface that you may see. So once you get to this interface on the left hand side go to tools and within that in planning go to keywords planner right so I’m going to click keyword planner here and something like this shows up now this is what I’m going to use for my keyword research uh because again as I said this is like a free tool to use you get a bunch of different keyword ideas and the search volume is also much closer to what the actual search volume is going to be since this is Google’s own data. Now the way that you could get started is you will click on discover new keywords right and then the next thing is that it asks for an input of a keyword. Obviously there are other things like start with a website filter with a website etc. But since assuming that we don’t have a website or we are just starting a new website etc. U in that case it is always good that you start with the keyword. Now what is this? So this is going to be a starter keyword just like you saw how I worked with Uber suggest in Uber suggest when I wanted to talk about men’s sneakers and when I entered men’s footwear I got a completely different results. So the starter keyword or the first keyword is very important. the the starter keyword should be the one yeah as small as possible and at the same time it should describe your business as close as closely as it can. So it’s like a head keyword but it is also describing your business in a way when you do that you will find more relevant keywords from it. So don’t forget this the starter keyword is very important aspect. So whenever you’re starting with the keyword research, make sure that you have a good starter keyword. So uh now what am I? What is my business? So my business uh AC’s fans. Okay, let’s go with both of these. Maybe I’m an electronic showroom. So uh my business is into selling these. Maybe I’m like a store like a Chroma store or something like that. Um, and I’m into a business of selling electronic items primarily into u helping with the rising temperatures right now. I know it’s raining outside and all but um let’s go with the uh rising temperatures of with ACs, fans, coolers, etc. So, uh that that’s what I’m into. And I sell off all different brands. So, I don’t really care much, but that’s my business. So it’s uh something that uh probably I already have like a local business. I’m I’m I’m also starting into uh e-commerce now. So that’s the context humid as well. Yeah, true. So with that said, let’s get into uh some of the starter keywords. U I maybe want to go with uh air conditioners as a starter keyword first. So let’s go with that and then we’ll also like see if time permits we’ll try some others. So, air conditioners um AC’s by let’s say AC online. Um yeah, let’s uh let’s not go too specific. Five star is good. Agreed. But let’s not go too specific. Uh I’m I’m just going to use one or two, maybe three. Like I said, like these keywords, that’s it. And uh you really like in the first search you don’t need a lot of them. You just need the core thing the core keywords uh and uh absolutely Leela I agree. So that’s the reason it is very important that you go with the core. So top five brand fivear etc is very specific. I’m not going specific. I’m going a little broader. So think of these as your head terms. So it’s the starter keywords. It should be relevant to your business while it is a head term. Right? So that’s what I’m going with. Inverter ACs, inverters. Yeah. But again, just going broad. Now once I’ve entered this, I will probably get those uh different things that you guys are saying like one turn, 25K, under 40K, 1.5 with fivestar inverter aces. I’m probably going to get those keywords. Durable, budget friendly. I’m going to get those keywords. That’s the beauty of it, right? This is what it does. It generates or provides you keyword suggestions. So, let’s see. Let’s get results. Okay. Of course, the number of searches rises during the summer, right? We can clearly see that trend over here. uh right now it is uh typically I would say a good time to buy is during winters because a lot of people have a lot of stock around it. Uh but you get the point right like as you can see it rises quite a bit over here right so as an SEO guy as an SEO expert I as I said earlier SEO is a long-term game so for me to start um in this month for uh the upcoming summer is probably the best case scenario because I have enough time to prepare and do something so let’s just do that. Let’s let’s try to identify a way to actually uh help rank during the summer periods. Right? By the way, this this thing that you see, this curve that you see is called as seasonality. This is a very common concept in marketing. Um this is not just something related to SEO, PPC, etc. This is a very common concept in marketing, but this is a very good example of seasonality. Right? So um now if I scroll down a bit um I can see like these are the key starter keywords that I provided and these are the search volume for the same. Then uh these are the keywords that it suggests. So these are additional keywords that it is suggesting to me and overall it says there are 1,728 keywords that it s it found and these keywords combined have around uh even during December they have around 28 lakh search uh search volume per month. So that means 28 lakh times people are searching for it in a single month and during uh the peak period almost 4.2 2 cr or 4 crore people are searching for it in May, right? So that’s what it tells me. However, it has all types of keywords like it uh it can have keywords that are probably not at all relevant for you. Some of you were mentioning 1.5 turn, one turn. It actually has those. Uh the one good feature that I like about Google Ads keyword planner is the refine keywords function. So you can actually define these keywords very quickly using this and that’s what I’m going to do over here. U so I’m going to go with only non-brand keywords. What does this mean? So keyword which does not have a brand name in it. Now actually I’m a AC seller. This doesn’t matter to me. I want everything. Um these are fine. I don’t want a retailer. I don’t want Flipkart, Chroma, etc. I cannot use those. I probably not going to go with these brands, right? Yeah. So, that looks good. Uh these brands are okay. Maybe I’m selling some of these brands. Maybe I don’t want to go with all of them. Uh maybe I just want to go with let’s say Voltas, LG, uh maybe Samsung, Blue Star, right? Uh um higher o general Hitachi yeah so maybe these are the brands that I’m selling maybe right so brands are sorted uh products I am selling only split AC uh maybe window AC as well portable I’m removing tower I’m removing wall air conditioner I’m uh is isn’t that the normal air conditioner cassette AC. I don’t know what this is. Floor standing AC. I don’t want this. Don’t want this. Don’t want this. Right. So, quickly, as you can see, from 1,700 now, I’m left with 958. Nice. Uh, let’s go with this. Okay, all of these look good. Maybe I’m not selling four turn, three turn, two ton, right? Um, and definitely not selling five ton. Uh, maybe I just want to focus on one and two ton. Sorry. 1 and 1.5, right? So, I’m going to go with that. Um, 2022, nope. Used, I’m selling new outdoor, no solar, no shop is fine. Room air conditioner is fine. Appliances online is fine. Okay, so what am I left with? I’m left with 700 keywords. Good. So, this is what refine keywords typically does. It helps you quickly refine the keywords based on some of the categories that it has identified. And once I’m done with this, as you can see, I don’t need to go through the thousand keywords. I just have 700 left. So, uh, what do I do with this now? How do I use these? So, let us download these keywords. So, once I’ve refined them, I’m just quickly going to select download. Uh, select CSV. So this is where we are going to start using Google Sheets or basically spreadsheets. Actually let me just export in Google Sheets. Why do I need a CSV? So I just did that like download keywords. I selected Google Sheets. I just click download. That’s it. Once I did that, it automatically uh like created a spreadsheet like this for me. Okay. So once you download this is what the data looks like. Now what do you do with all of this data right? Of course uh uh as you can see there’s like search volume there’s competition but this competition is of no use. Why is that? So keep this in mind. I am highlighting it for you guys as well. Don’t use this for SEO. This is PPC related. Uh this is also PPC related, right? So these two are also not relevant. I’m actually going to mark it in the this red. This this this feels like uh uh this is like too vibrant. if that’s a good word to use. But yeah, uh this is related to PPC. Um now organic impression, organic average position, this will show up only if uh your website is already linked with that u with the account etc. And then you also get search volume by every month. So uh what search volume the keyword had in July, in August, September etc. uh for the last 12 months. So this is something that you get right. So once you get this u the since there are three parameters that I want to use one is the keywords relevance. Second is the volume and third is the competition. Since this competition is not relevant for me, I’m just going to focus on the keyword and the search volume. Okay. So, what I’m going to do is this is the raw data. This is where I’m going to work with keyword selection. Right? So the way that I’m going to do that is I’m going to select all the keywords here and paste it so that it is much more cleaner for me to work with. Now some people just prefer to delete all the other columns etc. But I’m keeping them so that it’s there for your reference. Right? Okay. I have the keywords, I have the search volume. Obviously I don’t have the competition. Uh let me add a filter. This is why uh if anyone is wondering the Excel is important especially when it comes to working with uh uh all the data and all uh in uh uh SEO uh not just SEO in digital marketing in general. Okay. So I have the keywords. I have filtered them. I’ve formatted them a bit. Um let me just do one thing right now. Uh it is sorted based on some kind of a relevance but I want to make sure that I’m focusing on uh keywords which have decent search volume as well. So I’m just going to do one thing. I’m going to sort this. Okay. I’m going to sort this. Perfect. This one does not have any search volume. Anyways, I don’t need it. Looks good. Sorted. Okay. So, these are the keywords, top keywords. Now, um yes, Deep, but I want to uh leave it as a reference. Uh okay. So, now here’s the thing. the three parameters that I mentioned. What were the three parameters? So, uh what is a good space? I’ll just write it over here. Keyword selection parameters. First is business relevance. Second is search volume. Third is competition. Now the question is how if I’m using Google ads keyword planner and if I don’t have access to some of the paid tools how do I judge competition? I’m going to show you there is a way but for that you need to make sure that you are sorted with the first two. So now the question is how do we do or proceed on this. So for business relevance while we selected head terms to find these keywords when we are actually selecting the keywords we would want to make sure that these keywords are highly relevant to our goal. So there are typically two goals from SEO perspective. The first goal again based on the business it depends but uh typically there are two goals. First goal is uh business uh identify keywords that help achieve specific goals. Let me do one thing. Let me actually put this over in a separate tab. Identify keywords that help achieve specific goals. For example, the first goal could be Example goals could be let’s say sales. So in case the business is related to selling AC’s online. So you would want to make sure that you are identifying that are related to that. So u yeah that’s what I’m going to type over here. Second is information. Why is this important? Because uh often times uh using information based keywords you can get people to your website. Does that help conversions? Not directly. But it does two things. It helps you increase the authority because if people are visiting from SEO to your website, Google thinks your website is important and thereby your authority goes up. I wouldn’t say it goes up all of a sudden. It goes up slowly step by step. Right? So that’s the reason even if you’re not into the information business like a news website etc. Providing information around uh your business related products or services will actually help improve your website’s authority and when your website’s authority increases there is a high chance that you will rank better for your sales related keywords as well. So that’s the second goal. So information related keywords. So if you are selling ACS online, find keywords related to reviews, uh let’s say or it could be AC information, uh technical details, services, service info, not services because we don’t offer services, right? Etc. to help improve SEO traffic and increase authority. Right? So, uh that’s basically the goal with the business relevance that while it should be relevant, it should be specific to a spec uh to a goal. If it is sales related, what you should do? If it is information related, what you should do? Search volume. Now uh obviously in this the best or the highest search volume is what you should go for but keep in mind about u like if something has a very high search volume and it has a very low competition there’s a high chance that there’s a reason behind it if not every single other website which already exists might have gotten it. So if you’re a new website uh you should probably be a little conservative. If you’re an existing website which already has decent traffic, you can be a little bit higher also. That’s okay. And if you’re like the Flipkart or Myntra or Amazon’s of AC, go for it. Go for any single keyword that you want because there’s a high chance that you can actually get to that. So search volume that’s basically the parameters new websites go for long tail and uh conservative search volume like now the reason I’m saying conservative is because uh based on your business you will see the numbers be very different in consumer electronics etc like ACS the search volumes will typically be very high but if your business is into something very specific maybe your business is into manufacturing the uh uh screwdrivers uh for a specific type of screw who even wants that going to search for that the chances are the number of people who are going to search for it is going to be very low. But those people who are going to search for it, the low people are actually going to place high orders. So maybe in that case even if you’re focusing on keywords with 50 search volume or even 100 search volume in a month that’s okay typically because the entire industry does not have as much of a search volume and it’s more B2B not exact match this is more about uh uh like how you should consider the conservative part uh okay So long tail go conservative for example in thank you Gita in B2C of um 500 to 5,000. Okay. Then on the second side you have uh websites with existing SEO traffic and some rankings. So for these go for midtail and uh yeah like mid search volume for example again in B2C it could be somewhere around 5,000 to even let’s say 40,000 or 50,000 right and then third is big brands or established websites with good authority. Go for anything above 50K, right? So, this can act like a good benchmark. Now are these benchmarks a good number? Not really. No. But this can help you in the start as you figure out as you gain more experience uh based on the business, based on the context of the business, based on what it is into the industry, the search volume etc. You will have to decide for yourself what is a good search volume. But since everyone is over here starting for the first time, this is a good benchmark. So right now uh there are certain assumptions that I’m going to make here. The assumption number one is that uh I have a new website, right? And the assumption number two is that uh uh my authority is Lil and the assumption number three is probably I can go with since again like this is based on this right. So based on this I should be going for uh longtail or conservative search volume keywords. So does that mean I can aim for these? Maybe but not right now because I don’t have uh any authority. Now if these assumptions were like okay I have a wellestablished website etc then it would change but not right now. So, with that, I’m going to scroll a bit. Maybe check HWAC. Uh, HWAC Samsung air conditioner seems decent. Uh, but again, Midtail maybe something I can look at. AC conditioner installation near me. Interesting. I’m going to scroll a bit down, further down. Um, okay. This seems like a safe spot in terms of search volume. Let’s see what kind of keywords that we have. Now, let’s go with these keywords uh at least like these keywords first and see like if I can identify any decent keywords here. So, um AC company seems to vague to me. Okay. Uh home air conditioner. Can I can I select this as a keyword? Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. So, I’m going to select this. I’m marking it in green for now. Uh central air conditioner prices. I’m not into selling central air conditioner. I’m more into consumer market. I’m not selecting this. So, I’m going to mark anything that I’m not selecting as. Yep. So uh I’m probably now as you guys remember so I can see that there are some nos short tail I agree uh but I have not done the second filter the second filter of competition yet I’m just looking at search volume right now so uh maybe in the competition filter this home SE will get removed but for now I’m still going to select this so I’m going to select this right and similarly split air conditioner price. Which color? Red or green? Absolutely. Right. So, this is basically what you would be doing when you’re selecting the keywords. As you can see, there is business relevance and at the same time uh these also have decent search volume. So, how many should we select? You should select as many as you want. like there is literally no limit but to be honest when you’re starting off uh having about uh 30 to uh I would say 30 is a conservative number so 20 to 30 keywords is decent size for you to start or at least start building something uh initially again like since you are just practicing even if you’re selecting five as a practice that’s fine but u when you’re doing this 20 to 30 is a conservative number in in a starting And as you scale up, then obviously you work with way more. U typically with SEO, however, how do you actually work with those individual keywords? So there is a way that you actually do that which I’m going to talk about in the next segment. So okay, I have selected these, right? I’m going to select a few more very quickly. So cheap AC, I’m going to say yes. uh best AC company. Uh I I uh like you can probably go with this but I’m there is like a personal element to this as well. So that’s the reason I’m not going uh split AC price. Okay. Uh O general split AC since I’m a retailer. I’m still going to uh going to go with this. This looks good. This looks good right now. Uh most of these are general keywords. What I’m going to do is I also want to find some keywords that are uh um information based information related. So let me just maybe check if there are any keywords that ooze out information. Yeah, looks like there isn’t any pretty good one. Best ACS AC key price. Okay, even these these keywords can be used for information. Best I’m going to go with the best one over here. Right. Yeah. again like I I can go with any number of uh these keywords, right? Based on what I’m into, what I’m trying to sell, etc. And now I’m just going to sort this a little bit. Uh sort by color. These are the ones that I did not select and these are the ones that I did select. Okay, so these are the ones that I have selected. Now I’m going to analyze the competition. So some of you are wondering how am I going to do that without a paid tool. Luckily uh there is a website which does allow us to do it. Uh so again this website itself is like a paid one but uh it does allow us to check for each individual keyword u what the competition typically looks like. So this is ah Refs. It’s a pretty good tool for SEO. They have some free uh uh uh like free SEO tools. Last I remember there was keyword difficulty checker. Yes, this is the one right. So I’m going to select India. India. By the way, this location is the search location. This is not the location that you are in. Just FYI. So, uh, basically, if you are focusing or targeting Indians, then you would go with India as a location. But if you are targeting US, then you should be selecting US as a location. Right? So, home air conditioner. So, I’m just going to put this keyword here. I’m going to click check keyword. Okay. So, it says the competition is 44. It is. It looks like it’s hard, right? And there’s like Amazon, Flipkart, and Blue Star, etc. over here. So, I’m just going to put that 44 cheap air conditioner. I’m going to do a few more over here. This is the reason it’s a bit tiring when you’re doing it individually for each single keyword, but uh this is a free method of doing it. So, this looks like it’s 19. It’s medium. Nice. Good. That’s good. Home AC. I’m just going to do like two or three more and then u uh I’m going to leave it. So, don’t worry. I’m now like But as you can see, this is like a very easy way for you to get competition uh info of SEO for free. I’m going to do this last one in a paid tool you can get this result for like even thousands of keywords. Okay, split AC prize. It’s easy. Nine. Nice. So, this is how you can basically check it. I’m going to leave the link over here as well as I’m going to leave it over here. 0 to 30 is good enough. But looks like I can go with all of these. Uh so these are pretty good keywords for me to go with. And based on that selection find selection status or something like that, whatever you prefer. I’m just using this for uh like ease and I’m saying like yes selected all of these right and that’s basically how you do keyword selection once you’re done with this you can basically just copy it again this is something that you can do based on whatever your preference is but this makes it easier for me so fine final selected keywords are these. And this is how you do keyword research. Yeah, I mean this is good. Even home AC is nice. Uh cheap AC, split condition price, split AC price. Pretty decent ones. Uh oh yeah, I forgot of this one. I want to check this one as well. This was going to be my my information keyword. But yeah, uh as I’m while I’m checking this quick check from you guys on uh what do you guys think? Oh wow, wonderful. Anyone who’s selling it AC’s this is a keyword to go for. You will get good traffic. What do you guys think though? Like does it make sense? Is this easy, difficult? Maybe, maybe not. But you guys able to do something like this. Uh so once you have selected the keywords the process of working towards ranking for those keywords takes time and uh uh because once you have implemented something you will have to wait for a while before you start seeing results from it. So typically before you start to rank it takes about at least 6 months even or sometimes in some cases where the keywords are much more difficult uh it could even take a year. So yes it takes time. Okay. So that’s how you work with different tools. Now again Uber suggest is one there’s bunch of different tools right? Uh there is keyword tool. So this is keyword keyword tool.io. Um there is answer the public. Uh I really like answer the public uh in the sense that it provides you different questions that people may ask but uh it basically tells you like uh what are the different questions people are asking. This could be good for uh the uh FAQ section if you would create one. So the next thing is we have these relevant keywords. Yes, I also mentioned about what are the different things that you could uh do when you’re selecting a keyword. But u there is something that you should be aware of when it comes to keywords as well which is intent typically and this is something that most of the tools uh third party tools etc also leverage as a way to communicate with you about the intent of the two different tools etc. uh sorry different keywords etc. And uh these are divided into four segments. What what does an intent mean? The intent of a keyword means what does the person want when they are searching for something. So when I’m searching for shoes online or buy shoes online, there’s a clear intent that I want to purchase the shoe, right? That’s the intent. And uh let’s say if I am looking for reviews uh of a specific restaurant, what is the intent there? The intent is this. Yes, I want to make a purchase or I want to visit the restaurant, but I’m still considering it. I’m not 100% sure yet. And as such, I want some more information before I complete the transaction. Right? So, similarly, there are like uh different intent. So, the transactional intent is very clear. I want to make a purchase right now. uh commercial intent is the reviews etc that I was talking about. So uh trying to learn more about something right before I make a purchase. So that’s the main thing right like commercial is more around before you make a purchase if you’re conducting a research and that could include reviews uh comparison or uh let’s say trying to find the top AC’s best five ACS or something like that or best place to buy an AC um AC shops all of those are commercial intent like you’re not conducting a transaction right then And there you’re just trying to uh conduct a transaction by first finding where you would want to conduct or how you would want to conduct that. Uh then there is navigational keyword. So navigational keyword basically means that uh you are using that keyword to navigate to a specific website. A very good example of this is when you just go on Google and you’re typing uh Facebook login. So for example, if you guys noticed, I wanted to go to Uber suggest website. But what did I do? I did not go to neilpel.com/ubersuggest. What did I do? I just typed Uber suggest in Google and then I went to the website of Uber Suggest. So is it branded keyword? Yes, part of it is. So uh because I did not want to type the entire URL, I just searched for it. Uh but in addition to that, uh you would also have keywords like Facebook login. This is a navigational keyword. You want to log into Facebook. Even if you rank for this keyword and maybe you are like ranking somewhere here with this, that’s not going to be useful because even if it has like millions of people searching for this, people are still going to go to Facebook to login, right? And that’s the main thing about these navigational keywords. These can be quite tricky. These can have search volume, but that search volume is uh to navigate to a specific website. That’s what navigational keywords are. And uh then there’s the crown of uh search volume which isformational keywords. Information keywords basically have a lot of search volume because people are looking for information. That’s what Wikipedia is all about providing information, right? And all of these blogs, all of these news websites etc. What do they do? They provide information. So u this does not have a commercial or transactional nature. So a keyword like this one that uh I was just showing best AC 1.5 ton is anformational keyword because I don’t know which AC I want to buy. I maybe just simply know that okay I want to buy a 1.10 AC 1.5 ton AC and that’s it. I I don’t know which is a good one, which is a good brand. I don’t have that information. And uh once I enter this probably I’ll be able to get some information around that. Or let’s say uh a very goodformational uh keyword would be something like um top travel destinations in uh wherever you want to go. Maybe you want to go to KA. Maybe you want to go to best travel places in Goa. Right? What do I get from this? I get information. I get okay 30 best places to visit. 52 best places to visit. 68 best places to visit. Yes, those areformational keywords. So adding anformational keyword to a website will pop up our website when search for that kind of information. Yes, LRA. Now, how does this help your website or how does informationational keyword help your website? The answer is uh when so this is one of the signal that Google uses is what are the existing keywords that you’re ranking for and uh what are in addition to that uh what are the amount of people or what are the amount of traffic that you’re getting from Google already informational keywords are the best way to sort of work with those numbers Because often times those commercial and transactional keywords are already being taken up by big brands which becomes very difficult for you to fight. But uh to get there a very simple way to do it is by providing information which isn’t something that a lot of people uh uh have a lot of sorry there’s typically not a lot of competition for those and since there’s not much competition it’s easier for you to rank uh if you’re ranking if you’re getting traffic your authority starts to goes up as well. So that’s a positive sign for Google as well, right? So that’s the main thing and that’s the main reason people do this. But the best part is uh nowadays even with theseformational keywords, you can still make sales happen. Although the sales may not be that high in number, the conversion rate might not be that high in number, you can still make sales happen. As people like go through the information, they can also make purchases. as you can see over here. Right? So that’s how you can work withformational keywords. But how do you identify these different intent? So let’s just do that very quickly. Right? So before I even go with the final selection of keywords, let’s add something else over here. Let’s just go with these keywords and try to identify the intent. Um, I’m going to add another column here. So, now one thing is when you’re looking at keywords like these, it is very difficult to decide what is the right intent. right? Is itformational? Is it commercial, navigational or transactional? It it becomes very difficult to identify that. So instead of keeping it very subjective, the best method I personally found is ask Google. How do you ask Google about the keyword intent? It’s very simple. just search for it. Just search search for the keyword that is not not search for intent. Search for the keyword and I’ll show you how that works. So let let me just create this simple drop down over here. I’ll say so what was thatformational navigational commercial okay now what I’m going to do is to remove any ambiguity I’m directly going to search for this keyword. Now once I searched for it, uh the first thing that it did is it actually provided me options and these are organic shopping results by the way. So it provided me some organic uh shopping results as I scroll down. Um it provided me uh pages of shopping websites. So but in addition to that it also has which type of AC is best for home what is suited. So looks like it is not completely transactional. Again this is subjective. This is highly subjective. Right. So as you can see you could either go with commercial or transactional. Which is the right one? Frankly speaking, no one knows. But uh you can go then why are we even doing this? The reason we are doing this is so that it is easier for us to decide the type of content and the page that we want to create. And that’s the reason keyword intent is important. So over here it’s very clear. I I I would personally go with commercial. I completely agree with Mahesh because there’s definitely a transactional like at least some intent for transaction but Google does think that people also ask questions around it. So that tells me that this is more of a commercial intent than transactional in nature. So again this is a bit subjective but the primary use case of this is so that you can understand what type of content you would like to build. So when I search for home AC, I’m going to do the same thing search for this and yeah, I I would go with commercial again and so on and so forth. So let’s just go with this one. Yep. see informational right so I’m going to go withformational over here and this is basically how you go with this right now in this scenario we don’t have a navigational keyword uh which is fine but uh that’s what I wanted to show you guys and uh that’s essentially how you decide the intent of the keyword so uh uh split AC size. I’m going to consider that as transactional. Uh cheap AC, I’m going to consider that as maybe commercial. um split AC prize transactional because it says price in that and that uh navigational is like I don’t think we have navigational keywords in this but navigational is typically uh like let’s say u Facebook login uh or uh chroma store chroma store account, um, Google account, etc. Those are like navigational, commercial is one step before transaction. Informationational is clearly so information is like you just want information that’s it. Um, and sometimes information can go into uh uh transactional as well, but that’s very less. The best way is again the best way to find out is just searching for it and seeing what type of results typically show up and uh as you can see over here uh the most of the results are information based. So it makes sense to mark it as information. So over here you’re letting Google decide instead of you just deciding on your own. And I’m going to finally put that over here. Okay. Now the final selected keywords also have keyword intent. So this is how I can decide that I can use this forformational uh uh likeformational intent. >> Just a quick info guys, Intellipath offers digital marketing course in collaboration with iHub IIT Riy. Through this course you will learn complete digital marketing from search engine optimization, search engine marketing to PPC analytics and social media marketing and much more from the IIT faculty and industry experts. With this course we have already helped thousands of professionals in successful career transition. You can check out their testimonials on our achievers channel whose link is given in the description below. Without a doubt this course can set your career to new heights. So visit the course page link given below in the description and take the first step towards career growth in the field of digital marketing. >> Uh we looked at uh Google ads keyword planner and I also talked or at least mentioned uh some of the other keyword tools that are there. U but something I feel like was missing is uh how you can kind of do all of those things. So the primary reason I used Google keywords planner, AHESS uh the free version or the free tool that AHFS provide and uh in addition to that I used that uh uh intent identification manual intent identification was so that uh we are able to clearly understand how you can do it uh without spending any money on the tools because uh frankly speaking as people who are is learning like yourself it becomes very tough to sort of uh shell out money for something that you’re not even aware of right and that’s the main reason but what I’m going to do is u I’m going to show a quick demo on how it works with a paid version of the tools as well so that you can understand that um um usually when you’re trying to do these things for free it takes a lot of manual effort But uh when uh these tools are provided by the companies or the businesses that you work with typically uh you would be able to do these things much faster. Right? So that’s the main reason. So I’m going to show it on SEM brush. Uh this is a tool that uh um like I have a like I primarily use its free version during the session but I’m just going to show like a very simple one on how you can use the paid version of it as well. Yeah, like SEMR shave. What did we actually discuss yesterday? So far, uh we have gone through keyword research, understood what are different type of keywords, head, mid, long and then uh research parameters, we looked at how you can do keyword research using Google ads. And then based on the raw data that we got from Google Ads, we then identified certain keywords. uh uh we looked at what their competition could be by using the ASF’s tool. We identified keyword intent. Um I know there’s a location saying like can we go through uh the keyword intent really quickly? I’ll do that. And then we finalized or selected the keywords that we want to work with. Right. So now, uh, what I’m going to do is, uh, I’m just going to like use SEM Rush real quick and, uh, show you. So, one second. Let me just log into that account. One. Okay. Yeah. So, this is, uh, SEM Rush. What I’m going to basically uh, do is um, yesterday I was doing the AC uh, keywords research, right? So what was the uh seed term that I had entered? Let’s see. I think it should be somewhere over here. Yeah. So these were the three seat terms that I used, right? So I’m going to start with air conditioners. Just air conditioners. And u let’s see what it shows. Air conditioners. I’m going to select India as a location. And and that’s that’s what I wanted to sort of show. Yeah. Now it has shown. Okay. So I have the search result as well and um u now this is something interesting right? So it also tells me in the top 10 results. So the we have reliance digital we have Amazon, Flipkart, Voltas, Chroma and all of these and it has something called as domain AS. So what is uh domain as? Domain as is domain authority score. Uh so this tells this is rated from 0 to 100. And uh now is this authority score the same as what Google considers? No. But this is something that will give us a guidance of what the authority of the website could probably be. Right? And uh that’s essentially the uh part of it. Now from this what we can understand is uh this particular keyword has a pretty tough competition. The domains have an authority score of almost 79. That’s that’s big. And uh now let’s just try to see if I can get some uh keywords from this particular single keyword instead. Okay. So it also gives me the key keyword difficulty. It says like it’s 63. So 63%. So that’s that’s pretty difficult. And this is for organic results, right? And if you notice, it also tells me the intent. So according to this, it’s commercial intent. The user wants to investigate brands or services. So what I’ll do is I’ll just click view all 54,000 keywords that it identified from this one keyword the starter keyword right and uh once I do that u right so and uh let’s take a look at this one the this is what I wanted to show so what are the things that we actually got in the keyword research yesterday. We got the keywords, we got the search volume, we got the competition and we got the keyword intent. What do we get here? So, we get the keywords, we get the intent. So, it uh as you can see some keywords are marked as two different intents. So uh now obviously these intents as I said are subjective but these are the intent that it identified and then we also get the search volume and in addition to that we also get the keyword difficulty right so for me when I’m doing keyword research and I’m trying to find different keywords a paid tool gives all of these information to me directly I don’t really need to like find each of them individually independently like I got this keyword planner. I got this from Ahref. I got this manually. I wouldn’t need to do all of that by using a paid tool. And that’s the difference. Now, uh is SEM Rush costly? Yes, it is. It’s uh I believe last I checked it was around $120 for a single month, which is pretty high, pretty steep. But uh at the same time it does provide enough value once you are starting to get paid for your work and that’s what matters over here right so um over here once I have this I can directly just export this data and uh start working with the same that’s the best part about it so this is just like a small glimpse that I wanted to give of how paid tools typically make it easier for you and uh They have a price but they have a justifiable price because of that. Okay. So in this scenario all of these are uh search difficulty like the normal SEO difficulty. Yeah. So competitive density is related to paid difficulty. So this one is paid difficulty. This one is SEO difficulty. So, uh, if I go to pricing, you can see, uh, like if I just look at monthly, oh, it’s it’s $140 per month now. So, it’s steep. Again, I’m saying it’s steep. That’s not a lie. But at the same time, uh, that’s the main reason I showed you how you can do it for free so that you can at least practice and understand these things. And uh later on once you start getting work probably the company or business you’re working for can sponsor it or uh yeah basically your work itself can sponsor it because sometimes if your work is good enough and you have good clients uh the the revenue that you make from it pretty much covers the cost. So I know uh like some of the SEO people who have been into it for almost 10 15 years and uh they work with some of the top clients right and I’m not talking about some small shot I’m talking about clients who uh make like millions and millions in revenue and for them uh they typically charge close to around $10,000 to $15,000 a month. So for them uh these tools are pretty much nothing jump and uh that’s the reason these tools are also priced in such a way because of the data and the value that they offer. So uh Uber suggest is a pretty decent tool in terms of price. I think they have a much smaller price tag uh probably around $ 19 or $20 per month if I remember correctly. But uh yeah uh then also the accuracy of it is a bit low and uh there are also caps in the number of updates that you can do etc. So that’s uh like a quick uh thing that I wanted to mention around SEO tools. The way that you determine intent is by uh trying to understand uh what uh they could potentially be looking for and based on that you can determine what type of content you would want to show to them, right? And that’s the main purpose of it. So there are four typical intent and there are four uh divisions of it and the first is of courseformational where uh people are looking for just information. They are not looking to make a transaction or there’s no commercial intent as such. Second is navigational. This is where u people just you know search for something because they want to navigate to a specific website. So uh it could be login dashboard or something like that or just the brand name itself wherein they know that they want to go to a specific website but they just don’t remember the the URL. Then there’s a commercial intent which is just one step before making a transaction typically. Uh so let’s say if you want if if someone wants to buy something before that uh they would want to do some quick research around something right and that’s basically what the commercial intent is all about. And finally after that we have the transactional one wherein they want to buy something and uh that’s the intent that they have. Now the best thing about these intent types is that by identifying them you can determine what type of content you should be creating for those keywords. So there was this question multiple times asked by every one of you is that how do you use these keywords in the website? How do you implement these keywords in the website? Right? And that’s where your SEO plan comes into the picture. So SEO plan is uh the next step after finishing your keyword research and uh uh this is something that sort of bridges the gap between your content and keyword. Now there is uh this is going to be something interesting right? So because this is something that I want all of you to focus on as well as this essentially uh will determine how effective your keyword strategy is going to be. Are key is keyword research important? Yes. But uh once you have done the keyword research how you use those keywords becomes more important as well. Right? If if you have a good idea, that’s awesome. That’s first step. That’s a important step. But that’s the first important step. The second step is to actually implement it and execute on that. And that’s what I’m going to talk about over here. Uh and uh for creating the content that is uh more relevant to the keyword, you’re going to create a SEO plan. Right? So let’s let’s try and understand how you can go and create an SEO plan yourself, right? Uh so I have a template over here, right? I’m just going to open this. Okay, so this is uh the template. Now uh over here one thing that I primarily do is I also like sort of uh update the templates as needed. Uh but anyways so this one is the example. Yeah. Okay. So what is this template? Let’s let’s just talk about this template now. Is this template how you should do it as well? Not really. Uh this template is more of a suggestion. Uh this is how I personally do it. But if you have a better way, go for it, right? So keep that in mind. It’s not like okay this is exactly how I should do it because Vishal sir told me to do it like that’s no that’s that’s not how it works. Uh everyone has their own way of managing their keywords, planning their keywords and the SEO around it. uh this is just how I do it and I feel like this is quite simple. Uh so yeah like if this works for you please go ahead but this is what I’m going to use to explain as well because the elements in this are important. So let’s try and understand what’s added in this template. So u the first thing is the primary keyword right. Uh you can ignore this particular part. Uh this is more for an example or just some details or description. I’m going to put it in a little grayish. Uh too gray this better. Yeah. Okay. So uh primary keyword you basically like what is your main keyword that you’re going to focus on the primary keyword. uh are we supposed to use just one keyword for a page or are we supposed to use multiple? So when it comes to a single piece of content or a single piece of page uh you should have only one primary keyword. So a primary keyword is the key focus of that page. So a good example is men’s footwear that we saw with Flipkart yesterday. Now uh what we saw in that is its primary focus was men’s footwear as a keyword and the entire page and the content etc was wrapped around that keyword as a primary focus but u it probably also has content good enough for some of the secondary or synonymous keywords like footwear or footwear online etc or even shoes online and uh those are typically considered as secondary keywords. Is it important to optimize your content for secondary keywords? It’s uh it’s not something that is super important, but if you do it, that’s a good thing. And uh that is something that I’m also going to show like how you can do that too. So you should have only one primary keyword, but you can have multiple secondary keywords based on how long your content is going to be. So only one primary keyword per page. And these are like related secondary keywords can be many based on content. Right? So this is how uh you can use different keywords. Now when it comes to these secondary keywords, you can actually use some of the secondary keywords as primary keywords in separate pages too. And uh uh like to not make it too complicated. Uh that’s also something that uh you can definitely do but for now let’s just keep it very simple that uh there should be only one primary keyword per page and you can have multiple secondary keyword related secondary keywords uh based on the type of content that they have. So the primary keyword is your main focus of a page. Okay. So what are we actually trying to do here? The main thing is we are going trying to take that keyword which we selected and create a page a web page around it a page on a website for that keyword. That’s the main thing that we are going to do. And uh to do that you cannot have multiple keywords and just you know stuff all of them and see like okay maybe this works. That’s not how it works. And that’s the reason for every page you should have one main focus keyword and that’s what this primary keyword is. So a primary keyword is the main focus of your page or the topic of your page if you may. And where do you get these primary keywords? We just did the keyword research for that. Right? So uh that’s what the primary keyword is. Secondary keyword can be supportive keyword or more supported keywords. I will show examples of this. don’t worry but uh it’s more like supporting keywords that you can use uh in addition to the primary keywords but the way that you use it will obviously be very different. Once you have a primary keyword the next thing is the content type. Now why is this important? It is important because your content type will be different based on the type of keyword it is. Um, if the keyword is something that uh has a high transactional or commercial value, probably you would want to use or focus that particular keyword towards a category page or a product page. But if it is mainly informational with a mix of commercial or something like that, a blog page would be much better. Right? So the what is the type of content that you’re looking to create around that keyword is also something which is very important and that is something that will be decided based on the intent. I don’t think I have mentioned the intent keyword intent over here. Let me just do that. Yeah. So, the keyword intent helps you decide and uh uh makes it easy on uh what type of content you would want to create as well. Uh secondary keywords again. Uh so these are basically supported keywords or additional keywords that you may want to also uh talk about in the content. Uh again the example for this is coming. Then there is URL slug. So basically let’s say something like uh after your domain name the website’s name. So if your website’s name is google.com uh then what will be the link for the page? Is it going to be google.com uh if if the keyword is maybe u hotels online uh then probably the URL SL could be google.com/hot-enon online right so this is nothing but this part of the page I’m going to unlink this yeah so this part of the URL is what the URL slug is Right. Uh the subdirectory subdirectory of the URL is what it is called. Then you have your page title. So page title is uh so let me just open this actually let me just open shoes online as a search and then I’ll be able to show a comparison of this as well. >> Right. So, uh, no worries. I’ll explain that. Okay, let’s just do a sideby-side comparison. Right. So far, all of these things very clear. Primary keyword, keyword intent, content type, secondary keywords. Let’s talk about the next things. Let’s talk about URL slug now. So URL slug is this part of the URL. So over here the URL slug is shoes. Over here the URL slug is men’s hyphen footwear men. Uh yeah uh it does not have a URL slug because this is the main domain. But yeah that’s basically what the URL slug is right. So uh basically the URL slug is whatever comes after the domain name. So myntra.com/sho flipcard.com/mensfootwear and uh uh then ago.com/men. So that’s basically in this case men is the URL slug. So that’s what URL slug is all about. Uh name of the page you can you can think of it this way. Yeah for sure. Name of the folder. uh to make sure that everything that you’re trying to talk about or say is visible in the page title, you need to make sure that the length of that is within the 40 to 60 character limits. Especially now that we are so much focused on mobile, uh you have to be more careful about this, right? And once you have determined the page title, so this is the page URL, this is the page title. What is the next thing? The next thing is this. This is the description. So this is called as meta description page meta description. So um again very similar uh it’s like shoes online, shop shoes online for men, women etc. Um you can’t be spoiled for choices when you are shopping for footwear online due to uh the extensive collections of brands like foot up right by footwear for men huge collection for men’s footwear and so forth. So basically uh this is what the meta description is. This meta description is typically not visible on the website but it is uh something that you pass on to the Google bot or the Google crawler. I’ll show you how you can do that using WordPress later on. But uh this is something that is shared by every website and you should make sure that the length of it is max to max 140 characters not more than that. If not it will again get truncated just like this with the three dots. Right? So that’s basically what the page meta description is all about. So these three things the URL slug the page title and the page meta description are something that are related to your u u the content that you want to be shown on the Google search. Why is it called meta? That’s because it is not something that you find on the page. It is available as meta data. Metadata is something that does not exist on the page directly visible to the user but it is available for the bots to see. So let me just show an example right. So Myntra for example over here and now I’m going to like move away from the split screen and go full screen back again. Okay. So what did we see over here? Uh we see that the meta description is this. Let me just copy this. Do a Ctrl F and paste it here. Am I able to find this anywhere on the page? The answer is no. Then how did this show up? That’s because it is not something that is visible to the users, but instead it is in the code. Don’t get scared with what you’re seeing on the screen. I’m just trying to show where it shows up. If you notice over here what I’m highlighting, I’ll just zoom into this a bit. Yeah, I think this is enough. Zoom in. Uh this is the meta tag. So this is a part of HTML and uh I’m trying to be very careful to not go very technical but this is a meta tag and uh this is a meta tag for description and this is where the meta description is present. So this is something that is shared or typically used by the crawlers or Google bots etc. And this is not something that is typically shown to the users who are visiting the website. Um this is just a way for making sure that the crawlers understand what the page is about. And that’s what the meta description is. By the way, uh just FYI, technical SEO will have a little bit of uh understanding on uh how uh some of these things work. I will try my best to explain it the best I can. Uh but uh yeah like u knowing a little bit of HTML or some of the context of HTML and the tags of HTML will help you a lot in doing SEO. Uh HTML is free to learn. You can just go to W3 schools for that. It’s a pretty good website to learn HTML. Um uh but yeah having some knowledge about that is uh definitely recommended. So page meta description that’s what meta description is. Now these two these are optional sections. This is something that I personally use when I want to as needed. But over here you’re just defining what is the primary purpose of the page or what you’re trying to use it for. What is the USB that you want to share etc. Uh over here you may want to identify like what type of customer you are actually trying to attract. So if it is something like B2B, B2C, if it is a specific consumer, what you’re actually trying to achieve from this page. So these two things is more for just keeping a record uh making sure that you yourself are aware of it, not to forget it. And the most important part is so that you are also able to share this with uh anyone else if you’re working in a team. So let’s say if there’s a separate team that manages content or works on these execution uh you can just share this and you can be sure that you have shared your way and vision uh on how you would like to implement the keywords. Then there is content outline. So once uh you have your plan the next step is to create an outline of the content. Uh I will show how and what this looks like. And then finally the content itself. Um and then you can keep a track of if this was published, it was in draft state, it was in editing state and when it was actually published. So uh that’s basically what this SEO plan template is all about. Uh so the purpose of the page is more about uh what you want to uh use the page for like uh so I actually have an example over here that I can talk about. So in this case we will talk talking about travel deals right and the purpose of this page was to provide information on various travel deals around India and offer links to the same. That’s it. So this is like a very simple way for you to remember what you are going to have in the page. Google ads keyword planner typically has uh decent uh uh data in terms of search volume. So that’s the reason I generally prefer this for search volume at least so that I have better expectation. Okay. So this is what I’m going to do now. I’m going to make a copy of this, right? And let’s uh actually let me just uh make a copy of this in this particular spreadsheet so that everything is in a single place, right? the SEO plan. Okay, so we have our keywords, right? And we also have the intent. Now in addition to this I can probably also add something along the lines of the the rest of the details right. So why shy away from that competition and I had the search volume. So these are the things that I already have. So I’m just going to copy and paste them over here. Perfect. So now uh how do I actually go with this? So the first thing that I’m going to do is let me also set some prioritization for this. So this is something that again depends on how you want to go with it. But uh for me I want to make sure that I’m prioritizing it so that I know like which keyword I want to focus on first. So, I want to focus on this one first because it has the least competition and it’s informational. I can probably set up a blog with this. Uh, next. This looks good. I can probably go with this one next. Uh, as and this as well. So, both of these I can actually do together. Um, then there is the split AC prize and this probably I can do both of these together as well. synonyms at the end of the day and this can be the fourth. Right? So this is my priority. So what I’m going to do is I’m just going to sort it based on this priority. Oh, okay. Perfect. So now that it is sorted, this is the first one that I want to sort of use for my keyword. Now I’m going to decide all of these things. So u there’s a very simple way of doing it and on how you decide it but uh there are certain rules around it as well and uh that’s basically what I’m going to uh sort of uh talk about over here. H okay. So uh in terms of content type over here I want to make sure that I’m working with a blog. Uh since these are transactional probably something like a landing page or like a product page is something that I can work with but I’m going to stick to a landing page over here. uh cheap uh air conditioner. So this one also I can probably go with like a landing page, category page, product page, whatever that is, right? So essentially I’m trying to define or determine uh a good content type. And uh finally home AC while it has commercial intent, I think I can probably uh just have like a blog over here or some kind of an information. So this is where I’m like this is a bit subjective but I’m basically defining what type of content I want to create. And in terms of secondary keywords uh what I’m going to do is I’m going to try and identify if there are any specific secondary keywords that I can use in addition to this primary keyword. So these would uh a very simple way for me to do that is actually just search for this keyword and see like what are the other keywords I can find. So, let me just do that really quickly. Um, I’m going to use Google Ads keyword planner for this once again. Just get some quick list from that, right? Um, I know today it’s getting a bit technical, right? Some of you are like, what is even happening? I hope that’s not true. But this is how it works. This is uh where the actual work starts. The searches depend on search volume. So if there are like there’s like enough search volume then it doesn’t really matter. Okay. So this is the main thing and then uh uh okay. So let’s see if there is any uh specific secondary keywords that we can actually use. So best AC 1.5 ton looks like best split AC is something that we can definitely leverage right uh probably let’s see um 1.5 turn fivestar inverter so inverter related ACs or something like that somewhere around that uh window AC of course right so these if you notice all of these are related keywords keywords that are similar to it uh similar to uh the existing one. So what do I have here? I have different types of 1.5 split ACs and then I also have um inverter or the star rating or the power rating of the ACS. Right? So from the secondary keywords what I can get is I can get some of the details around the um let’s say uh different formats of it different types different things so I can talk about all of these different segments and see since these secondary keywords also have I would say decent size of search volume like uh 4,400 14,000 800 and uh then like this one has 4,400 as well. U it’s it’s pretty nice. So I can probably go with these but uh yeah these are uh okay so competition Leela don’t forget this is paid competition. You don’t consider this uh but uh anyways this is secondary keywords. That’s the reason I’m not focusing too much on competition. My primary keyword is what will determine uh if I’m going to work with this or not. And secondary keywords is something that helps me understand sorry it it helps me uh target some of the additional keywords. Right? So these are not going to be my primary focus anyways. So I’m not really worried about the competition. If I get some traffic from it, great. If I don’t, that’s fine. as long as I’m getting traffic from this keywords, I’m I’m completely fine. So that’s the main thing. And with that, the next step is to identify a URL slug. So let’s say actually this is where I’m going to start using chat GPD. Just a minute. Right. So, uh what I’m going to do is I’m going to say I am um an electronics seller in India and I sell electronics online. Uh, suggest some domain names. Let’s see. I’m going to just quickly decide something. Um, okay. There’s two for six. Oh, interesting. Okay, I’m going to go with five. Gadget Bazar. Let’s go with this. This is again something that is just a nice way for us to like look at it. And I’m also going to be like catch it bizarre keywords. We just created a brand name. Nice. Is it an actual website? Oh, it’s an actual website apparently. Doesn’t matter. Uh okay. So, Gadget Bazar is the website, right? So, in this scenario, u I’m just going to decide what the URL ST is going to be. I want to make sure that the primary keyword is kind of there. Um, so let’s see. Gadget buzzer.in slash um I can just go best AC or I can just be like best 1.5 uh turn AC. Uh 0.5. I’m not very sure if a tot in URL works. I don’t think it’s supposed to. So, I’m just going to skip that. And uh best uh 1.5 AC, right? So, somewhere something along the lines, right? So, essentially, you’re trying to make sure that you’re properly communicating or leveraging the particular URL. So, let me just see. I don’t think you can use a dot. Uh so, that’s there. So, 15 AC, that’s fine. H I can actually do that. Yeah, I’m I’m going to go with whatever loop says best one and half done AC online AC. I’m just going to keep it to that. Right. But it is also supposed to be something simple and smaller. This is not very small. Let’s see. Uh I’m going to ask Charg about it. I’m doing SEO for this keyword. Can you can you suggest a URL slug? Yeah, this this is fine. Let’s just go with that best 15 turn AC. So I know uh I have like switched over the ton over here but that’s fine right. So that’s going to be my URL slug directly the keyword in the URL slug. Now as for page title, page meta description uh but the main thing that I want to make sure is ensure that uh primary keyword is at start of the title. Ensure that meta description contains the primary keyword. Right? So this is these are the two things that you need to take care of. So with that um let us ask JPD once again create page title and page meta description while ensuring they are within uh 50 and 140 characters respectively. The page title, the page is going to be uh an information blog and uh uh the primary keyword should be at the start of the page title. Yep, pretty good, I’d say. So, by the way, I’m also uh showing a little bit around uh um how you can work with uh prompt engineering. As you can see, I was pretty detailed in what I want. Discover the best 1.5 turn ACs for your home with our topics efficient cooling and energy saving options review. Perfect. I love this. Right. And uh yeah, I have my page title. I have my page meta description. It’s not huge. So, it’s supposed to be between 40 and 60. So, that’s fine. To the web. Okay. To the web. See, this is a navigational keyword to the web. Pixel checker. Word counter is different. So this is more of a pixel check in pixel you are checking like how much space it is taking. Okay, you need to enter. Okay, I can also enter the page title and met description. Let me just do that. Yep. Looks good. Right. So, that’s basically um like Okay, I’m just going to close this. Why did it load this? But yeah, that’s that’s like uh something that you can definitely do. And it also shows like a quick demo of uh the t typical mobile and typical desktop result. That’s pretty nice. So uh purpose of the page as I said it’s very clear. I want to provide information. So offer in indepth information about 1.5 ton ACS to potential buyers. Uh the primary focus is B2C general consumers. Okay. So looks pretty good, right? like now I have some semblance of what I want to do uh with the keyword right that’s basically how you go with it so there was a request for uh like an example of secondary keywords for some of these what I’m going to do is uh I’m actually going to fill all of these uh by using chat GPT itself so let’s see what kind of suggestion it gives and maybe so that way it is much more quicker as well and maybe then we can like uh I can uh quickly fix it. Right? So for the below data uh similar to the first keyword, can you fill in the rest? Okay, let’s see. Interesting. Uh, share some secondary keywords as well. Yeah, pretty good actually. If as long as they have search volume, I’m fine with that. Oh, now obviously I can check for the search volume for these, but I think uh this is pretty good. So, let me just quickly Yeah, it is fast. Now, is this how you should do it? Not really. Uh I mean, you can do it, but at the same time, you should make sure that you’re validating things. And this is something that a lot of people don’t do. A lot of people, they just don’t validate. Uh yeah it as I was saying I I what I did is I since I have the first set of data um I just told JPD can you follow the similar format and fill in the rest of the data and it just did that for me. Uh I just pasteed normally. I did not like uh uh I just pasted normally like normal copy paste. Tajibility is intelligent enough to sort of um do it. Okay. So, let me just copy this and then maybe we can quickly review it and then finalize our SEO plan. Okay. So, uh there was also the secondary keywords, right? Let me just quickly take these. I just paste it normally. So this is like Ctrl + Crl + V. Okay, I if you want I can paste it again. Not a problem. So this is interesting. But anyway, so I just copied it. Ctrl C and then I just went here. Ctrl + V. That’s it. So this is how I pasted the data. Okay, cool. Uh, were you able to understand how I pasted it? Okay, in the Excel uh so I just copied the table. So, um, so this is my habit of pasting in values uh with by removing formatting. But basically if I just copy this normally and if I just paste it u as you can see it would come like this. So I would just have to uh remove the wrap and all of those things. So uh to avoid doing that I just use a shortcut uh which is like if you want me to tell you I’ll tell you. It is alt e s um like and then I just select the format by doing this table on chat GPA. I think I just mentioned right now uh are you still confused on that? I just selected the table that I want. I copied that table and then I pasted it over here. So like for example this is the table selected it copied it came here pasted it and that’s it. That that’s basically how uh when then I sent it. Okay. So, uh yeah, uh I have some of the secondary keywords I suggested, but yeah, uh similar to that, I’ll just select some of the secondary keywords like these, right? Like, uh split AC prize list, etc. U so what I’m going to do is uh I’m just going to for now I’m not going to go too much into formatting. I’m just going to paste them as is. But yeah, that’s essentially how you can get those for the prompt. I’ll show that this is the prompt that I wrote. Uh now it already had the context of the previous one. So for the below data similar to the first keyword, can you fill in the rest? That’s all I said and then I pasted the value. That’s it. Um I I can do that. Okay, let me just do that. And yeah, so uh basically I’m I’m not going to spend a lot of time on that, but yeah, basically this is how uh uh it works, right? Like you have uh all of these list of keywords uh that you can potentially use in your content. Now, how are we actually supposed to use all of this data, create the content outline, etc. That’s the main thing. So that’s what we are going to figure out with content outline and then creation of the content. So I’m going to next as a next step I’m actually going to use a lot of chat GPT by the way. Uh so uh while I could do it manually I want to make sure that you guys are also well equipped with how to work with AI tools like these and how you can create uh content that is actually SEOfriendly as well while using these. So there are a few things to keep in mind. Uh but uh overall like uh that’s something that I’m going to talk about as a next thing. And the next step is content outline. So content outline I’m going to put it over here. And uh what is a content outline? Content outline is nothing but your structure of the content. This is not the content itself but an outline of the content. Now, some of you may be wondering why do you need a content outline? This is something that is actually very important because uh what happens is when you create an outline of the content uh think of it as uh how you are planning the entire content itself. So this is not where you’re writing content. So look at it this way. Uh you may have visited websites that have thousands of words of content. Ice I don’t think I remember the website but there are also websites which post uh content which are like 10,000 or 15,000 character sorry word length and that’s massive. That’s like almost good enough to create like a short story, right? uh but I’m not saying like that is what you should be doing here. Instead, it is more about identifying uh when you’re creating a content which has like let’s say 2,000 words or 3,000 words uh a structure or an outline helps you make it much easier in how you want to go with it and what are the things that you want to talk about because in the process of creating content we often get a little bit lost uh because we wouldn’t have a clarity of how many words is good enough? Uh maybe we would forget some of the other parts etc. So having that structure, having that outline makes it much easy not only in terms of creation of the content but also in terms of planning and making sure that it is SEO friendly. That is the entire reason we need a content outline. Right? Because uh look at it this way. We have primary keyword, we have secondary keyword, we have page title, we have uh things like keyword density, we have things like u um uh the uh where the keyword should be present, how it we should be using it, what are the different links, different sources, leveraging FAQs and I just uttered a bunch of words that uh uh that’s like too too many things, right? So how do you take care of that? you take care of that by creating a good content outline and that’s what we are going to do. So uh in a content outline uh these are some of the things that you kind of take a look at the optimization checklist. This is something that we also sort of leverage with both the content outline as well as the content itself. I will explain all of this. uh this is nothing but how you go from the journey uh or the onpage journey right so that that’s basically what it is uh let’s do that so let’s get started with the best AC 1.5 ton let’s start with this keyword okay so um obviously I do have a template for what a content outline should typically look like let me just open that. Okay, so this is an example of a content outline. Now over here, if you notice the main keyword again, let’s just go through what a content outline typically looks like and then we’ll create our own. Okay, so this is an example of a content outline. We have uh the main technical keyword uh so sorry main keyword or primary keyword. So I’ll just call it primary keyword instead of main keyword so that it’s not confusing. Okay. So primary keyword. So let’s assume that the primary keyword is technical SEO. Uh the secondary keywords again keywords that are related to this that expand on this a little bit. Uh technical SEO technical SEO checklist. What is technical SEO? Technical SEO tool. Types of technical SEO. Technical SEO factors. Okay. Uh this is the URL slug. So since this is a blog, this has like a blog slug. Again, if you’re publishing blogs and if you want to segregate it, you can do that. Uh page title. So page title contains technical SEO. Looks good. Um meta description 140 characters long including the main keyword. Okay, so it does not have that right now. Word count. Now word count is something that uh you can determine based on the competition of the keyword. A good benchmark is to make sure that uh uh it’s at least as big as your uh the competition, right? So the one who’s ranking at least one or two or something like that. And uh uh this is determined based on keyword competition. So how do you determine this? So let’s say if I do a quick Google search of this technical SEO. Okay. So uh for technical SEO as we can see these are the pages that are ranking. Uh this page it says there are like 7,000 words. Oh my god. Okay. That’s that’s uh that’s truly an ultimate guide. I believe uh this one is 3,000 words. Uh this is 3,000 again 3,000 uh they are pretty typically going for 3,000. This is by Google. Uh this is 8,000 by back linko, right? So that means if if I want to rank myself, I need to make sure that my content is at least at par with that. I should have at least 3,000 to 5,000 words. Um, and looks like uh HubSpot actually has this content with a lot of words. So that’s basically one of the examples of a long form content I would say. Right. So based on this, I should actually update this from 1500 to 2,000 to maybe 3,000 to 5,000 or 4,000 even. Right? So again like this is uh based on your competition because if you want to beat your competition you need to be at least at par with them. I’m not saying like word count is a way to compete. All of a sudden if let’s say someone has thousand words if you put a 10,000word article all of a sudden you’ll rank number one. That’s not how it works. But this is just like a benchmark that you should at least uh have um enough content for. That that’s all it is. It’s it’s not like okay this is a benchmark for you know 10xing or getting like one lakh words of content or something like that. Never do that. Uh as long as you are within the same range you’re okay. Right? So determine based keyword competition. So 3,000 4,000 something like that. This is a single page, right? And uh this is a good example of a long form content, right? Just look at the amount of content it has. You’re saying the the ultimate guide to technical SEO. The technical SEO. It looks fine. Fine, right? Oh, page title and this. Okay. in the example. No, it looks same technical SEO. Technical SEO. Uh Vibbon. Yeah, there is an extension. Uh I use this extension, the keyword surfer extension. Um it’s not super accurate, but it is still pretty good. uh so it provides me decent direction uh for free and uh I don’t really need to like open the web pages so that’s the reason I use it. Keyword surfer is uh something that I’ve included in this tools and resources over somewhere over here over here. Can you please suggest some of the exition that could be beneficial? Um all of all of the extension etc are listed over here. Feel free to go for it. Keyword surfer, detailed SEO, Mo SEO, all of these are extensions. Go for it. Add them. Hopefully it does not slow down your browser like it did mine. Okay. Um so yeah, like the page title, meta description, word count. Now I have mentioned the SEO optimization checklist over here once again just as a reference um but that does not mean that uh you have to do that as well. It’s just something that uh uh you can do. So what is the checklist now? Primary keyword usage the you should be using the primary keyword in the URL in the title tag preferably at the start at least once in the first 150 words of your content in the H1 and H2 tags for anyone who’s asking what H1 and H2 is I will explain this uh but this is basically your uh the biggest most headline and uh H2 is like a bit smaller than that heading. Yes, heading. Thank you, Hina. Uh then we have the title enhancements. So you can also use title enhancements if you want like in 2023, how to best guide review or something like that. Um but it’s uh only when it is applicable. It’s not something that you should be using everywhere. In fact, let me just change this 2023 to 2024. Yeah. Uh image optimization. So, primary keyword is good. Title enhancement fine. Uh image optimization. So, in the content, if you just have words, it’s going to be pretty boring. Uh so, over here also, for example, this is a very long form of content. It actually gets pretty boring. Um but at the same time this is very helpful and useful but I’m not seeing any images surprisingly. Oh we have we have an image over here. So something like this right? So this is an image. Now uh for those images uh you should use a descriptive image name and alt tag. What is this? Let’s check this out. So this particular image right I’ll just um open this image in a new tab and I can see this image the name of the image in the URL you can see this technical SEO guide_3 so this is a very descriptive image name so they have very clearly laid out that this is related to technical SEO guide right and the second thing is uh the description or the alt tag of the image What is an alt tag? I don’t know if they have used it over here. Let me just quickly check again. Don’t get scared when I’m doing these things. Uh oh, they also have an image over here. Nice. Yeah. Okay. So, this is the alt tag that they have. Uh let me try to get to it. This is the image. Yeah. So over here in HTML if you notice uh this is the URL of the image and then there is something called as alt equals to and they have mentioned the alternate text for this image. Alternate text is typically used by the crawlers and by accessibility tools to uh know what the image is all about. So this is like a description of the image itself. So um technical SEO checklist hierarchy that’s the alternate text. So by reading this you will know what the image is about and uh that’s the main purpose of the alternate text. Right? So uh whenever you are adding an image, it is important to have a descriptive image name and the alternate text along with that. Um and whatever number of images you use, let’s say if you’re using two, three, four images, at least one just one of those images should have the primary keyword in them. Um along and the all tag as well in the image name and the all tag. So this is the part of image optimization. Now there was a pretty interesting question uh talking about videos. In fact just like images you can actually u add videos as well. The name of the video the title of the video and uh the alt text of the video can be much more related with your keyword. And in addition to that what a lot of people also do is just like this content outline uh when you’re creating videos also you can plan it in the similar fashion. Yes. But at the same time uh you can also add a video and add a transcript of that video below that if you just have video content and that itself will help you create different type of form of content as well. So again, I’m not going too uh like deviating from the main topic here, but that is also something that can be done if anyone is interested into video content primarily. Uh alternate text is nothing but a way for us to communicate with the bots to tell them in u u communicate with the bots about what the images actually contain. So over here uh the communication that the bot gets is technical SEO checklist hierarchy. So using this uh the bots will know that this image is a checklist hierarchy or basically related to technical SEO and some kind of a hierarchy for that. So that’s basically what this is and uh uh this is this alt tag or this alt text is a way for us to communicate that with the bots. So but yeah that’s basically what the alt tag is u now keyword variety. So what is this basically when it comes to uh I think I should put this keyword density over here. Okay. So what is keyword density? Now this is the um keyword density is nothing but how many times you would like to repeat the keyword in the content. Imagine this if uh you are repeating the keyword uh like if if the content is like a thousand words and in those thousand words you have repeated your keyword like 100 times that’s clearly keyword stuffing you’re like literally putting so many keywords into it in hopes of ranking for that Google can easily catch that and uh the minute it catches that there’s a high chance that it will block your page and not rank it at all. But uh that does not mean the keyword should not be there. You should still have the keyword. You should still uh have some percentage of the words as keyword. So the keyword density typically if you have it between 0.5 to 2% is a good number. So what that means is let’s say if you have uh a content which is around 2,000 or let’s just put it as a thousand right you have a thousandword content in thousand words uh you should probably have your keyword um mentioned at least five to 10 times even if you have it around 15 times that’s okay. If it is u let’s say a lot longer than that um having it five times or 10 times is fine. If it is let’s say a 500word content then again same five times is good enough. So that’s the main thing like you should not repeat the keyword a lot. That’s what the keyword density is. The keyword should not be the major part of your content. Why will it block? Does it violate any of its policy? The answer is uh it basically understands that you’re trying to game the system. I think this was almost uh 15 20 years back if I remember. Uh at that time a lot of websites were trying to do this. uh they in some cases the entire content at least 50% of the content was the keyword just repeated or some of the websites what they would do is they would have the keyword repeated multiple times and in white color with the background as white so the user could not see it and uh but for the bots they would be like okay yeah the the keyword is repeated so many times and that’s what keyword stuffing is as Girish mentioned so what happens with that is uh like initially at those times again this is like two decades before u Google was actually ranking them and that became like a very decent way of quickly gaming the system black hat and uh ranking your website and all um and Google saw this and it stopped it and it stopped it by making sure that the algorithm did not consider it did not consider those pages And in some cases it would also de-index those pages. De-indexation is as equal to as blocking because that means that they no longer want to store your page data. So that’s the reason is it is very important to have u like a smaller keyword density. Now uh there is another thing that you can also do and uh which is keyword variety. What that means is um you should also include some synonyms or LSI keywords. So uh there are there is a tool like LSI graph or you can just ask chat GPT about LSI keywords. So yeah latent semantic indexing. So these are words or phrases that are related to the main uh keyword or topic. What’s a good example of this? So uh a good example is shoes and footwear. Both of those mean the same thing. But uh essentially uh the word are different. So footwear is something that people wear. Now obviously shoes is a part of the footwear. Uh in footwear you will also have sandals and clogs etc. But u that’s essentially a part of your LSI and synonyms right like what are the different words etc that you can use so that it is much when people are also using those different words you are also able to rank for those that’s the main uh context behind it so it is good to have a variety uh in the in terms of synonyms and use of LSI keywords so LSI graph is one that you can actually use to sort of get some of these uh and then the linking practices. Okay, I know there’s that’s the reason there’s a checklist, right? It’s not just content. There’s so many things. So, we have the primary keyword, we have the title, image, keyword itself, how we are going to use the keyword and then the linking practices. What is this? In addition to having the particular content, you would want to make sure on how you’re linking or using links on that particular content. So a quick example is this one. So this is a link. What is this? This is an internal link. What does that mean? So if I go to this link or if I click on this link, it will take me to a different page of HubSpot itself. Similarly u this is also internal link. This is also internal link. Internal internal I don’t know if they have an external link. They have. Yes. And then this one right. So source they are saying this is an external link. So why is this an external link? Because this is going to an external or a different website. Now that’s essentially what is the difference between internal and external link. So the main thing that you should keep in mind is whenever you’re working with uh any content there are two types of link one is external and another is internal. In external link you should have or you should make sure that there are descriptive anchors. Uh now in this case you don’t really need like a proper description because this is just the source of the image. But let’s say if you are uh saying that okay you got uh or you sourced something from a university page or something like that just make sure that uh there is like a decent description in the text of the link. Uh FYI this text is called as anchor text. More about that later. And internal link. So this is nothing but um these are links that goes around your website. So for example this is an internal link. technical SEO start by conducting this audit, right? Um, onpage SEO, this is an internal link. Now, if you notice, onpage SEO is a good secondary keyword over here as well. But at the same time, this is also going to uh the on-page SEO tutorial that HubSpot has uh which talks more about u uh uh like how you should do it and essentially uh um like uses onpage SEO as a primary u what do you call it primary keyword over here I believe at least I guess it does but yeah this is an internal link right and having a mixture of both internal and external link uh is very important when it comes to your uh particular uh onpage SEO and finally we are at secondary keywords okay so there’s a bunch of things before I get to secondary keywords I’ll just quickly go to that okay so this is like a checklist we’ve been so if you’re asking like how the density works this is like a checklist now in density you’re essentially trying to make sure that your primary keyword is at least mentioned um let’s say if if your content is in thousand words you would want to make sure that your primary keyword is mentioned at least five times or 10 times somewhere around that that’s essentially what it is so as long as you have that you’re good to go that’s all that matters so uh in addition to and that’s essent essentially about the density in terms of variety whenever there is scope wherever there is scope you can definitely use different variety of keyword as well. So these are optimization checklist based on applicability based on where these things are applicable and how it is going to make things more helpful. You will have to take a decision. It’s not like okay just because I have put it in the checklist you have to follow it by default. That’s that’s not how optimization works. It’s quite subjective because at the end of the day, you want to make sure that the content is helpful, genuinely helpful to the users. Think of it from the perspective of the users and the Google bot. Let’s now get into content outline. So, this is again an example. We are still going to build this, but uh this is like a quick example of an outline, right? So introduction uh this is where you are going to explain like a quick introduction about what the content is going to be. Keep it short but at least have something around that. Um and uh then u like from here you start with the your secondary keywords or different type of content. So use H2Os to divide your content into different uh subsections. So what is technical SEO is one uh technical SEO todos. Um then these are like further uh list within that complete technical SEO checklist, essential SEO uh tools. Um and like these are like subsections, right? Subsection of the content so that it is like a very quick outline. Now this is not the actual content as you can see. This is just describing what the content is supposed to be. Why is this important and why is this needed? So this makes it easier for you to then create the content that you want and that’s the main purpose of this. There is another example somewhere that I have of yeah this one travel deals content outline. Let let me just use this. Okay. So this is another example. Travel deals is the primary keyword. These are secondary keyword online travel deal, best travel deal, uh holiday deals, uh flight and hotel deals. Right? So this is the URL slug, title, meta description, uh word count determined based on keyword competition. And now this is the content outline introduction. Um then H2, uh H2 basically travel deals and how to find them. uh H2 over here is discover India’s top travel destinations right so as you can see very different from what this content outline has but at the same time this is just like a quick outline of how you can uh structure your content so over here like top travel destinations some suggestions around that uh uh types of travel deals uh upcoming holiday deals uh secrets to snagging best travel deals so on and so forth Right. So this is how you can like uh this is what a content outline typically looks like. So let’s create one of our own right now. Uh, this is actually a pretty good example to be honest, the HubSpot one. Uh, W3 Schools. This is a pretty good website for learning HTML. So yeah over here if you notice uh audit fundamentals is the first subsection. This is the H2. Uh the second H2, the third H2, the fourth H2. Right? So there’s like a quick outline that they have mentioned over here. Clickability checklist. Within this, they have H3s, right? And uh then they have the content for these H3s. So that’s like a quick example I would say of how uh um they would create the outline first then the content comes in later. So let’s just create a quick outline right I’m just creating a quick copy. And this one is for gadget bazar. I actually like the domain name gadget bazar.inh. Interesting. You can definitely tweak it a loop. It’s It’s not mandatory to have it the be the same. You can definitely tweak it. Okay. So, let’s start with this one. Best 1.5 ton AC. So I’m building a content outline for best AC. Uh we had selected some secondary keywords. I’m just going to paste this over here. Yeah. So these are just some examples that I selected. I don’t necessarily need to just go with these, right? um page title. Some of you may be wondering why am I doing double work? But this is uh the content outline. So it is important to have it in a single space. Okay. So word count to be determined based on keyword competition. Let’s just take a quick look. Okay. So, let’s take a look. Uh, Hindustan Times has 4,900. Um, this has 2,500. Um, around 5,000 over here. So, I think a good ballpark would be close to around 3,000 words. Yeah, that’s a hefty one. But yeah, looks like everyone is upping their game in the number of characters. Now, based on these checklists, I want to create a content outline. Now, as I mentioned, I’m going to take a help of chat GPT over here. So, this is what I’m going to do. Um, I want you to create a content outline for best AC 1.5 ton. provide me with uh u various H2s and H3s within those where applicable with the context of India. India and uh consumers looking to make a purchase or decide which one is best. Okay, let’s see what it gives. Pretty interesting stuff. Okay, I like it. I like it. But is this good enough? How do you decide that? That’s something that is important to do. So, let’s do that. So, we already searched for this keyword. Let’s look at the websites that are already ranking for it. I’m going to go with Hindustan Times over here. Gadget 360. Um, let’s see live mint. This is good enough. Right. So now what I’m going to do is I’m going to uh just take a quick look at the topics or the subsections that they are covering and see if there is something missing from the ones that chat GPD suggested so that I can also cover those. So it has direct list um it talks about what are buyers saying on Amazon, why choose this product, specifications. Okay. So, what do we have? Why choose this? Uh, best. Okay. Brand name, model, pros and cons, price. I think this is pretty good. Key features to look for. High efficiency, inverter noise level, air quality. Yep. Uh, budget friendly options. I think this is also going to be something pretty good. Uh, installation, maintenance, customer reviews, testimonial looks good. Uh I think more or less we have covered a lot of these things. What are buyers saying on Amazon? Why choose this product? Um yeah, looks like that’s pretty much what they have over here. Surprisingly, they are ranking pretty well, but that’s fair. Okay, so they literally just have a list of products over here. Nothing um I can take from uh Yeah. So it tells you like H1 how many H1, H2, H3, H4 etc it has. So detailed SEO the extension link is present in the tools and resources of the session notes. Okay. So over here um again it’s like it it’s pretty much a copy paste of instant times. Oh my god. Okay. So, I think I get the gist of it and I feel like what charg shared is pretty good. Uh, so I’m basically just going to use this. Uh, but I’m going to edit this a bit. So, let me just do that. Um, let me just paste this over here. Oh yeah. So again, uh it it’s not a very good formatting, but ignore that for now. Introduction is missing, but that’s okay. I can always add that. Hry explain what this is. Yeah, I think this is pretty good as an outline to be honest. Um, uh, I can probably add some options with all of these, mention some of the brand names. uh in terms of the secondary keywords that I had best split uh AC 1.5 ton I think there should be something related to split that uh okay so nothing related to split is it noise level air quality types of AC I think that is missing in this h types of AC is missing So I can basically add that as a H2. So this would be window versus um right so typically like these are the three that they are there I can talk about those um but yeah that’s pretty much it so once I have some semblance of understanding for this I can just make sure that uh um I have a clear understanding of okay what the content outline could be and once I’m satisfied with this uh the next step is obviously adding this link back to my SEO plan over here so I’ll just add the URL over here and my outline is ready right so now how do I go from outline to content I’ll talk about that shortly but Uh that’s basically what I would do with the content outline and uh yeah like I pretty much just quickly use chat GPD for this. Some of you may be wondering like isn’t that going to pretty much provide the similar type of content to others and all. Uh you should be reviewing the content uh outline again the reason there’s a strong reason for creating outline and not the content directly. I could have asked JGBT to create the content, but I did not do that because I first want to make sure what I’m actually going to write about. And now here’s what I’m going to do, right? Uh I to create this content, I’m basically going to go step by step. Now, if I just told Chad to create the content, what it would have done is it would have created a content with maybe 500 words or something like that. And that’s not what I want. my competition has 3,000 to 4,000 words. I will be nothing when I do that. So to actually beat my competition, what I would do is I would ask RGP to write about each section individually and then go from there. So uh the next prompt I would say okay uh let’s write a quick introduction keep it within 0 to 100 words and uh uh talk about uh like a quick introduction about what we are going to talk about and uh then I’m going to ask it to write this one for me like uh what uh explanation of what this means uh what are the room sizes uh benefits etc. Um after that based on these uh if there are specific models at a top that I can identify I will just share that and I will ask it to write the features. U now the question is will Google not detect AI content and restrict it. So this is where the differentiation comes in on how you use AI for doing this. In today’s day and age, if you write content yourself, that’s perfectly fine. But you will end up spending a lot of time um in uh creating content while your competition will just use AI. And if you use AI, there’s going to be duplicate content. There’s going to be AI content. There’s going to be restrictions. There’s going to be plagiarism as Mahesh mentions. So how do you uh make the better of these two worlds? The answer is by ensuring that you’re leveraging AI while making sure that the prompts that you’re using is personalized and customized for your own type of content with little modification. Yes. So how are we going to do that? Uh think of it in this way. When we look at different websites, we all of a sudden in our mind get a tone. Let forget about website for a minute, right? Look at any videos, look at any people who are uh mentioning something on a video. Uh the way that they talk about it, the way that uh they add the tone to it etc. is very different. Uh so when I talk about let’s say someone like uh u let’s say karim minati u you would know that uh he’s someone who’s going to um essentially talk in a certain way wherein like he’s just shouting a lot and uh being quite expressive and being like okay or something like that right and uh then if I let’s say talk about someone like technical guru he that person he’s going to be very different. The way that he talks is going to be very different. There’s a tone. There’s a way um that he would say certain things. You can actually uh do the same thing with your content. Now what about AI content then? So Google is not against AI content. What Google is against is plagiarism, duplication as well as blatant disregard to being helpful. That is what Google is against. So how do you deal with that? How do you work with that? The best way to deal with that is by making sure that you’re providing content that is useful. You can actually generate useful content using AI. and uh in addition to that making sure that there is a sense of personalization along with that content. So there is uh something that Google has for all of these things there there are certain parameters that Google uses and that is what we are going to do with the particular content creation as well. uh but uh yeah that’s uh basically uh how you differentiate distinguish and make sure that you’re uh getting the best uh in terms of content while also being efficient. So uh but yeah essentially this is what content outline looks like. So the next part is what about the content? How exactly do you proceed with the content? did talk a little bit about it in terms of content outline. Uh but the next thing that I want to talk about is content creation itself. So let’s try and understand some of the things around content creation and uh essentially uh how you can also leverage AI or gen AI along with that. So we have seen that Google’s mission is to organize words information right. So this is something that we all make it universally accessible, useful and whatn not. So from this one thing that we understand is that we have to provide the best possible information for the keyword that we have selected. So whatever the keyword is, we have to provide the best information possible or the best content possible. So a good content has to be clear and precise. So these are some of the things that you should keep in mind even when you’re using Gen AI. These are some of the very important things. It has to be clear and precise for both readers and search engines. So this is a very important factor, right? So a lot of times we forget that the content that we are writing is for two different types of audiences. One is your human readers. People like us, you, me, everyone else, right? uh all of us reading the content and second is the search engine funny enough because uh they are the ones who will decide what is the rank or what is the position we are going to get. If the search engine will not understand the content then that’s a failure and if the readers will not understand the content then also it’s a failure because both of these are actually interconnected. So uh second is you should also make sure that you’re reducing bounce rate. So what is bounce rate? Uh bounce rate now while Google has mentioned that this is not one of the ranking factors or primary ranking factors. I’ll talk about ranking factors later, but essentially a bounce rate is something wherein someone has visited your page and then they did not visit any other page or left your page after just a few seconds. And that’s a very common thing. uh often times we visit a page and if we are not getting the information that we want we are like okay I’ll I’ll visit the second page that shows up in the Google search result because we have so many options and choices right we don’t want to just visit one page and get the information if if that information is not available so it is very important to reduce the bounce rate so you’re just like going to the website and going back again going to the website going back again so that’s that’s like you’re bouncing back and that’s what is called as a bounce rate. So let’s say if the percentage of people who have visited your website and then uh bounced off is maybe 20%. That is fine. That means out of 100 only 20 people bounced off which is an acceptable number. But if out of 100 90 people bounced off that’s alarming. That tells you that okay that’s not a good number and that is something that you should definitely work towards to make sure that you’re reducing that and that’s what it means to reduce the bounce rate. Third is increase trust. So SEO should also enable us to increase trust. It’s not just about you know putting the data or content out there but it should be trustworthy content. How can you do that? Uh there are multiple ways of doing it. Uh you can definitely try to make sure that you’re using sources that are well vetted. Uh you can also provide links to the sources. You can also uh talk about where you got specific data points, right? And then there is like essentially something that gets attention and backlinks. So this is what off- page uh SEO is about. But uh this should be something that people actually genuine gen genuinely like enough that they are also sharing with others. Um and uh at the same time because they are sharing with others it is also generating backlinks. Right? So that’s uh essentially what happens with good content. What exactly is bounce rate? Right? So bounce rate is let’s say when I go to Google there are five different results. I went to the first website I did not f find what I was looking for. So maybe I wanted a recipe for idli and when I went to the website it was talking about dosa. I’m like okay I don’t want this. So I go to the second website. So for the first website I have bounced off it. And that uh means like uh and now if let’s say out of 100 people uh 20 of them are doing the same thing that means the bounce rate is 20%. If 90 are doing the same thing that means the bounce rate is 90%. And how do you reduce bounce rate? There are multiple ways. One way is to make loading time faster. Second is to make sure that the content is much more relevant. As it says good content has these following effects. Right? So u making sure that it is more relevant. It is clear, precise. It is offering the information that uh people want. It is not filled with multiple popups etc. It is not filled with advertising like a lot of news channels or news websites today are right. So that’s that’s the main thing that’s how you reduce bounce rate. Google eat. So what does it mean to have quality content? So this is something that you may have heard me say quite often. You should have good quality content. Anytime you’re looking at SEO, they will say good quality content. But what does good quality content actually mean? So for that uh Google has laid out something called as E A T experience, expertise, authoritiveness which together brings trust. So um now the way that Google scores this is a bit different. Now does this mean like this is a ranking factor? No, this is not a ranking factor. But this is a guideline provided by Google to their quality raers. I have a link or URL to the exact document which also shows this thing and this is like a official Google document, right? But uh over there you can check how they want their quality raers to review or validate a website. And this is a pretty good metric to look at. The reason for that is because this this is not a metric by itself, right? But this is a pretty good guideline to go with because this will help you ensure that whatever content you’re creating is of high quality. Now what does that mean? So this is an excerpt directly taken from the document. Right? So what does all of these mean? So when it comes to experience and expertise, this is of the person creating the content. Keep in mind this is much more closer or much more relevant for blogs. This is not relevant for the product pages. For product pages, as long as you have uh details and definitions of uh the companies etc. that will help. But when it comes to the blog part, making sure that the experience and expertise of the person who has creating the content is also mentioned over there or uh there is some level of trustworthiness around it and uh then uh the authoritiveness and trustworthiness of the creator of the content, the content itself and the website is also taken care of. What does all of this mean? I have a checklist for you so don’t worry about it. But basically what this means is that experience and expertise of the person is something that should be there and at the same time the website it should uh through its content show that it has good uh authoritiveness and trustworthiness. So typically this is what the document shows. As you can see by combining authoritiveness, experience and expertise uh you create trust. So this is the source of that. This is this link has uh uh like this is always updated. So if they have made some change. So see it is update last updated on March 5th, 2024. Uh you will notice like all the different things that it talks about in terms of um the quality of the content, right? And how quality rating overall works. So u read it at your own pace or whenever you want. And in this if you notice there will be the mention of eat right and it talks about what each of these mean. But let’s uh like for example online stores product reviews etc for the trust experience expertise authoritiveness etc. Right? So it mentions all of these. So you can definitely go through it but I’ve also created like a quick checklist for all of you uh to like ensure that you are good with eat as well. So this is the checklist for Google eat right. So now is this checklist exactly what you should be doing? Uh the answer is that it depends right. So this is a checklist uh this is more like a general checklist. uh you have to follow them based on what is applicable uh and uh obviously not everything is applicable everywhere right so you can keep that accordingly so uh essentially what this is all about is on your website you need to make sure that you have an about us page a team page and an author page what are these three about us page everyone whenever you go to a company page or a website a page where they are talking about their company uh their business or whatever their website is all about right they would also in that same page mention or show details of people who are actually contributing or working in the same company so it could be CEOs etc or if it is just like a blogging website you can just have details about you your and yourself right so that’s basically what is expected here and when it comes to author page this is nothing but a page of the person who is writing the content and all the set of different contents that the person has written. Uh I will show an example of this as well. So this is a website that I had created as a test u and uh I’ve basically uh tried to follow the eat things right like Google eat uh guidelines. So over here this is the author page that I’m talking about. So just something that has like a quick uh description about you, who you are and all the topics that you have written. So this is what an author page is all about. Now uh collaborate with known people. So essentially make sure that uh um if there are people that you know or who are highly uh good in terms of a specific field that you’re writing about uh mentioning them or uh having them linked or collaborating with them for writing some of the content will also improve the authoritiveness and the trustworthiness of the content that you’re writing. It would also make sure that uh to highlight to Google that the content is vetted by an actual expert. Keep your content clear and straight to the point. Of course, uh this is something that I already talked about. Um add your personal opinion or scenario to the content. Now, this is where experience comes in. So, expertise, authoritiveness, trustworthiness, that’s there. But experience part of the eat is more about not just telling about something but also adding your own experience so that c uh like let’s say users who are visiting your website can relate to what you’re talking about. Uh make sure that the content is regularly updated of course so that uh people uh know that whatever you have written is updated accordingly. Uh link to highquality sources. So you should also provide external links to websites like let’s say government websites, research websites, research papers etc. Uh or even the high uh like big news media outlets also works in this case but these should be highquality sources for something that you’re citing. Um consider multiple viewpoints not just like a single viewpoint but essentially talk about it from different perspectives uh different uh uh uh people etc and obviously manage and maintain your brand’s online reputation. Uh so this is essentially how you make sure that Google can trust your website. So that’s a little bit of what I have tried over here. I wouldn’t say it have successfully done it but uh a quick example over here I’ll I’ll show in this particular post what do solar panels do understanding their function and how they work right okay so in this case uh if you notice there’s like a bunch of different content but I’ve also added sources so US department of energy uh national renewable energy laboratory uh international energy agency like these are some highquality sources from where I have gotten the content. So that helps increase the trustworthiness of what I’m talking about. There’s a lot of different data. There’s a lot of different information available over here. And I’m mentioning like where I actually got them from. Right? So that’s essentially what Google eat is and how you can like work with the quality of uh the content or that’s like a quick highlight of the content uh part or the quality content. Next, let’s understand what are the types of content. So, this is something that I kind of uh uh talked about a little bit, but typically for each keyword, you need to decide what type of content you’re building. The most popular content are usually let’s say product pages or blog posts etc. But there are also glosseries, slideshows, directories, videos, etc. video. The most popular one is uh your uh uh YouTube for example, right? Like there’s like a bunch of videos over there. So videos, a good example is uh YouTube. But what are glosseries? I’ll show you a good a pretty good example of a glossaryy, right? This is what a glossery looks like. So it’s like u Darwin Box has a HR software. So HR glossery for HR term. So what they basically have is a bunch of different HR terms and then for each of those they have a individual page. So absentism policy is a part of HR and they have like a meaning and definition around it. Now u there is something around this that Google has also released which is called as thin content. Uh so what that means is when the page has very little content just like this one and this glossery has been one of the ways that a lot of websites sort of tried to create a bunch of different pages to rank themselves. Uh but obviously um it isn’t it like now Google has sort of caught on to that and that’s the reason now you will see glossery pages which isn’t with thin content anymore. So for example uh appointment letter over here as you can see this is not thin content. What is a thin content? Thin content means content which is very less in size. This is a very good example of that. And then uh normal content is something like this which has decent amount of content written for the same with examples and all of these things. Right? So that’s what a glossery is all about. And uh that is what like a glossaryy content is all about. It’s like a blog post but it’s just defining different content or different part of things. So let’s say if you are into HR software or something like that you can have a glossery for HR related things. If you are into masalas like kudwa is then probably you can have a glossery related to different types of masalas or different type of ingredients or different meanings of different ingredients as well. Right? So just an example but that’s essentially what it is like a product catalog not exactly more like a definition and a meaning more like a dictionary if you will uh for that particular industry so just like these right so it’s it’s not something that has to be a part of your actual menu uh but you can just like have something over here so I’m sure they have like a glossaryy link over here so HR glossaryy right so you can have it as a part of your resources and then you and have all of those links. So within HR glossery as you can see the uh glossery items comes up. Yeah. The terms HR glossary terms. So agile HR absentism policy appraisal each of these are like as you can see there are so many different type of terms right wage r wellness program work life balance workspace bullying etc. All of these are the primary keywords over here and that’s what you talk about. Um under resources over here also we will have the glossaryy. Every website has a glossy page not really but uh it helps to create multiple pages and when you have multiple different pages the chances of you ranking for some of those or having those pages get organic traffic increases thereby helping your website gain authority. So uh it’s one of the way u in fact there was a name for this method uh ski slope method if I’m not wrong. So it’s a strategy a SEO strategy that is used by a lot of websites especially SAS software websites or B2B websites which just want to have pages for different type of things. So yeah that’s like what glosseries are. So that’s how like uh these are the different type of content and uh you’re not limited to just blog post or pages right you can determine what type of content you want to build uh based on the keyword that you have and the intent that you want to service that’s a little bit on the content side what content means but let’s try and understand how you would actually fit that content on the website and what exactly the site structure what does a site structure mean so just let’s just take an example. I hope all of you have filed your ITR if you have any income and paid nala her part right so this is clear tax this is a pretty massive website um so let’s take a look at this right so this is a website which has multiple different products so if I hover over the product I can see they have um uh products for in like individual you know indep independent products. So that includes GST, accounts payable, vendor management, ITC, so income tax related um TDS, invoicing, they have product suites for finance. They have consumer products like ITR filing, tax consultation. Then in resources, they have case studies, newsletter, uh they have guides, blogs, webinars, events, FAQs, etc. In company they have about us, support, career and all. Right? So it’s it’s as you can see from just these three parts I can browse the entire website even though they have like thousands and thousands of pages. Clear tax literally has thousands of pages. If you go on Google and if you type anything related to tax you’re going to get clear tax website. That’s how big it is. So if I just go on website and if I type let’s say uh something along the lines of uh section IE in ITR3 right what did I get I got clear tax because of how massive their website is they have multiple thousands of pages talking about every small little thing around income taxation finance etc and u given Given that and given so many pages even then if I visit their homepage their structure is very clear I have the products I have individual products product suits I have resources I have like let’s say things to read learn from I have details about the company that’s it right so I don’t have like a cluster of like okay we have thousands of pages we don’t know where what is that’s not how it is and this is why a site structure is important. Another pretty good example is um websites like let’s say uh the uh content websites etc. So uh or courses websites what’s a popular course website? Udei is a popular course website. Let’s go to that. So if I go to Udemy.com for example now Udemy has if if I’m not wrong it has millions of courses but even then there are categories. So for development there’s like web development, data science etc. And then they are showing like the popular topics for photography and video. There are like different topics uh that I can look at as well. And it’s pretty much sorted right like I I I don’t need to really uh go and search for specific thing because I know like where I should be looking at. And same goes for websites like Amazon as well. Like they have literally millions and millions of pages. But still if I go to this all and if I look at the categories it’s very clearly defined. So for a website as massive as Amazon if they are able to categorize their website in such a simple way for me as a consumer to quickly browse through or get what I want then why not every other website right uh even the ones that are as small as u just starting out. So that’s the main thing and that’s the reason structure is important. I’m I’m sure they do have a good or huge team who continuously update it but at the same time uh it is the responsibility of an SEO to ensure that these things are managed and these things are prioritized accordingly. So that’s what it means to have a good site structure. So yeah like uh as I just showed you the example homepage category and different pages or subcategories on different pages under those subcategories right so that’s basically what it is supposed to be it shouldn’t be a random collection of pages but something that is structured properly now uh importance of a good site structure obviously as I said it significantly impacts the user experience so uh users experience improves, makes navigation easy, allows visitors to find the products or information they are looking for, creates a good experience. Look at all of those websites that I just showed as an example. It makes it so easy for me to find what I’m looking for. And the same goes for search engines as well. So, it’s not just about the users, but search engines too, wherein they can understand your website better. And also if you’re ch making changes to your website they will know uh in a better way as well. So that’s why it is important. Now while uh having a good structure is important the second thing to keep in mind is internal linking and that’s what I’m talking about a little bit over here. So what is internal link? Internal linking is where in addition to having that structure, you’re also linking different content on your website uh all across other pages, relevant pages. So let’s say if you have two posts, so the post one is linking to second post, second post is linking third and so on and so forth. And in some cases, post one can link to all of these. Post four can link to all of these as well. And crisscross, right? Just imagine how it works with thousands of pages or millions of pages. Wikipedia, right? Wikipedia is a wonderful example of internal linking. And let me show you why. Let’s just go to Wikipedia.org. Now, as you can see, Wikipedia um you can find almost anything that you want, right? So, let’s just see uh maybe dog breeds. I want to learn about different dog breeds. So, there is dog breed. Perfect. There’s a content for that. Let’s go to that. So, dog breed. So, it talks about what is dog breed. So it says a dog breed is a particular type of dog that was purposefully bred by humans to perform specific tasks and further details. But if you notice, it has uh certain words highlighted in blue like this one, dog. And this one, artificial selection, uh phenotype, code color, right? And then it also has breed standard. And as I’m hovering on it, it also has this nice little feature where it also shows me some quick snippet about what that link essentially has. Crossbreeds, mixed breeds, natural breeds, right? And uh as I’m scrolling through this, you can see there are so many internal links available. So what are these internal links? What will happen if I click on these links? So if I click on artificial selection for example, it opens another page on Wikipedia which talks about what is selective breeding or redirected from artificial selection. Right? So what exactly is this? This is nothing but how internal linking works. So you are providing context or information about different topics that you’re mentioning in your content and if its pages are available. Why is this important or why is how is this helpful? So think of it from the perspective of a Google bot. For a Google bot, what happens is if uh it comes to your page and it sees that on that page there are links to some of the other internal pages, the chances of it visiting those other pages will increase. If it visits those other pages, the chances of it indexing those pages will also increase. Now, this is not a concern with most of the smaller website. If you have a website which has like maybe 10 20 pages probably it’s not a big concern for you. But if your website has hundreds of pages, in that case it is very important to have a good internal linking structure so that the crawler can actually um establish a good connection between multiple different pages of your website and thereby increase your chances of getting indexed faster. If you’re making changes or updates to your website, getting those updates published faster and um essentially making sure that your website is presented in a proper fashion and improve its success rate. So that is the main point of internal linking. So in this case, even as a user, if I hover on this, it’s actually not providing a bad experience for me, right? I’m like okay it is explaining certain terms and things to me which I may not have understanding about but what if every single thing was linked and then if I have to click on it and uh understand that okay it is not even talking about what I want now that is bad and that is a very poor uh user experience so that is something that you should avoid essentially Think of yourself as a user. Put yourself in the user’s shoes. Even though there are so many links here, I’m okay with it because I can get its information very quickly. But let’s take a look at another website. Uh let’s take a look at money control. I I have often seen a lot of links that it has. But typically what happens is uh let’s say if all of these had a bunch of links to world street, Don Miller, Don Lemon, Elon Musk etc. and if it did not provide me information instead I had to click on it that’s a pretty bad experience for me now and that is something that you should avoid. But instead let’s say if had it had like it currently has what like maybe uh 300 words or 500 words not a lot. Oh my god, so many pop-ups. So, um, not a lot of words, right? So, in this case, if it has maybe five, uh, three to five internal links, I would be fine with that. Uh, unless and until it was providing me information as I hovered on it as well. Now, that is another piece of coding that would be required as well. So assuming you’re not looking at doing that uh keeping for something like this keeping it at three to five internal links should be good enough but uh as long as it is relevant you can definitely add more uh overall while ensuring that the user who is visiting uh does not have a poor or bad experience that’s the main uh limit I would say uh right now I am on Wikipedia page I just came back to Wikipedia page. So that’s what internal linking is right now. Um in addition to having this site structure, uh the next thing that I’m basically going to talk about is something which is uh optimizing onpage components. So there are different on-page components. Uh I’ve sort of already discussed this. So I’m just going to quickly like guide glide through them. But in addition to having those internal links, it is also important to make sure that you’re optimizing your content, it is very important to have those uh other onpage components optimized as well. The checklist is already available in the session notes, but uh the title tag should or the title of the page should have your keyword and putting it in the uh front or the first words will have more weight. Make sure that the URLs are SEO friendly. Having the keyword in the URL and making it simple is definitely good. And obviously all URLs should be unique. No two URLs should be the same. Um H1 tag there should be only one per page. This I’ve already mentioned earlier but I’ll mention again. And make sure it includes your keyword. Typically your page title itself would be the H1 tag. Experiment with different modifiers like the ear, the best guide, reviews, etc. If you’re working with blog content and all, use multimedia in your blog post like images, screenshots, videos, etc., uh, make use of H2s and H3s. Optimize your image. Make sure that you’re tagging your image with the keywordrich alt text. Um like obviously it may not help with rankings but it will help you rank traffic from Google image search which is also helpful in increasing authority. Uh use keyword at the beginning of the post in the first 100 words. Outbound links uh ensure that you’re including at least two high authority or related authority sites. Outbound links internal links make sure you’re adding at least two to three internal links. Um and uh then finally uh social sharing buttons are like I would say uh they aren’t as important but it is good to have those outbound links are basically links that are external. So not of your website but of other websites. So uh for popular blogs, news websites, educational websites, government websites etc. If you are sourcing content from some of those and all you can have those outbound link one of the example that I mentioned was uh in fact Wikipedia itself is a good example at the bottom if you go of any Wikipedia page you will see all of these references. So these are sources and all of these are external websites. So Miam Webster um um like the New York Times and uh then there’s like this one other books there are like other different books that it was sourced from other websites it was sourced from right so all of these are sources so all each of these so let’s say if I want to uh go to this breed so this is an external link for Wikipedia because Miam wter is not Wikipedia’s website. So this is what it means for uh it to be an outbound link. Right? So that’s basically some of the things that you should be taking care of as a part of onpage optimization. Now we know what the website structure should ideally look like. We know um what are the things that you should include in the content. But what about the content itself? I have been sort of touching this topic a little bit playing around with it but um I haven’t really gone into it. Okay. So SEO copyrightiting I have been as I said like I have been touching around this but I haven’t really gone deep into it and that’s what I’ll do right now. So what exactly is uh SEO copyright? Why am I talking about copyrightiting here? Why am I not saying content creation? Why am I saying copyrightiting? There’s a big difference. So as I mentioned earlier and this is this is a question that a lot of you have asked as well is uh how do you ensure that uh even if you’re using AI to generate content your content is plagiarism free free and uh it does not have any issues in terms of being like a copypasted content or something like that and at the same time it is something that is genuinely helpful. The way that you sort of uh do that is not just by creating content but instead by creating content that is uniquely yours. So there are multiple ways of doing it. Uh the first thing is to clearly understand the tone of your brand or the website. What is the tone that you’re trying to set? So what is a good example of tone? What what does that actually mean in terms of a tone? Think of it this way. The minute I say that um I want to look at some content of uh maybe on the website of Narendra Modi just as an example, right? The minute I talk about Narendra Modi, any single thing that he would say, there’s a specific tone that we have for him, right? That uh he would probably first of all use Hindi to communicate and uh he would talk about anything in a specific manner. Now if he was talking about SEO pro for example, now I’m very bad at impersonation. So please have a laugh at your own accord but probably he would be saying something along the lines of SEO or something like that. Yes. Yes. That’s so like I said I’m very bad at these things, right? So uh but uh there’s a specific tone to u him to how Narendra Modi would speak but on the other hand of the spectrum um people I I feel like you might know who Karim Minati is right that YouTube uh guy like that young YouTuber who’s gotten the most subscribers I think in India right now or at least towards somewhere around that and The tone that he would use is so different. If you give the same topic to Narendra Modi versus Karim Minati, you can imagine the conversation and the way that they would say. He would say Narendra Modi would say it in one way and Karim Minati would say it in a different way. And the difference over here is the tone. So even when you’re writing content for SEO, it’s all about that segregation and identifying what is a tone that is uniquely yours. So that even when you’re writing that content or creating that content, it will be something that is actually genuinely yours. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of way that you can talk about different things and different topics. So u and given the type of different topics that exist there is a very high chance that you will um actually face any issues or any challenges in uh the plagiarism check and that’s where the copyrightiting comes in like a brand identity. So that brand identity, brand identity in terms of the tone for your content is what it’s all about. So I’m not going to uh go too deep into the tone. That tone is something that you have to identify yourself for the content that you’re creating based on the brand that you’re working for. If it is a personal brand, you can create that tone based on what or how you wish to communicate. If it is a specific brand or a business then you can define how that brand should be communicating as well. Right? So uh but apart from that let’s try and understand from the SEO perspective u what copyrightiting or SEO copyrightiting actually means and how it can influence your content itself. So this is a very good example. I I personally love this. So on the left hand side you can see this is a content that is written for search engines. So your maybe your focus keyword is lose weight fast. So it says if you want to lose weight fast you need to cut calories. Cutting out desert can be tough but it’s important if you want to lose weight fast. And if you’re looking to lose weight fast here are five tips. For me as a user, if I read this, I’m like, what is happening? I will probably exit the website right then and there. But for a search engine, the search engine or the bot or the Google bot, what it will see is it says lose weight fast, lose weight fast, lose weight fast. So probably it’s a good website, right? And that’s why what it will do is it will see uh it will try to show this to a few users. Now all of a sudden what happens is users go to this website and because they are like me maybe they will be like what is this what is even happening and they will bounce off it the ranking maybe it was good at one point of time but it starts to go down again and that’s basically what happens here. On the other hand if you’re writing content for human so want to drop those excess pounds look no further than the tips in this post. Here’s where you learn how to reduce caloric intake, burn excess calories, and more. Sounds human, looks interesting for me as a human. Looks good. But if you notice, no way does it actually talk about losing weight fast. So while it is good for me as a user, it’s probably not good for the Google bot. And creating the balance between these two is what it means for content optimization or creating uh SEO optimized content. So you don’t need to use those keywords multiple times as long as you are able to use that keyword even a few times while maintaining the keyword density and as well as ensuring that your content is talking about that specific topic. you are good. So for in this same thing, as you can see, want to drop those excess pounds? Look no further than the tips in the post. Here’s where you’ll learn how to eat healthier, burn excess calories, and lose weight fast. Uh that’s basically uh uh what an optimized content looks like because not only is it written for the human users like all of us but it’s also written and ensures that it’s also talking about the robot. Now why is this important? Now, this is related to bounce rate a little bit, but um you basically don’t want people dropping off your website, right? Because the entire purpose of ranking on SEO is so that people visit your website and then spend time on your website. You’re not creating a website so that people just come to it and go off. And that’s where bounce rate comes into the picture. So, Google uses bounce rate where people leave your page after spending a few seconds as a ranking factor. to avoid this um there are some methods that I’m going to talk about as a part of copyrightiting but as you can see under 10 seconds typically your ranking starts to sink but above 10 seconds the more time that the user spends on your website the higher your website rank would go nowadays most of the good websites on average I see that their uh average time spent again depending on the website if it’s a content based website typically 2 to 3 minutes is very normal on average. So that means there are some users who also spend 10 minutes, 30 minutes. There are some users who spend only a few minutes or even a few seconds but the average is that um now I’m definitely not considering the social medias that available on your phone and all that’s like next level and uh that’s anyways not something that would should be your goal either but it’s all about trying to maximize the average time that a user would spend on your website. Uh the first thing about uh your content is it is very important to make sure that your content is properly structured as shown on this over here. Right? Like if you have a bunch of different part of content making sure that making sure that there is like a table of content or something like that so that it is easy for people to quickly go through the different segments of the content that you have as well. So it is important to make sure that the content is properly structured as shown on the right side. A good way of finding structures for different topics is look at courses or course pages and how they answer so many questions. So this is an example that I had added of code academy and uh as you can see over here it is very like simple. it it shows like what are uh the overall syllabus how it has added like different different pieces of content and all right but overall there is like a pretty good structure for something so massive so if I just go to maybe okay yeah I think I’m not able to do that right now but anyways uh basically what I want to show is like how structuring your content is pretty important impact if a user spending less or more time on our website. Does it help in discoverability? Not exactly. This is something that Google is tracking about your website, right? So, Google also tracks how much time a user actually spends because if a user is exiting your website, the chances are they are going back to Google and that tells Google that uh so imagine this. Imagine that you are ranking for a keyword like dog breeds. We we just looked at dog breeds, right? So now if I go on Google and if I type dog breeds, right? And if I scroll down a bit, there are uh these two websites AKC and Pedigree. Now what happens is uh for me as a user I maybe I went to AKC’s website and I did not like the content and then because of that I came back to Google and I went to bed’s website I like the content I stayed there. So if this is the same thing that uh let’s say now maybe the number of people who search for dog breeds in a month is 100 and if all 100 people are doing the same thing wherein they are going to this they are spending very less time and then going back and then going to pedigree that tells Google that uh Google is not able to provide the necessary information and uh the one at the top AKC is probably not a good website because pedigree is the one that everyone is going to and then not coming back. So that way Google will then rank pedigree on the top and then lower the rank of AKC. So this is why this is like a very oversimplified example but this is essentially how the time that a user spends on your website affects the ranking. So I talked about structuring a little bit right like it is very important to structure your content properly. So for example over here also what are stocks understanding stocks etc. This is like a well- definfined structure. So if I want to visit or go to any of these sections I can do that. Now the second thing is now this is a tactic right this is a tactic that I personally uh like but you can also use a tactic similar to this. So this is called as bucket brigades. Bucket brigade is a old copyrightiting tactics. There are multiple copyrightiting tactics. You can just ask charge about that uh copyrightiting tactics for sales letters for example and it’ll like give you a list. Let’s actually do that. I think I have charge open right now. What are copy list top copy writing tactics for sales? Yeah. Uh let me just give it an example. This is where you like keep modifying or changing the prompts like bucket brig. So these are some of the different tactics right like bucket brigades aid pass social proof scarcity and urgency powerful headlines storytelling benefits over features. So there are multiple different tactics you can go with a tactic that you want or you feel good with. There are like they have uh it has shown 14 but there are like a lot more other tactics that you can work with. So I’m going to talk about bucket brigade because personally I prefer this uh but like you can go with the one that you feel could work well for you. So now uh as for bucket brigades let’s look at this. So, for example, over here, bucket brackets. What is this? It’s an old school copyrightiting tactic that were originally designed for sales letters. All you need to do is find a spot in your content where someone might hit their browser’s back button. What does this mean? So, imagine now as as you might have seen when you’re writing content, you would be writing like thousands of words. when there is so many words for someone to keep scrolling through all of them it takes a lot of time and effort and uh there are a lot of chances that after one or two paragraphs uh they would just click back. So you need to identify what those segments or sections are. Um and this could be based on and this could actually be very subjective, right? It’s not necessarily like after every paragraph you have to add it but it it is something that you should definitely look into and based on that in those segments you can add a bucket bracket. So some of the examples are now uh these are like short copies to help people stick to the content or stay around for a longer period. So some of these examples are here’s the deal. Now what’s the bottom line you might be wondering or something like these over here as well right? It really just erases feelgood chemicals. Uh communication is simpler. Right? So these are the things like as you can see I have actually highlighted this um probably I highlighted it too well. It feels like it looks like almost a part of the uh headline. But u as you can see this is a bucket brigade. After two paragraphs it has a bucket brigade so that people can stay connected. This is a continuous content. There is like uh there isn’t like a proper break in a content over here. But this is like a continuous stream of content. The same second chemical is this. So why is it that we are so quick etc. Overall it’s all about making sure that people are staying connected with the content and you are expanding the amount of time that they might spend on your website. So that’s the main purpose of bucket brigades. So there are some example articles that I have linked over here. I don’t know if these are still live. Oh yeah, it is. Apparently it was updated recently as well. And if we look at it, why we overthink take action now. If you’re overthinking an idea and all like this was not necessary, but it helps people who are just quickly scrolling. And that’s what I’m going to do right now. If I scroll down a bit, okay, there there’s some quotes and I keep scrolling. Direct your attention elsewhere. I’m not even reading this. So, what does this mean? I will read this probably. If I scroll down further, stop talking about it. Maybe I should read this. Right? And that’s essentially the part of it. These are these are not exactly headlines, but instead these are more of something that would help users still stick to the content. So this is one of uh the methods. Then similarly there is a agree promise preview. So in this you’re essentially agreeing with a viewpoint that someone has and then you’re promising more details around it and finally you’re also previewing what you have with some of the insights. So over here for example uh the content is music improves well-being and quality of life research suggests. So it says uh uh this is where it is agreeing. So let’s say if someone came to it they want to know that okay music actually improves well-being. They are talking about a pre a review of 26 students finds uh benefits of music on mental health are similar to those of exercise and weight loss. Okay that means it agrees with me. I agree that okay well-being of uh people improve with music and it has a review around that. Awesome. Uh so music wrote the late uh Oliver Saxs has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly needs no meditation. Looks promising. A review of this conducted across several countries uh has found that music may provide a clinically significant boost to mental health. Okay. So let’s try and understand. So the context over here is from this from this particular paragraph I get the context that okay if I scroll down there’s a high chance that I will be able to uh get insights into this particular review and this is like a quick preview of the content itself. So that is essentially like these are just some examples but as you saw there’s like bunch of different ways that you can work with different things. uh aida formula attention grab the reader’s attention with a compelling headline interest provide interesting information desire highlight benefits action end with a strong call to action and this is a very common theme that you would also notice with a bunch of different content today uh pass social proof scarcity urgency all of these right like you can work with uh the one that you feel or think is the best. But uh this is also uh something that you can use for creating content. Now what does that actually look like? Let’s try that out. Um so I’m now going to go back into content creation, right? Gadget bazaar and I’m going to go back to creating the content for this one. Best 1.5 turn AC. Okay. So let me actually it is but it’s it’s not that good of an example. Yeah, this is something this is something that I added as a screenshot as well. So yeah, over here uh this isn’t a long content either, but as you can see the psychology behind social media. There’s some content, some more content, and some more content. This is when you don’t use bucket brigetting. It’s boring. So, I’d be like, “Okay, what even is this? Should I even read this? What is this supposed to be?” But now add those uh bucket brigades back. There’s a high chance that I might actually read it. It releases feelgood chemical. What does this mean? It’s interesting. It’s something uh that makes me read at least the first couple of sentences. Communications is simpler. Yes. Okay. How is that simpler? Self- fulfillment. Nice. So that’s the main thing about bucket brigade. It it adds elements in the content at the specific pages or spaces where people might just skip your content and uh that’s the main part of bucket brig. Now the best part is uh using AI, right? So that’s again this is one of the form of copyrightiting and these are so subtle that um like you you don’t really see it because of how subtle it is and that’s how it is supposed to be as well for a user it should not be like okay what is happening the user should be able to go through the content uh normally right so um now I’ll show you some quick example Create uh 100 uh 100 is too small. 200 word content around um white sneakers while using bucket brigades method. Okay. Yeah. So this is the bucket breaker method. Right now what I’ll do is do the same but with a method instead of bucket brigade. Yeah. So, if you notice over here, it’s more conversational. Why everyone needs a pair of white sneakers? Versatility at best. Comfort meets style. Ever wonder why white sneakers are so popular? Uh, easy maintenance. Think white sneakers are hard to maintain. Affordable luxury. Okay. Uh over here the must-h have shoes for every wardrobe. Okay, why are they must have? White sneakers are the ultimate fashion stable. Okay, why white sneakers stand out? So it’s like talking more about it. Uh creating a desire around it. The perfect blend of style and comfort. So that’s what sneakers are. Action elevate your style today. Ready to transform your wardrobe? Do this. Right. So it’s just a style of writing as I said both of them are talking about the same thing but in a different way and both of them are unique content individually. It’s all about using different methods or it’s all about using different uh ways of copyrightiting so that your content can be uniquely yours. Now, in addition to this, there are a few other things that you can also use to make the content actually uniquely yours. And that’s what I’m going to show with this example. But uh let me just show you what it would look like with this. Okay. So, I’m going to open this content outline and let me also open the earlier. Okay, perfect. So, this is what Chad GPD told us previously. Okay, so let’s do this, right? Um, I’m what I’m going to do is since it has already created this outline for me and it has some previous context of what I was trying to do. So what I’m going to tell is uh I want to write so let’s do it this let’s write content for uh this content outline. So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to say let’s start with um this one. I want you to create content that is um uh that is engaging. uses the bucket brigade sales copy writing style and um um uses the tone and voice of um voice of PhD. Let’s just do Elon Musk. Tone and voice of Elon Musk. Let’s just go crazy, right? Um, so in addition to this, what else can we say? Yeah, let’s just try with this. Let’s enter. Just look at this. Understanding AC tonnage. All right, let’s cut to the chase. What does this mean? Why should you care? In the world of air conditioner turn, which refers to the cooling capacity. Simply put, a 1.5 ton AC can remove this of heat from your room in an hour. Think of it as a cooling superhero with the power to make even the hottest Indian summers feels like a breezy autumn day. Nice. So, uh that’s the thing, right? Like you can go nuts with this. Like there’s so many different things. Now obviously if you notice it uh it while it is nice uh probably I would want it to be a little bit more descriptive right so um so for example when it says understanding tonnage explanation of what it means now um so maybe if I want I can also ask it to explain this better so let’s say ideal room size for this which is good uh I want wanted to also compare or provide examples along with that. It has provided a nice example but maybe like an example comparative example I can do that or I can like ask it to do multiple different things right and then once I have said that what I can basically do is I can be like okay great uh do the next topic now and that’s what it would do. So the next topic was top five best 1.5 ton ACS in India. What was that? As you can see here, it already has the context around it. Top five best 1.5 turn ACs in India. So this is the content and what has it written? Let’s see. So um now obviously in this there isn’t like much to do with the tone and all but uh it still tries its best. Probably not something that I would go with. Maybe I can change this a bit. But that’s that’s the main thing, right? Like you can work with it, play around with it, change the tones, change the prompts and uh try to uh make it in a way that one you’re not just asking it like okay now that you have created outline create the content for me. the chances are it will not create that great of a content and two is even if it did create the content it would be very short and you will not be able to uh properly edit or work with it as well. So yeah uh that’s basically how this works and as you are doing this as you’re reiterating and iterating and working with this you will be able to come up with a proper tone and the best part is you can actually ask it to give you the prompt that you should be using for the next set of uh content. So for example, if I want to if I were to start a new chat and wanted you to create content from um just the keyword as an input in addition to the other things mentioned above. What would the ideal prompt look like? And that’s it. I have my prompt ready. It says provide a content outline detail for each section. Use a tone and voice similar to this. Makes the content is this. So I’ll just copy this prompt, use it in another one, and I’m mostly sorted. probably I’ll have to edit this again but you get the point right like this is how you reiterate and work with the prompt engineering side so that you are u essentially trying to automate as big of a chunk of your work as possible in terms of content creation but yeah that’s basically what I wanted to talk about uh the most exciting part I feel uh is uh a demo on WordPress I will just do a quick understanding of how WordPress actually works. Is this important for you as someone who is going to do SEO? Um I would say it’s not very important but it is something that is uh something that you should be aware of as well. So WordPress uh before I get into WordPress, I want to first talk a little bit about uh how a website works because often times what happens is there are a lot of things in SEO that we do wherein we just need some basic understanding of how a website works and uh sometimes I feel like that is what is missing. So let’s just talk about that really quickly, right? So often times people are like okay I need to use WordPress that’s the only way. Some people are like there should be like a custom website. There’s something called a CMS as Mahesh says and then some people are like no I’ll just create like a custom platform of my own. uh maybe I’ll use uh some of the languages like PHP, Laravel, um and um maybe I’ll build something of my own etc. Right? Like when it comes to a website, uh there are all sorts of different types or ways that you can get a website up and running. Um and as someone who would be looking at SEO, you will need to at least have that basic understanding of it so that when it when the time comes that you need to implement something on the website, you will be aware of uh uh it right. So that is something that I’m going to talk about really quickly. So how does a website work? Now think of it as a parallel to real world. What does this mean? Now um let’s look at real world and maybe let’s look at a website over here. Now in the real world what happens is if you want to visit a place um how do you go to that place? Do you go to it by identifying what is the latitude and longitude degrees of it and then you visit that place or uh do you just go on Google maps or something and type in an address and then you go to the place. So there are two things. So there are two things you’re doing when it comes to actually uh going to a place you would be doing two things not just one. you’re one is you’re actually identifying uh the place by using a name and second is by doing so then you’re visiting those coordinates. So on Google map also when you go on Google map it will actually tell you for any location what are the Google maps coordinates. So if I for example say Amazon headquarters, right? It says some Seattle or something like that. This is where the headquarters is. Now if I go to maps, what happens? It loads up the map of Seattle. And uh maybe I’ll just click for this space needle on Seattle. Now the minute I did this so typically what happens is all of these locations are dependent or based upon the latitudes and longitudes these degrees etc that you see are based on the latitudes and longitudes right but that is not what we use. So even when it comes to a website there are two parts to it. One is going to be the name of the place and second is going to be where the place is actually located and that is essentially how a website also works. So in the real world you would have name of the place and the location of the place. Now uh can you shift the name of the place to a different location? Yes, you can. And the same thing happens with a website as well. Can you change the name while retaining the same location? Yes, you can. And that’s also something that happens with the website. So, similar to this, what website has is called as domain name and it has something called as hosting or server hosting. Right? So the name of the place in the real world is nothing but the domain name on the website world or you can call it like webs world if you want and in uh terms of the location of the place that’s nothing but where the files of the website are located because at the end of the day every single thing that we see online or even on the laptops desktops mobile phones etc all of those are nothing but ones and zeros or bunch of different files that are that we access through the internet and that’s basically how a website works. So uh let’s say when you go to a website like maybe amazon.com what is happening is I while I’m going to amazon.com uh every single thing that I see here all of these buttons all of these characters all of these different like clothing items or whatever these are these are images and files that are probably stored in some server uh somewhere across India US or wherever the servers location is. Now, I’m not typing in the address of that server. I’m not typing in the IP address of that server like okay 136.1 something or whatever that IP addresses. I’m typing amazon.com the domain name. So typically what happens is in the web world or in the website these two are usually sold separately because domain name is something that you buy separately and where you want to host your files is something that you buy separately and then you join both of these or link both of these together by something called as DNS. You combine both domain name and server hosting by using something called as DNS. Domain name server right and that’s basically how a website function and how both of these are linked. Now uh to keep it simple obviously there are services where you don’t need to worry about all of these things um and WordPress.com etc are some of those services uh events uh Shopify if you have heard of it Squarespace even GoDaddy offers some of these services right like uh if you go to Godaddy Blue Host etc you don’t need to buy these things separately while they do offer you to buy these separately you don’t need to you can definitely like buy like a package a web hosting package which includes the domain name as well. HostGator is another one. Absolutely. So, uh all of these uh they offer it as a package because they understand if someone wants a domain name, they want a server hosting. If they want a server hosting, they probably need a domain name. And uh uh you don’t really need to worry about all of these. But uh sometimes what happens is you need to have an understanding of why these are different and that’s what I wanted to explain. So when it comes to right so let’s try and understand then how is a website actually created there are three types of websites typically so the first one is manual setup second is semi-automat automated and third is fully automated right now obviously this is like a broad oversimplification but we don’t need to know more than this right so if even if you get an understanding of what this is you are good to go um as someone who is going to practice SEO so let’s try and understand a little bit about what these three things are now in manual setup typically you will need to buy domain and hosting yourself and manage everything so when it comes to domain name you buy it from wherever you feel like when it comes to server hosting you buy it from some other place or maybe you use like a cloud server or something like that uh to get the ball rolling etc right and uh that’s basically what you would end up doing uh so a quick example of this would be let’s say if you’re using AWS Google cloud etc then in the semi-automated what you’re doing is you’re buying domain in yourself. Uh so uh and hosting that will be managed for you. So essentially um hosting separately and uh hosting is managed for you. So a good example of something like this is some of the services, right? And finally, fully automated. They do everything for you from domain to hosting but costs are higher and obviously you will have lower control. A good example of this is Squarespace, Shopify or even WordPress.com. Right. So this is basically what the difference is. Now as you can see I’m talking about fully automated and WordPress.com but there is also a semi-automated version of WordPress. And that is basically what I want to talk about. So where is WordPress in all of this? The answer to this question is there are two versions of WordPress. There’s not one. So the semi-automated version is something that you get from WordPress.org and the fully automated version is something that you get from WordPress.com. Now why is this a difference? Why is it like this? Some of you may be wondering this is so that WordPress can be a solution for both people who want to customize what they want for themselves and at the same time it can also be a solution for people who don’t want to bother with it. I’m also going to talk about.org part only. Uh but I still going to just show both of these. So WordPress.com is a fully u like done for you fully automated solution for you and obviously you can get started with this for free. Uh but they also have like if you want to get your own domain name or your business name then you have to pay for it etc. So there is this free plan. I think they have an explanation of what that free plan includes somewhere. Yeah, it’s just like direct setup or uh what you can do is you can go with like a paid plan wherein uh this includes a free domain name for one year. uh like all their paid plans includes the free domain for one year which is pretty nice and uh then obviously like there are other limitations on uh different things like DNS SSL there is ads WordPress has ads as well word ads apparently this is something that they launched recently oh yeah um I wasn’t aware of word ads actually interesting okay so they have this word as well. Um they have um like site logs, inapp analytics and all of these different different things right in this entrepreneur they also include Woo Commerce if you want to do shopping etc. Now the thing is uh this is pretty like good if you don’t have any um like or if you don’t want to bother with the uh going into the one and if you just want to directly start using a service you can do it. Um is element available in com I am not sure of that. I think they do have plugins capacity but I don’t know if element is a part of it. Frankly, it’s been a while since I’ve used comoo. Um, and then there’s aorg.org What happens is this is more open-source as it says and uh you typically if you click get WordPress it will ask you to download a zip file and set it up or you just uh like they also provide some recommended hostings uh that you can go and sign up with as well. So what is better essentially it depends on how deeper you want to get into it. uh for most of the simple use cases.com is decent enough but if you do want good control over the things that you want to do and you don’t want limitations uh typically this is also cheaper when you’re using it with some of these services in that case.org org is better. So what does this look like? This carbon lightning website that I was showing earlier is uh something that is built on.org. So this is the website. This is carbon lightning. Um this is a website that I have uh created using WordPress, right? Um and it’s like a very simple website. Frankly speaking, it’s not like high design or anything. It’s like a very simple website. I think I’m using element on this uh but uh yeah like that’s what it is using. Uh it has some posts from last year that I’ve made and uh yeah that’s basically what it has. So what I’m going to do right now is I’m going to access its admin panel. So to do that, I’ll just click type in wpenadmin and uh it would ask for my login, but since I’m already logged in, it just loads the dashboard. Uh there’s a bunch of things over here. Uh but I don’t really need to worry about these. Apparently, they have meetups in Bangalore. Okay, good to know. Um then over here in the left side there’s like uh all the different options that I have. But if I want to create content or post content like blogs and all I should be going to posts. So this is where I would be creating my blog content etc. If I want to create pages like about us page, contact us page, a landing page or something like that, I would be going to pages. So if I go to pages right now um yeah you would notice that there’s like a privacy policy page the homepage that I have an about us page that I have set up and a contact us page right so this is where you would be setting up your pages and u in the posts this is where I have all my blogging post etc like uh in-depth solar panel review what do solar panels do understanding their function and all of these some of these things that I had published. In addition to this um I also have some other plugins etc installed and uh that is something that I can access from here. So what are plugins? Just like in our phone we will have mobile apps right. So what are the apps that you typically find on a phone? uh you would have uh things like your camera app, your SMS app, your phone call app, you would also have Gmail, Google maps, uh you would have WhatsApp, uh Facebook, Instagram, some of these apps, right? So just like a phone has apps and you can install those apps from your play store or let’s say app store etc. uh even WordPress has apps and those apps are called as plugins. So using these plugins you can add or remove functionalities within your website and there are like a lot of different things that you can do with this just like you can do with apps on your phone. Literally you can from creating music to you can edit photos, you can edit videos, you can talk to people, do video calls, you can like play games. U there are like so many different things that you can do from your phone because of these apps. The plugins also do the same thing using different plugins. Obviously some plugins will be paid, some plugins will be free, some plugins will be premium wherein some part of it is free, other part of it is not like software. Absolutely Mahes. So that is how plugins work. So Gana this is u like.org setting up the website is free but I did pay for the domain name as well as I paid for the web hosting that I’m using. So uh similar to that I have a bunch of plugins installed here. Now I’m not going to go too deep into the plugins but uh uh if any of you are interested I can probably share the list of plugins that I am using over here. I’ll probably do that during the break time. Yeah. So uh I have like a bunch of plugins. I have element that I’m using for website builder. Um these days I have uh transitioned into um generate press. I I prefer that more but yeah limiter is also pretty good pretty fluid. U then I’m using like a contact form. Um I’m using light speed cage to improve the speed. I’ll talk about this later. Uh I’m using metapixel for tracking. Um I’m also using um this as well. uh authors plug-in uh there’s like schema plug-in this I’ll be talking about as a part of technical SEO um and a bunch of other things based on my requirement right but that’s typically what I have over here so now uh when it comes to these plugins as you can see I’m using uh element so let me just show you how u using these things I can make things happen so One primary plug-in that I want to talk about and this is important for SEO is Yost SEO. So, uh this is something that we will definitely be using as a part of both our uh um onpage content optimization as well as with some of the technical SEO elements as well. So, I’ll be talking more about this. Now, there are other plugins as well for WordPress. There is all-in-one SEO, there is rankmath, there’s like a bunch of other SEO plugins. Uh, personally like all of these are fine. You can go with any plug-in that you want. Uh, they all of those plugins will also have a premium version, but this is like a test setup. So, um, even the free version is mostly fine for most of the requirements. So, Yoast is good for multiple things. I’ll be talking about it. But yeah, this is something that I’m going to show as well in the post. So, what does Yoast do? Obviously, it has its own section wherein you can work with the different settings and all of these things, but I’m not going to go into that right now. Instead, what first I want to show you what it does for your content. So, for example, in this uh you can see there is this content and over here these are Yost SEO scores etc. So it says this content score SEO score is green which means it is good. It shows the readability score of this content as green as well. So that means this is good as well. Then the key phrase. So this is the primary keyword that I’m using over here. And uh it also mentions the same to me. Now what I can do is if I just quick uh just click on edit I can see more information about why it is green and what are the different checks that it has done. So let’s take a look at the content and try to understand what’s actually happening here and how I’m using YAST. So this is the content uh at the very top over here what we have is the uh main title or the H1 of the content right and uh yeah so at the very top we will have the title. This also acts as a H1 for the content and as I mentioned earlier there can only be one H1 and uh solar panel reviews as the primary keyword. Now as I scroll down you can see like okay uh this content it talks basically about solar panel solar energy and uh this is an internal link that I have for solar energy category over here as I scroll down there’s an image now in the image I have done some optimization to the image too uh in the alternative text I have mentioned my um like keyword primary keyword as well and uh as well as when it comes to the name of the image. I think I have set the name of the image is something. Let me just take a quick look. Yeah, image name is solar panel reviews, right? So, in both the image name as well as the alternative text, solar panel reviews is there. And this is like a quick description of the image. As I scroll down, there’s like uh the headline uh headline two. This is the H2. As you can see over here, I can select or change the head headings. This is the paragraph and uh yeah, more content around factors to consider. Uh some more images. Even this image has like an alternative text, right? And then as I scroll down, there are there’s like another H2 uh with more text, another H2 with more text and so on and so forth. And then over here I have links to external websites like SunPower, LG’s website, I have linked to Panasonic’s website etc. And uh finally like a quick conclusion. Now as I scroll down with this particular content I have done all of those checklist part and as you can see uh because of all of that the SEO score is good and along with that uh it also tells me what this would look like in the search appearance in mobile as well as on desktop. So I can get an understanding of what this would look like if it shows up on Google. In addition to that uh this it also helps me change or edit the title uh for SEO. So this basically becomes your page title as well. And uh you remember right like in this in the SEO plan we were creating the page title. So this page title basically goes over here as a part of your SEO title. Then this URL slug will go over here in the URL slug part. So URL slug is different. URL slug is your URL itself, the link of your page or the post and then meta description. So from here you can just take your meta description, put it over here. And it will also tell you if they uh they are exceeding the character limits etc. and what it would look like in different results. Right now another good thing about this is it also shows this SEO analysis. So if you expand on it, it will tell you what are the things that it looked at, what are the things it checked. So if any of these things you have not done, it will also tell you like these are some of the things that you should be looking into. Uh so now does it mean that everything applies everywhere? It completely depends and it is a bit subjective as I mentioned earlier but this is a good checklist to have and that is what this plug-in is doing for you and uh as you scroll down you also have an option for cornerstone content. So if this content is like the primary content which is quite long which uh is then linking to other pieces of content you can check this if not you can ignore this also. Um and in terms of advanced uh this is something that I’ll be talking about later don’t worry uh I’ll be talking a little bit around this in terms of canonical URL etc in terms of uh technical SEO but yeah it also has options for that. So overall that’s basically how it works. In addition to that it also has like a score for readability etc. What type of voice you’re using if that’s good or not. um it sort of looks into those. I wouldn’t really put a lot of mind into this one. Uh SEO score is much more important. But does it mean if your SEO score is green, you are going to rank first. No, it is just a checklist. This is not a ranking method. SEO Y SEO will not make you rank, but it will help ensure that you are taking care of all the things that you need to and that’s the main purpose of it. Don’t just rely on Yost SEO and be like okay it will take care of my ranking. That’s not how it works. It will just help you go through the checklist and then you are the one who has to make the decision on what are the things that you should be looking into. So that’s like a quick u I would say a demo on what this looks like or how this works. And if I click view post, you can also see uh uh this is what the actual post looks like with the URL and uh all of these details. It also has this author box that I was talking about and uh yeah, that’s basically uh how you can post content on WordPress. So exciting stuff. Technical SEO. What is technical SEO? Some of you may be wondering, of course. Now, when it comes to onpage SEO, um like I mentioned in the earlier slide, it is divided into two parts. One is uh the content part and the second is the uh the technical part. Yeah. over here as I mentioned in this that when it comes to the uh keywords and the content that’s mostly on the content SEO segment wherein uh your primary goal is the content itself and how you’re sharing that with the users as well as the search crawler right but the technical SEO is going to look at two aspects, two primary aspects. One is uh the search engine accessibility. So how easy it is for the crawler to find your website. If it is finding the content on your website or not. Uh if it is finding the right content on your website or not. If it is able to read the content properly or not. if it is able to show the uh write elements of the content on the search engine results page or not. Right? In addition to that, you’re also going to look at improving the experience of the users themselves. So that is what technical SEO is all about. And there is a big reason why it is called as technical SEO because it is highly technical right. So u don’t worry too much if you guys feel like what am I even talking about because as you guys practice these things as you guys look into uh learning more SEO and doing these things you yourself will be able to uh figure out and work through these. But uh as as long as you are able to understand some of the concepts that I’m talking about that is good enough right so with that okay so this is also set up all good with that let’s get started on the technical SEO part so the agenda for technical SEO is uh we are going to talk about Google search console what exactly this is and how it can be set up. We’re going to talk about uh crawling which includes uh robots.ext and sitemaps. Uh we are going to talk about indexing uh which also includes canicalization, redirects and rich snippets or schema. Uh we are also going to talk about page experience which includes the speed, mobile friendliness and security. some of the top uh aspects that uh Google looks at when it comes to the experience overall. Right? So that’s what we’re going to focus on as a part of technical SEO. So Google search console, what is Google search console? Um the top search engines of the world, Google is the top one. Then there is the Bing, there is Yandex in Russia, there is uh what is the China one called BU I think right? So these top search engines of the world uh I don’t know about the rest but these do offer um a search console or a web master or like a dashboard for you to understand how your website is interacting with their search engines. That is the main purpose of this. So Bing has its web master. Uh Yandex also has its web master. I don’t know what BU has. I I don’t remember uh what it has frankly speaking. It’s been a while since I’ve even looked at BU. Uh but uh Google has search console. Previously search console used to be called as Google webm then they renamed it as Google search console. So what exactly do these tools or dashboards do? Let’s go to the website to understand itself from there itself. Right. So, Google search console. Okay. So, this is basically the uh homepage of search console and it tells you information to help improve your performance on Google search. That’s the main purpose of it. So it has a bunch of information available for you on how your website or what your website looks like on the search console and if there is anything you can do to fix or improve that. So you can optimize your content with the search analytics and this analytics is very different from what you will be able to see on Google Analytics. I’ll be showing what that is as well. uh you can uh get an understanding of the content uh that is being shown on Google and how uh you can also get your content placed on Google as well. Uh you can fix issues or get alerts on the issues that Google sees on your website and fix those and also basically get a good understanding of how Google spider bot or whatever is crawling your website actually sees your web pages. So they have also some uh nice training videos if you want to go through those. Uh it’s pretty good uh more like a summarized version but still they are pretty good and comprehensive for anyone to get started with and uh it also talks about uh core web vital rich results both of these are something that we are going to talk uh around as well. uh am you can pretty much ignore this is no longer one of the important aspect even Google is no longer supporting it uh so uh unless and until like you can actually forget about this this is this isn’t as important anymore so these are the two things that we are going to talk about right so uh yeah with that let’s get started so this is search console the minute I like I’m already logged into Google so it just uses those credentials. Uh what I’m going to do is uh it has a couple of websites here. So when it comes to Google search console, if you don’t have a website added already, the first thing that it will tell you is to add a website. And uh uh this is something that will pop up. So it has two options. one is uh you can add a specific uh domain directly or if you want to add only a specific part of the domain you can also add that over here. So u this one as it shows it requires DNS verification and this one it has multiple verification methods. So what is the difference between the two? Um this one is more around a specific u domain itself. So google.com entire google.com will get validated but uh this is more of let’s say search.google.com or uh something like let’s say business.fas.com or something like that. So it’s more like a subdomain or uh something along the lines of a specific area or segment only. uh that’s basically what would get validated here. So um if you are using free WordPress so for example if you’re using WordPress.com and you have set up a free account probably you will have uh a free domain from the WordPress right something like let’s say maybe you have set set it up as your name.wordpress.com WordPress.com or something like that. And if you want to track how that looks like on Google search, sorry, through Google search console, then you would be using uh the URL prefix option. But if you have full control over the domain or the website, you would be going with the domain option. Now, as you noticed, it says it requires DNS verification, which is quite true. So what this means is if you’re using this option and if you are entering your domain name you will have to validate uh your domain or if you are the owner of the website through the DNS. Now if you have WordPress there is a much more easier way of doing this. You don’t really need to do this. Instead what you can do is uh you can simply just use let me just close this instead in WordPress there is a plug-in called as GKIT this is an official plug-in from Google uh so this is like G sitekit uh sitekit by Google right so this is uh a plug-in through which you can install uh all the primary tools of Google uh in a single click literally. So through this you can enable search console analytics. If you have AdSense you can link that. You can get page speed insights. You can also link your tag manager. So all of these word uh Google tools you can directly integrate from here. And the best part about this is uh if if you’re using WordPress you don’t even need to do all of this. You can directly from G SiteKit or Google SiteKit. you can directly just enable your search console and it will validate it very quickly. So this way uh your website would easily get validated and uh uh you wouldn’t even need to do the DNS verification and I’ll just show you what that looks like. Uh SiteKit settings. So over here you can see search console is connected, analytics is connected. It also tells me the tags etc. And then the page speed insights also like if I want to I can uh take a look at that. And if I want I can also connect uh other services as well. So looks like now it has also added Google ads tracking as well. Interesting, right? And if I go to the dashboard over here, I will get all the details about uh um what the traffic etc. looks like. Oh, looks like uh I had 20 visitors. Uh but yeah, anyways, so uh there’s like some traffic etc that it talks about impressions and all. This is pretty much a dead website, but I guess it still gets some uh search queries and all. Anyways, uh so that’s that and uh uh yeah, like it basically helps you get that validation done very quickly. So that’s the main purpose of it. So let’s say if I put in test.com over here, uh it will tell you like what are the settings that you would need to do on your DNS record and uh based on the name server provider, you can also like it will also provide you um the tutorial on how you can do it as well. And looks like they also have Yeah. But yeah, that’s pretty much how it works, right? So that is how you set it up. And once you set it up, let me just show with this one. I remove this. I’ll remove this also. So once it is properly set up, this is something that you would be able to see. So this is one of the websites called as uh petrebels.com and their primary market is in the European region. Now as you can see it uh uh this is like an overview, right? And in this overview, it gives you details around performance like uh how many clicks you got from Google. Um you also get a detail on how many pages were indexed and how many pages were not indexed. So this website has like 2,700 pages indexed. So that means Google’s crawler identified like these are the pages that are worth indexing. Uh there’s there is like video page index saying these many no videos uh indexed. So okay so apparently there’s some videos that did not get indexed. It also tells you about core web vital. We will be talking more about this. Uh we’ll be talking more about indexing as well. Don’t worry. Uh it also has shopping trend. If you are an e-commerce website and you have linked your merchant center etc. Uh it tells you if uh the product snippets are valid or not. if the merchant said uh listings are valid or not. Looks like there are some invalid listings uh that can be improved and then overall enhancement. So review snippets, site links, uh profile page, uh FAQs, breadcrumbs, etc. So it gives you like a good overview about your website from the technical standpoint. What are the things that you should be doing as a part of technical SEO? the content once you are done with content once you have published a bunch of content it’s all about technical SEO as a next step to ensure that technically Google is able to actually see the content and you do that by using this particular dashboard and all of these slides are going to basically talk about the same things so connect your website I just talked about this you uh go to Google search console login through your account add a proper properties, select the verification method and set it up. We would have your performance looking something like this. Uh let’s actually show go through the performance as well in this uh obviously sitekit is better if you have WordPress. If you don’t have WordPress then it is much better to uh add property and update the DNS like I talked about earlier. The difference is that over here you’re just validating the ownership. The data is anyways being collected and processed by Google itself. You’re not placing any pixel on uh your website for this. Okay. So this is what the performance overview overall looks like. Right? In performance, uh you have impressions, you have clicks, you have CTR, click-through rate. Uh that means like out of these many impressions, how many people actually clicked on your website? And then you have your average position. Now, if you notice something interesting over here, advertisements show impressions because they want to show uh how many people saw your ad. Tell me what does impressions in search results or organic search results mean? Seen and left. But uh it has a different meaning in u um organic search. What it means is um not bounce. No. So an impression is so let’s say when I am searching for shoes online I just gave one impression to all the three top websites that you see over here I have seen Myntra’s website I have seen Neman’s website I’ve seen Ago’s website so all three of these websites got one impression from me just now that is an impression if I scroll down Flipkart got another Metro shoes got another one. Sketchers got another one. Tata Click got another one. I did not click on that exactly. I’ve just glanced at it. Now, the reason uh the performance of search console is important is because this impression is something that happens on Google’s website. Google Analytics starts only once someone is visiting your website, not before that. over here I’m not visiting any of these websites but uh this data is still being tracked and available in your uh search console and that’s the main thing because this data is proprietary to Google search itself and that’s the reason they share it over here like uh they share it only after you have validated your ownership so this impressions data that you’re seeing is something that you will only get from search console. Uh same goes for the CTR and average position as well. These are the three numbers that you will never find in Google Analytics. So this performance that you’re seeing is uniquely uh its own only after the clicks you will be able to track that in analytics like from these clicks how many actually ended up on the website and what they are doing. So now as you can see that is why the performance or the search console performance uh and the analytics that it provides is so valuable. you’re getting data points from Google directly on how users are seeing your content on Google’s website and uh this tells you uh like for example what were the queries that people were searching for right and from that queries how many of them actually clicked on your website after seeing your particular results and if I go to pages it tells me like what are the pages is that actually got the most clicks. Uh what are the countries from which I got the most traffic? Uh the devices. So device uh obviously mobile is always at the top. How my website uh appeared. So looks like product snippets and merchant listing are the top ways that my website appeared. And uh at the end of the day uh by date also if I want I can get the information. So it tells me overall u how the traffic from Google search came to me and based on all of this information I can also determine what are some of the things that I should be looking at or fixing. So um that’s basically what the performance aspect looks like right but let’s try and understand a little bit more around some of the things um so that’s search console I just gave a quick glance about it but we are going to come back to it because as you notice there are other aspects in this as well there’s indexing there is experience etc so u let’s before I get into it let’s try and understand a little bit around different aspects and elements that you should be looking at and what technical SEO actually means right so let’s start with this so what is technical SEO technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website to help search engines like Google find crawl understand and index your pages goal is to be found and improve your rankings. And frankly speaking, in today’s day and age with so much content being created, technical SEO is one of the most essential elements of SEO at least uh when it comes to bigger scale. A good example of that is uh websites which have uh let’s say lacks of pages and there are websites which have lacks of pages right u for all of them just making sure that their pages are being indexed properly is good enough for them to get a lot of traffic from uh search engines. So uh what essentially happens is let’s say if you have 10 lakh pages and um if you have 10 lakh pages that means obviously uh you have content uh that is spread across all of those pages and uh that also means you’re probably talking about many different things. So the chances of your website showing up in search result increases a lot more as long as the content is also very different in each of those pages and a lot of websites do have that caliber especially in today’s day and age with AI it is very common to have thousands of pages being created in just a couple of weeks in fact and that’s the level of speed that websites have picked up by using all of these different tools and sources. So with all of that, technical SEO becomes one of the most important uh aspects because even if you have all of those lags and lacks of pages, if Google is not able to find them, how are you even going to rank? and uh if uh Google does find them then there’s a high chance that you may end up ranking for some of the longtail keywords that you couldn’t have even imagined about and obviously with that you will start to see a good increase in traffic. So uh a very good example I can in fact take is of the company that I currently work for. We have uh if I’m not wrong we have around 25 million pages. Uh in fact the number of pages keep increasing uh every day and that’s not a small number. So we uh really don’t work a lot on the back links etc. The primary focus of the SEO team is technical SEO. That’s it. And uh all they do is they try to make sure that the pages are crawable uh the pages are indexed properly and uh it has a good score on the core web vital that’s all by doing so in the last few years and using all of those pages uh SEO for the website has become so big and so massive that it actually is a significant percentage in the overall revenue for the company and uh obviously 25 million is not a small number right yes women in a single website so that’s the thing now obviously this is a company at a big scale I’m not assuh I’m not going to say that every single one of you is going to manage website at that scale but uh that’s just like a small example of how uh these things work at scale as well and why technical SEO is a separate entity of its own even though it comes uh under the part of your onpage SEO because of the emphasis and uh how important this entire segment is. So u I’m going to just talk about some of the basic elements around this. These are not basic in the sense like something that you should care of but basic in the sense some of the fundamental aspects of what technical SEO actually means and uh what are the things that you should be doing to improve the same. Now when it comes to technical SEO it’s all about what are the different uh fundamental aspects of search engine and how you can sort of influence that. There were three things that I mentioned uh about how a search engine works right crawling, indexing and algorithm. Algorithm is something that we can never control. Even Google says that it’s a black box. I don’t know how true that is but they uh for them also majority of it is a black box in the sense like they have no control over how it actually functions. they can just in uh they cannot influence the outcome but they can definitely influence the inputs and how they are fed to the algorithm. So the two things that we can definitely control or at least slightly try to control are crawling and indexation. So once you have content from your onpage SEO uh what you are essentially trying to do is you’re trying to work with identifying what are the things that you can get crawled and second is once the website is crawled how you can influence the indexation part of it as well. So that is what that is what we are going to discuss. So when it comes to crawling there are two uh I would say fundamental ways of how you can sort of influence or control what gets crawled. So normally if you if you’re not providing any control or anything it will crawl anything or everything or sometimes even nothing. Uh but at the end of the day by using these two things one is a robots.ext file and second is a sitemap.xml XML file. Uh, by using these two things, a robots.ext and a sitemap, you can at least try to influence the way that a search engine would crawl your website. So, let’s try and understand what these two are. Uh, so crawling is where search engines grab content from pages uh and use the links on them to find even more pages, right? So, that’s why we have internal and external links. Uh and there are many ways to control what gets crawled on your website. Some of those are robots.ext and sitemap. So robots.ext is a file that tells search engine where they can go and can’t go on your website. So robots.ext is a public file. What that means is anyone can access it for any website. So even if you want to see the robots.ext text for amazon.com or myntra.com or any of any website that you want you can you can do that as well because it’s a public file because uh they want all the bots to see that file and uh I will give you a quick demo on this as well don’t worry but uh that’s what robots file is and it has information on the pages or areas of the website where robots are allowed to go and not allowed to go by default before visiting your website the first thing that they do is they read robots.ext file and from there they understand what areas of the website they are allowed to visit. uh it’s a text file it’s not an HTML it’s plain normal notepad text file and uh u the second is a sitemap right so sitemap what is a sitemap a sitemap is an XML file XML is a file format just like txt is a file format XML is also a file format and this file uh essentially contains all your important content of the website. So a sitemap would h have all of the important links or the pages of your website and this is something that uh you would want to share with the crawlers or robots or the boards etc. so that they only focus on those areas of your website as well. So we will dig deeper into this to understand more about it. Don’t worry but uh that’s like the quick overview about it. So, as I said, it’s like a simple text file uh that goo uh tells Google not to crawl a page or part of your site. So, that’s basically what it says. Like, if if you have areas on your website that you don’t want Google to crawl, you can mention that in the robots.ext file. And it always has the same URL. So, the URL slug of it will always be robots.txt. And uh so for example if your website is exampample.com then the URL of that will be example.com/root.txt. So blocking the crawler on certain pages does not mean so this is important to note when you’re saying that robots should not visit a specific page or the URL. That does not mean the URL might not show up in the search result. Sometimes it may happen that it may find its way through the search results because maybe someone has added that link somewhere but uh it will include it but it will just not know what is inside that page. Right? So that is basically what it does. It does not know what is inside that URL. So the chances of you ever finding it on the search engine will be almost nil but in some cases it might happen. So a quick example of what the file contains is this. Uh the first thing a robots.ext file will have is user agent. So user agent what is this over here for now every search engine has its own robot and uh Google has its own bot has its own bot and uh at the same time Yandex etc also has its own bot in addition to that open AI because they also crawl websites right so open AI also has its own bot u your uh SCM Rush, AHERS, etc. also has its own bots. Similar to that, there are literally thousands of bots on the internet. If if I’m not wrong, it’s probably more than that going to multiple different websites for their own purpose. So what you can do over here is in the user agent you can define which bots you want to block or allow for certain things. And if you want to do it for all the bots by default you can just use star. Star means every bot. So you’re saying user agent star then you’re saying disallow this page. So what you’re saying is uh the user agent should not be visiting this page but you’re allowing it to visit admin Ajax for whatever reason maybe. Uh and then if you want you can also tell it like your site map is available over here. So that’s basically what the robots.ext file contains. So we’ll take a look at some of the examples for this as well. amazon.in/root text myntra.com/root.ext. Okay. So, user agent this and then Amazon has so many pages, right? So, what it is doing is it is saying it is disallowing all of these. So cart page, product page, product availability, rate the item, uh some other internal things that they have, customer reviews, um customer review, media upload, images, etc. Uh it is allowing wish list universal. So wish list is disallowed by default, but if it is a public wish list, it is allowing those. Uh the same goes over here. Then registry, it is disallowing all of these. Um it allows hi I don’t know what that is and yeah then see over here it is for all the user agents but over here they are specifying a specific user agent they don’t want e to spider to look at anything at all. So for that reason it says disallow slash that’s it. uh disallow means it is hiding that from the bot from this bot or from uh this uh for from every bot. So this is how you’re speaking to the Google crawlers and all the other crawlers or all the other robots right. So uh when it says disallow that means the bots will not go to these pages. Uh for this also it says disallow for Twitter bot they have another set of disallows right Amazon adbot GPT bot. So this is chat GPT or open AI. So they are disallowed everything for open AI and then CCbot I don’t know what this is but yeah disallowed everything as well. So if there is disallow slash this means they don’t want them to visit any part of the website. The entire website is disallowed it. This is not the default in website. I will show what the default looks like. Uh disallowed is done by you. So uh basically if a page is disallowed it will not be indexed. So you will obviously not see any metrics for those. So that means that it will not show up on Google search. It will not show up on um a search console of course because of that. Let’s take a look at Myntra right. So in Myntra if you notice uh they are allowing the main website for all the agents and then they are disallowing a bunch of other uh e-commerce related things like size chart filters uh capture cart checkout address login etc. Um, apparently they are also disallowing Zara. Maybe the brand said like I I don’t want you to index any of our products on Google, right? And a bunch of other things are allowed disallowed proxy and then they have also provided the link to the site map. So Google or any other bots can also take a look at the site maps as well. Uh you don’t really need to add an allow specifically. Um usually if you have not updated robots.ext by default everything is allowed but uh robots.ext is primarily used for disallow areas or segments. So I’ll show you a very simple one. Carbon lightning right this is my website the test website that I had set up. Let’s take a look at what the robots.ext of this looks. That’s it. Nothing else. It just says user agent disallow WP admin. This is the sitemap. That’s it. Because I literally don’t have anything, right? So I’m like, okay, uh I just don’t want it to index the WP admin URL of my website, but apart from that, it can index everything else. So in Yost SEO, you go to tools, right? If you want to set it up using Yost SEO, you go to tools and uh then within this you will see file editor. So just click on that file editor and over here you can just make changes that you want. So if I want to remove this Yost SEO block or something and then uh maybe I also want it to disallow uh let’s say Maybe I wanted to disallow orders. I don’t have any orders page. But yeah, u I’ll just click save changes. And that’s it. So my carbon lightnings robot.ext is now updated. Okay. Why is it not updated? Uh maybe I’ll need to clear the cage. Yep. Let’s refresh. Let me just open it in incognito. Okay, so for some reason Yost SEO is not updating it, but I can anyways do it from my file hosting, right? So I can always go to my file hosting and update this text file and that’s it. So it’s nothing but a text file at the end of the day. You’re just telling it from this text file what to do and what not to do. Okay. So, um yeah. So, that is one way to control what you can show uh or what if there are pages that you want to block, how you can block those. So, why block a crawler? This is something that you guys have been asking. So, some of the sites or the pages on the site serve a purpose, but that purpose isn’t ranking in search engine. So uh like the cart, admin, login pages, thank you page, uh newsletter, subscription etc. Your main purpose for those are not ranking. And second thing that you want to make sure is uh if your site is small, you don’t really need to care about it. But if your site is big, as big as the ones that I was mentioning about earlier, you definitely want to make sure that the crawler is only looking at the important pages on your website and not everything because uh there is a concept of crawl budget. So at the end of the day, every time Google or any of these bots crawl your website, they uh their servers are also taking a load because of it. Because every time the bot is crawling your website uh it is taking a note of that website and the details around it and every time that happens a part of it is saved on their servers. So to reduce that load and optimize it what Google will do is it will try to optimize the crawling as much as possible and as much uh value it adds. So as a part of that what it would end up doing is it would um assign a specific budget to every website on how much uh time a crawler should be spending on every website. Now we don’t know what that budget is. No one knows that that’s a theoretical budget that even Google does not know for every website because there are millions of websites. So uh but this is only something that you would come across once your overall uh uh website has uh let’s say lacks and lacks of pages and in such a scenario you would want to make sure that you are only prioritizing the pages that are most important. Okay. Uh so yeah that’s the main thing about robots.ext right now moving on. Uh I think I talked about this. So if you want to create just go to Yost SEO go to tools create the robots.ext file and it’ll do that for you. So uh what is sitemap.xml. So generally found under/sitemap.xml or sitemap_index.xml or whatever that is usually if the URL is different robots.ext would mention it. So for example for carbon lightning this is the sitemap.xml that I have right. uh for a lot of Shopify websites probably it would be a bit different and so on and so forth. So what is this sitemap doxml? So sitemap.xml as I mentioned it is the collection of all the important pages that you have uh that you want google to index right so in robots.ext text you were just working with the crawlers here but in sitemap uh in addition to the crawler you’re also working or identifying what are the pages or important pages that you definitely want indexed. So yes sitemap.xml is for the crawler and in robots.ext text you’re blocking pages. In sitemap, you’re telling it these are the important pages. Focus on only these pages. And uh the best part about the sitemap uh uh file is you can also submit it in the search console and by submitting it you can track if the crawler has indexed all the important pages or not and what is the status of it. So let’s try and understand that a little bit. So this is u the sitemap.xml that is generated by Yost SEO. Now uh typically the sitemap uh the XML file uh has things in a different fashion but uh this is like a clean way for you to see like okay what are the different pages etc. Right? So over here for example it says that carbon lightning has seven site maps. For me the most important site map is actually the post sitemap because in the post is where all my blog content is and then page sitemap because that is where all my uh like pages are listed, privacy policy, contactctors etc. Uh in addition to that author site map is also something that is kind of important for me because it has the list of all the authors for Google eat purposes. This is something that I should probably look into. So within the post sitemap what I have is I have details of all the links that my uh uh uh that I have published. So I have these five blogs that I’ve published uh introduction battery demand uh power comparison uh panel reviews what uh what do solar panels do etc. It also tells uh the within the site map it also says like how many images etc are there and so on and so forth. So it makes it super easy for uh Google or their crawlers to know exactly what are the details available exactly. So for Google bot this is used to navigate the website right. So I’m uh going to go to this page that women had shared earlier. I think it also has a site map that I can probably use as an another example of how it works on Shopify. So over here this is the actual uh format of uh what do you call it the sitemap and as you can see over here also it lists like okay this is the uh sitemap pages these are the collection pages and these are the blog pages. So if I want to find all the blogs, I can just visit this page and then it has uh the first URL. Uh what is the frequency of change? I have the second URL. So this uh basically it has this one. Uh for some reason this has its own URL. Uh I don’t think this is supposed to happen, but yeah. Uh h interesting. Uh then there is this one as well uh how to choose the right perfume for you uh which is also added but looks like this is also part of the same URL. Anyway, so these are the URLs that is uh that are available here within I uh then when it comes to page also it has uh like the page uh uh pages or the contact pages sitemap listed over here. Right? So this is what the site map typically looks like. Now once you have the sitemap URL what you can basically do is in the Google search console you can just go to the sitemap section and over here you can just enter the URL of that sitemap. So uh for petrols for example uh site maps are already entered and uh this is like the Dutch uh sorry German, French, English and the uh Dutch site maps and uh with all of these site maps it also tells you as you can see how many pages were discovered. So if I click on this for example it tells me what are all the different site maps uh that it detected within this single one. And if I look at let’s say a product sitemap for example, it tells me how many it discovered. So if I want to see if all of these were indexed or not, I can just click see page indexing. Okay. Uh for some reason it’s not working from here. But you get the point, right? Like I can also see the page indexing from here maybe to understand how many were indexed and how many were not indexed. Right? So this is the main thing about the sitemap. From here I can clearly track and understand if uh the site maps the URL in the sitemap are indexed or not. So if we get ranking based on uh these uh so sitemap is used for the crawler to properly navigate the important pages on your website. That’s the main thing. Uh Pratiba. So we have to exclude disallow links from sitemaps. Uh typically those are already done if you’re using some of these content management systems like uh WordPress uh Woo Commerce, Shopify etc. But it is always good to take a look at those and see like what are the things that you may want to change if any. Uh but in WordPress for example it is better if you use something like Yost SEO to uh create this and also control it. So uh in Shopify also there are apps to help you control what you want to display in the sitemap. Uh so in Yost for example if I go to settings uh and within the site features all I need to do is I need to scroll down and there would be XML sitemaps. So it says enable feature that’s done. So if I want to uh make more changes to it, I don’t think it has that available. Uh probably I can exclude some of the content types but yeah like if I just enable this by default it will automatically create the site maps for me. Sitemap on the other hand is used to share the important pages from your website. Right? So that’s basically what I’ve mentioned over here as well. U and yes of course you can submit the sitemap on Google search console as I just showed you. So yeah that’s essentially uh what this is uh the site map is all about what the robots or text is all about and how you can work with the >> just a quick info guys Intellipath offers digital marketing course in collaboration with iHub I ri this course you will learn complete digital marketing from search engine optimization search engine marketing to PPC analytics and social media marketing and much more from the IIT faculty and industry experts. With this course, we have already helped thousands of professionals in successful career transition. You can check out their testimonials on our achievers channel whose link is given in the description below. Without a doubt, this course can set your career to new heights. So, visit the course page link given below in the description and take the first step towards career growth in the field of digital marketing. >> Right? So now one thing that uh uh Google search console provides us is called as URL inspection. So basically you input any URL in the search on the top and it would provide you insights around it. So uh let’s just take a look right. Um let’s go with this one maybe. Or does it actually have pages indexed? Wow, it does. Interesting. So this is like a very basic website. I was not expecting that it would index any pages but anyways let’s just look at this URL for example. So what is this URL? So this is a simple website which talks about um a service now right so in this u like there’s like a beginner’s guide on how to get started etc. And I want to understand uh what like this is what we see right we see an image over here we see some text and all this is what a user would normally see on the website but what does a crawler actually see so what I will do is in the inspect URL I will just paste this URL I will enter and then it will retrieve data from Google index and from here you can try and understand uh what is actually happening So let’s say the first thing it tells you is if the URL is indexed or not. So if a URL is indexed that means it will also show up in the search results. So it clearly says that the URL is on Google. Good. This is what we want. So this means that it can appear in Google search results if not subject to a manual action or removal request with all relevant enhancements. Relevant enhancement is something that we’ll be discussing later. But yeah, uh so that’s perfect. Right now, if you notice, it has two options here. One is view crawled page and second is request indexing. We’ll come back to this. Let’s just take a quick look at this. Right? So page indexing, it says page is indexed. It tells me uh what is the site map that it used. So this was the site map that it used to index the page. Okay. So the sitemap that is installed is definitely leveraged here. It uh leverage the post sitemap which makes sense because this is a post or a blog post. Uh it also talks about something called as canonical. We’ll discuss what this is don’t worry. But yeah uh so overall looks good to me. Page fetch is successful. Crawl allowed yes perfect. indexing allowed. Yes, perfect. Crawled as Googlebot smartphone. So, one thing to know is Google whenever it visits your website, it will visit uh typically it will visit as a smartphone bot. Previously, it used to visit or see it uh from a desktop perspective, but now it will see it from a mobile perspective because Google focuses on your website being mobile first, right? At the end of the day, they do have like 99% of the mobile traffic. So, uh it obviously makes sense. Um so it also tells you when Google last visited this URL. So it was on 6th August. Okay. Fairly recently. Not bad at all. And uh it also talks about um HTTPS. The page is served over HTTPS. So this is like a security. I’ll talk more about this as well. But yeah, so this looks good as well. So overall all checks looks good. Now let’s try and understand what these two things are. So it says view crawled page. So what this means is we can check what Google actually saw from this. So if I click on this, you’ll notice something that just popped up on the right side. So what you will notice is it is very different from what we see of the website because what Google captures is the code of the website. It does not capture the uh what the screenshot uh of the website looks like on the phone or something like that, right? What it tries to do is it captures the code of what actually was available on the website. So this includes u what it had in let’s say the head section uh what was let’s say meta robots meta u some of the meta codes like canonical meta uh meta property and then um let’s see meta description meta title or the page title right so all of these things is what it will capture so if you want to know what Google will typically capture the most simplest thing to do is just uh right click click on this view page source. If you’re using a different browser probably you’ll see something else but uh you just click on this and this is basically what Google will typically capture right so this is the code this is the front end code or basically what is get uh what gets downloaded every time you visit a website and this is basically what the crawler will see every time so as you can see it’s a bunch of different code the same thing that I just showed you guys and uh you can just review it. Right? In addition to that, you also have uh a screenshot option. But this is available only when you test a live URL. So I I can just click on that. It’ll take like a couple of minute to get that. And uh yeah, like that’s basically how it works. Now let’s say uh once you have noticed this crawl page and all and you saw this HTML that was fetged uh you notice that based on the time that it was actually pulled um there has been some changes. So for example in the index what we noticed is uh so okay so this basically loaded with the screenshot and all. So this is what Google actually sees as a part of the screenshot, right? So this basically tells you uh what you can expect the bot to see and this looks like a pretty decent website to be honest on the screenshot. So yeah, not too bad. Uh in the more info we have more details around what the content type is. If it is uh let’s say an image or a PDF, it will say that over here. HTTP response code. Okay, this is also something we’ll be talking about shortly. But yeah, it also says that what was the HTTP response or the server response if everything was loaded or not and if there were any messages. So yeah, so that’s the best part about it, right? Like it tells you every single thing and you can essentially test to see u if your page is properly being seen by the crawler or not. You don’t have to do guesswork and that’s the main benefit of this and uh let’s say so that’s what view create page crawl view crawled page tells us right andh as we look into this as you saw that this was last crawled on 6th August now sometimes it happens that it takes even 30 days for a page to get crawled and um in such a scenario let’s say uh if you have made some changes to the page Maybe some information that you had on it was incorrect and uh you want to make sure that the correct information is indexed. Maybe the title that you had earlier was wrong and now you have fixed it. So in such a scenario uh what you can do is you can request indexing as well. So basically if you have made some changes or updates you can re-request uh it to crawl it once again and it will do that for you as well. So now does it mean the minute you click on it it will do it? No. It takes up time but uh it will definitely try to prioritize it whenever possible. Right? So that is what the index or what the view of Google actually looks like. Right? And this is basically what the search engine also sees. And uh when you look deeper into it, you also get to find out what this looks like uh what indexing overall looks like on Google search console. So what I just showed was just one page, right? But what if there are multiple pages? And this is a pretty good example for that. The website that I’m uh showing right now as you can see in the last three months it had around uh one lakh clicks from SEO or Google search right. So this the reason is because it has decent number of pages indexed already. So what you can do is to understand what those are you can just go to pages and you can see all of the details of it. We understand what is URL inspection. We understand what is performance and let’s try and understand a little bit about indexing. Right? So we looked at sitemaps as well. Let’s try and understand what is pages. Uh when it comes to indexation, what does it actually look like? Let’s take a look. So when I go to this pages section in indexing, what I notice is uh it will tell me how many pages it detected and uh out of those how many it indexed. So now if you notice it says that overall it has detected a bunch of pages. So if if I just look at the most recent data, it says that it has overall detected close to uh what is that not index is around 29,000 index is 2,700 something. So that means around 31,000 or so pages were detected by it. But out of that only 2,700 pages were indexed. Yeah. 31. So uh now what can I do with this data? How can I actually look into this? So the first thing is I can check what are the pages that actually got indexed. So I’ve just deselected this. So now I have only selected the indexed pages and within this I can see like okay these are the pages that got indexed. So if I want I can also click on view data about indexed pages and I will know like what are the pages that got indexed. Now, if you notice something interesting over here, it tells me that around uh 2,771 pages were indexed. And then uh over here it says like from 30 July to 31st July it says 2737. So that means around 20 30 30 plus pages are no longer indexed, right? U maybe there is some drop in it maybe there is something that the Google bot detected but this kind of a drop is very normal but if let’s say instead of something like this what we saw is from 2700 or something like that maybe all of a sudden there’s a big drop it just became 2,000 or maybe it became500 that’s like a massive drop and even if it happens over a period of time that’s a cause for concern right so over here like and that’s not the case. So that’s good. But I’ll also talk about what you should be doing if something like that happens. So yeah uh over here if I scroll down I can see uh what are the pages that got indexed and when it was last crawled. I can also filter u like based on specific things like URL. So let’s say if I want to see URL that’s related to NL um I get all of those URLs URLs that is related to D I can also get those and I can like quickly validate if all the pages that I want are indexed or not right once I’m done with this um as you just noticed there were quite a few pages that were not indexed and it says 12 reasons. So let’s try and understand what they are. Okay. So it says alternate page with proper canonical tag. So that’s 16,623. What is this? So this is nothing but um essentially it detected a bunch of duplicate URLs or content the same content with multiple URLs and that’s the reason it says like there are already other pages that exist and hence these pages these duplicate pages did not get indexed and this is a very common thing. So this is a normal reason. You don’t really need to worry about it. Uh you can safely ignore this, right? And the reason it did not index it uh is due to something that got added to it, right? Some parameters, etc. I’ll talk more about that later. So don’t worry, more’s coming. There’s a lot more coming, right? Uh then out of 29,000 that was 29,000 right? Out of 29,000 16,000 or so have this which is perfectly fine. Then 4,000 plus have a redirect uh which basically means that it is going from uh the URL to a different page. 3,000 plus are not found. Okay. So maybe something that I should be looking at and so on and so forth. So what are these exactly? These are the reasons why some pages were not indexed and this is also something that I can use to understand and fix over here. There are there are a bunch of reasons we’ll be exploring that but that is basically what Google search console can help you with. It helps you in not only tracking and understanding how your pages are currently indexed but it will also help you in making sure that uh if something is not indexed you can work on fixing the same and that’s what brings us to some of the common issues. So once we have gone through some of these things over here we will try to debug uh whatever we saw over there as a part of issues. So let’s try and understand some of the things around indexing, right? What are the common issues? So we looked at uh what indexation actually looks like. Yes, things are indexed. Great. But what about the things that did not get indexed? So if a URL isn’t indexed, if you have a specific URL that you found is not indexed, the best method is to just use your URL inspection tool on Google search console to identify why. And uh uh typically it will tell you why it is not indexed etc. But if let’s say you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of pages uh you can essentially use the indexation pages section of Google search console which we were on just now to get the details of why uh how many pages are indexed, how many are not indexed, what are the issues behind it etc. And commonly the things that you will notice are as follows. So monitoring indexation obviously is very important right now. Overall if you look at it some of the things that issues that you will notice is the first one is that there is a drop in index pages but there are no error. You guys just saw a small example of it. That’s not a big example but that’s a very small example of it. But let’s say uh right now maybe there are 10,000 pages of your website that is currently indexed. Okay, great. Uh, but over a period of time, what you have noticed is from 10,000, it starts to go down to 7,500, 5,000, 2,000. Now, if pages are going down or not being indexed, uh, that’s bad because if pages are no longer indexed or if the index pages are dropping, that means your page will not show up in the Google search. So as a part of that what you will do is you will try to understand what is actually happening. Again using URL uh inspection you can actually find what could be the potential reason but uh typically the reason it happens is maybe accidentally the page was blocked uh due to the robots.ext right so in the robots.ext maybe you mentioned that okay this page should be blocked or something like that. Maybe it’s a login page. Maybe it’s a duplicate page. Maybe it’s a page that uh uh is something that Google essentially does not want to index for whatever reason, right? And you can get to understand that um uh from the URL inspector. But if you see all of these drops, most probably it happens because maybe it is restricted by the uh for the crawler to visit uh because of any number of reasons. Sometimes those reasons could be technical, sometimes those reasons could be an accident as well. So usually that is what you should be looking at. Second is um as we just saw there’s a high number of non-indexed pages than indexed. So we just saw that overall there there were like what 31,000 URLs but out of that only 2,700 something were indexed and rest of them were not indexed which is like only 10% of it was indexed and 90% or more was not indexed. Now in such a scenario there are two possibilities. The first is that a large number of duplicate pages probably because it uses some of the other parameters like uh type equals to dress, color equals to green or sort equals to price or in the example that we just saw it was add to cart option and for each add to cart it was detecting a new URL the crawler. So when these parameters are added, what happens is the content is not changing. The content stays the same only the URL changes a bit and that is probably the reason for such high duplicate pages. How do we deal with this? The answer for that is canonical URL which we’ll be covering shortly. Right? And the second issue is probably because these pages like won’t even be indexed. Uh maybe because uh they have the same content uh which is like maybe it’s like a page or a category page where you’re just sorting or filtering through different products and things, right? Uh a very uh I would say a very good example of this is the Amazon search page. So when you’re searching for something on Amazon, you get this URL, search URL and in that you have all of these different filters. So as you’re using that the fil URL will also change according to that and in such cases also the pages probably won’t be indexed. Then there’s server errors. So essentially this means the Google bot essentially can’t access your URL or the website because uh it it tried to access it. It waited a while and your site did not load. Your site was busy. The server was down. could be anything. Right? So this is the third common uh issue that you find. The fourth is a 404 error. So 404 error basically means a website which has like now usually what happens is a website server as I told you guys last time has multiple uh error codes or HTTP status codes. 404 basically means that the there was no content that was found, right? And finally, the fifth common error is missing pages or sites. So, this means Google couldn’t find your page. It could be due to that this page was newly created and not is not crawled yet or that uh it’s like essentially the page is dropped for indexation. So, that means it was indexed earlier but it is no longer indexed. So the best option again is to use the URL inspection to understand the potential reasons. So these are some of the common issues. Right? Now something else that I added over here and this is something that is also important to understand is what are the common HTTP status codes. So what is a status code? Uh basically what happens is when a website loads it uh serves or it provides the files of those websites through a HTTP server or in a simple term a server. Now these servers will show different status codes. Now there’s like a bunch of different status codes right? If you if you’re like a a nerd who wants to like go through all of those, I have attached a link for that as well. But it is not necessarily as someone who is into SEO, you will probably only need to look at some of these from this. Also, you will only need to understand a few of these. So, let me just uh go through really quickly what these status codes are and what it means. Typically uh if the status code so if the status code says 200 so where did we see 200 in URL inspection um let’s say if I add this one I’ll just search for this yeah so I can ignore this because I’ve already checked on that but view crawled page more info. Yeah. So over here you can see the HTTP response or HTTP status was 200. So if it is 200 that means it is good and it is okay. So 200 is normal. Now there is another one that you should be aware of which is 301 and 302. What are these? So sometimes what happens is uh maybe you are having a website issue or maybe you are doing some maintenance on the website and that maintenance is for maybe 2 hours or 4 hours or something like that. In such a scenario what you will do is every time someone visits the website uh they will instead of visiting let’s say google.com uh they will be visiting google.com/maintenance. The reason is because you are temporarily redirecting every user who visits google.com to google.com/maintenance. So that is a temporary redirect. You’re doing it only for 4 hours. Now within that 4 hours, let’s say if Google crawler shows up on your website, Google crawler will be confused why is maintenance loading up. So to make sure that Google crawler knows that it is just a temporary redirect and there is no action that it needs to do in terms of updating its pages etc. you will need to use 302. However, maybe you have made a change in the URL altogether. Previously the URL that was indexed was uh okay. So let’s just say if you had a page which uh had 2020 in the URL as a year and now that it is 2024 you want to change that part in the URL as well. So in just in in such a scenario you would be using a permanent redirect which is a 301 redirect right because you want to make sure if any of those old URLs are also indexed those are also permanently redirected to the new one. Then uh 400 is bad request. So uh this basically means that the URL is incorrect. Uh 401 is unauthorized. So this means that uh you do not have access to it. Uh 403 is also forbidden like it it is not even allowing you to visit the website. 404 is not found. So this means there is no content or the URL itself does not exist as a page. Uh and 404 as we just saw is a very common error because often times what happens is some URLs gets created but uh there is no content in them at all. This is a very common thing that happens and that’s the reason it is called as 404. And finally uh the next most popular is 500. So this is an internal server error. I don’t know how many of you noticed but uh there were a bunch of uh those issues over here as well. 500 right. So for these pages there were some server issues and that’s the reason it did not get indexed. Um but yeah, I think I can understand uh and I can live with it not being indexed because anyways like these are not the pages that I want indexed. So that’s fine, right? So that’s basically some of the common HTTP status codes that you should be aware of. So let’s try and understand a little bit uh better about both canonical URL and redirect. Right? I’ve talked about this a little bit over here. uh but uh let me just show you what it actually means uh with some examples as well. So canonical URL let’s first look into that. So search engines what you need to understand is why is canonical URL even a concept. Search engines rely on unique URL and index all the pages they find on the internet. So as you just saw a URL could multiple type of URL could be created because of any number of reasons and uh as such now if Google search were to index all of those URLs what will happen is it would have so much data which is like worth nothing and that’s the reason search engines rely only on the unique URL that means it will rely on pages or URLs which has unique content. Now while there should be a unique URL or a single page uh often uh web pages can introduce slightly different URLs for the same piece of content. We just saw an example of that add to cutart. So a common reason for this is the use of URL parameters the extra bits of data appended at the end of the URL. And the problem is that search engines can’t decide what are important URL parameters for content and which ones aren’t. So what we do is as a solution we ourselves tell to go Google what is the canonical URL by using the canonical meta tag. This is a tag that is added to your page in the header section. And this line of code tells search engine that no matter what the URL might show up, the URL that they should be using should be the canonical URL when they are indexing the page. Right? So, uh this is a quick example over here on what the code actually looks like. And this is an example of Amazon. So, uh the meta tag, this meta tag that I’ve highlighted here is added to the head section of a page that tells search engines which is the preferred page. So, I actually got this entire content from Amazon’s website directly, right? Uh I just clicked on a random uh product on it and uh when I looked at its uh uh code uh within that particular code, the meta text and all the canonical URL was this. Right? So, but if any of you have noticed Amazon’s URL are never that small. It is never this small. Always whenever you are sharing the URL or something like that, it will have a bunch of different things after it, right? Like something like this. Whenever you’re clicking on any product page on Amazon, it will have a bunch of different things attached to it. So, the canonical URL is this, right? And this is both the pages will basically have the same content. So let’s just take a look at that. So let me just load this. And let me load this as well. Both of those URLs have loaded. And as I can see, this one is pretty much the same as this one. Now in such a scenario obviously Amazon would want only uh the most unique URL to be indexed or the most sleek URL to be indexed not this long URL with a bunch of different parameters and data etc. Right? And that’s the reason canonical URLs are used. So no matter what page you’re creating, it is always important to at least have a self canonicalization. What that means is if let’s say you’re creating a page which is website.com/ SEO, you can just put a canonical URL for that itself. So that it is very clear that no matter what other parameters get added uh Google will still have the right URL. That’s basically what it is. Uh it’s it’s the unique URL that you want indexed. Now what does that actually mean? So in the um in the inspect URL if you notice now uh if you don’t declare a canonical URL Google will select a canonical URL by itself and when Google selects it you don’t know which one it is going to select. Sometimes it will select something uh which is absurd which is not what you want. So in such a scenario it is always best that you use you declare the canonical URL by yourself and then it will take it or most probably use the same one. So that’s the main purpose of it right so that’s basically what canonical URL is how to declare canonical URL so you declare it by using this link real equals to canonical and then you mention it. So that’s how it works in code. I can actually show it how it looks in WordPress also. Let’s just go to Carbon Lightning, the website that I was using earlier. So typically if you use uh SEO plug-in like Yoast SEO or all-in-one SEO etc. uh it will take care of it automatically for you. So over here I’ll just quickly edit this. Let’s scroll down. Now in this as I scroll down there is something called as advanced in Yost SEO. I’ll just click on this. And over here it will say canonical URL. Now u if I want it to use the same canonical URL and if I don’t want to make any changes, it will use the self canonicalization and I will show you what that is. But if I want to make sure that this is not the URL that I wanted to canize, I can enter that manually over here. So I just need to enter the URL. That’s it. So let me just show you what the page actually looks like. So this is the page and over here link real canonical this. So this is the same URL that uh I currently have available right exactly the same. If I copy paste on it, it’s the same. The reason is because this is uh like this is the one that Yost automatically adds. So now even if this page gets loaded like this maybe something like let’s say uh source equals to SEO or something like that and someone visits it uh even then it will still use the proper canonicalized version uh for indexation. So that’s basically why this is important. Now, Yoast obviously takes care of it by default. So I don’t need to really worry about it on WordPress. Uh similarly, if you’re using a different content management system, uh there should be like a SEO tool which should probably take care of it automatically for you. If it doesn’t, um uh you should be able to at least mention this in the like customized fields of your page headers. And uh what that basically means is it will look something like this. This is the example of it. And finally redirect. But uh basically another reason that duplicate content might exist is because a web page may have moved from one location to another on your site. The old location and the new location could potentially be in the search engine’s index at the same time. And to avoid this situation, whenever you move content around, it’s important to implement proper redirect rules. Okay, so what does this mean? Uh I just showed you a quick example of it, but let me just uh show something over here as well. Uh carbon lightning. So you guys just saw that I had this review page, right? Okay. Yeah, there it is. So uh I had the solar panel review in depth. Now what will happen is maybe I uh because this is 2023 I want it to be for 2024 which is current year. So in such a scenario I will change the URL. So what happens is when I change the URL the old URL which is 2023 will cease to exist and it will show a 404 error. And since this is the URL that is indexed on Google, Google will think that this page does not exist anymore. So my ranking for this page will start to drop. So for such a reason, it is very important that I also redirect this old URL to the new URL which is 2024. So similarly, a lot of times you will be making changes to the URL of the page. And whenever you do that, make sure that the old URL is also redirected or has the right content so that Google does not uh confuse or create like duplicate indexations of it. And that’s the reason redirects are important, right? So yeah, that’s basically what I wanted to talk about as a part of indexing. Okay. So let’s look at uh the next part of it which is rich snippets, right? So so this is a rich snippet about rich snippets, right? Um what does it say? So rich snippets are also known as known as rich results are normal Google search results with additional data displayed. This extra data is usually pulled from structured data found in a page just HTML. Common rich snippets types include reviews, recipes, and events. Let’s try that. Right. So, I’m just going to do a quick Google. What are rich snippets? We have the same one over here. Right now uh if I actually uh as you can see basically right like this is very different from the results we see over here or over here. This is a normal search result right? This is what we expect that first there will be the name of uh the company or the website then there will be the URL then there will be this blue link which has which like Google expects you to click uh and okay I’m just going to go back and then you have the meta description right so the blue link is the page title and this this is the meta description so this is what we expect the normal search result to be but sometimes you would have these feature ed snippets right like this one so it it does say about like I don’t need to click on it but yeah you can find out more about this which we are anyways discussing over here but feature snippet as you can see is a very prominent uh thing because the minute I search for it it shows up over here right and as I scroll down you can also see uh even these videos are a part of some of the uh rich result. Let me see. Yeah, this is another example of rich snippets. So, this rating, the review, the price, the stock, free delivery, 14-day reserve, uh 14-day return. What are these? These are additional information in addition to what is already available. And how do you actually get this? you get it by using something called as schema. So what are the examples of rich snippets? Let’s take a quick look. This is an example u of rich snippet. Uh so obviously as I said right a search result can contain more information than just a regular title slug and meta description. For example, when you search for a funny cat video, the snippet may contain the thumbnail of the video, the duration of the video, the upload date, and the person who uploaded it. Just like this, it has a thumbnail, the duration of the video, the person who uploaded it, and when it was uploaded, right? Then, uh this is another I would say like around stock market that Google has. Um and then we have a bunch of different types, right? So for example, this is related to reviews and rating. Uh this is for songs which would include genre, release date, when it was recorded, uh when it was produced and some of the other site links around it. This is rating uh with a bunch of different uh reviews. Um num amount of time it would take, the amount of calories it contains. Uh this is for a movie which has uh streaming date, runtime, rating, genre, and release date. And finally, this is for a product. It says in stock, the price, the reviews, uh free delivery or not, 14-day return or not, etc. Right? So, what are these? How do you actually get those to show up in a search result? The answer is you do it by using schema. So knowledge graph is different. Yes. So knowledge graph is uh like uh typically it also uses some of your rich snippet data but knowledge graph is quite different. Google usually partners with uh providers for knowledge graph. Um okay so let’s try and understand how to get rich snippets. So there is something called as structured data. Structured data is a piece of code that you put on your website. So what is structured data? It’s a piece of code that you put on your website. It’s a code in a specific format written in such a way that the search engine can understand it. Now obviously for a search engine to directly pick up this data, it’s going to be so difficult, right? So that’s the reason you have to format it in specific order and a specific way. And that is by using structured data. So when I say structured data, what does it mean? It means by leveraging the uh schema or the uh structured data codes from schema.org. So big search engines have developed a project called schema.org where you can find all the structured data markups supported. So uh by the search engine you can use this to find markups. For instance, if you sell sh sells shoes, uh you could show what color shoes you sell and what sizes you offer in the snippet via product schema. This is available over here. So this is a products related schema and in this as you can see when you’re using these different tags for those tags uh what it expects and uh some details around the same right now obviously as I scroll down you will notice there are so many different tags for it right so many different things and then it also provides you like uh some examples around what it looks like without any markup, what it looks like with uh by using like let’s say micro data and uh maybe if you’re using JSON or maybe you’re using structure etc. So this is something typically a developer would be helping you with but then how can you do it yourself and that is what we are going to talk about. So luckily um you don’t solely need to depend on a developer for actually working with structured data. U I’m going to show you two methods. Uh the first is on using a WordPress plug-in. How you can do it using WordPress and second is how you can do it manually if you don’t have WordPress at all. So let’s try and understand. Now these are some of the tools that you would be using for working with it manually. So there are three steps to it. The first is you need to identify the type of snippets that you want to use and you can look at the previews of that over here. So this is a direct guide from Google itself. Right? So developers.google.com searchs appearance structured data article. So this is the article structured data. But let’s open it. So what is this article? Structured data helps with article, news article, blog posting etc. Typically this structured data would look something like this with a thumbnail or with a specific image that you have uh as a part of your page and some quick snippet about the content of it and uh uh they have provided an example over here. As you can see um uh now let’s say this is your HTML page within this uh this is where your structured data script is provided. So it has uh the type of content it is. It’s a news article. Uh the headline of it, the basically the headline of that particular news article. What are the images that you’re using? Uh what is the date it was published? What was the date it was modified? And who is the author person? Uh so if the author is a person or an organization, that’s what it is. uh the name of that person or organization and the URL profile of that author. Right? So if there are multiple authors, you would have multiple authors listed similar to this. And uh if I click try it out in rich result test code it will say if it is valid or not. Right? So we’ll go through it step by step. Don’t worry but that was just like quick example. So as you scroll down for this article, you can see proper guidelines around it like what are the different uh properties that are available or objects that are available and uh how you can work with it along with some examples as well. And if you look in the left hand side, you will see these are the different structured data snippets that uh Google search is um uh like okay with and basically supports heavily. So, book actions, breadcrumbs, carousel, uh course info, course list, discussion forum, uh Q&A, uh salary estimation, uh employer rating, events, FAQ, jobs, math solver, movie carousel, right? Then you have uh within product you have product snippets, merchant listing variants, product variants that is uh your profile page, recipes, uh review snippets, right? Videos. So you have all of these different snippets and as you go through it, it will also give you examples of what those snippets could look like. So over here, as you can see, uh when I selected video, it shows like a quick example of what it could look like. So over here it’s like uh this is how it could load the video. Uh in the image also it could show the video sometimes in the video section it could show it and uh of course in the discovery page of Android phones also it could show it. So yeah that’s uh how you can identify different structured snippets data that is available. So this is like all the list of it. You can also see like different uh type of things. So for example, let’s say if there’s an event or maybe you’re conducting an offline event etc. you can use this to actually uh get extra traffic from it because Google also supports searching for offline events etc. Right? Um and uh yeah so that’s the main thing at the end of the day. Why why would you want to use this? The reason is so that uh you can show more information on Google search and when you do that there’s a higher chance that you can also get uh not only better ranking but better clicks or traffic to your website which is much more informed. So this is where you can find. So once you have identified the type of snippet and pre uh like that you want to use you can um now if you’re using WordPress it’s a much more straightforward way. So I will show that in the next slide. But uh if let’s say you want to generate it manually the way that you would do that is you would be using the schema generator tools over here. So uh over here for example uh schema generator tool we have I have listed three. You can use any of these. It’s not like you have to use all three of these. You just need to use one. I’m going to uh select the Google one. Right now what this does is it helps you create the schema that you want. So I’m just going to um let’s say I’m going to open the carbon lightning page only the solar panel one. this one. I’m going to copy this URL and paste it over here. Now once I’ve selected or identified the uh structured data that I want to create, I will just uh identify that over here. So this is an article. So I’m just selecting articles over here. Right? And then I will select start tagging. So what it does is it loads that web page for me and over here using this tool I can directly uh like select the text that I want to use for tagging purposes and if I don’t want to select from here I can directly enter the details also. So let’s just do that. So uh I want this to be the title. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to select this right and uh um then it says article body. I’m going to select maybe some of these uh maybe I’ll just keep it till here to keep it simple. Article URL. Now, URL, I don’t really have one. Uh, image, I want to use this as the image. Uh, date published. I don’t think I have date published on this. Oh, that’s something that I should definitely add. Uh, author name. I have the author available here. So, this is the author. And if I want to understand what are some of the things that u um I don’t know I can also like hover on it. I think this is supposed to be article name if I’m not wrong. No, it’s the name of the author. Okay. Or is it? Yeah, it’s the name of the author. Okay. So in that case uh this is going to be author type I guess but anyways I’m just going to select this as a name of the author um URL I can add that manually publisher aggregated rating etc. Okay so I have selected whatever I could find. I’m just going to add missing tags. So uh let’s say if maybe I want to add uh um the URL. So URL is going to be this one. Uh what is that? Grab lightning. This one save. And the URL is also added. Now once this is done, as you can see, I’m not writing any code here. I’m just selecting the right things. And if I want to add something manually, I can just do that from by using this add missing uh tags. And once I’m done with all of this, I can just select create HTML and it will automatically create micro data or the JSON format for this. The next step for me is I just need to copy this data, right? I just need to copy and paste it within my uh uh header of the website. That’s it. So that’s basically what I would be doing. And if I want to test it, I can go to this URL. I can copy this. I can go to the code section, paste the code and I can select test code. It will test the code and it will tell me if everything is valid or not. And it says there are non-critical issues. So I can also understand like okay unnamed item. So looks like headline and author is missing which uh basically I can add. So this is essentially how you work with it. Uh if you don’t have access to some of the schema generators etc. Right? Uh if you want to or if you have to generate these manually or understand how to work with it without having knowledge of proper code, this is how you can work with it. But if let’s say you have something like WordPress etc. there are plugins for this as well. Okay. So on WordPress uh let me see the plug-in that I have installed. Yeah schema and structured data for WP. So this is the one that I have installed. And uh over here if I go to my post I’ll just click edit. Now all I need to do is I’ll just scroll down. There’s Yost SEO. After Yost SEO, you will see as you keep scrolling down, there will be something called as schema and structured data on this post. So it automatically fetched the right schema for me here. But if I want to make changes to it, I can do that. I’ll just click modify sche article schema output and uh it like it loads what it has already identified right uh the headline the description the article section the article body right it has automatically created all of this for me including the author type person and even my photo nice um all of these things it has automatically identified and if I want to make changes to it. I can do that. So that’s the best part about these tools. They know like what are the things and what are the different parts or aspects that they need to select and based on that it becomes super easy for me to directly u not worry much about it. So uh if let’s say you are using WordPress or any of those other tools you can use these plugins as well. There is a plug-in called as uh uh Google sitekit. So just install that plug-in and uh from that you’ll be able to validate your Google search console access. So the process for structured data uh I’ll just do a quick overview on it. Right. So there are three steps. The first is to identify the structured data type that you want to use. You can go to um the developer URL over here. So just go to that and you’ll be able to find all the different type of uh articles and or the different type of structured data types that are available. Select the one that is more relevant to um like basically know like which one that you should be using. Once you have done that, the next step is to use one of these tools to generate the structured data. And uh once you have done that uh you can test that in this particular website. So how do you actually use these tools? Uh what you would do is you would basically just go to let me just open this tool once again. You would go to the tool uh you would select your already published page over there or you can just copy paste that URL over here. And once you have done that you just click start tagging. you tag the data or select the data over here. So for example, if I want to tag this, I can just select it and I can tag it accordingly, right? Based on the one that makes sense. Once I’m done with that, uh I can just uh like create HTML and uh get started with it like by uh and implement it. So this is the manual method. If you want all of this to happen automatically, you can use the WordPress plug-in that I shared over here. So yeah, if you want it to happen automatically, you can just use this plug-in. Uh you can also uh use WordPress.com uh free version of WordPress.com. I don’t know uh what actually it’s been a while since I’ve used the free version. So, I don’t know if you can install plugins in this. I don’t think you can. H I don’t think you can. But at least you’ll be pra able to practice a bunch of things. If you at least create the free website, this free plan of WordPress, uh you’ll be able to practice connection with Google search console, working with that, uh posting content, etc. uh you’ll be able to work with all of those things if you at least work with the free web uh free account of WordPress.com, right? So yeah, um that’s what rich snippets or schema is all about. Okay, so let’s talk about the next part which is experience. So now what is experience exactly? Let’s try and understand this. So experience is u so far what we have been doing and what we have been talking is all about how the Google bot sees our website and uh how we can make it easier for Google bot to work with our website as well. So in such a scenario what does experience actually mean and why is it a part of technical SEO? The reason is the next part to make sure that your website is good in in a good standing and people can actually visit and work through it is the experience that you’re delivering to your users. Let’s try and understand what this is uh technical SEO experience. Essentially, what is this? This is uh the experience that a user will have when they visit your website. So essentially um there are a few things that you should be taking care of. The first is that uh there is something called as core web vitals. I will be showing how you can measure this right and this is a very important aspect for your website to know and understand um what are uh or what type of performance users are seeing when they visit your website. Second is that it should be mobile friendly. I don’t think I need to say this or explicitly talk about it anymore but it is very important because we often forget it as uh like we work on it right. What happens is most of the time when we are creating a website or working with a website we would be uh doing that on a desktop and as we are building it as we are working with it etc. we tend to forget what the website would look like on the mobile phone and in doing so we often times would see that uh uh even if we are offering an amazing experience on the uh like let’s say horizontal screen orientation something like the uh uh the laptops desktops etc uh the vertical screen orientation of your mobile phone is probably having a lot more difficulties So it is very important that your website is mobile friendly because in today’s day and age almost 80 to 85% of your mobile uh of your traffic is going to be from mobile phones. Being mobile friendly is an important aspect. Third is to not have a lot of intrusive interstitials. What is interstitial? Interstitial is nothing but pop-ups. Let’s just go to um any of the Indian news website. I’m just going to type it. Money control. Yes. Oh wow. This is an interstitial right when I try to visit money control. This is an advertisement even before I was able to visit the website. Right. This is an example. Literally in the URL if you notice it says interstitial. Let’s continue to money control. Okay. Um it has something over here related to push notifications, right? Uh often times website would also have some kind of a video popping up from over here right and then um like if I say no thanks maybe something else will load and there would be bunch of different ads etc right but you get the point overall it becomes very difficult for me to go through anything and that’s what an interstitial is all about okay so that’s basically what I wanted to show right that uh these obviously are not good experiences and especially if I visit the uh maybe the mobile page uh you will notice that uh it’s even much uh worse like for example uh if I let’s say load something over here it will show a bunch of different ads it will show like a bunch of different uh things on the page which are blocking me from reading anything at all like uh Maybe it has this thing get app uh sometimes they have like live chat and a bunch of other things. So the more you have those what happens the user will have a lot more worse experience by doing so. So it is always good to avoid as many pop-ups as possible and finally making sure that your website is secure by using SSL. Right? So these are the four main thing. We are going to dig deeper into all four of these. Uh some of those are very straightforward. I I I think mobile intrusive and all I’ve already explained those but I think uh let’s dig into the site performance a bit because that’s going to be a lot more interesting. So let’s try and understand first from uh the site performance including the core web vital. So what about the site performance or the speed of the website? Site speed. Site speed is simple. How fast is your site? Now I don’t know how many of you uh know this or are aware of this but uh the first big billion day sale of Flipkart server crashed. So uh what happened when uh server crashes people could not access the website could not buy anything probably. So basically what happened is the site crashed. It was so uh I think it was almost 10 years back or so that they had this big billion day sale and that was massive. Literally the prices that they had was crazy because they were like spending a bunch of money on investor money that is on all of those things. And what ended up happening is uh because they all of a sudden got so much traffic uh the website was not at all loading. It loaded for the first few minutes but then it completely stopped working at all and it was down for almost 1 to two hours if I’m not wrong. So uh and that’s the thing right like uh now what happens is when the website is not loading people will not be able to visit it and if people will not visit it unless and until they actually want something from it uh they will abandon it and they’ll be like okay if it is not working I don’t want to go on it anymore. So big billion day was an exception because people knew that okay they are going to get a good deal so they kept trying to go to it but they’re not going to do that with your website right like u especially with SEO where they have so many options like literally if let’s say if you’re searching for uh maybe how to uh how to type on a keyboard maybe that’s a search query and you find a bunch of articles around it yours is one article out of 10 if they went to your website it does not load what will they do they’re like I don’t care I have a bunch of other websites I’ll visit one of those right and that’s that’s what happens so site speed matters a lot uh like unless and until you are offering something as tempting uh people are not going to be just waiting un until the website loads right And that’s the main thing like obviously now does that mean it’s simple? Uh not really like even today a lot of websites go down and that’s quite common. A lot of websites become slow. That’s also normal. Uh so it’s not simple but at the same time there are a few things that you can do to make it uh easier. So the site speed however can be determined in various ways and at different times while loading a page. This includes the time until you see something on the page to happen or on the screen to happen. The time until the entire page is loaded, the time until the site is ready to be interacted with, and the time to first bite, the time it takes for your server to send back the very first tiny bit of information. What does that mean? So if I go to moneycontrol.com, I’m I’m doing the cardinal sin once again. What happens? It loads something. It loaded the text on the top. And after a bit of time, then it loaded this advertisement. Now, if I go to this, the first thing it loaded are the ads on the top. Apparently, ads are faster. Then it loaded uh a bunch of other ads at the bottom as well. Finally, it loaded the menu and then it loaded uh some more content over here and finally at the end it loaded the ads on the right hand corner. So as you can see there is a sequence. First it would load something second, third, fourth, fifth. So and all of those we could clearly see. Now how do I visualize this? There’s a tool for that as well. Let me just do that. Uh let me just put this at the bottom. Uh I’ll remove the responsiveness network. Okay. Now, uh disable cage. Let’s throttle it to 3G. You guys don’t need to worry about what I’m showing right now, right? So, let’s just reload this. Okay. Now what just happened is as you can see this is like a good visualization of how long it is taking for each of the elements to load. And as you can also see there are so many different elements that are getting loaded. 229 requests so far and the entire page has not even loaded. 231 2 MB has been transferred. The resources are 3.6 MB in size, right? And uh I think it is still loading if I’m not wrong. Or is it stuck? I think it is stuck. Oh wow. But you get the point, right? Like as you can see, this is how long it took for the entire content of the website to load. So if let’s say the content that you want people to interact with is somewhere over here, there’s a high chance that some of the people will drop off in this time frame itself. Okay, finally everything loaded. Uh yeah, it it went to this size. See I I don’t think I would have waited this long, right? If I had other options. And this is why there are different stages to a website and different stages to how fast a website is. This is still going on and that’s what I mean. So it should be a fast website. Uh this is something that is available in any of the browser like Chrome. So what I did is I just pressed F12L and then I went to network. Again you don’t need to worry about this. I’m going to show a much more simpler tool for you to do this. Right? So that’s what sight speed is. So let’s try and understand a little bit more about this. The importance of sight speed. If your website is slow, people will bounce off. Bounce rate increases. And uh uh the bounce rate if let’s say the load time is up to 5 seconds, it increases by 90%. If the tight site takes 10 seconds to load, the chances that the bounce but that’s true, right? Like no one is going to wait like 10 seconds for a website to load. There are like so many other options. Why should they wait? So, and that’s the reason Google has officially announced that page speed will be a ranking factor and it is including the mobile first index part. So, there are a lot of ways that you can look at improving your site speed. Um I know some of you a lot of you maybe not understand this properly but uh a quick win is to make the images file size smaller and improve the load time um compress the files use better servers etc. So how do you actually uh identify all of these issues? Right? So I’m not going to go through these because uh this is something again uh if if you are technically savvy you can quickly understand these but I’m going to show you ways of how you can actually work with this. So let’s start with page speed insights. So there is this website called as page speed.web.dev. So what is pages.web.dev. Over here you can enter any uh website that you own uh which you want to analyze and work with it. Right now in addition to owning the website even if you don’t own it you can still analyze it. There is no issue with that. So let me do one thing and uh I’m going to work with carbon lightning.com. I’m going to open let’s say myntra.com right and I’m going to open Gita’s website. Perfect. So now uh if you notice there are two sections of this. One is discover what your real users are experiencing. So this is something that shows up only when you have uh a lot of people visiting your website uh from a Google search etc. Um now typically big websites are where you will see uh this even if the website is not too big you will still see some data as long as there are at least like let’s say uh traffic in thousands per month for your website. And uh second thing that it shows is uh performance issues that it has identified through a simulation. So this is not a simulation. Real users one is not a simulation. It is based on what actual users are experiencing. And this one is a simulated thing that Google has built based on its bot. And if you notice it has mobile and desktop sections. So you can check what the performance looks like in both of these segments. So in mobile it has four different sections. Uh the one that I’m going to primarily focus on is performance. So as we scroll down in performance you can see it has some metrics over here. It has first contentful paint, largest contentful paint and cumulative layout shift. Right? uh these are what you call as the core web vital. These three metric help identify uh how users are experiencing your website overall. Uh total blocking time is basically uh so I’ll I’ll explain all three don’t worry. And then total blocking time in the sense like how long it takes for uh the website to load without blocking anything. And what is the speed index overall? How long it took for the entire website to load? So speed index is quite bad of this website. 7.4 seconds. And uh first content full paint. So what is first content full paint? This means how long it took before it was able to load anything at all on the website. So it took about 1.8 seconds. Second is after that whatever is the biggest element. So let’s say if your biggest element is an image or a video or something like that how long it took for that to load. So that was 2.3 seconds which is fair. The third is cumulative layout shift. So what this means is uh once the website has loaded did the layout change and I will show you a very good example that Google has for this as well. Uh so as we scroll down we also get this tree map of how Google saw this website load. If I click on view tree map but yeah as you can see in this uh snapshot maybe I can zoom in to show a little better. Uh each of these are screenshots that it took uh to show like how u each element of the page was loading. Correct. So that’s basically what it shows over here. So u it looks like in the first three slots it uh did not even load anything and then um from the fourth slot it started to load something and that’s the reason the first content full paint is so uh poor. It is 1.8 second. So each slot is 0.5 second. So in the first 1.5 second nothing loaded in the uh between 1.5 to 2 seconds something loaded. So that is the first contentful paint. Uh then uh slowly between 1 2 to 2.5 2.5 to 3 to 3.5 and 3.5 to 4. So I know how uh long it took for the content to load. So this gives me a good glimpse of how fast my website is. Now as I scroll down uh it also provides me diagnostics in the sense it tells me what are the potential areas for me to improve. So it says reduce unused CSS. So this means like uh essentially if I have some uh code or some files that I can probably reduce or uh look at uh minimizing uh initial server response. So it says like how long it took for just the server to show up or server to respond. So probably I’ll need to work on the server a bit. um eliminate render blocking resources and all but as you can see it’s already at 90% so I don’t don’t really need to work on it except for maybe SCP uh FCP a bit and also the speed index a little bit but mostly uh based on all of these checklist and as you can see the audits the number of audits it did it seems pretty decent right uh similarly I have all the other uh different areas as well like uh serve of images with low resolutions and all as a per out of best practice that I can look at as well. But overall, this gives me a good idea of what are the things that I should be looking at. So let’s just take a quick look at some of the other pages uh that I have loaded over here before I talk about uh a simple way of improving the score. So this was page of so it looks like there are already real users who are visiting the website and its core web vital assessment has failed. So it says the largest contentful paint happens at 3.3 seconds. So there’s a possibility of improving that cumulative layout shift is zero. That’s good. Uh ne interaction to next paint. So this is an interesting one as well. I’ll talk about this. uh first contentful paint is at 2.9 seconds and uh uh time to first bite is 2 seconds. So that means for first bite to show up it takes about 2 seconds right. Uh however the overall performance is at rated at 83 and uh some of the things that uh uh Gita can probably do to help with this are also mentioned here like for example this background image uh can be uh much more smaller right uh but this is not that big of a website so let’s try and understand what a big website looks like like myntra even Myntra has failed its core web vital. What does that mean? It means that sometimes u it’s it all depends upon see how bad this is. It all depends upon how you’re optimizing and what you’re working with and the type of users you’re working with. Uh just yesterday I think I was analyzing one of the websites uh which had a pretty decent uh site speed. Uh let me just load it. One second. So as you can see this is another website storebox. I was just analyzing this yesterday and uh you can see it’s core web vital actually passed FCP in green LCP in green FID everything is in green right and now the thing is how can you make this happen or how can you make something like this happen? Now, obviously, there’s a bunch of different things, right? It’s it’s very complicated. As you just saw, there’s like a bunch of different areas that you should be working with. So, as a part of quick win, the main thing is that you should optimize your website with uh by having smaller websites, smaller file sizes, etc. Uh make sure that you’re using uh the latest technologies so that it is much faster. uh you’re combining files so that it is again much faster. You’re using uh uh compressing the files uh you’re using the latest servers etc. Now all of this can be a bit technical. So the most easiest way is essentially use a plug-in right uh what does a plug-in look like? You can use WordPress plugins like Lightseed Cage, W3 Total or even like premium version of WP Rocket. Uh all of these are pretty good plugins that you can use to optimize your website. I personally for carbon lightning I’m using light speeded gauge, right? All you have to do is in um like in this once you have installed the plug-in uh there will be something called as light speeded gauge. The one thing that I like about is the presets. You just go to this. You can select the advanced preset by default. You don’t even need to worry about it. Just click apply preset. And once you have done that, so let’s say for example, I’ll do this like apply preset. And after that, I can just uh like click on this button and clear or purge all the cage. That’s it. What this will do is it will take care of all of these things for you by default. It will even like do some basic optimizations etc uh that are needed and uh that should ideally help you improve some of the performance but at the same time as you notice the core web vital and your performance score can be a bit different. So what are core web vitals? So that is how you improve the performance this performance score. But let’s try and understand what are core web vital right. So uh if you install the plug-in obviously there’s a bunch of things that you can do with it uh in terms of optimizing and working with some of the different cage compression and all of those things automatically taken care of for you. Every other content management system will have that. But uh for core web vital let’s first try and understand what these things exactly are. So I’m going to first talk about the u u the largest contentful paint. Actually these are the three that have been promoted to core web vital now. So let’s talk about largest contentful paint. I’ve just clicked on this and as you can see over here it clearly says uh what is largest consent pool paint. So it basically if it is under 2.5 seconds that means it is good right so this means whatever is the largest content on your website how long it takes to load. So some examples over here uh for largest contentful paint as you can see um in this in the first few seconds it was this this part was the largest contentful paint next this was the one after that this was the one. So it basically shows an example of uh this being the largest contentful paint of the entire page once it loaded and how long it took to load this. Same with this one over here. The LCP is this one. This is the largest contentful paint. Uh in Instagram it’s its logo when it you’re trying to login. In Google when you’re trying to do a search the largest contentful paint is probably this one because it takes the most amount of time. uh sorry over here like because it takes the maximum space right so that is basically how you identify LCP similarly luckily we also have good examples for all these uh others as well I’m going to just talk about these two right now you guys can explore the others as well and you can find more details around it on web.dev def but let’s look into this nip is basically u how responsive your website is for uh interactions so poor responsiveness take a look at this when you click on something it takes a lot of time to load so let me zoom into this a bit and hide this as you can see it is taking so long to load but over here a Good responsive website loads quickly. So this is a very strong part of the experience that your users will have once they load the website and that is what INP is interaction to next paint. So how long it takes to interact with the next part of the content. So what is this? This is nothing but a sudden shift in layout. So let’s say a website loaded and it’s like order confirmation and you want to go back but all of a sudden something loaded on the top because of which it completed the order. What happened? Why did it happen? It happened because the layout shifted because something loaded later on something on the top it loaded later. And uh if there is a shift in the layout as your website is loading that means your cumulative layout shift score is high and if it is high that is bad. It should be zero. So what that means is there should be no shift in the layout as the website is loading. Right? So these are some things that are not directly related to the uh performance aspect that you see here but instead it is more related to how you’re designing your website or how you’re creating your website and ensuring that the type of images or the type of things that you use are that much more optimized. Right? So that’s basically what the sight speed and core web vital talk about screaming frog SEO tool. So I’m going to provide like a quick demo of how it works and how you can work with it or use it. Um this is pretty good to identify a bunch of uh technical issues as well as some of the content related issues. Uh but don’t worry, we’ll have like a pretty good uh uh walk through with this one. Okay. So, let’s get started with this. I’m going to start with uh uh this carbon lightning website only on this because this is fairly smaller website and I don’t think it’ll have a problem in crawling the entire website because it’s not that big. So, let’s see. Uh let’s see. It has Okay, it does have a bunch of category pages. So, maybe it is a bit big. Uh let me try this one. I’ve not created anything in this. Yeah. So I think this is a fairly decent site. Uh there’s an about me page, there’s a homepage, there are a couple of blog articles and that’s about it. So I think this is a pretty good one to start with and I’ll show you why I’m choosing a smaller one and then not like a bigger one. Right? So uh before I start let’s just try and understand what is screaming frog SEO or uh the screaming frog this tool that is there. So this is a tool. So what it does is it’s a it is something that you install on your desktop be it Windows, Mac or Linux and you can use this as a website crawler. So what it will do is it will crawl your website and help on uh improving your onpage SEO issues. So this includes both the content as well as the um uh the technical part but primarily it is on the content uh sorry primarily it is on the technical aspect right. So what it will do is it will for the free version it will download and crawl 500 URLs and uh if you buy a license it will become unlimited basically uh there will be no limit that’s the main thing right so um it does do all of these things you can like uh go through it if you download the app also you’ll be able to check it out and these are the things that is included as a part of free version in addition to that in the paid version you also have like let’s say crawl configur ation uh JavaScript rendering near duplicate content uh mobile usability crawling validation structure validation grammar and spelling checks custom extraction so there’s like okay apparently crawl with openAI and Gemini is also there uh but yeah as you can see there’s like a bunch of different additional features that they have available uh with the license so u now obviously I’m not expecting that if you’re just learning that you go ahead and make a purchase of the license because that wouldn’t really make sense even me myself unless and until I’m doing it for a purpose of actual work I wouldn’t use a licensed version right so that’s why even for me as you can see it’s an unlicensed software so once you download and install the software this is what it would look like right it’s fairly easy to download uh there’s nothing like a registration or anything I think you just click download and it’ll download the particular ular software for you. You select the operating system and done. Once you do that, uh it would have a bunch of different things on the screen as you can see. Uh there is the file where you can like uh look at different recent things that you have crawled probably right. Uh you can uh look at different modes like list, SER or spider. So SER is like search engines result page that it has configuration if you want to configure something um if you want to export some of the reports uh get the site map visualize some of the things etc right like it has a bunch of different features and these features are actually built over a period of time uh screaming frog SEO if I’m not wrong it was created almost uh a couple of decades back uh probably 15 years is when it was I’m not really sure when it was created but yeah it’s been quite some time and that’s the reason right now we are at version 20 of this right and uh overall uh this is this has been one of the uh easier way or simpler way to understand how a bot would look at your website so to get started you would just paste your website link over here I’m just doing that I’m pasting the website link link and after that uh you can select the option you uh by default just go with subdomain because that’s like the normal one. uh but u in this what it does is it will go through all the different uh aspects or you can also just have it extract URL but uh don’t really worry if you’re just starting out right just start with subdomain you don’t really need to worry about anything else enter your main domain name uh select this and click start that’s what I’m going to do so now what happens is once you do that it will uh start to crawl the website so this is the website that I asked it to crawl. So now it is crawling it. It is going on the landing page and it is identifying what are the links that are available and it will click on every single link that is available. This is basically what the uh crawler will also do. Now if you look at the website as you can see there aren’t many links. There is this homepage, there’s about me, there is this um um this uh content link there’s like a read more link but both of them are same, right? There aren’t really a lot of links over here. But if I check this out, as you can see, it identified total 16 URL. And I can also see what those URLs are. So, um, as you can see, it identified the homepage. This is the about me page. Then it also identified the CSS uh file that uh loads the content. This is the first link. Um I don’t know what this is exactly. Okay. Uh then this is the second link. Uh this is the author’s page and then there’s like a bunch of uh other files that are related to working of the website. And finally an uncatategorized category page. Right? So these are the pages that it identified. Pretty simple, pretty normal. And as you saw, there aren’t really uh a lot of pages that are u indexed or a a lot of pages on the website itself. So that’s the reason it just identified these. Now in addition to that, I can also check the external pages that it identified and we can also see like what those are. So LinkedIn it identified uh Chrome extension it identified um um and a bunch of other uh articles and URLs as well right uh if I go to security I will be able to understand u if like there are any issues or errors over there so so 200 means everything is okay 400 404 means not found so obviously this particular page is not found and that’s the reason we have that right and so on and so forth, right? Like you have all of these different things like response codes, URL. Uh if you just want to validate every single thing, you can just check this nice little sidebar that they have created over here which includes everything. U over here it tells you like what are the different types of pages that are there. Uh what are the HTML pages? You would probably be looking at the HTML pages only. uh then in terms of security uh are there basically any content which has HTTP or HTTPS. So if there is even one piece of content which is HTTP probably good idea to move it to HTTPS because you should be using SSL right. Um it says that there are some content or some content policies missing. So this is something that can be improved. Okay. Um, and as I scroll down, right, uh, I also get to know like some of the other things like how many were properly loaded, uh, based on the response codes. Uh, as I can see like out of 16, 11 properly loaded. Uh, two had a 404 error probably and, uh, the three were redirects. Okay, so these are the redirects and I can see like what they are. Uh these are 404. Okay. Interesting. So that’s what it is, right? And uh then internal also I can take a look at what uh the internal data tells me. If something was not found, yes, of course, this page is not available. Um in terms of URL, if there is something so as you can see it has analyzed so many different thing. It also analyzed the page titles for me. How many page titles are over 60 characters? If you remember being over 60 characters will not have or show your page properly on the search engine. Uh how many of them are over 561 pixels. So those onpage checklist is something that it is also helping validate as well over here. Um if there are any let’s say meta descriptions that is missing. So apparently all three of them are missing meta descriptions. Uh meta keywords doesn’t matter. It’s not relevant. You can ignore this one. Um H1, if H1 is missing somewhere, uh if H2 is duplicate somewhere, so I can see uh over here uh there’s a duplicate H2, right? And so on and so forth, right? Like there’s so many different things it checks uh low content pages, uh soft 404s, readability, difficulty, um and then uh canon recalization. So let’s say if uh there is a canonicalized page or not. If the pages are canonicalized then that is good. Um and yeah everything is self-referencing. So that’s perfectly fine. Um pagination directives like index no index follow no follow. I’ll explain some of these things in the backlinking phase don’t worry. Um Href lang. So if you’re running or working with uh different languages than English uh using these tags become very important. U in this you would basically be saying like what is the type of language your website contains. So Google will also get to know about this. Um and yeah like that’s essentially uh what it has right like all of these different things. Now from this uh for you to identify issues it becomes a bit tough. So the best part is it also has something called as issues over here. So I can just click issues and from issues it will tell me what are the major issues that I should be looking to fix. So H1 is missing. This is a very uh uh like this is an actual issue. The priority it also prioritizes the issues for me so that it becomes super easy for me. So this is like okay something that I should fix. Uh this is an opportunity page title is over 561 pixels. Uh there is another opportunity. This page contains low content. It has only 141 words. And then uh as I scroll down it also lists all the low uh priority issues as well for me. And on the top over here, it also tells me if there are any high priority issues like if there is like a no follow, no index. Um if there are any uh pages without internal links, if there are any internal client errors. Right now obviously I will have to validate these myself. This is basically what it identified. But I will have to validate if what it is saying is correct or not. But uh this becomes fairly easy for me, right? I don’t need to remember like what these issues could be. I can just run this and I can just like over here I can just export this and uh maybe I want to export it in an Excel workbook, right? So I’ll click save and open. Let’s see it’s taking a bit of time and yeah so once I do that as you can see I have list of all the different things. uh they uh generously and graciously also shared how I can probably fix some of these issues which is pretty good. All right. Um maybe I’ll reduce this size a bit. Yeah. Uh so basically I will uh get to know from here like okay if uh there are anything that I can do to fix it. uh I can sort it by maybe priority. Maybe I want to first check out the ones that are of high priority and I’ll just filter for that. And then for each of these it also tells me like how I can probably fix the same right. So this is the main reason uh u this is a very good tool because not only does it make your life easier and quickly just validating a bunch of different things if you are working with like hundreds or thousands of pages but it also helps you uh quickly know like okay what are the potential issues and how you can probably go uh understand it and also how you can potentially fix the same. So that’s the main thing about it. So I’m what I’m going to do is this was a fairly small website, right? So it obviously does not have a lot of things, but let’s try and do it with uh a bit bigger websites, right? So I’m going to select Dragon Flora. Okay, interesting. Let’s open the website also. Let’s do that with uh one of these websites. Sweet. Let’s see what it does. So um I have Oh, I thought I already started it. I have started this. Okay. And yeah. So as you can see at the bottom right corner, it is currently detecting different pages or different URLs and then uh crawling them. So far it has detected 300 plus. Let’s see. 315, 318, 321. Right, it keeps going going and going. Looks like there’s a bunch of PDFs that this website has. Looks like it’s almost done detecting where it keeps detecting more and more URLs, right? So, okay. So while it keeps working, we can still access or go through some of the data. But anyways, it’s almost reached. Oh wow. Okay. So there’s 479 URLs in this. Perfect. So it is done, right? So it has done this analysis and uh now as you can see uh basically this is the main URL. This is the uh like WW is actually redirected to this. Perfect. Looks good. And these are all the internal pages or URLs that it has detected. As you can see, it clicked on every single button that it found. So, page number zero or something. So, these are I believe paginations. So, it went through all of them, every single button and then looked at identifying like what it does and what should be done. It found uh the external uh uh links as well and for some reason it found a bunch of PDFs as well. Uh not PDF. Oh, images. A bunch of images and CSS. Okay. So, it has a bunch of images apparently. Yeah. And then it also has bunch of CSS files as well. Right. So, that’s basically what it saw. So as I’m not going to go through all of this once again uh uh but let’s just try to go through the issues right and we can see overall it has identified 32 issues in total it says uh uh out of that there are three issues 16 are warning and 13 are opportunities so let’s go through these bit by bit so I’m going to first go through issues what are the issues that it identified So let’s see three issues right? So let’s try and understand what these issues are. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to expand this a bit. And now it says there are three issues. The first one is this one. It says this URL is uh giving us 500 internal server error. Okay let’s just identify what this is. This is the URL. The status code says 520. And this URL looks like it’s like a page nation itself nothing else. So let me just open this in the browser once. Um okay. So yeah it says that there is a uh issue over here with indexing this. Um but I think that is probably because of this. So as you can see there’s like a bunch of different images as a part of the slider and uh it essentially uh could not index one of these is what I’m assuming right so okay anyways this is completely fine I don’t really need to worry about this right now it does load the URL for me so I’m perfectly fine with that for now uh now over here it says these are medium issues H1 is missing so it says in contact and the blog H1 is missing. So, let’s just take a look. So, when I open this, um, yeah, basically there isn’t like a proper H1 or a page title. Um, but yeah, that could be something that can be added over here because I think these are H2s if I’m not wrong. Yeah, this is an H2, right? So it is missing H1 is what it says. U so there should be only one H1 per page and uh if you are add that then that becomes easier. So for blogs and contact and all this is something that happens quite often. So it is good if you add uh those two. Um yeah that’s pretty much it with H1 missing. So there are two URLs which does not have an H1 and then there are all of these images where there is no alternate text. Now what is an alternate text? Alternate text is something that is very beneficial for accessibility as well as for crawlers etc to read the or understand what your image is all about. So that’s the main point of it. So if I open this image for example, this is the image and looks like I can also see where it got that image from. So if I scroll maybe not. Okay. Um image details. Okay. So when I go to image details, it tells me where it got this image from. It was from the homepage. So on the homepage, this image could use an alt text. So uh that’s basically what it says. So same for this one, right? In product and services, this image does not have an alt text. This one, this one, this one. Uh and essentially if I add that, it becomes easier to for me to make sure that all of these are also properly accessible by the uh crawler. So that’s basically what it says. Similarly, I can go through the warnings as well. So it says like there are some no follow links which is fine. This is fine. Uh so I just need to check the warnings if those warnings are fine or not. And uh that is how I can proceed. So similar to that uh I can take a look at this one like no index uh email protection. Yeah, completely okay. Canalization. So it says uh pages that have a canical uh canonical to a different URL. Okay. So it just says like the these are canonicalized pages. So when I go to gallery, what does that mean? URL details. Let’s see. It says it is canleized and the canicalization link is gallery itself which makes sense, right? So essentially all of these are additional parameters that are getting added and for that uh this is the canicalized URL which is perfectly fine. So I’m completely okay with this. And uh then uh canle canonical missing. So in this particular for this particular URL there is no canicle which is again fine because this is like a file p uh this is like a pdf file. So uh we cannot really do much for that right. So that is basically how you would be validating each of these and as you click on each of these warnings and issues etc. you will be able to read the description and how to fix it as well. Uh all you need to do is you just need to validate if those are actual valid issues or actual valid things that you need to fix and then work through the same uh same same goes for opportunities as well. uh page titles below 30 characters. Uh so maybe we can increase or improve the page titles for these uh individual pages uh below 200 pixels, low content pages. Maybe we can add some better content for these um images over 100 KB. So that means maybe we can optimize these images a bit and so on and so forth. Now there is one thing one question that is added how to add alternative text for images. Let me just show that you can basically in the alternative text you can mention uh what the image is about. You don’t need to like uh just talk about the same category. You can also just mention what the image is about. That’s it. So alternative text the main purpose of it is so that if the image is not loading that text will load instead and people will be able to understand what actually is in the image. That’s the main thing about it. The reason for that is uh uh to improve accessibility. So imagine let’s say if you cannot read maybe you have vision issues but you can listen uh you go on a website and uh you ask your accessibility uh uh software to read out whatever is there on the uh particular uh uh website. It will read everything and wherever there’s an image if there is no alternative text it will not be able to read it. But if there is an alternative text, it will be able to read it and then explain what that is. So that is the main purpose of alternative text. Now in addition to that, it is also used by uh the crawlers as well to understand what is there in the image. So which is the reason why uh not only is it important for accessibility but it is also important for your SEO. So how do you add alternative text? So let’s say this is an image. Okay. So let’s add an image media library. Uh maybe I’ll just upload something. Okay. Okay. So, I’ve just uploaded or uploading an image. I don’t know what is happening. Uh but anyways, now as you can see over here, there is an option called as alt text. So, what I would do be doing is I would once the image is uploaded, I can enter the alternative text over here and I can then click select and that way it would in uh add that alt text to the image for me. So, that’s basically how it works. So yeah, the image is uploaded and now it decides to load everything right. Um once that is done, I can be like uh uh what is this image? I think this was golden temple. So uh golden temple travel image. That’s it, right? Um, and once I’m done with that, I’ll just click select and it would load that particular image along with the alternative text for me. So that is basically how alternative text works. Right now obviously this is not something that I want to add to this particular uh content so I’m removing it. But that’s basically how you add the alternative text. right now. Uh that is how you add it in WordPress. But how does it actually work normally? Let’s look into that as well. Alt text W3 schools. They have a pretty good tutorial on this as well. I personally love W3 schools. Anyways, uh try it myself. Okay. So, as you can see, this is the image tag in HTML, right? So this is image img src and then the name of the image or the link of the image you can add here. Then there is another tag called as alt equal to and your alt text is basically this. So whatever you update over here it becomes your alternative text. It is not visible on the image but instead this is visible in the back end of the image. So uh essentially your uh crawlers etc would be able to read it. So this is how alt text works and when you want to implement it this is how you would implement it as well to your images. So yeah, that’s basically how you work through it, right? Like that’s basically how you use Screaming Frog SEO. And uh trust me, this Screaming Frog SEO has made the lives of a lot of people quite easy because of how simple and easy it is to use and also go through a bunch of different uh websites. Now keep in mind if uh your website is a bit bigger like Dragon Flora for example had less than 500 URLs. So I I could look at all of those but uh a normal midsize website would have somewhere around thousands and thousands of pages and URLs. So even if you get the paid version of screaming frog uh you need to make sure that uh uh your IP address or your your laptop itself from where you’re searching does not get blocked. So that sometimes happens but uh that I have seen that happen primarily with websites which have like 20,000 or 30,000 URLs but yeah that still happens. So uh if if that happens, don’t worry about it. Just reach out to uh your uh server hosting provider or the person who manages your website’s technical side and ask them to whitelist your uh PC. So that’s that’s basically it. But yeah, that’s where we finished technical SEO just now. Let’s get into off page SEO. So far we have been looking and working on relevance. We have been trying to understand what is the best way to identify uh keywords for which our business is relevant and then making sure that that relevance is something that we can talk about as well by the means of the content and making that content accessible through technical SEO. Right? So that is basically what onpage SEO is all about. Ensuring that you are able to identify relevant content and are able to talk about the same. So it’s at the end of the day all about relevance that you can control. But off-page SEO is not at all about relevance. It’s about authority as you guys rightly remember. And when I say authority, this is something where you try to influence others into giving you the authority. And this is very similar to how politics works. So that’s why every time I talk about off- page SEO, I bring in politics a little bit. I’m not a political guy or anything. I’m I’m very bad at it, frankly speaking. But uh um the basic of the basics of politics right it’s essentially when when we say that someone has political power that what it means is that person has political authority in making or doing something that they want in terms of SEO that authority translates into getting the keyword ranking that you want in terms of politics it’s getting that power that you want in terms of SEO. It’s getting that ranking that you want. That’s basically how it works. So in politics, what happens is you would gain authority by having other people vouch for you saying that this is the person to go for for any of those problem, right? Any of those specific problems or whatever problems that you have. Uh and the same goes for SEO, right? uh you’re basically ensuring that you have the right authority to talk about the specific topic that you want to talk about. So let’s say if you’re talking about how to buy an AC you’re uh through off-page SEO you’re ensuring that you have enough authority or you have gained enough authority to uh be able to talk about it as well. And uh now here’s the fun fact. Just like in politics um like at the end of the day if you want to win you have to understand how to play politics. You cannot just be like as long as I have the right policies I’m going to win. That’s not how politics works. Same goes for SEO, right? It’s not just having the right content uh and winning through that. That that’s never going to happen. you have to get your hands a little dirty and uh uh at the end of the day that is what we call as the gray area. you’re not completely doing illegal things although there are people who do it but you should not do it right and uh because if you do get caught all of a sudden all the authority that you have built up will go down the drain and that’s exactly what happens with SEO and that’s that’s the best part about uh how you can parallelly relate to both of these things so in SEO Some of you might have heard of this thing called as white hat, black hat, right? Black hat is where you’re trying to illegally or uh by uh you’re essentially trying to game the system or game the algorithm into thinking you have the right authority. That’s essentially what black hat SEO is mostly about. So uh you will try to identify uh ways of you know getting a bunch of backlinks for example maybe you want to get like 5,000 back links from that one good website or something whatever that is uh that’s blackhead SEO and uh just like the legal system etc have evolved over a period of time like today for example everyone have a cell phone and they can record people and that has made the politicians much more conscious about what they are doing. The same thing goes with SEO as well. You cannot execute those blackhead techniques because in doing so Google or any other search engine is going to easily catch you because they know what to expect. So now does that mean you should only do what uh they actually want you to do? Kind of. At the end of the day, in an ideal situation, in an ideal world, how does democracy work? Democracy works wherein I know I’m going a little bit on the civics side, but that’s not something that I’m very good at anyways. Well, I’ll try. Okay, I’ll try. So democracy the way that it works in an idealistic scenario is that every person who is trying to vote is aware of every other uh every person who is standing in the politics or in the particular uh field right uh and fighting to maybe get that PM post or president post or whatever that is. They are aware of the policies and by being aware of every single thing uh after analyzing every single thing they are making a sound and wise decision that is how ideally democracy is supposed to work right but that is not how it actually works. people vote based on the brand image, based on the brand authority, based on uh uh just that okay this other person is also doing it so that’s the reason I’m also going to vote and uh similar kind of things happen in uh the SEO side as well. At the end of the day, it’s all about how you influence uh other websites to provide the vote of confidence so that you can increase your authority. And that’s basically what is off-page SEO. It’s not completely white hat because Google says like you should not be building back links by reaching out to people. But uh and at the same time it is not black hat because you’re not doing it in a way wherein you’re like okay I just want to go crazy and get some bunch of backlinks but it’s somewhere in between. It’s a gray area. So Google uh is aware of this gray area as well. Every single SEO expert is also aware of this gray area. But every single other person still does it because they also understand that this is how it works. But that’s basically what it is right. So let’s try and understand a little bit more around that. So off-page SEO what are we going to look at? We are going to try and understand what is link building what are the different types of backlinks traits of a good backlink and backlink or link building strategies. So off-page SEO let’s go through this. Off-page SEO refers to actions performed beyond your website for the purpose of improving the position of the website in the search engine results page. So as I just said, if you want to rank number one, you are trying to perform certain actions which are outside the scope of your website, outside the scope of onpage SEO. and uh that includes uh through various different means and methods right but the primary driver of that is links or back links. So how does Google know if a website has higher authority or not? It knows that by checking what are the websites that are providing the back links to your website. So let’s say if you own Myntra now Myntra is a massive brand if you think of it. It has done so many different things uh to build up its authority. It has worked on a lot of brand uh advertisement, brand marketing. It has worked on a lot of uh uh different uh type of campaigns. It runs a lot of advertisements. But at the same time, in addition to that, a lot of websites also have URL to Myntra. Today, if you go on Google and if you type in uh top shopping websites in India, there’s a high chance there’s going to be a bunch of articles. Now, I don’t know if this is true. I’m just making it up. But uh there’s a high chance that there are going to be a bunch of articles which will list out Myntra as well. Why will they do that? Because it has that kind of authority that by default uh you will be saying like okay Myntra is the website and this is the link for it. This if you click on it you can go to myra.com and what happens with that that link is basically a backlink for Myntra. So when it comes to a website typically uh backlinks are the ones that are linking to you or inbound links for you. That’s basically what it is. And uh the more inbound links that you have uh the higher the authority that you have. But it’s not that simple. It’s not just about getting a bunch of back links. there are a lot of other factors involved and that is what we are going to learn today. Right? So u as I said it’s the most important cont um component of SEO and any SEO campaigns that in grows quality link building will fail. So your website with backlinks equals to high ranking and traffic at the end of the day. That’s how politics works. Okay. I’m I’m probably going to stop talking about politics for a minute there but yeah that’s basically how it works right. So if your website does not have good links pointing to your uh website links that convince the search engines your site is valuable it may not be possible to rank on search engines. So the way that a crawler works is now think of it this way just like the crawler comes to our website it will also go to other websites and on every website that is goes it will check what are the links that are available on all of them and by checking those it will identify how many times when it comes to the external links is your website being mentioned and those external links becomes backlinks for you. So what is link building anyways? Let’s try about uh learn about this. So when it comes to link building, it does not mean that uh you are uh literally going to a website and placing your link. That is not what it means. A lot of people get confused. This is not something that you can do. You have to literally influence someone else to do it. And that is what link building is all about. Uh now there are process of it but basically link building is the process of getting links from third party websites or basically other websites and uh having them point to your website. These links are called as backlinks. So there’s a pretty good example in this image here. So let’s say this is your website and this is some other website and on their website they have provided a link back to you that is a backlink right now it does say strong backlink and all we’ll talk about this a a bit more but that’s basically how it works uh a good backlink is the one that is also contextually relevant like uh if you are talking about how to run a marathon and the website is about fitness weekly and they have provided a backlink to too. That’s good. That’s a good vote over there. So, that is what backlink is all about. And you need backlinks to rank. Like I said, backlinks are like votes to your site. Each of these votes essentially tells the search engine this content is relevant, credible, and useful. More votes you get, the higher your site will rank in Google and other search engines as well. So if this is your website, all of these back links are like votes to your website. Now why is link building important? Links from other sites help your site in ranking in four ways. These are these two are some of the things that you may have noticed in uh uh some of the tools like for example SEM Rush, Ahref if any of you have used it, right? But uh there is something called as page authority and domain authority. So getting links from other websites will help uh in adding value to the page and improving the authority of the page and at at the same time by adding value to your entire domain as well. So let’s say if you have 10 different pages and uh uh you get one link for each of those pages, not only will it add value to those pages, it will also add value to your entire domain as well. Um so that those are the two things. Then the third is it also helps the search engine understand the topic of your website. So imagine this. Let’s say every backlink that you have is coming from uh let’s say if you are an electronic store and every backlink that you have is coming from uh uh tech websites or electronic related websites etc. That tells the search engine that okay your website is also tech or electronics related which is good. But if those links are coming from maybe pet related website, health related websites or wellness related websites etc. then search engine will also be confused. So having other websites uh provide relevant links for you will actually help increase uh and help the search engine understand the topic of your website as well. And finally those links can also help you get traffic from those websites. So let’s say if I’m on any of these website, I can just click uh and go to that website and become a visitor of it as well. Right? So essentially you would also get some traffic from it as well and that is why backlinks are important. Okay. So that’s the reason why we should be building backlinks. I think all of you understand why backlinks are important. But what kind of backlinks to build? So there are uh backlinks that make very small difference. By the way, uh these are back links coming from low authority and websites that are kind of relevant, not exactly relevant. U then there are back links that can make a lot of difference. These are from websites which have a lot of high authority and they are also highly relevant. These are the ones that you want. And then there are back links that can also hurt your rankings. So keep that in mind. It’s not just about you know going out there and getting a bunch of backlinks but there are also uh links that can hurt your ranking and you should always avoid those. So those are spammy or link milling websites or let’s say bad PR backlink etc. So overall uh there are different types of backlinks we will talk more about what those different types of backlinks are but essentially what we want are the ones which have high authority and high relevance. Right. So, types of backlinks. Let’s go through this. The type of backlink that you want is a do follow link. So, uh what is this? What is do follow? Essentially, if a link does not have this attribute re equals no follow. Even before we get into this, what is a link? A link looks something like this. Let’s let’s let’s uh open one of the websites that I have. For example, Carbon Lightning. I’ll go back to this once again. It’s loading. Let’s open this. Now, I have some links here. These are external links. So, these are back links for these websites. So, this link is for sunpower.com. This link is for lg.com, etc. Now if I right click on it even before I do that as you can see this says link over here right but if I click on it it will not open something like link if I click on this it will open sunpower.com and basically the website of sunpower looks like it’s a 404 website right now but yeah uh 404 page but sunpower.com and something right so it will basically open that sunpower.com/roucts/ solar panels/x series and similarly neon2 uh Panasonic etc. So all of these are different links and as you might have noticed what we see here is not what opens what we see here is called as the anchor text. What does that mean? So this is a text that anchors the link essentially that shows or has the link um and uh this text is the one that I would click and if I click on it the link would open. So in this scenario link over here is the anchor text and the URL of the anchor text is sunpower.com/rouct/solar panels/x series. Now what does this look like in HTML? Let’s look into that. I’m going to click inspect. Okay. So, this is what the link looks like over here. I’m just going to open this a bit. So, this is the highlighted part. Uh, a is uh basically anchor and then href uh means you’re adding the URL. So, this is the URL. Target equals to blank. This means that uh the link should open in a new tab. This is again not relevant. uh uh this is something that you typically add if you want to make sure that it opens in a separate tab. U then re equals to. So when it comes to a backlink a lot of uh attributes related to back links are added in re equals to. So re equals to it says no referer no opener. This is a very common um attribute. You can pretty much ignore these attributes. If you see these attributes, that means there’s nothing uh for you to worry about. This is a normal link and then it just says link. This is the anchor text and this is the URL. Right? So basically this is what a do follow link looks like and this is a do follow link for sunpower.com. Now in this scenario there aren’t any uh attributes that you should worry about. it just shows no referer and no opener. So both of these are very common attributes. These are typically used as a part of security um attributes. So we can ignore this. So since we can ignore both of these things in the link, what we are left with is the URL and the anchor text. So whenever you’re looking for a do follow link, it means a link which has just the anchor text along with the URL. And when you see uh any links like these that is a good link. So now this link is a backlink for sunpower.com. This link is not a backlink for carbon lightning. Right? This is a backlink for sunpower.com. So it will benefit sunpower. It will not benefit my website which is carbon lightning. So this is what a do follow link is and this is exactly what you want uh for others to do. Basically if if you want a backlink you want others to provide a similar link like this. So even over here for example that is what I have provided as an a quick example here. So what I did is uh I just selected a link I did a right click on it I did inspect and within that I saw that this is the link a href. So this a is still here / a right. So this is the entire link and in this this is the anchor text and AMA hosted today. I can also see this anchor text over here and this is the URL. So this is a backlink to reddit.com. Basically a do follow link is the one that does not have re equals to no follow. So in real we just saw it had no opener no referral. If it does not have no follow that is good but there are no follow links as well. A good example of these are comments on the blogs or forum posts etc. And in fact even when you go to any Wikipedia article at the end of that article there are citations. These are external links right? So and uh essentially if you do an inspect HTML for them you will notice that these are generally marked as no follow. So this is what it looks like. Re equals to no follow. That’s basically it. So if a URL in addition to the anchor text and the URL itself, if it has re equals to no follow, then that means that that is a link that is of no value for SEO. Now why is something like no follow attribute even exist? Why does it exist? The reason for that is because uh sometimes you don’t want the crawler or the bot who comes to your website to follow an external link and uh that is very common because you are providing that link for the reference of the users who visit your website the actual people who visit your website not for the bots and uh Wikipedia is a very good example of that. Now imagine uh given Wikipedia has like hundreds of link sometimes for the most popular posts or most popular articles on it. What happens is if uh it would do a do follow for every link then the crawler will become crazy. It will not be able to go through every single Wikipedia article. Instead it will just keep going through all the external links instead and Wikipedia will start losing its ranking as well. So to avoid that it has provided a no follow and in addition to that because it is also not validating all of these links because at the end of the day Wikipedia is what Wikipedia is a collaboration of all the people who are making it happen right or who are providing these citations etc and validating it vetting it etc. Even you can edit Wikipedia content by the way will it add value to your website? Not really but that’s what Wikipedia is all about. So uh that’s the thing right and that’s the reason it has to use no follow and by using no follow uh the crawler will know that this is a link that it should not go to but if you noticed in my website in carbon lightning I did not add the no follow link the reason for that is because that’s a different strategy my website is very new so all I’m doing is I’m using uh an external a link to help validate some of the claims that I have mentioned on my website. So that is something that you should keep in mind when you’re using these links. Right? So a good example of that is this one. So in this if you notice uh at the end over here I have mentioned sources. Each of these sources are linked to specific websites and these are government or high authority websites. Now uh the reason I’ve added back links or provided backlinks to them is because in a way I’m telling Google that even though currently I don’t have authority the content that I am sharing comes from other high authority websites and uh for Google to validate that I want to make sure that it is a do follow link. So that’s the reason these are do follow links. So uh that is how normal backlinks or natural backlinks are generated. These links are back links to other website. These big links are not backlinks to my website. These are outbound links. So what that means is it is going outside of my website. Inbound back links links that are coming into my website are the ones that will help my authority. But it will help my authority only if they are do follow links. If it is a no follow link, it will not help. So essentially when it comes to a backlink, a backlink for you is the one that is a inbound link. A link that comes to your website. So in addition to no follow, there are two other attributes that are that like Google has started to recognize as well which are sponsored and UGC links. So what are these? So these are also similar to no follow link. Basically if uh the link has sponsored or if it has UGC uh the crawler or the Google bot will not follow it at all. So sponsored are basically paid links. So if let’s say you have paid for a backlink and it shows the sponsored uh attribute that is not a backlink that is still a no follow. Keep this in mind. And uh if you have like let’s say added links on medium, Reddit etc. uh and if it has real equals to UGC that is also a no follow link or as equal to as no follow because that is a user generated content. So keep that in mind that uh as long as if the thing that you want is a do follow link that is what you should be looking for and if it has no follow if it has sponsored or if it has UGC that means that is basically worthless for you for SEO authority. Now the thing is I have told you what are some of the things that you should avoid in a backlink but what are traits of a highquality backlink. So we’ll go through those five traits and then we’ll talk about some of the strategies. So the first trait is that these back links come from trusted high authority sites. So as I mentioned SEO backlinks in SEO is like a vote and if someone in high power is voting for your website that’s good. So that’s basically what it is. So uh think of it this way. Would you rather get a backlink from New York Times or some random website which is like which has zero authority? Obviously the answer is New York Times, right? So when it comes to uh building highquality backlink, you would want to make sure that they come from high authority websites. So there is a concept called as domain authority. Uh essentially the more authority a site has the more authority it can pass on to your website as well. Can authority be transferred? it cannot be transferred per se but uh you can at least pass on a little bit of authority uh when you get a backlink and that builds up over a time over a period of time. So that’s basically what happens and that’s what uh Google thinks of as well. So what is authority of a website a very simple way to understand is is uh how important Google thinks your website is. Now the thing is that Google does not have any u number or any official metric around authority. So because of this reason the only way for us to understand or know the authority of a website is by using third party tools. So that is the reason that every third party tool like SEM Rush, AHEF, MOS, any of these they also have an authority score but the authority score will be different because the way that they measure the authority score is going to be different. So what does it mean for you? Two things. One is that the authority score that you see on these tools are supposed to be used with a grain of salt. What that means is those are directional. It does not mean an actual metric or number uh that you should focus on heavily but instead those are directional numbers that will help you understand where you stand overall in terms of authority. And the second thing is that uh since these numbers are generated or created by an algorithm of these third party tools, there are also ways to game or mimic it. There are websites which do it as well. So don’t fall into the trap that if a website’s domain authority on mo is 50 that means it is a good website to get a backlink from you should check for two things. One is it should have a high domain authority and at the same time it should also have good organic traffic because both of them are always together. Right? So that is how you would be checking the authority of a website if you are pursuing it to get a backlink from them. So authority of any web page is combination of number of external backlinks and their quality, relevance with the content, the traffic etc. Right? Uh authority of all web pages contribute to overall authority of the website. You can check the authority using tools like mo. So let’s just do that. I’m going to load up ahref. So, one thing that AHF has is obviously it has like paid plans and all. Oh, it started the starter one, but it really has like nothing of value. I really like these free tools that it has. So, what I’m going to do is uh it should have an website authority checker. So, I’m going to load this up. Okay. So, let’s check the authority of Amazon.com. Obviously, it will have a very high authority. Let’s just check that anyways. Yep, it has a authority or domain rating of 96. uh it has these many back links. Of course, it does. It has these many linking websites, right? And uh 91% of them are do follow. 74% of them are do follow. Makes sense, right? Now, let’s check Carbon Lightning. My priced position of a website that is literally nothing. Obviously, I’m expecting it to show me a zero authority or zero u like the domain rating, but let’s see. Yep, it is zero. Apparently, I have a backlink. Wow. Okay, I don’t even know who that is. I’m I’m actually going to check. Okay, interesting. I I don’t even know what this website is but yeah apparently they have uh provided a backlink to me whatever that is right so uh this is uh uh the domain rating now let’s check a mid-level website uh what can be a mid-level website I think that storebox one that I showed last time uh yeah this is the one let’s just check with this H yeah. So this is 25. It has 6,000 back links. 95% of them are do follow and it has 191 linking website. 75% of them are do follow. You guys notice something interesting here. Basically what is happening is there are 191 websites which are providing a backlink to it. But overall there are multiple pages within these websites that also provide backlinks to it. Because of which overall the number of backlinks it has is 6,000. However, when it comes to your authority, this numbers matter more than this. So this should be higher or at least like this is the one that you should focus on not this linking websites. So the total number of unique domains that are linking to your target, right? uh 75% of them do follow and yeah the domain rating is 25 which makes sense right so this is basically how you can understand or identify what is the authority now the higher the authority the better it is the second question was how can you uh know the traffic of a website typically you cannot know that but one thing that you can definitely do is there are again tools for that uh I think even mo if I’m not wrong. Okay, MOS does not show that. But yeah, uh typically you would what you would be doing is you will be checking uh the type of keywords that those websites rank for and if those are like high search volume keywords or not and that’s a very simple way of getting to know it. Another way is basically just let’s say uh use some of these extensions like uh uh the keyword surfer extension. So, I don’t think I have that installed right now. Let me just install it. Or I think a keyword surfer should have that by default. Anyways, I’ll just add it to the Chrome. Not a problem. Anyways, like u u I I’ll just add this and show you like what there are again there are a bunch of different tools that can provide you an estimate of it and that’s basically what you want to check. So in this scenario I’ve just installed this tool and uh this gives me an estimate for this website right like how many uh visits it has uh look like it is not able to estimate for this one but for LinkedIn it is able to estimate the monthly traffic for domain in India. Okay, India. I think I if I change the location, it’ll probably tell me. But you get the idea, right? There’s a bunch of different website. Uh let me check UK. I think it should show. Oh yeah, now it shows, right? So, United Kingdom because that’s where it is. It has some traffic. So 25 domain rating for that makes sense because this is B2B as well. So it should not have a lot of traffic anyways. So this is what you would be doing as a part of the uh check of authority right you would be checking the authority as well as the traffic that it has. Yep. So that’s the first trait right it should be of high quality. Second is that uh the anchor text you guys saw what is anchor text. So the uh anchor text should ideally have your target keyword. So if your target keyword is let’s say buy shoes online um and you want people to buy shoes online on your shoes website or shoes link then that should be the URL and the anchor text should be your keyword. However something to keep in mind is that uh you should avoid anchor text spamming as well. So what this means is if every backlink to your website has the same words in it, it doesn’t appear naturally. So uh for example, if you have 100 backlinks and all of them are pointing to your website and 95 of them of them have the same exact anchor text or the same exact keyword that is your primary keyword, it is a very strong signal to search engine that this anchor text is spammy in nature. Right? So uh and the only exception to above is when you’re using branded anchor text. So if let’s say I want to get back links and uh I have gotten 100 backlinks and all of them are solar panel reviews, solar panel reviews, solar panel reviews, right? The anchor text says that. So in such a scenario it doesn’t appear natural. So you I should be avoiding that and instead I should be getting maybe uh 95 of them I can get for carbon lightning.com as anchor text and the rest I can get maybe something like solar panel reviews or something like that. Uh so the first thing that I talked about was it should be what was that? It should be of high authority. It should have relevant anchor text and the third is that it should be topically related. This is something that I talked about earlier already. But yeah, as you can see in this image, um, basically if you are getting a backlink, ideally it should come from someone or a website or a topic that is actually related to the link as well. If it is not related, then uh there’s a high chance that it is a spammy link or probably it is not of high value. There’s a high chance that it is of not high value. But that’s the main thing. If it is topically related that increases the quality of the backlink. The fourth is it should be a do follow link. So avoid no follow link. I talked about this already. And the fifth is also a very important one. So the backlink should always come from a new domain every time. So let’s say if a website X links to you multiple times uh so the first time it links great second time it does okay third fine fourth fifth 6th 7th and so on and so forth it’s not going to matter at all. You guys know the concept of diminishing returns that applies to backlinks as well. So if the same domain is providing you a backlink multiple times it will have diminishing returns. What is a good example of diminishing returns? So imagine it as this. If you are hungry and if you eat a meal maybe uh you like biryani and you have biryani right? Uh if you’re hungry you have biryani great you’re no longer hungry. Then I’m like okay fine have more biryani maybe you’ll eat second time as well maybe you’ll go for third as well if you’re very hungry but what about the fourth time fifth time sixth time seven plates eight plates nine plates 10 plates by the 10th plate you will start to feel sick you don’t want to eat it anymore you will be like uh this is not what I want and you will start to see neg negative uh like basically negative effects of it. The same applies to SEO as well. If the same website if the same website is providing you the links multiple times, the first link will have value but the rest of them will have uh diminishing returns. So whenever you’re trying to build back links, it is always a good idea to get back links from new website every time instead of going for the same website again and again because that will not add much value. So when I showed the linking website that means uh those are the unique websites that are linking to that particular website and maybe some of those websites have provided multiple links to it but uh the main thing that you should focus on is what are the unique websites that are providing you the links. Okay. So those are the five traits of a good backlink, right? And um yeah, high authority and uh making sure that uh it is basically a do follow link. Uh it is also having backlinks from new domains. Um it is also at the same time what do you call it? it is topically related and it is not doing anchor text spamming. Right? So these are the five five traits of a good backlink. So whenever you’re doing link building keep that in mind. Now as we go through it, I know some of you are like when am I going to learn how to build these links? Then how can uh you find the right people to give you the links? And uh that is where it becomes a little tricky, right? And that is where we have some link building strategies as well because u building links is almost equal to trying to do sales pitch in a way. The only difference is that since both the parties are going to benefit in this transaction uh and there is no exclusivity uh you will get better responses. So let’s look at some of the link building strategies, right? I have uh I think two or three strategies in this. If I’m not wrong, maybe there’s four. But uh the ones that uh you should be primarily focusing on are uh like only a couple of them, right? Rest of them are more opportunity based. Uh so let’s just go through it. The first thing is before you even start building links, there are some things that you need to keep in mind, make sure you have key pages for popular products and services on your website. What this means is making sure that your website is actually ready to get back links. If your website is not ready, all the efforts towards getting back links is going to be nothing worth nothing in fact. So make sure that you have key pages for popular products or service on your website. So let’s say if uh you are into flower business, make sure that you have pages related to flowers or be uh pages that sell flowers so that you can create backlinks for those. Second is focus on creating inbound links to these key pages. Often times we create links just to homepage but uh it is much better if you create links to the key pages instead of homepage because you would want to increase the authority of the pages which make the sale than the homepage. Homepage will anyways get high authority because of the transference of it. So make sure that the back links are uh geared towards those uh key pages. Third is link velocity. So this is the rate at which a piece of content or a page earns link over time. It should appear natural. So what this means is let’s say if you just created a page today and tomorrow you went on Fiverr, you found this nice Fiverr gig where the person says I will give you 1,000 backlinks per day. you were like $5 1,000 links, let me just do that. And uh maybe all of those are like very high quality and all of those things that I talked about. But a new page all of a sudden gets 1,000 back links for the next 10 days it there’s like 10,000 backlinks overall. That is unnatural. Unless and until your website is like Times of India or something like that wherein you have published some good news and people are sharing that news all over the website, it is not natural. So basically the velocity or the rate at which you are getting back links for your pages should also be natural. Uh typically you can build a few links per month is also fine. Sometimes getting even one or two is fine. Sometimes getting five per week is also fine as long as you have good authority or good traffic from SEO already. But don’t just go crazy and build like hundreds or thousands of link per day. That that’s not what you should be doing. It should appear natural. It should be something which is the within within the realm of reality. Uh fourth is that whenever you are approaching a website for guest posting or link building or anything at all, it should be on relevant, trustworthy and high authority sites. And finally u one of the basic thing is analyze your competitor’s backlink and identify link opportunities uh to understand what could be the potential areas or potential website that could provide you the link. So this is typically how you uh get started with it or how you prepare. This is you just preparing yourself. Sorry I have just shaken the desktop but yeah this is just preparing right. This is where you’re just like okay I am ready to get started. Once you have all of this uh then you can start applying different strategies. So these are the four strategies that I’m going to talk about. One is link insertion. Second is guest posting. These two are a lot more active. Third is creating linkable assets. This is a passive strategy wherein uh you are creating assets or creating things which would help get you back automatically or naturally. And fourth is more of an opportunistic strategy wherein if you find an opportunity you go ahead and grab it. That’s basically what it is. So uh let’s try and understand this. Let’s start with the active ones first which is link insertions and then we’ll go to guest posting. So what is link insertion? A link insertion is also known as niche edit. Uh it is a process of getting a website owner to include a backlink to your website in one of their existing post. So what this means is um you find a good website where you saw that okay there is a content that is relevant to your website as well. you would reach out to that website owner and ask them to include your website’s URL into that existing content. So, uh that’s basically what you’re doing here. So, since the content is already there, there is less friction and they are more eager to actually add your link. Um once they do add that link, it’s pretty much that, right? So there are some things that you should uh keep in mind as a part of this. The first is that the website is topically relevant. The post that you where you want your link to be inserted should also be topically relevant. The website should have organic traffic. I mentioned this earlier as well, but it should have some organic traffic from the target location that you have. Uh the backlink should be do follow backlink already mentioned in the good trait and of course it should not be marked as sponsored because link insertion are typically uh something that you may have to pay for quite often as well. So what does it actually looks like? What is the process for this? In simple uh the process involves wherein you are first prospecting for backlinks. So you’re focusing on identifying websites which are likely to provide backlinks by analyzing your competitor’s backlink profile. So what you’re doing is uh you’re basically looking at your existing competition uh through SEM Rush for example and trying to see uh what are the other uh what are the websites that are actually providing backlinks to them. Since they are your competitor, there’s a high chance that those back links are coming from relevant websites. So from that you can build a list of maybe 100 to 300 prospects wherein you have maybe identified other pages where they don’t have link and those are topically relevant as well. Once you have created that list, you would be doing an outreach. So you can use tools like snowvo or just you can directly just write an email to them and uh you need to send like personalized emails uh maybe if you want to make this more scalable uh send around 20 to 30 personalized emails per day and obviously make sure that you’re avoiding spam filters and all. Don’t go like email blasting and all and ensure that the email content is compelling with personalized subject lines and creative valuedriven messaging. Finally, once you have negotiated with them, now obviously you would expect a response from them, right? Once they have responded, negotiate with them on uh how you can add the link, maybe you are providing some value, etc. And once you all of that is done, uh you would finally have them place your link. So upon positive responses from prospects proceed with link insertion but be prepared to negotiate if they ask for compensation or have specific requirements for backlinks as well. So this could mean you uh they may uh ask for money to get that backlink or add that backlink or they may also ask for something else like maybe they want some piece of content or maybe they want a backlink of their own on your website as well. It could be anything. They may have multiple different requirements. So be prepared for negotiations accordingly. So this is an example of link insertion wherein like uh this is an existing content where the link was inserted to the target website. But uh let me just show you what the outreach email typically looks like as well. I think that would provide you some context on how these outreach emails are created. See that’s the main thing about uh link insertion and even with guest posting you would be pretty much doing something similar. Only thing is I find or the reason I’m talking about link insertion first is because uh link insertions are mostly much more scalable in the sense uh over here it becomes much more easier for you to get your links inserted into existing content than uh creating content and then trying to have those posted on the website etc which takes a lot more time per link. So this is an example of an outreach. So someone else uh did an outreach uh to me and where they’re like, “Hi, I’m Kai from Softlist.io. We blog about business productivity tools and solutions.” Um and this is a subject, right? So they’re like, “Okay, I’m reaching out to you because I noticed that your website is potential asset for um a work efficiency and project management content. By including soft list io on your resource page, you can attract new visitors who are interested in learning about the latest tools for productivity and efficiency. Here is our website. In exchange, we would be happy to include a link to your website on our own page uh which I believe would be mutually beneficial arrangement. Let me know if you have any questions. Right? So over here this person is directly saying like this is what they can offer. Um then there could also be something like this right friends from this I hope you are having a wonderful day uh I handle public relations for this I came across your website doing some research and notice you have some great resources I would like to suggest another resource that I believe will be beneficial to your re readers this please review it at your earliest convenience and let me know if you think this is a good fit I’m looking forward to hearing you soon so in this there is no mention of a compensation or something in done. Now in this I can definitely just respond to this person and be like okay yes I want this from you or this is something that I’m going to charge for the link or something like that. What will happen is uh based on that negotiations will go through and finally based on my agreement I will agree and then I may add a link to this particular URL that they are sharing. So that is how uh the outreach emails typically look like. But yeah, that’s basically how link insertions work. Then there’s guest posting. Uh guest posting is again very similar to this. But only thing is you would be reaching out to websites that allow you to post uh content on their website. So uh this is basically okay let’s just go through the slide right. So by writing guest blogs, sharing ebooks or visual assets with other websites, you can build links by asking them to use your asset and link back to your website. You guys saw an example of that outreach email as well. As an example, let’s check out guest blogging. So guest blogging is relevant, industry specific, and gives you opportunity to brand yourself as an industry expert and thought leader. Posting on guest sites that already have millions of fans is an easy way to draw traffic to your website. A very simple way is to identify guest posting website is uh search for the niche plus write for us. If you do a Google search for this, you’ll be able to find all the other websites that allow guest posting. So let’s say if I want to uh storage solutions plus write for us. See uh write for us, right? So this is uh one website that allows guest posting cloud storage solution. Okay, maybe not that relevant uh right for us. Okay, these are related to hosting and all but you get the point, right? Whatever solution that you’re offering or whatever it is that you work on. Just select that product or service, search for write for us and you’ll be able to find a bunch of different guest posting websites for that. So this is basically how you can uh find a bunch of different websites and typically on the pages like these they would have instructions specific instructions on how you can write for them. So looking for guest blogging opportunities these are the guidelines and how to submit. So you you need to reach out to this particular email. Now what happens is as long as you’re following those guidelines you can like go ahead and create some content for them and work with them. You can also sometimes just directly reach out and then cross check like okay this is what you’re planning to do or if you have any questions etc as well. So this is like a very straightforward and easy way of uh doing guest posting as well. So link insertion is more direct wherein you’re scaling based on existing content and guest posting is where you’re essentially reaching out to existing websites which allow you to write for them and whatever content you write you can also provide or include your own website’s link in that. So that’s how you get a backlink for guest posting. So that is the second method. As I told you both of these are more active methods, right? So guest posting and link insertion are active ways for you to reach out and have them include your link so that you can get a backlink. The third one is creating linkable assets. So this means creating assets or creating content that people would want to uh link to. So these are the ones that normally earn back links naturally. These often include resources like infographics, original research, in-depth guides, etc. But before you create any asset, you must understand that what people in your niche are linking to. So a very simple way is to check out your competitor’s backlink profile and you’ll see or understand what are the different type of content that people generally link to or provide back links to and you just need to create similar ones, right? So that’s basically what it is. So a good example of linkable asset would be anything that you may want to link back to or provide a link back to. U so let’s say for example if I had provided an in-depth analysis of how solar panels function people may want to provide a backlink to this website. But uh in uh instead of that what is happening is I found this how do solar panels works from US department of energy. Yeah. So I found this thing right like u from national renewable energy lab uh talking about cell research efficiency and all and it this is like a very good research this is an original research that they have published over here with a bunch of different PDFs charts etc. So this is something that takes a lot of time and effort and I can definitely uh provide a backlink to it because this is of such high value. So if you are able to create similar assets that will naturally attract people to provide backlinks to it and finally by examining your competitors back links. So in addition to uh doing active and the passive methods or strategies of link building, you can also look at examining your competitors to see and reverse engineer what they are doing. What type of content tends to earn more backlink for them? Who is linking to leaders in your niche? Uh and look for different patterns, right? Like what are the different top pages, topics, style, length and format. So for example, does your competitor write about how to style or controversial subjects and uh it is basically able to get back links through those. Uh what is the format? Is it long content? Is it short content? Are they using a lot of images, videos? Do they use a lot of pictures, graphics, GIFs? And what is the style of writing? All of these things will help you understand more about uh uh what are the different areas and what are the different ways that you can build back links. What are the different websites that may be interested in getting your back links or even what are the directories where you can get yourself listed just like we saw with storebox. So that’s basically uh like how you uh like some of the strategies of how you can build back links overall. Uh next up I’m going to give a quick demo on SEM Rush. I already did this a little bit but I want to show a few other things. Let me just open it up. So, SCM rush we u looked at how you can do a little bit of competitive research. Uh but uh let’s do it once again. I’ll just run some website over here. Um let’s see which website should we run. um 3PL companies in Bangalore. Okay, let’s go with this one. Okay, what does this look like? So this is a website that has um major traffic share from India but it also has a lot of traffic from US etc. But basically what this do does is uh when you run it similar uhly in SEM Rush or AHS etc. for any website it will provide you a lot of information about uh their rankings their authority score uh DA equals to authority score. Yes, it’s the same. Uh they will also tell you about how much organic traffic they are getting, how many backlinks they have, right? Uh it also tells you about uh pages per visit. Um like these are some of the additional metrics that they sort of show. As you scroll down, you can also see a trend. Looks like uh their organic traffic decreased uh in 2023 and it has recovered a little bit ever since. Right. As I go down, I can see these are the top keywords that they are currently ranking for. Software companies in Hyderabad, good firms, cloud computing companies in India, uh cloud companies in India, medical billing companies, right? These are the keywords that they are ranking number one for. Uh branded traffic they have around 5%, so that means most of the keywords are non-branded keywords. Um we also have a split by intent. Looks like majority of it comes from uh navigational and then uh navigational is the major and then these are uh other similar websites which also have similar set of keywords or similar set of keywords that they’re ranking for. So clutch.co, manifest.com, designrush. These are some of the other websites that are also ranking for similar uh keywords. Looks like DesignRush has a higher uh density of overall keywords and traffic etc. Uh clutch.co also has a better one. So these are the two that are like proper competitors, right? So this is basically how you can quickly understand each of the different things. Yeah. 33% commercial. That’s pretty interesting actually in fact. Yeah. Absolutely. Right. So this tells you basically in a very nice overview of how things are running for them. So now what I can do from this is let’s say if I want to understand the keywords that they are ranking for and if I if this is a good competitor for me I would go to the details of this and I will get all the um not all but at least a significant list of keywords that they are ranking for and if these are the keywords that I want to rank for as well I can basically uh get those and do that. It’s still loading. Yeah, there it is. Right. It also tells me the intent if it is commercial, navigational, informational and what is the URL that is ranking? Uh what is the keyword difficulty? Uh the volume overall, what is the percentage of traffic, how much traffic they are actually getting. Right? Let me see. There should be something over here for paid one. If I go to domain overview. So this is the organic segment and this is the advertising research. In advertising they don’t have anything right now. So major traffic is coming from organic and uh next thing that I can basically do is I can also do a backlink audit of this. So there is like a backlink analytics audit etc. So I just I will just click on backlinks over here. And what this will do is this will help me understand uh uh how their back links overall look like. So as you can see uh they have total 30 to,000 websites that are referring to it. Uh but uh they have like 5.1 million back links. But what matters is this referring domains are these uh monthly visits that they get are u almost like half a million and the organic traffic that they get is 133 or 137,000. Um now out of that we can also see the overall distribution of the authority score. So very good and niche relevant is what it says. So what this means is uh the backlink profiles look natural right the link power is very good. So basically measures how many backlinks this domain has as well as their overall quality uh organic traffic and estimated of how much organic uh search traffic this domain gets. Uh you can also take a quick look at the network graph if you want to uh do something fancy over here to understand like how uh the backlinks are overall there and we also have like a nice authority score trend in the last 12 months. Over here uh we get uh to know the referring domains looks like they have done some backlink uh building in the last few months. Uh number of backlinks have definitely declined however. So maybe the referring domain have gone up but the number of backlinks declined but as you can see okay these are the anchor text uh good firms badge good firms logo digitance empty anchor good firm clutch badge upwork badge okay so it looks like what they’re doing is uh since they are a aggregator a lot of them are uh adding their badges or certification that they are listed over there as well So this gives you a pretty good idea of what they are doing and how they are getting all of these back links. So what I would do is as a next step I can look into few things. Uh now if I go to back links what I can do is I can basically filter these based on follow. It is still loading. Yeah. Uh based on I want to make sure that these are do follow links. So do follow means follow. Okay. Now I will have the data of uh what are the overall links that are follow links. Right? So what I can do is um as a part of this I can also look at the backlinks that this company has lost and let’s say if this company I’m a competitor of goodfirms.co What I can basically do is I can identify if any of these lost pages have content that is relevant to me or relevant to my site and based on that I can identify if maybe I want to u reach out to them and get some links. That is a very simple way of doing a research of your competitor and trying to uh get some back links for wherever they lost it. So if any of these uh make sense for me, I can reach out to them. Right? Second thing that I can do is I can go to index pages and in index pages looks like overall they have 1.3 million pages indexed. So probably they have a lot more pages but these many uh pages are what indexed. Uh basically what this means is these are the number of pages that Google has indexed of their website. Now out of this what I can do is I can select this what are the broken pages and from this I can see if there are any pages that currently have significant number of back links and if those pages are relevant for me I can basically go to the backlinks of theirs or the domains that are providing these back links and uh then I can also reach out to them by creating a similar page or pro asking them like okay why don’t you link to my page which is much better okay so um basically that is what I can do from this so for example this comp uh this page it is currently not found what I can do is I can just click on all the domains and then in this I can essentially go to these websites if if they make sense to me. Uh let me just sort by this first authority score. Looks like these are very small domains. So doesn’t really matter much. But yeah, as you can see like this is another opportunity that I can find wherein if there are any websites that have good authority score and they are pointing to links that are broken, I can uh essentially ask them to replace that with my link. So these are some of the small things that you can do to uh quickly get some back links as well. So let’s try and understand something. Let’s just go to uh overall. Let’s just go back to this. Okay. So referring domain. Let me just go to this Okay. Now if you notice this one domain has provided 1.3 million back links. So let’s just take a look at this. Okay. So looks like what is happening is probably they have provided a backlink in the footer or a header section. They have around 1.3 pages 1.3 million pages and since they have provided in the footer or header it is that backlink is replicated across all of the the pages. So let’s just validate that. See they have put it in the footer. So that’s why the number of backlink are shown every for every single page. So if they have 2 million pages, it will show that this one domain has provided 2 million back links just because it is in the footer. So that is basically what is happening here. Does that mean it’s good? Doesn’t really matter. As long as there is one backlink that is also good enough. Okay. So this is typically how you do your um competitive analysis. Now obviously SCM Rush has a bunch of different tools and um methods of doing it and you can like use all of those. In fact you can also use something like site audit to do like a quick SEO audit as well. Yeah. So that’s basically how you kind of look into your competitor right and try to identify what you can do with them. Now, SCM Rush personally I think it is a pretty good tool but also it is quite pricey. So um like it has a free version as well but it is quite limited but you can still use it to explore what the tool looks like overall. So what about the free tool? Uh these are two which are available. The first one is small SEO tools. These are like small small things that uh it has like a combination of all of them and you can basically uh try to quickly like use some of these to get what you want. Um these tools are ad supported and even these have some limitation but it is still a bit better like text analysis which plagiarism checker and all. Um they also have like a design tool, image editor, keyword tool. This is related to SEO uh backlink tool, right? Uh but yeah, these are still uh some decent tools that you can use uh and they are available for free because they are supported by uh advertisements. And then there is SC optim. Okay. So SC Optima. So uh what does SC Optima does? It is a pretty good uh tool to do a quick audit of your website’s SEO. Uh it is pretty comprehensive in the sense of the checklist but it is still limited because at the end of the day this is a free tool. So let’s try and understand what it looks like. So what it does is it checks five to six different areas of your website and uh from that it tries to identify uh the different things that needs to be improved and um yeah five different things it’s almost finished. Yeah. So this is where it is. So it checks your on-page SEO, it checks the links, usability, performance, and social media. So it’s like a full-fledged audit, but at the same time, this is like a quick audit. What that what that means is it just checks your homepage. It is not checking other websites. Sorry, not other website, other pages of the website. It is not checking uh things around um let’s say uh how overall it is impacting what are the different type of uh uh ways that you can improve it etc. It is not going as deep as screaming frog SEO does. That’s basically what I want to say but at the same time it it still provides pretty good results. So let’s just take a look at both of these right and try and understand what it is. So uh Kanti Veda looks like uh this is what is this website kanti.com home organic. Okay interesting. So basically organic products. Perfect. Sounds good. Now um what it says is onpage SEO there are things that can be improved. Uh links it’s F. Uh social can be improved apparently. Uh performance can be improved and usability can be improved. This is how it is scoring you across the entire diagram. If your um um like if these this chart has more blue area covered that means the better your website is. Now does that mean every single thing that they say is right? Not necessarily. You will have to use your own understanding and context of the website to see like if that is a high priority or not. Uh so over here it also prioritizes things for you like it provides like recommendations execute a link building strategy include metad description tag looks like you don’t have meta description tag on this page uh reduce your total page size increase length of title tag uh add H1 header tag improve sideloadad speed as you can see there’s a bunch of different things right and if I want I can take a look at those independently or individually also so for title tag it says it should be between 50 to 60 characters in length. Meta description is not there. It shows like a quick snippet. Obviously, this doesn’t look that great. Uh because the meta description as well as there can be improvement with the title. Um okay, language it has detected English US. Uh H1 header tag uh is not being used. So, as you can see, it like provides like a pretty good overview, right? It also talks about keyword consistency uh in the page and the frequency of those different phrases that are added. Uh amount of content there is image alternative text is not there. So all of the things that I sort of talked about or mentioned is something that it will do a quick audit of. Why is it providing this for free? Some of you may ask. The reason is because this is doing it just for one page. In a comprehensive audit you would be looking at multiple pages. And that is where SEO optimr u makes money right. So usability it can be better. Uh it shows this popup right uh as it renders and on tablets looks like it is not rendering properly. Uh bunch of different optimization for speed email privacy performance results. Um it like shows like how it is working overall bunch of other things. So this is basically uh a pretty decent report and if you want you can also run it. It is free version right like it is a free thing that you can run. So that is basically what an audit typically looks like. I know I I just cut it pretty quickly but that’s basically what it is. Now how does an audit transform from uh auditing the website to uh let’s say doing an SEO. Um so the next thing is to understand and identify uh what an SEO actually does. M so most of the things that we talked about were about SEO in general but uh how would you actually approach an existing website? Uh so let’s just talk about that a little bit. So the first thing is obviously when you’re approaching an existing website what you will do is you will try to understand uh what they are currently doing and how they are. You would be you can probably run something like SE optimr to understand uh uh how they are currently doing. You can also run the uh screaming frog SEO tool to understand uh what are the different links what are the different issues. Uh it also provides like a list of things that you should be improving right according to uh along with priorities and what it is etc. You can look at those from both of these you can identify what you can do to improve it. But overall in addition to this what you should also be looking at is you should be looking at the website itself. Visit the website try and understand what is the structure. How are they uh linking each of the pages together? Are they utilizing all the right things or not in terms of uh is their content built based on a keyword strategy or it is just built for some reason. uh is it properly categorized or not? If it is easily accessible or not, their robots.ext, their uh uh site map, uh how they are indexed, are all the pages indexed or not? Check their Google search console. Uh check how the users are navigating the website once they visit. If they already have some traffic, see if they are visiting the website. Uh what is the user doing? You can do this from Google Analytics, right? uh you can check like once they visit the first page are they going to other pages or not? What are they doing? Are they achieving the goal that they want or not? And once you get to this point right you yourself will get a lot of ideas of what you can do, what you can improve and how you can fix things and only after that you just need to create a list of things that you would want to do to fix the existing setup. Once you have done that, the next step then starts from the basic keyword research. So once you have done all of this, you will do another set of keyword research. You will try to see if the current set of keywords that they are focusing on or their website is focused on is it good? Can we improve the content? Uh if you identify new set of keywords, see if uh you can create some good content for that. After that, follow the entire set of things that I talked about throughout all of the seven sessions previously, right? Uh from keyword research, go to onpage SEO, go to technical SEO, check everything. Uh check if uh their entire setup for technical SEO is proper or not. Are they using the schema properly or not? Uh if for the new content creator al created also if they are doing it or not. Uh are they applying the Google eat methodologies or not? and so on and so forth. You would also be then looking into backlinks. What type of backlink they currently have? What are the different opportunities around that? Can you get uh some links for them? And that is how you start to build an entire data around not just what is the challenges right now, but you will also be able to identify what you would want to do. And this audit that I’m talking about is not a simple audit. This sometimes it takes about 2 to 3 weeks of time for you to just work on it and after you have comprehensively built it that becomes like a plan that you can follow for the next one year. So that is essentially how you should be thinking or approaching any existing website as well, right? Um so yeah that’s that’s basically how you do SEO. So what I’m going to do right now is I’m going to talk about um a success measurement a little bit about what are the key metrics that you should be looking at. So success measurement as it says SEO not only involves the analysis of basic metrics like traffic from organic search but it also requires a holistic approach to measure success or measure business outcomes and making adjustment based on the data. sales is one of the important business outcome that they’re looking for as a part of SEO which makes sense at the end of the day. Why invest money and resources and time on uh SEO if it is not going to achieve a business outcome, right? And that is the entire reason businesses invest in SEO altogether. So what are the challenges when it comes to measuring SEO value? The first thing is that you don’t own the data, right? What this means is every SEO data that you see is provided from Google. Um basically Google from Google search console will tell you if your website is good or not. Uh if your website is indexed or not, how what kind of impressions you’re seeing etc. Um and uh then obviously uh sometimes you may not have proper analytics setup or proper ways of measuring setup. That’s also a big issue. tracking is properly not set up. There are not proper people to help out with this and at the end of the day you don’t trust the measurements that are currently set up. Right? So this is based on a survey that was conducted but this tells you that uh what the major challenges are. So when it comes to measuring the simplest and easiest way is essentially to use an analytics tool like Google Analytics. Uh now does that mean you will see 100% measurement? Not really. It will but still be around 90 to 95% of the measurement. So uh for a small website it doesn’t really matter much. But when you’re working with let’s say millions of traffic and millions of websites sorry millions of pages that is when you will start to see the major issue or challenge with this. So the first thing is anyways uh that the first thing is that you should uh install an analytics solution like Google Analytics. Second is define your business objectives and KP KPIs similar to sales. For some of you it may be traffic for some of you it may be leads for some of you it may be uh just getting newsletter signups right. So what are those? You need to define them and then configure those within the analytics. So in analytics today, you can also set up events uh to make sure that you’re measuring those business objectives in terms of the traffic in addition to the traffic that you’re getting as well. So overall, what are the metrics that you should be tracking? The metrics that you should be looking at at least from SEO perspective are the first one is keyword ranking. How can you look at keyword ranking? You can use tools like um um SEM Rush again. Uh so or you can also like for free you can use ahrefs uh there’s like a free uh tool in ahref for checking your ranking. Let me just open that. So this is a free tool uh keyword rank checker. So what it will do is we looked at good firms right so let’s say I want to check good firms uh ranking for uh 3PL companies right so let’s just take a look at that so this is the keyword 3PL companies the domain is this United States check ranking And it tells me that okay where my website or good firms ranks which is at 47 right now. And it also tells me like what are the current uh websites that are ranking 1 2 or three right? So this is basically uh how you can check your rankings. Now there are tools that just help you with rank checking as well. So you can use some of those too. What’s my rank for example? What’s my SER I think. But there is rank tracker multiple different rank trackers right like you can u uh track your rank. So for your website for example it will give you a list of what for what keyword what is your position how much traffic you’re getting etc and so on and so forth. So the first thing is as I mentioned keyword rankings tracking these are important. U back links what are the quality of backlinks and what are the quantity of backlinks measure that uh monitor that uh what is your domain authority you can get the authority score from multiple different third party websites. What type of organic traffic you’re getting? Organic traffic is going to be separate from paid traffic, social media traffic or direct traffic. Uh how much time someone is spending on a page. What is the bounce rate? So and uh then how much mobile traffic you’re getting. Typically it is going to be around uh 75 to 80% these days. And finally what is the clickthrough rate for your SEO. So for example when someone sees your listing are they clicking enough or not? And if they are not clicking enough, that’s a that’s something that you should be fixing as well. So yeah, that’s basically uh the ways that you sort of measure and work through SEO. What you need to remember is everything that I taught you guys so far is more of the foundational concepts. Once you learn this and understand this and as you dig deeper into it, you will notice that there are a lot of the things that will show up and that is quite common. Um, at the end of the day, it’s up to you, your grit and how you go through them which matters and how you like tackle those things because at the end of the day SEO is ever changing. uh and this is something that you guys will also know and understand because of how uh everyone is also fearing AI or and uh at the same time how everyone is like uh um looking at different search Google keeps releasing different algorithm updates and so on and so forth. So it is very important to keep yourself updated. >> Just a quick info guys, Intellipath offers digital marketing course in collaboration with IHUB IT RI. 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