SEO training: Maximize your online visibility with search engine optimization

The first part of the tutorial series is about getting to know search engine optimization as a core competence in online marketing and understanding its importance and scope for website operators and marketing managers.

The starting point of the customer journey is often the Google search input field. And that's exactly where this lesson starts. It's about snippets, universal search and structured data.

Important performance and loading speed metrics have been bundled as Core Web Vitals, which, together with mobile optimization, safe browsing, HTTPS and no intrusive interstitials as signals for page experience, represent a separate ranking factor for Google. This lesson explains how you can check and ensure a high Page Experience in your projects.

When a user clicks on a ranked website after entering a search term on Google.com, Google measures exactly how long the user stays on the website and how quickly the user switches back to the SERP results to visit another website. Google sees key figures in various interactive user signals that represent a ranking factor and thus the classification of the relevance of your website in the SERPs for certain search terms.

There is a whole range of technical aspects that are a prerequisite for good rankings and all related measures. It is important to know these, even if some of them can only be implemented correctly by a developer.

The website content should be organized according to a certain structure and linked to each other. There are many factors to consider.

Some actual agency client projects will show you the great benefits of search engine optimization using an SEO tool like Seobility.

A real agency client project is crawled and various options for the crawling settings are explained. The results are evaluated as a starting point for the first optimizations.

After crawling, the Seobility dashboard shows different areas with optimization levels in "Technology & Meta", "Structure" and "Content". In a live project, errors are explained and corrected step by step to show the actual manual work involved in search engine optimization.

Performance (loading speed of server and website) is also a ranking factor, which is why this lesson focuses on achieving some performance improvements. This is achieved here, among other things, by adapting the image files from the old JPG format to a modern WEBP format, which enables better compression of images.

In the live project of the nursing service website, further errors are now being identified by the SEO tool and fixed directly in the WordPress backend. Further crawls show that the errors have been corrected.

The latest work in our live project is about recurring problems that many websites do again and again without realizing it.

Looking at the information architecture of a website, the content of the homepage and subpages should be optimized for keywords that meet the highest possible user interest. In this lesson, you will learn how to select the keywords with the highest search volume and low competition in order to rank highly in the search engine for such search queries.

You can use the keyword check on subpages to test how well you have optimized for your defined keyword and where you can still make adjustments. You will also receive a score value to classify your keyword optimization.

After all the on-page and keyword optimization, you naturally want to know where your website ranks. The ranking check helps you to keep an eye on your visibility for certain keywords.

In the competitor comparison, you can see what your competitors are doing better from an SEO perspective. The SEO Compare Check helps you to identify your own optimization potential - especially where your competitors are currently doing better than you.

Other tools for competitor analysis are domain, gap and intersection analysis. Use these tools to correctly classify your website in the ranking of your competitors, to also use keywords of others and to exploit further optimization potential.

Forums with millions of posts in particular have problems with the perceived quality of content when hundreds of thousands of embedded images no longer work and there are too many inactive, content-free user accounts in the portal. Here you can find out how we automatically removed 580,000 broken links from millions of posts and why we deleted over 764,000 registered users who had become inactive.

One ranking factor is the authority of a domain. Google measures how many other websites link to your own (backlinks!) in order to obtain a key figure for the externally measured relevance. The domain authority can be determined with the Seobility backlink checker. I will also tell you what measures you can take to attract external links to your website. I will also show you what you can do if you identify bad links to your website (Bad Neighborhood).

In the last part, I'll give you five quick tips for working with websites that are helpful for your on-page quality and search engine optimization. These are about working with structured data, multilingualism, unformatted text insertion, texts from legal notice and privacy policy generators and the search functions in page source code mode.

This is a screencast of my presentation from Seo Day on November 2, 2023 in Cologne.