For my SEO consulting clients, I have come to develop the framework ERICA to make sure all SEO efforts have a maximum impact towards the end result of high rankings and huge traffic volumes from search.
The acronym ERICA stands for Evolution, Interlinking, Research, Content and Accountability. Here's what they mean in practice:
If you get the most traffic (or often highest converting) traffic from search engines, your most important channel is organic. For this reason, 2 things must be constantly monitored:
Organic visibility helps to see positive impacts of your SEO efforts in very little time, as it takes into account your rankings even if they don't bring in traffic yet (e. g. a keyword moving from page 5 to page 3 after some optimizations contributes to increased visibility).
Make sure you check both, your organic visitors, but also your organic visibility, on a constant basis! #seo @sistrix Click To TweetResearch is a huge part of SEO - not only for defining content to be written (see "C" of ERICA) and keywords to be used, but also in terms of your competitors - what are they doing well, where do they get their traffic from, what can we learn from them and where are we better, etc.
Researching also means paying attention to the respective markets and intents, as rankings greatly can vary between different countries, cities and search intents.
SEO means #research: competitors, keywords, content, tactics, ... what else would you add? #seo Click To TweetGoogle, despite all social signals and artificial intelligence, still relies heavily on links as a signal (or vote of confidence), following the simplified premise that important sites will have (earned) links from authoritative sites in their niche, and thus deserve to rank higher.
Link building has greatly evolved over time, but is still one of the key tactics to rank higher. Both external links, but also the often overlooked internal links (from one page within your site to another page) give Google an idea on content relevance and importance.
Once your site and #content is optimized, #links will move the needle and determine your #rankings. #seo Click To TweetContent must be written with an intent. If a site wants to attract organic visitors, its articles must respond to search queries with a certain volume to really have an impact on the overall traffic. A content plan or content map makes sure the content you have addresses high volume queries and isn't being published just for the sake of having another post up on the blog.
Content must be written with an intent. #seo #searchintent Click To TweetEven site owners who know that they get most of their traffic (and many sales) through Google, very often are so busy they forget about checking their statistics, or they don't take potential SEO risks seriously enough until they sense a big drop in sales and then search for a reason why that happened.
In order to create a certain sense of accountability, I usually do 1-2 video calls with my SEO consulting clients each month, where we analyze together how the organic traffic is evolving, and determine the next action steps to further attract more organic visitors.
Only what you #execute will contribute to your desired results. #accountability Click To TweetWould you like to know how ERICA can help you grow your organic traffic? Schedule your first 15 min. call with me today!
