The SEO Wheel:10 Elements That Must Be Included for Improved Rankings

Today, I want to do a quick walkthrough of the SEO wheel and why it’s important for your business, medical practice, firm or agency to have it in place.

The First SEO Myth

So, when we talk about SEO or search engine optimization, a lot of people instantly go to the fact that they think the goal is to rank better. So, get our keywords higher. But that’s just the means to the end. The true end of SEO, what everybody should have as their bull’s eye is this, the end game is not ranking. It’s new customers, patients or clients from qualified traffic. So, if you’re in a service industry or a medical practice, or something like that, you want bookings. If you have products, you want more sales. That’s the end game of SEO.

The Second SEO Myth

And then there’s a second myth, and that’s this. There’s some type of magic secret key, that if we can just find it, it will unlock some kind of Pandora’s box of traffic.

Back in 2005, there were some magic secret keys, but the search engines have gotten a lot smarter. And so, SEO is not one magical thing that we do. There’s no silver bullet. Basically, it’s the culmination of many on-page and off-page elements that work together in tandem to grow traffic.

The SEO Wheel

And it’s what we at Moon and Owl call The SEO Wheel. (Note: this isn’t a linkwheel strategy despite the similar name.) It’s something we’ve developed. And we’ll talk about its strength.

Let me show you The SEO Wheel. The SEO Wheel has 10 elements that work together to drive traffic, which leads to bookings and sales on your site.

And this is important because many agencies will only use a small piece of the SEO wheel. They’ll use one or two tactics. And if the algorithm in Google shifts and those particular elements get de-emphasized, you’ll find your traffic drops off radically. So, we want to run all 10 elements consistently on your site, so that we have a very full and balanced approach to SEO.

01: Site Health

So, let’s walk through them really quick today. So the first thing in the SEO wheel is site health. And that’s basically our Google and other search engines seeing your site as healthy because they’re gonna reward a healthy site. So what are we talking about there?

We’re talking about things like do you have any 404s, which are error pages?
Are there duplicate titles, meta descriptions?
Are your headers set up right?
Is your speed right?

And we use multiple tools that crawl your site to make sure that it’s healthy. And so, this is kind of the 101.

You want the foundation of your site to be solid and error-free. So we maximize your site health.

02: Keyword Research

The next thing that you want to do is make sure that your site is targeting the right keywords. And so, not only do we want a high volume keyword, but we want a keyword that has buyer intent, transactional intent, it’s going to equal a win for your site.

And so, we want to get a full 360º view of all that is happening in regards to keywords. So your current keywords that are getting you brand clicks and also transactional clicks.

And then we want to look at entity related keywords. Those are words that Google associates with an entity, for example, a LASIK practice. It’s going to have several words that it formally associates as parallel entities with your main keyword. And we want to make sure to incorporate those in the mix.

We actually have some proprietary means that we’re not aware of that other agencies are using in order to find out what Google sees as related entity terms. We want to see what keywords your competitors are paying for. We want to see what the search volume is on those keywords and the number of results we’re competing against, and even what the Google suggest tool shows as related terms or questions people ask.

And then we populate that all into a structured or ranked keyword list in terms of importance and that’s where we begin the SEO efforts.

03. Page Tuning

The next thing we want to do is page tuning. And that’s where we tune our page structures to what is indicated as being important on the pages that already ranked very high on that term. So, we’ll go in and grab a keyword. We have two proprietary softwares we use to do this tuning.

Of course, Google won’t tell us the algorithm that they’re using, but we can put in the keyword and compare the page on your site to the top-ranking page sites, and see where the other sites are strong and have things in correlation that we don’t. And then we can go in and make those improvements. And we call that page tuning.

It’s typically, they’re decreasing or increasing the number of headers, exact match keywords, related keywords, word counts, image alt tags, partial keywords, but we don’t want to be artificial, but we do want to incorporate in our page what the top-ranking pages have in place. And we have the software to do that comparison.

04. Content Creation

Next, we start to create content around those keywords. And that benefits the site visitors. We don’t want to be artificial in our writing. But we make it easier for writers. Whether it’s your writers or we write for you, we can create content templates for articles and pages that inform the writers of, “Hey, use these keywords this time. Answer these questions. Here are some synonyms to use. Here’s how long it needs to be. Here are some high-ranking sources from which you can do research and draw.”v

And then we want to optimize existing content and future content along these guidelines, and we’ll even work with training if you have writers on the foundational elements of solid SEO writing. So that’s something else that we want have in place.

05. Syndicate Content Over a Network

Next in the wheel is once we get that content put together, we want to syndicate it out. What does that mean? It means we’re going to create more discoverable content with healthy backlinks to your site.

So, what we do is we create about 20 Web 2.0 platforms around your site that can rebroadcast your content. Those include social media, other parallel sites, also as well, including, like, bookmarking sites that have high authority.

So any article that comes on your site gets syndicated to this network with a backlink showing, “Hey, this article originally showed up on your main site.” And this serves to create healthy web links.

It grows what we call the E.A.T. score, which stands for expertise, authority, and trust, which is a ranking signal to Google. And it even allows others to discover your content on these other various platforms. So we say, if you’re gonna take the time to write content, why not leverage it out as best as possible. And one of the best ways to do that is through creating a syndication network.

06. Address Site Bleeding

Next, the next thing we want to do is address “bleeding.” Every site bleeds visitors, so it’s really important to determine the pages where people are either bouncing or exiting from your site. And we want to come in and shore those pages up because anybody that leaves your site, unless it’s on your thank you for buying page or your thank you for booking page is a lost possible customer, patient, client. And so, we find the pages that are bleeding the most, and sometimes we come in and give you content recommendations.

We can implement next steps. Like, if you like this, go check this out, that keep them on the site. We can even do A/B testing of your page layout and try to get that exit rate or that bleed rate down on that page.

07. A/B Test for Conversion

Next, we want to do A/B testing. So, A/B testing allows us to test different elements on a page to see if they can prove your conversion rates. That might be changing the color of a submit button, that might be moving your elements around on the page, that might mean either reducing or increasing the fields on a capture form. There are all kinds of ways for us to do that.

And then we can run A/B test and present users both versions and see which one wins, and let the data drive the decision.

08. On-page Entity Strengthening

Next, on-page entity strengthening. So, entity validation is a new SEO. And what entity is, is Google looking to say, “Is this a true and real entity, a person, a place, a thing, etc.?”

In the old days, Google wasn’t able to look at entity for strength.

So, basically back in the day, they just looked for the raw number of backlinks coming into a site, whoever had the most backlinks was considered the best entity. And so, that led to things, in the early days of SEO, like, link farms, you know, just getting as many backlinks direct to the main site as you can.

Google’s gotten smarter. So now, it’s asking the question, “Is this place a real entity and can we trust it?” And so, there are some ways we can really strengthen your entity and raise your E.A.T. score. So we want to really make sure that we’re emphasizing the best schema practices, and schema is some code that sits in the header of your site. And it basically tells Google more about you. It tells them, “Hey, we’re here, but we’re also this entity on Facebook, on LinkedIn. We also are located here.” And so, we can build all that code, the end-user doesn’t see it, the bot sees it, and it tells people about your website. So we want to make sure you have full, full, robust schema on your site.

And then we have some other means we do, where we build an internal entity page and we put all your entities basically together in one place. And as the bot crawls that page, it’s able to see all your properties in a single location. It kind of assimilates those together and that gives your site real power.

09. Off-page Entity Strengthening

Next, we want to do off-page entity strengthening. So we’ve talked about the on-page side, we want to make sure we’re doing the same things off the site in order to strengthen your brand. And this is where a host of SEO agencies get lost.

So, things we want to do or get third party mentions, even if they’re not backlinks, we want to get you cited on reputable sites because the algorithm is smart enough now to make that assimilation to say, Dr. So-and-so’s name appeared on this site, it’s a reputable site. We know who Dr. So-and-so is, he’s an entity now and so, we’re gonna give them raised authority because they’re being quoted on this reputable site.

We create an entity network of all kinds of strengthening platforms that helps Google to say, “This is a reputable, authoritative, trustworthy entity.” That can include knowledge panels, how we use Google My Business, how we use YouTube. Those are powerful because those are Google-owned properties.

In fact, we have a thing we do called building drive stacks, where we leverage Google’s narcissism in our favor, so in the favor of your site. And so we put together all these Google properties, and Google loves Google, and it then raises your entity E.A.T. score, activity, relevance, trust in Google’s eyes, which leads to more traffic. We want to build a large, but note, healthy backlink profile, so that your site gets a lot of authoritative votes, which leads to more traffic.

10. Track the Results Carefully

Finally, all efforts combined to grow the site’s E.A.T. score. So, we want a very clear measure of results.

That’s how we know whether SEO is working.

And so, we have a comprehensive dashboard and reports that we give you. We’re super transparent with our tactics and the results we’re getting. A lot of SEO agencies will be like, “It’s secret. We can’t tell you what we’re doing.”

You’re going to know exactly what we’re doing on your site and why each month, each week because we know you don’t want to reverse engineer that. You want to do what you do, not SEO.

And so, we’re very transparent with you about what we’re doing. We take KPI measurements, and typically, that’s the increase or decrease in organic traffic, the increase or decrease in your conversion goals, whatever those are. And if you do e-commerce on your site, the increase or decrease in revenue that comes from organic traffic. At the end of the day, that’s what matters to you.

We also look at six different measures of E.A.T. scoring to see how authoritative your site is. We want to know, is that authority going up or down? Is that expertise going up or down?

Again, we look at traffic growth. So, we’re going to look at converting traffic. We look at the means of traffic acquisition.

So, how did the traffic come in?
Which keyword drew the most traffic?
You know, what other elements worked in your favor?
Are the conversion goals being accomplished?
How are the individual keywords ranking and what is the result of traffic from each of those keywords?
The A/B testing deltas, when we look at this page version versus that page version, which one won?
What did we learn from it?
How can we apply it to other pages on your site?

We look at the tactical elements that are implemented and we disclose those to you. We look at the strategy and tactical recommendations that we have coming up for the next month.

So, you’ll always be fully abreast of what’s happening on your site and what the results of your SEO campaign are. So that’s The SEO Wheel.

Diversity Strengthens Against Algorithm Changes

I know I went through it quickly. Today, was just more of a cursory view of the SEO wheel. If you have a website and you are not doing these elements on your site, give us a call. If your SEO agency is not covering all these elements on your site, give us a call. Why?

Because if you don’t have those elements on your site, then you’re vulnerable to any kind of algorithm shift that happens in Google and/or, you might not be getting the best results you can get.