SEO Tuning: Why It Works and How to Do It [+Case Studies]

The broad strokes of search engine optimization (SEO) are relatively easy to understand, even for lay people.

Google and other search engines want to reward good content, and they want to provide users with relevant content for their needs.

Accordingly, good, relevant content makes it to the top of search engines.

If you want to achieve the highest rankings possible within your domain, you'll need to write lots of relevant, useful content for your target audience. You'll also need to support that content with a host of different SEO strategies, including technical optimization and link building.

But in today's hypercompetitive online marketing environment, the fundamentals alone aren't enough to guarantee you success. Instead, if you want any page of your website to dominate the competition and rise to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs), you'll need to incorporate SEO tuning.

But what exactly is SEO tuning, how is it so reliable, and how do you practice it for your internal pages?

We hope to answer all your questions and more in this guide.

What Is SEO Tuning?

SEO tuning is a specific set of strategies in the umbrella of search engine optimization.

These strategies are designed to help you fine-tune and polish an existing page, ultimately supporting it in terms of its ranking potential and relevance to your audience.

Chances are, if you've been operating a website for some time, you have lots of strong pieces of content that need just a little bit of extra help to reach the upper echelons of the SERPs.

The strategies in SEO tuning include things like cutting ineffective content, including more relevant keywords, minimizing keyword cannibalization, and fixing small technical issues.

Additionally, SEO tuning calls your attention to specific ranking factors and qualities of your page, so that you can maximize its likelihood of ranking highly for relevant queries. These include things like:

•       Images. Does your page have images, and if so, how are they optimized?
•       Header tags (H1-H2). Which header tags are in use and what are the strategically valuable keywords included in them?
•       Content length. Is your content an appropriate length, and if not, how can you add valuable content to it or cut it to an appropriate length?
•       Internal links. Do you have sufficient internal links to other pages on your website and are they relevant?

Note that SEO tuning isn't about creating new pages, nor is it about completely overhauling existing pages. Instead, it's about taking solid, reliable pages on your website and fixing the little issues that might be holding them back.

You can think about it as taking a page that ranks as a B or B+ and moving it to an A or A+.

Why SEO Tuning Works

Why does SEO tuning work?

For starters, SEO tuning can help you with the following:

•       Improved relevance. SEO tuning allows you to increase the relevance of a given page for the keywords and phrases that are most valuable to your organization. For example, if you have a page that offers details on how to fix a clogged kitchen sink, you'll need to make absolute certain that Google and other search engines can correctly identify the topic of the page and prioritize your page when providing this information to searchers.
•       Precise optimization. This process also allows you much more precise optimization. When writing content, you might be mindful of your most strategically valuable keywords and phrases, but you'll still spend most of your attention crafting quality content. SEO tuning affords you the opportunity for a final pass, so you can beef up the relevance and authority of your page and help it succeed.
•       Issue correction. The SEO tuning approach provides you a platform for correcting any minor issues you see in your content. Irrelevant content sections, technical performance issues, and even conflicting keyword targets can all be eliminated.
•       Content refreshing. As we've known for years, Google highly prioritizes new, fresh content. That's partially because humans frequently seek novelty, but also because older content has a much higher likelihood of being inaccurate or irrelevant. Simply making changes to your older pieces of content can help them seem fresher, and therefore help them rank higher in searches.
•       Cannibalization mitigation. Keyword cannibalization occurs when you have multiple pages competing for the same strategic keywords. This happens often with large organizations and sprawling websites with hundreds of pages. While it is somewhat valuable to have multiple pages with your most important keywords at the domain level, it's also important to avoid having pages directly compete with each other. SEO tuning helps you clarify your individual page goals and remove redundant competition from the equation.
•       Conversion opportunities. The primary goal of an SEO strategy is to attract more organic traffic to your website, but that goal is usually in service to another, more important goal: generating more sales. SEO tuning gives you a chance to see how your conversion optimization efforts are faring, so you can improve them if desired or necessary.

It's also important to recognize the current landscape of SEO.

These days, the SEO field is incredibly competitive, even for relatively obscure fields and niches. Even if you have a piece of great content on your website, there are probably a dozen other websites that offer content of similar relevance and quality. If you want to reach page one, or even rank one for a given keyword phrase or query, it's imperative that your page is as polished as possible.

At the highest competitive levels, even the smallest changes can make a big difference.

On top of that, companies that heavily invest in SEO often suffer from redundancy and pages that overlap in their pursuit of goals. SEO tuning provides you with an opportunity to separate your strategic targets and remain focused on your most important objectives.

How to Tune a Page for SEO

How do you tune a page for SEO?

The easy answer is to work with the team of SEO experts, like those of us here at Marketer.co. We can help you identify the most valuable pages of your website, brainstorm about strategically valuable keyword targets, and ultimately conduct analyses that lead us to the best SEO tuning strategies for each page.

But if you choose to do the work on your own, you need to keep the following concepts in mind:

•       User intent optimization. Throughout the process, focus on user intent. Who is this page meant to serve? What will they be searching for? How can you cater to them and give them what they need?
•       User experience optimization. Similarly, you should highly prioritize user experience optimization. Perfect keyword frequencies and linking strategies are nice, but they aren't going to serve you well unless your page is user friendly.
•       Page topic and query relevance. The topic of your page and the keywords within it should be highly relevant for strategically valuable queries. SEO tuning helps you discover gaps in your page so you can close them.
•       Technical optimization for ranking factors. You also need to think broadly about technical optimization for important ranking factors. The better and more thoroughly you can analyze a page’s potential performance, the more actions you'll be able to take.

SEO Tuning Audit

Everything starts with an SEO tuning audit. Essentially, this phase is about identifying potential page targets of your website and evaluating them in terms of SEO performance. There are SEO tuning software tools available to help you do this; these will often provide you with specific recommendations, based on the content of your website.

However, it's also possible to conduct this audit on your own.

When evaluating pages of your website, look at:

•       Current positions. Where are your top pages ranking? Pages with significant ranking potential, without hitting the top ranks are your most lucrative targets.
•       Current traffic. You may also want to study traffic patterns for each valuable page on your website. Which pages naturally attract disproportionate traffic, given their existing rankings? Which ones will be most valuable to help you achieve your long-term marketing and traffic generation goals?
•       Current conversion rates. You can practice conversion rate optimization separately or together as part of your SEO tuning strategy. If you're concerned about landing more sales, make sure to evaluate current conversion rates of your various pages as well.
•       User behavior. It can also be valuable to study user behavior. This can help you determine traffic patterns within your website, as well as how engaging your content is from a user experience standpoint.

Once you have a list of valuable page targets, take a look at the following:

•       Search queries/keywords. Using keyword research tools and analyses of your existing pages, assign one or two specific keywords, phrases, or search queries to each page in your SEO tuning arsenal. It's possible to optimize for more, but be aware that each new target is going to split your attention and potentially compromise your results.
•       Competing pages. For each strategically valuable query, study competing pages. Which competitors and rivals are currently ranking ahead of you? What makes their content better? How can you set the bar even higher?
•       Onsite factors. Take a look at on site factors as well, including things like images, header tags, meta descriptions, and technical performance.

SEO Tuning Analysis and Recommendations

Once you have a full analysis in place for a given page, you'll be able to devise a plan for how to make changes to it. If you're working with SEO consultants, or if you've used an SEO tuning tool, you'll likely have specific recommendations to work with. Otherwise, you'll need to brainstorm solutions on your own. Depending on the current status and position of your page, there are probably many things you can do.

The process of applying these changes can be somewhat tedious and repetitive, but remember that every tweak inches you closer to SEO ranking perfection.

Surgical Removal

Many people think SEO tuning is all about adding new, better content. But in many cases, the stronger move is to surgically remove things that aren't working.

For example:

•       Irrelevant or redundant sections. Are there any sections of content that aren't relevant to the main topic? Are there any sections that are redundant? If so, get rid of them. They're cluttering up what is otherwise a good piece of work.
•       Outdated materials. Look for anything that's currently outdated or proven to be inaccurate. This is your chance to update your content and make it relevant for the present.
•       Broken links. Scan for any broken links and replace them with links that are working. If those links are internal and valuable for users, they'll be even stronger.
•       Fluff. Even the best writers have a tendency to include fluff from time to time. It can sneak into your content and go undetected for years. SEO tuning is your ultimate opportunity to remove it.
•       Bad calls to action (CTAs). Crafting good CTAs is a fine and challenging art. But based on your performance metrics, you should be able to determine which of your content CTAs aren't working. Consider cutting them and replacing them with something better. For most pages, one or two CTAs is plenty.

Tweaking Opportunities

Once you remove everything compromising your SEO ranking potential, you can focus on tweaking what already exists and adding more.

Pay especially close attention to the following:

•       Title and header tags. Your title and header tags help Google understand what your content is about, as well as how it's structured. These are some of the most important tweaking opportunities, since they allow you to include appropriate keywords and prove the proper organization of your content.
•       Images. These days, users want more visuals. Every page of your website should have images, and those images should be properly optimized with descriptive, relevant text.
•       Length and depth. Both long-form and short-form content have places in your SEO strategy, but you need to use these dramatically different types of content in appropriate contexts. For some articles, 1,000 words is plenty. For other, deeper topics, you'll want several thousand words of informative content. Keep in mind that adding fluff for the sake of fluff isn't going to help you succeed in creating a piece of content of appropriate length.
•       Internal links. Internal links aid in the navigability of your website, and they make your content more informative and engaging as well. Make sure there are at least one or two internal links for each 1,000 words of content on your page. Any more than that could be problematic, and any less than that could be wasted potential.
•       Organization and flow. Verify the organization and logical flow of your content. We don't know exactly how Google evaluates the outline or organization of your content, but this plays a crucial role in helping users understand and engage with your material.
•       Readability and engagement. Similarly, it's important to polish the readability and engagement of your content. Don't be afraid to use bullet points, bold fonts, and different formatting elements to make your content easier to read.
•       Competitive opportunities. Thoroughly read competing pieces of content that rank ahead of yours and find a way to outdo them. Can you include better information? More information? More direct or more readable information? Strive to offer the best content possible on this specific topic.
•       Technical performance. Gauge the technical performance of your page while you're at it. Does it load quickly and easily? Are all elements loading seamlessly across browsers and devices?
•       Conversion performance. Conversion optimization is technically outside the scope of SEO tuning from a purist perspective, but this is an excellent opportunity to try out some new calls to action.

Measurement and Analysis

The final step is to measure and analyze your results. Keep in mind that Google’s index updates only periodically, and it may take several weeks or months before your changes take full effect. Schedule an analysis in the future to see if your changes have increased your pages’ rankings, traffic, conversions, and other dimensions of performance; if they haven't, analyze why and consider starting from scratch.

Don’t Overtune for SEO: How to Avoid Overtuning

So the solution is to tune your pages for SEO as much as humanly possible, right?

Not necessarily. There's such a thing as “too much of a good thing” in most areas of life, and SEO tuning is no different.

Google doesn't want pages that are tuned to technical perfection, necessarily; it also wants authentic, user-centric content. If it becomes clear that you're artificially manipulating your rankings, or if your content becomes so tuned that it reads as robotic or mechanical, it could end up hurting you more than helping you.

These are just some examples of how:

•       Keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is the practice of including too many keywords in a given piece of work. If you want to ring for a given keyword or phrase, it's a good practice to include that keyword or phrase throughout your article, especially in the title and header tags. However, overoptimizing can make your content seem spammy and unfriendly to users.
•       Excessive linking. Similarly, excessive linking can be problematic. It's a good thing to link to other pages on your website, but if you have a link in every sentence, it's going to turn users off. Note that this goes for both internal and external links.
•       Unnatural linking. Any unnatural linking processes can also work against you. For example, it's permissible to include valuable keywords and phrases in the anchor text of your links, but if all your anchor text instances include primary focus keywords and seem unnatural, it could work against you. Similarly, linking to too many top-level pages can seem suspicious as well. Make sure your links are highly relevant and valuable to the people encountering them.
•       Poor content. There are countless ways that your content can display poor quality. If it's poorly written, poorly researched, insufficient in terms of depth, or difficult to read, it can be a significant mark against you. Unfortunately, many SEO tuners have made the mistake of optimizing for technical precision at the cost of content quality.
•       Keyword cannibalization. Remember, one of the reasons why SEO tuning is often successful is because it can prevent or eliminate keyword cannibalization. But in practice, SEO tuning can sometimes lead you to pursue optimizing for more keywords, which isn't necessarily a good thing.

These tips and strategies can prevent you from overtuning your articles for SEO:

•       Optimize for users first. Always keep your users in mind – and keep them as your top priority. If a strategic move would technically increase your chances of high rankings, but it would also seem unnatural or spammy to a user, err on the side of caution and cater to your users.
•       Improve overall content quality. Similarly, every move you make in the realm of SEO tuning should either increase the quality of your content or keep it neutral. If you have to sacrifice content quality in some way to make an SEO tuning move, you probably shouldn't make it.
•       Keep pages focused. Each page of your website should be laser focused on a specific topic or keyword phrase. That doesn't mean you can't have domain-wide strategic targets, but you should have a unique justification for each page to exist. Without a strategic goal, SEO tuning isn't going to help you much.
•       Diversify keywords and links. Similarly, make sure you diversify your keywords, links, and linking strategies. Too much repetition is going to compromise your content quality and threaten the results of your efforts.

Real Results of SEO Tuning

We’ve helped a wide range of clients achieve next-level SEO results, and one of the best tools in our arsenal is SEO tuning.

Here are a few of the best success stories we have to offer:

SEO tuning is hard. If you have hundreds of pages to optimize for, it’s even harder. That’s why we make every effort to help our clients navigate this space – and tune their pages for ranking perfection. If you’re interested in a free SEO tuning audit, or if you need help executing the finer directives of your SEO strategy as a white label SEO reseller, contact us for a free consultation today!

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