1. Get your technicals right - make sure your website is crawlable and indexable. 
2. Find a keyword to target - the topic of your page and the main source of organic traffic.
3. Create an optimized page - both users and Google want useful and interesting content. 
4. Build links to the page - links are one of the most important ranking factors.

In this article, I’ll explain and demonstrate how this process works using some of the SEO tactics Ahrefs used to grow into a 9-figure SaaS company.

Technical factors can impact your rankings or even prevent your site from appearing on Google’s search result pages.

To rank your content, Google needs to:

In most cases, unless you’ve specifically instructed Googlebot not to crawl and/or index your site, your pages are ready to show up on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Keep in mind that it may take some time before Google indexes your content. 

The easiest solution to technical SEO issues is to get SEO auditing tools and fix any problems they report back to you. 

Two tools we recommend are Google Search Console and Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (they’re free). You can also set up Bing Webmaster Tools if you want to monitor your performance on Bing. 

For example, to find sitemap issues in Ahrefs Webmaster Tools: 

1. Open Site Audit 
2. Go to the All issues report and scroll to the Sitemap category
3. Click on the found issues and see the affected pages. You can also see the recommended solution

To get traffic from search engines, you need to create content about something people search for. 

Here’s an example. One of the keyword research methods we use is to look for search demand for specific niches or industries in our area of business. For this, we filter for keywords that include the word “for.” 

The content of a page is something that allows Google to “connect you” with the searchers. 

The more interesting and useful your content is, the better. And that’s because quality content is something users expect and search engines need to provide. In fact, Google admits that content is the most important ranking signal.

How Google exactly ranks content is kept a secret. But they actually provide a hint on the five things that determine which results will be shown for a given search query:

Let’s take a look at an example of optimizing a page for search. 

You’ll need two types of links: internal links and backlinks. Both are ranking signals, with backlinks being one of the major signals in SEO.

Internal links are links from other pages on the same website, e.g., a link from one article to another on our blog.

Their main roles in SEO are to help search bots crawl pages more efficiently and pass link equity from linking pages.

Because of the above reasons, you probably won’t find an article on our blog without at least one internal link pointing to another article or a product landing page.

By having internal links, we can create a situation where a page with a lot of backlinks can give a much-needed boost to newer pages (see the middleman method for more details).

Backlinks impact rankings and rankings impact traffic. So, generally speaking, the more backlinks you get, the more organic traffic you can generate.

The difficulty here is that you can’t fully control backlinks. You can either earn them organically (wait for people to discover you and link to you) or build them (ask people to link to you). Let’s look at that in more detail.

Generally speaking, the best links you can get are “followed” links placed within the main content and those that come from relevant, authoritative websites.

Head on to the guides listed below if you want to learn more about backlinks and link building.

Before your jump into the process, it’s good to have realistic expectations in terms of the time and money needed to do SEO successfully. 

When it comes to the results, SEO is usually a lengthy process. We learned from over 4k respondents that it typically takes between 3 - 6 months.

Here are a couple of other things to know when it comes to the time involved in the process:

• Crawling a page can take Google anywhere from a few days to a few weeks (source). So it seems that there’s a “natural delay” in SEO that comes from the technology itself.
• According to our study, only 5.7% of pages ranked in the top 10 (for at least one keyword) within no longer than one year.

As for the cost of SEO, the least costly option is doing SEO by yourself - all you need is time to learn and experiment and tools that fit your budget. 

Alternatively, you can consider hiring an agency, a freelancer or a consultant. Read our full study on SEO pricing to know what costs to expect.

Monitor your results on a regular basis because search engine rankings tend to change. For this, it’s best to use a tool that tracks your ranking history and shows how you stack up against competitors (see our Rank Tracker, for example). 

And because rankings change, be ready to regularly revisit step 3 to improve your content and step 4 to build more links.