SEO Guide. How to optimize a website and how much it costs

When a user enters a query into Google, the search results are included in it for a reason. Search services compare pages in many ways and offer the user the best ones. You can influence the output by "persuading" the search engine to put your site on the first page.

Everything related to optimizing a site for search queries is called SEO (search engine optimization). In this article, we will look into the topic in detail: how to please a search engine, does every site need SEO, how to get to the top places, how to implement SEO on your site, how much it costs and how to distinguish high-quality optimization from mediocre.

Sergey Lukashevich, the leader of the SEO direction at Unisender, helped with the article. Sergey shared cases, insights and talked about SEO problems he encountered while working at Unisender.

The article is huge, so just in case, keep the content — jump right into the section that is interesting to you:

What is SEO?

Why SEO is necessary for any website

What affects the site's position in the search results

The technical part

Site hygiene

Text optimization

Improvement of behavioral factors

External optimization

How to implement SEO on your website

Criteria for high-quality SEO

What is SEO
SEO (search engine optimization) — these are actions that raise the site in the search results for certain queries. The better the SEO, the higher the position of the site. Well, the higher the position of the site, the more organic traffic it receives — more payments and registrations.

Google search results for "what is SEO".
Google search results for "what is SEO". Whoever is higher has a better optimized website for search algorithms
Reference: how to optimize a website for Yandex
Working with SEO is working with search engine algorithms. To give the user the most relevant results, algorithms compare sites in many ways. For example, they evaluate the site's loading speed and user behavior on the page, and look at the content of articles.

Reference: how to optimize a website for Google
Search engines have help for website optimization. There are quite basic recommendations there — they can help the site rank better, but for competitive queries this is not enough to break into the top.

It is not known for certain how the algorithms of search engines work. This is kept secret so that fraudsters cannot use this data for their own purposes.

In addition, search engines are evolving. Seasoned SEO specialists are aware of many subtleties that affect the output. The more experienced the SEO specialist, the more predictable SEO works for him.

SEO Guide. How to optimize a website and how much it costs 2
Sergey Lukashevich
Head of SEO Unisender

SEO refers to marketing and has a similar goal — to get targeted traffic and monetize it into potential customers. But unlike other areas of marketing, SEO has a great emphasis on technical specifics, because the SEO specialist works with search engine algorithms — and these are numbers and analytics. But there is nowhere without creativity: linking pages, designing a website, adding the necessary sections — all this is the design and creativity of the platform and processes.

SEO has another global goal — to better understand the audience. Search queries are the key to what people are interested in. It's like surveys, only more reliable — in the search engine, the user does not hide his tastes and is not shy about them.

How and what a person is looking for can provide insights for the creation and development of products. For example, Unisender has a utm tag generator, feature pages, a section with ready-made mailing templates, a section with services, and a significantly redesigned price page.

But not all ideas can be implemented quickly due to the workload of colleagues.

Another example: SEO can help you design a startup's website. Based on the requests, you can understand whether a blog is needed, which sections will be needed on the main page.

Many hypotheses are born precisely from SEO. I even have a special scoring document - in it I enter all the ideas that come to my mind during the analysis of search queries. Some ideas require large budgets, while others are limited to one page. I like how in this case both sides win-win: the user will find the answer to the question of interest, and the site will rise in the search results.

Scrolling a document into Google Spreadsheets.
Scoring a document in Google Spreadsheets. Ideas are automatically ranked by topic complexity, traffic, and user interest

Why SEO is necessary for any website
Any website is created for some kind of audience. Even a non—profit project is interested in traffic - to organize a fundraiser or to inform about communication methods. The site doesn't make sense without visitors.

Visitors to the site will not come from nowhere, you need to invest in its promotion. SEO is the only source of free traffic that, once configured, can work for many years and passively bring visitors.

For example, in Unisender, SEO brings in an average of 70% of users every month. We have articles that rank well for certain search queries and bring in a lot of new users year after year. Some of them become clients or subscribers of the mailing list.

However, SEO has its own peculiarities:

The first 3 search results receive 75.1% of all clicks.
Only 0.44% of users go to the second Google page.
This means that if the site is not on the first page of the search, then it does not seem to exist specifically for this query. Therefore, SEO needs to be done so that the site gets at least into the top ten for key queries.

The more competitive the niche, the more serious SEO needs to be. The site is struggling with competitors in the search results — whoever is better prepared is in the top.

Backlinko research.
Backlinko research. The distribution of CTR (clicks to views) from the first result to the last on the first page of the output
SEO Guide. How to optimize a website and how much it costs 4
Sergey Lukashevich
Head of SEO Unisender

Not every project needs a website, a lot depends on the goals and budget. Sometimes a page in social networks is enough — their functionality is enough. On Instagram and VKontakte, you can even launch stores within the community. Some local businesses easily limit themselves to this.

But if a website is needed for your purposes, then SEO is also necessary — but not every site equally. Large projects with developed infrastructure and competition need to work with SEO on an ongoing basis — this requires a full-time SEO specialist, and sometimes more than one. For example, mailing services are a competitive environment, so I'm on fulltime at Unisender. Plus, I have contractors to whom I delegate some of the responsibilities.

Local projects will have enough basic SEO work, which will take a couple of days and will not need to be monitored in the future. At least optimize the text and headings on the site and open it for indexing — that is, allow search robots to view it.

The main thing is to study the market: a lot depends on competitors. The more of them and the more serious they are about SEO, the more difficult it is to get to the top.

What affects the site's position in the search results
Search engines compare users' queries with the content on the site pages, but their position in the search results is influenced by many factors. For search engines, the main thing is that the page is useful, convenient and responds to the user's request — the algorithms determine this quite accurately. Therefore, SEO refers to:

Working with the technical part of the site. For example, high page loading speed and adaptability. For search engines, this is an indicator of convenience.

Site hygiene. Broken links and duplicate pages have a negative effect on SEO.

Text optimization. SEO keys are used by search engines to determine which search query a particular page is suitable for. As well as uniqueness, structure, literacy, and even the presence of forbidden and stop words.

User behavior on the page. The more the user is on the site and is active, the better. This is how search engines are convinced of the benefits of the page. Therefore, video and interactive mechanics have a positive effect on SEO.

External optimization. Links and mentions from other reputable domains. This is how the search engine understands that the site is reliable and useful.

Each of the points is equally important and this is a large layer of work. We will discuss them in detail in the following sections.

The technical part
The site should open quickly and look good on the smartphone and desktop screen. Search robots like fast and convenient sites and are pleasant for users.

Adaptability
Adaptability — the site adjusts to the width of the user's screen. For search engines, this is an additional plus to raise the page to the top of the search results
Adaptability is rarely a problem. Usually, the entire site development team initially works on this. All site designers (such as Tilda) have adaptive blocks — you make up for a desktop, but in fact also for a smartphone. Even the letter designers have adaptive blocks.

But with the speed of the site, not everything is so obvious. Of course, if the page loads for a minute, hardly anyone will stay on the site. But according to a neipatel study, 40% of users close the site if the page loading speed is more than 3 seconds.

But, let's say the main page loads for about 2 seconds — everything seems to be fine. But in fact, competitors' websites can open twice as fast: the user is unlikely to notice this, but search robots are required. For this reason alone, you can fly far down in the search results. And vice versa — the download speed at the level of competitors (or slightly higher) will give a solid increase in output.

Basic information on page speed can be obtained in the Pindgom service, where you can also find tips for improving speed:

The loading speed of the pages of the main Unisender.
The download speed of the main Unisender. Performance grade — evaluation of page performance according to pingdom algorithms. Load time — the loading speed. Page size - the page size in megabytes. Requests — the number of requests. We are interested in Load time — in Unisender 3 seconds and this is... an imperfect result. We are still working on this part, it is really possible to bring it up to 1.5-2 seconds
There is also a cool tool from Google PageSpeed Insights. There you can see not only the performance of the site, but also other parameters useful to the user: content offset, background contrast and other characteristics.

The site may be slow for these reasons:

Slow servers hosting the site.
Unoptimized page templates. For example, an article template or a product page template.
The connection between backend and frontend code.
Page caching is not configured.
Other inaccuracies. For example, the site engine loads all the images on the page at once, and not as scrolling.
The site itself can work smoothly, but this may not be enough for SEO: developers will not even know about it, because they are not interested in SEO, they have other KPIs.

Therefore, the seoshnik is connected to the process. Programmers and sysadmins improve the site with their "hands", and the ceo takes measurements, tells where to dig and what to improve. If necessary, it helps to figure it out, and after improvements, it tests and monitors the indicators.

It is not always wise to increase the site performance to ultra-high speeds. It is convenient to rely on competitors: ideally, you need to be a little faster than them. For example, a pizzeria site in Orenburg does not need a network of servers in different countries — it is expensive, and SEO will have little effect. The level of competitors is not the same and customers are only from Orenburg.

A piece of technical specifications for developers to speed up the work of the site

Site hygiene
Hygiene includes:

Deleting broken links. Broken links lead to non-existent pages. A few broken links will not affect the output, but if they flood the domain, it can throw the site off the prize places.

Working with redirects. Redirect — redirection to another page. Redirects are usually used to redirect deleted irrelevant articles to updated materials. For example, here is this page 

It's a useful tool, but only if you keep an eye on it. Without monitoring, redirects can redirect to other redirects. This slows down the site, harms SEO and slows down site surfing.

Pictures, videos, titles, formatting. Their presence, on the contrary, is insignificant, but has a positive effect on the issuance. Search robots are distrustful of web pages with only one text. It is important to treat this from the point of view of benefit to the user — add pictures and videos when appropriate.

Format the text if possible — use numbered and bulleted lists, nested structure with H2 and H3. Under certain circumstances, the search engine can pull up the list into a block with quick answers. This will attract users to the site.

The article "How to make a mass mailing in Mail.ru " from the Unisender blog
The article "How to make a mass mailing in Mail.ru " from the Unisender blog, the first one in the search results for a similar query. The instructions from the article were pulled into the block with quick answers
Monitoring comments. At Unisender, we constantly encounter comment bots. This method of promotion is chosen by low-quality sites, the link to which from your domain negatively affects your SEO. You can configure it so that there are comments, but the search engine does not see links from them to other sites — so SEO will not deteriorate. Or you can just not skip comments with links — here it is to your taste.

Prevention of email newsletters. Search engines have their own email services: Google has Gmail, Yandex has Yandex.Mail, and so on. There is a lot of spam in the mail and mailers have a lot of clever algorithms for calculating them. For example, each sender has a reputation: if a company buys a subscriber base, then its mailing list is often complained about, reputation becomes low and emails are highly likely to end up in "Spam".

A low reputation in mailers can also negatively affect SEO. "Maybe" because this is only a hypothesis, there are no absolute facts of connection. However, the systems are improving and even if it doesn't matter now, the picture may change in the future.

A good reputation among mailers does not hurt: letters will not get into spam, and one of the cloudy days the SEO specialist will not come with the hypothesis that SEO suffers because of a low reputation in the mail.

There are many articles on the topic of spam on the Unisender blog. How not to get there or what to do if you have already got there:

What is the sender's reputation?
What to do if emails end up in spam
15 layout errors that can get you into spam

SEO Guide. How to optimize a website and how much it costs 10
Sergey Lukashevich
Head of SEO Unisender

Broken links, 404 pages — this is also what the SEO specialist does. It takes a couple of minutes a day to monitor the site, but sometimes serious problems can be revealed that will worsen the site's position in the search results for a long time.

Therefore, it is important to monitor not only the technical part, but also the traffic. If it suddenly sags on some pages, you need to identify and solve the problem.

I am interested in the traffic on the site as a whole, but there is a group of commercial pages that need to be monitored in isolation from the general traffic. There are cases when there are no problems in general traffic, but something breaks on important pages and the number of organic visitors drops significantly.

Text optimization
Text optimization includes semantics collection, clustering, and key generation for pages. Let's analyze all these incomprehensible words in more detail.

Semantics are queries on a topic that relate to our site, page, service, or business in general. To collect semantics means to collect a list of queries for which we can potentially get into the output. It is with semantics that text optimization begins.

Semantics for the article "The best mail services".
Semantics for the article "The best mail services". Only a part of the queries is shown here. The higher the query, the more often it is searched for. Volume is exactly what frequency means, a thousand is a thousand such requests per month on average among all search engines. Difficulty — difficulty: the higher it is, the more difficult it is to get to the top of the output
Semantics is a storehouse of insights that will help improve the product. There are extraordinary queries buried here, the implementation of which will help to attract more traffic to the site and make more profit. In the example about the pizzeria, it may turn out that people often write "order pizza and rolls". And this is already a vector of development — to add rolls to the store.

Clustering is the division of semantics into groups of queries that the search engine considers to be one topic and outputs the same results for it, plus or minus.

Ideally, a separate web page is created for each cluster. This way we will not only cover the entire semantics of queries, but we will also come across people with a suitable offer.

For example, an online pizzeria may have such large clusters:

pizza pickup;
pepperoni pizza to order;
buy rolls with delivery.
An example of elementary work with clusters.
An example of elementary work with clusters. Milano is a pizzeria in Orenburg. But on request, "milano rolls" offers not the main page, but a section with rolls
A blog is a great way to advertise natively based on information requests. For example, there are many articles on the Unisender blog outside of email newsletters. This expands the semantics and number of clusters. An SEO article is a solution to such clusters. We write 10-15 articles a month, and we also have SEO-unoptimized materials. Paradoxically, this article is not focused on SEO.

Flexibility is needed when working with clusters. There is not always one cluster — one page for it. It happens that a page perfectly combines two clusters and it does not need division. And sometimes low-frequency clusters (fewer people are looking for them than high-frequency ones) are disclosed not on a separate page, but inside a page tailored for a high-frequency cluster. In this case, the search engine can immediately move the article to the right place and highlight the important text.

An example of how multiple clusters can work in the article.
An example of how multiple clusters can work in the article. I entered the query "how much to cook shpikachki", Google on the first request threw me to the right place of the article about the duration of cooking, although the article itself is called "9 ways to cook shpikachki"
Another important rule is that there is one page for one cluster. Otherwise, the pages will cannibalize each other: distribute traffic among themselves, which is why they will lag behind competitors and fall in the search results. Learn more about cannibalization.

Adding keywords (keys). Keywords help search engines sort sites by specific queries. The output is affected by the number of occurrences of keys in the text, their case and a bunch of other factors:

I'll sleep with the keys.
Dangerous words — cigarettes, alcohol, adult videos.
Links to low-quality sites.
Abuse of water and stop words.
Other.
TK for the article "how to adapt a letter for mobile"
TK for the article "how to adapt a letter for mobile"
Only relying on the cluster will not be able to deduce the ideal formula for keys and their occurrence in the text. Therefore, the selection of keys to the page is a study of competitors with whom you will have to compete in the output in the future. They have already got into it, which means they have a ready-made recipe for keywords that they have deduced by accident or when analyzing their competitor.

Preparing the keys is a research job that takes several hours. Specialized services help you search for keys on the page. Here is a list of services that the SEO specialist works with for text optimization:

Collection of semantics (Ahrefs, Semrush, Serpstat, Wordstat).
Clustering: (KeyAssort, KeyClusterer).
Text analysis: (ISTIO, Copywritely).
Optimizing text for search results is always a compromise. Editing works according to its own laws, text optimization according to its own: they rarely overlap. It is impossible to add all the keys without loss for clarity and simplicity. Sometimes the article does not assume the words that are provided in SEO at all.

SEO often has to be sacrificed to keep the text cool. And the most difficult thing is to determine the edge when it is possible to integrate keys into the text relatively painlessly.