SEO is a complex, evolving process with many moving parts. As a result, it’s easy to get confused and frustrated when trying to optimize your website for search engines.

Understanding how SEO develops can help you avoid these common pitfalls and keep your business on track. The following are the most common stages in the SEO journey:

The Initial Stage (Status-Check)

During this stage, you check your site’s technical health and ensure it has all the right components to rank well. This includes the correct URL structure, meta descriptions, and page titles. If you find any issues, then it’s time to address them before they affect your rankings.

The ‘Status-Check’stage is the perfect time to identify the problem areas that are holding your site back. These include:

Topic Mismatches

Having pages that are getting impressions but not CTR is not a good sign, so you’ll want to identify this and fix it. This could mean creating new content that answers the query or re-optimizing old content for a better search experience.

The Expand-Outstage

The Expand-outstage of SEO is dedicated to building more backlinks for your website, which is crucial for establishing domain authority and ranking higher in Google. This phase involves attracting links from high-authority websites in your niche to build trust with search algorithms.

Finally, you’ll need to monitor the performance of your SEO campaign and make changes as needed. This will help you identify problem areas and maintain your gains over time.