How to do SEO work

SEO work starts with understanding what your client's target customers actually search for. You'll begin by conducting keyword research using tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz to identify search terms with reasonable volume and achievable difficulty levels for your client's authority level. This isn't about chasing high-volume keywords—it's about finding the intersection of search demand, commercial intent, and realistic ranking potential. Once you've identified your target keywords, you map them to pages on the website. This might mean optimizing existing pages or recommending new content creation. For each page, you'll work on on-page elements: title tags, meta descriptions, heading structure, and body content that naturally incorporates your target keyword while actually answering what searchers want to know. The content needs to be better than what currently ranks, which often means longer, more comprehensive, or more actionable than competitor content.

Technical SEO ensures search engines can actually crawl and index your client's site properly. This involves fixing crawl errors, improving site speed, ensuring mobile responsiveness, implementing proper redirect chains, and setting up XML sitemaps and robots.txt files correctly. You're also checking for duplicate content issues, ensuring proper use of canonical tags, and making sure the site architecture makes sense both for users and search engines. This foundational work matters because a beautifully optimized page won't rank if Google can't efficiently crawl it or if the site has serious performance issues.

The third pillar is building authority through backlinks and mentions. While you can't control who links to your client, you can identify link-building opportunities by analyzing competitor backlink profiles, reaching out to relevant industry websites and publications, and creating content worth linking to. You might pursue guest posting, broken link building, resource page placements, or local citation building depending on your client's industry. Throughout all this work, you're tracking rankings, traffic, and conversions through Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and whatever conversion tracking your client has in place. SEO isn't a set-it-and-forget-it process—it's continuous optimization based on performance data, algorithm updates, and changing competition.