SEO first aid with Ahrefs – Community questions answered!

00.11 – My company has a website built using Bootstrap framework and we’re finding SEO quite challenging. I am doing the more common work of on-page keyword optimisation etc but am struggling getting too far – any tips? Are there any best practices specifically that I should look at? 00.58 – What’s the ONE we thing we should: Do more of. Change. Stop. in an effective 2023 SEO strategy 01.48 – What are the first 3 Triage points of SEO, if you had to say start here then do this and this, what would they be?/What are the most important factors to consider when setting up a new website to give you the building blocks to work from? 02.19 – If you’re a small business, is there any point at all in using the most popular key words/phrases on your site, as competition from bigger businesses means the likelihood of appearing on the first page is slim. Is it better to solely focus on long-tail key words/phrases? 03.23 – The ‘right’ mixture between long- and short-tail keyword targeting, considering budget and resources as well as timeline. 04.04 – How can you regularly measure SEO and keep a track of it all? And what data is useful to track for a SaaS business? 05.05 – If you are considering a rebrand, but also considering bringing an SEO agency on board to help with lead gen – what should come first? Is there a way to still bring authority to the current website, and ensure that if a rebrand and new website happens, that all the hard work from SEO activities isn’t lost? 06.30 – Why should I pay for SEO when I can just pay for Google PPC? 07.28 – When is it time to decide to retire old or unsuccessful content? 08.24 – What type of content works best for SEO? – short form, long form, blog content, data-led content, video, photo galleries etc 09.03 – What is the best way to describe the importance of SEO in a marketing strategy to peeps who don’t understand the mechanics of it. 09.46 – What specific data analytics should we be challenging our SEO marketing agencies on for maximum impact 😉 11.05 – In modern search, is buying authoritative, high organic traffic websites and redirecting them and keyword mapping them (professionally) still an effective strategy to deliver results. Let’s say I have website A, it’s high traffic and good position in SERPs, but I come across website B, which is similar, should I buy website B and amalgamate them by redirecting website B to website A 12.49 – My question is what’s going on here? A search for my client’s URL is returning a title, meta description and site links to another clinic’s site. The title and URL still point to arg.co.nz, but the other site links go to another site altogether. 14.12 – Of course an AI question… What are your top tips for embracing AI tools such as ChatGPT to aid the process of creating authentic & well optimised content? 15.38 – Scenario: You create a well optimised piece of content that features prominently within the site architecture. Would your recommended next step to improve the ranking still be to build some trusted backlinks to the article or something else? If backlinks, do you have any recommendations? 16.18 – First, in managing my own website, if a blog story starts to fall in the rankings on a given keyword, what can we do to disrupt that story to get it going back up? Or should we just give up on that post, and create a new story? 17.05 – Second, all my efforts are on earned search. But if I use PAID (which I never do) to get in those top slots, does that help me in the earned, or do I go back to where I was on earned when I stop paying? 18.05 – Organic traffic’s declining. Where to start?