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There are no concrete rules when it comes to creating an SEO strategy, however here are the steps we recommend following if you want to do SEO yourself:

1. Know your brand positioning and try your best to communicate well, and enable people to understand your business.
2. Websites are important. You can create one via WordPress and it has various themes, and tools for doing SEO.
3. Design your website (UX,UI) to make it approachable. Be precise in your communication to visitors, ensuring you always stick to your brand guidelines.
4. Conduct a website back-end audit, looking at factors including pagespeed, stability, and quality, image size and alt tags (caption details). All of these factors will affect the chances of Google users reaching you via search, especially in the Google Image section.
5. Create content that readers will be interested in, adding keywords or phrases that people would use to search and find your website. Write with the benefit of the reader in mind, since Google organises their rankings based on their users’ needs, and good rankings are directly linked to the functionality and usefulness of a website.
6. Add links connecting one page to another on your website (internal links), and links connecting to other websites (outgoing links) as well. Being referred via links on other websites (backlinks) is also important.
7. Keep your website up to date, and remember to check regularly to see if each page on your website is working as it should be (some pages may be accessible but not readable).

Tip: Install Google Search Console and Google Analytics to analyse your website’s capability accurately and fix problems to improve the quality and ranking of the website.

An SEO strategy is the whole process from the planning of SEO to the execution. The purpose of an SEO strategy is to improve the ranking and traffic (organic traffic) for a website.

Examples of adjustments you can make to improve your SEO ranking include:

• UX & UI improvements
• Research on keywords related to your business
• Enable the voice search function
• Comply with Google’s algorithm updates
• Not breaching the rules to get backlinks or improve your rankings in an underhand way (link schemes)
• Analyse higher-ranked competitors to see what you can learn from their content and website
• Keep the website content up to date and useful to users
• Enable Snippets and Rich Snippets (data shown on Google results pages)

The SEO process involves the following steps:

1. Crawling. This is when Google accesses your website to collect data from your content
2. Indexing. This is when Google analyses, understands and keeps such data in its system
3. Ranking. This is the ranking of websites based on searches by users. The data kept in the index will be shown as results based on how relevant it is to the query

• The ease of the process

• Increasing the amount of visitors to your website and business
• Building awareness of businesses, industries and services globally
• Beating your competitors in the industry
• Increased credibility
• No fees, since there is no payment for Google’s ranking. However, your website has to be the best it can be, and answer users’ needs when they search for something
• It increases your chances of generating income and profit in the long run

Since the competition is different in each industry (including the volume of searches and the objective of each user) it is quite difficult to give a timeframe for a business to start ranking highly.

However, if the website has never been adjusted to comply with SEO criteria and has never ranked before, once you start the SEO adjustments, it generally takes at least 4 months to see your website in Google’s top 100. Nevertheless, the average timeframe for SEO results would be from 6 months onwards. Regardless, there are many factors to be taken into account when it comes to Google’s ranking results (be it the website itself or the keywords users choose).

Firstly, let’s look at the different types of SEO:

1. What is Black Hat SEO?
   Black Hat SEO is when a website tries to appear in the search engine rankings as quickly as possible without considering the user. It can be done by creating lots of articles, plagiarising other people’s work, duplicating articles, or focusing on getting backlinks from other websites, which may include gambling or adult content sites or even websites that sell backlinks (Link Farms). Black Hat SEO is actually against the rules of SEO since it uses unreputable programmes without taking the user into consideration. Content spinning and keyword stuffing are two other Black Hat SEO methods which may provide higher rankings in the short-term, but can quickly follow a penalty from Google.
2. What is Grey Hat SEO?
   Grey Hat SEO is a combination of Black Hat and White Hat SEO, which means it can be risky and against Google’s principles. However, the level of risk depends on whether the tricks from Black Hat or White Hat are being used. Doing Grey Hat SEO can be useful to the users if the content is decent and does not include any irrelevant information. However, this method can also be used to receive backlinks from untrustworthy sources or websites that were bought especially for the purpose of creating backlinks. This is why Grey Hat SEO is not the best method, and also not the worst. If you want to try Grey Hat SEO, you may have to be prepared for when Google finds out and issues you with a penalty which could result in your website dropping down the rankings.
3. What is White Hat SEO?
   White Hat SEO focuses on constantly adjusting and improving a website. It complies with Google’s algorithm which pays attention to the quality of the website, and those that answer users’ needs by, for example, modifying content according to what people search for, referring to other related links for users to understand more, and having well functioning pages which load quickly and are designed well. The element which is focused on most when doing White Hat SEO is giving visitors the best experience with good UX, UI and a smooth customer journey. Websites that do White Hat SEO will rise up the rankings in the long run, since they are useful to users. Doing White Hat SEO takes time, but when your website does reach the top rank, you will own the spot without paying for ads (as long as you maintain the quality of the website and give visitors the best experience), which is very powerful.

What Type of SEO Should I do?

We can definitely say that when doing SEO, it is best to avoid doing Black Hat SEO. Yes, you will climb up the ranking rapidly but it is cheating Google, and that could result in a penalty. Google itself also has constant updates and developments to help prevent such search ranking cheating. The focus for Google is to provide quality information that answers the user’s question on the first results page. Hence, after a while, if you do Black Hat SEO, you may face a penalty from Google and the chances of ranking highly will be slim since there are new websites being created every day, all around the world, which can be chosen by Google to top the rankings. So, the best way to earn a top ranking spot in the long run is with White Hat SEO. Nevertheless, it depends on each person’s objective and attitude towards risk.

You can actually do SEO by yourself, that is, if you can study and/or do the following:

• Understand technical SEO terms and how to apply them in practice
• Know the tools required for doing SEO
• Analyse competitors to find out what they do better, and adjust accordingly
• Understand SEO, both Off-page and On-page, in detail. There are some things you must know: how to install add-on tools to your website, adjust the size of images or the layout for practicality, use words and word counts effectively, conduct website audits and keyword research, provide bilingual pages, carry out local SEO including internal links and backlinks, and more!
• Plan and design content for your website that answers the search engine users’ needs
• Know how to use tools like Google Search Console, Tag Manager and Google Analytics to analyse results and improve the quality of your website

However, there may be some limits to doing SEO by yourself, for example, some elements for SEO may be specialised and need help from a developer.

Tips: All of the DIY SEO elements above can be studied online through various websites. We recommend  you check out international sites like Neil Patel, Moz or Search Engine Journal since they were written by experts and specialists in the SEO field.

If you want to increase your chances of rising up the rankings, you should consider doing SEO alongside PPC (Pay Per Click). PPC is hosted by Google Search and requires payment. It’s important to understand the difference between the two first:

SEO: focuses on generating organic traffic when people search for keywords and click on a website. This is done without the business having to pay for their website to reach the target group.

PPC: also creates traffic via keywords and clicks, but the website owner has to pay for each click. It is a Pull strategy just like SEO.

When PPC and SEO work together, it can help attract visitors to your website. However, if you do not pay or do not have the budget, once you stop doing PPC, it may lessen the chances of people visiting your website because your online channel presence decreases. This means that when you stop doing SEO, people or target groups may not be able to find your business. By having PPC and SEO working together, you expand your coverage of online channels which may have a direct effect on your business. We recommend doing both, however, it also depends on your budget and your value assessment of marketing investments.

There are many factors at play when it comes to earning your website a top spot on the search engine rankings. It involves a combination of on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Let’s start by taking a look at the definitions:

On-page SEO is where we are able to adjust or develop our website’s SEO ourselves, for instance:

• Changing the titles of articles, creating content, and adjusting articles to make them appear with voice search
• Creating internal links by referring to related articles for readers to get additional information
• Adjusting the size of images and adding Alt tags to all images
• Planning the layout of the website, improving response times and modifying the backend coding
• Making the website mobile-friendly

These are just some of the adjustments you can make to improve the quality of your website. They’re factors Google will consider when it comes to your website’s ranking.

Off-page SEO is the things we are not able to adjust or modify ourselves, since they are external. This includes being referenced by other websites or receiving backlinks, which we cannot control. You could be referenced by reliable websites or unreliable websites i.e. gambling sites, which could be good or bad. However, if you receive untrustworthy or spammy links, you can inform Google by selecting the Disavow link feature on the Google Search Console.

On-page and off-page SEO are both essential and they cannot be done in isolation. Off-page SEO is more difficult as it relies on external parties. It also takes time and effort to create good articles which result in other websites referencing them and creating backlinks.

Organic Search is when people search for keywords and click on the websites ranked on the search results pages (Search Engine Results Pages or SERPs). These websites found on the results pages have not paid for their position in the ranking.

The websites that you see displayed on SERPs all have titles and descriptions which broadly match the keywords you searched for. When you click on a website, that particular website will receive organic traffic value.

A Google penalty is a penalty from Google that results in your website dropping down the rankings on the SERPs, or not being placed in the rankings at all. The cause of these penalties is often a violation of Google’s rules, by using programmes or tools to modify and adjust a website, with the intention of making that website climb up the rankings quickly. The most common reason for Google penalties is Black Hat SEO which is considered inappropriate.

There are two types of Google penalty:

1. Manual: a penalty that occurs through inspection by Google staff. This occurs when Google decides you are not compliant with their guidelines. This is the most serious type of Google penalty.
2. Google algorithm update: this happens every so often when Google updates its system to detect different ways for websites to climb up the rankings without being useful to readers. The best way to avoid this Google penalty is to keep yourself up to date on the news regarding Google updates, and to prepare and adjust your website according to Google’s criteria.

Sample cases that will result in a Google penalty

• Using programmes to create articles with excessive use of keywords, when in fact, the articles are incomprehensible when read by actual human beings (article spinning to attract bots)
• Receiving too many backlinks unnaturally or receiving spam links which are low-quality
• Hiding text or content in the backend system, mostly consisting of keywords
• Poor-quality content, plagiarism or unuseful content

The Google algorithm is a system Google uses for selecting which websites to show on SERPs based on the content and text that is most related to the user’s query.

Google algorithm updates, also known as Google updates, are when Google does maintenance on its internal system in order to be able to select the websites to be shown on SERPs most accurately. Each update contains some adjustments which can affect the ranking of websites on SERPs. This is why SEOs always keep up to date with the latest Google algorithm update and try to adjust their websites accordingly for their website to maintain their position in the rankings.

Examples of major Google algorithm updates

• Panda Algorithm (2011), focused on the on-page SEO, from the website to the content, with particular focus on the accuracy of the information provided for the benefit of Google users
• Penguin Algorithm (2012), focused on off-page SEO including websites receiving backlinks from good sources which are not spammy, and being referenced by other websites
• Hummingbird Algorithm (2013), focused on the keywords being searched, as well as the voice search feature

• Pigeon Algorithm (2014), focused on local SEO or local searches within an area (using maps or locations) for users to find relevant businesses more efficiently
• HTTPS/SSL (2014), was an update suggesting that websites change from HTTP to HTTPS for user security
• Mobile Update (2015) or Mobilegeddon, focused on ensuring website had an efficient mobile version, since the increase in mobile phone usage made it essential for people to be able access websites easily on any device

• RankBrain Algorithm (2015), was when Google introduced machine learning to monitor search queries and generate similar words or phrases, for Google to be able to understand the search behaviour of users. This algorithm studied previous searches as well, which is why SEOs had to create articles with more quality keywords and related keywords
• BERT (2019) or Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, was an improvement concerning how words are searched. So, whether in switched positions, or with the same words but in different contexts, the system could still understand what people were trying to find
• Core update (2020) was a change focusing on all components of a website

Google is often updated in order to screen for the best quality websites that are most accurate to what people are searching for. Therefore, those that manage SEO need to keep track of and update their websites regularly in order to rank well and be easily accessible. You can keep track of any updates via Google Search Central

There are many factors involved in earning a spot in Google’s website rankings. To begin with, you have to know your website, what it’s about, and what your business is. After that, you can do keyword research to find target groups that could bring you organic traffic. You can then conduct a website audit and adjust both on-page and off-page properly. Be cautious about link spamming and keep checking reports from Google Search Console and Google Analytics to adjust your website and its content accordingly. The entire process should be completed with the user’s best interests in mind.

Ultimately, all of this takes time and requires constant updating, plus analysis of your competitors shown on SERPs, to identify the right strategy and continually improve. When you complete all of these tasks, your website’s ranking will consequently improve.

Search intent is the reason users search for something. This can be divided into 4 categories:

1. Informational: to find information or news e.g. searching for ‘a pizza recipe’, ‘how tall is Emma Watson’, or ‘which fruits contain the most sugar?’
2. Navigational: for navigation, to find something or to know where to go, e.g. Gmail login, Google drive, Facebook login
3. Commercial: these are searches for things such as price comparisons, or product reviews. For example, when we want to buy sunscreen, we may search ‘best sunscreen’ to compare different sunscreens
4. Transactional: is a search before purchase, to find things such as product prices or discounts.

SEO content is content written to be found easily on search engines such as Google. Good SEO content should have answers to what people are searching for, and the article itself is essential to SEO, since it will help Google’s system understand what your website is trying to convey.

Tips: How to write SEO-friendly content

1. Know the main keywords of the article and try searching those keywords to see how other websites are using them
2. Analyse other websites to take note of their strategy to improve your website
3. Include the keywords that people would use to find your content in a natural way
4. Do not forget to adjust the title and description, you can look at Mangools for examples

There are 3 main types of SEO keyword, namely:

• Generic keywords: these are keywords that people commonly search for, and they usually have broad definitions i.e. ‘sports shoes’ or ‘digital marketing agency’. Generic keywords normally have high search volumes.
• Medium tail or chunky middle keywords: are longer keywords that people search for, usually 2-3 words, with the intention of getting more accurate results. For example, ‘women’s sports shoes’, or ‘digital marketing agency prices’.
• Longtail keywords: are more specific keywords, compared to medium tail or chunky middle keywords. They are more precise. For example, ‘sports shoes, women, white’ or ‘digital marketing agency in Bangkok, price’. They are also longer than other keyword types, since they consist of many words to specify exactly what people want to find. Longtail keywords give you the most chance of gaining conversions.

When choosing SEO keywords, variety is important. There should be various types of keywords in an article, since each person’s search intent is different. All in all, you should focus on the main point you would like to convey in the article, and should not mix unrelated topics together to the point that the reader can not understand the essence or key message of the article.

Tips: 

• A Seed keyword or Head keyword is the main keyword that explains your business, and helps people understand what a particular page is about
• Branded keywords are brands or business names. The names are specific, i.e. ‘Primal Agency’, ‘Adidas’ or other keywords together with the brand, for example, ‘shoes Adidas’
• LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing) are keywords that are very similar to the main keywords we would like to use. They can be in the form of a word or phrase that helps make the search easier and more relevant. For example, if the main keyword is ‘digital marketing’, the LSI can be phrases like ‘online marketing’, ‘online ads’, ‘social media’, etc.

To find SEO keywords without using online tools, you can simply conduct a Google search. As you type in your keywords there will be auto suggestions from Google which can give you an idea of the keywords you might like to use on your website.

There are various reasons Google will not display your website on its SERPs. It can be because those pages are still new and Google’s bots have not studied the content on the page so cannot collect data and show your page as a result when people submit a query.

How do I get my website to show up on Google?

1. 1. Verify your website or URL with Google by going to your Google Search Console (GSC)
      • For first-time verification, select add a property, then website type, and upload the files such as the HTML, Meta Tag, and Google Analytics Account
        • 3 ways to verify your website with GSC:
          1. Upload HTML file to root folder or server
          2. Upload Meta Tag to the website’s header section
          3. Connect the website’s GSC with Google Analytics
      • If you want a particular URL to be shown on Google index, you can submit the link and press the request index. You can read more information about it here.
   2. Creating internal links from one related page to another page which is not yet ranking will show Google that both pages are related
   3. Creating backlinks for the website or particular page by posting the URL on popular websites with good credibility

Tips: Normally you do not have to submit the URL to Google for your website to show up on the Google index, since Google itself has Web Crawlers or Web Spiders that are constantly collecting data and updating the system.

Backlinks are part of off-page SEO. Having many backlinks can help your website rise up the rankings, as long as those backlinks are from trusted and well-known websites e.g. news websites like PostToday or Sanook.

So, if you have many backlinks from untrustworthy sites, you may face a Google penalty as it can be seen as unreliable link building. Google is aware that when sites with low-quality backlinks rank highly, readers may not receive the information or content they’re looking for. For example, if you get backlinks from gambling sites or misleading webboards, Google will consider your site as a low-quality website that may somehow be linked with other low-quality sites. Therefore, getting lots of backlinks can raise your ranking in the short term, but if they are untrustworthy links then they can be harmful to your ranking.

With that being said, there are also other ranking factors to consider such as on-page SEO, good user experience, quick page loading time, simple and intuitive menu navigation, and meaningful content.

To determine the quality of a backlink and whether you have high authority backlinks, you have to trace the origin and see whether or not that site is relevant to your site. For example, if you have a marketing website, you should get backlinks from other marketing sites, rather than housing websites. Also, you need to check if the hyperlinks you receive are from trusted websites with relevant content because that can affect your ranking. We recommend you check the DA (Domain Authority) score which acts as a website credibility checker. Plus, you should consider the site’s traffic volume, or the number of site visitors, and the flow of internal and external links. And remember, SEO is not only off-page. You also need good on-page SEO to rank highly.

Tip: An easy way to check a website’s credibility is to look at the DA (Domain Authority) score which ranges from 1-100 (read more about DA at Moz.com). The higher the DA score, the better the quality of the website. However, remember that the DA score of each website is calculated from machine learning by Moz, not Google. As it is calculated using multiple factors, the score can go up and down as time goes by. Therefore, you should not determine the quality of backlinks from the DA score alone.

Follow our tips for the best way to earn high-quality backlinks:

• Create valuable content for your readers. The more your content answers a reader’s questions and can be informative and educational for them, the more interesting your content will be, and the more your articles will be shared.
• Focus on statistical information or research data, simplify it and organise it well. By providing reliable information, people will use your site as a reference, giving you quality backlinks for free.
• Write eye-catching stories with new and fresh content on topics that are different from other content creators.
• Add graphics to your article to make it easy to understand and visually appealing. For example, use an infographic to summarise data or visualise the statistics. Readers can then reference these graphics and provide quality backlinks to your site.

Tip: In order to get a better SEO score (or make your website more accessible), do not forget to add the ALT tag to graphics so that people can also discover your site through Google Image Search results.

To disavow a link is to discard a backlink you suspect to be spammy or low-quality. This allows you to inform Google that those links are not from your site, preventing you from getting a long-term penalty.

With that being said, you cannot fully control backlinks from other sites. Sometimes, you may get bad links from the keywords you use often, your competitors, or someone who used black hat SEO against your site. However, you can report black hat SEO to Google as it is illegal.

The result is hard to anticipate. Disavowing links or reporting suspected backlinks to Google can help or harm your ranking in the long term. Since Google’s Algorithms update in real-time, if you report lots of suspected links, your ranking may fall. However, looking at it for the long term, it may be better than a ranking drop from a Google update or a Google penalty.

Therefore, there is no right or wrong when it comes to whether or not to disavow links. It is up to you to decide which links you are going to report. It may affect your ranking, or it may not.

Still, you should not disavow links too often as it will seem like you are checking regularly to discard them. You should give it some time and do it naturally, perhaps once or twice a year and only remove damaging links.

Dofollow and nofollow links are defined as:

• Dofollow links are the links that allow search engines like Google to access one website from another. The origin site passes the authority to the destination site via backlinks. This is how Google learns about your content and sees the relationship between the two websites. If the origin site has good authority, the destination site will also be considered as a quality website. It’s Google’s preference for links to be helpful to readers for them to understand more and get more information.
• Nofollow links are links that do not pass any authority of their sites to the destination ones, this is because the destination sites may be irrelevant, or low-quality. So, nofollow links will not impact search engine rankings as Google does not crawl the link.

Tip: Every website should have internal and external links to allow for a smooth user experience and to increase the time people spend on the site seeking more relevant information.