The Pareto Principle of SEO

When hiring SEO specialists, I begin one of my favorite interview questions by presenting two websites. I ask the applicant to recommend changes that would have the greatest long-term impact on driving more customers to each website.

One of the websites is always a well-known brand (Bulletproof Coffee is one of my go-tos). The second is a smaller brand, with less than 100 web pages that see a few hundred visitors each month from search engines.

Here’s what I’ve noticed: two-thirds of SEO specialists focus on the same things for both sites. They use their preferred SEO tool to run a site audit, then present three to five of the most significant site audit issues they find.

Next, they recommend a full-scale SEO audit. They suggest fixing every issue on the site, using on-page optimization to update elements like title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags.

This approach is spot on for Bulletproof Coffee. However, it’s the wrong approach for the small business.

Why?

The smaller brand will benefit from those fixes, too, but focusing on different initiatives will give them better results.

We take a different approach.

Instead of putting 80% of our efforts into on-page SEO, we only put 20%. We place the other 80% of our SEO efforts into initiatives that drive the greatest impact for emerging businesses: content and links.

We call this the Pareto Principle of SEO.

The Pareto Principle of SEO (or 80/20 rule of SEO) is the concept that 20% of efforts drive 80% of results. It helps emerging brands steer their SEO investments towards the highest-impact opportunities to scale organic traffic and revenue.

We apply the Pareto Principle of SEO to that first type of business.

In the sections ahead, we break down what the Pareto Principle of SEO covers, map out its main areas of focus, and explain which actions to prioritize for each area.

Here are the four elements of the Pareto Principle of SEO:

1. Indexability Optimization
2. High-Impact SEO Positioning
3. The Remaining High-Priority Technical SEO Fixes
4. Authority

1. Indexability Optimization: Discoverability, Crawlability, and Indexability (Part One of Technical SEO)

The first SEO priority is to confirm there are no indexability issues. In other words, can search engines find, analyze, and show your pages in search results?

A good starting point is to log into Google Search Console and analyze your page indexing report. Here, you’ll get a quick glance of the pages on your site that are indexed.

You’ll also be able to see a breakdown of other pages on your site that Google has discovered, but hasn’t indexed.

For a more granular breakdown, plug any URL on your site into the URL inspection tool to see if the page is already indexed.

We dive much deeper into Discovery, Crawlability, and Indexability in this guide: What Most Businesses Get Wrong About Indexability and Crawlability.

Once you’ve confirmed your site is indexed, it’s time to move on to SEO positioning.

2. High-Impact SEO Positioning

The second phase of Pareto SEO is mapping out and implementing the key positioning elements on your site to give users and search engines a clear understanding of what your business does.

Here’s an example: A pillow company that describes itself to customers as a “high-end Hungarian goose feather pillow company.” However, only ten people go to Google every month to search for the phrase “Hungarian goose feather pillow.”

Sure — it’d be great to capture those ten monthly searchers. But an SEO team will push for a broader positioning to maximize customer acquisition through search.

Perhaps someone else on the SEO team pushes for a primary focus on “goose feather pillows.” It’s a tougher keyword to rank for, but it sees 1,200 monthly searches.

There may be some back and forth, but the two mindsets eventually decide how broad versus narrow to position the site for key business themes like the example above.

We see the best results when following two these two SEO positioning guidelines:

1. Each business theme is associated with one page on your site. Someone searching Google for that theme would be satisfied to land on that dedicated page.
2. If we don’t have a page that meets the above criteria, we create a new landing page dedicated to that theme — either a blog article, product page, features page, or any other page type that will appeal to that searcher.

Implementing SEO Positioning

Once you’ve decided on your initial SEO positioning, there are many ways your site can incorporate that positioning for users and search engines.

Here are the highest-priority elements to reflect your positioning:

• Title tags and meta descriptions
• URL structure of pages on your site
• Header tags (h1-h6 tags)
• The anchor text of internal links you build to each page
• The copy on the page

See the Relevancy Principle of SEO for more context.

Now that we’ve discussed indexability and SEO positioning, we have one more area to dive into before diving into Authority: the remaining high-priority technical SEO items.

Once you’ve gotten through section 3, it’s time to shift the remaining 80% of your SEO resources into Authority.

3. The Remaining High-Priority Technical SEO Issues

Your site has countless technical SEO elements to analyze on an ongoing basis. We assess 47 different potential issues at the onset of every client relationship. Many of them are issues we continue to assess every week.

Brand new sites will see 80% of the technical SEO impact by focusing on the following high-priority technical site issues:

Fixing Broken Backlinks

Broken backlinks work in a similar way. They’re scenarios in which an external website links to a page on your site that no longer exists.

Why?

Maybe you changed the URLs on your site. Perhaps you deleted the page.

Either way, it’s straightforward to redirect that old URL on your site to a new working URL.

From an SEO standpoint, this re-routes the value of that external link to a working page on your site that has the ability to rank.

I recommend using Ahrefs’ Broken backlinks report to check this. Plug in your site and redirect any broken URLs.

Ensuring “All Roads Lead to One”

This is a concept I see so many businesses get wrong.

“All Roads Lead to One” is a concept we invented to describe the ideal SEO scenario. In this scenario, users who type any variant of your domain name into their browser will be redirected to a singular URL path.

Let’s take the Intergrowth site, for example.

Regardless of whether you type http://intergrowth.com or www.intergrowth.com, you’ll be redirected to the main version of our site: https://intergrowth.com/.

There are eight total variants you can type into your browser to land on the same URL:

Here’s Why This Impacts SEO

Let’s say users can access our site by typing https://www.intergrowth.com/ and https://intergrowth.com/ into their browser. The two load as separate web pages with the same content. The same holds true for every URL on our site.

Doing this would force search engines to analyze twice as many pages on our website. On top of that, the SEO value of our homepage would be split between two different pages. Search engines will likely recognize one as a duplicate of the other and choose to show one version in search results.

So, the version that’s not shown in search results — what happens to the value of that page?

It’s lost in the void.

There are workarounds for this. Businesses can use canonical tags to show search engines which is the primary version. However, you’ll see better results if you redirect all website traffic to a singular version of the site.

Mobile Friendly Analysis

Google began switching to a mobile-first index in 2018. Put another way, they began crawling the mobile version of web pages instead of the desktop version of web pages. They now use their mobile crawler to crawl all sites as of July 5, 2024.

If your website was built within the past five years, you probably don’t need to do anything here. However, it’s wise to spend a few minutes looking into this to confirm.

Google retired its mobile testing tool in December 2023. We recommend two sources to verify:

1. Log into Google Search Console and check the Page Experience Report
2. Use Google Chrome’s Lighthouse tool to assess page performance.

If you encounter serious page experience issues, talk to your developer. You may need to invest some resources into updating your site.

Core Web Vitals Optimizations

Core Web Vitals (or what I refer to as “Site Speed 2.0”) is a series of metrics that analyzes how fast your site loads. It also quantifies important elements of how users interact with your site.

We dive into more details about Core Web Vitals in the above article. However, all pages on your site ideally fall in the “Good” range of page performance. This requires a score of 90/100 or better in PageSpeed Insights.

Realistically, this won’t always be possible.

I recommend talking to your developer or SEO team about opportunities to improve Core Web Vitals without interfering with site functionality.

Site load speeds and user experience can have a massive impact on your conversion rate, so treat this as a revenue maximization opportunity as you scale your site visitors. It will also have a positive impact on SEO.

Some of the lighter-lift opportunities might include:

• Image compression
• Converting images to AVIF or WebP formats
• Lazy loading images
• Delaying the rendering of JavaScript and CSS until the core elements of the page load
• Delaying the rendering of third-party scripts (think tracking scripts, chatbot scripts, etc.)

Once you’ve implemented the lighter-lift initiatives, see how you stack up against competitors.

If you and the competition are neck and neck, slap the “good enough” sticker on this puppy and move on.

If competitors far outperform you, assess the cost of the more complex optimization opportunities, including but not limited to:

• Minifying and consolidating CSS and JavaScript files
• Converting videos/gifs on the site to static images (and then loading the video/gif file after the rest of the page contents load)

4. Authority: The Rest of Your SEO Focus

Unless you’re the online industry leader, 80% of your SEO success will come from enhancing your site’s authority.

We divide “authority” into two key elements:

1. Creating the right type of high-quality content
2. Building high-quality backlinks from reputable websites

The Only Five Types of Content You Should Create

There are only five types of content any business should create.

Read our content strategy components for more on each. I’ll provide the abridged version below:

1. Awareness Content: Content that drives brand awareness and organic search traffic by focusing on educational search queries your audience searches for monthly. Awareness Content drives minimal conversions but can promote visibility for more valuable pages.
2. Sales Centric Content: Content that makes an argument for people buying your solution, or that helps provide a positive post-purchase experience to encourage repeat purchases down the road. Sales Centric Content sees minimal visibility from search results. This content often relies on other channels (e.g., Awareness Content or paid ads) to drive visibility to the page.
3. Thought Leadership Content: Content that showcases your expertise via your unique perspective on industry best practices, proprietary processes, or predictions on industry trends. Thought Leadership Content sees minimal search visibility and conversions. Still, it can be a powerful tool for winning the trust of your customers and others in your industry — branding you as an industry expert to follow.
4. Pillar Content: Content that lays the foundation for you to explore related subtopics that promote and showcase your topical authority within that theme. A pillar page might be one of the longest articles on your site, providing a short overview of your primary business themes’ core concepts while linking to your other articles that discuss those themes in depth.
5. Culture Content: Showcases employees at your company and how great it is to work on your team. This content doesn’t fall into the Pareto Rule of SEO. It’s a great idea for another time, but should take a back seat to the four other types of content.

When evaluating whether you should create a new type of content, ask yourself: Does this topic fit inside one of the five buckets?

If the answer is no, don’t create that piece of content.

Building LInks from High-Authority Publications

Links from other sites are one of the biggest factors that search engines look at to assess the credibility of your brand.

Get enough reputable sites to link back to you, and rankings will follow.

The issue? Google is generally opposed to any type of manual link building. They make a few exceptions here. However, most of their link building recommendations focus on great content creation.

I have two issues with Google’s recommendations:

1. Your site needs links from other reputable sites to rank in Google (so people can find your great content). Otherwise, you’ll need to invest aggressively in ad platforms (like Google Ads) to get your content in front of people who can link to it.
2. The other, more tangible recommendations than “make great content” mostly consist of initiatives I describe as digital PR. Digital PR will have a massive impact on your brand (and link profile). However, PR campaigns are generally expensive.

We look at link building as a necessary evil for most growing brands.

Without links, your site won’t rank. However, people won’t link to your website unless they find it.

We treat manual link building as the catalyst for ranking. The best link building focuses on building a handful of links to educational content to help that content rank in Google faster. The best content will then attract links on its own from engaged readers.

We elaborate on some of our favorite simple link building methods and how to acquire links from massive publications that connect journalists and subject matter experts.

Conclusion

And that, my friends, is the Pareto Principle of SEO.

Start with indexability optimization. Follow that with high-impact SEO positioning, another batch of top-priority technical SEO, and then build Authority through links and content.

Looking for a team to help you? We help growing brands acquire more online customers in two forms:

1. Growth Catalyst: We lead the strategy and implementation for getting more customers through SEO.
2. Growth Advisor: We lead the SEO strategy and train your team on how to get more customers through SEO.

Contact us today to learn more and see if we’re the right team to help you.

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