What is the difference between Focus Pages and the SEO Live Assistant?
The SEO Live Assistant (SLA) and Focus Pages are two completely different features. Meaning: you get to build “search relevance” (and also enhance your content and your strategy) by using the SEO Live Assistant from Squirrly SEO. But that is just a sub-set of what needs to be done in order to rank your focus pages.
All your pages should be optimized using the SEO Live Assistant, but you shouldn’t place ALL your pages as Focus Pages inside Squirrly SEO. Let us tell you more:
Focus Pages analyzes a page’s chances of ranking by analyzing and providing feedback on over 113 ranking factors that Google also takes into account when deciding if it should rank a page on Google and on which position.
One of the things the Focus Pages system checks for is whether your page is optimized using the SEO Live Assistant (to ensure you have Search Relevance). But it also looks at things like:
- the keywords you are targeting,
- the competition for those keywords and their place inside your strategy,
- traffic health (how good and how well targeted is the traffic and do people spend time on the page?),
- whether you have backlinks for that page,
- whether you have inner links,
- and many other factors (again… over 113 factors) that impact your chances of ranking.
A team can influence the ranking factors for about 10 pages at a time. Getting traffic, social media shares, writing better and longer content, making sure visitors have a good experience on a page — all these take a lot of focus.
By influencing the ranking factors and turning those Red Dots to Green, you start ranking higher and improving the chances of ranking on the first page.
Once a page starts ranking in TOP 10 on Google, then you no longer need to focus on tweaking the page and you can just check its ranking from the Ranking Section of Squirrly, to make sure it stays in top 10.
And as an extra measure, also add that page to the SEO Audit section. From the SERP Checker and the SEO Audit, you’ll get to know how well your previous focus pages keep performing. But you won’t continue to actively invest in those pages, because those are already ranked high.
This frees up space for new pages you want to start ranking (new pages that you can set as Focus Pages).
You’ll start focusing on a new set of pages and you’ll increase the monthly organic visits to your site by ranking the new set of pages. Your previous focus pages will also keep bringing in traffic, so you’ll be compounding a lot of organic visits over time, while also working step by step and being able to focus your efforts.
If you want to know more about the Ranking Vision AI which powers Focus Pages and the Next SEO Goals, then read about it here.
Having a page set as Focus Pages doesn’t influence the SEO Live Assistant Score for that page.
Whether you have that page set as a Focus Page or not, the SEO Live Assistant will check for the same number of items.
