Getting Started - (2018 version)

“I put in work, and watch my status escalate” – Keith Edward Elam

As Keith says in his brilliant song, you need to really think about working hard if you want to see your rankings escalate.

Work.

Step 2 is all about you understanding that you will need to study more… and work more in order to get the rankings you desire.

Squirrly SEO offers you the tools, but you need to be the one who uses them.

You also need to be willing to understand that sometimes the rankings you think you need right now may be wrong. Real data from what real people search on Google and the intent of the search should make you change your mind about some of the rankings you think you need.

Without using the tools from Squirrly SEO you can end up ranking number 1 in Google for:
– keywords that nobody ever searches for. (this article helps you learn more about ranking for wrong keywords)
– keywords that don’t turn you a profit (trust me when I say that “need for speed cheap steam game” will help you sell more copies of the NFS steam game, than the keyword “need for speed screenshots”; I had an online store in which I was selling cheap steam games. Ranked it for hundreds of profitable keywords. Low search volume. High purchase intent.)
– keywords that bring in people who don’t convert from visitor to actual member of your audience (they don’t sign up for anything. They’ll never come back again)
– keywords that mean something completely different from what you thought they did. (you can see my “premium coffee” versus “specialty coffee” video to learn about this huge problem that people get themselves into without proper tools and research)

If you can’t adapt, if you’re unwilling to re-optimize, then you should most probably stop right now.

Squirrly SEO is for people who really want to put in the necessary work.

These tools will make you feel overpowered. Unstoppable. One who has an unfair advantage. BUT only if YOU use them.

Adapt.

You may currently think that something like “digital ecosystem” is the keyword that you want to be found for.

You could struggle for years to rank on the First Page of Google for this keyword.

It would be the wrong kind of work. Why:
– competition is way too high. It would cost you a LOT of time and money to get to page 1 for this keyword.
– useless traffic to your page. People searching for that want industry reports. They don’t want to contact you so you can sell them digital branding solutions.
– few people searching for this.

With Squirrly, if you put in the work, you’ll avoid such pitfalls. Our tools will help you see that this direction is wrong.

By using it even more you could come up with lucrative alternatives.

Digital Branding Solutions with suffixes and prefixes placed in the Keyword Research tool from Squirrly would uncover amazing alternatives for you. Alternatives which would bring you real money.

Prepare yourself mentally. Be ready to work.

You’ll need to keep the following in mind:
– strategy
– work
– adapt

Start with a strategy. Work. If things don’t go as planned, or they could go better, then do adapt. 

This is step 2 of Getting Started. If you’ll remember the paragraph above, you’ll do just great.

Here’s a video where I show how we’ve adapted to a new strategy and new keywords. After working on some ideas, we saw (using the Squirrly SEO tools) that we weren’t getting anywhere with the online store (we have an online store where we run different tests). In this video I show why we chose to shift strategy after looking at results and data. Fast forward since then to present time: we’re currently getting orders from customers who end up on the pages we’ve re-optimized after the analysis in that video.

Note: that video is for Shopify platform, for which Squirrly SEO offered at that particular time when it was streamed fewer tools (about 40 to 50% of what’s in WordPress). If we had all that we have on WP right now it would have worked even better.

Strategy before tech mumbo-jumbos.

WordPress SEO is about really working on SEO with the proper tools.

The other plugins, that only have settings in them won’t help you much, because they just add pieces of code to your pages and that’s about all they do.

Technical SEO is almost pointless without a proper SEO Strategy to power it up.

With Squirrly, we want you to be able to find a winning strategy and get real world results, not just tid bits of code in a WordPress.

Welcome to Squirrly SEO.

Before you can benefit in full from using the plugin, it’s good to know that Squirrly SEO is about a lot more than just a couple of settings in your WordPress.

SEO Live Assistant, Keyword Research Assistant, Performance Analytics, SEO Audits, Google Rank Checkers, Briefcase – and over 200 other tools and features are the things that make this software invaluable.

It brings to WordPress things that have never been seen before inside a WordPress Plugin.

You can use this plugin with any other WordPress SEO Plugin. !! Warning !!: If you do, make sure that you let the other plugin handle SEO Settings, don’t activate them in Squirrly SEO and don’t expect them to be handled by Squirrly if you don’t decide otherwise yourself.

Activate all the Settings

a) Check for SEO Errors.

You will see that Squirrly offers you an orange button which you can click. It reads: “Check for SEO Errors”. This will help you see if it is currently safe to turn on the SEO Settings from Squirrly

Why is this important? Themes and plugins in WordPress don’t always follow to 100% the indications of WordPress, therefore interfering with other software, like Squirrly.

Doing this step a) is important for your safety.

b) Go to WordPress -> Squirrly -> SEO Settings.

You will see that you have multiple tabs there. Go through all of them and start activating all the settings from Squirrly, if you want it to offer you its full power.

Make sure the switch is turned on!

Then, look at the right side of this box inside your WordPress.

Activate Canonical

Activate Required METAs

Activate XML Sitemap

Activate Feed (so you can easily give readers and apps access to your RSS Feed)

Activate Favicons and Apple Icons

Activate JSON-LD for Semantic SEO

Activate Options for NoFollow and NoIndex

By activating these first, you will that new options appear in your Settings.

Then move on and activate all the settings in the First Page Optimization section:

Title, Description, Keywords.

You can now start writing the information needed for your homepage at the right side of this section. You can also choose an Open Graph image which will be used when people share your homepage on Social Media.

There’s a preview in that section, of how things will look like. It’s powered by our TrueRender technology, so it will show the end result (there’s no other plugin which does that; they show info from before the wp page is rendered).

Scroll more, down to SEO for all posts / pages.

WARNING: read the text carefully in this section. It says “Exclude”, so only do click one of the boxes if you have a couple of WordPress post types for which you 100% DON”T want Squirrly to show.

Good!

This tab is now done.

Go to the next tab from the upper menu.

Structured Data.

Give it information in all the fields it has.

The information you write here is super helpful for JSON-LD settings. Read more about structured data with JSON-LD here.

This is all about Semantic SEO. (Squirrly SEO offers more for Semantic SEO than just this, but in this step this is what you need to setup).

Completing your Social Media Profiles inside Squirrly SEO’s settings will also boost you JSON-LD definitions.

Social Media.

Now move to the Social Media tabs.

Here you setup your Open Graph and Twitter Cards.

Also, here’s where you write the social media accounts of your brand. This is important for Google!

Site icon.

Here you setup an icon for your website.

This will be displayed as Favicon and also as Apple Icon for Apple Devices of the people from your audience.

Tracking Tools.

Here you setup your tracking tools.

Facebook Admin ID

Google Analytics ID

Facebook Pixel. (more about fb pixel here)

Connections.

Here you integrate your WordPress site with various other tools!

Do NOT skip this step. This is super important.

Search Console (ex-Google Webmasters) (if you don’t have a Google Search Console account yet, create one now. You’ll need it)

BING Meta code

Alexa Meta Code

Setup your Pinterest RICH PINS (highly valuable for e-commerce sites)

Sitemap XML.

Let Squirrly Create you an amazing Sitemap and also an amazing Collection of Sitemaps.

It is pretty advanced.

Select to PING your articles. Once you publish a post, it will be pinged so search engines learn about the update. This DOES NOT guarantee indexing. That’s up to Google to decide what it wants to do, according to your Website Authority. Don’t expect Google to easily index a site with low SEO Audit Score or with very low Authority Scores (you can see these inside your weekly SEO Audits)

Next: tell Squirrly for which Post Types from WordPress you want it to build sitemaps.

Then, select if you want your sitemaps to contain images and videos (it’s recommended that you do).

Tell the Sitemap Feature how often you update your Website. This is important for Google. Try to give an honest answer.

Feed Pagination – select how many items you want to have in your sitemaps. (sitemaps with tens of thousands of items can be problematic, that’s why we provide an option where you choose how much should be included).

We personally use 1000 for our setup.

Ranking Options: Google Rank Checker.

Here you make settings related to the Country for which you want the SERP Checker to verify your positions in Google.

Also, you’ll be able to make other settings for the Rank Checking Option.

Advanced Settings.

Here you can make some more settings for your site.

I personally would ALWAYS use the NEW version of the SEO Live Assistant, always let Squirrly download images from blog posts to your WP Media Library (it’s fair play for other creators because you don’t make them pay for bandwidth that’s not being use on their own sites, and you can never run into non-existing images on your posts).

Correct Feed links and images – make sure it’s on.

Robots.txt

Here you can make additional settings to your robots.txt file.

Patterns – make sure you’re using them!

These patterns do SEO Automation on your behalf.

You can easily use this function to optimize a WooCommerce site with 2,000 products in a couple of minutes.

You can make settings for each post type in your WordPress!!! YES!! Squirrly SEO lets you choose any post type you have in WP, not just from a narrow definition of post types.

If you don’t understand what this means, it’s better to just leave the setting on and move on.

You can learn more about the SEO Patterns later on. The important thing is to have them activated, because they help remove a lot of duplicates.

Import.

Use this one for Imports and Backups.

It’s not at all necessary to use it now, unless you want to import settings made with other plugins you’ve been using prior to Squirrly SEO.

c) OPTIONAL: Import Previous SEO

If you want, you can start IMPORTING all the settings you’ve made with previous wordpress SEO plugins you were using.

Great!

Now the settings from Squirrly SEO are active! You are now ready to move to Step number 2.