Remember the fundamentals

Itamar says: “Don’t neglect the fundamentals.

Don’t forget the core aspects and pillars that make up SEO, in terms of the technical, content, and backlink foundations of your website. Make sure that you’ve still got a solid foundation to work from.”

Have the fundamentals remained the same for the last couple of decades?

“Yes.”

Are there any new fundamentals?

“I don’t think so, at this moment in time. There are AI developments, but those are secondary in that they can bolster these core pillars. I don’t see the fundamentals changing.”

Which aspects of the fundamentals do you focus on?

“You need to prioritise in order of importance.

You’ve got the technical side of things: do you have the right types of pages on your site? Are search engines able to crawl, read, and understand these pages successfully? Are you optimizing for what you want search engines to crawl and also index? Keep on top of those first and foremost, before you get into the quality of your content and building links. That’s number 1.

Then you move on to your content. With the pages that you’ve got, are you optimizing for unique keywords for each page? Then, have you comprehensively covered the content around your niche?

Once you’ve established your assets and your content, you move on to building links and establishing more of the authority that’s passed through from external sites. That’s going to help improve your perceived relevancy and authority to search engines, and hopefully influence how it ranks.”

How do you determine that search engines are indexing your site and how do you know if what they’re actually crawling is good or needs to be improved?

“Google Search Console should be the absolute most basic tool that you use to understand what Google is saying. You’ve got the pages report, where you can see what pages/URLs are being indexed, what aren’t, and the reasons for that.

You might see that certain URLs have been discovered, but they haven’t actually been crawled, or you’ve got pages that have been crawled but haven’t been indexed for whatever reason. Gauging what Google sees is important because that’s the main thing you need to be aware of: how does Google see your site and what do you need to change based on what you see?

Your most important pages are your commercial pages. If you’ve got a website, you’re most likely trying to get something out of it. You’re not just a blog, you’re a service provider or an e-commerce shop. Make sure that the pages where users can find what they’re looking for and convert are indexed. Check those, first and foremost.

If you’ve got a massive site, because of the limitations of Google Search Console, you might need to set up multiple properties so that you can dig deep and be thorough in your analysis to see whether all your important pages are being indexed and shown correctly.

You could look at additional elements like schema or rich snippets but, at this stage, you’re just making sure that the pages are there, and Google isn’t seeing anything that’s wrong on the page. If we’re talking the fundamentals of technical SEO, that would be it.”

To target unique keywords on each page, how do you select the right page for the right keyword phrase?

“Again, that’s something that you can use Google Search Console for. If you specify a particular query, look at the pages that are visible for that query, and notice that there are multiple pages that have a significant number of impressions (because that’s showing your visibility), then you can strip it back.

Do a more thorough analysis of the SERP. What’s being shown? Then you can determine whether 2 pieces of content really should just be 1 because they cover the same thing, for example.

When it comes to understanding your audience and the funnel, the most important thing is seeing what types of core pages you need. If you have other pages that complement that or are supplementary to that main content or topic area, then it may be worth seeing what other keywords are unique to that.

It might be longer tail keywords with different modifiers added to them, or keywords for specific use cases. See whether it warrants having that on its own page. Sometimes it is trial and error, but you can troubleshoot that with Google Search Console to see where you’re at.”

Is it necessary to be aware of how you’re indexed and what your pages look like in other search engines besides Google?

“It depends on how you’ve set up your robots.txt.

There are certain things that Google cares about more. I would argue that schema markup is something that Google cares more about than other search engine bots.

However, as long as you’re not limiting other types of user agents from crawling your sites within your robots.txt, then you should be fine across the board – provided you’re set up with the standard protocols for HTML and how web pages should be formatted and laid out.”

Do you need to ensure that your pages look good in social search as well?

“It depends on what you’re doing. It would be more of a primary focus for your brand search, as well as for tutorial or how-to searches that typically warrant more social and multimedia displays on the SERPs.

Other than that, I wouldn’t say that they would be a massive focus.

If you rely on a lot of tutorials and how-to content that is more visual by nature, then you should absolutely be using other channels to try and market yourself.”

What aspects of link building are key to focus on in 2025?

“The vast majority of sites have quite a natural link profile, where the majority of the backlinks pointing to a site will go to the homepage. Something that people should be focusing more on is having links that point to your commercial pages.

In reality, you care most about being competitive and ranking for commercial terms. If you’re not building links to commercial terms in a competitive space, you’re going to have a hard time being competitive and showing up where you want to on the SERP.

Have a think about what your most important pages are. What are the ones that will drive the most business value in terms of conversions, revenue, etc.? Then, build links to those pages.

Think about the anchor text, in terms of variety and the context of that to the destination page. Maybe use a variety of anchors, if you’ve done your keyword research and found that people search for the same thing in different ways. Use that for variety when you’re building links to it from other websites. Those would be the focus areas when you’re doing link building.

Obviously, if you’re starting out on a new site, you are going to need links to your homepage. You need to build up the credibility and the index in terms of search engines finding your site through other pages and other websites. However, for established sites who are looking to be competitive, your key commercial should be the focus of your link building.”

How much time should be spent focusing on fundamentals?

“I don’t think SEO has changed as significantly as some people might think. You do need to spend more of your time getting the technical foundations right. Once you’ve sorted out the technical aspects, you don’t need to worry about it, unless you’re on a custom build or something that needs to be updated regularly.

Then it’s just focusing on your content and your links. Once you’ve got your content sorted out, in terms of your main content pillars and your commercial pages, then it’s scaling that up and keeping up-to-date with changes in your niche. You could write about that on your blog, for example.

From a link-building standpoint, it’s getting more links over time, and the freshness of links is important as well. Being consistent, not only just in your content but also when you’re building links, is going to be important.”

When your fundamentals are at a healthy stage, how do you decide what to prioritise?

“You need to look at the data. You need to see what your performance is, and the performance needs to be prioritised in terms of what’s making you the most money.

If your commercial pages aren’t performing as well, you might need to look deeper. If you look up the keywords you’re targeting, what shows up? What types of content do the people who rank above you have that you don’t? What types of links do they have? How many links or backlinks do they have that you don’t?

Niche down your focus towards the pages that make the most business impact, and then try to reverse engineer to see what Google is rewarding and how you can improve what you have.

It’s quite tricky because, when people have built a site, they’ve often spent hundreds of hours looking at the site and building the content. You get fatigued in your objective thinking about your content, and your website as a whole. It’s important to try and think as objectively as possible when you are doing this research, to understand when you’re not doing XYZ that other people are doing better.

That’s sometimes where you need a second pair of eyes to help you see that. If you’re working on the same site for a long time, you might miss things. You will get the most value out of being as critical and objective as possible when you’re auditing your own content, based on performance. If the performance isn’t there, try to figure out why, be objective, and really focus on the things you can do to improve.”

How do you help clients understand the value that focusing on fundamentals can have?

“If somebody’s paying you, you’d hope that they would care about your opinion. They’re paying for your time and your expertise.

I’m more than happy for clients to share new things that they’ve seen. It’s similar to when you get forwarded emails from Google Search Console because one page has not been indexed for some reason. It never tells you the page, which is why it gets forwarded to you, and then you check and say, ‘This is a page that you don’t need indexed, so don’t worry about it.’

If you’re paying me to help you do this, and we have clear goals and a focus that we’ve agreed on, then let me cook. That’s the way I see it. Some clients want to be more hands-on and engaged with what’s happening, which is fine. However, the education part is still important.

If somebody does come to you with other ideas that they want to focus on, then you can tell them that you want to be doing the things that will make you successful in the next 1, 3, 5, and 10 years on search engines. That’s what you want to do.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“The thing that pops to mind is Core Web Vitals – assuming that you’re not using a custom CMS and you’re using a CMS that doesn’t have issues with performance.

A lot of the time, websites get bogged down in the Core Web Vitals. The Lighthouse reports have set numbers from 0-100, and everyone wants to be at 100. The reality is, it’s often not worth the amount of time it takes to do the work and get yourself to that point. You could be spending that time elsewhere, improving the fundamentals.

Of course, if you’re an e-commerce site and speed is more important to you for conversions, and you’ve got lots of massive multimedia file sizes and it’s taking a while to load, then absolutely work on that. However, if you’re just trying to get from a 90 to a 95, why would you spend 5-10 hours doing that when you can be spending 5-10 hours working on your content or building links?”

Itamar Blauer is Senior SEO Director at StudioHawk, and you can find him over at ItamarBlauer.com.