14 things you absolutely must do to prepare for 2025

1. Find the best keywords for your website

Keywords are the foundation of SEO. Although content is crucial, keywords come first: they determine what type of users you find when searching. And since you want to be found by the right users, you should choose your keywords carefully.

Which keywords are suitable for your website?

• You have a high search volume.

In non-SEO terms, this means that a lot of people are typing these keywords into search bars. A few hundred searches per month is good, but going further is always recommended. The more the better.

• They accurately capture search intent.

The relationship between a website owner and users works like any business transaction: if you don’t offer them what they want, they won’t take it.

It’s like buying new shoes. If you’re a size 7.5 adult, you won’t be buying children’s shoes (at least not for yourself). And if you’re looking for generic shoes without having anything specific in mind, it’ll take you forever to find what you really need.

Keywords are largely the same. If you have an online store where you sell shoes, then a product page that is optimized for the keyword “shoes for women size 7.5” is much more suitable than a page that says “shoes for women” or also just “shoes”. Bottom line: Use keywords that accurately describe what your audience wants to find.

• They are not overly competitive.

Strong competition for a keyword means that many other websites are already ranking for it – and it won’t be easy to beat them all. But for pretty much every keyword there is a less competitive version. You just have to find it and use it.

How do you find keywords that meet all of these criteria?

Search intent requires you to know your audience and their needs really well and then use your best judgment. Other factors can be represented in numbers, and this is where SEO tools come into play, such as WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions Tool.

Do you have your own keyword ideas? Enter it in the field and press Search. The tool creates a table of related keywords, and then you simply select the most promising ones.

2. Optimize your pages with keywords

Do you have your keywords? Great. Now you need to make sure you use them correctly.

For maximum effectiveness, your website pages must contain keywords in the following places:

• Page URL
• Page title
• Meta description
• H1-H4 headings (even better if you have a table of contents)
• Throughout the text itself
• Image file names and ALT texts (for Google Image Search)
• Video transcripts (if you have videos)

Scan your website’s pages with WebCEO’s Landing Page SEO tool to check the status of your keyword placement.

If the tool finds spaces that could be filled with keywords, run this and then perform another scan. Immediate improvement before your eyes!

One more thing: Even though keywords are a must, don’t overdo it. A set of related keywords per page or even one keyword per page is usually enough. Then incorporate the keywords into your text in a natural-sounding way. The gold standard for content is usually written text with helpful information.

3. Optimize your site structure

It’s easy to turn your website into a poorly connected mess if you don’t know what you’re doing.

If you Do If you know what you’re doing, you can give your most important pages a significant ranking boost – just by placing the links correctly.

Your users will also appreciate it. Who doesn’t want to have all the content they need at their fingertips?

So here is the recipe for an optimal page structure:

• Page hierarchy. Imagine a tree: the homepage as the trunk and the landing pages (e.g. landing pages, product pages, blog articles) at the ends of the branches.

• Topic clusters. It is advisable to link to pages that deal with related topics.
• Navigation bar. A bar at the top (less often on the left side) of the screen that contains links to the most important pages of the site (e.g. Home, About Us, Contact).
• Footer bar. Another bar at the bottom of a page containing the same links from the navigation and a few more at your discretion. Often the footer contains links to social media.
• Breadcrumbs. Have you ever seen a series of links in a row, something like this? Home » Category » Subcategory » Page? They’re called breadcrumbs and they help users keep track of exactly where they are on a website.
• Three-click rule. An unspoken rule says: Users should be able to go from any page A to any other page B in a maximum of three clicks.

However, to use links on your website like a pro, you want to know exactly how much authority your web pages have. And you can find out with the right SEO tools.

Scan your website with WebCEO’s internal linking tool to get this information.

This tool shows the pages with the highest amount of link juice. Share it with your most valuable pages by simply linking to it from these high authority pages.

This approach is most effective when the linked pages are linked thematically, i.e. form a topic cluster. For example, one page about the best toothbrushes and another about the best toothpastes. It makes sense to link the two together so that a slight ranking boost is guaranteed for both.

4. Maximize your loading speed

How long is too long? Five seconds may not seem like much, but if your page takes that long to load, most users have already abandoned it.

People hate slow page loading. People generally hate waiting. No matter the location or website, everyone wants immediate service.

And Google agrees. That’s why the loading speed of a website is an important ranking factor that you should definitely not neglect.

And it’s also one of the easiest to improve!

First, scan your website with WebCEO’s speed optimization tool.

Not only does it measure the loading speed and Core Web Vitals of your pages, but it also offers constructive criticism by identifying what is slowing down your website. Just follow the tips from the report and experience the success of your website.

And remember to constantly pay attention to slow-loading pages on your website. Set the speed optimization tool to send you regular reports. If you notice a site stalling, help it get going.

5. Check your website for errors – and fix them

Nothing is perfect, not even the best website in the world. Things break, errors appear. But no self-respecting website owner will allow things to stay broken – that’s a recipe for losing your customers!

You’re better than that too. Scan your website for errors now with WebCEO’s Technical Audit tool.

This tool detects all types of glitches, from broken links to more serious issues like server errors. Take a look at your report and don’t despair. It’s just a list of things that can be fixed.

You can resolve these issues yourself or send the report to your site administrator and have them do it for you. After the work is done, scan your website again and generate another report showing the decrease in errors. Your customer will love it.

And yes, the technical audit tool can also send automated scheduled reports.

6. Check the quality of your backlinks

What do you think is the number one ranking factor? Which of these can give you the highest ranking boost?

The note is right at the top of the heading. That’s right: backlinks.

Links from other websites pointing to yours. If your website isn’t on the #1 page of Google, the lack of good backlinks is most likely the reason (assuming everything else is fine).

To determine if you have a backlink problem, you need to check the current status of your link profile.

How can you do that? Scan your website with WebCEO’s Backlink Checker.

What should you look for there?

• Total number of backlinks and linking domains. The ratio between them can give you a rough idea of ​​how many links each domain gives you on average. If this ratio is too high (e.g. 1000 backlinks per domain), most of those backlinks are likely to be of poor quality.
• Loss of backlinks. Sometimes websites stop linking to you. Maybe they found someone with better content than yours, maybe they removed the page with the backlink, or maybe even their website died. Whatever the reason, it can negatively impact your rankings.
• Backlink texts. Good anchor text tells users what they will find on the other side of the link. If this doesn’t work, fewer people will click on the link. Look for non-descriptive anchor text (e.g. “click here”) that will keep your rankings low – changing this may be just what you need.
• Malicious backlinks. Spammy links from low-quality websites won’t do you any favors. If you have too many toxic backlinks, you need to remove them.

Knowing the health of your link profile opens up two different paths to improvement: link building and link detoxification. Let’s start with the former.

7. Revise and expand your link building

If you want to gain new backlinks and improve your website ranking, you should do some link building.

Which sites offer the best backlinks?

1. They are extremely authoritarian;
2. They have a thematic connection to your website.

And the better they meet these criteria, the harder it will be to land your backlinks there. These websites have high standards.

Link building is its own challenge – but there are many good strategies for it.

To name just a few:

• Provide high-quality (and ideally unique) content on your website that others will want to link to.
• Find broken links on other websites and offer the owners of those websites to link to your content instead.
• Find unlinked mentions of your website or brand and offer to add a backlink.

And we strongly encourage you to try more. You may find some of the link building strategies easier or more effective than others.

What about steps 8-14?

Bet this is just the beginning? Want to use even more SEO techniques to prepare for 2025?

Good news: The Complete SEO Guide is available exclusively to WebCEO users in PDF format and is completely free. Download now and get a head start on your competitors!