The Periodization and Life Cycle of SEO

During my senior year of high school, I competed in a powerlifting competition. While being in the gym was something I did on a consistent basis, the actual preparation for the meet was 12–16 weeks long.

This very strict training program focused on specific aspects throughout the 12–16 weeks.

For example: 

Focus on building muscle (Weeks 1–4): Less weight, more repetitions

Focus on strength (Weeks 5–8): More weight, fewer repetitions

This sort of training is called periodization. Periodization is the planned manipulation of your training variables, for example, volume, intensity, frequency, rest periods, exercise selection, and range of motion. The main two things people periodize, however, are volume and intensity.

The same concept applies to body recomposition: losing fat or gaining muscle. 

Little did I know my fitness training was teaching me business and SEO concepts all along.

See, I’ve found it’s best to periodize your focus when building an SEO strategy. 

What’s going to grow your business in the most meaningful way given your current position? 

What’s going to produce an ROI ASAP?

As with weight training, there are so many SEO variables and levers you can pull at any given moment — site architecture, internal links, content creation, link building, anchor text optimization, engagement improvement, and much more. 

The two main things SEOs should periodize and focus on are content and links. These are akin to your volume and intensity.

Why is this important?

Most people want to rank ASAP and try to do “all the things.” 

But this shit doesn’t work. 

We all have limited resources, the most precious of which is our time. Unless you have an unlimited budget with a massive team behind you and more than 24 hours in a day, it’s just not possible to optimize all the variables mentioned above.

Those who try this are more likely to fail even when they’re putting in the hard work. They simply can’t dedicate enough time, energy, and focus to optimizing every variable.

The power of focus is real. 

Those who chase two rabbits end up catching neither.

Periodization of SEO

Now, I can’t drill down into the finer details of each and every website. 

The levers you need to pull for your business are far too personal and specific to your individual needs, but there are some universal guidelines.

Brand-new websites

When I start a brand-new website these days, this is exactly what my process looks like. 

For brand-new websites and those with fewer than 100 articles, content creation will be the focus. Seriously, start pumping out content and don’t even think about link building right now. 

Spend six months to a year dialing this in, building a content creation team and perfecting a system that will pump out content without your involvement. 

Content is the lifeblood of SEO, so spend all your time focusing on it.

Figure out what makes a good article and how to perform keyword research. Create writer guidelines, hire writers and train them, and get this humming.

You need to build topical authority within your niche, and focusing on content will allow Google to understand what your site is all about.

Once you have 100 articles published, you can step away and focus on link building. 

Again, just as with content creation, I want you to step into link building and give it your all. 

Learn what makes a good link and a bad link. Learn how to write an effective outreach email. Build relationships with other websites within your niche. Focus 100% of your time and energy on building links.

And then, you guessed it, create a system and build a team that can take over this process as well.

Now you have a content creation and link building team that crushes. From here you want to start focusing on user engagement — keeping your visitors and turning them into customers.

Since the helpful content update, it’s become clear that we need to pay attention to user engagement metrics. Content and links will get you to the top of page one, but ending a user’s search journey will keep you there.

Note: From the very beginning, you should install heat maps from HotJar and Microsoft Clarity. While you may not be using these tools until you start updating content, you want them collecting data in the background so that when it’s time to update content, you have data you can analyze.

When updating content, it helps to know at what point people are navigating away from your page. Why aren’t they clicking your product link? What pages are they bouncing off of and why?

Review screen recordings and spend hours and hours testing so you can create the best user experience possible. 

It’s during this time that you should also be focusing on converting these visitors to subscribers/customers.

Create and test different lead magnets and start building an email list so you own them. Write weekly emails and learn everything you can about your customer avatar. 

This, in turn, helps you update your content and the language you use within it so you can speak to your ideal customer avatar. 

One caveat . . . I typically like creating lead magnets as soon as I start a site because I’ve learned how important an email list truly is. An email list means you won’t have to rely on Google (or other platforms) and helps you make the most of the traffic you get during the content creation and link building phase. I don’t like letting that traffic go to waste when I could be getting info on them. 

But creating a lead magnet in the beginning is often a shot in the dark because you don’t know exactly what your customer avatar wants. 

You can check out my article on lead magnets and capturing emails to help with this.

Now, not everyone on here is a brand-new website. In fact, most of you probably fall somewhere in between. So let’s explore where your focus should be.

High-authority low traffic

If you’re a brand with high-authority but low traffic (DR 50+), then content creation is the name of the game. I typically find these websites are brands that have just never focused on SEO before. 

They’ve used other internet marketing channels to grow and it has worked well for them. That’s right nerds, not everyone relies on SEO to make money. 😀

A good example of this is Brain.fm. This is a well-known brand that has gotten a ton of press coverage because of the quality of its product (I’m literally using it right now).

Because of this coverage, it’s a DR of 74 but only gets 18,000 organic visitors a month. And of that 18,000-person traffic, it’s all branded search terms. 

This is a clear-cut case of needing to focus on creating high-quality content around a niche. If Brain.fm were to publish, say, 500 pages, it would explode. 

The authority, links, and brand recognition are there. They just need to pull the content lever.

Another example of websites that need to pull the content lever are expired domains. I’ve been a fan of these for a year or two now, and they work wonders. 

If we buy a DR 50+ expired domain, we know that the next 12–24 months is simply going to be about creating and optimizing content. We’ve been able to push off the link building lever thanks to the existing backlink profile. 

Lots of content but few links

I don’t care what some Twitter influencers say, you need links to rank. If you’ve produced 100+ articles on your site and you just aren’t seeing the traffic and revenue from it, start building links.

A good DR to shoot for is 50+ depending on your niche.

To get tactical, go and look at your competitors and their DR/authority. If you have relatively the same number of pages as them, yet they crush you in the SERPs, it’s most likely their link profile.

You can’t always just use the link hammer to jump up in rankings, but more often than not I see companies concerned about creating more content yet they have a DR of only 30 . . . you need to build links, my friend. 

Everything in between

Probably 90% of you fall somewhere in between. Perhaps you’re at a DR of 40 with 50 articles. 

Or 200 articles but a DR of 30.

My biggest suggestion to you is twofold. 

1. Review your competitors and see where they’re at. 

2. Based on your findings, focus on producing more content or building links, not both (unless you have the budget to hire an agency).

Reviewing competitors

Gather a list of 5–10 competitors that are outranking you and doing well in the SERPs. Put them into a spreadsheet and review the following.

• Number of pages getting traffic on each site

• Number of backlinks and the DR of each site

Let’s say I’m the gym clothing brand Ryderwear. 

Ryderwear is sitting at a DR 63 with 124,000 organic visitors. 

I would pop my website into Ahrefs and review the “Organic competitors” tab, which would show me the following:

In the list above I see GymShark. Run it through Ahrefs and I see it sitting pretty at a DR of 78 and 3.4 million traffic: 

Safe to say, they’re kicking my butt.

It’s clear I need to close the gap on DR (Ryderwear is 63 and Gym Shark is 78). 

But what about content? 

Pop GymShark into the “Top Pages” tab in Ahrefs and I see they have 33,000 pages getting traffic!

Ryderwear has 1,200 pages . . .

If I were Ryderwear, I would focus on closing that content gap instead of the authority gap. At a DR 63, Ryderwear doesn’t have terrible domain authority by any means. 

But the sheer amount of content GymShark has is helping it rank far better than Ryderwear.

Now, you can take this analysis even deeper by figuring out the CPC of each individual keyword, i.e., what keywords will actually make money, but I’m sitting at 2,000 words and we’re getting a bit long here.

If this is something you want me to cover, shoot me an email and I’ll queue it up. But for now, I’ll leave you with this.

Your Next Steps

Reading articles and theory is cool, but you know what will actually move the needle for your business?

Action. Don’t just read this. 

Implement it or send it to a team member.

Here’s what to do next:

1. Figure out what lever to pull that will bring you the quickest ROI for your business.
   

2. Do this by reviewing your competitors’ link profiles and pages.
   

3. Make a decision.
   

4. Put all your focus into that lever for the next 6–12 months.
   

5. Reassess. 

That’s it! 

See you next week and, as always, hit me with any questions you may have.

Much love ✌️