The Factory Agency

/SEO GUIDES

SEO GUIDES
THE WORK, IN ORDER

SEO advice is usually published as a flat list of tactics, which is why so much of it gets applied in the wrong order. These guides follow the sequence we actually work in — foundation, intent, authority, measurement — because each stage makes the next one worth doing.

/THE ORDER
WE WORK IN

Four stages. Skipping ahead is the most expensive mistake in the discipline, and it is the default one.

01

Technical foundation

Whether search engines can reach, render, understand and index the site at all: crawl paths, canonicals, rendering, status codes, site architecture, performance. Content investment on top of a broken foundation is money spent on pages nobody will be shown.

02

Intent and content

What people actually search for, what kind of answer the results are rewarding, and whether your page is that kind of answer. Most “content problems” are intent mismatches — a commercial page competing against informational results, or the reverse.

03

Authority

Whether anybody outside your own site treats you as a credible source. Earned links, citations, and the entity signals that let a search engine connect your brand to a subject. Slow, cumulative, and the hardest part to fake convincingly.

04

Measurement and iteration

Knowing which of the above moved the number, so the next quarter’s work is chosen rather than guessed. This is the stage most often skipped, and the reason so many SEO programs cannot say what worked.

/GUIDE TOPICS
AND WHERE THE DETAIL LIVES

Each topic maps to work we run, so the guides and the practice stay honest with each other.

Technical SEO

Crawling, indexing, rendering, architecture and the performance work that supports them. Stage one, and the one with the fastest wins on neglected sites.

Technical SEO

On-page and content structure

Titles, headings, internal linking and the structure that makes a page legible to both readers and machines.

On-page SEO

Search intent

Reading the result page as evidence of what the engine believes the query means, and matching your page to it rather than to your sales funnel.

Search intent

Off-page and authority

How links are actually earned, what to do instead of buying them, and how to evaluate an opportunity that a tool has scored highly.

Off-page SEO

Local and map visibility

Profiles, citations, proximity, and why a business can rank nationally and be invisible three streets away.

Local SEO

Ecommerce SEO

Faceted navigation, pagination, out-of-stock handling and the crawl budget problems that only appear at catalog scale.

Ecommerce SEO

AI and answer engines

How content gets used by generative answers and assistants, what that does to click behavior, and what is worth changing now rather than speculating about.

AIO

Auditing

How to run the whole sequence yourself, in what order, and how to decide what not to fix.

SEO Audit

/PLATFORM-SPECIFIC
GUIDES

The same principles, but the failure modes differ enough by platform that generic advice stops being actionable. Each of these has its own service page with the detail.

  • WordPress — plugin conflicts, taxonomy bloat, and the archive pages nobody meant to publish.
  • WooCommerce — variable products, filtered URLs and catalog-scale duplication on a stack that was not designed for it.
  • Magento — layered navigation, multi-store URL structures and crawl budget on large catalogs.
  • Shopify — enforced URL patterns, collection duplication and the limits of what the platform lets you change.
  • New websites — what to get right before launch, when it is still cheap.

/FREQUENTLY ASKED
QUESTIONS

WANT THE SEQUENCE
RUN ON YOUR SITE?

The guides are written so that a competent team can follow them without us. If you would rather not, an audit produces the same sequence applied to your site, with the stages that do not apply to you removed.

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