Lesson 2
What You Can and Can’t Control as a Website Admin
What you’ll learn
By the end of this lesson, you’ll know:
Which SEO elements are safely within your control
Which areas are not worth worrying about
How to focus effort where it actually matters
Why this matters
One of the biggest sources of SEO stress is working on the wrong things.
Website admins often worry about:
- Rankings changing day to day
- Algorithm updates
- Technical issues they can’t influence
This lesson helps you draw a clear line between:
- Your responsibility
- Everything else
What you can control
As a website admin or content editor, you typically control:
- Page titles
- Meta descriptions
- Headings (H1, H2, H3)
- Written content
- Images and alt text
- URLs (in most CMSs)
- Internal links
- Which pages exist and which don’t
These are the core inputs search engines use to understand a page.
They are also the areas where small, careful improvements add up over time.
What you can’t (or shouldn’t) control
You generally cannot directly control:
- How many backlinks a page has
- Exactly how Google ranks pages
- Whether competitors change their sites
- Algorithm updates
- Whether Google rewrites snippets
You also shouldn’t try to micro-manage:
- Keyword density
- Exact ranking positions
- Daily traffic fluctuations
Those things are outcomes, not inputs.
Where most people waste time
Common distractions include:
- Chasing “perfect” keyword usage
- Constantly rewriting content that already performs well
- Tweaking pages without a clear reason
- Obsessing over tools instead of content clarity
In this course, we’ll focus on stable inputs, not volatile outputs.
The mindset to adopt
A useful rule of thumb:
If you can’t change it directly on the page, don’t optimise it here.
Your job is to:
- Make pages clear
- Make them accurate
- Make them useful
Search engines take care of the rest.