What is an SEO Strategy?
If you’ve worked in marketing, you’ve probably heard of SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimisation, and it is the process of optimising your website so that it is more likely to be found when people search for related keywords.
If you don’t have an SEO strategy for your content, you’ll have difficulty ranking in the SERPs and getting traffic. The good news is that if you take the right steps, you can maximise the effectiveness of your SEO strategy.
You are essentially building a house when you create a website. You must ensure that all rooms are well-organised so visitors can find what they are looking for. When your content is disorganised and scattered, search engines have no idea where to look to find what you’ve created. This can result in a lower page rank, which can lead to fewer visitors to your site.
What Every SEO Strategy Must Have
1. Keyword Targeting
The keyword targeting feature allows you to target keywords in Google AdWords. It’s a great way to get your ads shown when potential customers search for the keywords you choose. It also allows you to set different bids for each keyword, which means you can spend more on high-volume keywords, and less on low-volume ones.
Keyword targeting is selecting keywords that are most likely to result in website visitors looking for what you have to offer.
2. Metadata
The definition of meta-data is, “Data about data”. It can be used to understand the meaning of data in context, provide a description, and describe its semantics. Meta-data is not necessarily related to data. The term ‘metadata’ is often used as an abbreviation for ‘metadata. Meta-data is commonly used in information retrieval to describe and understand data.
3. Backlinks
How they work and how you can use them to get more traffic and sales. There are two ways you can get backlinks. The first is through SEO. This involves finding websites with a link to your website and asking them if they would be interested in sharing their link. If they agree, they will usually add your website as a link on their site. The second way is to buy links from other websites.
4. Technical SEO
Technical SEO is optimising a website for search engines through the implementation of technological enhancements, like 301 redirects and title tags.
5. SEO metrics
Technical SEO is the process of optimising a website for search engines. It involves the optimisation of web pages and site content to ensure that they are accessible, useful, and easily found by search engines. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of enhancing your website’s visibility in search results. Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo!
Why are organic traffic and SEO important?
The answer to this question is simple: in the past years, we’ve seen an increase in the number of companies that are competing with each other. This trend has been present for several years now and has been on the rise since the beginning of this millennium. This competition has resulted in more companies competing for a smaller amount of visitors or customers. And that’s when organic search marketing (SEO) and organic traffic become essential.
What is an SEO Plan?
An SEO plan is a road map to help you reach your goal of having your website rank in the top 10 search results for your chosen keywords. It’s more than just putting up a website and hoping that it will rank well. The SEO plan includes all aspects of your web presence, from content to links to social media. The plan should also include ongoing marketing activity to keep your website ranking high.
SEO Report
An SEO report is a summary of your SEO efforts over a specified time period. It essentially shows your level of success as well as any areas that require improvement. Having a consolidated report also allows you to present the data to relevant stakeholders to demonstrate why your SEO activities are important and how they drive business growth.
Your SEO report can include metrics such as organic traffic results, your website’s SEO health, inbound link generation, and any areas where growth has slowed that need to be addressed for future improvement.
Mobile SEO Strategy
Mobile SEO is important to keep in mind when creating your overall strategy. Mobile optimisation involves ensuring your site and content are available and accessible to visitors on mobile devices, so they can have the same experience and receive the same value as desktop browsers.
Mobile optimisation is incredibly important, as Google practices mobile-first indexing. This means instead of crawling a desktop site; the algorithm will use the mobile version of your site when indexing and ranking pages for SERPs.
While it is not an entirely separate process, mobile SEO has distinct considerations such as monitoring page speed, responsive site design, local SEO, and creating high-quality content that is viewable on any device.
What are the Top 3 SEO Strategies?
1. On-Page SEO
This is the practice of optimising your site for search engines. It’s the best way to ensure your site gets found in the search results. The goal is to make sure your site’s content and design are both search engine friendly.
2. Technical SEO
Technical SEO, also known as on-page SEO, ensures that a website is optimised for search engines. This includes making sure the content on your pages is written well, that your site’s code is clean and valid, and that you have a good balance of keywords throughout the various pages of your site. Technical SEO has become increasingly important because Google’s algorithm focuses on how fast and relevant your site is for users.
3. Off-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO: Off-page SEO is the practice of promoting your site to other sites and pages on the web. This includes social media marketing, link building, and guest blogging.
Create a Strategy That Supports Your Business Goals
Ranking high in search results can be difficult. While creating content centred on high-traffic keywords may appear appealing, this strategy may not help you meet your business objectives.
Instead, for tremendous marketing success, develop an SEO strategy that assists you in addressing your specific business needs.
How to Create an SEO Strategy?
So, rather than provide you with an SEO strategy template that would send you down the wrong path, let’s look at the key principles you’ll need to consider while creating an organic search strategy. Getting these fundamentals right is crucial, whether you’re a beginner or an SEO expert.
1. Set SEO goals
Before you embark on a major search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign, you must first define your objectives. After all, without clear goals, your SEO efforts will not yield measurable results. It’s also critical to link SEO results to top-level metrics like revenue.
Begin by identifying your desired marketing outcomes, then work backwards to define your process objectives.
2. Consider SEO scalability
Scalability is one of enterprise companies’ most difficult challenges when developing an SEO website strategy. Internal SEO teams are extremely smart and efficient. They understand how to get things done. However, they rarely have the resources to handle large-scale SEO content creation or high-quality link building.
A truly scalable SEO strategy goes far beyond plugins and third-party software subscriptions.
3. Execute a competitive analysis
The process of evaluating your competition to improve your SEO strategy is known as competitive analysis. Examine your competitors’ organic search rankings, online reviews, blog strategy, and backlink profiles. Then, investigate their user experience, social media, target audience segments, unique selling points (USPs), and differentiators.
You could expand your investigation by conducting a technical SEO audit. Examine the health of their website, technical SEO implementation, page speed, and mobile-friendliness.
Of course, your main competitors should be included in your competitive analysis. You should, however, include your online competitors in the SERPs. Look for websites that rank on the first page of Google for your target SEO keywords, even if they aren’t direct competitors.
An industry publication, for example, could pose a threat to your search engine results page.
4. Do keyword research and build topic clusters
Keyword research is at the heart of any effective SEO strategy. It may seem obvious, but it is critical to creating content and web pages that your target audience searches for. Large brands frequently overproduce content that does not target specific keyword phrases or repeatedly targets the same term.
Proper keyword research can help to avoid this mistake and increase SEO ROI. You’ll be able to cover topics thoroughly without cannibalising keywords and diluting value with advanced keyword research. This means increased website traffic, engagement, and conversion rates.
5. Build topic clusters into your SEO Strategy
Avoid being too specific in your research. Single keywords are critical to a high-performance SEO program. It is, however, equally important to identify the broad topics in which you are an expert and deserve a high SERP ranking.
Topic clusters are a great way to leverage broad themes via pillar pages like this blog post.
As you may have noticed, SEO strategy is a broad topic (or pillar page) with many subtopics. These subtopics are referred to as cluster pages in the pillar cluster model. Pillar pages cover a broad topic and link to in-depth resources to learn more.
Topic clusters have a wide range of applications. You can cover the entire range of a keyword group, from high-volume head terms to very specific long-tail keywords. An internal linking strategy allows you to communicate the breadth of your coverage to search engines while also passing inherited link value between relevant content.
6. Finding the right keywords
How do you come up with keywords to fuel your website SEO strategy? Aside from proprietary technology, here’s a comprehensive list of tools and processes for locating the most impactful search terms.
7. Align content with search intent
Because it underpins Google’s search objective, search intent is one of the most important aspects of keyword research. In other words, Google wants to deliver the most relevant content to users as quickly as possible.
A keyword may have a high volume of searches. However, it could result from user intent misaligned with your content, business, products, or services. Ranking would be nearly impossible in that case, and any traffic would most likely bounce without converting.
8. Build SEO strategy into the conversion funnel
When developing your SEO strategy, keep the entire conversion funnel in mind. Even if you are in charge of a large online retail brand, eCommerce SEO should go beyond product and category pages. Consider how your customers’ needs change throughout their journey.
9. Map customer pain points to keywords along the journey
How can you effectively cover such a large and deep funnel when the customer journey can take months?
Identify customer pain points. Then, within the purchase funnel, map keywords to each pain point. Finally, address the fears and concerns that prevent people from acting.
Prospects at the top of the funnel, for example, may be looking for symptoms rather than solutions. As a result, it makes sense to distribute informative blog posts that assist them in understanding the root cause of their problem. Or perhaps they are attempting to educate themselves but are unsure where to begin. Grab their attention with an entertaining piece of related content in this case.
The prospect begins engaging with various brands/vendors in the middle of the funnel. The prospect may be looking for more advanced and detailed content or specific product information at this point.
The prospect may be comparing options and making a final decision near the bottom of the funnel. With an ROI calculator, a competitive comparison matrix, or customer reviews, you may be able to push them over the finish line.
10. Capitalise on your strengths
Capitalising on your strengths is a highly effective strategy for dominating organic search results. How? Increase your efforts in the categories where you already rank well.
Rather than focusing on a few unrelated high-volume search terms, attack the vertical in which you already excel until you dominate it. Saturating the funnel with large sets of overlapping keyword groups will help you communicate your expertise to search engines.
11. Technical SEO strategy
The foundation of your search engine optimisation strategy is technical SEO, which must be prioritised. Your content and backlinks will greatly impact your organic search results if you have a solid technical infrastructure.
12. Off-page link-building strategy
Off-page SEO (also known as off-site SEO) refers to any actions you take away from your website to improve your SEO. Link building, getting published on third-party websites, and being interviewed are all common examples.
Because Google cares about what others think of your brand, on-page optimisation isn’t enough. You must demonstrate to search engines that others regard your brand as authoritative. To truly maximise your organic search results, make strategic outreach to high-quality, credible websites and influencers.
13. Voice search strategy
Voice search is becoming increasingly popular. According to Comscore, voice search will account for 50% of all searches by 2020. Voice-based shopping is expected to reach $40 billion by 2022, according to OC&C Strategy Consultants. Behshad Behzadi of Google confirmed that voice search is the fastest-growing type of search.
People can use voice search to interact with technology rather than typing search queries into a device. Voice-based technology is much more than just task management at random. Voice search is quickly becoming the preferred method of locating information online.
14. Video SEO strategy
YouTube, the world’s second most popular search engine, is a search and social media powerhouse. Over one billion users watch over one billion hours of video daily. With that level of impact, you must focus on video SEO.
Because of YouTube’s dominance, it is critical to round out your search, social, and content initiatives. However, the value extends beyond increased visibility among your target audience segments on YouTube.
An effective video SEO strategy promotes your content in the Google SERPs. As a result, video production and optimisation will benefit your digital marketing strategy.
15. Local SEO strategy
Suppose you are a retailer or service provider with physical locations. In that case, local SEO is an important discipline to include in your SEO strategy, which involves optimising a website to be found in local search results. It’s also important if your market is geographically focused, whether or not you have a storefront.
Local SEO is especially important for converting interest into actual sales. Read more about local SEO here.
16. SEO and Marketing Strategy development
Many businesses first create a marketing strategy, complete with initiatives, campaigns, and assets, and then add SEO as an afterthought. Then they try to improve on what they’ve already created.
SEO, on the other hand, can act as a powerful compass upstream in the marketing strategy development process by using search data as an insight engine. Rather than optimising fully baked campaigns, your audience and competitive landscape knowledge should drive the strategy you implement across all channels throughout the funnel.
This method will enable you to match each buyer persona and piece of content to the most appropriate digital marketing channel, whether paid, social, or organic.
17. Track SEO metrics and KPIs
Define KPIs ahead of time so that you only track SEO performance metrics relevant to your goals. Everything else is a gimmick. Consider KPIs in the 80/20 rule: focus on the 20% of activities that drive 80% of your results.
For example, does your blog account for 100% of your conversions? Or is it one of your top five product category pages?
Track the metrics that show how your top pages perform so you can implement an SEO content strategy to improve them.
Conclusion
SEO strategy is a detailed plan to improve a website’s search engine rankings in order to capture more organic traffic. This plan should draw from several foundational pillars, including technical SEO, content strategy, on-page SEO, link building and user experience.
One of the primary benefits of an SEO strategy is that it presents your brand to searchers at every stage of the customer journey. As a result, your company becomes a trusted, familiar resource for consumers no matter their stage in the purchase funnel.
Furthermore, if you want to start your SEO journey and create the best SEO strategy for your business, don’t hesitate to contact experts. We recommend you partner with Ubique Digital Solutions. UDS is a digital solutions company that offers amazing and effective SEO-related services. UDS can assist you with improving your SEO performance and creating Free SEO Analyser now.
