Attracting web traffic is harder than ever. Once upon a time, you could stuff keywords onto a page, and that was all it took to rank. A combination of higher competition and more sophisticated search algorithms has changed things.

If you want to gain organic traffic in 2020, you need a seriously good SEO strategy.

This is crucial for businesses of all sizes. Ultimately, SEO is all about acquiring new customers. The goal of this is to generate additional revenue. Despite this, a shocking number of businesses leave this up to chance.

Of course, this is a big problem. To help get around this, we’ve compiled a five-step process that almost anyone could follow to achieve SEO success.

But first, let’s start with the basics.

guide to design seo strategy

What is SEO?

What Is SEO? Why You Should Use?

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a series of steps that can be taken to rank a web page higher on the search engine results page (SERP). 

Keywords and keyword phrases are selected based on the target market demographics, the industry sector, the company’s location, the type of product or service offered, and what the competition is doing.

The coveted positions on the SERP are the top three places on the first page of the search. Those top three positions account for 46% to 59% of the click-throughs from the SERP to go on to the website link found by the search engine. 

Having a search result appear on the second web page of the search rarely generates any traffic. The click-through rate (CTR) for any listing on the second page is .0001% or less. 

This means one click per thousand views, and that average only happens if the keywords have more than 10,000 results each month.

The goal of keyword optimisation and SEO is to get the search results in the top three positions on the SERP.

With that in mind,

A Data-Driven 5-Step Framework for Building Your SEO Strategy

1. Performance Audit

Free SEO Audit that You Can Perform Yourself

When creating an SEO strategy, the first step is to decide where things stand presently. To do this, you must audit your site for SEO factors. You can pay someone else to do this or use a dedicated tool to conduct an SEO audit.

In either case, you’re looking for three main things. Let’s take a look at each.

Technical Issues

In terms of SEO, how your site functions is the first thing you need to consider. To understand why, think about what search engines’ end goal is. They want to provide users with the right information as smoothly as possible.

For example, if your site doesn’t load, the algorithm will realise you can’t provide this.

More often, the problem is with load speed. Google realises that people are lazy. The longer users wait to access your content, the less well it will rank.

Crawlability Issues

Next up is crawlability.

Crawlability is a term used to describe the process of a search engine examining your site. The easier it is for the crawlers to find information, the more likely they are to display it to users.

This comprises things like how your site is structured, how you link between different pages and the quality of your sitemap.

Onpage Issues

Finally, you should audit your existing site content for on-page issues. These fall into two broad categories:

  • Content-level issues – Including readability, word counts, and keyword usage.
  • Metadata issues – Including titles, meta descriptions, headings and image alt attributes.

We’ll look at how to create each of these a little later.

For now, it’s important to understand the principle. As with the rest of your site audit, the idea is to create a strong foundation to build new SEO-focused content. 

With any luck, your audit will list relatively cheap and easy actions. These will improve your SEO greatly, as well as ensure that your future SEO strategy reaches its full potential.

In that vein, the second step in your strategy should be rectifying relevant technical issues.

2. Technical Actions

Now, the words ‘technical actions’ may well make some of you a little nervous. Never fear. Most SEO-related technical changes are pretty simple. Where things get a bit more complicated, they should still be easy to get a pro to fix without breaking the bank.

Briefly, here are the kinds of things you’re likely to need to change.

These are the most common technical SEO problems. They’re also the easiest to get your head around. The first thing to check is that each page on your site has at least 3-4 internal links pointing to and from it.

It’s also important to understand what’s known as the link status. There are a lot of these, but for SEO, you only really need to understand four broad categories:

  • 200 codes – These normally mean that everything is okay with the link,
  • 300 codes – These indicate a redirection, meaning that the URL of the target page has changed. This is often either a 301 (permanent) redirect or a 302 (temporary) redirect. 301s are fine as long as they aren’t overused. Instead of using a 302 redirect, you should change the target URL to the new page address.
  • 400 codes – These usually mean that the page you’re trying to link to no longer exists or that the browser can’t find it. If your audit finds internal links with a 400 status, replace the link with the correct URL or a new address.
  • 500 codes – These indicate that something has gone wrong with your server. You may need to increase capacity or consult a professional to identify a fix.

Except for some 500 errors, these are all easily fixed by anyone who knows how to add edit content on your site.

Load Speeds

Load speeds affect SEO in two different ways:

  • Directly, by slowing down the search engine indexing process,
  • Indirectly, by giving a poor user experience and impacting important SEO-related UX metrics like time-on-page and exit rates.

In either case, the solution is to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible. Actions you can take include:

  • Using compressed/minimised CSS/PHP files,
  • Ensuring high levels of server-side performance,
  • Choosing the right compression for images and other media.

Load speeds can be measured using Google’s free Page Speed tool:

Depending on your level of tech savviness, you may be comfortable doing this yourself, or you may need to hire a developer to help you out.

Security

Security is more important for SEO than ever before. Google and other big web companies know users are increasingly concerned with protecting their data. As such, insecure sites rarely rank well on SERPs.

Luckily, there are a handful of accepted security standards which you can adhere to.

For example, using the HTTPS protocol instead of the older and less secure HTTP is vital if you’re serious about attracting organic traffic.

Even where HTTP sites rank, most browsers will warn users that they are insecure, causing a large proportion of users not to click through

You should also ensure that your SSL certificate is fully up to date at all times.

Site Maps

Finally, your sitemap is an easy way to boost your search engine rankings. This is a document which outlines how your site is structured. You can then submit this to Google using Search Console.

This means that the crawlers don’t have to figure out the structure of your site for themselves.

However, it’s important to ensure that your sitemap is current.

Where there is a mismatch between your sitemap and the actual structure of your site, this confuses the crawlers, causing them not to rank your content.

3. Conduct In-Depth Keyword Research

What Is Keyword Research? Best Keyword Research Tools

By now, you should have your house in order. It’s time to move on to the next step of your SEO strategy. That is, it’s time to think about what new content you will create. Remember, SEO is all about matching your content with search engine queries.

These queries are called keywords.

What is Keyword Research?

Your content should be based on one or two primary and several secondary keywords. These are often variations on your primary targets or related words and phrases.

Keyword research is the process of figuring out what keywords people use in your niche.

You can begin this process by brainstorming the problems your ideal customers are most likely to encounter. These are then used as the basis of your search for the best keywords relating to those topics.

How do You Choose Keywords?

There are several keyword research tools out there. All of them tell you two essential pieces of information:

  • Search volume – The number of people searching for a keyword in a given month,
  • Keyword difficulty – A measure of how likely you are to rank successfully.

Once you’ve identified a list of keywords with the right combination of high search volume and low difficulty, the last step is determining their search intent. This is what a user wants to achieve when they perform a search.

These are the four types of search intent:

  • Navigational – searches for a specific website,
  • Transactional – searches to make a purchase,
  • Commercial research – research about a product, 
  • Informational – searches for a piece of information.

You can figure out the search intent of a keyword by simply looking at what is already ranking.

Best Keyword Research Tools

The most widely used keyword research tool is Google Keyword Planner. This is free to use and allows you to generate keyword ideas based on topics and competitors.

There are also countless premium keyword research tools, which give you a variety of additional features, such as more specific data on search volumes and rich text SERP elements.

4. Content Creation for SEO

What Is A Content Plan? Five Tips to Creating Your Content Plan

After all of that, it’s time to put pen to paper. However, before we get started, it’s important to reiterate the role of content marketing in your SEO strategy because many people have the wrong idea.

There’s this pervasive myth that content marketing is simply a way to stuff keywords onto your site. This couldn’t be more wrong. Keyword stuffing has a better chance of getting your site blacklisted.

Instead, content marketing is about creating valuable information resources.

Remember, the search engine’s job is to hook users up with the information they seek. As such, your job is to create the most interesting, engaging and valuable content on the topic.

Here are a few ways you can achieve this.

Content Standards for SEO

Luckily, there’s a whole lot of data out there on what kind of content performs best. For example, blog posts perform best between 1,000-2,000 words. This is enough to provide insights without boring the reader to tears.

Additionally, if you’ve ever tried to write for a successful site, you’ll know they generally have many other content-level SEO standards. There are all sorts of variations on these best practices.

Still, there’s a broad SEO checklist which you can follow while creating marketing content:

  • Readability – This measures how easy your content is to read. The most common readability standard is the Flesch Reading Ease ScoreYou should aim for your content to score at least 60-70 out of 100. It’s easy to achieve this using simple language and 2-3 line paragraphs.
  • Keyword placement – The most common rule of thumb for keyword density is 1-2%, but this is a target more than an absolute rule. If you have a two-word primary keyword, you should aim to use it every 200-300 words and in at least 1-2 subheadings.
  • Keyword variations – These days, SEO is all to do with topic clusters. This means that it’s vital to use semantic variations of your primary target throughout each piece of content.

Metadata

Beyond the content itself, your next onpage SEO priority is metadata. Once again, there is a lot to take into account here, but these are your main priorities:

  • Titles – This is the article’s title as it appears on SERPs. It should accurately describe the content in 50-70 characters, including the primary keyword.
  • Meta descriptions – The meta descriptions should enticingly describe the topic of the article in around 150 characters.
  • H1/2/3 – The H1 is the title of the article, as it appears on the page. It should contain focus keywords without being an exact match of the title. H2 and H3 tags are subheadings which should contain a mixture of primary and secondary keywords.
  • Alt text – Alt text is used to describe images where these can not be displayed. Each image should have a unique alt tag, containing either a primary or secondary keyword.

5. Ongoing Optimisation

Finally, once you’ve completed your new content creation, there are just a few more steps to ensure it performs as well as possible. Let’s look at two of the most important ongoing efforts you can make in your SEO strategy.

Build Domain Authority

Domain authority (DA) is a measure of how authoritative your site is within your niche. It’s also one of the most important SEO ranking factors. However, it’s difficult to utilise until after you have a good foundation of decent content on your own site.

This is because building domain authority requires you to get new backlinks from other sites.

This can happen naturally or as the result of a link-building campaign.

Measure the Success of your SEO Strategy

It’s also critical to constantly measure and reevaluate your SEO strategy. Your goal is to learn from what worked and what didn’t. That way you can create constant improvements.

It should also be noted that once you’ve completed the early stages of your SEO plan, you’ll still need to revisit these in future. For instance, new technical problems can emerge. You’ll also want to find a constant stream of quality keywords to target.

In fact, the only way to remain at the top of the SERPs is to constantly up your SEO game.

What is a Digital Strategy? | ProfileTree | Marketing Strategy | Strategies for Marketing | Business

How to Create an SEO Strategy

Creating an SEO strategy that maximises customer exposure to your business or product is key. Being able to define your topic area is important. Think about what you are selling; what is your expertise? 

From there, you can argue your brand’s purpose and why you are the ideal business for the consumer’s needs. Defining your audience is an important part of your SEO strategy as well.

Knowing who you are selling to helps optimise your keywords and create reachable targets. Analyse the habits of your current customers and who your competitor appears to be targeting. 

Recognise the benefits of what you are selling. This helps you streamline your services for the customers who will avail of them.

Developing a successful SEO strategy takes research, planning, execution, and constant optimization. Follow these key steps:

1. Define Your Goals

Be specific about what you want to achieve from an SEO perspective. Do you want to rank #1 for a core term? Generate 500 organic leads per month. Increase overall domain authority? Defining goals guides your strategy.

2. Research Target Keywords

Conduct in-depth keyword research to identify terms that are highly relevant to your business and have a solid search volume. Tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush and Google Keyword Planner are invaluable here.

3. Perform Competitive Analysis

Analyze competitors ranking well for your target terms. What are they doing right? Look for weaknesses you can capitalize on.

4. Create Optimized Content

Create blog posts, guides, and other content optimized with your researched keywords to drive visibility and traffic for high-value topics.

Earn backlinks from trusted industry websites through guest posting, interviews, Roundup mentions, and influencer partnerships.

6. Improve Technical SEO

Optimize page speed, site architecture, meta tags, alt text, structured data and other technical elements. Fix any indexed errors.

7. Track and Iterate

Use analytics to identify well-performing content. Expand on those topics. Refine underperforming pages. Monitor new opportunities. SEO is always evolving.

Developing an effective SEO strategy takes expertise. Our team specializes in data-driven SEO to maximize your search visibility. Get in touch to accelerate your organic growth.

SEO Strategy Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How often should I update my SEO strategy?

A: SEO requires constant optimization. Review your approach monthly and refine as needed based on the latest trends and competitor data.

Q: What’s better – longer or shorter content?

A: Generally, long-form, in-depth content performs best for SEO. But quality trumps quantity. Focus on providing value readers want.

Q: How long does it take to see SEO results?

A: It varies, but typically 3-6 months is needed to start seeing rankings improve, more so for competitive keywords. Be patient and persistent.

Q: Should I optimize for voice search?

A: Yes, voice queries are growing. Use natural conversational keywords that people would speak. Optimize for long-tail variations.

SEO Strategy Conclusion

With proper planning and execution, an SEO strategy delivers exponential returns through increased qualified traffic, leads and sales.

Conduct keyword research, create optimized content, earn backlinks, and track performance. SEO success requires playing the long game.

For expert help developing and executing a data-driven SEO strategy tailored for your business, our experienced team is ready to partner with you.

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