Creating an SEO strategy

Why do you need an SEO strategy? The same reason you need a recipe for baking or a training plan for the gym – without it, you’ll just spend money and see poor results.

The resource required to make a measurable difference in your online search performance – both organic and paid – is significant.

Not just budgetary – also the employee hours spent on research, data collation, content creation, performance analysis and more.

Committing to all that without a coherent SEO strategy as a startpoint is a surefire way to lose ground on your competitors.

It’s not the easiest task you’ll ever tackle in your business – but building an SEO strategy can be made much simpler by ensuring you know two things:

• Who your target audience are
• What you want to achieve (your business goals)
• By clarifying your aims and potential audience, it’ll make everything much more efficient and effective.

And with the guidance of a SEO digital marketing partner that can help you identify them, it’ll happen sooner and with more precision.

What’s the point of an SEO strategy?

It’s easier to identify areas to focus on and define milestones – and ultimately goals – by following a clear process:

1. A full technical audit that incorporates detailed analysis of historical data
2. A content audit that incorporates detailed analysis of current approach
3. Identifying opportunities and areas of focus using both sets of data
4. Outlining possible tactics, technical and content requirements, on page and off page actions
5. Documenting a complete strategy with a timeline, planned tasks, deadlines and forecasts

What types of SEO are there?

The countless elements of an SEO strategy can be broadly grouped into three areas of focus:

Technical SEO

We’ve covered technical SEO in detail recently* – these are basically the belt and braces box ticks that make your site search engine ready.

So less content and keywords and more things like site security, page load speed and mobile friendliness.

Ignoring technical SEO is a red flag to Google, as these relatively straightforward steps are often used to determine your site’s quality.

Content

Put simply, content refers to what’s on your pages – copy, images and other media designed and optimised to help you rank for certain keywords.

Your research on relevant terms and targeting these with engaging and informative output will help drive this.

Its contribution to your overall strategy depends on the content quality (how well it answers user search enquiries) and how up-to-date it is.

Outreach

This covers your ‘off-page’ efforts to direct people from other areas to your site.

A significant amount means gaining high quality links from other sites to build your authority and trustworthiness in Google’s eyes.

As well as referring domains, off-page SEO may also cover any social platform output that includes a link to your site.

There are other areas besides these three – but to start outlining an SEO strategy, those are your key zones to focus on.

Is your strategy working?

With so much SEO activity going on, very quickly you’re going to see the needles start moving in terms of your baseline data.

But with so many metrics available, which should you pay attention to in order to determine progress?

As highlighted above, this is where clearly defining your targets early on will pay off.

Measuring the right KPIs is really important. If a metric doesn’t have any impact on attaining your business goals, it doesn’t matter how positive it may appear.

If a metric doesn’t have any impact on attaining your business goals, it doesn’t matter how positive it may appear.

For example, one of your stated strategic aims might be to identify and attract a certain audience sector that will be more likely to convert.

But if you’re seeing visitor numbers go up without an increase in conversion rate, your content could be attracting the wrong type of traffic.

Those bigger numbers may be tempting to celebrate but they won’t align with your actual commercial aims.

An SEO business that understands your intentions and can provide the support to achieve them will help you avoid vanity metrics.

And if you’re measuring the right things, you’ll know definitively whether your strategy is working or whether it needs refining.

Start your SEO strategy journey

Technical, content and off-page (outreach) SEO – none of them in isolation will make that meaningful dent in the rankings you want to see.

But with a cohesive, logical strategy that starts with clearly stated and trackable goals, you’ll be setting off in the right direction.

Get in touch today, or if you know someone who might be interested, share this content and spread the love.

Photo by Julian Hochgesang on Unsplash