SEO strategy is a crucial part of digital business. People must know your business and be aware of your services or products. You have a product that addresses your customers’ pain points. Your customers need your services but aren’t aware of you. SEO strategies put you on the right road to success at SERP.
In this article, you will find
- What Is an SEO Strategy?
- Why Is SEO Needed for Your Business?
- How Does SEO Work?
- SEO Strategies
- FAQs
- Final Thoughts
- Similar Reads
What Is an SEO Strategy?
An SEO strategy is the process of planning and implementing steps to organize the website’s content to improve search engine visibility and rankings. It relies on several strategies, such as content strategy, on-page SEO, technical SEO, and link building, to boost organic traffic to the website.
Why Is SEO Needed for Your Business?
People go to search engines to find out about a service or product they want for their business. It’s a general norm that people always refer to the websites that are at the top of page 1, and to an extent, they search for answers on the websites displayed on Page 1.
As a business owner, you would wish to appear on the customer’s first page of SERP for a search query. You are offering some services or products that your customers are looking for. It’s a wish of every business owner to appear on the top on page 1. Appearing on page 1 has more likelihood that these prospects convert to leads and then clients.
A good SEO strategy optimizes your website so it gains traction. The more your website’s visibility increases, the more people will come to your website. That means you are gaining organic traffic. The services or products you provide reach more people, making them aware of your brand.
How Does SEO Work?
SEO strategy for your business is a process that includes analyzing your business goals, what the customers are looking for, and how your services or products can solve your customer’s problems.
The process starts with providing the right content, tweaking the content with the right keyword, link building strategies, and promoting it on the right platform.
You acquire an authoritative voice in your niche when you provide content that answers your customer’s pain points. Design an SEO content strategy to produce high-quality content. Content that is relevant and useful to your customers.
It gives you an authoritative voice over others, and you will slowly be regarded as a trusted source. Your audience comes to you for solutions, buys from you, and becomes your clients.
Your sales funnel is filled. SEO enables you to make sales happen, generate revenue, and foster relationships with them.
SEO Strategies
Each business is different, and its needs and processes differ. Yet, the bottom line is to get more customers and have more sales. The methods they use to achieve the goals of ranking on top of SERP are not limited to the SEO strategies discussed here.
Identify SEO Goals
You surely would have defined your business goals. In the same way, define SEO goals before you start your digital marketing campaigns. Set the goals to achievable metrics that you can track, measure, and leverage to achieve the goals.
The ultimate goal of your business is to sell and generate revenue. With that in focus, work out goals that complement your process. Ask these questions when you set SEO goals.
- Which clients do you want to pitch to increase your sales?
- Do you wish to get more people subscribing to your services, such as newsletters, subscriptions, and downloads?
- Are you looking for organic traffic to your website?
- Do you want to drive conversions through lead-generation strategies?
If you answer ‘Yes’ to these questions, you must devise strategies to measure the results.
Competitor Analysis
Competitor analysis is the first step in your SEO strategy and is essential for your business. Analyze your competitors if you wish to know where you stand in the market, strengthen your marketing strategies, and see how viable your products and services are.
Compare your marketing methods with your competitors, and discover creative ways to reach your customers. Analyze your competitors to ponder how you can provide the same results differently.
Competitive analysis is the analysis of your competitor’s businesses and their websites to gain insights about their product, sales, and marketing tactics. It helps you to identify your unique value proposition and stand on top of what’s next for your competitors.
Identify direct and indirect competitors of your business. Direct competitors are those businesses that sell the same products as yours to the same type of customers. Indirect competitors are businesses that sell similar products to the same category of customers.
Focus on businesses that are direct and indirect competitors and use Google Search Console (GSC) to evaluate your competitor’s search rankings on SERP. Review their blog strategy, backlink profiles, user experience, social media accounts, target audience, and USPs.
Intensify your competitor analysis further by doing a technical SEO audit and reviewing their site health, technical SEO implementation, page speed, and mobile friendliness.
Keyword Gap Analysis
If you start with competitor analysis, it’s a good solution to start with keyword analysis. To stay ahead of the competition, look for fresh ideas, and update the content already existing as your audience’s interests change over time and the keyword usage fluctuates.
Keyword gap analysis takes all the keywords that your competitors rank for and subtracts the keywords that your website ranks for. You get the filtered list of the keywords that you must be targeting.
There are many tools for keyword gap analysis, such as SEMRUSH Keyword Gap, Ahrefs Content Gap, and Moz’s Competition Keyword Research.
Ahrefs’ Content Gap prompts you to enter the name of your website and other competitor websites, then displays a list of keywords you should be targeting. You can select the keyword that has low KD and high volume to write a stellar blog.
Keyword Research
Another method of collecting keywords to create content is using the Google Auto Suggest feature. As you start typing in Google’s search field, it suggests a list of keywords based on what your targeted audience was searching for.
List these keywords in a content calendar or content repository and include additional details to it, such as the date it will be written and published, details of who will write the blog, and the graphics designer who will work on infographics, gifs, and videos.
That’s your content SEO strategy. Use tools such as Trello, Asana, or Kanban to track the workflow.
You can use tools like Uber Suggest, Google Search Console, and Answer the Public for keyword research.
Finding the Right Keywords
When you have found the keywords, you must ensure that the blogs rank for those keywords. When the keyword ranks, it brings organic traffic to your website. Use tools to find the probability of keyword difficulty and the estimated volume of traffic it would fetch.
Look for the Keyword Difficulty (KD) and Volume. Keyword difficulty gives an estimation of how hard it is to rank in the top 10 organic search results. Volume is an estimation of the average monthly searches for a keyword which must be of high value.
After identifying such keywords, start optimizing your blogs for those keywords. For instance, creating blogs with keyword machine learning is generic, and it’s difficult for them to rank well on Google. You can infer it from the KD and volume generated from the Ahrefs tool. Have the topic of machine learning as the pillar content and others as clusters around it.
Choose long-tail keywords that dig deeper into the original topic keyword. Use long-tail keywords to create blogs explaining the specific topics within your selected pillars. Put together, the search engine understands long-tail keywords as clusters around the pillar concept, so it can connect users with the information they are looking for.
Long-tail keywords have low KD, making them easy to rank, fetch organic traffic and have a decent traffic volume. Write cluster content using long-tail keywords. Ultimately, the pillar page, such as machine learning must complement the services that your business is offering.
Create Blogs
Blogging is the detailed explanation of your services or business to your target audience. You educate and inform your audience through blogs. What kind of services or products you provide, the benefits, your competitive edge, and your USP are known to the audience through blogs.
It’s essential to have a content SEO strategy in your marketing efforts. In your content marketing strategy, it’s essential to publish new blogs every day. Google identifies consistency as one of the most important factors to appear on top results on SERP.
Use content management systems, such as WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla, to tweak the blogs with keywords and SEO optimization. Optimize the image, title, meta title, meta description, and keyword density in the blog.
Do not overstuff the keyword because Google marks it with a red flag. Mark it as pillar content if it is one, or link it within the parent pillar page.
Sometimes, you can write about a tangential topic deviating from the pillar topic. Remember that you are writing for humans and not just for a Google bot. You can address the issues or solutions that your target audience is looking for.
You can use Google Trends to find out the latest trending topics.
Create Content that Aligns with Search Intent
Your audience comes to your website looking for answers. Their search intent differs based on their needs. The content that you create must influence them to become your clients. The content marketing funnel takes the user to different stages of marketing.
There are three types of search intent: informational, navigational, and transactional. The audience when they wish to know more about a product or service, the read your blogs to understand what you offer.
They return to your website when they find that the information you have on your website is useful and relevant to their search. You establish yourself as an authoritative source when your audience gets back to you.
They move down the content marketing funnel when they start comparing the services you and your competitors offer. They navigate between two or more websites to leverage between quality and cost.
The final part of the funnel journey is when they are interested in buying your products; they look for content that explains or describes what they do. Demos, success stories, and testimonials aid them in becoming clients.
On Page SEO
Several on-page factors can make your SEO strategy for campaign successful. On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing the elements on your web page, including content, meta-tags, titles, links, and anchor text.
Tweak all the elements on the web page so it works together for good for search engines and for users. Make sure all your content follows E-A-T, showing that you write and publish content with expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
Focus on having a title that pulls the user’s attraction. Mention numerals and adjectives, and induce curiosity in the titles.
The titles contain numbers and adjectives that instill curiosity in the reader’s mind and get them to click on them. The meta description gives the readers a glimpse of what they can expect in the blog. Though meta descriptions aren’t a factor for SERP ranking, they improve the click-through rates and help differentiate your content from your competitor’s website.
Include internal links, as they help search engines to understand your site’s structure when they crawl your web pages. That’s how search engines index your newly published blog. Internal links add value to your website, and you establish the fact that you have blogs that spread over your niche. Internal links make the users stay longer on your website navigating from one web page to another.
Image optimization, including relevant names for images and alt tags, are all SEO factors contributing to rankings.
Off Page SEO
Off page SEO concentrates on factors such as guest posting, link building, and social media marketing. Link building is a meticulous process that involves getting links from other websites of your niche to bring organic traffic to your website.
The foundation for link building is content. When you have content that answers the user’s questions, they get traction. More traffic is generated. When your website gets more traffic, automatically, people wish to connect to your website.
You get backlinks that indicate to search engines that you provide trustworthy information. You can gain reciprocal links and enhance your website’s visibility.
Social media marketing, brand mentions, and PR are other methods you can employ to work on off page SEO.
FAQs
What is an SEO strategy?
SEO strategy is the process of optimizing the elements of the website so that it ranks organically in SERP. The aim of ranking in SERP is to bring more traffic, visibility, and revenue.
Why is E-A-T important in SEO strategy?
E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. The content on your website must educate, inform, and provide answers to the user’s questions. This is important in Your Money Your Life (YMYL) websites.
What are the tools required to create an SEO strategy?
- Keyword Research – Ahrefs, Uber Suggest, Google Search Console
- Content Management System – WordPress, Drupal, Joomla
- Project Management System – Trello, Kanban
Final Thoughts
An SEO strategy must go hand in hand with your business, marketing, and sales goals. You need to take your business to the targeted audience. Then, inform your audience what you offer, and influence them to become your customers. All these need foolproof strategies.
SEO strategies broadly include content marketing, link building, and social media marketing.
