The new year is a perfect opportunity to start thinking about new business goals and objectives you want to achieve this year. Outlining goals and objectives help to outline a roadmap of tasks to help you achieve these. The best way to consolidate this – a tight, effective SEO strategy of course!
What is an SEO Strategy?
An SEO strategy outlines critical tasks to help improve the amount of organic traffic to your website. By understanding your target audience and creating a goal-driven SEO plan, you can make improvements, competing better online than your competitors. An effective SEO strategy is one that is feasible, relevant and time-bound.
A Step by Step Guide on How to Create an SEO Strategy
Boosting visibility and keyword rankings, gaining more customers, and improving revenue are all achievable with an effective SEO strategy. In this blog, we have put together a step by step guide to improve your organic traffic and start your 2021 off on the right path.
An effective SEO strategy is goal-driven, feasible, relevant and time-bound. The following steps enable you to reach your target and goals.
5 Key Steps on How to Create an SEO Strategy
Step 1: Keyword Research
Keyword research helps you to find the terms you want your website pages to rank for on search engines, and hone in on the keywords that have low competition rates and a healthy search volume.
Keyword research helps you to find the terms you want your website pages to rank for on search engines, and hone in on the keywords that have low competition rates and a healthy search volume.
Here is a keyword research checklist that helps to guide the process of uncovering new search terms:
- Develop different buyer personas and audiences for your brand.
- Identify topics related to your products or services and group keywords relevant to each persona created.
- Discover specific, niche keywords that relate to each topic and organise by search volume.
- Using your preferred tool, pinpoint opportunities to rank for long-tail keywords. These can be used for content ideas on your website.
- Create a finalised list of lucrative keywords using a keyword research tool to track your progress and identify the best-performing keywords.
Step 2: Create Quality Content
With the rollout of Google’s latest core algorithm update, websites that have high quality, relevant, and engaging content is valued now more than ever. If you feel particular pages on your website need a little TLC, now is the time to re-optimise neglected pages and refresh them with the help of your new keyword list. This is also the perfect time to look at what content your competitors are releasing and see what keywords they may be targeting. You can then use this information to help shape the focus of your SEO content strategy.
Using your preferred SEO tool, conduct a content audit on your website. This will give you an indication of what pages need improvement by analysing key performance metrics, such as bounce rate percentage, page duration, and session. This will provide you with a list of pages to update, and will help you put together a monthly content plan for your website.
Step 3: Optimise your website
Following your research and creating quality content, the next step to take is to check that your website is currently running as smoothly as possible. The best way to do this is by conducting a technical SEO audit. This will highlight any issues with your website that may be affecting your performance in SERPs.
Once any issues are outlined and analysed, there are then multiple ways you can optimise your website by implementing the following to your pages:
- Internal links.
- Optimised meta descriptions and titles.
- High quality, keyword-focused content.
- The use of keywords on-site, including headings and subheadings.
Step 4: Focus on Backlinks
Seeing the improvements from SEO tasks mentioned above can take time, and building quality backlinks is an important task in any effective SEO strategy. Backlinks are links that are directed back to your site. They help drive more traffic to your website, increase your domain authority and boost search engine rankings.
When link building, the first thing you can do is to perform a backlink audit to check the backlinks you already have. A backlink audit can help you discover any toxic links affecting your rankings. These links will need to be disavowed as Google penalises websites with spammy link profiles.
Once a backlink audit has been done, you can start to focus on building new links for your website. This link building checklist can help you with the process:
- Don’t purchase backlinks- This can affect rankings.
- Make sure links are relevant to your website and brand- Backlinks that aren’t relevant to your website can be confusing for search engines.
- Avoid link exchanging or ‘reciprocal linking’ – Google’s guidelines advise against ‘excessive’ link exchange.
Step 5: Track your SEO Results
One of the most important parts of any effective SEO strategy is to keep track of your results. Using SEO tracking tools, you can evaluate real-time data from your website to see how it is performing in regards to the tasks you have completed. You can see exactly how your efforts have improved your website and if you need to improve more!
SEO can take time and effort to see the results you desire, so don’t expect them overnight. Monitor your progress thoroughly, and you will start to see the steady impact it is making.
For more information on SEO and our services, feel free to contact us by emailing enquiries@helloseed.co.uk!
