How to Create an SEO Strategy? A Complete Guide
SEO is complicated, unpredictable, and takes a lot of time! Continue reading this article to learn about how to create an SEO strategy.
We see rapid changes in the SEO landscape because Google constantly updates its ranking algorithms. Some SEO specialists are OK with "it depends"; others go for deep research and experimentation to rank their websites and web pages.
But what exactly is SEO? It is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It improves a website’s visibility in search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc. In other words, it is increasing the quantity and quality of a website’s traffic from search engines. Creating a well-thought-out SEO strategy is essential to achieving and attaining the best results.
In this blog post, we aim to inform you of the latest methodologies and techniques to include in your 2023 SEO strategy to have the edge over your counterparts.
What is an SEO strategy?
It is the most crucial action plan that every website owner must outline to improve their website’s organic traffic and increase search engine rankings. It is a roadmap or detailed process of planning and implementing actions to improve a website’s search engine rankings and organically generate better leads and revenue.
Simply put, it is a step-by-step guide to increasing a website’s organic traffic.
How to Create an SEO Strategy? - A Detailed Process
Step 1 - Find Your Benchmark Performance
Before proceeding further, SEO specialists must create a report of their website’s current stats and performance. Getting a performance benchmark is like setting a baseline to find what works for a website and areas requiring optimization.
Consider the following to determine benchmark performance:
- Organic traffic
- Keyword ranking
- Backlinks
- Content format & structure
- Video reach
- Call to action result
- SERP ranking
- Mobile-friendly test
- XML sitemaps
With all the insights, you can form a comprehensive report of your website's overall performance.
Step 2 – Working On Organic Traffic
Organic traffic refers to visitors landing on your website without any paid sources.
You can find out how a website performs regarding organic search in several ways. The easiest one is to set up your website on Google Analytics and monitor your website’s performance. This means you can keep track of keywords that rank and have issues with.
It is essential to have content on your site that matches the intent of your target audience. For example, suppose you are selling car care products. In that case, your potential customers and audiences look for content about taking good care of cars, maintaining cars, and solutions to the many other issues they encounter with their vehicles.
For this, you can research your competitors and check what keywords they have covered and for what they rank.
Further, you must consider the keywords related to the main search topic. For instance, if the primary keyword is ‘scratch remover,’ consider adding related keywords like "residue-free scratch remover," "colour protection," "non-flammable scratch remover," and more.
Step 3 – Make A List Of Long-tail
Long tail keywords are longer and more specific phrases that get fewer monthly searches but have higher conversion rates.
Target the top 10 long-tail keywords related to the primary one, allowing users to dig deep into the original topic. This allows you to attract more users who search for specific information or products with different queries. Thus, using long-tail keywords creates more entry points for people interested in the product, services, and information you offer.
With more specific content you provide on your site, the more specific audience you will get. Google bots are always looking for the value that a website can provide to a user. Web pages that always go deep in explaining to users the inner workings of the main topic are considered the best to answer queries for online users. As a result, they will rank higher.
Step 4 – Focus On Featured & Zero-click Snippets
The trend of featured and zero-click snippets is the primary source of getting website traffic and being good in the books of Google's search bot. Many website owners cannot truly grab the potential of featured snippets and, thus, cannot rank. The popularity of snippets is not decreasing anytime soon. But you have to be cautious with its optimization.
The zero-click results will also rank when your content is structured correctly. This is because most users will not take the pain of clicking on the website to know more when the information is in SERP snippets. To get a perfect balance, you need to apply schema markup, which matches the type of content on the page being considered.
Step 5 – E-A-T is the Way To Go
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These are the three pillars you must prioritise in the optimisation strategy. It has several aspects that lead to a more considerable contribution to SEO. One of them is backlinks.
A backlink from an authoritative source will help your website rank higher. However, linking your website to another authoritative one covering your niche is essential.
Besides, Google determines the expertise of an author based on the content present in it. The quality of a web copy is based on "everyday expertise," meaning the person is well-versed in the topic. Also, someone posting content related to a specific topic on Google Forum and Reddit threads is not an expert. So, if your niche requires a specific and trained author, you must find someone who can write in-depth content for the same topic.
Lastly, trustworthiness encompasses more than just the content. For this, you need to make your site as Ad-free as possible. In addition to this, it should be HTTPS secured. Likewise, site owners must provide their contact information to make themselves credible and trustworthy to users and the Google bot.
Step 6 – Focus On Video Content
Video content is the way to go if you want to rule the world of content marketing. In the past couple of years, short-form video content has exploded on the internet, becoming the prime way to consume content on social media platforms. It has become one of the most effective forms of engaging viewers.
Consumers now use video platforms to attain information, entertainment, and searches. Creating video content that genuinely defines your brand and resonates with your target is insufficient. It also needs to be SEO optimized to reach people searching for it.
Step 7 – Optimise Content For Voice Search
With the introduction of Siri and other voice assistants, online marketers are pushed to try creative ways to incorporate voice search.
According to the Global Web Index, more than 27% of the population uses smartphone voice search. As a result, sites that have not optimised their content for voice search are missing an ample opportunity to connect with a wide range of audiences.
One of the most common ways of optimizing content for voice search is understanding the data points, search context, and real-time conversational keywords, creating compelling persona-based content, adding context with schema markup, and building web pages that cater to FAQs of your niche.
Besides this, you also need to think local and mobile, and this is because smartphones are now capable of providing users with on-the-go local queries.
Most people are okay with typing in their search, but some young ones are looking for quick answers and instant results without typing their query. You can target those audiences with voice search content optimization.
Step 8 – Write Quality Content
You might have heard many times, “Content is King”. Yes, it is, without a doubt, true. It is something that provides your users with the information they seek.
The key is to create valuable, authentic, and highly-informative content that matches your user’s intent. It answers user queries, solves their problems, gives better insights into the solution, etc.
Make sure when writing content you do not stuff the page with extra information which is not needed. Likewise, great content needs a proper flow and place keywords so they don't feel absurd. Stick to the main topic for the most part, and describe similar concepts in brief.
These days, with the inception of ChatGPT, there has been hype about AI content generators. They will not replace real writers, but they can surely help you with content creation. Replacing your content writer with an AI tool is not a good idea.
Use these tools to generate basic outlines, find new and trending ideas, and generate FAQs for your content. Also, you can use AI for machine translation to cater to local SEO, but even then, you will need a manual editor to go through the translation.
Step 9 – Identifying Competitors
The most important step is researching your competitors and finding what leads them to higher search rankings. You can use several tools to perform competitor analysis. Find the top 10 competitors for keywords you want to rank on and relevant to your business.
Keep in mind not all your business counterparts are your direct SEO competitors. Someone who is not online can still be your local competitor. Also, you need to audit your competitor's backlinks as they are represented as a vote of confidence. From the audit, you can check which sites provide a backlink to your competitor's website but not you.
Step 10 – Set Your Goals
Setting goals and KPIs is the last step of your SEO strategy. This way, you can evaluate your success once all the optimization steps you took.
KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are the ones that help you track down the progress of your goals and how far you have reached. The top 5 KPIs are –
- Organic traffic
- Keyword rankings
- Backlinks
- Average CTR (Click-through rate)
- Coverage issues
Regular tracking of KPIs is essential to check whether your optimization is performing optimally or not. Moreover, with constant KPI tracking, you can find the errors causing web pages that are not indexed.
Wrapping Up!
As we said earlier, SEO is the most critical component of online marketing that makes your brand recognizable. It is a hard nut to crack. However, a well-thought-out strategy, a willingness to learn, and consistent efforts can do wonders. Also, it is not a one-time activity. It requires you to experiment and continuously evaluate the performance to understand what works for you.
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