Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the keys to your website gaining more visibility. However, just adding an SEO plug-in to your content management system (CMS) or stuffing your content with keywords won’t cut it.
To improve your site’s reach and rank substantially, you need to build a comprehensive SEO strategy based on better competitor analysis and user intent research.
What is SEO?
SEO is the process of optimizing a website so its pages rank better in search engines. It helps businesses gain organic traffic and reach a wider customer base.
While SEO continues to evolve, especially with the advent of answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO), there are several main types to consider:
- On-page SEO: On-page optimization involves refining your website's text, titles, headers, and meta descriptions to enhance its relevance and visibility in search results.
- Off-page SEO: Off-page optimization focuses on acquiring backlinks from other reputable websites, which act as a vote of confidence toward your content’s quality.
- Technical SEO: Technical optimization emphasizes improving your website's speed, coding, and structure so search engines can crawl and index easily.
- Local SEO: Local optimization improves your presence in specific geographies by focusing on local maps and search results, a particular boon for smaller businesses.
Understanding each SEO type is crucial for improving your site's visibility and enhancing customer experience.
What Is an SEO Strategy?
An SEO strategy is a plan of action for improving how high your site ranks in search results. It involves using a variety of techniques to draw more organic traffic, helping you to uncover growth opportunities and expand your digital footprint.
Key components of this strategy include:
- Keyword research: Finding the phrases and terms your potential visitors are searching for.
- Competitor analysis: Studying your competitors’ SEO strengths and gaps to identify opportunities for your site.
- User intent: Understanding the why behind how people search and the sorts of information they’re hoping to find.
Creating an Effective SEO Strategy in 12 Steps
1. Create An Ideal Customer Profile
One way to kickstart your SEO strategy is to develop an ideal customer profile (ICP). This detailed persona includes demographics, interests, and behaviors, guiding your content to meet their specific needs.
For instance, if you're targeting parents looking for educational toys, your ICP will help you focus on the right topics and keywords.
When developing your customer profile, think about the information they'll seek as they move toward buying your product. Consider factors like their life circumstances, income range, hobbies, and unique challenges. This understanding helps you predict how shoppers might phrase their queries, allowing you to target them with appropriate material.
With your ICP in hand, tailor your content to each stage of the buyer's journey. Pick keywords and create content that speaks directly to their search intent at each phase.
Pro tip: Use the detailed aspects of your ICP to inform your keyword selection and content creation. This ensures your material is not only relevant but also highly targeted to the people most likely to buy from you.
2. Evaluate Your Current Website Performance
Take stock of where your website stands today. What’s working well and what needs improvement? Do you have the data to establish a baseline for measuring future success?
You can use Google Analytics to answer these important questions:
- What volume of unpaid search traffic arrives at my site?
- Which pages attract the highest number of visitors?
- What search terms bring the most people to your website?
- How many smaller actions (like email subscriptions) and major actions (like sales) result from unpaid search visitors?
This evaluation gives you a clear picture of your starting point and helps identify areas that need the most attention.
3. Research Your Competitors
Understanding what your rivals are doing can reveal valuable opportunities, especially if you look at businesses competing for the same search positions you want to capture.
Tools like Ahrefs and Semrush offer free and premium options that let you examine competing websites. Focus on discovering which search terms they rank for that you don't, study the typical length of their articles and other content, and review their approaches to earning links from other sites.
Pay special attention to their most successful keywords and the type of material they produce around those terms. This research helps you spot gaps in your own approach and identify new opportunities to stand out.
4. Set Clear SEO Goals
Establishing concrete objectives keeps your optimization work focused and measurable. Use the SMART framework to create goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely.
Review your website's weak points and create objectives that address those areas while supporting your broader business aims, such as boosting sales or expanding brand recognition.
Define concrete and measurable objectives such as:
- Grow unpaid blog traffic by 50% within the next 12 months to expand brand recognition.
- Increase publishing output from one to three articles weekly to boost unpaid visitors.
- Secure 30 incoming links to our site within the next three months to improve search positions and credibility.
5. Perform Keyword Research
Keyword research is the bedrock of any complete SEO strategy. It’s a crucial step in identifying the topics your audience cares about.
Google Trends is one way to research what your target market is looking for. Type a particular keyword into Google's search bar, and watch as it fills in with suggestions. These suggestions are valuable for SEO because they mirror real search trends directly from Google.
When conducting research, pay close attention to long-tail keywords. These are the specific phrases your audience types into search engines when they're closer to a purchase or when they're looking for detailed information.
For instance, someone may type in “grain-free small breed dog food” instead of just “dog food,” to find a more precise match for their needs.
Balance your approach by targeting both short-tail terms (broad category indicators like “women's jeans”) and long-tail phrases (specific interest signals like “high rise women's skinny jeans”). Shorter terms typically have higher search numbers but face stiffer competition. Longer, more specific phrases usually have smaller search numbers but less competition. They also tend to convert better since they show a user's clear, well-defined interest.
Targeting such queries can directly increase your content's visibility and precision in meeting user needs. To analyze the search volume of these terms, keyword research tools like Ahrefs and Semrush can be incredibly useful. You can also use resources like Google Trends to see how search interest changes over time, which helps when planning your publishing schedule.
6. Analyze Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)
After choosing your keywords, it's time to analyze search engine result pages (a.k.a. Google search results). This is where you'll get a picture of the competitive landscape and what it takes to rank for your target keywords.
Here are the main steps:
- Check how many others are trying to rank for your keywords. This tells you if a keyword is too competitive.
- See who is at the top: big names or smaller, specific sites. This helps you know who your competitors are.
- Pay attention to the type of content that ranks well.
- Examine organic search queries to learn the user's intent. This insight can shape your content to directly address their needs.
- Keep an eye on Google's SERP features like featured snippets and People Also Ask.
With the insights you gather from analyzing the SERPs, you can adapt your SEO strategy to better align with user search intent.
7. Build a Content Plan
After checking out search results, it's time to create content.
Start by considering your customers’ problems and what they want. Aim to solve these issues with your content. For instance, if your audience struggles with internet connectivity issues and you have a unique solution, you can produce a blog post entitled “5 Easy Fixes for Common Home Wi-Fi Issues.”
A successful, comprehensive optimization approach targets queries throughout the entire user journey. With your selected terms in mind, develop blog articles, videos, and infographics that educate and engage visitors who are considering making a purchase.
Think about your customer's objectives and challenges, then brainstorm material ideas that address relevant search terms and help customers gather information toward a purchase decision.
Next, tackle the challenge of ranking for keywords. Instead of cramming a page with keywords, create pillar pages for each big topic related to your products or services, as well as more specific articles and posts that anchor to those pillars.
Decide how many of these main pages you need based on your product range or services. This strategy makes it easier for customers to find you, no matter what keywords they type into a search engine.
8. Address Technical SEO Obstacles
Even the best material won't help if search engines can't properly crawl and index your website. This is how platforms like Google understand and present your site's information to users.
Using a resource like Screaming Frog, perform a technical review of your website to find problems such as slow loading times, orphaned pages, 404 errors, and other issues that prevent high search rankings.
You can also use Google resources like PageSpeed Insights, Search Console, and the CrUX Dashboard, all of which help you monitor and improve core web vitals, the measurements Google uses to judge your site's usability.
9. Demonstrate your E-E-A-T
Writing content that meets E-E-A-T (expertise, experience, authority, trustworthiness) criteria is essential. Google's algorithm now goes beyond just checking if your content has the right keywords. While E-E-A-T isn't a direct ranking factor, Google uses this criteria to ensure its unpaid search results are useful for users and free of misinformation.
To demonstrate your expertise, consider implementing the following strategies:
- Highlight your industry expertise and years of experience in the About Us section of your website.
- Publish case studies or success stories showcasing real-world results and achievements in your field.
- Contribute guest posts to relevant, high-ranking blogs and websites to share knowledge and build authority.
- Participate in industry events, webinars, or speaking engagements to establish yourself as a thought leader.
- Collaborate with or feature contributions from professionals known for their expertise in successful projects.
- Include your credentials across the web, including your website, social media profiles, and professional networking platforms like LinkedIn.
- Add a contact page and privacy policy to your site.
- Feature quotes from subject matter experts within your material.
- Display testimonials or product reviews from customers.
These steps help build your credibility and authority, signaling to Google that your content is valuable and trustworthy.
10. Develop a Link Building Strategy
Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to your site. When they do, you earn what's commonly referred to as a backlink.
Backlinks help search engines understand the relevance and authority of your site. The more authoritative the site linking to you, the more positive the impact on your search engine rankings.
Several strategies can contribute to securing helpful backlinks:
- Contribute high-quality content to other sites, which can include links back to your pages.
- Create content that people want to share, from original research, infographics, or guides that address real industry pain points and spark conversation.
- Participate in online communities relevant to your industry, contributing valuable insights and advice linked back to your site.
11. Don't Forget Internal Links
Internal links that connect your pages to one another can be just as powerful as external backlinks. These links use relevant keywords as anchor text to help search engines understand the relationship between various pages on your site.
To build internal links, start by reviewing your content to identify opportunities where one page can naturally link to another.
For example, your food blog may have a post on “healthy eating tips” and another about “fish and shellfish.” You can link these pieces by using relevant anchor texts like “discover healthy eating tips” at the bottom of the shellfish article.
12. Measure The Impact Of Your Efforts
Make sure to whether your SEO strategies are paying off continuously. Choose the key performance indicators (KPIs) you care about, decide how often to check them, and figure out which tools will help.
There are lots of tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Google Analytics for tracking SEO progress such as website visits, cost per click, keyword positions, online visibility, and links to your site.
Also, use Google Search Console. It's free and gives you a look at how your site shows up in search results and checks for any technical issues.
You should examine your optimization approach every three months, with a deeper dive conducted annually. These regular check-ins help you maintain strategic focus while adapting to inevitable variations in organic search performance.
Remember, SEO is a Continuous Process
The above steps will help you create an SEO strategy that lays a solid foundation for success. However, remember that achieving and maintaining high rankings requires ongoing effort and adaptability.
Keep a vigilant eye on changing algorithms and evolving search intent, and be ready to adjust your approach accordingly. AEO and GEO are also having an outsized impact on how people search online, so take into account whether your SEO strategy blends AEO and GEO best practices.
With consistent monitoring and adaptation, you can ensure your SEO strategy remains effective in the long run.
SEO strategy FAQ
How Do You Start an SEO Strategy?
Begin by understanding your core customers, assessing your website's current performance, and studying competitors to determine where to focus your optimization work.
What is the Difference Between SEO Strategies and Tactics?
Your optimization strategy defines your destination and the routes you can take to get there. Tactics are the specific actions you implement to execute that strategy and reach your desired objectives.
How Often Should You Analyze Your SEO Strategy?
Conduct strategy evaluations every three months, complemented by an in-depth annual assessment. This timeframe allows you to prepare strategically while maintaining momentum despite typical fluctuations in website traffic patterns.
What Are The Main Types of SEO?
SEO is a constantly evolving field, but there are four main types of SEO to understand. On-page SEO covers your website's text, titles, headers, and meta descriptions, while off-page SEO focuses on backlinks and external quality indicators. Technical SEO is about your website’s speed and structure, ensuring that search engines can crown and index your site easily and effectively. Finally, local SEO is about localizing toward different geographies and regional audiences.