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What is a SEO strategy? A SEO strategy is a SEO approach. It’s basically the process or blueprint you’ll follow to get more traffic organic search engine traffic to your website. Any digital marketing strategy will also include other traffic methods too and a great marketing agency should be able to consider integrated any traditional marketing with your online marketing. Full is essentially what a full-service marketing agency does. But let’s stick to SEO strategy for this blog post.
Since SEO strategy is basically the process you’ll take to rank your website, you’ll need to start with the end in mind. And this is where many SEO companies actually get it wrong. They use a scattergun approach to SEO and don’t really know where they’re going with the strategy and what it actually takes to get there. To create a successful SEO strategy you need to know your competition. Because what good SEO looks like is dependent on effort you put in. It’s based on the strength of the competition. You wouldn’t start off driving just anywhere in your car without knowing your destination. You’d plan your journey and know how long it will take you to get there, at what speed and how much fuel.
You may reach roadblocks, traffic works and so on, but you’ll eventually get there. With SEO though you have competition who are all competing for the same market share. Your aim is to take market share from them. Their aim is to take market share from you.
SEO strategy should outline the following but what many SEO companies leave out are the timescales and metrics. These are the factors that will help you recognise what SEO success looks like. This should always be more business. The reason why clients cancel and that they aren’t a good fit for SEO, or you didn’t educate them and manage their expectations. Or a mixture of both. Ultimate good SEO companies will find the right clients whos website deserve to be ranked in Google. The best raw materials i.e. the underlying business, with someone at the helm or people in charge of the company, who will make good decisions for their company. Without all of these things, a SEO strategy is pointless, as the step to success won’t be followed.
Here’s the most fundamentals parts of any SEO strategy. There’s iteration in the steps and some will be revisited and tweaked through SEO implementation:
- Know the business goals and targets. Think SMART.
- Develop a basic list of keywords.
- Do competitor research, checking keywords against the first pages of Google and finding out who your competition are.
- Do substantial keyword research.
- Right to mission and vision statements if you don’t already have one.
- Decide how you’ll stand out from your competition and analyse their strengths and weaknesses. Do a SWOT analysis.
- Use your competition analysis and available keyword research data to find gap in your website’s content. This will form you content audit.
- Develop a content calendar.
- Decide where your target audience hang out online and decide how you’ll deliver your content to them.
- Use Hotjar or LuckyOrange to make UX improvement to your website.
- Perform technical SEO.
- Perform on-page SEO.
- How’s your backlink profile? Build and improve upon this.
- Keep taking action, analyse your results, track everything you do.
- Keep going!
