How to Create a Successful SEO Strategy?

To increase organic traffic, accrue top positions and boost organic revenue, you need to create a clear and concrete plan. You have to come up with an SEO strategy. The basics of SEO are not difficult. In most cases, they are usually common sense. A good SEO strategy can help you identify and achieve your biggest goals.

A good strategy will help you figure out where you are, where you need to go, and the best way to get there. When planning, there are three aspects that you need to consider. These include budget, resources, and timeframes. All of these will affect how your strategy looks and what you need to consider to achieve your goals. In this short guide, we are going to share a few proven tips you can follow to create an effective SEO strategy.

Creating an Effective SEO Strategy

When you want to put together a solid SEO strategy, it is important to have a series of processes to follow. While you’ll have to tailor this strategy to your business, having them in mind will enable you to get on track and focus on the right things. The process that we are going to discuss will increase your chances of success.

Look at Your Current SEO Performance

If you are not aware of your website’s performance, it will be quite difficult to create a plan that will take you to the next level. For this reason, you need to start by analyzing your current performance. You need to look at organic visibility, branded and non-branded traffic split, and keyword rankings. There are a lot of amazing online tools that you can use to get insights that will help you build your strategy. These tools provide historical and current organic visibility on the dashboard together with other insights. The estimated traffic trend will allow you to see how the visibility of your site has been changing over time and how it’s performing at the moment.

Knowing your website’s branded vs unbranded traffic split will help you identify opportunities since the majority of the branded searches are made by people who know your business. Making efforts to increase non-branded traffic usually aligns with the acquisition of users who are not familiar with your business. By gathering these insights, you’ll easily build up a more complete picture of the performance of your site before setting business goals and coming up with a plan to take you from your current position to where you want to be in the future. It’s important to use information from Google Analytics to know the conversion rates, leads generated, and revenue to get a full picture of your performance.

Set Your Goals

The most important part of creating an SEO strategy is setting goals and understanding your KPI’s. You need to know what you want to achieve to come up with a plan that will help you get there. You also need to measure your success regularly to find out if you’ve achieved your goals. What’s the difference between a goal and KPI’s? A goal is an outcome that you want to achieve. On the other hand, KPI’s are metrics you use to determine your progress. Both are important to consider while creating your SEO strategy.

Know Your Keywords

 

After setting your business goals and knowing your KPI’s, you need to know and define your keywords. You cannot achieve your goals if you don’t know the keywords that your target market is using to find solutions to their problems. You don’t have to research extensively to know these keywords. Since you already have a target market in mind, put yourself in the position of your potential customer. How would you look for the solutions that you are currently facing? For instance, if you sell dog food, most of your customers are probably concerned about the health of their furry friends. Search online and find out which sites pop up. Knowing the common words that your target market uses will enable you to increase traffic and boost your site’s performance.

Audit the Existing Content of Your Site

Before you start creating and publishing fresh content, you need to audit your existing content to identify pieces that need to be improved or those that can fit into your categories. You should consider using an online content auditing tool. However, a content audit allows you to identify content that should be kept, updated, or deleted. To run a content audit effectively, you need to start with what you have before creating new content. In most cases, websites will have an opportunity to use existing content to achieve their goals. Taking the time to conduct an audit will allow you to make informed decisions based on the data you’ll receive. Also, be aware that improving your current content will enable you to achieve results more quickly than creating new content.

Start Building Topic Clusters

After conducting an audit on your existing content, it’s time to start creating content and building it out. Your success is entirely dependent on intent. You need to know what your target market is searching and expecting to see. This helps in creating content that converts users.
When you get searcher intent right, you’ll easily build topic clusters. You can get your searcher’s intent by running a search for your keywords and analyzing content that ranks.

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Create High-Quality Content

You need to conduct extensive research on your target market to know the problems they are facing and come up with effective solutions. Valuable content is comprised of information that answers the questions your target market has, provides useful insights, and educates them to help them make informed decisions.

As you create content, remember to naturally include the right keywords into the text. You should avoid stuffing pages with keywords or adding extra keyword terms in your content all the time. The wrong use of keywords won’t improve your search ranking. And if you are caught by search engines, you’ll be penalized by being ranked lower on the list, or removed completely from the index. Plus, your visitors won’t be happy with your content. Keep everything real. And remember, you are writing for a real person.

Create Engaging Page Titles

It’s important to create interesting and engaging titles for your web pages.  Be sure your titles capture the attention of your target audience. If they don’t, your website visitors won’t read your content. You need to answer the question, “What’s in it for me?” to know what to highlight. Figure out the benefits they’ll receive from reading your work and why they should care. After figuring this out, use strong words and shorten your title to make it easy to read and memorable. While creating your headlines, ensure your keywords are in the titles.

Review Your Pages to Place Additional Keywords

After creating high-quality content that your audience needs together with attention-grabbing headlines, it’s important to encourage them to read further and look at everything you wrote. In your review, be on the lookout for more places where you can naturally place keywords. Just changing the structure of a few sentences could open up an easy opportunity to include appropriate keywords. You can also consider creating keyword phrases by adding words in front of the keyword. When you conduct several reviews on your newly created content, you’ll likely be amazed at the opportunities you had missed.

Focus on User Experience

User experience is playing an important role, especially in SEO rankings. In recent months, Google has been placing a higher emphasis on websites that deliver excellent user experiences across several devices and platforms. While traditional ranking factors are still important, search engines are increasingly interested in sending users to website that will provide outstanding user experience. Therefore, you should work with your website developers to ensure  your website is intuitive, easy to navigate and that all links help users get more information.

Fix Technical Issues Related to SEO

If your website has technical issues regarding SEO, they could hold back performance and prevent it from ranking as well as it should. Technical issues regarding SEO can be found using online site audit tools. The audit will analyze the website against all SEO mistakes. The audit will categorize these by warnings, errors, and notices based on their ability to impact performance and its severity. This is one of the quickest and best ways to identify opportunities to resolve issues that exist, before they become a crisis.

Analyze Your Strategy

After creating your strategy and implementing it, you need to focus on improving it. There’s no strategy that will be completely perfect. There will always be opportunities to boost growth. This might involve creating content, improving or optimizing content that already exists, and minimizing technical issues. Measuring and reporting your findings regularly will greatly increase your chances of success.

Conclusion

First, make sure to create an SEO strategy to improve the performance of your website. Then, ensure every team member is conversant with the goals and strategies in place to avoid confusion. By utilizing some of the tips provided in this post you should make the process a bit easier for yourself. We also recommend looking into using available tools such as Yoast SEO. You can read more about Yoast in our guide here.

Author Bio:

Sherri Carrier is a professional writer at dissertation proofreading services, blogger, journalist and a member of several writing clubs in New York. She has been writing her own poems since she was a child. The young author gets inspiration from her favorite writers and people whom she loves. She enjoys writing poetry in her free time and blogging on Instagram. Sherri loves playing the piano and singing. She specializes in such topics as marketing, self-development, business, and education. Find Sherri on Twitter.