SEO is hugely important for building your website’s ranking on search engines and generating more traffic for your website. The best part is that SEO techniques are usually free and therefore, great to implement in your website from the beginning.
What is an SEO strategy?
An SEO strategy is the steps you can take to boost your organic traffic.
These steps are proven techniques and activities that you can perform before and after you create content in order for it to be optimized for search engines. It is important to implement an effective strategy in order to cover all ground and opportunities for optimisation.
10 Steps to an Effective and Successful SEO Strategy
1. Keyword research
Even just getting started with SEO, keyword research is definitely something you will have come across. Keyword research may seem simple, however, it is a very thorough and essential process for your content to rank well in search engines.
Keyword research includes analyzing long-tail keywords and keyword variations to start with. Brainstorm some topic ideas that your niche audience will be interested in and use tools such as Google and Pinterest autofill suggestions to come up with long-tail key-phrases.
Inputting these phrases into free and paid tools can show you data such as keyword suggestions, the search volume, how competitive the phrase is and the top ranking pages. Just because the search volume is high does not mean it should be a keyword to target as the competition can be extremely high/ Therefore, the chances of ranking highly in Google is less likely.
Instead, this research can show keywords with more potential for ranking highly with lower competition and fair amounts of search traffic. Additionally, keyword research means you can develop your content to be targeted to your audience and not too general. This means the targeted content will be meeting your audience’s needs and can lead to higher conversions.
2. Competitor Analysis
Keyword research naturally leads to competitor analysis as part of your SEO strategy. You cannot blindly make content to rank highly in search engines without knowing more about the content you are competing with. You need to know information like:
- What keywords do your competitors rank for?
- Who are the top ranking pages for your relevant keywords?
- How valuable is their content? What makes it rank this highly?
- How many backlinks/referring domains do those have to their pages?
This information is needed to inform the next steps in your strategy, particularly the number of backlinks the pages have. Knowing the number of links gives you an idea of how many you will need to compete with them as links contribute massively to search engine results.
3. Being Better than your competition
Now you’ve now analyzed the competition, it isn’t the idea to copy what they write and add a little more. You want your content to be different, unique and be more valuable in order to rank.
Google’s algorithm is highly complex and no one really knows how to crack it. However, the algorithm is intelligent enough to know valuable and original content. Therefore, how are you going to stand out against your competition’s outstanding content?
Making outstanding content of your own that:
- Provides a new perspective
Do you have different thoughts, controversial ideas, or have knowledge that changes the point of view completely on that topic? This can be what sets your content apart from the competition and can add more value to your audience.
- Is highly authoritative
Are you an expert in your field or is your website a trusted brand/name that will attract people to click on your content? If not, how can you create the authority of your competition? For example, expert interviews or endorsements from trusted people directing them to your content.
- Is bigger and better
The content you create needs to add more value to your audience. This typically means longer and more in-depth content. You can create skyscraper content, merge multiple, related pieces of content into one or create ultimate guides.
4. On-Page SEO
SEO has lots of elements including on-page and off-page seo. On-page seo has many more elements that contribute to your websites ranking such as:
- mobile optimisation
- keywords
- meta descriptions
- titles and headings
- website speed
- visual content
- and more
The search crawlers will analyse this data on each of your pages and evaluate it in relation to search queries. Therefore, it is not just the content you create that is important, it is also your website and the visitor’s experience of your page.
The benefit of paying attention to these elements of your content has other benefits. Such as reducing bounce rates and increasing the number of leads you generate from your content as the visitors have a positive experience. Ultimately, contributing positively to your SEO ranking.
As a result, your content can include more visuals, audio or video content that is SEO optimized for visitors to enjoy. As well as headings and subheadings that break up content and optimised metadata and URLs.
You can perform regular site audits to check on the health of your site and these on-page SEO elements as part of yours. More on this later…
5. Searcher Intent
In addition to keyword research, you want to make sure your content meets the requirements of the target audience. This is why long-tail keywords are important to ensure that the focus of the article is correct for searcher intent.
Search traffic should not be the reason for choosing to target a keyword if the content is irrelevant. This will only harm your SEO as visitors are likely to bounce off your page when they do not find what they are looking for.
Therefore, putting yourself in the shoes of your audience allows you to create targeted and valuable content for them. Ask questions like:
- What does your audience want to know?
- What is their goal and motivation for this search?
- How can I add more value to them than my competitors?
This will result in better content and more targeted content for search engine results.
6. Link Building
Backlinks are seen as one of the most important elements of SEO. Once you’ve made your outstanding content that will be able to rank highly, you need to acquire the links that will boost it to the top of SERPs.
The saying, ’publish and they will come’ doesn’t work and you need to get it out there in order to obtain traffic and natural links with it. Therefore, reaching out and manually obtaining backlinks is essential for this to happen.
Outreach is a great way to get your article in front of many potential links. You can use outreach for:
- broken link building
- guest posting
- content promotion
- building relationships for potential backlinks
Creating an effective plan for link building is necessary because of it’s weight in search engine results. Also, from the research you conducted on already ranking pages, you know how many links you need for your page to rank.
Therefore, consistently reaching out for links, even months after publishing your content, is going to be necessary for your SEO strategy.
7. Check competitor’s links
Link building can seem challenging when contacts are limited. However, a good technique to build your contacts for outreach can be analyzing the links your competitors have.
Using free and paid tools, you can enter specific pages, such as content on the same topic you are writing, and find a list of all the linking domains to that one page. These would be ideal potential backlinks as they are already linking to similar content. Maybe they haven’t discovered your website yet and can be converted to a fan!
Make sure to exclude websites that have already linked to your or already been contacted through your outreach strategy.
Including these contacts in your emails can be more successful than reaching out to irrelevant sources. This research should give you a huge bank of contacts for future outreach.
8. Content Promotion
Typically, blog owners create a piece of content, have a list of the usual things to do to promote the post and then leave it. The work really starts after your content is published and to get it ranked on Google.
A study by Ahrefs revealed that 5.7% of pages make it to the top 10 in Google within a year:
(Source)
This goes to show that social sharing, contributing to communities and all the other activities after publishing a post might not help SEO as much as you think. The graph also shows that websites with a high Domain Ranking, tend to get to Google’s top 10 much faster.
Therefore, building your website’s ranking, authority and backlinks can speed up the process of ranking simultaneously.
9. Website Audits
A website audit was briefly mentioned earlier and is definitely something you want to add to your SEO strategy. This is because an audit can evaluate the health of your website and various elements of on-page and off-page SEO.
Performing a site audit regularly is a good idea in order to continuously improve your website’s search engine optimisation. As they help to avoid errors, reveal potential areas for better optimisation (in titles and metadata etc.), and therefore improve your website’s chances of ranking.
10. Update Old Content
Now that you have completed a website audit and improved the optimisation of your site, revisiting your old content should also be part of your SEO strategy. “Fresh” content has the potential to rank better in SERPs as Google will see the information as relevant, new and up-to-date.
Often, outdated and inaccurate content can rank poorly. Therefore, updating old content means it will be more relevant to search queries. Also, don’t forget, all the links you worked hard to build will still be there on the old content, meaning it has better potential to rank high.
When going through old content keep an eye out for content that is duplicated and possibly merge into much better content. Also, delete any content that is no longer relevant and doesn’t produce much traffic. This can boost your SEO as pages that do not add value to your visitors can negatively impact your overall ranking.
Implementing an Effective SEO Strategy
An effective SEO strategy is detailed and thorough but is essential in order to have the highest potential for ranking highly in SERPs.
Although ranking highly in search engines is the goal of an SEO strategy when done right can have huge benefits. For example, using keyword research, searcher intent and creating outstanding content means you receive highly targeted traffic. Resulting in higher conversions, more sales and subscribers to your website.
Now it is down to you to implement an SEO strategy for better search engine ranking.
Author Bio
Helen Thomas is an experienced finance and business writer at PhD Finance Writers, specializing in PhD thesis writing for finance. She specializes in research, content and article writing on various topics, including finance, math, and economics.
