SEO strategy is a process where a website's content is organized by topic to maximize the likelihood of your website appearing in search engine results. Basically, it improves the search engine rankings of your website, attracting more organic traffic.
SEO strategy is an important piece of the puzzle in marketing because it helps your content be seen in the search engine result pages or SERPs. Cluttered and chaotic content makes it difficult for search engine bots to index your website, rank your website pages, and identify your website's authority. Luckily, there is an SEO Planner where you can plan your strategy and find the right keywords. See SEO Planner here.
What Is the Benefit of Effective SEO?
You may have the best website with state-of-the-art design and worth-reading content, but if no one ever sees your site, then it's just as good as nothing.
One major benefit of an effective SEO strategy is that your brand is presented to thousands of searchers at every step of the customer journey. It helps you stay on course when creating your website content. It also ensures that you are creating content that online users are actually searching for rather than creating content that you think online users are looking for.
How Do You Create an Effective SEO Strategy?
#1: Evaluate Your SEO Performance
Before developing an effective SEO strategy, the first step you need to do is to evaluate your current SEO strategy and how it performs. You can start by identifying how your content connects to a specific market and where it will gain popularity among customers and viewers. You need to assess your website's organic traffic, gauge the branded and non-branded traffic split, and your keyword rankings.
Tools like SEMrush Organic Research Tool can show you the performance of your organic traffic and where your keywords rank over time. Such trends will be easily noticed, and you will get a comprehensive idea of the performance of each metric. If there is a window of opportunity to further connect with your viewer that is searching for your brand, it will show in the branded and non-branded traffic split.
You will get a general concept of how your website performs from an SEO viewpoint by taking into account the metrics, data from Google Analytics, and your revenue and conversion rates. This is also helpful in recognizing the weak points that will ultimately factor into your new SEO strategy.
#2: Do an SEO Analysis of Your Competitors
There wouldn’t be a need for SEO if competition didn’t exist. Analyzing the SEO strategies of your competitors is the next step once you have looked into your current SEO performance. Doing so will help you get an idea of what's working for them and what's not. You may even get an idea where you can capitalize on gaining an advantage.
To get on with your analysis, make a list of your major competitors, and that includes those that consistently show up on top in the SERPs when you search your main keywords. You can get this information on your competitors using the SEMrush tool mentioned above.
What to Look for When Analyzing the SEO of Your Competitors
Look for your competitors' pages that get the most organic traffic and how well the ranking of their keywords and their link profiles are as well. By simply discovering which of their pages have the highest rank, you can easily identify what type of content your website needs in order to increase your keyword ranking. Analyzing your competitors' keyword rankings will help you know if they are ranking for keywords and you are not. You can take this opportunity to improve your keyword rankings.
#3: Set Your SEO Goals
It is quite important to determine your goals if you want to create an effective SEO strategy. In any case, your SEO efforts won't have significant ROI without definite goals. Identifying them will guide you in creating an SEO strategy that will effectively achieve these goals and aim for success.
#4: Define Topics and Main Keywords
Algorithms determine search engine rankings. It also tells you how well a certain search query is answered by a website. And the use of keywords plays a huge part in that.
Once you have defined your marketing goals, perform keyword research to define your main keywords and ensure optimization. Keywords, whether one simple word or compound phrases, let search engines know what your content is really about. But there's more to adding keywords than just simply putting in the name.
To optimize your keyword, you need to consider other factors such as search intent, long-tail keywords, which are specific terms users use in order to find the exact answer to their query, and funnel keywords that target users at different stages of the sales funnel, and relevant keywords.
Final Thoughts
Although creating SEO is never easy, it's a crucial part of any digital marketing. But with your will to learn the strategy, you will be able to send your website to the top of the search engine result pages!