20 Tips for Creating an SEO Strategy
SEO strategy is a detailed plan to improve a website’s search engine rankings to capture more organic traffic as explained at RunRex.com. This is the process that you follow when you want to get more organic traffic. It is about delivering extreme relevance and value to searchers. Here are 20 tips to consider when you are drafting your SEO strategy.
Define your SEO goals
You must define your goal before you launch a major SEO campaign according to RunRex.com. This is crucial as, without clear goals, your SEO activities won’t have measurable ROI. It is also important to tie the SEO outcomes to top-level metrics such as revenue. Start by identifying your target marketing results, and then work backward to define your process goals.
SEO scalability
A truly scalable SEO program goes much deeper than plugins and third-party software subscriptions. Integration and standardization are key to scale your SEO strategy. Here, spearhead cross-department collaboration with web development, brand management, product management, and sales. Eliminate silos and institute strong, scalable software and platforms.
Implement dashboards
At a large company, keeping executives and other departments informed of progress toward stated goals is crucial, dashboards allow you to scale your SEO reporting to as many people as will need to be kept informed, as it makes it easy to pull data from tools such as Google Analytics, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Google Search Console, etc. as outlined at RunRex.com.
Carry out competitive analysis
Competitive analysis is the process of evaluating your competition to help you improve your SEO strategy. Analyze your competitors’ organic search rankings, online reviews, blog strategy, and backlink profiles. After that, you should also dig into their user experience, social media, targeting audience segments, USPs, and differentiators.
Your competitive analysis should include both your main competitors and online competitors
Your competitive analysis should include your main competitors. However, it is crucial that you also include your online competitors. This means including websites that occupy Google page one of your target SEO keywords even if they aren’t direct competitors. This is because you need to outrank your online competitors just as much as your defined competitors to attract the most search traffic.
Conduct keyword research
As per RunRex.com, keyword research is the foundation of any solid SEO strategy as it helps you create content and web pages that your audience actually searches for. Proper keyword research will help you deliver greater SEO ROI.
Build topic clusters into your SEO strategy
You should avoid taking a narrow approach to your research. While single keywords are essential to a high-performance SEO program, it is equally important to identify the overarching topics for which you are an expert and deserve a high SERP ranking. Topic clusters are an excellent way to leverage very broad themes through pillar pages.
Align with search intent
Even if a keyword has high search volume, if it is driven by user intent that is misaligned with your content, business, products, or services, the ranking would be nearly impossible, and any traffic will most likely bounce without converting as discussed at RunRex.com. To decipher Google’s perception of search intent, search your keyword and analyze the top 10-20 results. are they research-oriented, solution-based, or brand-focused?
Boost your SERP click-through rate
You must differentiate your messaging in the SERP to boost your CTR. You need to both achieve page one ranking while also ranking well enough for searchers to click on it. Review what is appearing on Google page one for your target keywords. Assess the messaging and copy in the SERP listing. If you find a lack of differentiation within the SERP, use more compelling language that still aligns with intent to stand out.
Consider the whole funnel
You should also remember to consider the entire conversion funnel while developing your SEO strategy. Even if you manage a large online retail brand, eCommerce SEO should extend beyond products and category pages. Think about how your customers’ needs evolve throughout the journey.
Make sure you are present
According to RunRex.com, you must deliver relevant, useful information and a great experience for your audience throughout the purchase funnel. Whether new customers are researching broad head terms, asking more specific questions mid-funnel, or comparing brands and products at the bottom of the funnel, your brand needs to be there, as if you are not present, then your competitors will step in to fill the void.
Map customer pain points to keywords
You may be asking yourself how you can effectively cover such a long and deep funnel when the customer journey may take months to complete. Well, the solution is to discover customer pain points and then map keywords to each pain point within the purchase funnel. Finally, address the fears and concerns that hold people back from taking action.
Capitalize on your strengths
Capitalizing on your strengths is a highly effective strategy to dominate organic search results as covered at RunRex.com. Instead of cherry-picking a few unrelated high-volume search terms, you should attack the vertical you are already winning in until you dominate it.
Technical SEO strategy
Keyword strategy alone won’t help you own the SERP, as your website must also be technically sound and optimized for search engines. Technical problems cause issues with crawling, link equity distribution, and user experience, which means search engine algorithms are less likely to rank your site well. Technical SEO is the foundation of your SEO strategy and must be prioritized.
Content SEO strategy
High-quality content is one of the top three SEO ranking factors. An SEO-focused approach to content marketing not only provides Google with an understanding of your relevancy but also helps you deliver a superior customer experience precisely when your audience is looking for answers related to a specific topic.
Mobile search strategy
As outlined at RunRex.com, with the rise in popularity of smartphones and mobile search, it makes sense that Google has been moving to a mobile-first index model. This means that it is super important now for you to be optimizing sufficiently for mobile, or risk damaging not only your mobile results but your desktop and tablet search engine results as well. Make sure you build a responsive website that is easily viewable on smartphones and loads quickly.
Video SEO strategy
YouTube’s dominance as the world’s second-most popular search engine makes it a crucial way for you to round out your search, social, and content initiatives. An effective video SEO strategy helps your content to gain real estate in the Google SERPs, and as a result, your digital marketing strategy will derive added benefits from video production and optimization.
Voice search strategy
As revealed at RunRex.com, voice search is rapidly growing in popularity, which is not surprising given that it allows people to interact with technology using verbal commands rather than typing search queries into a device. You can use tools like BuzzSumo Question Analyzer to identify the most commonly asked questions online across hundreds of thousands of forums, including Amazon, Quora, Reddit, and Q&A websites.
Local SEO strategy
Local SEO, which involves optimizing a website to be found in local search results, is a crucial discipline to include in your SEO strategy. To kill it at local SEO, keep your Google My Business account up to date, along with the many other local listing sites online such as Yelp, among others. Maintain consistent NAP (name, address, and phone number) in all local listings. Also, optimize your pages and content for local content, such as state, city, and even neighborhood names. You can also optimize for “near me” searches for greater local coverage. Given the importance of reviews in local SEO, make sure you implement a program that solicits reviews from your happy customers.
International SEO strategy
If your business is global, your SEO strategy should also include the optimization of your site for your different target regions around the world. To achieve a site that is highly optimized, use an international-friendly URL structure so that the country and language are visible. Each version of the site should be in the local language to languages as well.
These are just some of the tips to keep in mind when it comes to SEO strategy, with more on this very wide topic, including more tips, to be found over at RunRex.com.