As many entrepreneurs and marketing managers know these days, SEO is not a one-time effort. These days, most organizations understand that SEO is more than just a one-time audit or a one-time optimization of your website. By continuously working to optimize your website, you create an optimization process that steadily improves your search visibility. SmartRanking helps e-commerce businesses, B2B companies, and platforms enhance their search visibility through a structured SEO process.

People still often talk about the โ€œthree pillars of SEO.โ€ We see it differently and refer to four pillars of SEO, which we believe is the key to SEO success. Weโ€™d love to share more about these four pillars, which are a crucial part of any SEO strategy.

The Pillars of an SEO Strategy

Technical SEO forms the foundation of your search engine visibility. Without this foundation, search engines are unable to properly crawl, index, and render your website. Technical SEO consists of the following components:

  • Your website’s crawlability: Search engines need to efficiently find the right pages and avoid visiting too many unnecessary pages.
  • Your websiteโ€™s loading speed: Itโ€™s important for both users and search engines that your website loads quickly and meets the Core Web Vitals standards. This ensures a positive user experience.
  • Structured data on your website: Structured data allows search engines to display additional information in search results and helps make your website easier to understand.

The first step in an SEO process is to lay a solid foundation so that further optimizations have a greater impact. After all, itโ€™s difficult to achieve success with a weak foundation. Our technical SEO specialists help identify optimization opportunities and translate them into clear action items for the developers.

Learn more about technical SEO

On-page SEO involves optimizations made to your online store or website that go beyond content creation. This includes properly structuring your page, meeting user intent, and using the correct HTML headings, meta titles, and meta descriptions.

By optimizing the various elements that we consider part of on-page SEO, you can improve the pages on your website to better align with search intent. This truly helps your target audience.

Learn more about relevant content

In our view, the third pillar of SEO is โ€œSearch Quality.โ€ This includes working on E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) and the usability of your website. Think of things like proper breadcrumbs, actively responding to reviews, accurate translations, substantiating claims, and projecting your reliability.

Search Quality goes beyond simply adding an author profile to your blog posts. It is an essential part of your strategy for making your website more transparent, reliable, and user-friendly.

We view authority as the icing on the cake in an SEO strategy. It involves building your online reputation through collaborations with websites in your niche or through digital PR. Building authority is usually referred to as link building, although that term often carries negative connotations. In our view, thatโ€™s unnecessary, provided you secure relevant backlinks from websites that are themselves easily discoverable.

The internet is built on links, which is why authority remains a key component of an SEO strategy, even though it is the final step. To start building your authority, itโ€™s most effective to first focus on the other three pillars outlined above.

Our Approach to SEO

We believe that SEO is about optimizing your website for your target audience, not about influencing search engine algorithms. In our view, this is the foundation for sustainable growth in organic search. Unfortunately, thereโ€™s still far too much of a misconception that SEO is just about implementing a few simple tricks. Thatโ€™s why weโ€™ve put our vision for SEO into writing.

Read our take on SEO

What does an SEO project look like?

We value structure and a clear approach. In our experience, this ensures clarity, sets the right expectations, and forms the foundation for a successful collaboration. Thatโ€™s why, for every SEO project, we follow the steps outlined below, which together form a streamlined SEO strategy. As an SEO agency, we focus 100% on SEO. Each SEO project has a single point of contact for content-related matters, while a team of specialists is also involved to deliver maximum value.

During a no-obligation online introductory meeting, weโ€™ll go over your challenges. Weโ€™d be happy to discuss the obstacles youโ€™re currently facing in improving your online visibility, what your market looks like, and how youโ€™re currently working to improve your online visibility.

We’ll also briefly explain our approach to SEO, how we work, and discuss how we might be able to help each other.

If thereโ€™s a mutual interest, weโ€™ll draft a proposal and schedule a time to go over it. The proposal for the collaboration includes a debriefing, an overview of the current situation, and the opportunities we see. This represents an investment of our time in a potential collaboration and is therefore non-binding. The proposal also includes more information about the proposed collaboration, its objectives, and the budget.

Once the proposal is approved, weโ€™ll schedule the SEO project. It begins with a kick-off meeting, during which weโ€™ll explain our approach in more detail. Weโ€™ll then develop the specific strategyโ€”including various essential analysesโ€”during this strategy month.

We will present these findings to the relevant stakeholders, along with the plan for the next phase of the SEO process.

Once weโ€™ve agreed on the strategy, weโ€™ll work together in monthly sprints to optimize the website. Tasks are prioritized based on their estimated impact. Each sprint begins with a monthly SEO meeting, during which we discuss the results and upcoming tasks. Where necessary, the strategy is adjustedโ€”thanks to continuous iteration and the regular meeting scheduleโ€”to ensure we achieve our goals.

Strategic Support for an SEO Project

In addition to working based on the four pillars of SEO, analyses that provide insights and input are indispensable. These include keyword research, keyword gap analyses, content pruning, Google Ads data analyses, and various other analyses that provide the right insights. Based on this, we take the right steps at the right time by optimizing the four pillars.

Improve Your Online Visibility with an SEO Strategy

Are you ready to improve your online visibility through an SEO strategy? Feel free to contact us for a no-obligation introductory meeting. Our SEO consultants would be happy to work with you to turn your project into a success story.

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