By focusing on an effective marketing mix—one that includes search engine optimization—your company can ensure a healthy balance in its marketing strategy. Search engine optimization is therefore crucial to your company’s online success. Moreover, search engine optimization is the only free marketing method that can generate immediate conversions.
Many companies are working on their SEO, but aren’t sure where to start or how to structure their efforts. Follow the 7 steps below to develop an effective SEO strategy.
When you optimize your website, it’s important to measure the success of your efforts. Without the right insights, you won’t know if your efforts are paying off. It’s also important to quickly realize when you’ve done something that has a negative impact.
By defining SEO KPIs, you can effectively measure the progress of your SEO efforts. Some KPIs we recommend for measurement are:
You can find more KPIs in the article “KPIs for Search Engine Optimization.” By regularly checking your KPIs or tracking them in a dashboard, you’ll know how you’re performing. This also allows you to effectively respond to Google’s countless algorithm updates.
In addition, you’ll be able to set clear SEO goals once you know which KPIs are important for your business.
Before you set your goals, it’s important to understand your current standing in search engines. You need to answer questions such as: “How many organic visitors am I currently getting?”, “How fast are we growing right now?”, and “What is our authority score?”
Based on your SEO KPIs, determine which data to include in your baseline measurement. Then record this baseline measurement in a document so you can refer to it at any time.
Return on investment is important for all your marketing channels; it’s crucial to link your goals to your KPIs and use them to guide your efforts. Specific SEO goals for your company are crucial for achieving good SEO results.
Make sure your objective isn’t “increasing organic traffic”—that isn’t specific enough. A specific objective is “to achieve an 85% increase in organic traffic from July through December, compared to the same period the previous year.”
By keeping an eye on your KPIs, you can quickly see whether you’re meeting the goals you’ve set. By defining specific SEO goals, you can avoid confusion and immediately know when the SEO process has been successful.
Once you know what your goals are and how to measure them, it’s a good idea to look into SEO tools. With the right SEO tools, you can carry out all your tasks efficiently and save a lot of time.
Commonly used SEO tools include Moz, Ahrefs, Semrush, SE Ranking, Majestic, and ContentKing. An SEO tool may sometimes seem like a significant investment, but it’s ultimately indispensable if you really want to achieve success. To make things even easier for you, we’ve developed a number of important SEO tools that are free to use:
Feel free to use these tools; they’ll help you complete your analyses and tasks more quickly.
By establishing the right KPIs, a baseline measurement, goals, and the right tools, you’ll have laid the foundation for your SEO strategy. The next step is to develop and implement an SEO plan.
Since SEO is an ongoing process, you need to keep working on optimization efforts. Therefore, set aside time—preferably at regular intervals—to carry out SEO optimizations.
SEO activities are divided into three categories, with each category representing one of the three pillars of SEO:
Using a small Word file, Google Calendar, or a notebook quickly becomes disorganized when it comes to a solid SEO strategy. To organize and keep track of your schedule effectively, it’s better to use Trello, Asana, or a Google Drive Excel sheet. This way, you can work with multiple colleagues at the same time to implement optimizations while maintaining a clear overview of the categories and tasks.
Before you can fill out your SEO plan with the right tasks, it’s important to know what you need to optimize. Conducting a technical analysis, a content analysis, and a link analysis are the three main tasks you need to carry out.
Your website’s technical aspects form the foundation of your search engine visibility, so it’s important to ensure they’re in order. Good technical practices include having a user-friendly and easily crawlable website.
Google has one goal, and that is to provide the best user experience on websites for its users.
When a Google user quickly finds the answer to a search query, the website is rewarded with a higher ranking in the search results. It’s also important that Google’s crawler be able to properly access the pages on the website.
If your website’s technical setup blocks the crawler or if the code is incorrect, Google won’t be able to index your pages. As part of the technical analysis, you should look at:
Based on the issues identified in the technical analysis, you’ll create action items to optimize your technical SEO. You can add these action items to your SEO plan.
Be sure to check out these articles on technical SEO:
Technical SEO is a vast field, and there can be dozens of technical errors on your website. By referring to the articles above, you’ll learn everything there is to know about potential technical errors and ensure a thorough technical analysis.
You’ll only achieve true SEO success when you attract visitors to your website and those visitors subsequently convert. Your website must meet the expectations and search queries of your target audience.
To find out what your target audience is searching for, conduct keyword research as part of your content analysis. Keyword research allows you to identify all the relevant search terms used on Google.
The Google Keyword Planner shows you search terms along with the number of monthly searches (the search volume). If you can’t or don’t want to use the Google Keyword Planner, there are several good alternatives for conducting keyword research.
We use Semrush and SE Ranking to conduct keyword research.
The easiest way is to put all the data from your keyword research into an Excel file; that way, you’ll keep track of all the search terms and search volumes. If applicable, you can also group the search terms by topic, landing pages, or blogs. It always takes a little trial and error to figure out what works best for you.
Using the data from your keyword research, you’ll know what’s trending among your target audience and what they’re searching for. But you’re not the only one who wants to rank highly for these search terms—your competitors are definitely working on this, too.
Using tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you can assess the potential of keywords and landing pages.
By adding competitor data from your SEO tools here, you’ll create a rock-solid document that includes all the keywords and their potential.
Keyword research is the foundation of your content analysis; you’ll use this research continuously as you work on your SEO action items. Incorporate the search terms in a logical way on your landing pages. This will help your users find the right information.
When your pages meet all of the user’s expectations, your bounce rate will most likely decrease, the number of pages per session will increase, and you will ultimately achieve more valuable conversions.
By writing unique and valuable content combined with attractively designed landing pages, your website will climb the search rankings.
So be sure to thoroughly analyze the landing pages on your website. By this, we mean product pages, informational pages, blogs, or category pages. Keep in mind that your landing pages should:
Do you notice any discrepancies in your data based on the KPIs you’ve set? If so, create action items to address them. To keep everything organized, it’s helpful to create a file where you can record the results of your content analysis. Based on all the issues you encounter, you can then add action items to your SEO plan.
In addition to technical factors and content, the final pillar of search engine visibility is a website’s authority. Google views high-quality backlinks from other authoritative websites to your website as votes.
The more valuable and relevant backlinks you receive, the more authority your website will gain. It is important to note that:
You build authority through link building, a general term for acquiring backlinks. If you do link building correctly, it can have a positive impact on your search engine rankings.
The opposite is also true: if you receive harmful links, it will cost you valuable rankings. With the Google Disavow Tool, you can identify and exclude harmful links pointing to your website.
An authority analysis involves examining the backlinks currently pointing to your website. You can do this using both Google Search Console and other backlink tools, such as Majestic. Also, assess your competitors’ authority so you’ll know right away what steps you still need to take.
You can include link building as an action item in your SEO plan. Keep in mind, however, that link building is the third pillar, so it’s important to focus on your technical aspects and your content first before diving into link building.
Now that you’ve conducted various analyses and finalized your SEO plan, it’s time to carry out the optimization work. Thanks to the various metrics and analyses, you know what your website’s current status is and what your goal is.
Based on the technical analysis, you’ll carry out the optimization work first. After all, technical aspects are the foundation of your search engine visibility and crucial for generating conversions.
Depending on your CMS and the composition of your online team, you can implement the optimizations yourself, outsource them, or work with an in-house web developer.
A good technical analysis is structured so that the areas for optimization are prioritized from most important to least important. Start with the optimizations that will have the greatest impact and work your way through the technical analysis in that order.
Keep a close eye on all developments at Google—for example, by setting up a Google Alert —and monitor your website closely. SEO is constantly changing, and staying up to date on new techniques ensures optimal results. By monitoring your technical aspects with SEO tools, you can be sure that nothing goes wrong on the technical side.
Based on the keyword research and the action items from your content analysis, once your website has been technically optimized, you can get started with on-page optimization.
Optimizing and expanding your landing pages is an ongoing process that requires continuous work. Based on the data you collect, you’ll keep fine-tuning your landing pages and expanding your content with effective content marketing to improve your search rankings.
Once you’ve achieved good rankings, don’t just sit back—keep optimizing and expanding your content. If you don’t, the competition will overtake you, and you’ll have to work hard to regain those rankings.
When performing on-page optimization, always keep the visitor in mind. For Google, user experience is the most important factor, so if you provide high-quality content and well-designed landing pages, you’ll see that reflected in your rankings.
Once you’ve continuously optimized the pages on your website and created several new ones, it’s time to start working on link building as well. In most SEO strategies, link building isn’t added to the workflow until several months later.
Whereas link building used to be about posting as many links as possible on the internet, it’s now about acquiring valuable backlinks. In link building, quality trumps quantity. Get started as a guest blogger, share your valuable content through social media channels, and distribute press releases.
By using a variety of methods to acquire backlinks, you can obtain them in the right way, which will help improve your online visibility.
With the KPIs and goals you’ve set, you can quickly see your SEO results. Based on improvements in search rankings and data from various tools, you can develop new SEO action items.
By continuing to track metrics and constantly identifying new areas for improvement, you show Google that you take your website’s user-friendliness seriously. Carrying out optimization efforts on an ongoing basis will pay off.
When you’re up to date on all the latest SEO developments, you can quickly come up with new action items, such as optimizing for local SEO.
Developing a good strategy can quickly become time-consuming. Furthermore, Google usually doesn’t immediately reflect the changes you’ve made in its search results rankings.
So there’s a good chance you won’t see immediate results from your SEO efforts. When you’re working on search engine optimization, you need to be patient—it’s a long-term strategy.
In most cases, it takes at least 6 months before you see the first good results. Research by Ahrefs has shown that it can take up to 1 year to reach the top 10 and that, on average, it takes 2 to 3 years to reach the number 1 position.
So don’t give up right away if you don’t see results—stick to your SEO strategy and keep optimizing. By following the SEO strategy outlined above, you’ll be working effectively to improve your search visibility.