Loading...Table of contents:
SEO Strategy – What Is It?
SEO comprises on-site and off-site activities. The first ones include content creation and optimization, the latter ones link building. SEO activities aim to increase website visibility and acquire traffic that will translate into users’ queries and product or service orders. To achieve the intended results, an SEO agency prepares a strategy, i.e. a plan of actions to be taken so that the website meets the requirements of Google algorithms and increases its visibility for keywords important for your business.
Activities that make up the SEO strategy should be consistent and well-thought-out to ensure that they complement each other and help you achieve the goal.
What Constitutes an SEO Strategy?
The elements that have an impact on visibility can be categorized into a specific group of activities and, of course, should also be consistent.
Keyword Research
It’s one of the first steps taken when preparing an SEO campaign. Before you start linking or optimizing content, you should determine the keywords that best describe your business and can attract customers. When selecting keywords, use tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush (check out: 10 useful tools supporting keyword research). Take into account the number of searches, find phrases related to the main query, and find relevant keywords based on them.
At this stage, prepare a list of the most important phrases for the website, e.g. for the offer or product descriptions. However, keep in mind that you’ll be coming back to this step on numerous occasions, e.g. when preparing subsequent blog posts, or adding new products or services to the offer.
Source: SEMrush
Content Plan Creation
Once you have a list of keywords, you can move on to planning new content and expanding existing texts. It’s worth creating the so-called topic clusters referring to a given subpage.
Need an example?
Let’s assume that you have a subpage with a description of the service you provide. Use keywords that best describe it and at the same time correspond to queries entered by Google users. Then, create thematically related content, such as blog entries related to the service. If you offer transport services, your potential customers may be interested in a blog post entitled “How to prepare for moving out,” which contains an internal link leading to a description of your offer.
Your content plan should always be based on pre-selected keywords. By creating random articles and ignoring the optimization of existing content, you may stay behind your market rivals. Created content should help you gain more visibility and organic traffic translating into queries and sales. That’s why it’s so important to rely on the data collected at the keyword research stage. It’s always best to plan first, especially when you want to create a consistent SEO strategy that will be beneficial for your website.
When creating a content plan, benefit from tools. In addition to those already mentioned, it’s worth checking data from Ubersuggest or keywordtool.io, which are based on related searches displayed by Google at the bottom of the SERPs when you type in a query.
Website Optimization
Optimization should be consistent with the previous steps. You’ll use the prepared keywords when creating titles, headers, image file names, alt descriptions, and internal links.
Refine your content to maximize your chances of being displayed in the so-called “zero position.” To learn more about it, check out our article: Direct answer – the most desired zero position in Google.
Of course, optimization should also include technical issues. It may be necessary to speed up page loading, install an SSL certificate, check canonical links, and more.
Read our blog post about What is technical SEO?
Internal linking is also a part of optimization activities. Do you apply keywords and link-related content? It’s very important to focus on that as this makes it easier for Google to understand website structure. Moreover, they support indexing and translate into better visibility in the SERPs.
Google My Business Listing
This step is extremely important when talking about local SEO. By listing your company in Google My Business, you make your business card visible in Google Maps and in the so-called local SEO 3-pack, meaning the three results that appear for local queries, usually at the top of the results, under Google Ads.
When creating a profile, you should remember to use keywords – it’s worth including them in the company name and in the first 250 characters with spaces of the description. You can also use them when creating various posts within your listing – e.g. informing customers about new products or services.
Don’t forget to link your website in the GMB listing and place a map with your company’s location e.g. in the contact tab. How to do it? Find your listing in Google Maps, then click “Share.” You’ll then be able to download the HTML code and insert it on the page.
Link Building
Link building is another important element of a consistent SEO strategy. It focuses on acquiring backlinks to your website from other valuable pages. At this stage, you should determine what you want to link.
If you aim to improve the visibility of products in a given category, you should acquire backlinks to this category. However, it’s worth remembering that all backlinks should never lead to one URL, as Google may perceive it as unnatural. Even if your main goal is to build visibility for a given category, you should remember about links leading to the homepage, blog, and other subpages. Nevertheless, the majority of backlinks should redirect to the category you care about.
When talking about link building, remember to keep a balance between dofollow and nofollow links. Ideally, there should be 50% of dofollow and 50% of nofollow backlinks, but a higher proportion of dofollow links also shouldn’t do any harm. A significant majority of dofollow/nofollow links aren’t seen by Google as natural. So make sure that your link profile is diverse.
The quality of backlinks is also important. When choosing linking domains, analyze the visibility of these pages and SEO parameters based on popular tools such as Ahrefs or Majestic. This will maximize the chances of improving your website visibility. Reckless link building can do more harm than good, as poor quality backlinks can decrease your positions in the search results.
To learn more about potential mistakes, check out our report: The most common link building mistakes in 2021.
Consistency Is the Key
Lack of proper communication between the agency and the client can be a possible problem while running a consistent SEO campaign. Some website owners make significant changes to their website structure without consulting the SEO agency, which may cause cannibalization of key phrases or create other difficulties that may hinder the process of improving visibility. Both parties should be aware of who is responsible for given actions and what steps should be consulted to prevent negative consequences and budget burning.
SEO agencies don’t always implement all the actions included in the strategy. You, as a client, may create content, whereas the SEO specialist may prepare post topics, keyword guidelines, headers, and more.
Our cooperation with Code & Pepper is an example of an SEO campaign where the client is responsible for part of the activities. In this case, we started with comprehensive off-site and on-site activities, but in 2020 the client decided to carry out link building on their own, and our agency focused on on-site activities and content creation.
Clear division of tasks and transparent communication translated into success. We are implementing a consistent SEO strategy that aims to generate organic Google traffic and attract customers. You can read more about this campaign here: https://delante.co/clients/codeandpepper/.
