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SEO is a long-term game, and there is no silver bullet when it comes to formulating the perfect strategy. However, there are certain foundation principles that every good SEO strategy should adhere to. In this blog post, we’ll share our top tips for formulating an effective SEO strategy that will help you rank higher in search engine results pages
Step 1: Establish your business goals, objectives and key results
- Define your goals before you launch a major SEO initiative
- Start by identifying your target marketing results, and then work backwards to define your process goals
Step 2: Competitive analysis
- Evaluating our competition for the sake of improving our own SEO strategy
- Analyze our competitors’ organic search rankings, online reviews, blog strategy, and backlink profiles. Then, dig into their user experience, social media, target audience segments, USPs
- Do their technical SEO audit. Review their site health, technical SEO implementation, page load speed and mobile friendliness
- Include websites that occupy Google page one for our target SEO keywords even if they aren’t direct competitors
Step 3: Finding the right keywords
- Use robust, comprehensive SEO tools like Ahrefs, Moz and SEMRush for keyword-related data.
- Remember to explore not only head terms, but long-tail keywords as well
- Check Google Search Console to see which keywords already drive organic traffic, and identify opportunities for optimization
- Review Google Search Trends to spot rising trends
- Reference Google’s autocomplete to reveal related keyword ideas
- To Use BuzzSumo “Questions” to uncover related questions from millions of forum posts, Quora and other websites
- And don’t forget to tap into own organisation’s customer feedback
- Search intent is one of the most critical aspects of keyword research because it denotes Google’s search objective
- A keyword may have high search volume. Yet, it may be driven by user intent that’s misaligned with your content, business, products or services. In that case, ranking would be nearly impossible, and any traffic will most likely bounce without converting.
- Focus on fulfilling the search intent with your destination pages
- To Boost SERP CTR: It’s important to differentiate your message in the SERP to boost your CTR.
- Review what’s appearing on Google page one for your target keywords. Assess the messaging and copy in the SERP listings. Are they all essentially saying the same thing? Is it difficult for a searcher to distinguish one result from another? If there’s a lack of differentiation within the SERP, use more compelling language that still aligns with intent to stand out.
- Map customer pain points to keywords: map keywords to each pain point within the purchase funnel. Finally, address the fears and concerns that hold people back from taking action.
- A highly effective strategy to dominate organic search results is to capitalize on our strengths.
Step 4: Create Marketing Funnels to convert prospects into customers
- At the top of the marketing funnel, prospects may be searching for symptoms rather than solutions. So it makes sense to deploy informational blog posts that help them understand the root cause of their problem. They are trying to educate themselves but are not exactly sure where to start. In this case, grab their attention with an entertaining piece of related content.
- In the middle of the funnel, the prospect is beginning to engage with various brands/vendors. At this stage, the prospect may be looking for more advanced and detailed content or for specific product information.
- Towards the bottom of the funnel, the prospect may be comparing options and making a final decision. At this stage, we can push them over the finish line with an ROI calculator, a competitive comparison matrix or customer reviews.
Step 5: Technical SEO
- Technical SEO is the foundation of your search engine optimization strategy, and must be prioritized. With a solid technical infrastructure, your content and backlinks will have a far greater impact on your organic search results.
- Apart from SERP, Your website must also be technically sound and optimized for search engines.
- Use the required Tools to uncover critical technical SEO issues
- Technical problems cause issues with crawling, link equity distribution and user experience. That means search engine algorithms are less likely to rank your site well.
- To evaluate the load time of the site and make it minimum
- To make the page responsive and major browser compatible.
Step 6: Content SEO strategy
- Keyword reasearch and competitive analysis, To explore content opportunities
- Outlines to guide creation of content that satisfies search intent and has the abilities to rank
- After writing content based on guilelines, editing and optimization to be done for search
- Monitor performance and refine approach over time.
Step 7: On-page SEO
- All on-page SEO elements fall into three main categories: Content elements, HTML elements, Site architecture
- To Focus on
- High-Quality Page Content
- Page Titles
- Headers
- Meta Descriptions
- Image Alt-text
- Structured Markup
- Page URLs
- Internal Linking
- Mobile Responsiveness
- Site Speed
Step 8: Off-page SEO strategy
- Need to prove to search engines that others view our brand as an authority
- To place quality and relevant backlink(to our website) from high domain authority website and social media channel
- Link from Facebook post/youtube video to our landing page/website
- Guest blogging- Posting article or blog to relevant third party sites
- Linkedin - Add your website link at the profile section
- Influencer marketing
- Influencers in our niche have the ability to reach very specific audiences. Instead of you relying on thousands of followers, influencers can help to ensure a very targeted audience who is likely to be interested in our product reads and engages with our content.
- Word-of-mouth aspect of influencer marketing builds trust for your brand
- Customers will engage with your brand because of the authenticity of influencers
Step 9: Track the SEO Effort with SEO KPIs on regular basis
- ROI : Tracking ROI from your SEO activities is crucial for the simple reason that it is the best measure of success that there is more incoming cash flow than you are spending
- Conversions (Sales and Leads): You can track conversions in Google Analytics. Measuring and tracking organic conversions (either sales, leads, or both depending on your business's set up) is a way to demonstrate success.
- Organic Visibility: This KPI track and measure to show consistent growth is organic visibility. And you can measure and report on this in two ways. 1. Google Search Console 2. Organic Research tool in SEMrush
- Organic Sessions: Growth in organic Impressions should result in an increase in organic sessions, and this is where you can start to demonstrate a real impact from your SEO strategy. Once your efforts are taking effect, one of the key metrics that you will see an impact on is organic sessions (traffic). Impressions result in traffic, and traffic turns into conversions; and when you look at it this way, seeing an increase in organic sessions is the point at which you truly start to notice an improvement in your SEO ROI.
- Branded vs. Non-Branded Traffic: This KPI help in analyze the true impact of our efforts on organic traffic
- 1. Branded traffic is usually driven either by previous knowledge of a business or a recommendation from someone else
- 2. Non-branded traffic is usually people searching for keywords around your products or services that you rank prominently for. In other words, traffic from searchers who probably weren’t familiar with your business before they saw you ranked on the SERPs.
- Keyword Rankings : This KPI track how our main target keywords are ranking on the SERPs.
- Backlinks: One of Google’s top three ranking factor. The link metrics that one should measure are:
- 1. Total number of backlinks
- 2. Total number of referring domains
- 3. Number links lost
- 4. Number of links earned
- Organic CTR: used as a ranking factor, The better your organic CTR, the more people are clicking on your listing on the SERPs.
- Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is an important measure of whether content is engaging those who land on the page and can also be a great way to understand how relevant it is to the search queries that it is ranking for.
- Average Time on Page: The longer a user spends on a page, the more engaged they are. And the more engaged someone is, the higher the chance that they will convert.
- Coverage Issues: Google Search Console allows you to analyze any coverage issues your site suffers from
- PageSpeed: The speed of your site is something that can negatively impact both your search rankings (and resultant traffic) and your conversions
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very concise and thoughtful articles written by the author on Search engine marketing strategy. If one follows this SEO strategy, one can get the result very soon. best wishes
Thanks you Raj for your feedback. For Online marketing Blog Resources, visit our website at http://digitalyaar.com/
This article by digital yaar is very helpful & valuable information that helps the online marketing goals of my organization. By following step-by-step methods written in a blog post, We can get our website on the first page of the Google search result page for our keywords within two months. And we have started receiving genuine leads from website traffic. The Digital yaar is doing good knowledge sharing. I wish the team a bright future
Thank you ashutosh for your feedback. We are more motivated from your feedback. as always, we tried our best to write informative content for Search engine optimization that helps our users in their search engine marketing(SEO) goals and increase their web presence, thereby increasing their sales and revenue.