How do you go about building an SEO strategy?

 

For your SEO marketing campaign to rip-roar success, you need to do some planning.

Whether you want to increase organic traffic, improve conversion rates, or rank higher than your direct competitors, you’ll often need a marketing strategy.

You often need to do a lot of work before any site changes are made. For example, you often need to do keyword research, plan what content to write, and analyse your backlinks and competitors.

This can give you a clear idea of how much work is needed.

Before you do anything, get the foundations right.

It’s all well and good to jump in headfirst, but sometimes this causes problems.

Let’s give you a real-life example we commonly encounter: the business has a very poorly designed website.

The websites are so weak that Google and other search engines can’t even fathom what products or services are being sold.

Therefore, often, and we would say more often than not, some web design work might be needed.

This could be to create new pages; it could also be to facilitate adding more text to a page.

It would also be possible to convert the website to a CMS, which would allow SEO changes to be made.

Some websites are just so basic that, well, they don’t even allow you to enter a meta description!

Marketing tools that you will need

Before you even start implementing SEO, make sure you have the right tools in place to monitor metrics such as organic traffic.

 

Therefore, you will need:

• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• As well as a paid SEO tool, such as Moz Pro, to check competitors’ backlinks.

 

Pause for a second and assess your current situation

You may have noticed that we can’t go quite so far into this article, and we haven’t even recommended any actual work to be implemented on the website yet.

That’s because top agencies track where the website ranks, how much organic traffic it receives, and what links it currently has.

Just as any good mechanic doesn’t start work without running a diagnostic check on the car.

 

Your chosen SEO consultant needs to do the same.

Therefore, check the following:

Keyword Rankings

How high or low is the website ranking for keywords that are important to that business? Is the business in the top 7 positions? Or is it nowhere to be found on Google?

Therefore, use your Google Search Console account to understand where the website currently ranks.

Site heath

There are various tools, such as Moz Pro, that you can use to run a technical SEO audit.

Have a look for any duplicated content, broken links, thin pages, and pages where AI text can be applied. Perhaps some pages need updating, as the information is outdated?

Run a site audit

Ask your content marketing manager to have a look to see where there could be content-thin pages.

Perhaps there are pages which are content-thin; perhaps those pages stand absolutely no chance of ever ranking in the top 10 positions on Google because, well, there are a few lines of text, which means the page is “content-thin”.

 

Keyword research

Keyword research is really important when creating a marketing plan.

The reason is that a good agency will tell you whether that keyword should be targeted based on the marketing budget you have.

Sometimes, ranking for that keyword, well, sometimes, it’s nearly impossible with small marketing budgets.

For example, car insurance, national solicitors, and online clothing retailers will be massively competitive.

Trying to rank for these on a small marketing budget of, say, 7k a month or less will mean it’s very difficult to secure first-page rankings for important keywords.

A good SEO manager will therefore:

 

Analyse search volumes

For example, are enough shoppers asking that query? Or perhaps on the other end of the spectrum, as too many people ask that query, such as “car insurance”, meaning that competition is fierce for that term.

 

Keyword difficulty

Is it realistic for the business to say that, in 6 months, it will be ranking on the first page for that term?

Or is it that they are competing with established brands with multi-million-pound marketing budgets?

 

Search Intent

Is bringing that customer to your website likely to bring more sales? It doesn’t all have to be about sales; it could be about improving brand awareness.

Therefore, does bringing visitors to your website benefit you through increased brand awareness, or perhaps by signing them up for a monthly newsletter?

 

Start where you’re going to make the maximum impact

Okay, so the day is short, and the amount of work needed is often endless.

Trust me, I am an experienced SEO consultant with over 10 years of experience, and you could be endlessly chipping away at your business’s marketing. Yet if you don’t direct your efforts to the right areas, you will not see results.

Therefore, start with on-page optimisation; however, do note that you shouldn’t over-optimise, and that the work needs to be completed in a white-hat way.

 

Page titles / Product Descriptions

A great place to start is to see the page title (H1) and make sure it actually reflects what’s being sold.

For example, you could be selling shoes, formal shoes, and the page title is just / formal shoes.

However, wouldn’t it be far better to incorporate the brand, the shoe name, and the leather colour?

This is much more descriptive, much more accurate of the page itself.

Therefore, it’s more likely to match search intent, as someone might be searching for “Hush Puppies, size 9, brown leather”.

Well, that H1 title is going to better match the query, rather than just leaving it as “formal shoes”.

 

Product description

Perhaps there’s no well-worded product description in place?

Well, that’s a brilliant opportunity to change that, to add a well-written product description.

Therefore, as part of your marketing plan, perhaps you will state that you will add a nice, well-worded product description.

 

Meta description

Perhaps the meta description is blank?

If so, what a great opportunity to include in your marketing plan to add a meta description to each of the main pages and the product pages.

 

Internal links

Perhaps there are no internal links, so, as part of your marketing plan, you’re going to state how you’re going to create internal links, say, from blog posts to the main pages.

 

New pages

Perhaps new pages need to be created, perhaps there’s an issue where some services are not mentioned or promoted at all.

Perhaps it would be better to create a new page.

A brand-new set of pages so you can target those new keywords.

 

 

What about technical SEO issues?

Technical SEO issues can massively hold a business’s website back. We always say to clients, “Is this like trying to drive a car forward with the handbrake applied?”

Therefore, a good SEO team will need to:

 

Fix a cannibalisation issue

Is there a mass of pages all targeting the same keyword? For example, if you sell Kenwood Kitchen Blenders, how have you made sure that it’s clear there are different products? Or has the e-commerce manager optimised, say, 7 products just for “Kenwood kitchen blenders”?

Google Search Console

What’s the business’s Search Console account flagging?

Any error messages?

Perhaps Google can’t crawl a page?

Perhaps links have become broken?

Perhaps the page has developed a glitch?

This will all need to be fixed.

Duplicated content and AI-written content

We think that duplicated content and AI-written content are like throwing an anchor overboard; they will slow down forward momentum to a grinding stop.

Therefore, pages need to be high-quality and original, and Google EEAT guidelines need to be followed.

 

Creating a content calendar and blog content strategy

Businesses spend huge amounts of time writing blog posts.

But why?

Well, the real reason is that well-written content marketing can massively help to improve your business’s organic search engine optimisation.

It means the website becomes more relevant to what you’re discussing.

If you’re talking about the benefits of purchasing certain Dewalt power tools, the different products, the different benefits, the new items that are just being launched by the manufacturer, well, over time, it becomes clear that you’re a business that is an expert when it comes to power tool retailing, for example.

 

Does the current content need updating?

The content marketing today needs to be good; actually, forget that it needs to be excellent.

Googlebot indexes millions of new pages every day of the week.

Therefore, Google can choose from millions of answers, so you have to ask yourself: what makes you stand out?

What makes that page worth ranking on the first page?

 

Google EEAT

One of the main ways Google determines whether a page is high quality is by using Google EEAT.

For those who do not know what this means, Google EEAT stands for expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

Does your content marketing show that you’re an expert on that subject?

No matter if you’re an estate agency or dentist, your website must have a strong Google EEAT score for it to rank high on Google.

 

Link building strategy

You have to develop a link-building strategy.

The main reason for this is simple: link building is massively time-consuming. You could spend even a whole day trying to build a quality link and still not succeed.

Therefore, you have a link-building strategy.

Why not have a list of competitors for whom you are confident you could build the same links?

Perhaps instead of analysing the backlinks of large businesses, select businesses where you know the backlinks are high-quality and you are confident you could earn the same links.

You could always generate links using the following methods:

Guest posting, but only on a high-quality website

Generate quality directory listings

Identify broken links, and perhaps suggest to the website that you replace them with your own links.

Digital PR: has your business won an award? Perhaps you could capitalise on that and gain a new backlink.

 

Conversion Rate Optimisation

Conversion rate optimisation is something your business should invest time and energy in.

The reason being, well, you could employ the very best marketing agency in the world.

Sometimes they could secure several 1st-place positions on Google for your business.

However, sometimes letting the side down is the website itself. It could, for example, be difficult to use and a bit slow.

Therefore, this is where CRO, or conversion rate optimisation, comes into its own.

You can improve the calls to action, the web design, and the website so that you convert more visitors into customers.

Here are just some of the ways you could do that.

 

Website navigation- make it simple to use

Add more calls to action on relevant pages, such as blogs and main service pages, like “leave your number for us to call you back.”

Add some recent testimonials, not just quotes, but perhaps a photo and comment from the customer on how happy they are with the products or services provided

Perhaps add WhatsApp so the customer can ask questions there.

Perhaps add a chatbot to answer some of the questions customers ask. Perhaps the chatbot would prevent that customer from having to go to a competitor to find an answer.

Add a simple FAQ section.

 

Reach out, Ryan C Walsh

With over 10 years of experience, we are one of the best and most well-known SEO agencies. Perhaps you need some help with your business’s keyword research?

Perhaps you need some assistance building links?

Perhaps your content marketing is not ranking anywhere near page one of Google.

Well, do not worry.

We are here to help, a friendly and supportive team.

We are here to help your business generate more sales and leads

For a free, no-obligation quotation.

Why not call the team today?