An SEO strategy is the plan of action you use to get to your overall goals for search engine visibility. SEO strategy in digital marketing provides the blueprint you’ll use to build the whole structure that lets your customers find you on the internet.
There is no one-size-fits-all SEO strategy that works perfectly for every company, since every business has its own:
This means there’s an almost infinite variety of strategies you can use to get to the results you want for your own SEO. In this blog we’ll go through the steps that help you build an SEO strategy, including what you need to include and some pre-built strategy options.
Search engine optimization (SEO) means intentionally setting up your online presence in a way that makes your website more likely to show up highly on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. If you imagine an internet that only has 1,000 websites, with each about one specific topic, SEO would be very straightforward. For example, if you ran a website selling pipes for house plumbing, you could call it “House Plumbing Pipes for Sale” and anyone searching for that could easily find your site, and only your site.
But as of early 2023, there are 1.7 billion websites on the internet, and it’s growing at a rate of around 576,000 new sites PER DAY. With this volume of information out there, making sure your website can be found by the people who need it is much harder. Search engines use increasingly complex algorithms to choose the best results every time someone does a search. Doing SEO well with this level of competition can be a huge challenge.
When developing your own SEO strategy, there are a few main areas that you should think about. These main components are:
These can become the basis for creating an SEO strategy template you can use to optimize each page of your website, and refer back to in keeping your strategy up-to-date over time.
A list of things to include in your strategy is a good place to start, but you’ll need to narrow it down before you settle on your final strategy. You want to think about what will make a good SEO strategy that actually works for you and your specific needs.
Here are some ways to help you narrow it down:
We’ve gone through many of the elements you’ll want to include in your own SEO strategic planning. Now let’s look at an example of how a company could use these different elements to make a full strategy.
Hardworking Tools is a hypothetical SaaS company that runs local tool sharing platforms to allow small repair-person businesses borrow or swap tools with other small businesses. They have an older website and a lot of blog content with repair tips and the benefits of the sharing economy. But they aren’t seeing much traffic being generated through their website and want to implement a new SEO strategy.
They decide to implement a pillar-based marketing (PBM) approach and incorporate a consistent linking strategy throughout their blogs to establish their subject matter expertise to search engines. They laid out a full strategy of which pages of their website they would work on and when. As they updated the content and linking structure on each page, they also added appropriate metadata, images, and high value keywords. Once a page had been fully optimized, they shared it on their social media channels and invested in paid ads on search engines to increase the organic and paid reach of each. By monitoring the page traffic throughout their optimization process, they could watch the SEO improvements each page saw as it was finished. After following their SEO strategy for six months, they had finished the entire website revamp and seen a tripling of organic reach.
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