Developing an SEO plan that will attract qualified traffic to a website and boost conversions is both a technical and creative effort of interconnected elements.
If you’re planning to employ SEO for your business, your top concerns probably are:
- how will more customers find your business online when they need to?
- how to stand out among scores of online competitors?
- how to employ tactics that will let you stay on the top results in the page?
- how to earn more returns from your SEO efforts?
These are all pertinent questions that should be answered by a comprehensive and thorough SEO strategy. Technical SEO knowledge, analytical expertise, a defined keyword map and a solid content marketing strategy require both experience and expertise. It will decide the success of your business’ presence in the first page of the search engine, preferably among the top three results.
What is an SEO Strategy?
No one wants to see their site dead and buried in some obscure corner of Google SERPs. What should you do then? Create an effective SEO strategy that will utilise every page and link of your website.
Every SEO strategy begins with the first elementary step: An SEO Audit.
Find out the avenues that need improvement before you set to build up an SEO strategy. You need to know the present standing so that you can measure the successes of your SEO rankings. Make sure that all technical SEO set-up and indexing strategies are in order so that your site can be crawled and indexed by Google efficiently. Think programming, it makes for better SEO.
Next, plan an outcome-oriented strategy including these five essential elements underlined below.
1. Optimise to Google’s Algorithm Updates
The natural language processing updates along with AI incorporation in search content delivery has upped the user experience game. Google’s latest updates like the Hummingbird, RankBrain, BERT are user-focused. Now, the SERP landscape has moved on to intent matching rather than keyword string matching.
Experts like Kelly Stanze and Eli Schwartz agree that the SEO strategy should now focus on user intent and clear architecture of content. At the end, a strategy based on content enhances engagement and produces results through social proof in positive reviews.
2. Choice of Keyword Strategy
Long tail, short tail, local—keywords are an essential part of your SEO strategy. Hitting the bull’s eye requires finding the winning combination between search term volume and search term competitiveness. A competitor’s keyword analysis will clarify the odds stacked against you. Why not target keywords with a reasonable volume but less competition rather than keywords with the highest volume?
Websites on the first page of Google receive 95% traffic, therefore chances are better for a less popular term on the first page. Refine your target audience by settling on the perfect keywords.
3. Make Content Good to E-A-T
Relevant, high-quality, and optimised content affects a lot of SEO strategizing elements such as link building, site structure, and social shares possibility. Of course, you should write for the audience and when they like it, they will take it to places. However, Google has its own high-quality content requirements based on Expertise, Authority, Trust or the E-A-T attributes. Credentials defined by structured data mark-up and any fact-oriented schema are ways that Google will weigh your content credibility and in turn, your ranking.
4. Entity and Knowledge Graph Optimisation
Knowledge graph panels with prime visibility without clicking have changed the search dynamics. Gearing up for this entity and fact-based information to derive the real-world connections will boost your SEO rankings. Remember, local search is entity-based, and with quality content that caters to users and crawlers alike will send entity-related signals that are going to help you keep ranking.
5. Search the Visual Way
Explicit image alt tags, structured data like price and availability, schema markup—they have all boosted the image search among users. Data shows that one-third of searches in Google is carried out through images. As a result, quality images of graphs, data, stats are earning powerful backlinks and hence, rankings. In fact, for e-commerce businesses Google Lens has made image optimisation an important part of SEO strategy.
All of these elements are an important part of a comprehensive strategy. It will be effective in making categorical and encouraging contacts with your target audience online. SEO elevates your chances to be an organic top ranker better than paid channels.
Along with this, your website’s potential actions should be optimised to create a customer-friendly, frictionless user experience which will be valued by your visitors and by Google.
Take a look at the below related Chapters
Chapter 1: Top SEO Success Factors You Should Know
Chapter 3: Authority, Relevance, and Trust-The ART of SEO
Chapter 4: All About Tracking Google Algorithm Updates
Chapter 5: Top SEO Ranking Signals to Watch Out For in 2021
Chapter 6: SEO Keyword Research: How to Do it Right?
Chapter 7: How to Communicate Your SEO Strategy in 2021
Chapter 8: 10 Must-Have Elements to Effectively Optimize Your Content
Chapter 9: SEO and User Experience An Effective Combo To Capture the Top Spot on SERPs
Chapter 10: How to Get Started With Local SEO: Helpful Tips for Beginners
Chapter 11: Things You Need to Know About Mobile SEO
Chapter 12: Top 8 KPIs to Track for SEO Success