How to Create an Effective SEO Strategy
Having an effective SEO strategy is essential if you’re going to invest time and money into SEO. No matter the size of your business or website, if you’re just starting or have been publishing content for a long time, you can build a strong strategy. Maybe you’re not seeing the results you want or maybe you’re just getting started -taking the time to build an effective SEO strategy can take you a long way and save you a lot of money.
When creating an effective SEO strategy, the main things to focus on are:
- Making sure your audience is the most important factor
- Differentiating yourself from your competition
- Utilizing real data
- Incorporating a linking strategy
- Making time for reporting and analytics
You can always work with an SEO agency to help you build a strategy, but it’s also something you can absolutely accomplish on your own!
Let’s take a look at each of these considerations to learn how you can apply these ideas to your brand.
Creating an Audience-Based Strategy
Remember that your audience is who you are doing all of this for. You’ll get farther with SEO if you begin with the end in mind: the end being a successful and mutually-exclusive relationship with a client or customer.
An effective SEO strategy should be tailored to your specific audience and the actions you want that audience to take. But how do you do this?
Avoid cookie-cutter solutions
SEO isn’t a one-size-fits-all endeavor. The methods and results vary wildly depending on who you are and especially who your audience is. Anyone offering you quick or immediate rankings isn’t telling you the truth. The work you put in is proportionate to the results you’ll get. When doing the day-to-day work of SEO, be prepared to adapt based on what your audience is asking for.
Knowing who your audience is and what they want will inform whether you use local SEO, B2B strategies, paid ads, blogging or video, etc. The more you learn about your audience, the more unique and targeted your strategy becomes.
Be real
Humans know and can recognize real human content and connection. AI doesn’t know your business as well as you do. It’s a fantastic way to speed up things like editing and publishing. But when it comes to strategizing and writing, make sure you’re offering genuine and thoughtful solutions to your audience. They will know the difference.
Answer real questions
Audiences go online to search for solutions. People constantly have problems that you could be solving. Make sure that what you’re putting out there answers questions that people are actually asking. Not only that, make sure you answer common questions people ask all the time – or evergreen topics – in addition to seasonal things. Part of your strategy should involve looking ahead to learn what specific needs your audience will have based on what’s going on at that time.
Differentiating yourself from your competition
Ask yourself: What is my competition saying about the same services I offer? If a potential client compares your brand against a competitor’s, what pros and cons will they see on either side?
Ask yourself these questions when thinking about the competition:
- Is my position unique? If not, what can I offer or provide to stand out that is genuine and sustainable?
- What things do they leave out? Are they ignoring certain pain points, sub-audiences, or keywords?
- What are they saying about me? How can I get ahead of their competitor’s research?
- Is my brand voice specific enough to stand out? Do I have or need blog writing guidelines that include strict standards for voice, tone, and content?
- Is my content conversational, educational, and professional and not just focused on sales?
After doing research about your competitors, consider performing an audit of your website while asking yourself these questions.
Utilizing real data
You need to factor in real data throughout the lifetime of your strategy. This is where deep research comes into play. Use tools like Google Search Console and SEMRush – our favorite SEO-focused tool out there – to figure out what your audience wants.
Don’t center your strategy around highly competitive keyphrases. Instead, go for “easy” targets and use them as stepping stones to move up the ladder. Not only is this a proven strategy, but incorporating data means it’s easier to get buy-in from your team. No one wants to spend time and money on stabs in the dark.
Incorporate a linking strategy
Using real data will lead right into building a linking strategy. It’s an easy part of the process to overlook. But you should always be writing with outbound links and backlinks in mind.
How does your content connect to other content? How will people use and share it? How does it create a full picture? If your posts are all about you, why would people share it with others?
It might seem counterproductive to link to other content or sites. You want people to stay on your site as long as possible, right? It’s more important to be a useful and thoughtful leader in your industry. You can do this by linking out to other respected brands in adjacent industries. Make sure that you back up what you’re writing about with other sources.
Make time to work for backlinks. The best way to get backlinks is to create and notify people about your outlinks. You can do this by emailing your content to a list, sharing it on social media, tagging people you mention in your posts, or repurposing your content into new mediums. So much of a great SEO strategy is about networking on the web.
Making time for reporting and analytics
Don’t just post and move on. Most tasks you perform in an SEO strategy are about testing and experimenting to see what works and what doesn’t. You’re tossing things out there to see what sticks, so if you walk away before observing what sticks and what doesn’t, how can that inform your next toss?
Plan for reporting, analyzing reports, and then planning new content around what you’ve learned. Collect information about clicks, impressions, and bounce rates. Don’t just look at what sales or conversions you got, but the times when someone chose not to convert. Automate reporting and use human intuition to analyze those reports. Even better – collect information from converting clients and customers about why they chose you!
You can build an effective SEO strategy faster than you think
Here are a few ways we can help you boost the power of your SEO projects:
- Check out our SEO e-book all about building your strategy in just a few hours – you can even download a free chapter all about auditing your site for SEO.
- Download our free SEO workbook that breaks down all the steps you need to take to soar with SEO.
Purchase a comprehensive SEO audit so you can know exactly where to begin with your own strategy.
