SEO Strategy Example – Before we get into the details, let’s look at how organic traffic improved over the years (Client website anonymous).
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Step 1: Get to know your niche and competitors.
Can you complete with them?
Does it worth to spend time, money and effort to outrank them?
What is the potential benefit (in terms of traffic), if you get top positions for the keywords you are targeting?
You can use SEMRUSH (or other similar tools) to find out the rankings and traffic of any website for any keyword.
Step 2: Get to know your website
How much SEO traffic you get per day?
Your most popular landing pages (organic)
Which keywords drive traffic to your website?
Your ranking position for the keywords you would like to improve
Add this information into a spreadsheet and try to compare your performance with your closest competitors.
Step 3: Start an SEO Log File.
What is an SEO Log? It’s a simple spreadsheet to take note of all SEO related changes you will be making to your website.
the only way to keep track of your changes and their impact on your SEO is to know what you have changed and when.
Step 4: Perform a Technical SEO Audit of your website.
(Check below for checklist)
Step 5: Identify for which Keywords to create pillar content
Now, it’s time to use this information and create your master keyword list. The list should include:
The keywords that you already knew and are important for your business
Keywords that you didn’t know about but your competitors are getting traffic
Keywords you are already ranking (and are important for your business)
In other words, your master list has ALL the IMPORTANT keywords you want to rank for.
What is Pillar content? It’s content that targets a particular keyword (or phrase) and has the following characteristics:
The content is unique and thorough
It is linked to from your homepage
It has internal links from other related articles on your website
It has incoming links from other websites
It’s the content you want to rank as high as possible in search engines
It is well formatted
It’s content you are really proud off.
It’s better content that what is already ranking on Google.
Step 6: Build Topic relevancy – Identify long tail keywords (supporting articles)
The next step is to re-analyze those keywords one by one and find long tail keywords you can target.
By doing so, you will be able to:
Make your pillar content stronger (by adding more internal links)
Get more search engine traffic since long-tail keywords have less competition and are easier to target.
Search Google using your target keyword and scroll down to the “People also ask” section and to the “Related Searches”.
Step 7: Master On-Page SEO Optimization
With on-page SEO you deal with things like:
Optimizing your titles
Optimizing your meta descriptions
Optimizing your H1 tag and headings
Proper usage of keywords within the content of a page
Image SEO and Video Optimization
Efficient use of internal links.
Step 8: Perform a Content audit
A content audit is the process to follow to analyze each and every page of your website and decide whether:
To remove content
Improve content
Re-publish content
Merge content together
The overall goal of a content audit is to make a website stronger by eliminating pages that have no rankings, traffic, or links.
Step 9: Promote your brand online
Now it’s time to deal with off-page SEO.
To get noticed by Google, you need backlinks and brand mentions.
You need three things:
You need to track all kinds of brand mentions and try to increase them.
You need to expand your strategy and go after brand mentions and not just links. Social Media networks and guest posting on high authority websites are a great place to start.
You need to try and convert some of those mentions to links.
Step 10: Create a link-building plan
If you search the web for link building techniques, you will get a ton of methods you can use but the truth is, most of them work only in theory.
Create a link building plan which includes (blogger outreach campaigns, social media campaigns)
STEP 11: STAY CURRENT ON LATEST SEO PRACTICES
SEO practices change all the time. Google deploys thousands of changes per year to their ranking algorithm and it is important to know what is changing and how it might impact your SEO performance.
STEP 12: MEASURE SEO RESULTS CORRECTLY
When it comes to measuring the results of an SEO strategy, you need to ensure that:
You have an accurate picture of your rankings and traffic before starting the implementation of your plan.
You have an SEO Log (Step 3 above), to track ALL changes made to your website
You are measuring the right KPIs.
It is essential that you keep track of the dates Google is deploying changes to their ranking algorithm and analyze the impact by comparing your SEO statistics before and after the changes.
STEP 13: KEEP YOUR CONTENT RELEVANT AND UP-TO-DATE
One of the secrets of growing your organic traffic steadily is to keep your content relevant and up-to-date.
Once you get a good ranking for a keyword, it is not guarantee that you will keep this ranking forever.
Don’t just focus on creating new content but go back and do a quality check of your existing content
