SEO, or search engine optimisation, is one of the most important processes of online marketing.
It’s how you can ensure that your website appears as high as possible on search engine results pages (SERPs), helping to drive more traffic and leads to your business.
But SEO can be complex, and it can be challenging to know where to start.
In this blog post, we’ll outline some simple steps you can take to create an SEO strategy for your business.
What Is an SEO Strategy?
An SEO strategy refers to the plan you intend to implement to improve your ranking on search engines so prospects have a greater chance of finding you.
How to create an SEO strategy
Step 1: Goal setting for SEO
The starting point of any plan is goal setting.
The first step is identifying what goals you have for your website.
- Is it to increase organic traffic?
- Do you want to increase leads?
- Or do you want to increase sales for a specific product?
Based on your goals, you will need to create a strategy to ensure their success.
Step 2: Keyword research
Keyword research is the process of investigating and discovering popular search words within your industry or niche and creating content around that.
Keyword research is the key to success in any industry or niche.
It’s vital for discovering what people are searching for and how you can create content that will push your business forward.
Step 3: Content creation
Now that you know what you can create content for, it’s time actually to create it.
For example, we created this blog post ‘How do you know what your eCommerce emails are working’ based on what we found people were searching for through keyword research.
This process is all about creating content that is in demand within your area of expertise.
Step 4: Title Tag
This step is all about optimising the content you create on your website.
Some best practices include:
- Using keywords within your title so that search engines can recognise what your content is about and link it with search results.
- Your title tag should be an H1 tag (main heading), and the rest of the headings should be H2 (subheading) and H3 (sub subheading).
- Under 60 characters in heading to avoid it being cut off.
- And finally, the title must be relevant to its contents. If the title doesn’t match what is in the article, visitors will leave quickly and be disappointed.
Step 5: Meta Description
A meta description is a summary of what the webpage is about.
Meta descriptions are important because they:
- Let searchers know the content of that webpage.
- Encourage them to want to see what’s on the page.
- Increase clickthrough rates.
For example, Moz’s meta description lets the searcher know that the article is about SEO for beginners and it’s a guide. It lets us know that they will cover various topics of SEO.
If you are a beginner and want to learn more about SEO, you know that this article is meant for you.
Step 6: Internal Linking
This is where you link to another page on your website.
Internal linking is critical to an SEO strategy because:
- Internal linking helps your page to be discovered by search engines.
- If one of your pages is doing well for example Moz’s beginner’s guide to SEO. By linking from that page to another one of your articles (that’s not doing well), authority can be passed to the other page and increase its ranking.
We used internal linking above when I referred to our blog post on ‘How do you know what your ecommerce emails are working’.
Step 7: External Linking
This is where other websites link to your content or vice versa.
This is also a critical step because when someone links back to your website, they signal that they have found your content to be valuable.
Google now knows that an external party found your content valuable, and the more backlinks you get, the more valuable it is.
To determine how many links you will need to rank highly.
- Pick a topic that you want to rank highly on.
- Complete a Google search on it.
- Add the first 10 results into Moz Link Explorer.
- Identify how many root domains (kasandz.com) link to them.
- Create a backlinking strategy to achieve that set number of links.
Step 8: URL (Uniform Resource Locator)
A URL is the address of digital assets.
URLs make it easy for:
- Search engines to categorise your content.
- Searchers to know the contents of the page.
Step 9: SEO Monitoring
Monitoring your SEO performance allows you to identify what’s working and what’s not so that you can do more of what is working and course-correct what isn’t.
Things to monitor include:
- Organic traffic
- Keywords
- Backlinking
- Domain authority
- Page speed
- Bounce rate
- Conversion rate
You can track your performance on Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
Search engine optimisation is all about improving your visibility online so that you can serve more and sell more.
SEO is one of the most important aspects of online marketing, and it’s a process that should be continually refined in order to stay ahead of your competition.
The tips we’ve shared in this blog post are a great starting point for improving your website visibility and driving more traffic to your site.
Even if you only implement a few of these tips, you’ll be on your way to better SEO and increased traffic and leads.
Want more help?
Contact us – we’d be happy to assist you in getting the most out of search engine optimisation for your business.
