02 Apr
An SEO strategy is a broad plan that focuses on the big picture, and it is made up of various facets and tasks that all work together to accomplish your larger goals of better visibility and more traffic which will ultimately increase revenue.
When creating your SEO strategy, make sure you consider your budget, goals, and timeframe to achieve your goals. If you do not have the resources within your business to effectively implement and manage your SEO campaign, you can work with a digital marketing agency.
What is an SEO strategy?
An SEO strategy also referred to as “SEO approach” or “search engine optimization strategy” is the process of planning, outlining and implementing steps designed to improve search engine rankings.
In other words: an SEO strategy is the process that you follow when you want to get more organic traffic.
Effective SEO strategy
Here are some proven steps to follow. These can each impact what your strategy looks like and need to be considered alongside your plan to achieve the goals that you’ve set.
1. Benchmark Your Current SEO Performance
To start with an effective strategy, you need to know your website’s current performance. As a baseline, you need to be benchmarking performance across:
- Organic visibility
- Keyword rankings
- Branded vs. non-branded traffic split
You can use the tools to gather these insights that you can use to build your strategy. You’ll find your current (and historical) organic visibility displayed as the ‘Estimated Traffic Trend’ on the ‘Traffic’ tab of the overview dashboard. You’re also able to see the breakdown of branded vs. non-branded traffic on this same view.
The estimated traffic trend helps you understand how your site’s visibility has changed over time and how it currently performs. Moreover, understanding your site’s branded and non-branded traffic helps you to identify opportunities.
You can then see a breakdown of your site’s current ranking positions on the ‘Positions’ tab of the tool and how the number of indexed keywords has changed over time.
By starting to gather these insights, you’re able to build up a comprehensive picture of how your site is performing right now before setting goals and putting in place a plan to take you from where you are now to where you want to be in the future.
To gather a full picture of your current performance, It’s important that you also supplement the insights from the Organic Research tool with business data from Google Analytics or your own platforms around conversion rates, revenue, and leads generated.
2. Analyze Your Competitors’ SEO Strategies
Analyze your competitor’s performance and strategies to identify where they’re winning and where they’re not. And for this you need to follow certain steps:
Compile a list of your competitors
You’ll likely be able to do this from wider competitor research that your business has done. Still, it’s worth also supplementing this with an analysis of your SERP competitors (these are the businesses that have a strong keyword overlap with yours). You can find these using the ‘Competitors’ tab on the Organic Research Tool, where you’ll see the common keywords with your own domain.
Pages Tab
Use the ‘Pages’ tab of this tool to see which pages drive the highest volumes of organic traffic. This insight can help you to identify the type of content that you should be using to rank. Pay particular attention to whether it’s largely blog content, product and category pages, or other types of content driving traffic, as this can help you identify opportunities to double down on.
Keyword gap tool
Use the Keyword Gap Tool to help you identify keywords that your competitors are ranking prominently for and those you are not. While we’ll dive deeper into this when looking at keyword research, this is an exercise that’s worth undertaking at this stage to help you to understand which competitors are performing for which keywords.
This tool is as simple as entering your own domain and up to four competitors (either enter competitors who you’ve identified or choose from the recommended list on the dropdown).
Backlink analytics tool
Use the Backlink Analytics Tool to audit your competitors’ link profiles to understand how they’re building links and where these are coming from.
At this stage, it’s also important to use this insight to determine the size of any link gap between your own domain and competitors. This is the difference in the link profile size between your own domain and your competitors, usually noted as the number of referring domains rather than total backlinks.
3. Set Your Goals and KPIs
Setting goals and KPIs is the most important part of creating an SEO strategy.
You need to know where you want to end up so that you’re able to both put in place a plan of action to get there but also to be able to measure your success and know when you’ve achieved your goals (as well as tracking your progress against these and knowing when it’s time to pivot).
But let’s determine the difference between goals and KPIs because you really need to be setting both.
- Goals = The end outcome that you want to achieve
- KPIs = Metrics that demonstrate progress towards your goals
While these are often used interchangeably when it comes to SEO, you must set both during your strategy creation phase. To give an example, this could look something like this:
Our SEO goal is to increase organic revenue by $500,000 over the next 12 months. The KPIs that we’ll track to show progress against this are organic impressions, organic traffic (including an increase in non-brand traffic), and rankings.
4. Define Your Primary Keywords and Pillar Pages
A pillar page serves as the foundation for a topic cluster that is built around it. In short, topic clusters help you to focus on owning the SERPs for topics. This differs from focusing on single keywords and is a proven method of establishing tight topical relevance for sections of your site.
keywords define topics at a broad level; think ‘shoes,’ ‘sales software’ or ‘student loans’ rather than more specific long-tail keywords or subtopics.
Firstly, this means identifying the topics you’ll build clusters around, and a great starting point is the Topic Research Tool. Head to the tool and enter a topic that aligns with your business and any specific growth goals you have around certain areas. By this, you’ll be served with a list of content ideas that can help you to identify potential subtopics or to establish whether there’s enough depth to a topic to build out a cluster.
Moreover, don’t forget to validate the keywords to optimize your pillar page for using the Keyword Overview Tool. Essentially, you’re looking to define the main keyword targets for multiple pillar pages at this stage. Once you are done with this step, you’ll have a list of topic clusters for your site.
5. Find Long-Tail Keywords and Define Cluster Content
Now, when you are done with choosing your main topic cluster and pillar page keywords, you need to build your cluster content strategy. These sub-topics and supporting content add depth to your topic.
While there’s no set number of pieces of cluster content that you should be creating for a particular topic, it’s usual to expect anywhere between 15 and 25, depending upon the size and nature of the topic. Sometimes it’s significantly more; sometimes, it’s less. Whereas pillar pages typically focus on higher search volume, broader head terms, cluster content is more commonly focused around long-tail keywords.
Think content that explores a specific part of a topic in great depth. This could be answers to questions, guides on particular areas, or even opinion pieces on a current trend.
But how do you identify keyword targets for cluster content?
If you’re not already familiar with the concept, start by understanding what long-tail keywords are, Long-tail keywords are keywords that don’t get searched as much as other, more popular terms; usually, because they are very specific. Most long-tail keywords are, at a minimum, three words long. However, length itself doesn’t define whether a keyword is considered long-tail or not.
Furthermore, Long-tail keywords take their name from a graph of Google’s search results. A few terms (the “head” of the graph) are searched frequently, but the majority of searches (the “tail” of the graph) are for longer and more obscure keywords.
Keyword Magic Tool is a great place to start your search. Enter your main pillar page keyword, and you’ll get an extensive list of potential search queries. Consider the intent and depth of these and identify those that could work as a cluster page.
6. Audit Your Site’s Existing Content
It’s recommended to audit your existing content before you start to build fresh content. And you can do this using the SEMrush Content Audit Tool. However, a content audit mainly helps you to identify content that you should either:
- Keep
- Update (improve content to better target search queries that it ranks for)
- Delete (content that’s thin, duplicated, or is cannibalized could be holding back your rankings; it needs to go)
Running a content audit is all about starting with what you’ve already got before creating anything new. In most instances, websites will have opportunities to make their existing content work harder based on the available data.
Taking the time to audit your site’s content allows you to make decisions based upon data, focus your efforts on meeting your goals, and recognize that improving existing content often drives quicker results than creating something new.
7. Build Out Your Topic Clusters
Once you’ve identified your pillar pages and cluster content within a topic cluster, it’s time to start creating content and building this out.
While we’re not going to talk you step-by-step through how to write content that ranks, let’s take a quick look at some pointers to keep you going in the right direction. It all starts with intent. You need to know what a searcher is expecting to see when they search for a query. That helps you create content that captivates users and leads to conversions.
For example, someone searching for ‘shoes’ hasn’t specified what type, color, or even style of shoes. You could expect to land on a page that offers options to browse different types of styles from this query.
8. Get Your On-Page SEO Right
There’s a fine line between creating great content and on-page SEO, but there’s no getting away from the fact that you need to make sure you’re optimizing these elements in-line with your keyword strategy. On-page SEO is all about optimizing:
- Title tags
- Meta descriptions
- H1/H2/H3 tags
- Internal linking and more
You can use the SEMrush On Page SEO Checker to get actionable recommendations to help you to improve your on-page optimization in minutes, alongside a clear explanation as to why these should be acted upon. On-page SEO might seem like SEO basics, but improvements to these elements remain a proven way to increase your page’s organic visibility.
9. Find and Fix Technical SEO Issues
If your site has technical SEO issues, these could hold back its performance and stop it from ranking as well as it could if these were fixed. You can find technical SEO issues using the SEMrush Site Audit Tool and get an insight into the errors or problems that could be holding your site back.
It will analyze your site against more than 130 technical and SEO mistakes. The audit categorizes these by errors, warnings, and notices based upon their severity and ability to impact performance.
10. Master Off-Page SEO
Backlinks remain one of Google’s top three ranking factors, and the reality is that you’ll struggle to rank for competitive search queries without a solid link building strategy.
This means that you’re going to need to put together a plan that helps you to earn quality backlinks if you want to drive growth and meet your goals. While there are many different tactics that you can use to earn links to your site, those that are often the most effective include:
- Digital PR
- Resource link building
- Broken link building
- The Skyscraper Technique
- Creating link bait and promoting it with outreach
But that doesn’t mean you should discount other techniques. Our guide to link building strategies for 2021 and beyond is a great resource to help you find new ways to build links.
Another great way to find backlink opportunities is by using the SEMrush Link Building Tool. Use the tool to set up your project, and it presents you with prospects that you can focus your efforts on to attempt to land links from these pages.
11. Analyze and Refine Your Strategy
Once you’ve created your strategy and begun to work through the implementation of the tactics, you must take the time to analyze and refine it regularly.
No SEO campaign is ever ‘finished,’ and there are always opportunities to continue to drive growth. Whether it’s creating new content, optimizing or improving what you’ve already created, or ensuring that no technical issues appear, you need to be constantly evaluating and refining the work you’re doing to ensure it’s successful.
Just remember you set goals and KPIs early on in your strategy creation. You need to make sure that you’re measuring and reporting on these at least monthly to be in a position to make sure that your progress is on track to meet your goals. Adopt a mindset of continuous improvement and focus your efforts on achieving growth.
Conclusion
By following the steps outlined above, you can create and implement an effective SEO strategy that will help you achieve your goals. Just remember to constantly audit your KPIs once you implement the strategy to track your progress towards your goals and make adjustments as necessary.