Successful SEO strategy is an important part of having a successful online business. However, there are many aspects to take into consideration when developing your strategy. Some of these include: competition analysis, keyword research, competitor analysis, on-page optimization, off-page optimization, link building, content marketing and branding.

This blog post will show you how to build a successful SEO strategy in just three steps. To begin with, you need to understand your SEO goals and develop an effective plan for achieving them. Second step is to choose the right keywords that are relevant to your business and that will generate the most traffic for your site. Third step is to implement the changes on your website to make it rank higher in organic search results.

The Importance of an SEO Strategy

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a key component of your website’s success. Many small businesses haven’t used SEO to the extent they should and are paying the price for it.

The reason? It’s difficult to find the right keywords that will rank high in search results, especially if you’re unfamiliar with how search engines work. You need to understand this process so you can make smart decisions when picking keywords to use on your site and optimizing your content. You can see a great seo case study with a Human Resources company  where we took a 1 year-old startup and increased their organic traffic to the thousands and their domain authority from a low 12 to 50’s which are industry highs for their niche.

Developing Your SEO Strategy

Before you start to develop your SEO strategy, it is important to understand exactly what your goals are. You can break down your objectives into two key areas: customer acquisition and customer retention.

Customer Acquisition Goal (CAG)

Your primary objective when developing an SEO strategy is to acquire customers. While this goal is difficult to achieve with traditional means, competition analysis and competitive intelligence are the best ways of achieving it.

Keyword Research Goal (KRG)

The second main objective of developing an SEO strategy is keyword research. This is a process that allows you to find keywords that will generate the most search traffic for your website over a given period of time. By using a variety of tools, such as Google Keyword Planner, you can discover keywords that are relevant to your business domain and brand name. This will allow you to use those keywords in future marketing campaigns and help you identify high-quality keywords that will help drive more traffic to your site.

Building Successful SEO Strategy in 3 Steps

Let’s begin by looking at the three steps to building a successful SEO strategy:

1. Identify your goals. Your goals should be related to one of the following:  – Buyer acquisition – Build long-lasting business relationships – Increase sales conversion rates – Be more visible and reach a wider audience

Once you’ve identified your goals, it’s time to start working on them. You want to make sure that you’re setting up an SEO strategy that will help you achieve both of these things.

2. Determine the keywords that you want your site or blog to rank for in organic search results .  We’ll talk about how this can be done later in this post, so feel free to skip this section if you have no idea what this is.

3. Implement changes on your website to rank higher in organic search results .  This step is essential if you want your site to rank higher in organic search results. Search engines are looking for content that is relevant and helpful for their users (users are referred as “viewers”). A well put together website with useful information, such as articles and guides, will be much more helpful than a random blog post full of useless information or photos. Search engines are mainly used for 2 things: finding out answers to questions and buying things quickly and efficiently.

Keyword Research

The first step to building a successful SEO strategy is to identify keywords that are relevant to your business.

You need to identify the keywords that you want to rank for and then narrow down the search terms you’re targeting. This can be done by using tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest,  and Semrush.

These tools will show you how many searches for each keyword phrase are happening in specific languages, as well as how many searches are occurring for these particular phrases on the top 100 search engines. The fun doesn’t stop there! Before moving forward, you also have to really focus on mapping your keywords. This process is called keyword mapping and is basically the foundation or blueprint of your whole campaign.

Competitor Analysis

Competition analysis is the process of determining what companies are doing that are similar to your business. You need to know all the different approaches they have taken and the marketing strategies they use.

There are many ways you can do this:  using statistics, industry reports, research, eye-tracking studies and customer surveys. The main reason for doing a competition analysis is to determine what competitors’ strategies may be and how your company can compete head-on with them.

For example, if you’re a footwear retailer, you might want to compare how Nike competes head-to-head against your business and understand how their advertising strategy is working on different channels like television or print ads.

Once you analyze the basics, you want to then conduct competitor backlink scraping and keyword scraping.

Why competitor backlink scraping so important?

This process provides you a backdoor to keyword gaps that your competitors are ranking for, see how much search traffic each competitor receives (from specific pages and keywords), and lastly because you can see ALL their referring domains ranked by strength, industry relevant, and type of link (nofollow / dofollow).

So now all you have to do is backlink outreach and try to place a link on their strong referring domains to start competing.

Sounds easy, right? Welcome to a whole new negotiation process 🙂

On-Page Optimization

On-page optimization is an important part of SEO. It essentially involves optimizing the content on your website and pages to get it found by people when they search on Google or other search engines. This is also known as on-site optimization, but we will use the term “on-page optimization” for simplicity sake.

As a small business owner, you don’t have the resources to ensure that every page has been optimized on all devices. That’s why taking your time to optimize your site with tools like Search Engine Watch  along with the WordPress plugin Yoast, can greatly benefit your business. These tools give you insights into which pages are ranking high in Google and will help you make changes accordingly. Some major strategies for on-page optimization would be, image alt tags, geotagging your images for local seo, and internal linking mentioned below.

Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

The title tag is a vital element of every website’s SEO strategy. A title tag is essential because it tells search engines what your website is about and what keywords you want to rank for. Additionally, the meta description of your site is also important inside the title tag. It provides information that helps search engines understand what your business does and how it can be used by users.

URL Structure

is a strategy that is extremely important when it comes to SEO. The best way to ensure you have optimized your website’s structure is to first have mapped your keywords and future keywords. Next is to reflect the specific words you want to rank for on your Slug, title tage and meta descriptions (along with synonyms) to have the most powerful impact on your rankings. Don’t keyword stuff, act natural…but be aware of what you’re trying to rank for.

Internal Linking

Internal linking is a great way to add value to your site and optimize its SEO.

The term “internal link” in SEO refers to the links between pages on your website. In general, internal links are not visible to search engines like Google or Bing. They’re invisible unless you have them pointed out by a site owner or admin of your site.

This means that you can use internal links for two main purposes:  to emphasize key aspects of your business and to increase traffic.

First, internal links are a great way to highlight features of your brand and product that would otherwise be overshadowed when looking at a page’s listing of external links. Second, with internal links pointing out important parts of your site, visitors will surely want to know about these features so they can learn more about how you’ve succeeded in building your business (and perhaps even sign up for future offers from you!). You can also use internal linking as an opportunity for marketing and customer communication.

For every important page you want to rank for, make sure your site has at least 2-3 internal links somewhere with the anchor text utilizing your specific keyword you want to rank for. You can see this reflected on this blog post.

An easier way is to think about Wikipedia – their Domain Authority is one of the highest in the world. Why? mainly because of their internal links on each page (in addition to referring domains)!

Content Optimization

Finally, keep your content fresh, relevant, and engaging.

Content marketing is a great way to attract customers. Your content is the foundation of your brand’s identity. What you say about yourself and what you do for your business are the two most important aspects of your company in terms of customer attraction. Be sure to keep your content fresh, relevant and engaging. If you’re currently on the first page for an out-of-date article, revise it and modernize it. Google loves to see work being updated from old blogs…sometimes more than a completely fresh one.

Have any questions? Reach out to me on Linkedin!