A focused-SEO strategy should 100% be a part of your overarching marketing strategy. The problem, however, is figuring out how to create the most impactful strategy for your business, and then how to follow up by executing effectively.
To get the best results, SEO can’t be just a one-time or here-and-there effort; you need a consistent, ongoing strategy. If you don’t have such a strategy in place, you’re positioning yourself to waste a lot of time and effort…and likely end up generating little to no results.
In this post, I will guide you through the process of creating and executing a high-impact SEO strategy for your business.
Determining an SEO strategy
In determining your company’s SEO strategy, you must first identify your broad business goals, as well as your company’s marketing goals. Taking the time to understand these goals will help you more easily develop your SEO strategy.
Let us consider a scenario where a company’s core goal is to gain new leads for an accounting software it just launched. Here’s a hypothetical set of goals the company might set.
– The marketing department is looking to send 1000 potential leads per month (each with the opportunity to put up to 20 organizations on the platform).
– Sales has a goal of onboarding one thousand users monthly from those 20 organizations.
As the SEO professional for this particular campaign, you have a responsibility to look at these goals and decide what number out of the set target is going to be generated by search traffic.
Now that you have a known SEO task, it becomes easy to implement an action plan, that will guide you through generating ROI for your client or employer. Your SEO strategy may look like this:
SEO strategy Objectives
- To bring 20,000 visitors to the company’s site (5% will sign up)
- To rank for “XYZ” keywords (do your research to determine which ones you should target
- To publish “Y” number of posts and “Z” number of youtube video reviews.
- Then, write “X” number of guest posts and conduct “Y” number of backlink outreaches (the aim is to generate a sufficient number of backlinks to boost the domain’s authority)
When you have identified your SEO goals including the keywords to chase in SERPs, you will decide on what resources to spare towards attaining this strategy.
- The hours to be invested in the SEO process
- The amount of money you are willing (and able) to spend
- Other personnel resources like social media and content teams (that will push initial traffic to the site) etc.
Now don’t get too excited trying to lift this strategy and apply it to your business, because, although this is a suitable strategy for the particular company in question, it may not necessarily be the best SEO strategy for another company, say a fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company or a company whose objective is to get the prying eyes of regular blog readers to its blog.
Generally, the best SEO strategy requires identifying the organization’s marketing or sales goals and SEO goals and implementing a custom solution with a strategy suited to the specific situation. Always take the following SEO activities or action plans into account when formulating a business strategy:
Actions to include
Any good SEO strategy should have a holistic focus, not simply focused on optimizing your on-page content for search.
When creating your SEO strategy, make sure you work in an action plan for each of the following related tactics:
- Content marketing (blogging, ebooks, video and other content)
- Email marketing and affiliate marketing
- Link building campaigns (including guest blogging)
There are other elements to consider as well, but I want to focus on the three above. For more insight into where you should focus your SEO efforts beyond the three actions above, check out this list of 200 of Google’s ranking factors created by Brain Dean and the Backlinko team.
Content Marketing:
This involves the strategic creation of landing pages, product/service pages, blog articles, videos, podcast episodes and other types of content to increase brand awareness and generate SEO value. Here’s a brief overview of each of the tactics I just pitched
- Landing page: A landing page is that place on a website where your new customers may first reach, either from an advertisement or another traffic source, the goal being for you to convince them to complete a website action like signing up for a newsletter or adding a product to cart.
- Product/service pages: This is where you have a chance to provide your visitors with insight into the unique value of your products or services. It’s good to have educational content here to really engage. A product demo video works great here.
- Blogging: This is the act of creating articles with other content included (think thought leadership and educational content) to promote your expertise and make connections with your audience with the hopes of turning them into paying customers. Just like this particular article that you are reading.
- Videos and podcasts: These are two of the most popular types of content on the Internet today. So, it is important to create video product reviews, and how-to video guides to boost your SEO presence in Google search and youtube.
Always adopt SEO best practices when carrying out your content marketing activities — SEO copywriting, landing page optimization, proper meta descriptions, page title and heading tag, etc. This will help boost the potential of your content marketing efforts will yield adequate results..
Guest posting and affiliate marketing:
To increase a business’s reach and create a deep-rooted domain authority (one that users and Google will trust) it’s important to seek out opportunities to be featured on other brands’ websites (brands with content relevant to yours).
One way to achieve this is through guest posts. You must create a purposeful guest posting plan that promotes your website’s links. Here’s a great guide to help you create better guest post pitches and get your article accepted by more site owners.
Guest blogging is an expensive SEO based on the amount of personnel hours it can take to pitch and create content. It is, however, a task totally worth its time and money investment as guest post backlinks are often attributed with rel=”do-follow.”
Link building campaigns:
Link building should always be a strong focus of your SEO strategy. Because without links, even well-optimized pages may not rank in search. Hence, the need to deliberately strategize towards link building campaigns and outreach. How you do this is to reach out to other people who blog about your kind of content and make an ask for them to link to your pages, either for free or paid (free is better).
Be cautious how and where you ask for links, however. You need to focus on building a diverse link profile on a variety of high-quality sites. Otherwise, you risk your link building efforts having a negative impact instead of the positive one you were expecting.
When all these strategic points are followed in an SEO campaign, you will be well on the path to achieving great results in SEO.
Conclusion:
We have demonstrated how to formulate an SEO strategy from content marketing to link building. But as with every strategy, it is not a one-solution-fits-all. Circumstances may arise where you will need to tweak the strategies discussed here or adopt a different one entirely. The key thing is to identify the broad goals you are trying to achieve and then formulate SEO specific goals.
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Related posts:
- How to Create and Execute an SEO Strategy That Boosts Your Rankings - March 31, 2020
- Online Business Basics: Why Your Business Needs to be Online Now - January 23, 2020
