5 Steps of SEO Strategy
STEP 1: AUDIT YOUR ONLINE PRESENCE
In order to create an SEO plan and measure improvement, you need to know your starting point.
This means documenting and understanding the following items:
Audience - What they want, how they search for it, and how they find you.
Website metrics - Traffic, speed, critical issues, missing content, etc.
Keyword rankings - How well you rank for industry keywords, as well as your own brand.
Listings - Where else do you appear? Social media, business directories, etc.
Competition - How do they rank? What content do they produce?
Tools - Do you have what you need to track the above?
Based on the results of your audit, you can see where there are critical issues, room for improvement, and potential growth opportunities. Once you’ve recorded and digested these results, it’s time to move into the planning phase.
STEP 2: SET GOALS & CRAFT A PLAN
Those areas where you saw issues and growth potential? That’s where you should start when setting the goals for your SEO plan.
Whether you have an in-house marketing team or hire an agency like Bright Flower Creative to help you, your goals should relate to increasing the volume and/or quality of the following 3 metrics:
Traffic
Leads
Clients
So what does that mean? Your goals could be any and all of the following:
Increase volume of website traffic
Attract higher-quality website traffic
Increase volume of incoming leads
Attract higher-quality leads
Increase volume of new clients
Book higher-quality clients
For the sake of argument, let’s say you have this one goal: Increase the volume of website traffic.
How does that translate into actionable SEO steps? Let’s break it down…
Website traffic comes in four major forms: 1) organic, 2) direct, 3) referral, and 4) social.
When it comes to SEO strategy, we tend to focus primarily on organic and referral traffic. The rest of your digital marketing strategy will likely target the other two (three if you’re including email marketing traffic).
To keep it simple, let’s focus on organic.
Organic website traffic is determined by how well you rank in search engines. Your ranking, in turn, is influenced by a whole bunch of sub-elements that you came across in your audit. These include: security concerns, website speed, keyword use, meta descriptions, local citation accuracy, domain authority, etc.
So, that means our plan needs to address improving those sub-elements!
How does one prioritize and tackle these items? That’s where the next three steps come in!
STEP 3: START WITH CRITICAL ISSUES (NO MATTER WHAT)
If there are serious technical issues on your website, it’s likely you’re not ranking well, if at all. No matter your goal(s), these needs to be addressed first as they impact your ability to move forward across the board.
Search engines view critical issues as seriously detrimental to user experience. As a result, they will drop your ranking if you are flagged for any of these: site not secure, slow website speed, page errors, broken links, missing sitemaps, and a lack of mobile-friendliness.
Note: Unless you’ve got some coding know-how, you’ll want to work closely with a web developer or SEO pro on these items as they can be tricky and involve access to your website builder and backend.
STEP 4: FIX MISSING & DUPLICATE CONTENT
With the critical issues out of the way, it’s time to further optimize your website and online listings.
Now, you’ll want to make sure that all opportunities for titling, meta-describing, alt-tag-naming, internal-linking, and keyword-dropping are taken advantage of (known as on-page SEO). Additionally, if you’re not utilizing business listing sites and social media platforms (off-page SEO) - the time is now.
What do these do? When search engines crawl the web, these descriptive elements and linked pages paint a picture of the scope, quality, and authority of your website. If the picture is well-executed, you’re likely to rank well.
Pro-Tip: If you’re DIYing your SEO, this is where sites like Yoast and Moz can be helpful. That said, there are a lot of SEO tools on the market. Ask us about how we can automate and manage on-page and off-page SEO for you!
STEP 5: SHARE CONTENT & FORM CONNECTIONS
It’s important to create the right content. To improve SEO, your content should be original, specific, authoritative, and genuine.
In the old days, many SEO “pros” and amateurs alike made the mistake of favoring keyword-packing over high-quality content creation. This approach benefits no one. Your users will not come to value you as a trustworthy expert and Google will not reward you with rankings.
A few important tips:
Your content should answer questions and/or solve problems encountered by your clients.
Your content should be engaging and genuine. Find your voice.
Your content should be based on keyword research.
Another helpful tactic for guiding users to your content is to craft a link-building strategy. Here is where that referral traffic mentioned in Step 2 comes in! There are a variety of ways to do this, but here are some of our favorites:
Involve your peers. Cross-promote vendors you work with frequently through resource pages, guest blogs, and social media posts.
Fix broken backlinks. If you’ve been active in your industry for years, it’s possible you’re linked to from business directories and resource pages across the web. But are the links correct? Do they point to an older, unsecured version of your URL? Are any links broken?
Turn mentions into links. Sometimes your business gets mentioned online, but the person writing about you doesn’t add a hyperlink to your site - bummer! Consider reaching out and asking them if they’d be willing to add your URL.
Are you thinking, “Great, grand, wonderful. But I don’t have the time for all that…”?
We’d love to help! If you have questions about SEO strategy or would like a quote, let us know.
