SEO strategy — that’s the subject of this lesson. What an SEO strategy is, how to build one, how to define it, which mistakes to avoid, the differences between an SEO and an SEM strategy, international SEO strategy, SEO strategies for ecommerce… there’s a lot to get through.
As you’ll know, in our SEO Academy we cover every topic connected to ranking on search engines. If you’re new here, have a look at the earlier lessons — we’ve covered a number of things that will help you follow this article.
If this lesson interests you, it’s probably because you haven’t defined a Search Engine Optimization strategy of your own, or the one you have isn’t getting you to your business goals. And you want to focus above all on how an SEO strategy works and the method to follow.
Enough introduction — let’s get going!
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What is an SEO strategy?
An SEO strategy is a coordinated plan of actions set out by a company or brand to reach its SEO goals (search engine rankings, more traffic and conversions, attracting qualified leads, better brand awareness and so on).
Developing an effective SEO strategy means clearly defining long-term goals, knowing the target audience and their interests and needs in depth, and selecting the right tools and tactics.
Why you need an SEO strategy
A study by Time magazine found that the typical user spends barely 15 seconds on a web page. That means you have very little time to create interest and engagement in your visitors, so nothing can be left to chance. Beyond the many benefits SEO offers (there’s no shortage of data online), there are cases where an SEO strategy is particularly necessary:
- The market or niche you’re operating in is highly competitive and standing out is difficult
- The marketing goals you want the website to achieve aren’t clear and remain ambiguous
- The site has a great many pages, demanding intensive management and maintenance that risks going unrecorded
Types of SEO strategy
There’s no clear taxonomy of SEO strategies.
The distinction can be drawn by type of site or by target market. In the first case, an ecommerce SEO strategy is entirely different from a blog’s. In the second, an international SEO strategy differs from one aimed at a single country.
Other distinctions can be drawn from a combination of two parameters: the site’s current position (new, established, with high or low domain authority) and the goals being pursued.
Far more commonly, ranking strategies are classified by their focus on one or more of these:
- content;
- technical aspects and/or on-page SEO and off-page SEO;
- brand (reputation, engagement, brand identity/awareness).
International SEO strategy
Ranking multilingual sites calls for SEO strategies that differ technically as well. These run from the choice of site structure (ccTLD, subdirectory or subdomain) to organising content by subdirectory or subdomain, to placing hreflang markup in the site’s head. But an effective international SEO strategy also depends on identifying the main local keywords and analysing the competition.
In one of the Academy’s next lessons we’ll explain how to run an international SEO strategy in detail.
Ecommerce SEO strategy
SEO, and therefore strategies for ranking ecommerce sites, has its own peculiarities — but they can’t do without the common work of planning, implementation and monitoring. Alongside publishing quality content, earning quality inbound links naturally and maintaining a social media campaign, there’s a whole set of tactics, starting with finding the right keywords and writing unique descriptions for every product.
In one of the Academy’s next lessons we’ll explain how to run an ecommerce SEO strategy in detail.
How to develop an effective SEO strategy
In common practice many SEO managers and SEO consultants start building a good SEO strategy from an initial analysis of the website (an SEO audit). The SEO strategy plan that follows has to surface the strengths and weaknesses of the site’s current setup and give clear pointers for the decisions to come. During the review the auditor works through a checklist covering a great many things, among them:
- Site architecture and user experience (UX)
- Internal links and anchor text
- Competitors’ link building profiles
- Metadata, including the title tag and meta description
- Heading tags (H1, H2, H3 and so on) and image alt tags
- File and code infrastructure, including scripts, duplicate content and rel canonical, sitemap.xml, 301 redirects
- Length and quality of content
- How often content is updated
- The presence of social signals
- Competitor analysis
The point of this analysis is mainly to give you what you need to:
- Understand which sector the business belongs to, who its target audience is, who its competitors are, whether the budget allows a competitive SEO campaign, and whether the current target keywords are performing well in the SERPs
- Identify problems: bugs affecting crawling and any issues with page load speed
- Identify opportunities: topics or content the competition hasn’t covered yet
- Find solutions and set priorities for action
- Establish which goals the SEO campaign should reach, and align them with the client’s own
SEO strategy & content
Creating and/or optimizing content of all kinds (text, video, product titles and so on) for search is one of the pillars of a solid SEO strategy. The more precisely content answers search queries, the better its chances of getting first on Google.
For that to happen, though, the content has to meet certain criteria:
- It’s current, original and capable of sparking interest, interaction and sharing
- It’s of high quality: informative, and valuable to a given audience
- It aligns with Google’s principles of expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-A-T)
- It captures not only the user’s search intent but the roots of their needs
- It has a strong chance of attracting links from authoritative sites
This SEO strategy plays out over several steps.
Step 1: build a list of topics
In this first stage you build a list of topics relevant to your target customers, the ones you want to rank for.
A good starting point is drawing up a list of 10–15 terms tied to the products and services you offer. That list can include terms covering generic topics such as “SEO strategy” — what matters is that they mean something to your business.
To compile it, lean on Google Keyword Planner (GKP) and other SEO tools to measure search volumes and keyword competitiveness, and run an analysis of your site in Google Search Console to see which keywords you already cover.
Once the list is compiled, select the 10–15 keywords that matter most (we’ll call them pillars) and order them by relevance to your business.
Step 2: keyword research
Once the topic is chosen, the next step is finding the main keyword (the top keyword your content and SEO copywriting strategy will be built around). With the main keyword in hand, you then look for 10–15 keywords (split between secondary, related and long tail) covering aspects of the top keyword in detail — we’ll call these sub-topics.
That fundamental process of finding keywords and phrases is called keyword research. It can be done with various tools, some free — Google Keyword Planner, Google Suggest, Google Trends and Ubersuggest — and others freemium or paid, such as Ahrefs and SEMrush.
Let’s look more closely at two tools we recommend for this research: Google Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest:
Google Keyword Planner
Search for Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) or go here and register. Log into your account, click “Tools” at the top right and choose “Keyword Planner” under “Planning”. Click “find new keywords”, enter the keyword and run the search.
For the keyword “SEO strategy”, the main keyword this article is built around, we got the following result:
Image from ads.google.com
As you can see above, “SEO strategy” has a higher monthly search volume than keywords such as “SEO strategy meaning”, “best SEO strategy”, “SEO strategy b2b” or “SEO strategies”, which is why it was chosen as the main keyword for the article.
To be sure you’ve chosen the right keyword, though, we recommend checking with tools such as Ahrefs Keyword Explorer and Ubersuggest that:
- the Keyword Difficulty (KD) isn’t above 50 — if your site is fairly new or has low Domain Authority, you’re better off building content around long-tail keywords, which give you a better chance of ranking
- there aren’t major brands (Amazon, say) competing for your core keyword
- the SERP contains magazine posts, Q&A pages, forums and the like (all signs that the keyword you’ve chosen isn’t competitive)
With that check done, the next step is identifying your main competitors.
Ubersuggest
Open the site’s home page (go to the official site), enter the keyword and the country in the relevant fields and run the search.
Image from https://neilpatel.com/ubersuggest/
As you can see above, this tool gives you plenty of useful information: volume, competition, number of results and CPC for the chosen keyword, along with details of the main competitors ranking for it.
Step 3: competitor analysis
Competitor analysis is part of any marketing plan, but what interests us here is establishing which main competitors rank for the keyword we care about.
That’s easily obtained from tools such as Ubersuggest, Moz, SEMrush and others.
If we’ve already produced content for our site, we can analyse competitors’ sites to find keyword gaps (keywords they cover and we don’t) or find ideas that let us improve our content and get ahead of them.
One way to go about it:
- download and install the MozBar and SEOquake extensions in your browser
- enter the top keyword in the browser
- use Moz to export the top 10 SERP results as a CSV or Excel file
- go to Ahrefs and, from the “More” menu at the top right, choose “Batch analysis”
- enter your competitors’ URLs and select URL from the “Target mode” menu, as shown in the image below, then click “analyse”
- copy the social sharing data (Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn) and referring domains (RD) into a column you’ve created in the CSV or Excel file
- use the MozBar and SEOquake extensions to check the site’s age and number of backlinks, and add those to the table
- now go through each competitor’s page by hand, note the number and type of any media present (video, images, infographics, PDFs and so on) and add that to the file too
Image from https://ahrefs.com
Step 4: create content optimized for Hummingbird
Google updated its algorithm with the Hummingbird update and introduced features such as the knowledge graph, which let it grasp conceptual differences and return results relevant to the search query (semantic SEO). Optimization based almost entirely on keywords and their repetition is therefore long gone.
So focus your SEO strategy on creating content that includes variations of your top keyword and a mix of related and long-tail keywords with low competition and high search volume. Distribute LSI keywords through the text as well — the ones that help Google understand what your content is about — and/or use them to build content of their own.
Here are some simple ways to find LSI keywords:
- use tools such as LSIKeywords and LSI Keyword Generator
- look at the words shown in bold in the meta descriptions of the top 10 SERP results
- use Google Suggest: type a query such as “content marketing” into Google and the search engine itself will suggest keywords, many of them LSI keywords. Do the same on other search engines, YouTube included
Image from Google
- type a query into Google and go to the “related searches” section at the bottom of the page. Many of those keywords are LSI keywords too
Image from Google
Step 5: organise your content on the “topic cluster” model
To rank content at the top of a search engine results page (SERP), avoid keyword stuffing and instead organise your content on the “topic cluster” model. Since the RankBrain update (2015), the Mountain View search engine favours indexing content built around specific topics — so-called “topic clusters”.
In short, a topic cluster consists of a “pillar page” covering every aspect of a subject, linked to several secondary pages, or sub-topics, that treat particular aspects of the main subject in greater detail.
Image from hubspot.com
To build a winning SEO strategy on this model, create a page or article around a specific top keyword — “Digital Marketing”, say (step 1) — then research topics connected to it, such as “Email Marketing”, “Social Media Marketing” and so on (step 2), and create content for each, linking it back to the “Digital Marketing” pillar page to form your cluster.
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SEO strategies: common mistakes to avoid
Here are some of the most frequent mistakes to avoid at all costs in an SEO strategy:
- Optimizing content around a single keyword: as we’ve established, thanks to machine learning and artificial intelligence, search engines have got enormously better at grasping search intent. So beyond being ineffective, this practice is worth avoiding because it gives the user a poor user experience.
- Not optimizing site speed: load time gives the user a good user experience and earns a high crawl rate. There are plenty of tools for measuring it, and some — GTmetrix, Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom and YSlow — also tell you how to improve it.
- Not optimizing for other search engines: although more than 79% of desktop searches happen on Google (over 63,000 searches a second), it’s good practice to optimize content for Bing and Yahoo too.
- Focusing on quantity over quality: publishing a lot of content guarantees nothing, especially when the content is poor. RankBrain penalizes that kind of content heavily.
- An unoptimized URL: people often let a page or blog post title become the URL. Use short, simple URLs, and remember to include the focus keyword (if your keyword were “SEO strategy” –> www.yoursite.com/seo-strategy).
- Leaving out external links: external links give users relevant information and are read by them, and by search engines, as a signal of content quality.
- Not fixing errors in the HTML: an SEO audit often turns up errors in a page’s HTML which, left uncorrected, affect where content ranks to varying degrees. These errors are often caused by:
- Duplicate or missing title tags
- Broken links
- Images with no alt text
- Pages blocked in robots.txt
- 302 redirects that should be 301s
- Low-quality links: in link building people often think only about the number of backlinks they have. Thanks to recent Google algorithm updates, the quality of those backlinks has become far more important. So make sure links come from authoritative sites.
- No mobile optimization: a site that isn’t mobile friendly weighs heavily on user experience and on rankings.
- No optimization for local search marketing: 97% of users run an online search to find a local business — so why not take advantage of the visibility local SEO offers?
- Not using analytics and measuring metrics: tools such as Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are essential for improving results and understanding what users are really searching for.
Tools for checking whether an SEO strategy is working
Beyond the tools mentioned above, there are other SEO tools of great use in defining, implementing and monitoring the effectiveness of an SEO strategy. Among them:
Google Search Console (go to site): a free Google service that lets you monitor your site’s traffic, improve rankings, carry out market analysis and generally gather plenty of useful information on which to base technical and other decisions. The tool’s newer version shows a summary of the most important metrics and notifications, mobile ones included, on its “Overview” page.
Google PageSpeed Insights (go to site): another free Google service that lets you analyse a page’s content, measure its load speed and find and fix problems. The tool gives the page a score from 0 to 100 (90 or above is considered fast; 50 to 90 average; below 50 slow).
Google Analytics (go to site): a free web analytics service from Google giving detailed statistics about a site’s visitors. Integrated with Google Ads, the tool lets you analyse online campaigns, track conversions, lead generation and much else. For SEO, the “organic traffic” report shows metrics for organic traffic and which landing pages or search engines bring the most of it. The “assisted conversions” report lets you gauge traffic quality and spot changes in conversions attributable to organic traffic. Another important one is the “site speed” report, which identifies content with poor load times.
Screaming Frog (go to site): a paid tool that has to be downloaded and installed on a PC or Mac. It crawls the site and returns information valuable to an SEO strategy, such as:
- Finding broken links (404 errors)
- Analysing problems with titles and meta descriptions
- Detecting the URLs of duplicate content
- Detecting URLs blocked in robots.txt (excluded from indexing)
- Identifying follow and nofollow links
- Generating the sitemap
SEO strategy: a case study
As you’ll know, the Academy is a section of our agency, EU Web Agency. We’d like to show you a case where we implemented an SEO strategy successfully.
The client was The Italian Community, a portal for Italian businesses, professionals and individuals in the United Kingdom. The platform had four main sections: a business directory, a blog, a job search section and an ecommerce store.
When they came to us for SEO consultancy, the first thing we did was an SEO audit, which flagged technical problems we promptly resolved.
The other problem we found was how few keywords were ranking organically. So we implemented an SEO strategy built on writing optimized content. That got us the following results:
- 9,800 keywords ranking on Google
- 456 keywords in first position on Google
- 1,261 keywords on the first page of Google
- 6,300 quality backlinks
Conclusion
In this lesson of your favourite SEO Academy we’ve covered SEO strategy. You now have what you need to define or improve an SEO strategy yourself — but that isn’t enough on its own. SEO is a process in constant motion, and it never guarantees a place at the top of Google. Follow a sound SEO strategy, though, and the odds improve. Machine learning, artificial intelligence, semantic SEO and topic clusters are just some of the recent arrivals that affect how SEO is done, and we’ll keep covering where they lead in the lessons ahead.
Stay tuned and keep following us — in the next lessons of the SEO Academy we’ll get into plenty more interesting territory…
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