If your goal is to make your business website achieve top rank on Search engines, you need to execute a professional SEO strategy. If you don’t know how to create an SEO strategy that brings results, you’ve come to the right place. In this post, we will help you build an SEO Strategy with a solid foundation for your website.
17 steps to building a winning SEO strategy in 2022
The competition on the internet is growing every day and to stand out from your competitors, you must have a digital marketing plan to keep your business ahead of the curve. That’s why you have to create a result-driven SEO strategy. Don’t worry if you are completely new to SEO. Here you’ll learn how to create an SEO strategy to reach the top of Search engine rankings. Let’s get started…
Create Detailed Buyer Persona
Before creating any SEO strategy it’s important to know and create a buyer’s persona. It involves creating a fictional and generalized profile of your would-be customers based on market research and the attributes of your existing customers. The more data you have on their personal and professional goals, online behavior, challenges they face, and their needs, the better buyer persona you’ll build.
As a digital marketer with an experience of more than a decade of, I can attest to the importance of this step for your SEO strategy to be a success.
Find Profitable Niche With Low Competition
Identifying the competitiveness and profitability of a niche plays an important role in the complexity of any SEO strategy. Above all, it helps you decide on the budget needed to outrank the competition.
Niches with high competition often require a large amount of investment in SEO. However, even if you don’t have the budget to rank your website for high competition keywords, you can still find customers for your business by focusing on long-tail keywords.
The benefit of long-tail keywords is that you don’t have to compete with internet giants and still get highly targeted traffic to your website.
With low competition long-tail keywords you can create a more concrete and focused strategy that will bring quality traffic to your website with a high conversion rate.
Conduct thorough Keyword Research
Starting from your buyer persona analysis, you have to analyze what kind of searches you do and therefore, what are the best words to position your website and make it find you.
Going back to your buyer’s persona, you need to do a complete analysis to find the right keywords related to your products and service that’ll either bring huge website traffic or leads to a higher conversion rate.
After selecting good keywords you can formulate a ranking strategy that brings results. For this, the content on your website should be structured around the important queries related to your product and services. They are many tools you can use to find the best keywords for your website.
Some of the popular keyword research tools are:
- Sistrix
- Ahrefs
- Semrush
- Google keyword planner
If you’re wondering how to select the most effective keywords, it depends on the niche of your website and competition, also the demographics of the audience you are trying to attract.
The best keywords are those which help you explain the main topic of your web pages easily to your target audience. It should also help search engines like Google better understand your content for comparison with other websites and assign a ranking to your web pages.
Check out our complete keyword research guide to become an expert in SEO keyword research.
Discover Your Competitor’s Keywords with SEO Competitor Analysis
Once you are clear about the idea with which you want to land in the digital world, before getting with the purest aspects of the SEO strategy it is important to know the competition we have.
Competition research is an integral part of preliminary any SEO project. Once you have got a clear idea of your online venture, you must find out who your competitors are and what are their strengths and weaknesses.
The simplest way to conduct a competition analysis is by searching the queries associated with your business on google and collecting data on the websites that appear in the top 10 positions.
7 Important Steps for SEO Competitive Analysis & Research
- Analyse competitor ranking
- Analyze organic traffic to their website
- Check their Domain authority
- Analyze their website User Experience
- Conduct a backlink profile analysis
- Explore their content marketing strategy
- Analyze their Social media profile
A thorough competition will help you discover the type of content your competitors are creating, their website structure, keywords, and their backlink profile. You can use this information to build your website accordingly. Get inspired and improve on what they are doing right, and build a stronger SEO strategy.
Improve and optimize your existing content
Writing original, useful, and value-enhancing content is not an easy task. But, the reward is worth it.
A tip as basic as vital is that you open your mind, be creative, and above all, that you put the focus on your audience, which you must keep in mind as Google’s algorithms.
Creating original, informational and value-added content is not easy. However, it’s worth the rewards it brings.
Everyone is selling products and services online these days. To stand out among the myriad of competitors you need to create content with the needs and wants of your target audience. Your website should serve as the best resource to solve their problem and clear their doubts. You should also work on the structure and tone of the content based on the target demographics.
Some examples of content types are, tips, tutorials, and resources on the topic. Answer the questions of customers. Create guides, infographics, audio, and video content. There are many studies that informative content with at least 1,000 words generates better results for an SEO strategy.
Types of content.
Content in a website can be categorized in two ways, transactional and informational.
Promotional content
The pages of services, products… they will have a more transactional objective, that of acting on the part of the user: a purchase, a call, a contact…
Promotional content usually deals with directly selling the products and services to the customers. It includes the content in newsletters, website product/service pages, and checkout pages. Content on these pages has a transactional objective, ie, helping the customers make a purchase decision and close the transaction.
Informative content :
For its part, the contents of the blog will be more informative: solve doubts of the users, tell experiences … give you information that you do not know and that solves something punctual but that brings you closer to what you offer and a possible future transaction.
Informational content helps to resolve the doubts in the mind of the customers and establish you as an authority in your field. It boosts the confidence of customers in choosing you as the provider of products or services. Informational content can be a blog post, a video, a customer review, tips and guides, infographic, etc.
It Doesn’t matter which type of content you’re creating, it should be of high quality.
Optimize your website for Google’s Position Zero.
To reach more people Google Discover and Google’s zero position can help you.
Position zero is one of the newest features of Google search. It aims to answer the queries of users directly on the search page, by displaying the most appropriate answer above the organic search results.
If you want to increase your chances of appearing in Google’s Discover (among others):
To increase the odds of exiting in the zero position:
Answer frequently asked questions from users in your field.
Look for keywords in the form of a question in the tools to know that they are of interest.
You get to the point with the doubt that you are working. Put aside thin content and focus on what matters.
In the zero position, like Discover, you don’t choose when to exit. However, the more you optimize the content and the better you do it, the more likely you are.
Take care of ALL the details that make Google fall in love
It’s no secret that the success of any SEO strategy depends on bigger details in creating and optimizing a website. However, small details that are often ignored by my marketing managers are also important to outrank your competitors. Let’s talk about some of these factors:
Create Meta Title Tags and Meta Descriptions for SEO
The title tag is the first thing visitors see on the search results when looking for the products and services you’re offering. To make a good impression and entice you must be creative with the title tag. Don’t fail to include the important keywords in your keywords along with call-to-action keywords like “Find out” click here, “get a quote now” or “visit here? etc. Meta description has lost some value as Google these days scans the website content and picks a description from the sales copy of the pages. However, you must still create it as it’s still used by other search engines. And Google still uses it sometimes when it can’t find a good description on your webpage content.
Optimize your images:
Image optimization is an important task for the success of any SEO strategy. To optimize the images you must add an Alt Tag to the image. It helps search engines recognize the relation of an image with the topic of the content. Optimize images for size and dimensions to make them load faster and appear properly on Pc as well as mobile devices.
Use descriptive custom URLs
Custom URLs help Search understand the topic of your website and rank it accordingly. Webpages with Non-descriptive URLS usually rank lower in search engine ranking than the ones with descriptive URLs.
Find and Fix Broken Links
No one like to click on an anchor text and land on a page with a 404 error. Google also doesn’t like web pages containing broken links and often penalizes them on SERPs. That’s why analyzing your website for broken links and fixing them with active web pages is a very important task of a successful SEO strategy.
Optimize Website Internal Linking Structure
Optimizing your website’s internal link structure is a very important task often missed by many webmasters. Internal links show search engines the flow of pages on your website and help them decide on which pages are important. Internally linking related web pages also improves your website usability as visitors are able to smoothly find more information on the topic without leaving your website.
Pay attention to website usability
Website usability is an important factor that shouldn’t be missed for creating a successful website on the internet.
A website with a clean design following the latest standards of web development, with a simple structure, helps your visitors navigate smoothly, improves your user experience, and also makes Google value your website positively. Thus improving your website’s conversion rate and making it appear high on search engine rankings.
Don’t ignore Ignore Your Website’s Page Speed
Webpage Loading speed has become an increasingly important factor in the ranking of the website on Google. If your website loads slowly, you not only lose customers but also negatively affect the ranking on Search engines.
Google has already stated in 2021 that the Page experience algorithm update considers the load speed of a webpage, and a website with a slow load speed will see a drop in ranking.
Google page speed insights is a free tool you can use to analyze your website’s load speed and optimize the code and database for faster load times.
Use HTML Heading Tags Correctly
Headings are an important part of copywriting both offline and online. Headings create a hierarchy serve to hierarchize the content on a webpage, and they should be used correctly for Search engines to interpret the meaning of your content. It also guides users through an important section of the content on your website. The most commonly used Header tags are H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and h6.
Best practices for using header tags:
H1 tag
H1 tag is usually the header containing the most important content on your webpage. it’s usually the title of the webpage too and is an important ranking factor. Search engines use it to understand the topic of the page.
A header with an H1 tag is the first thing visitors see on your website. That’s why you must create a catchy h1 tag with relevant keywords and a call to action to catch their attention.
H2 tag
If the main title H1 is like the title of a book, the H2 subtitles are like chapters. You can use H2 headers to break content into logical sections. For example, if the page title is “The Best SEO Practices for 2021 and How to Implement Them,” you could break the content down into two main “chapters”: a list of best practices and how to implement them.
H1 tag is the title of the content on a page, whereas H2 is used to split the topic of the header with the H1 tag into the header with relevant contextual content.
For example, if the Header with the H1 tag is “How to Plan your SEO strategy for high ranking on Google”, Header with H2 tag would be “Keys to an Effective SEO Strategy”, as in this example, the header with H2 tag provides visitors with more information on the topic of Header with h1 tag. Creating a hiarchy of content with relevant information.
H3 Tags
Headers with H3 tag further break down to refine the content under H1 and H2 header tags. For example, if the header with H2 tag is “Header with H2 tag would be “Keys to an Effective SEO Strategy”, the h3 tag can be used to elucidate it further by naming the best SEO strategies. For example ” Define your buyer persona” and “Find Profitable Niche With Low Competition”.
H4, H5, and H6 tags
Just like the above header tags, H4, H5, and H6 tags are used further hierarchy organize the content on the webpage. With these tags, you can provide readers with finer details on the topic of the page without them having to go through reading bulky paragraphs.
Create a Favicon That Grabs Attention
Favicon is the image that appears on the address bar of the browsers when someone visits your website. It doesn’t have any direct effect on the ranking of your website on search engines, However, it’s something you shouldn’t miss as it acts as your brand emblem on the browsers.
The general rule is the use the logo of the website as the favicon, however, you can also create an image that represents your product and services best and use it as the favicon. Just make sure it’s memorable and reflects your brand to the website visitors.
Create a coherent Content Marketing & Off Page SEO Strategy
Implementing all of the above SEO strategies is important to achieve a first-page ranking on Google. However, you must not ignore off-page SEO strategies like link building, content marketing, and Social media marketing.
Offpage SEO strategies help you attract valuable backlinks for your website to boost its authority on Search engines, and also bring more customers directly. Especially if your website gets viral on Social media or gets linked to a popular website in your business sector. Thus, you must create an off-page SEO strategy that is in complete sync with your on-page SEO strategies to bolster your brand online.
→ Note: if you’re starting with link building and want to learn more, check out our link building guide.
Measure SEO Performance and Results
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is your best friend for examining your website’s compliance status with Google Search guidelines. With this free tool, you can analyze the performance of your website for important keywords on the Google search engine. You can also use this tool to detect problems and errors on your website and fix them promptly.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is also an important tool to gauge the performance of your SEO Strategies and find more details on the traffic your website is receiving. With its comprehensive list of metrics, you’ll be able to analyze the traffic, channels, and conversion and modify your SEO strategy accordingly to improve the quality of traffic and conversion rate.
Using the above tools to analyze your website and find out whats working and what’s not, create a more effecitve and coherant SEO Strategy. SEO requires longterm time investment and you must create, modify and improve your strategies based on the changing trends on internet and nature of periodical algorithm updates.
Final Words
What do you feel after reading this article? Will you be able to create your own SEO strategy? The strategies listed above are just the start of a long road you must take to achieve top ranking on Google. However, if you’re too busy, and want an expert SEO team to help you achieve top ranking, feel free to contact us, or check out our SEO plans and Link building pricing packages.
Last Updated on January 5, 2023 by Social SEO Team
