To increase organic traffic, boost revenue, and secure top positions in search results, you need a definite SEO plan. An effective SEO strategy can help you identify and achieve your goals in the best way possible; it can help you figure out where you are, what you need to do next, and what strategies need to be implemented to meet your desired goals.
A. SEO Plan: Key Focus Area
When creating an actionable SEO plan for your website, your key focus areas should be on-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO.
- On-page SEO: On-page SEO focuses on your website’s content, navigation, and structure. It includes various factors that you need to implement on your website to optimize it for users and search engines. Some of these factors include meta tags, alt tags, image optimization, content upgrade, rectifying broken links on the website, and publishing new content.
- Off-page SEO: Off-page SEO includes Google local listing, social bookmarking, blog commenting, local citation listing, outreach campaigns, guest posting, and more. This helps boost your brand’s visibility and helps drive organic traffic to your website.
- Technical SEO: Technical SEO refers to the architecture or design of your website. The technical aspect is as important as on-page SEO. It includes making your site responsive, implementing SSL on your website, using descriptive permalinks, optimizing website speed, using a reliable web hosting provider and cross-browser testing.
B. Creating an Effective SEO Strategy
An SEO plan makes implementation easy but for beginners, the entire SEO process may be overwhelming. This is where an Seo Agency Surrey can help you, right from the strategy planning based on your business requirements, to execution and monitoring.
Below we have listed a few search engine optimization techniques that’ll help you create an SEO marketing plan for your website.
1. Analyse Current SEO Performance
To determine what changes are needed to improve website performance, it is important to analyze your site’s current performance.
- You need to look at the rankings received by the keywords used and the overall organic visibility of the brand.
- Check for branded and non-branded traffic split. This can help you identify opportunities for improvement since a majority of branded searches are made by users who know your business.
- There are several SEO audit tools that can provide vital website insights and offer details about historical & current organic visibility along with an estimation of web traffic, errors that need to be fixed, page performance issues, among others.
- It is also important to use Google Analytics to know your conversion rates, the number of leads generated, and the revenue earned, to get clarity on your site’s performance.
All this can help you plan an SEO marketing strategy that works best for your business.
2. Set Goals
After a website audit, it is essential to set your goals and understand your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The goal is the end outcome, while the KPIs are metrics that demonstrate the progress made towards your goal. Determine what you want to achieve and plan an SEO strategy accordingly. This will help you measure your success and know whether or not a particular SEO strategy is helping you achieve your goals.
3. Research and Create a Set of Keywords
Defining your target keywords is essential for effective search engine optimization. You cannot achieve your set goal if you don’t know the keywords used by your target audience to search for your products/services.
SEO tools, such as Google’s Keyword Tool, can be used to determine the right set of keywords for each website page. Avoid keyword stuffing, instead use long-tail keywords for your website pages and blog. This will help improve the keyword density. Plus, it will ensure you are using highly targeted search phrases or search terms that are frequently used by users while looking for a product or service similar to yours.
4. Identify Long-Tail Keywords
Research indicates long-tail keywords have a 3-5% higher click-through rate compared to generic keywords. The most beneficial part of using long-tail keywords is that they have lower competition, which can increase your site’s organic visibility and ranking. So, identify a list of relevant long-tail keywords that help attract more organic traffic to your website.
5. Optimise for Search Intent
Search intent optimization is basically providing the best possible results to your customers after analysing exactly what they are looking for. It is all about meeting your customers’ immediate needs and providing an enhanced experience. To optimize for search intent, use relevant keywords in the meta-data, URL and headlines. Also, add keywords strategically in your content to improve your site’s visibility.
6. Optimise for On-page SEO
After creating the required website content/blog, make sure your page/post is optimized. This includes title tags, meta description, header tags (H1, H2 and H3), and alt tags for images. The content should have keywords and relevant internal/external links. Make sure the content is error-free, and use the Yoast SEO plugin to analyze your content & check if it includes the best SEO practices.
7. Create High-Quality Content
Content is the driving force for all digital marketing campaigns. Without high-quality content, you wouldn’t be able to yield much in terms of traffic, ranking, or conversions. For blogs, make sure you research & select topics that are useful (informative) to your target audience. While creating content, keep in mind to naturally use the target keywords. This will help strengthen your SEO content strategy. Also, always write for your audience and not search engines. Your goal should be to provide value to your audience, which, in turn, will help you rank higher in the search result.
8. Focus on Link Building
An SEO marketing strategy is incomplete without link building. Link building is an important off-page SEO factor that can help improve your site’s domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA). Link building includes attracting high-authority backlinks to your site from other relevant sites in your niche.
- Backlinks can be generated through infographics and guest blogging (guestographics).
- Broken link building is another technique that you can use.
- Also, claim unlinked brand mention on other websites.
- For local link building, you can claim your business on local business directories or pitch for guest blogging on local websites.
9. Optimise Existing Content
This is one of the other SEO strategies that is often overlooked. As mentioned above, for a strong SEO campaign, creating high-quality content is important. However, apart from creating new content, you also need to work on optimizing existing content. This includes updating the information on the blog, adding more points to the list, updating meta description, including relevant internal/external links, adding images/videos, among others. This will ensure your site is up-to-date, which will help reduce bounce rate and increase your site’s dwell time.
10. Focus on User Experience
Google’s algorithm consistently takes user experience into account while ranking a website. To this end, when it comes to creating an effective search engine optimisation strategy, your focus should be on improving the experience of users visiting your website. Some tips to improve user experience include:
- Increasing website speed
- Simplifying website navigation
- Making your site mobile-friendly
- Writing informative content
- Using engaging images, videos, and other multimedia in your content
11. Rectify Technical SEO Issues
Technical SEO issues can affect your site’s performance, impact user experience and lead to low ranking and traffic. Some of the common technical issues are sluggish website speed, crawling errors, broken links, duplicate/thin content, complex URL structure, lack of AMP pages, to name a few. Website audit tools can help you identify and rectify technical SEO issues on your website. This can help improve your site’s performance & functionality, which will reflect positively on your site’s ranking.
12. Track, Analyse and Measure Your SEO Strategy
After creating an SEO plan and executing it, it is important to track and monitor its progress to measure its success. By analyzing your strategy, you’d be able to understand what needs to be changed and find growth opportunities. It will help you fine-tune your SEO strategy, which will assist you in generating consistent targeted website traffic that converts.
Need help planning an effective SEO strategy for your website? Check out the SEO services surrey that we offer, and for more information, contact us today!
