Right now, your potential customers are on Google and other search engines looking for services or products that you offer.

However, they will probably not find your website or social media accounts if it is not optimised to rank high in search engine results pages (SERPs).

There are several factors that influence the ranking of a website on search engines, one of them being SEO.

The goal of SEO is to increase a website’s visibility in SERPs to attract more organic traffic and potential customers. It sounds simple in theory, but there are several technical elements that make it possible, all guided by an SEO strategy. So, what does this strategy mean?

What is an SEO Strategy?

An SEO strategy is a detailed plan designed to craft and optimise content on your website to boost your search engine ranking. The plan aims to attract organic traffic to your website, indirectly increasing your revenue. An effective strategy sets clear goals and steps to achieve them from your current position.

Let’s clear one thing; having a list of keywords you use for your blog posts is not an SEO strategy. SEO strategies typically include keyword research, creating optimised content, prioritizing technical SEO, etc.

Why is an SEO Strategy Important?

Chances are that any success you have experienced in your business so far is because of planning, right? It’s the same deal with SEO strategy. For instance, when doing keyword research, you’re trying to understand search behaviors, needs, and intentions of your target audience.

With an understanding of the search intent of your audience, you create content that is more aligned with what they’re searching. As a result, Google and other search engines will recommend your content more organically to them.

Other benefits of having an SEO strategy include;

Increased brand awareness and credibility,
Audience reach and lead generation, and
Higher ROI from your content marketing budget.

Finally, SEO is nothing like paid advertising. It promotes sustainable growth. The more you update and implement your strategy, the more visible your brand becomes.

The Evolving SEO Landscape

SEO has changed a lot in the past few years. For example, you might have noticed the inclusion of AI overviews on search engines like Google. Does this mean your audience won’t find your content on the web? Probably not.

Still, this does not mean you should ignore the new route search engines are taking. Instead of thinking how this affects your SEO efforts, you should think of how to optimise your web content to be included in the overviews.

SERP algorithms are also constantly changing. This includes changes to the ranking mechanisms used by search engines. The good news is that Google’s E-E-A-T framework is still intact and it has the biggest impact on ranking.

Your takeaway from this should be that SEO is still relevant. This means if you want more exposure to your target audience, you need to evaluate your SEO strategy. And if you don’t have an existing strategy, don’t worry since we’ll show you how to create one.

Building a Winning SEO Strategy

This in-depth guide provides a proven blueprint for creating an effective SEO strategy from start to finish. Let’s dive right in.

Step 1: Define Your Goals and Target Audience

The best SEO strategists set realistic goals. What do we mean? Before starting any project, you must always plan ahead, right?

Similarly, for SEO strategies, you need an ultimate goal. A valid one. It’s not great to only aim to “increase your traffic.” You need to focus on increasing “quality traffic.”

“What’s the difference?” we hear you ask.

Some websites have huge traffic but only convert a small fraction. More traffic with limited revenue isn’t a success, after all.

Wouldn’t you agree that having sizeable traffic with an equally significant conversion is better? After all, you’re looking for conversion not traffic.

Examples of a realistic goal would be;

Increasing website traffic by 20% in six months,
Ranking in the top three positions for specific keywords,
Or generating a certain number of leads from organic search.

With such goals, you can now plan how to achieve them. This is where expertise in SEO comes in. You might have to perform an SEO audit of your existing content, delete content, add content, and rewrite to achieve these goals.

Your target audience should also help shape your SEO strategy.

Ask yourself these questions to figure out the ideal people that visit your website;

Who is most likely to buy my products or services?
What do they do for work?
How much do they earn per month?
What’s their age bracket?
Where do they live?
What’s their gender?

Additionally, you need to know what solutions your target audience is looking for. To figure it out, ask yourself the following;

What is your audience searching for and how are they searching for it?
Are they looking for informational, transactional, or navigational content?
What problems are they trying to solve?

So, focus on strategies that convert as much as they skyrocket your traffic. This is the first step to any successful SEO plan.

Step 2: Conduct Comprehensive Keyword Research

You’ve probably heard how important keyword research is to SEO. But we’ll rehash this truth because the importance is undeniable. Without the right keywords, you’ll invite the wrong people to your website or get no visitors.

Put simply, you need to do it right.

Do thorough keyword research. By thorough keyword research, we mean keyword grouping. Select a specific theme, find similar keywords that would fall under the theme, and group them.

Here’s an example:

You run a clothing store. Some keyword themes may include spring clothes or winter outfits. Under winter outfits, you may have keywords like winter jackets, winter boots, gloves, etc.

Using keyword research tools, you can group these keywords under the right themes and analyze their quality or volumes. Some of the best keyword research tools include Google Keyword Planner, Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz Keyword Explorer, Ubersuggest.

Most of the time, you only need to input the seed keyword or keyword themes in the research tool to get similar keywords. Another key to using the right keywords is to avoid extremely competitive keywords. At the same time, don’t target keywords without search volume.

Create keyword sitemaps or clusters to ensure each page on the website targets a specific keyword. This helps avoid keyword cannibalism.

The keyword sitemap typically includes:

Page URL: The specific page on your website.
Target keywords: The main keyword(s) assigned to that page.
Content focus: The primary topic or intent the page addresses.
Optimisation status: Notes on whether the page’s content, metadata, and headers are optimized for its target keywords.

Don’t forget to identify your competitors.

Knowing your organic competitors is simple. You may run a random search on Google using your primary keywords. But this provides a shallow knowledge of your competitors.

For in-depth research, use keyword research tools. The best tools will analyze all metrics, including traffic, the number of keywords you share with the competitors, etc.

With this information, you’ll better understand what keywords attract your target audience. And you’ll know what your competitor is doing right.

Step 3: Optimise Your Website Content

Turns out content is still king. What does that mean? Keep creating content, and not just a lot of it but also valuable content. Google and other search engines will penalise your content if you’re just writing for SEO.

For content to be considered valuable, it has to be;

High-quality
Informative
Engaging
Aligned with user search intent

Practice on-page optimisation techniques. These include optimising page titles, meta descriptions, headings (H1-H6), URL slugs, image alt text, and internal linking for targeted keywords. Doing this signals to search engines that your content is relevant to specific search queries.

Website content takes several formats. The common ones include blog posts, articles, ultimate guides, infographics, videos, case studies, white papers. For instance, whatever you’re reading can be classified as an ultimate guide or a blog post.

You need to have a variety of content formats on your website. The reason? As much as your target audience has many things in common, they have different preferences. Therefore, you need to create content in different formats to address the differences.

Have you heard of user retention? If not, it means the ability of your website to keep visitors engaged for long. High retention is shown by longer session durations and low bounce rates.

This has two major benefits. One, it signals to search engines that your website is valuable, and their algorithms will rank it higher SERPs. Two, when visitors spend more time on your website, the more chances you have of converting them to customers.

Don’t just stop there. Audit your content periodically. In these audits, check whether the content is still relevant, accurate, and optimised for current SEO practices.

Step 4: Focus on Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the process of ensuring your website meets the technical requirements of modern-day search engines. Elements of technical SEO include crawlability, indexing, rendering, and website architecture.

Crawlability is the ability of your website to be discovered by search engines. You can ensure this by ensuring your website has a defined XML sitemap.

Search engines decide which websites to save or index. This is what indexability is about. They base their decision on the value of the content on those websites. That’s why we insisted on creating quality content.

Technical SEO also improves how your site feels to visitors. Fast loading times, mobile-friendly design, and smooth navigation make users stay longer and explore more, which tells search engines your site is worth showing to others.

Tools you can use to fix technical SEO include: Google Search Console, Google PageSpeed Insights, Semrush Site Audit, etc.

Remember that the easier you make it for Google to crawl, index, and understand your website, the better your chances of ranking.

Step 5: Build High-Quality Backlinks

Think of backlinks as favours from authority sites within your niche. It’s a favour because if you get a backlink from a website receiving higher visits than yours, Google records that as a vote of confidence.

On the flipside, you may also get penalised if you get backlinks from low-quality websites.

Backlinking is also called link building. Creating precious content worth linking to is one of the first steps to building a solid backlink strategy.

You want quality links from authoritative websites. But these websites won’t link to your website if you only churn out lackluster content.

Here’s how you increase chances of getting backlinks;

Create high-quality content that naturally attracts links
Guest blog on relevant websites and publications
Build relationships with industry influencers and bloggers
Do social media promotion
Analyze competitor backlinks to identify potential opportunities

Step 6: Track, Measure, and Refine

You’ve laid the groundwork and everything is working. But don’t stop there. You need to ensure everything is working fine. Tracking metrics and measuring them will help you know what’s working and what’s not.

Monitoring your SEO performance is important. It helps you measure the effectiveness of the SEO strategy and identify areas for improvement.

SEO Metrics to focus on include;

Organic traffic: Total visits, unique visitors, page views
Keyword rankings: Positions for targeted keywords
Backlinks: number of referring domains, backlink quality
Conversion rates: Percentage of visitors completing desired actions (e.g., making a purchase, filling out a form, etc)

Wondering where and how to get this information? There are tools for that, including Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Semrush, and Ahrefs.

Most of these tools have tracking and reporting features. You can configure them to send you reports or generate them on demand. A report will help you make sense of the data which eases decision making.

Start Implementing SEO Strategies Today

And that’s it. The six steps to creating an effective SEO strategy for your business.

Just remember that SEO is a continuous process that requires ongoing effort and adaptation. It might take you longer than expected to see results too. So, start implementing their SEO strategies today to 10x your business.

At SLINKY, we specialize in SEO with decades of experience helping businesses across diverse industries, both in Australia and globally. Don’t just take our word for it—see what our clients have to say by reading their testimonials here.