An Introduction to SEO: Developing an SEO Strategy
If you aren’t developing an SEO strategy that starts with your business and marketing goals, you’re wasting precious time and money. Stop the madness and learn how to do it right so you can achieve the best results possible.
Here’s the thing: Too many business owners have it wrong when it comes to SEO.
SEO isn’t about tricking search engines into ranking your website, especially not these days. Your objective is to help Google (and other search engines) fulfill their goal, which is to provide searchers with the perfect results. That way, they’re happy with the query they made on the site.
If you think you can outsmart Google, you’re wrong. You need to create a website that people want to visit, and that they want to tell other people about, link to, and share on social networks.
That is the key to SEO, and you’ll never rank if you aren’t doing that. But developing an SEO strategy is what will create the signposts so Google realizes you have the good stuff they want to promote.
Understanding Where Your SEO Strategy Falls
You can’t expect to get anywhere with SEO if you approach it backward.
You need to be strategic about it, and you can’t look at SEO separately from the rest of your business. Your SEO goals should be tied to your general marketing goals and your overall business goals.
There are three steps, and SEO is last. Take a look…
1) Determine Your Overall Business Goals
You can’t market your business or even begin to think about SEO until you have a firm grasp on your overall business goals. That’s putting the cart way before the horse.
What is it that you are trying to accomplish in your business?
- Do you want to grow your sales?
- Do you want to increase your passive income?
- Do you want to become the most trusted brand in your niche?
Whatever it is, you need to define it clearly and get your team on board so you are all working for the same end result.
2) Create a Marketing Strategy
Once you have your general business goals, only then can you start looking at your marketing goals and deciding what your marketing strategy will be.
And yes, this needs to come before you start developing an SEO strategy. This concept may seem like a no-brainer, but too many companies go about their marketing haphazardly without it stemming from the specific goals that they have for their business.
The goals you set to achieve with your strategy might include…
- Generating brand awareness
- Growing top of funnel traffic
- Attracting an audience that is ready to purchase
- Increasing recurring revenue streams
…or any number of targets that allow you to fulfill your business goals.
3) Implement SEO Tactics
If you skipped over steps 1 and 2, now is the time to go back. You simply can’t work on developing an SEO strategy that will prove effective until you’ve nailed down your business and marketing goals first. Seriously, don’t try.
Once you’ve done that, you can begin developing an SEO strategy that will actually accomplish your marketing goals, which will in turn accomplish your business goals.
As a result, your SEO strategy will be different than ours and even from those of your competitors. For example, your SEO strategy might include any of the following (or not):
- Ranking for keywords that are low in demand but high converting
- Getting traffic from higher-demand keywords that have low competition and are less focused on commerce
- Creating content that attracts links
5 Parts of Developing an SEO Strategy
Once you’ve built a solid foundation by following the first three steps above, then you can dig in and work on all the aspects of developing an SEO strategy.
You’ll need to perform some research that will help you determine the best course of action.
Create a document that defines your target audience, competitive research, keyword research, content strategy, and your goals and priorities.
Let’s walk through each of these now…
Target Audience
SEO is impossible if you don’t understand your target audience because those are the people you are marketing to and trying to attract.
Defining your target audience—and creating a customer avatar—means knowing their age, gender, geographic location, pain points (what they want and don’t want, what problems they have, what needs aren’t being met), and more.
You should be conducting primary and secondary market research through methods such as…
- Surveying your audience
- Reviewing focus group findings
- Examining infographics
- Pulling statistics from sites like Forrester, MarketResearch.com, and U.S Census Bureau
Once you know whom you are looking to attract, you can then research what websites are currently giving your target audience the results they are looking for in search.
Then, you can determine what you have to offer that no one else does so that you can legitimately steal traffic away from them. That may sound harsh, but that is what developing an SEO strategy is all about, isn’t it?
Competitive Research
Next, you’ll need to perform research on your competitors so that you know where you stack up and what gaps you can fill.
Do some Google searches and see who comes up. Look at their Google listings, content, reviews, and customer engagement.
You can look at their on-page SEO and the sites that are linking to them by using comparison tools such as SEMrush.
To see their traffic, you can use tools like Alexa or Nielsen.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is not an SEO strategy in and of itself. More marketers need to realize that. Rewriting meta details, backlinking, and making architectural changes is only part of an effective strategy.
And here’s another part of this that almost everyone gets wrong: You should do your keyword research based on what people are searching for, not on what you are selling.
You can’t get people to search for something they don’t know they are looking for, so make sure you know what your target audience knows. Are they aware of what you sell, or are they making “How to” searches to find the solution for a problem?
Once you have the main keywords that you want to rank for selected, you’ll need to find long-tail keywords (longer, more specific, and less competitive keywords) that relate to the main keywords. These strengthen your main keywords and provide content ideas for your content strategy as well.
Content Strategy
Having an effective content strategy is an absolute must when it comes to developing an SEO strategy that actually works. If you aren’t producing content consistently, your chances of ranking are slim to none.
And that content needs to consist of high-quality, relevant, valuable, useful information—no fluff.
It needs to be related to what you’re selling. Focus on answering all of the questions your target audience has about what you sell or the issue you solve. And use your long-tail keywords here!
Goals & Priorities
This is where you’ll decide which SEO tactics make the most sense for you to focus on based on the research you’ve done, the goals you’ve set, and the strategy you’ve developed.
Will you focus on buyer keywords? Should you target lower competition keywords? Do you need to put more time into on-page SEO or off-page SEO tactics? Do you need to up your content marketing game?
You can only answer these questions after you’ve done your homework first.
What SEO Can & Cannot Do
SEO has its limits, and you need to understand them when you are developing an SEO strategy.
Here’s what SEO can do when you have an effective strategy in place:
- Attract searchers that are currently looking for content, answers, products, etc.
- Determine how your brand will be seen in the search results
- Direct searchers to take specific actions and make certain queries that you want them to make
Here’s what SEO can’t do no matter how hard you try:
- Create or grow search demand by itself
- Build a brand by itself
- Convert customers directly
- Give you overnight results
Remember, SEO is a long game that can take years of consistent work to see results.
You need to earn links, engagement, and historical performance in the rankings. As you earn those things, you’ll grow your ranking—first for a few keywords, then for more competitive keywords, and then for harder keywords.
And it doesn’t end there. You’ll never “arrive” when it comes to SEO. You’ll always need to be further developing an SEO strategy that continues to work for you.
Takeaway
SEO is a lot of work, but it’s definitely worth it. If you do it right by developing an SEO strategy that is effective, you can build authority and create a more robust online presence. You’ll be bringing in organic traffic and qualified leads because you’ve earned it.
At Viral Solutions we are committed to seeing YOU succeed. It is our goal to grow your business with proven digital marketing strategies that will help your business for the long haul.
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