It’s the most wonderful time of the year - time to put together your annual marketing plan. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, your plan probably includes some elements of SEO marketing. But the digital landscape has changed a lot in the past five years. Is your SEO strategy up to date?
Whether you’re revisiting your strategy or just starting to build one, here’s a look at the three components of SEO strategy and how to tackle each one.
What does SEO marketing strategy mean when it comes to your overall marketing plan? You can’t achieve all your marketing goals with SEO alone, but it is a key part of your digital marketing strategy. Today, 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. SEO is a cost-effective way to capture some of that traffic and direct it to your website.
Depending on your perspective, there are hundreds of components you could include in your SEO strategy. We tend to group them into three main buckets:
Let’s take a look at these three categories and explore how you can apply each to your own SEO strategy.
While technical optimizations are ongoing in your SEO strategy, we tend to prioritize them first. Before you create any content, some factors are “table stakes” to play the SEO game at all. If these aspects of your website don’t meet standards, the chance of your content ranking will be seriously damaged.
Audit these technical SEO factors before you even think of deploying a content strategy.
When your website is in tip-top technical shape, you’re ready to think about content. To develop your SEO marketing strategy, start by identifying your content niche. What are your prospects’ pain points? What problems can you help them solve?
Next, use keyword tools like Google Trends and AnswerThePublic to research target keywords for your content. Competitor analysis can also help you decide which keywords to optimize for.
High-quality content is more likely to be ranked, and creating it is all about your reader. Google’s algorithm is just the middleman. Here are some quality indicators that Google looks for:
Once your content is polished up, don’t stop there! Amazing content doesn’t deserve to gather dust on page three of your blog. Instead, get eyeballs on your content by promoting it on your owned channels and earning backlinks from external publishers.
In addition to your website, you probably have some other online real estate - for example, your social media channels and your Google Business Profile. You should absolutely incorporate these into your SEO strategy.
Then, deploy your backlink strategy. Backlinks are one way search engines know that other users have found your content helpful. The best way to start earning backlinks is to create linkable content with data, quotes, and engaging media.
To synthesize these components into a comprehensive strategy, you need a prescriptive process. Here’s an SEO strategy example you can tailor to fit your own needs.
To determine how to optimize the technical side of your website, do a technical SEO audit. Here are some common first steps:
We know, you’re an expert at creating insightful and entertaining content! But building top-quality content for search algorithms is about more than that. Here are a few questions to include in your content checklist:
To make the most of your content and build backlinks, try these tips:
An excellent SEO strategy takes a holistic approach. Tackling these three components will help you ensure that your bases are covered from technical, content, and promotional perspectives.
If you said "hell yeah, who doesn't love a good checklist?!?" then you've come to the right place (and we should be friends).
