How to develop an effective SEO strategy
If 2020 has taught us one thing, online visibility and awareness of your business are crucial. The COVID 19 pandemic has kept people indoors more than usual, giving businesses a guaranteed online audience.
If your company has implemented an effective SEO advertising strategy, those searching for your products or services online are much more likely to find your business during the pandemic.
Aside from the pandemic, the trend already shows that more people search for products and services online than ever before, especially on mobile devices. To ensure your business appears at or near the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) attracts more organic traffic, and increases sales to improve your ROI, you need a solid, multi-faceted SEO strategy.
An SEO strategy is a broad-based plan that focuses on the big picture and consists of different facets and tasks that all work together to achieve your overall goals of better visibility and increased traffic, which ultimately leads to increased revenue.
The start of the new year is an excellent time to evaluate your current SEO strategy, revisit your online marketing goals, and determine how well your SEO strategy is meeting those goals. If you find that your SEO strategy is not meeting your goals o are not satisfied with the results, you can revise your SEO strategy for 2022.
When creating your SEO strategy for 2022, you should consider your budget, goals, and the timeframe for achieving your goals. If you don’t have the sources within your company to properly implement and handle your SEO campaign, you can collaborate with a digital marketing agency like SEO Bea.. Our SEO specialists will create and carry out a search engine optimization approach to achieve your advertising and marketing objectives. Also, we will constantly check and also track results.
The following tips will help you develop an effective SEO strategy for 2022
1.Evaluate your SEO performance
Before you develop your SEO strategy for 2022, you should first evaluate your current SEO strategy and its performance. You should evaluate your website’s organic visibility, keyword rankings, and the split between branded and unbranded traffic. Several tools, such as the SEMrush Organic Research Tool, can show you this data.
With this tool, you can see the efficiency of your natural website traffic and keyword rankings over time. You can easily see trends and get an overview of the performance of each of these metrics. The breakdown between branded and non-branded traffic will show you if there are opportunities to connect with a portion of your audience searching for your brand.
By taking these metrics into account and data from Google Analytics, including your conversion rates and revenue, you’ll get a general idea of how your website is performing from an SEO standpoint. It will also help you quickly identify weaknesses that your new SEO strategy can incorporate.
2.Perform a search engine optimization evaluation of your competitors
As soon as you have evaluated your existing SEO efficiency, it would help if you analyzed your competitors’ SEO strategies. That will give you an idea of what works and what doesn’t for them and where you can gain an advantage.
Start by making a checklist of your top competitors, including competitors in your service area and competitors that regularly appear high in the SERPs for your most important keywords. Several tools can provide you with this information about your competitors, including the SEMrush tool mentioned above and SpyFu.
When analyzing your competitors’ SEO, you should pay attention to which pages get the most traffic, how well their keywords rank, and their link profiles.
Knowing which of their pages ranks best will help you determine what content you should add to your site to improve your ranking, whether the top-ranking pages are blogs, product pages, or other pages. By analyzing keyword rankings, you can determine if your competitors are ranking for keywords you are not. That will help you identify opportunities to improve your keyword rankings.
Analyzing the link profile of your competitors’ websites will help you understand where their backlinks are coming from and how big the link gap is between their websites and your domain. It can help you develop your link-building strategy to build a solid backlink profile.
3.Determine your online advertising goals
The next step is to identify the goals you want to achieve with your SEO strategy and the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will measure your progress toward those goals. Articulating your specific goals will help you shape your SEO strategy to achieve those goals and measure success. For instance, if your goal was to increase sales by a certain amount in 2022, organic traffic to your website can be a KPI for the success of that goal. Therefore, part of your SEO method will be to increase natural traffic.
4.Define the most important keywords and topics
Once your digital marketing goals are defined, it’s time to conduct keyword research to determine your most important keywords. Then, you can target your primary keywords by creating what are called pillar pages.
A pillar page targets one main topic or idea and is supported by topic clusters based on a subset of topics from the main page. For example, a company that deals with damage restoration may have a pillar page on “Damage Restoration.” Topic clusters derived from “disaster restoration” include the different types of disaster restoration services (water damage restoration, fire damage restoration, etc.), each of which has its page.
You can develop more targeted content and keyword strategy by determining your primary keywords for your pillar pages, topic clusters, and secondary clusters.
In addition to topic clusters, you can set up secondary clusters to support each topic cluster. In the same example, a page with the topic cluster “Water Damage Restoration” could lead to secondary cluster pages with the topics “Basement Flooding” and “Wastewater Restoration.” With this strategy, you can focus on ensuring that your pages rank well for all topics related to your primary keywords. That is more effective than focusing on ranking for individual keywords.
5.Identify relevant long-tail keywords
When developing your cluster content strategy, you can create as many clusters as possible around a specific pillar. In some cases, the scope of the central pillar will determine how many topic clusters you can create. The more collection topics you come up with, the more depth you can add to your website.
Your cluster topic pages should concentrate on a particular aspect of the central topic and focus on appropriate long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are more particular than the main keywords and consist of three or more words. These keyword phrases generally have a lower search volume than the main keywords from which they are derived.
Why are long-tail keywords so important? First, identifying relevant long-tail keywords helps you identify deeper topics of interest. Going back to our previous example: If remediation services provider identifies “how does basement flooding happen” as a long-tail keyword under the “water damage” topic cluster, they can capitalize on it by creating and publishing a blog about the causes of basement flooding.
Long-tail keywords are important because people use long-tail keyword phrases in voice search queries – someone is more likely to say “how does basement flooding happen” in a voice search query than simply “basement flooding.” Therefore, if you include these long-tail keywords in your content, you can better optimize your website for voice search queries.
Finally, when creating content that focuses on long-tail keywords, make sure that you create different content for each long-tail keyword and that there is no overlap.
6.Review the current content on your website
Now that you’ve developed your strategy for content, keywords, and topic clusters, take the time to review the existing content on your site before adding new content. Auditing your existing content will help you identify content that can improve and work with the newly defined topic clusters.
When reviewing your content, you should divide existing content into content that should retain, updated to match better relevant keywords, and content that should delete. You should delete duplicated content, too short or has a poor ranking.
Reviewing the current content on your site before creating new content can conserve a great deal of work. Updating existing content to target your keywords better will affect your site faster than creating new content. Identifying ways to improve existing content will help you build your content creation plan.
7.Create content for column pages and topic clusters
Now that you’ve determined your pillar pages, cluster pages, and secondary cluster pages, it’s time to start creating content. The content of your web pages is crucial to the overall performance of your website.
You need to make sure that you create quality, informative content that will be useful to your target audience. The research study you did in the previous steps to identify your subject clusters and long-tail vital words tell you what type of content will be valuable for your website.
8.Improve on-page SEO
After you’ve created the content for your web pages, you need to make sure that each page is optimized correctly. That includes optimizing the title tags, meta descriptions, header tags (H1, H2, and H3), and the content with the keywords you want. You should also ensure that all internal links on your website are working and deal with broken links.
You can evaluate the efficiency of these on-page search engine optimization elements with tools like thesaurus on-page SEO tracker. CMS systems like WordPress also offer suggestions for improving on-page SEO.
9.Fix technical SEO errors
Technical SEO issues like slow loading speeds and broken internal links can affect your ranking. You must regularly check your website for technical SEO issues and fix the most significant problems you find. Several tools can use to identify these issues. By checking your website once a month, you can quickly find and fix these issues before impacting your rankings.
10.Work on off-page SEO
Once your website is established and optimized with new content around your pillars and topic clusters, you need to focus on building off-page links. It is essential because backlinks are one of Google’s three main factors determining your website’s ranking.
There are many ways to build off-site links, such as publishing press releases on third-party websites, submitting guest posts to blogs, posting on social media, building links on resource pages, etc.
11.Track and adjust your SEO strategy
SEO is an ongoing process, and there are always ways to adjust your campaign to achieve your goals better. Now that you’ve implemented your SEO strategy, you need to track your KPIs and adjust to get the best results. You should also track and record your KPI data monthly to ensure your SEO strategy is on track.
12. SEO Marketing Services from SEO Bea
By following the steps above, you can create and implement an effective SEO strategy to help you achieve your digital marketing goals. Remember to constantly review your KPIs after implementing the strategy to track your progress toward your goals and make adjustments as necessary.
If you do not have the internal resources to create, implement and track an SEO strategy, contact our experts at SEO Bea. Our SEO experts will work directly with you to understand your online marketing goals and implement an SEO strategy that works toward your goals. We will also track the progress of your SEO strategy and provide you with monthly reports to keep you informed.
You can call SEO Bea at UK: +44 (0) 844 995 1012 USA: +1 650 318 6296 or submit a contact form to learn how our SEO experts can help you.
Read More: The five pillars of content marketing