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If you want to create a successful SEO strategy in 2023 it should be for 2 reasons:
This must-read guide explains everything you need to know about creating a successful SEO Strategy from start to finish.
Let’s get started.
An SEO strategy is the process of planning and implementing how to optimise your website for increased visibility on search engines. It’s also about understanding how search engine marketing fits into your overall marketing plan.
A well-designed SEO strategy looks at your website’s current organic performance, sets out a plan on where you want it to be, and details the steps you should take to reach your SEO goals.
TL;DR Version: An SEO strategy is a process you follow to get more organic traffic and sales from search engines.
Here are the steps you should consider as part of your SEO strategy in 2023:
TL;DR Version: SEO goals should be focused on increasing sales and revenue, not growing traffic.
You’re here because you want more traffic, right?
Great!
But remember…not all traffic is created equal.
The quality of traffic you get makes a huge difference to the success of your SEO campaign.
While it sounds impressive to get thousands of visitors, if none of that traffic converts into sales then it’s almost pointless.
The best SEO strategies focus on increasing revenue NOT more traffic.
Let me explain…
Imagine you have 2 websites and each with a different SEO strategy.
Website A: Gets 500 visitors per month with 10% turning into a customer.
This SEO strategy is generating 50 sales each month for website A.
Website B: Gets 10,000 visitors per month with only 0.1% of visitors turning into customers.
Even though website B gets 1000 times more traffic, this SEO strategy is only generating 10 sales per month because they are too focused on increasing traffic without considering important factors like traffic quality and search intent.
The bottom line?
Set goals for getting more leads and sales and create an SEO strategy that focuses on increasing revenue instead of traffic to get the best results from your SEO service.
TL;DR Version: Choose ‘Sweet Spot’ keywords that have decent search volume but are not too competitive.
Keyword research forms the bedrock on which your SEO strategy will be built.
Choose the wrong keywords and you will attract the wrong type of people to your website.
Choose the right keywords and you’ll unlock a seemingly limitless amount of new customers you never knew existed before.
Keyword research is super critical to get right, so don’t rush and choose carefully.
Here’s a simple yet highly effective way of choosing the right keywords for SEO.
When it comes to keyword research, don’t choose keywords in isolation.
Your goal is to spot ‘themes’ and group similar keywords together.
For example:
Let’s say you’re choosing keywords for an online shoe store.
Keyword themes could include ‘running shoes’, ‘walking shoes’ and ‘tennis shoes’ if you sell those types.
You then want to find keywords that fall into each ‘keyword theme’ and bucket them together. So for ‘tennis shoes’ you might discover keywords like ‘Nike tennis shoes’, ‘women’s tennis shoes’ etc.
You’re now starting to build out topic based keywords which is the secret to great keyword research.
Once you’ve identified your ‘keyword themes’, it’s time to build out your keyword list and bucket them into the keyword theme’s you identified in step #1.
There are many different datasets and SEO tools for finding keywords and you should use as many as you can.
Pro-tip: Don’t rely on a single tool for keyword research.
Datasets available but not limited to you include:
Here’s how to build up an excellent keyword list:
For this example, I’ll use Ahrefs keyword explorer tool but as mentioned before, you should use multiple datasets.
Enter your ‘keyword themes’ from step #1 into your keyword research dataset.
2. Click on the ‘Having same terms’ option found on the left-hand menu.
Ahrefs will automatically generate a list of thousands of potential keywords.
Not all the keywords you find will be a good fit for you. Some keywords will be too competitive that you’ll never be able to rank, and others will not be worth chasing as they won’t bring in any sales.
You’re looking for ‘sweet spot keywords’, which are somewhere in the middle of all this.
When you get to this stage, you want to be strategic about your final keyword choices.
It’s all about finding that sweet spot between ‘too competitive’ and ‘not worth it’ keywords.
Identifying ‘Sweet Spot’ keywords is crucial and here’s how to do it:
During this step, you might discover some great keywords that don’t fit into any of your keyword themes. That’s ok, just note those down as important for now and something to address later.
For example, I run an ecommerce marketing agency that offers email marketing, but I don’t have a dedicated web page for it. So this might be a keyword theme I note down as essential, and I might want to address this by adding a new page during the content creation part of my SEO strategy.
Once you’ve found all your sweet spot keywords, it’s time to move onto the next phase of your SEO strategy, which is all about crafting winning content designed to get more organic traffic.
Keep reading.
TL;DR Version: Create content your target audience will value NOT for search engine bots.
Crafting winning content consists of 3 main components.
I’ll explain each component in detail below.
Understanding search intent is critical for crafting winning content.
Think about it…
If you don’t understand ‘why’ people are typing in your chosen keywords and ‘what’ they’re looking for, your content will never rank.
For example: Imagine someone searching for “mountain bike tips” on Google.
What’s the ‘why’ behind this keyword?
The person wants to improve their mountain biking skills.
It wouldn’t make sense to show them a review page listing the top 10 mountain bikes for sale…or an eCommerce product page selling mountain bikes.
This person is not looking to buy. They want more information to help improve their skills.
Search intent sounds simple but it can be a lot more complicated and you should spend some time thinking about each keyword you’ve chosen.
Pro tip: If you’re still not sure what the search intent is behind your keywords, don’t worry, an easy way to help you figure it out is to drop your keywords into Google and look at what types of results you see.
Here’s what comes up for ‘Mountain biking tips’:
Understanding and matching content with search intent is a vital component of crafting winning content and you need to get a good grasp of it.
Key takeaway: Perform a quick Google search before crafting any content. That way you’ll have a good understanding of what type of content and the search intent behind your target keywords.
“Publish Great Content.”
You’ve probably heard that many times before…
But what does it even mean and…(what does it look like)?
Short answer: Great content provides the best possible solution to a searcher’s query, without the added ‘fluff’.
And while there’s no proven success formula to “publishing great content”, there are some simple tips you can apply that can make all the difference:
Google is looking at UX signals more than ever to work out the quality of web pages.
This is because UX signals help Google figure out what content is most relevant to a particular search query based on how people interact and behave on different web pages.
Here are some must-know UX tips to lift your website’s user experience:
Use Google Analytics to see how much time people spend on your web pages. Are there any pages that have short session durations, for example, less than 15 seconds? If so, you may want to take a close look at these pages and if they’re important to your SEO campaign, work on improving them to lift session duration.
TL;DR Version: Focus on earning links through high quality content combine with a strategic email outreach campaign.
Putting together a link building strategy is all about making sure the elements NOT on your website are optimised.
And that means putting together a successful link building strategy that acquires high-quality links to your website.
The key to link building is to earn powerful backlinks and that doesn’t happen without mastering email outreach, stealing competitor links and writing high-quality guest posts.
Here are some link building strategies that work…
I want to share a link-building secret with you.
If you can master email outreach, you’re going to earn a lot of high-quality backlinks and give yourself a significant competitive advantage of your competition.
Why?
It’s because most people either avoid email outreach altogether or underestimate the effort required to pull it off successfully.
Here’s the crazy part…
Email outreach isn’t that hard to do, but it does mean work and you’re going to have to get used to being rejected. With that said, it’s still worth it.
How a simple email outreach process that works:
Important: Before you jump in and hit send on that first outreach email, your website needs to have at least one linkable asset. This is a non-negotiable because nobody is going to link to your landing or sales pages.
Linkable Asset: A linkable asset is a piece of content strategically designed to attract backlinks, it could be a super detailed blog post, in-depth data study or ego-bait style post.
If you’re trying to build links to a new website or are against some stiff competition, it can often feel overwhelming and hard to know where to begin with building links.
Remember: A big reason your competitors are already ranking is that they’ve built some high-quality backlinks to their website.
And the good news is you can often grab a lot of those links too.
Here’s how:
Step 1 – Go to Google and enter one of the keywords you want to rank for. Take a look at the top 3 search results:
In terms of your overall link building strategy, these websites represent your biggest competition and we want to kick off our link building by replicating as many of their links as possible.
Step 2 – Grab the URL of those top 3 sites and paste them into Ahrefs site explorer. Then click on the ‘backlinks’ menu found on the left-hand side.
By default, Ahrefs will show you the highest quality backlinks your competitors have at the top of the list (see image below).
Step 3 – Look at how your competitors built those backlinks.
For example: When I click on the 4th backlink from the image above, I can see that they acquired this DR 70+ link by posting a short article on a local community forum.
And I know from experience that forum links are easy to acquire.
All you would do is sign-up to the same community, write a helpful article like your competitor did and include a link back to your website.
Pro-tip: Not all of your competitor’s links will be as easy to get as the example above, but don’t worry. Spend some time investigating how they built backlinks and focus on getting as many of the same links as you possibly can.
What if you don’t have any linkable assets on your website but still need high powered backlinks?
Then guest posting is a great strategy.
Here’s the thing…
Like any link building strategy, the golden rule is always ‘quality over quantity’.
And that’s no different for guest posting.
So, focus your guest posting efforts on authoritative websites relevant to your niche. And if you’re not having much luck at first, don’t worry, start with some smaller websites that accept guest posts willingly. After you’ve published 1 or 2 quality guest posts on smaller sites, you can use these examples to sell yourself when pitching larger sites.
Here’s a proven guest post outreach template that works:
Email Subject: Blog content ideas for [insert their website name]
Hello [Name]
I would love to be a contributor to your blog.
[One sentence about yourself]
I’m happy to share my insights, failures and successes on [Broad topic you want to write about].
Here’s a couple of my recent articles I’ve written recently:
[Article One]
[Article Two]
I Look forward to hearing back from you and if interested, I’ll be happy to share some specific topic ideas I think would be an excellent fit for your site.
Thanks!
[Your Name]
TL;DR Version: Use both Google Analytics & Google Search Console to track the performance of your SEO strategy.
Paying close attention to how your SEO strategy is impacting your website helps you to not only identify future opportunities but uncover any problems that might be holding your site back.
And if you’re implementing an SEO strategy for a client, they’re going to want to see how the plan is performing regularly.
Here are some performance KPI’s to track when implementing an SEO strategy.
Google Analytics is the best tool for monitoring your sites organic traffic.
Not only is it accurate, but it’s also packed full of useful data including traffic behaviour, conversions, total visitor numbers plus lots more.
Here are instructions on how to monitor your campaigns organic traffic:
Comparing previous months will give you a good sense about how your SEO strategy is performing as you should notice organic traffic increasing over time.
Google Search Console (GSC) is another excellent tool for measuring your SEO strategy.
With GSC, you can dive a little deeper to get a better understanding of exactly which keywords are driving the most traffic to your site.
Step 1 – Open the Google Search Console dashboard, navigate to the performance tab found on the left-hand side and select the ‘Date’ filter.
You want to compare monthly traffic improvements to see which keywords are bringing the most traffic.
Step 2 – Change the filter and compare different date ranges.
Now you can see which keywords are driving the most traffic to your site and track the keyword performance as it changes over time.
For example: Keywords showing a positive difference means that rankings are improving and it’s a good sign your strategy is working.
But..if you see negative intervals, that means you’ll want to look closely at that keyword to analyse how you can make improvements and where your SEO campaign is falling short.
Now you have all the steps needed to create an effective SEO strategy.
It’s over to you.
Which part of the strategy did you find helpful?
Or…was there something I missed?
Let me know in the comments below now.
Jonathan Gorham is the co-founder of Engine Scout and a passionate digital marketer, focusing on topics surrounding ecommerce marketing, SEO, and web design. He's based in Melbourne, Australia, and when he's not working, you'll find him relaxing with family or hanging out with friends. Connect with him on Twitter or LinkedIn.
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3 Responses
Hi Jon, I went through the post in detail and I really found it helpful for people who are getting started. I like how you have showed all the example in the post.
Thanks for that, glad you found it helpful 🙂
Really I read it fully to the end and I got great things to better my seo off page techniques. thanks for sharing with us.