The Ultimate Guide to SEO Strategy
These days most businesses understand the basic elements of SEO and why they’re significant. But what drives rankings in organic search in 2022 is largely the same as it has been for the past decade or so. And that is creating great content and links. Some SEO experts believe that today’s SEO focuses on traffic in lieu of rankings, and topics in lieu of keywords.
So without further ado, let’s dive deep into building a successful SEO strategy.
Step 1: Set up your site in Google Search Console
The first step in building a successful SEO strategy is to set up your site on Google Search Console. It’s a free tool that gives you an incredible amount of information about your site’s search performance. If you’re not set up already, follow this in-depth guide on how to get started on Google Search Console laid out by Google.
Step 2: Define Your Audience
Who are you talking to? Do you have several different types of customers, do you want to sell to all of them or just one?
Thinking about and defining who your target market is going to help determine which keywords you aim to rank for. Defining your audience also helps you to decide what kind of content you want to create. Get inside your audience’s head, listen to your customers. What are their pain points? What do they love to see? What information or insights can you give them that they can’t get anywhere else?
If you know your audience you’ll be able to clearly define what action you want them to take after interacting with your content.
Step 3: Do Your Keyword Research
When figuring out what keywords to target, first you need to divide them into two groups.
- The keywords you’re already targeting
- The keywords you’re not already targeting
We recommend using a tool like Ahrefs, ubersuggest or Google keyword planner to analyze your website’s keyword rankings and overall SEO health.
Use a tool such as ubersuggest to identify which keywords you’re ranking for, and target these as ‘easy wins’ first. If your website has been around for a long time, there’s a good chance that making some adjustments to pages that already rank for certain keywords could make a huge impact on your traffic.
Find what works for your competitors
Once you’ve figured out what keywords you already target, you need to look for the ones you’re missing out on. It is also called competitive gap analysis. Using semrush’s ‘Competing Domains’ tool you can generate a list of all the keywords your direct and indirect competitors rank for and exclude the ones you rank for. By following this process, you’ll be left with a list of keywords to target and build out strong content for.
Step 4: Optimize Your On-Page SEO
So far, you’ve taken all the steps necessary to create a solid technical foundation for your website. You’re now ready to start creating new content.
Your main goal in this step is to create in-depth content that provides solutions to your audience’s problems. As far as Google is concerned, the longer your content – the better. After completing step 3, you should now have a comprehensive list of keywords to which you can cater your content. Below we’ve outlined our recommendations for the On-Page SEO techniques you’ll need to abide by to make sure each of your web pages is set up for optimal performance.
Optimize your title tags, meta descriptions, sitemap & schema
These little tasks have a big impact on how your pages rank. For a WordPress site, it is recommended to use a plugin like Rank Math to sort out these nitty gritty’s.
Title Tag
A widely accepted saying in the advertising world is that on average, five times as many people read the headline as they do the body copy.
You’ll want to make sure your title tag is written in a compelling way so that the user wants to click it. Here is the formula Rank Math recommends for crafting title tags:
- Put your target keyword at the beginning of the title tag.
- Add an action word (optional) such as ‘learn’, ‘see’, ‘discover’ or transactional words like ‘buy’, ‘try’, or ‘get’.
- Add a power element or word to evoke strong emotion. Words like ‘amazing’, ‘success’, #1 Rated’.
- Include a number in your title tag. For example, ‘7 easy ways to clean your bathroom’ sounds more enticing than ‘how to clean your bathroom.’
- End with your brand or site title.
Meta Description
The optimal length for a meta description is between 100-150 characters. Any longer than 150 characters is usually cut off by Google. A good meta description will be long enough to accurately describe the page, but short enough to be easy to read.
Create Your Sitemap
A sitemap is a blueprint of your website that helps search engines locate, crawl and index all of your website’s content. Sitemaps also tell search engines which of your website pages are most important.
If you use WordPress, there’s a suite of sitemap-generating plugins you can choose from.
Submit Your Sitemap to Google Search Console
Enabling Schema
Don’t repeat your FAQs
In 2020, Google updated its content guidelines for its FAQ schema and declared that gone are the days where you can repeat the same question and answer on multiple pages on your site.
It’s important that you ensure that if you have the same question and answer throughout multiple FAQ pages on a single site, you remove the markup from all but one of the pages in question.
Think about the user experience of your website
Optimizing your On-Page SEO is also about making sure your pages are easy to navigate. Generally speaking, if users are landing on your page, only to immediately return back to the SERP, that’s a signal of a negative user experience. You’ll want to make sure that it’s easy for users to find what they’re looking for. Take a look at what pages are currently ranking for the keywords you want to target and use the overall layout of the content as a guide.
To get the whole 8 steps in this guide, click here and sign up for the FREE SEO strategy and guide in 2022.