How To Come Up With A Successful SEO Strategy
SEO or, Search Engine Optimization, is the process of optimizing your website to rank better among search engines. If you do a Google search you’re guaranteed to find thousands of articles on how to rank higher in Google. However, most of these articles will only talk about the technicalities of ranking and not how to set up and actual SEO strategy.
Having a good strategy will set up the perfect foundation for success as well as give you a path forward to measure how you are actually ranking in comparison to your goals. Anyone can optimize a site to look better in the eyes of Google. Adding title tags, meta descriptions and your H tags have become second nature to most people. However, in this day and age, you need to strategize and plan ahead before digging in and adding changes to your site.
Start By Coming Up With A Keyword Strategy Flow
First, you are going to want to pick a main topic for your business or website. For us, it’s internet marketing, for someone who owns a construction company, obviously, it would be construction. While this may seem too obvious and broad at first, there is a method to our madness.
The rest of your site should flow off of this main keyword and support it entirely. Your home page, which will have the strongest amount of authority, should be focused on this main keyword with all other pages supporting it. We recommend supporting it with relevant content, categories, which can spiral off into relevant pieces to your main keyword. Be wary not to spiral off track or Google will not understand the main focus of your website. This will have a negative affect on your overall rankings. Below is an example with our website on how we like to structure things:
As you can see subsequent pages support your target focus and will always link back to it providing authority. Using our construction example, your main keyword is construction but supporting categories and pages could include remodeling, contracting, etc.
Next, Choose Concrete, Achievable Keywords
The second thing you’re going to want to do is take a look at your business from a customers point of view. What would you customers be searching to find your product or service? If you provide internet marketing services like we do, would your customers be searching for something like “internet marketing services” or “internet marketing services {pick a region}”?
On the plus side the second one is more targeted and easier for you to rank for. This will likely get you the quality customers you are looking for. The negatives are if you are in too small of a region, very few people may be searching for it. If not many people are searching for your keyword, it will not give you the traffic you desire.
The first, is very broad which will have more competition and be difficult to rank for. This will also take a lot of time and there’s not guarantee you will ever be able to achieve it. On the plus however, if you do end up ranking for it, you will get a large stream of traffic. Although it may not be quality that amount of organic traffic is sure to get you business.
Great! But How Do We Research The Happy Medium Keywords?
You are next going to have to research relevant keywords to your industry and gauge what’s called “keyword volume”. Keyword volume is the number of people who type in that keyword per month on a search engine. The higher the volume, the more difficult to rank.
There are dozens of tools that will allow you to gauge keyword volume. My personal favorite comes straight from the horses mouth though. I am particularly fond of using Google Adwords for researching keywords. Signing up is easy, free, and it allows you gauge just how many people are searching for your keywords. Please ensure though, that you pause your first sample ad that they force you to create when you sign up. Otherwise, your ad will become live and you will get charged since a card is required!
Once your account is all set up in the top right select “tools and settings”. If you do not see it there, you will need to click “switch to expert mode” and do so before it will appear. It should look like the image below:
Once here, you can add keywords you would like to see like so…
And then see all the monthly volume for your keywords! You can even see suggestions to give you ideas going forward. In addition, they show trends regarding seasons, and much more!
If you do not want to use this method for gauging your plan there are many paid options that give you great strategies to work with. My personal favorite of paid keyword research is Agency Analytics. It’s a little overkill as to what it offers but it’s still got good data for research.
What’s Next In Your SEO Strategy?
Once you’ve got your flow and keywords picked out you are not ready for implementation. By this point you should know how your sitemap is going to flow and which keywords to add throughout your site.
This implementation is known as “on page SEO” and exactly how to do that will be covered in another article. For questions or concerns on how to plan an SEO strategy leave a comment below or get directly in contact with us and we would be more than happy to answer any questions for you!