Today, SEO is far more complicated than the days when choosing a few keywords and having a decent website would cut it. With an increase in online content, advanced web indexing and robust search engine algorithms, your SEO strategy needs to be multifaceted and thorough, covering everything from website infrastructure to quality of content and targeted marketing.
While it may seem complicated, creating a good SEO plan is easier than you’d think. It’s also invaluable and necessary for a successful online presence.
Build your strategy around these 5 key points:
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Have a Game Plan
Every great strategy begins with a solid game plan, and in every great game plan you need to know about two things:
- What you’re working with, and
- What you’re up against
Do an SEO audit, backlink audit, and content and content and conversion audit to find potential weak spots in your site and to see how you’re currently performing. Find areas that need improvement and note them.
Conduct research on your audience to find out what they want. Check out your competitors to see what’s working for them.
Create clear goals and objectives to tackle.
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Analyze
Turn your web traffic into conversions by analyzing important pages on your website to determine how well the overall user experience is. Pay extra attention to important pages where people sign up, buy, contact you and make their first impressions.
Look at key metrics to see what’s working and what needs to be improved.
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Include Quality Content
Quality content not only earns trust with customers, but it also keeps your site ranking well with search engines. Aim for consistency, the highest quality and a variety of content outlets.
Create blog content, ads, infographics, photos and other forms of content depending on the nature of your business and what your audience would pay attention to and appreciate.
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Optimize
This is where you fine-tune your site and make everything in line with, if not better than, best practices.
Optimization tends to be data-heavy and fueled by analytics. Pay attention to bad backlinks, title tags, metadata, internal links, app optimization, penalty removal and other SEO ranking factors.
You’ll end up with a fast-loading site that has relevant, quality content and is easily picked up by search engines.
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Build Connections and Trust
SEO is really all about trust and proving to your audience and Google’s algorithm that your site is an authority in its field.
Create a strategy that builds trust in your brand while also building connections and relationships.
Whether through acquiring authoritative links, guest posting on relevant sites, syndicating content and using social media to expand your reach, building consistent and quality connections is important for your SEO.
By having a solid game plan, fine-tuning your infrastructure, analyzing your site to see where you’re currently at and where you need to go, and by building a base of quality content and connections that speak to your customers, you’ll rank high in search engines and as an authority in your industry.
