Marketing is everything in the world of business, and a major part of any marketing strategy is SEO. However, it’s not enough to just incorporate SEO into your marketing campaigns and content creation.
Google changes it’s algorithm roughly 500-600 times every year. For this reason, you should not just incorporate SEO into your marketing, but actually, build an SEO strategy.
An effective SEO strategy will not only increase organic traffic to your business and increase conversion rates, but it will also be able to adapt and last. Never becoming stale or out of date.
Keep reading for tips on how to properly build a successful SEO strategy to give your business the best chance possible at beating out the competition!
Choose Topics for Content Creation
The very first step in building your SEO strategy is to research trending topics associated with your product or service. You can be sure to choose the best trending topics through keyword research or checking out the competition.
Keyword Research
Think of words or terms associated with your product or service. For example, if you repair windows, you might consider terms like window repair, window replacement, etc.
Once you think of several terms associated with your business, head on over to Google’s keyword planner. Keyword planner is part of their Adword service, you will need to create an account, but you won’t need to spend any money. So don’t worry.
Load your related terms into the search bar of the Keyword Planner and begin looking through the results. Pay attention to the ones that have high traffic volume. Those are the words you’ll want to use to build your topics around.
Many SEOs utilize several tools in order to ensure a good overall picture of the keyword landscape. If you have it in your budget, it would be advisable to try out some of these tools. Some popular tools for keyword research include MOZ & Ahrefs. There are additional tools that can help you develop strategy around backlink anchor text opportunities like Linkio.
The Competition
Another way to find trending topics associated with your product or service is to see what the competition is using.
Search for competing companies and see what they are writing about. Find out what topics seem to work well amongst your competitors and incorporate those topics in a new way into your own content.
There are also tools, such as SEMRush, that allow you to analyze your competitors. This helps you to view their top performing pages and determine how they did it.
Research Keywords for Each Topic
Once you’ve determined a few topics to start with, it’s time to begin choosing the focus keywords for these topics. To do this, you’ll head back over to Google’s Keyword Planner or any of your favorite keyword research tools.
The initial keywords you searched for when choosing your topics are what’s known as short-tail keywords. During this phase, you’ll be choosing long-tail keywords.
Long-tail keywords are more detailed keywords that help guide potential customers to your specific content or page. Going back to the first example of a window repair company, for a long-tail keyword you might choose tinted window repair or car window repair.
Run topic through the keyword research tool and sift through the results to find the best long-tail keywords that are trending.
Create Pages for Each Topic
Once you’ve determined the long-tail keywords for your topics, the real fun begins. Creating pages for each of your topics.
Ideally, you want to have a separate page for each of your chosen topics using the long-tail keyword as the focus keyword. This is where you’ll begin to put your SEO strategy into practice.
You have a choice of what each page is going to be. The pages should be a mixture of website content pages and landing pages.
Landing pages are pages that aren’t on your website but contain a specific call to action or CTA for potential leads. For example, a landing page might give a brief description of a service you offer and instruct the viewer to contact you for more information or a free quote.
These pages are important as they help to generate leads and can greatly increase conversion rates.
Develop a Blog
Another important aspect of your SEO strategy is to develop a blog your site. Company blogs help to grant your site authority within Google and increase the chances of your site appearing high in the search engine results.
You can use the same topic creation and long-tail keyword strategies you used for your site and landing pages, for your blog. This will help ensure your articles contain the proper focus keywords and trending topics to be ranked.
To provide your site authority within Google’s search algorithm, you will need to post weekly. However, don’t over publish articles on your blog. You really only want to publish around one or two articles a week.
Over-saturating the search engines with articles will actually hurt your SEO instead of helping it.
Be Innovative in Your Strategy
Above all else with your SEO strategy be innovative. Look at what others are doing on their pages and begin thinking of ways to think outside the box and create something different.
However, be sure to focus on SEO. You don’t want to lose the great content you’ve created behind website design.
Think of new ways to display your contact forms and incorporate SEO into those forms, as well as your ‘about me’ page and any other page. This will give you a leg up on your competition and generate more organic traffic.
Which of course is the goal of SEO, generating that organic traffic.
Continue to Audit and Update Your SEO Strategy
Now that you’ve got the foundation for a solid SEO strategy for your business, there is only one piece of advice left. Always stay on top of the latest trends in SEO, audit your own pages, and update where necessary.
You may even wish to consider hiring an SEO expert for your business to take over once you’ve established a good strategy to use.
This will ensure your pages continue to rank high amongst search engine results, and your site is considered to be an authority on your product or service.
SEO is the lifeblood of any marketing strategy and requires research, time, and patience to get right. For more information on incorporating SEO into your marketing strategy or for a free SEO audit of your site contact us today!
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