11 Steps To Creating A Conversation With Your SEO Strategy

In the world of online marketing, content creations and Search Engine Optimization, it can be difficult to keep on top of everything.

11 Steps to Creating A Conversation With Your SEO Strategy

Having a strong conversation with your SEO strategy will keep you up-to-date on your search engine rankings, the content you should be making and any changes you need to make to your marketing strategies. 

Not sure where to start? Below you’ll find 11 helpful steps to begin creating a conversation with your SEO strategy. You’ll never be in the dark again!

What Is An SEO Strategy?

The process of categorizing the content of a website in order to increase the possibility that it will show up in search results is known as an SEO strategy.

In essence, it’s the procedure you adhere to in order to enhance your chances of obtaining organic traffic from search engines.

It is crucial to have an SEO plan since it keeps you focused when producing content.

Your strategy will make sure that you produce material that people are searching for rather than simply producing what you believe they want to read.

An SEO plan is a vital component of content marketing since it determines how your material will be discovered in the first place, particularly in search engine result pages (SERPs).

Search engine bots will have a tougher time indexing your site, determining your area of expertise, and ranking your site pages if your information is dispersed and disorganized.

Benchmark Your Current SEO Performance 

Benchmarking your current SEO performance will create the perfect guide to look on back as your SEO Strategy improves.

Having a specific point to refer to not only allows you to see where changes can be made but you can identify the strong points of your strategy and how to engage them more effectively. 

Implementing this step every financial quarter or even bi-monthly will give you more information on your SEO strategy.

You can identify if you need to be more specific with your keywords, have a more direct marketing approach or include more external links within your website. 

You never know what the issue might be unless you take a look at the inner workings of the machine!

Analyze Your Competitors SEO Strategies 

Now that you have identified the strengths and weaknesses of your own SEO strategy, it’s time to take a look at your competitors.

Is their strategy successful? Are they missing something? This can give you an advantage in your SEO strategy. 

Once you have identified your competitors there are steps you can take to perform a SEO Competitive Analysis:

  • Evaluate Keyword Difficulty: It’s a good idea to evaluate the power of your SEO competition before you start looking at particular link-building tactics or on-page SEO. Although you can potentially outperform any rival for every niche and phrase, some keywords are simply impractical due to the amount of resources required.
  • Source New Keywords: Term frequency-inverse document frequency analysis or TF-IDF can be used to find low-competition keywords you might have overlooked or to correctly optimize your pages for search engines. This strategy gives direct, specific keywords you could be using to maximize the return on your SEO Strategy.
  • Study Site Content And Optimization: You will have a true trove of new material to work with if you use your competitive analysis tool to examine the on-site SEO of your rivals. You’ll discover how frequently they post content, the kinds of content they publish, and the keywords they’re focusing on. Focus on their Metadata,Headline Strategies, topic relevance, the types media they are producing, word counts and detail covered in their content.
  • Analyze Their Site And UX: Take a look at their user-experience methods throughout their site on desktop and mobile. Having an easier, faster user experience has shown improved search results.
  • Social Media: Social Media and SEO overlap in terms of strategy. With a good social media presence you’ll be able to increase website traffic, track brand mention and monitor user sentiment.
  • Competitor Ad Spend: Struggling to gain a competitive edge? Your competitors may be outspending you. Research their paid traffic campaigns to find out how much they are spending.

Set Your Goals And KPIs

Having specific goals and KPIs will give you a focus point whilst tweaking your strategy.

With a variety to choose from depending on your overall goal and the niche you specialize in, having the right KPIs could boost your SEO ranking. 

A few example of KPIs are:

  • Organic Traffic. This KPI counts the number of people who arrive at your website via organic search results.
  • ROI (Return on investment). You can use this to calculate the success of your marketing campaigns and how much you should be investing into your SEO Strategies. 
  • Bounce Rate. This indicator counts the proportion of site visitors who left without taking any further action.

Define Your Subtopic Keywords And Pillar Pages

A pillar page is the page on your site which covers your main topic in detail.

11 Steps to Creating A Conversation With Your SEO Strategy

For example, a hair salon will have a page dedicated to the services they offer and their prices.

This is the page where visitors can take the most action by purchasing goods and services or subscribing to your site. 

Subtopic keywords answer a particular query regarding the subject of your pillar page.

To increase traffic to your website, this piece of content ought to contain a link to your pillar page.

Find Long-Tail Keywords

Visitors are more inclined to employ long-tail keywords, which are longer and more specialized keyword phrases, when they are near a point of purchase.

Finding the right long-tail keywords can be crucial to improving your traffic.

For example when a customer is searching for a new mattress, they will begin by searching “mattress”.

Slowly becoming more specific as they search,e.g “memory foam mattress”. Having specific keywords which match your consumers needs are crucial.

Edit Existing Content

Before going out, wiping your site clean and creating brand new content.

Take a look at what you already have. It may just be a case of specifying a few keywords or creating a more enticing pillar page.

These small changes could increase your traffic and SEO ranking impressively. 

Another helpful tip when editing your content is to have a concise, straight to the point introduction.

The point should be made clear within the first 100-200 words without including too much fluff. 

Flesh Out Your Topic Clusters

A group of content assets on a website that are all concentrated on the same subject is known as a topic cluster (or content cluster).

Content from topic clusters delves deeper, and is more focused on a single topic.

Each topic cluster is formed around a piece of pillar content. Exploring subtopics or frequently asked questions about the main topic.

The topics will generally target less common keywords that have a strong relationship with the primary topic.

Topic clusters are consequently playing a larger role in many SEO specialists’ content strategies.

They demonstrate to Google that your website has a range of helpful, in-depth content regarding important themes in your sector. 

Although creating topic clusters on your website takes time, in the long run, it can help you demonstrate topical authority to consumers and Google, improving overall search ranks and generating more organic traffic.

In the short term, topic clusters can assist you in starting to drive traffic and rank for less competitive keywords.

You can rank for more competitive and desirable keywords once you have increased your site’s authority.

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO are the SEO factors that you can control on the webpage or the webpage code.

This can be the content itself, headlines and titles, images, title tags, meta descriptions, etc. 

Getting the right On-Page SEO structure will significantly improve your search engine visibility and increase organic traffic.

Whether this is through your content, or through internal links it’s important to appear trustworthy and knowledgeable about your niche to your visitors.

This will create a relationship where they keep coming back, further increasing your ranking. 

SEO tools such as Yoast are great ways to get your On-Page SEO down pat.

11 Steps to Creating A Conversation With Your SEO Strategy

They will guide you to creating keyword eccentric content and ensuring that meta description is alluring to a reader. 

Identify Technical SEO Issues

While you may have the correct keywords and an incredible pillar page filled with topic clusters, you might be missing out on one thing.

If there are any technical issues with your SEO, your traffic could be decreasing. 

Technical SEO issues could be: 

  • Poor Mobile Experience
  • Poor Navigation
  • Redirects not working 
  • Slow Page Loads

Any of these technical issues or others could be the reason you are not seeing the results you predicted.

Creating a seamless user experience is now one of the top priorities of SEO strategies.

As customers visit your site they are seeking a relaxed experience from first landing on your site to completing a sale.

Poor navigation and slow page loading could be costing you sales and traffic. Fixing out these kinks in your site could be the solution you are looking for. 

Off-Page SEO

We have mastered the art of on-page SEO but off-page SEO is just as important.

This pertains to the activity taking place outside of your website and can impact your ranking within the search engine results page (SERPs). 

Improving search engine and user impression of a site’s popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority is a part of optimizing for off-site ranking criteria.

This is done by having other trustworthy websites (pages, sites, persons, etc.) link to or promote your website, thus “vouching” for the value of your content.

This is where making industry connections can work in your favor. These so-called ‘friends’ will link your website and increase your SEO ranking and traffic. 

Refine Your Strategy 

Once completing all the above steps, it’s time to take a step back and look at what you’ve created. You can now benchmark your new SEO strategy and analyze.

Find out what works for your business and your SEO needs, either adding or taking steps away in order to create the best SEO strategy for your business. 

Taking time to view your full SEO strategy and all the individual elements will strengthen your conversation with your SEO and provide insight into where you are going right or where you are going wrong. 

Final Thoughts 

There you have it! 11 helpful steps to begin creating a conversation with your SEO Strategy.

You can begin gaining insight into the specific aspects of your website and where you can make changes. 

Whether it’s taking time to analyze the actions of your competitors looking closer to home for you on-page search engine optimization, you’ll witness an influx of traffic and SEO ranking as you begin conversing with your strategy. 

You can now start creating or improving your SEO strategy and begin climbing the ranks of your niche!

Justin Shaw