What Is a SEO Strategy?

In this post, you’ll discover how we’ve achieved:

• +100% growth in sales-qualified leads while reducing ad spend to $0.
• 100+ posts ranking on the #1 page of Google
• 1,300+ growth in traffic

…and how can you do the same for your website too. 

In fact, you’ll learn everything there is about SEO strategy, how to create one, and a few secret tips to help you stand out and rank on the #1 page of Google.

(we will even give you our exclusive SEO strategy template for FREE.)

Let’s get started.

What is a SEO Strategy & Why is it Important?

SEO strategy is a set of actions that will improve your rankings and the visibility of your website in search engine results pages (SERPs.)

(helping you get more traffic and potential leads to your website.)

The SEO strategy consists of these parts:

• Goal setting
• Target audience identification
• Competitor analysis 

…and so much more that you will discover later in this in-depth guide.

SEO strategy is also super cost-effective – eliminating any costs you have to pay for each click a customer makes with PPC ads which get mostly ignored.

That’s right, 70 to 80% of paid advertisement is ignored by searchers, leading to huge revenue loss.

Understanding The Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization may seem scary at first.

However, if you know what you’re doing and execute the strategy properly, you can achieve spectacular results such as:

• 100% growth in sales-qualified leads
• 1,300+ growth in traffic

That’s precisely what we have achieved with 10+ of our clients – across various hyper-competitive industries and markets.

To make your efforts as effective as possible, we’ll divide the SEO in four parts. 

• On-page SEO 
• Off-page SEO
• Technical SEO 
• Local SEO

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is focused on optimizing individual web pages to improve rankings and drive organic traffic to your website. 

This includes things such as:

• Creating SEO-friendly content to provide value for your readers
• Adding internal links and structuring your content properly for the best experience
• Optimizing title tags and meta descriptions for the best click-through rate in the SERP

Off-page SEO

To optimize your off-page SEO, you will need to focus on things that are not on your website. 

This type of search engine optimization is super counter-intuitive. In fact, most professionals in the industry are often confused by it.

…and that’s why we create an SEO template for link building with our tried-and-true strategies.

The off-page SEO strategies revolve around:

• Increasing customer base via social media marketing
• Boosting website authority by building high-quality backlinks
• Maximizing brand awareness by leveraging Influencer marketing

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the process of optimizing a website for search engines, but it can also include activities meant to improve user experience.

(which is one of the most ROI activities out there.)

Source: UX Design

Here are some of the strategies of the technical SEO:

• Improving website speed to minimize bounce rate
• Ensuring mobile-friendliness for the best experience on each device
• Implementing schema markup to help search engine better understand your website

Local SEO

Local search engine optimization is a branch of SEO that focuses on optimizing a website to be found in local search results.

This is super-important since local searches have a huge sales potential.

Leveraging local SEO strategies usually involve:

• Crafting service pages with location-based keywords
• Optimizing Google My Business profile for the highest rankings
• Building local citations & reviews to establish credibility and brand awareness

Building an SEO Strategy – The Key Components:

Now let’s build a proper SEO strategy together.

Goal Setting

Stealing website traffic from your competitors, generating more leads, or increasing revenue?

You have to set the right goals in order to maximize the effectiveness of your SEO strategy. The wrong goals can completely destroy your efforts.

Here are a few BAD EXAMPLES of the goals you should not set:

• Increase traffic
• Improve brand awareness
• Get to the #1 page of Google

All of these are not specific, timely-bound, or measurable.

Instead, you should use the SMART formula for goal setting and maximize the chances of achieving all of your goals.

As you can see, your goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.

Source: Fossil Consulting

Here are a few examples of the SMART goals:

• 500+ Increase in monthly traffic in the next 3 months
• Rank on the #1 page of Google for 100+ traffic keyword in 6 months

While it’s important to set ambitious goals, make sure they are achievable. 

10X your traffic in 3 months would be nice, but it’s almost impossible to achieve – which can lead to demotivation and frustration. 

Also, make your goals relevant to your overall business objectives. For instance, if your business objective is to penetrate new markets, your SEO goal might be to create content for a specific niche and track it separately from the rest of the increased traffic.

Target Audience Identification

Personalization is one of the most important things for maximizing user experience.

Source: Outgrow

In order to provide the most relevant experience, you have to know precisely who your target audience is and what their pain points and preferences are. One way of aligning your strategy to your target audience is by creating target personas.

To create a target persona profile, you will first have to conduct market research by identifying the readers who are most likely to engage with your content and become customers. 

You can then tailor your approach to meet their needs. 

You can easily do that with the Make My Persona tool from HubSpot.

It’s a FREE tool that lets you create your ideal buyer’s persona in a very clear manner, so you can know exactly who to align your content to.

Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis is about figuring out what your competitors do, building something better, and leaving them in the dust.

It involves doing things, such as:

• Researching major competitors
• Implementing stronger business strategies
• Warding off competitors

To get started with competitor analysis, you will need an SEO tool such as SEM Rush.

Conducting Competitor Analysis

The first step is to create a list of your competitors. Think about the websites that rank high or often for your main target keywords.

If you’re not sure who your competitors are, you can use the Market Explorer tool.

The Market Explorer tool automatically visualizes a list of significant players in your niche with the Growth Quadrant.

There are four types of categories your competitors fall under.

1. Niche players.
2. Game changers.
3. Leaders.
4. Established players.

You can hover over each entry to see their direct traffic, search traffic, and more.

Decide Who NOT to Compete With

To identify which sites aren’t your competitor, consider factors like current ranking, resources, and time investment. It may not be worth trying to outrank sites like Wikipedia or Pinterest for specific keywords.

Instead, focus on the competitors that can impact your traffic the most. These will likely be the websites that contribute the most to your lost traffic.

Analyze Your Competitors’ Top Pages

It’s essential to identify your competitors’ most popular pages. You should find the answers to these three questions.

1. Which pages rank for the most keywords? 
2. Which pages have the most traffic?
3. Which pages have the highest percentage of their overall traffic? 

These pages can give you valuable insight into what your target audience likes – so you can emulate it with your content and win.

Find (and Close) Keyword Gaps

Keyword Gap tool to identify your competitors’ keywords you share and don’t share.

Start by entering your site and up to four competitor sites to see the Overview report, which then indicates top keyword opportunities for you.

The Keyword Gap tool provides a detailed look at the competitor’s search landscape for any chosen search term. 

When you identify any gaps in that landscape, you can work on closing them. 

Identify Strengths and Weaknesses

What are the differences in strengths and weaknesses between you and each one of your competitors – where do they excel that you don’t?

Everybody has a weak point – even the biggest website in your industry.

Here are a few areas to look at to Identify the strong and weak points of you and each of your.

• Authority. Find out why other websites have higher authority and where do they get their backlinks from.
• Content. Perform full analysis of competitors content. Look at things like grammar, tone, formatting, readability, and the overall structure.
• Keyword rankings. Identify any drops or gains in ranking positions, find out what topics are searchers interested in and drive traffic to your website.

After you perform this analysis, you will have a clear understanding of how well you compare.

Building Better Content

You’ve now identified what works for competitors and what are searchers looking for. Now you just have to find a way to build superior content than the one they built.

There is a very little chance you’ll create something unique nowadays. 

However, you can definitely take something that exists and make it better with strong impact – that’s the main basis of the competitor analysis.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO revolves around the tech behind your site, such as:

• Crawlability
• Mobile friendliness
• Website load speed

We’ll now dive into each one of these and show you ways to perfect them – so you maximize your chances of ranking on the #1 page.

Crawlability

Crawlability is the ability of a search engine crawler, such as Googlebot, to access website pages and resources. 

Crawlability issues can negatively affect the website’s organic search rankings.   

To check your crawlability, you can use a FREE tool from SEOgraphy. You simply type in your URL and their tool will run a crawlability check on your website.

If there are any problems with crawlability, we suggest checking whether there are no problems with:

• Page discoverability
• Access restrictions
• Robots.txt
• Sitemap

Mobile Friendliness

Most consumers conduct Google searches on their phones – making mobile optimization one of the essential things to look at.

If you fail to optimize your website on smaller devices, you will lose potential customers to competitors.

…and all it takes is one bad impression.

To check your website’s mobile-friendliness, head over to the Mobile-Friendly Test tool from Google. You simply type in your URL and check your website.

Here are a few ways to make your website mobile-friendly.

• Eliminate pop ups
• Develop a responsive layout
• Use a large and readable font

Website Load Speed

Conversion rates are 3X higher for ecommerce sites that load in 1 second.

You have to make your website lightning-fast, or your customers will leave. You might think your site is fast but is that so?

Head over to PageSpeed Insights and check your loading speed.

Hopefully, the results do not look like the ones above.

Every second counts and can make or break your conversions. In fact, one-second delay in page loading time results in 7% loss of conversions.

Source: Google

There are many ways you can speed up your website loading time, such as.

• Cache your web pages
• Slim Down Your Website
• Add lazy loading

Content Strategy

An effective SEO content strategy should target users at every stage of the marketing funnel.

Source: TC Success

Because you want more than interested readers, right? 

You want to funnel your visitors through your pipeline and, eventually, make them buy from you. This means creating content that appeals to those who are just beginning their journey while also being ready to sell to those who are ready to make a purchase.

One way to approach this is by creating a combination of bottom-funnel “the best” articles and top-funnel informational articles. 

Plus, linkable assets, used to improve your website authority score and your overall rankings.

Bottom-Funnel Articles

Bottom-funnel articles are designed for buyers in heat, looking for “the best” solution for their problem.

Provide them with a list of “Top 5 SEO Strategy Agencies” and include yourself in the list. These users are typically searching for specific products or services and are looking for information that will help them make a decision. 

Here are a few more examples of the bottom of the funnel content types:

• Product reviews
• Product alternatives
• Product comparisons

Top-Funnel Articles

Top-funnel articles are designed to attract users who are just beginning their research. 

They are typically searching for information about a particular topic and are not yet ready to make a purchase. Target them by creating how-to guides, listicles, and glossaries.

Your biggest triumph is interlinking those top-funnel articles with your bottom ones in a natural and relevant way. 

Here is an example of how we did that in our PageSpeed guide.

The readers have learned about why page load time matters, now they want to speed up their site. That’s precisely why we’ve interlinked our post about web dev agencies.

Readers can discover that our agency can help them and become a new customer. For instance, when you are writing a guide about “How to Improve Your PageSpeed,” make a short link injection to your article that may sound like this:

Link-building Assets

Backlinks are one of Google’s strongest ranking factors.

This is because they increase the authority of your website, add credibility, and show Google that your website is trustworthy – otherwise others would not link back to you.

Unfortunately, most businesses fail to get any backlinks and get buried in the 10th page of Google. We are not saying it’s easy to get backlinks…

But if you have the right strategy in place, it can be automatic and you’ll get flooded with them.

…and that’s precisely what linkable assets are. 

Linkable assets are pieces of content that are designed specifically for link-building. These might include infographics, statistics, news, or other types of content that are highly shareable and provide value to the user. 

Here is an example of a linkable asset.

The goal of linkable assets is to attract backlinks from other websites, which will improve your search engine rankings. Every piece you will be putting out should be irresistible, so that other people cant help themselves but to steal it from you. 

Of course, not everybody will link back to you, but some will do!

If you want to build even more backlinks, consider these additional link-building SEO strategies:

1. Guest posting: Write guest posts for other sites in your industry and include a link back to your site in your author bio or within the content
2. Broken link building: Find broken links on other websites and reach out to the site owner to suggest your own content as a replacement
3. Local citations: If you have a local business, you can list your business in directories and business listings, which can provide backlinks to your site

Just remember to keep the quality of backlinks in mind.

Building a few high-quality links is much more effective and far outperforms acquiring many low-quality links from untrustworthy sources.

Off-Page Content Strategies:

Off-page content strategies don’t have a direct impact on your SEO, but they will also get you more momentum when you are just starting out. 

Here are a few examples of off-page content strategies:

• Link building
• Content marketing
• Social media marketing

The one that has brought us the most substantial results was social media.

We started creating short posts that “our article is now out,” and provided a link to the full article for the social media users to come to our website and read it.

We also often created teaser posts

Basically, we added curiosity to our social media posts, so readers could not resist learning more and headed over to our website.

Also, you can hook up with influencers to widen your reach.

You can try messaging influencers on social media, but that rarely works, since they get 1000+ DMs every single day. 

A lot better way is to use influencer marketing platforms like UpFluence

They can connect you with the right influencer, so you can collaborate with them, get the exposure, and grow your business.

(we also recommend creating a referral program for your influencers to increase sales as well.)

All of these methods will help you establish your business as an authority in your niche, widen your reach, and even boost revenue.

…plus, social media signals can improve your brand’s appearance in search results!

That means you get a boost in rankings and organic traffic as well – making it a must-have strategy.

Tips for Executing Your SEO Strategy

Looking to get your SEO strategy to the next level – and get the results faster?

Here are a few additional tips for executing your SEO strategy that will help you succeed, maximize the ROI, and drive long-term results.

1. Quality Over Quantity in Everything

Producing a stable stream of content and being consistent is important.

But if your content is not high-quality and your readers won’t get anything out of it – your SEO strategy won’t be effective. Your SEO efforts should be focused on creating content that is:

• Valuable
• Engaging
• Actionable

(pay close attention to the last point, since 99% of content out there is not actionable.)

If you produce low-quality content just for the sake of publishing more content, it can actually harm your website in the long run. Search engines are increasingly prioritizing high-quality content, so it’s important to ensure that the content you produce is of the highest quality possible.

2. Work Your Way Up

When developing an SEO strategy, it’s vital to make everything tight at the bottom of the funnel. Conversion rate optimization will help you to get the most out of your SEO strategy.

Landing pages and “the best” articles are the pages that are most likely to lead to conversions and generate revenue for your business. Once you’ve established a strong foundation with these pages, you can then expand your efforts to the informational content – middle and top of the funnel. 

Most professionals make the mistake of doing this in the opposite order – starting from top and going down the funnel.

…and while it may seem more intuitive – it’s not as effective.

You want to build out your baseline so you are not missing out on any sales because you have not yet created any bottom-of-the-funnel content. Also, BOFU content tends to be more specific and goes beyond the surface information. This gives you an opportunity to link back to it from your TOFU content – maximizing your chances of making a sale. Of course, this is only possible when you start at the bottom and work your way up.

3. Consistent Small Steps Beat One-Time Big Efforts

SEO is a long-term game, and it requires consistent effort over time to see results. 

Instead of trying to make a big splash with a one-time effort (or publishing content on 5 social media platforms from day one), it’s better to focus on taking small, consistent steps over time. By doing these things consistently, you’ll be able to build up your SEO and social media strategy and see exponential growth in traffic and rankings over time. 

Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid

You can have a perfect SEO strategy, but if you do any of these, you will blow it out, guaranteed. Here are a few SEO mistakes to avoid at any cost.

They will completely reverse your results and lead to poor performance.

Keyword and Internal Link Stuffing

Keyword stuffing is an unnatural use of keywords for tricking search engines to rank your website high on SERP – a black-hat SEO strategy.

You can see an example of keyword stuffing below.

Source: Similar Web

While it may have worked in the past, search engines are now much smarter and can easily detect this kind of behavior. 

(and punish you for trying to manipulate their algorithms.)

Also, keyword density is not considered to be important for rankings nowadays, since search engines can understand the search query – a semantic search.

For instance, if you’re looking for PlayStation console, all you have to do is type this:

There is no mention of the PlayStation, yet Google knew precisely what we were talking about. This just shows that keyword density and use of the right keywords is not that important.

…making keyword stuffing an outdated and useless SEO method to avoid.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content refers to content that appears on more than one page on the same website or on different websites. 

The problem with duplicate content is that you confuse search engines about which page to rank.

(since it does not want to rank 5 exact same pages.)

Source: WooRank

Google does not tolerate duplicate content, since it’s considered to be a search engine manipulation. Therefore it can penalize you for having duplicate content.

You can easily check whether you have any duplicate content on your website with the Siteliner tool.

There are a couple of ways you can fix it, including:

• Implement 301 redirects
• Meta robots noindex
• Rel=”canonical” 

It’s vital that you fix it as soon as possible to avoid any penalties.

If you get a penalty from Google it’s very difficult (if not impossible) to get back up and rank high – and we are sure you don’t want to ruin your business over this mistake.

Writing for Search Engines

The most common mistake we see with content is writing for search engines.

There is nothing wrong with keeping an engine in mind while writing, however, your content should primarily be written for your audience.

…they are the one reading it after all!

As you can see from the graphic above, if your readers love it, the search engine will love it as well.

Also, writing for the search engine will often make the content super-difficult to read, unappealing to users and unnatural with a bunch of irrelevant keywords everywhere.

Make sure to avoid that at any cost.

Ready to Create a Perfect SEO Strategy & Rank on the #1 Page?

SEO strategy is essential for every business – the ads alone won’t save you!

It’s one of the most cost-effective ways to get more traffic, close leads, and drive conversions and revenue through the roof. We’ve talked about the most critical strategies and tips to use for the best results (and leaving competitors in the dust.)

Be sure to apply them to your business and see your rankings and revenue skyrocket.

Not sure how to implement what you’ve learnt into your business?

Reach out to us and we will do the whole process for you. We’ll connect you with our professionals who have ranked 100+ posts on the #1 page.

It’s the best way to get the results you desire.