Online shopping is increasing every day by the hour. Even though many still rush to the store to pick things up, the temptation of purchasing almost anything from the comfort of your home is irresistible. You can order whatever you want with just a few taps on an app, and everything from pizza rolls to plumbing fixtures will be delivered without leaving your home. This implies that every business that sells goods should concentrate on e-commerce. Not only that but there’s a good possibility that most customers will purchase online if your company offers services rather than goods. This implies that you should pay more attention to website traffic.
Ultimately, you might have the most advanced website ever created, one tailored to provide the greatest possible user experience and a phenomenal copy. Still, it won’t help you if no one ever sees it. You must get yourself found. And for that reason alone, SEO is an essential component of any contemporary marketing strategy. Your goal is to rank highly in search engine results pages (SERPs) so that people will naturally find you. However, It is far easier said than done.
You are at the right place if you are an experienced professional seeking to review the basics for a customer or a beginner trying to understand how this entire SEO thing functions for your company.
This blog is for you if you want to increase your Google rankings. Learn all you need to know to create an SEO plan that will help search engines find you and drive more natural traffic.
What Is an SEO Strategy?
Using an SEO strategy, the content topics are arranged accordingly to increase a website’s chances of showing up in search results. So, precisely what is SEO strategy? It is in essence, the procedure you use to optimise your chances of obtaining search engine traffic organically.
Having an SEO plan is crucial as it aids in maintaining focus while producing content. Your strategy will guarantee that you provide content that people seek instead of just creating what you believe they want to see. An SEO strategy is a vital component of content marketing since it determines how people will find your content initially, particularly on search engine result pages (SERPs). It will be more difficult for search engine bots to index your website, determine your domain of expertise and assign a site ranking if your content is unorganised and scattered.
Competitors SEO Strategy
Choosing which keywords to target, what kind of content to write, and how to establish links is not up to you. Alternatively, you can view what has previously proven effective for others and expand on that achievement.
Examining the SEO tactics used by your competitors can benefit you:
- Take advantage of your competitors’ shortcomings
- Replicate the strategies used by your competitors.
- Sort the most crucial SEO chores into priority.
Let’s investigate that.
- Determine Who Your Competitors Are:
Find out who your primary SEO competitors are first. These are the websites that are competing with each other for the organic search keywords you want.
Go to Organic Research, type in your domain name, and then select “Search” to locate them. Select the “Competitors” tab after that. A list of your main organic competitors, the keywords you both use and their projected monthly traffic can be found by scrolling down. Look at the top 10 to see the competitors that seem most pertinent to your company.
Note: Your SEO competitors won’t be the same as all your direct business competitors.
For instance, Consider yourself a florist in a small town.
The other little florist down the road is your main local competitor. However, they don’t even have a webpage. Therefore, they pose no harm in terms of SEO. Enter your top five online competitors into your template document and proceed to the following stage.
- Find the Important Keywords Used by Your Competitors
Next, determine which important keywords you don’t rank for but your competitors do. Each of those keywords can be considered a potential source and has the ability to bring you additional traffic.
Here’s how to discover those keywords:
- Click “Compare” after opening Keyword Gap, entering your domain along with up to four competitor domains.
- To apply the “Missing” filter, scroll down to the table and pick it.
- This will only display the terms that all of your competitors rank for but not you.
- In your template, list the top five keyword opportunities.
- Download a CSV file and work with the data in a spreadsheet for a more thorough examination and additional insights.
- Two columns are included in the CSV export: “Volume” and “Keyword Difficulty,” which show how difficult it is to rank well for a specific keyword or search term.
This makes it possible for you to sort for more popular keywords that are also simpler to rank for.
- Examine the Backlinks of Your Competitors
One of the most crucial components of the SEO jigsaw is backlinks. You will probably find it difficult to rank without them. Analysing the backlinks of your competitors is an excellent way to uncover websites that are linking to them but not to you.
Why?
It’s likely that those websites will link to you if they are glad to link to your competitors, mainly if you provide content that is even better than that of your competitors.
Open the Backlink Gap tool. After adding your domain and entering your competitors’ domains, select “Find prospects.” The charts will compare your backlink profiles and those of your competitors. It’s a quick technique to find out which competitor obtains the most significant backlinks. All the referring domains that send backlinks to the competitor websites you entered are listed in the table below the chart.
To view more detailed information about the links from each referring domain to a competitor, click on the drop-down arrows in the table. This will display the Authority Score of the domain, the precise anchor text and destination URL, the backlink’s initial sighting date, and further information.
Click the “Export” button located in the top right corner of the page to export this report and include it in your template document. You will have a list of websites that you can contact to obtain backlinks for your content.
Steps to create an SEO strategy
Even while SEO calls for a thorough plan, it can be divided into several doable phases. Listed below are the steps to create an SEO strategy for 2024:
Step 1: Make a list of keywords.
Typically, the first stage in any legitimate SEO campaign is keyword research. And what’s the excellent method for identifying keywords that your potential customers use while searching online? Google Suggest. Enter a term into Google’s search bar, and a list of recommendations will appear.
As they are directly from Google, these typically make excellent SEO keywords. (This indicates that you are aware that they are genuinely being looked for.) Also, compared to “short tail” terms, longer keywords—also referred to as “long tail keywords”—generally have lower competition. Therefore, long tail keywords are significantly easier to rank for even though they have relatively low search volume levels.
It is advisable to enter several distinct keywords into Google until you have identified roughly ten keywords. Use a keyword tool like Ubersuggest or Semrush to see the search volume and degrees of competition for specific terms.
Once you have a list of ten keywords, you can begin with Step #2.
Step 2: Examine the First Page of Google.
Alright, so you identified a few keywords. It’s time to find out who is already listed for those terms. Simply enter one of the terms you identified into Google to accomplish that. Examine the top ten outcomes and make a note of any patterns you see.
For instance, lists of tools abound in the SERPs for “SEO Tools”. You should be aware that the majority of the results on the first page are list posts. If you want to write on that subject on your website, you must write a list post.
Step 3: Determine Who Your Competitors Are.
Prominent SEO experts prefer using Semrush as a go-to tool for competitor analysis in SEO. Their tool can save you a great deal of time and make the process relatively simple.
To begin, select “Domain Overview” and enter your URL. After that, if you scroll to the bottom, you will see a segment titled “Main Organic Competitors.”
These competitor websites are ones that target audiences similar to your own and rank for comparable keywords. You can examine all of your competitors as well as additional analytical data by selecting the “View all” button. You can see how many terms you have in common with these domains, as well as how much traffic these websites are bringing in.
You can see how many terms you share overall with each site in the “Common Keywords” column, which is helpful. You might think of websites that have a lot of common keywords as your competition. After completing this step, you should have determined at least Four to five primary organic competitors.
Step 4: Make Something Better or Different
Once you have the initial things listed and planned out, it’s time to produce some superior-quality content. Regarding SEO content, you have two choices:
- First option: You may create something unique.
- Second option: You can produce something of better quality.
There are moments when you want to create something significant and better than what already exists (The Skyscraper Method).
Nonetheless, there are instances when entirely different content is preferable since it makes your content more distinctive. For instance: If you sit down to produce a piece of content centred around “Mobile SEO”. You will notice a list of posts, such as “X Ways to Mobile Optimise Your Site” all over Google’s first page.
Now, you have the option of creating a more extended list post such as “100 Ways to Optimize Your Site for Mobile Devices”. However, that would be illogical. Instead, you can opt to create something different, such as “A definitive guide to mobile optimization”. Since such content topics are unique, they tend to receive a tonne of shares, comments and, importantly backlinks.
However, your goal is to produce something superior to what is now appearing on Google’s first page. In this instance, you want to release content ten times superior to what is already available.
For example:
The majority of “SEO tools” content only included 10–20 tools. This means that publishing another 20-tool list won’t typically work. Instead, try creating content like- A Complete SEO Tool List (2024 Update). The post would definitely rank at the top for the “SEO Tools” keyword.
Step 5: Include a Hook
If you want to raise your search engine rankings, obtaining backlinks (And a large number of them) is crucial in 2024. A study found that links are still highly connected with first-page Google rankings. Thus, they continue to be a significant Google ranking element.
The question is: How do we accomplish it? It would help if you ascertained the reasons behind the links that people in your sector make to particular content pieces—also called “The Hook”. Next, include that “Hook” in your writing.
Let’s examine this in detail:
A while back, voice search became the topic of more and more blog posts. Something observed with such posts was that writers included links to articles with statistics and data when discussing voice search. Hence, conducting a thorough statistical voice search study would be better. More than 90% of the backlinks mention a specific statistic from the post. Data is one kind of “Hook” that you can use to create linkages to your content. Ultimate Guides or Manual is another Hook that’s doing great at the moment. When you provide the ultimate manual, the manual itself is the hook.
Step 6: Make Your Page SEO-Friendly
The main focus of this step is to optimize your content for keywords. There is so much to cover over on-page SEO; everything could not be covered in one post.
Having said that, it is imperative to concentrate on these pillars of SEO strategies in 2024:
- Internal Linking
- Keyword-Rich Short URLs
- Semantic SEO
Internal Linking:
Yes, internal linking is still functional on the condition that it is done correctly. Additionally, you must mainly link to pages requiring more authority from other high-authority websites.
For instance, a few years ago, you published a blog post. You have discovered a new blog post on a similar topic on your website. That new post could benefit from being linked to the older, high-authority page. This internal linking strategy helps pass on SEO value to the newer post.
Keyword Rich Short URLs:
If you analyze millions of Google search results, the outcome that you will obtain will be surprising. Short URLs perform better than large URLs in search engine optimization. Long URLs typically score lower than short URLs. For this reason, using keywords alone in URLs is enough or a target keyword plus an additional word works impressively. Both approaches are effective.
SEO Semantics:
Semantically optimizing the content is the last significant step in implementing the top three pillars of SEO strategies. To explain in a simplified manner, the words connected to the targeted keywords are found in this step. Later, they are included in the content.
To do this task on your own, enter the desired keyword into Google Images. Google will provide you with terms and phrases that they believe are pertinent to that subject.
Next, enter the same term into a standard Google search, then find the “Searches related to…” section by scrolling down. Lastly, incorporate any of the following terms into your writing. And you are ready to go.
Step 7: Make Your Content Search-Friendly
To put it another way: The Skyscraper Method 2.0.
A brief example to demonstrate how this works.
A published piece performed reasonably well. However, it never made it into the top 5 results for the intended keyword “increase website traffic”. After looking at Google’s first-page analysis, you will discover that the search intent for that keyword was not met by the page.
The majority of the articles that ranked highly for “increase website traffic” provided brief advice on traffic.
“Increase Website Traffic” – Content was in existence. However, the added post provided them with a high-level workflow. The user experience that the search engine users were hoping for was different. Thus, the content needs to be revised to align with the Search Intent of this keyword.
Specifically, if you made a list post out of this content. If the content matches the search intent, it will automatically appear at the top for the target keyword.
Having stated that it is possible (and recommended) to publish content from the outset with search intent in mind. Include easy language that anyone can understand to simplify your content and rank better. The Search Intent optimization will let your post appear on Google’s top page in less than a month.
Step 8: Emphasize On Content Design
Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of content marketing is the design. You can write down the most incredible script ever in your content. However, it won’t usually gain much traction if it appears disorganized and cluttered. A considerable portion of the marketing budget must be saved for content creation. You can use WordPress to design and code the appearance of the content. Regardless, the excellent content design doesn’t have to be extremely expensive.
These four categories of visual content are very simple to create.
- Charts & Graphs:
Try to add a chart in every post because they are so helpful. Incorporate at least one chart in each post. Why? Because they facilitate understanding of facts.
For instance, most people find it difficult to visualize anything larger than 27.8 billion. Having an elaborative chart enables one to understand things effectively. Additionally, someone will occasionally use your chart in a blog article and provide a backlink to you.
- Images and Screenshots:
Add a screenshot whenever it helps in carrying out a particular action. Simple instructions can be explained effectively with screenshots. Screenshots are only helpful in explaining the technical descriptions.
What happens if your niche is non-technical, like fitness? Well, images accomplish the same thing. For instance, the image that serves as an exercise demonstration can be used in fitness blog posts to demonstrate proper form for workouts using pictures.
- Banners for Blog Posts
In contrast to screenshots and graphs, blog post banners have no practical purpose. It adds to the aesthetics of the blog. Banners are mainly used at the top of every post. For clarity, check the blog post banner at the blog’s beginning.
- Visuals & Graphics
graphics and visualizations are similar to Charts. However, they visualize concepts rather than data.
For instance, four versions of your website should all point to the same URL:
- http://abcsite.com
- https://abcsite.com
- http://www.abcsite.com
- https://www.abcsite.com
This idea is not too complex. However, visualizing this concept is difficult. Thus, a straightforward illustration created by the designer clarifies this idea.
Step 9: Create Links to Your Page
It’s time to start proactively constructing links to your content. There are various tactics of link building, but the three link-building tactics that are currently very effective are as follows:
- Broken Link Building
The process of locating pages in your niche with dead backlinks is known as “broken link building. After you have located these pages, you can get in touch with the owners of the websites and suggest that they exchange links to your content.
You can reach out via email, wherein you highlight in detail the part that consists of the broken link and where the link of your blog post goes in their post.
- Competitors Analysis
This is an old-school strategy. However, it continues to work amazingly. Locate a website currently ranked for the keyword you want to rank for first.
For instance, you are attempting to rank for the “SEO Audit” keyword.
To achieve favourable results, take the outcome from the first page and examine their backlink profile.
You will find a website that has various links from multiple domains. This means you will be able to access a good number of the same links that they do. Follow through their backlinks one by one and look for pages to which your link would be beneficial.
For instance, if you find a post that explicitly references your competitor’s content. No justification exists for linking to your post there. It’s better to look for other opportunities on the list. An even more comprehensive list with links to your SEO Audit blog would be ideal.
- Evangelist Approach
This approach focuses more on getting your content in front of the appropriate audience than linking. More specifically, bloggers in your niche. Encourage these bloggers to become evangelists for your products. They accomplish this through developing strong client relationships, producing insightful content, and offering top-notch customer service. Thus, an evangelist allows people to share the narrative of the brand or product.
Step 10: Enhance and Revise Your Content
You can increase your organic traffic by 200% with the content relaunch, which is quite effective.
For instance, you can relaunch a post from a year ago. However, it does not mean simply reposting the identical article under a new name. Instead, go through and delete outdated photos and screenshots and add new strategies. Eliminate tactics that were no longer effective.
What will be the outcome? A substantial increase in organic traffic to that page.
Conclusion
It becomes easier to handle when SEO is divided into four main components.
- Technical SEO ensures your website is correctly crawled and indexed by search engines.
- Optimizing on-page elements gives search engines useful hints about hierarchy and relevancy.
- The foundation for rankings is created by devoting time and resources to producing informative content demonstrating your expertise and responding to customer queries.
- By approaching external authority building strategically but authentically, you may solidify your site’s position as a reliable source on pertinent subjects.
To continuously enhance these four pillars, be sure to set specific SEO goals and monitor your performance KPIs.
FAQs
What are the top 5 SEO strategies?
These five SEO strategies are going to assist you in dominating the digital space and boosting your online visibility.
- Strategy 1: Content is King
- Strategy 2: Backlink Building
- Strategy 3: Local SEO Tactics
- Strategy 4: Technical SEO Techniques
- Strategy 5: Voice Search Optimization
What are the four pillars of SEO?
The best approach is to divide your efforts between the four SEO pillars: content, off-page, on-page, and technical. Your optimization process can be more effectively organized thanks to these foundations. By doing so, you can ensure that you are not overlooking any crucial information when you are formulating your plan.
What are the 4 stages of SEO?
Researching keywords, assessing readability, building links, and marketing are the four phases of SEO. Even while each step is significant on its own, if you make sure they support one another, the outcomes will be optimal.
What are the 3 main areas of SEO?
The Holy Trinity consists of Technical SEO, Content, and Link. Each of these three elements directly impacts how Google structures and evaluates websites to establish how highly searchable they are.
