Marcus Richards
With a potential recession on the horizon and living costs starting to soar, many businesses are looking for ways to increase their online presence and get their brand seen and heard online.
One way many businesses are doing this is through a robust SEO strategy. If you’re not sure what SEO is or how it can benefit you, read on.
How to develop your SEO strategy
1. Make sure your SEO strategy aligns with your business targets and KPIs
If you’re not sure whether your current (or nonexistent!) SEO strategy is on the right lines, ask yourself this: “Does my strategy align with our business targets and KPIs?”.
If not, it might be time to change tact. To start with, create a list of KPIs that you want to track as part of your campaign. These could be things like organic sessions, keyword rankings, bounce rate, and so forth.
However, try not to be too ambitious. If you set unrealistic expectations, you might end up feeling disappointed if you aren’t seeing the growth you’d hoped for. After all, SEO takes time!
2. Create a list of keywords
Once you’ve defined your KPIs, you’re going to want to create a list of keywords that are relevant to the niche your business is in. Look at a mix of both long tail and short tail as longer tail keywords are usually a lot less competitive!
Chris Shelbourne, Head of SEO at WMG commented:
“When planning your SEO keyword strategy, businesses should first consider which products or services are likely to be central to their business over a sustained period. It can take time and effort to gain rankings via SEO, so these efforts need to be focused on the products and services that are likely to be important for the company over a long-term period, to maximise ROI.
Businesses should then consider their target audience – the keyword variables certain audiences use (e.g. “cheap”, “bespoke”, “luxury”) may not be appropriate for all companies, and could result in the wrong type of customer being driven to the website, which can in turn impact conversion rates or lead to extra admin processing irrelevant leads.
Having established an understanding of their key products and services and their target demographic, businesses should then aim to find keywords that strike a “happy medium” between relevance to these factors and the available search volume for the given keyword. Niche keywords sometimes have lower search volumes but can convert at a higher rate if they are strongly aligned with the business’s audience – and may be less competitive as fewer businesses are targeting them. Conversely, broader search intent keywords may have significantly more search volume, but can convert at lower rates as they inherently attract a more “mass” audience – and they are often very competitive to target.”
3. Improve your backlinks
Backlinks are links that come from other websites that point to your website. Backlinks play an important role in most search engine algorithms in that pages with a high number of backlinks tend to have better rankings.
By taking steps to improve the backlink profile of your site, you can help bump your site up the SERPs.
4. Look at what your competitors are doing
Look at your competitors if you want to turbo-charge your SEO strategy. Think about what they’re targeting. If you think you should be targeting something your competitor is targeting as part of their SEO strategy – go for it! Alternatively, if you spot them doing something different and you like what they see, why not work it into your approach?
Now go put it all into practice!
