Businesses today mostly rely on SEO strategies that worked for other businesses rather than developing one on their own. Many others rely on SEO services companies to do that job for them. Though this is not all that bad, the approach isn’t right.
Every marketing aspect of a business including search engine marketing should be aligned to the business goal. This means SEO strategies should be different as they are key to effective search engine marketing. This is why businesses should develop their own strategies.
But make sure your SEO strategy takes the following into account.
A mind map for the whole project
Essentially a diagram that can help you develop a strategy from scratch, a mind map branches out to general and specific categories from the center. Ideas can be added to each category. The mind map doesn’t serve as a visualization of your final strategy, but is more like a catalyst to your thoughts, aiding you to develop a strategy. In short, it gives you a picture so you can come up with better ideas for your final strategy.
A document representing the strategy you came up with
With a mind map, you will have ideas for a strategy that can work for your business. This strategy should be represented in detail in a document i.e. this document should state:
- Goals
- Tasks attached to the goals
- Task priorities
- Subtasks
- Expected results
You can add more details to the document. The objective is to use the document to help your team or your client (if you are an SEO consultant yourself) to understand the strategy easily. So the format should be simple. Whoever goes through the document should be able to make changes if necessary without hassle, and should also understand the order the tasks would be executed, to whom each task is assigned to, and the present status of the tasks.
Knowledge on the company
To develop an effective SEO strategy, you should have an understanding of the business or the company that’s going to use the strategy. This will help you identify the strengths and vulnerabilities of the company, so you can tweak the strategy to fit that profile. It can also give you an idea on the tactics that will be more effective than the rest, and the challenges that are in the way.
Some factors you can study include:
- The business’ selling proposition
- The company’s vision
- Things associated with the company that might impact your SEO strategy negatively
Knowledge on the audience
Generally when an SEO strategy is being developed, there will be thorough research on keywords that would be effective. The audience and their behavior are just as if not more important than keywords. But learning more on the audience requires you to invest more time.
Here are a few things you can include in your study.
- How the audience responds to marketing, upselling etc.
- How much they know about the products or services your business or your client’s business is offering.
- Are the audience other businesses (B2B) or consumers (B2C)?
- How your services can benefit them or solve the problems they have?
Goals with an expected impact on the company
A better approach is to develop an SEO strategy that can have a specific impact on the company and how it functions rather than having it achieve a financial goal. Metrics should be chosen accordingly, and they can be anything from links to organic search traffic.
Though many may disagree, it’s not a bad idea to focus on task-oriented goals with time limits rather than focusing on KPI goals. SEO technically doesn’t directly impact KPIs. And that’s KPI should be a second priority.
Setting task-oriented goals, putting an effort to live up to those goals, measuring and analyzing the impact, and then tweaking the strategy accordingly is a better approach in the long run. An SEO strategy that can somehow manipulate KPIs to provide favorable outcomes may not work for long. And it puts more pressure on the SEO team as well. After all, search engine optimization is a slow process that doesn’t provide immediate results. So thinking long-term is never bad.
