While SEO may seem complicated, there are a set of repeatable steps you can follow to execute an effective SEO strategy. These steps include defining your audience, identifying relevant keywords, creating high-value content, generating backlinks, and optimizing your website’s performance. Let’s take a detailed look at each of these steps:
1. Define your target audience
The first thing you want to do is define your ideal audience, which will inform the topics and keywords you target. You can do this by creating an ideal customer profile or buyer persona that identifies things like demographics, psychographics, signatures, and more. You can create one manually or use an online tool like HubSpot’s Make My Persona to help you create one.
2. Conduct keyword research
With your target audience defined, the next step is to conduct keyword research to identify relevant search terms to target with high-quality content such as blog articles. The best way to do keyword research is to use a free tool like Google Keyword Planner or a payment option such as Semrush.
Search for relevant topics using one of the tools above and consider overall keyword traffic and ranking difficulty for each topic. From there, create a content track of relevant and related keywords with high traffic potential and a reasonable chance of ranking based on difficulty score.
3. Produce high-quality content
The next step is to write and publish quality blog articles, each targeting one of the main keywords in your content. To do this, start with an outline that identifies the general structure of your article header and includes your primary keyword in elements such as the title and relevant headings.
From there, create the entire piece, making sure to optimize for your main keyword and adding elements like images, stats, and more. Link to relevant articles using internal website links to help Google better discover your content.
4. Build quality backlinks
A backlink is a link from a third-party site that points to your content, which Google sees as a measure of authority. Once your blog articles are published, do off-page SEO tactics that generate quality backlinks, such as direct outreach. For example, find relevant websites that could benefit from linking to your content. Then find their contact information and reach out with a suggestion to link to your site.
5. Optimize your website performance
Make sure you’re also improving the overall health and performance of your website, which includes things like load speed, mobile optimization, and more. Google uses a Lighthouse Performance Score to rank your website on key performance metrics and assign you a score out of 100. Accessibility, best practices and general SEO scores are also included. The goal is to optimize your site to get these four scores as close to 100 as possible.
6. Iterate and improve
Check your SEO metrics monthly to determine how your strategy is performing. You can use an SEO tool like Semrush, Ahrefs or Google Search Console to track key SEO data such as traffic, ranking position and more. Iterate and improve your on-page, off-page and technical SEO tactics based on results.
7. Stay up to date on changing SEO trends
Search algorithms are constantly changing, affecting the best SEO practices you should follow. That’s why it’s important to stay on top of changing SEO trends and how they might affect your overall SEO strategy. Subscribe to or read online resources such as the newsletter Search engine magazine to make sure you don’t miss any changes.
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