Choosing a SEO strategy and giving you the steps to deliver it
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) helps your website to get more visitors to it.
Wild SEO Agency is a Search Engine Optimisation expert. We are the people who optimise websites to help them rank higher in Search Engines.
There are three different types of SEO - all of which can shape your SEO strategy: on-page, off-page and technical SEO
On-page SEO is all about the content on your website’s pages. The words, the images, the headers and titles etc.
Off-page SEO focuses on links that people follow to arrive on your website. This could be a blog that you’ve written that is hosted on another organisations website that includes links back to your site.
Technical SEO concentrates on the backend of your site. It’s the technical aspects of a website: like the code, html, meta-data.
Google, and all the major search engines we want to impress with good SEO, cares about all three types of SEO.
What should you be focusing on in an SEO strategy? All of the above, or one more than the other? How do you know where to start?
What is a SEO strategy?
Think of a SEO strategy as an action plan to help improve your website’s ranking on search engines and increase the amount of people who visit and use your website.
It will help you to get more organic traffic to your website. Organic traffic simply means real people who you haven’t paid to visit your site - they have found your website by searching for a question and your site pops up, rather than through any adverts you may have paid for.
Why is it important to have an SEO strategy?
An SEO strategy helps you to create relevant and helpful content for your website users.
Doing the work to develop an on-page strategy means you have information to help make decisions on what to create on your site. Information based on what people are actually searching for, instead of trying to guess.
A technical SEO strategy helps you to make sure your content is organised and easy to understand. Search engines won’t be able to easily identify your website as helpful, informative or answering people’s searches if it has not been optimised correctly.
So, how do you develop an SEO strategy?
Honestly, you get a professional involved, (preferably Wild SEO Agency… obviously) — SEO is a big job. It’s a time consuming, ever-changing beast. And, while you could refer to our blogs on topics like:
Auditing your website to develop better SEO and how to use links successfully for good SEO on your website for tips on some top-level, immediate SEO tips to improve the site you’ve already got. A long-term, thought through SEO strategy takes time.
But, we’ll give you some ideas of how we’d go about it so you can have a think about where you are on your strategy journey and what you need to work on:
Step 1: work out who your target audience is and what they are interested in.
Who are you marketing your product/business/information to?
How old are they?
Where do they live?
And, most importantly - what are their needs?
If you can figure out what they are looking for, you can provide it on your site.
Step 2: Keyword Research
Keywords are the words people enter into Google and other search engines when searching for information, answers, products or services.
Simply put - you need to know what words and phrases your target audience are typing into Google to find answers.
When you know those words, you can include them on your website (on-page SEO). You can include keywords in articles on other people’s websites that link to yours (off-page SEO) and you can make sure the keywords appear in your metadata - the behind the scenes area of your website (technical SEO).
Step 3: seizing opportunities
When carrying out keyword research it’s also possible to see if a significant number of people are searching for something relevant to your target audiences.
These highly searched terms are an opportunity to create content on your site to attract the high volume of search traffic.
Doing the research can help you identify opportunities to bring new people to your website.
Step 4: getting sneaky… find out who your competition is.
You could start by typing in some of the keywords you use on your site (or hope to use when you’ve finished developing your SEO strategy) into Google and seeing who appears at the top of searches.
In its basic form - the people who appear in the top searches are your competition.
Have a snoop on their websites. Learn from them - what does their site do well? How can you improve on that? What are they missing out on - how can you fill the gaps?
Wild SEO Agency can help you with the technical side of seeing how your links compare to theirs. And do an in depth competitor analysis.
Step 5
If you explore steps 1-4 and carry you would learn a lot, gather a lot of information. You’d also have a long to-do-list of actions to improve your website.
Step 5 is working out what your highest priority is. What have you learnt about what your site needs? What do you have time for? What can you do yourself?
And… What do you need Wild SEO Agency’s help with to start forming and delivering on your SEO strategy?
We’re here to help you figure out all the steps. Just get in touch and we can start chatting.