Your 5 Step SEO Strategy

Create a simple SEO strategy for your business

Kerry Knight
10 June 2021
3 min read

Knowing where to start with SEO (search engine optimisation) can be a bit of a minefield for business owners, however it’s not as terrifying a topic as one might imagine. Even the tech-averse can get a good handle on it by utilising a bit of forethought and planning. With that in mind, follow these five steps to create a simple SEO strategy for your business.

CREATING AN SEO STRATEGY

At the most basic level, SEO is all about improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to your website from search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Putting together a strategy for your SEO may seem like an impossible feat, however there are plenty of tools and resources online that can help you get a basic understanding and clear idea of how to approach your business’s SEO strategy.

There are lots of ways to tackle SEO – far too many to cover in one article – however these five steps will give you a good starting point to get going and build upon, as and when the need arises.

FIVE STEP SEO STRATEGY

1. Understand your target audience

First and foremost you need to understand who your target audience is and what you offer them. What problem do you solve? Identify who they are by addressing their challenges and frustrations, their wants and needs, as well as their values and expectations. And think about where you would find them online – which social media channels are they using, what websites appeal to them, are there any blogs or influencers they follow? Knowing and understanding your target audience puts you in a great position to understand where to concentrate your SEO efforts.

2. Know your keywords

What keywords relate to your business? What search terms are people using to find your products or services? Make a list of any words that are relevant to your business and industry. You can do this by a general brainstorming session, or by looking at what people are sharing on social media, as well as seeing what content your competitors are publishing too. Take your research up a notch by using a keyword planner tool (Google Ads has a free one you can use) to come up with keyword suggestions too.

3. Build your content plan

Half the time, knowing what content to publish can cause quite the headache. However you can use your list of keywords to come up with content that not only fits with your brand but is also relevant to your target audiences’ search terms. A key aspect to think about at this point is to ensure your content matches the search term that people will use to find it. Ultimately, you want to build a content plan that is full of content people can value and trust, so that other sites of authority will want to link to your content too.

4. Seek out link-building opportunities

A big part of being a popular website online (known as having domain authority) is down to the number of links to your website, ideally from websites that have a high domain authority. Now, this may sound like an impossible feat – getting others to link to your website. However, there are lots of strategies for this – I recommend using backlinko.com to give you a bunch of link-building strategies to use.

5. Goals & KPIs

The final part of your SEO strategy relates to setting your goals and KPIs (key performance indicators). You definitely want to know what part of your strategy works – or doesn’t – so that you can evaluate your efforts and keep fine-tuning and improving your SEO strategy. After all, brand reputation management is an on-going, never-ending process.

This article was first published in the Suffolk Free Press, Thursday 10 June 2021.