Now we are in 2021, two things stand out for those thinking about or considering SEO.
Firstly the world as we know it will be different. More and more businesses are moving their operations online, due to the COVID outbreak. In turn, more and more of your customers will be coming from your online presence and activities.
Secondly, more businesses and business owners are now aware of SEO and its strategic importance to their success online.
Therefore it is more important than ever to craft the right SEO strategy and not spend time on so-called quick-fix solutions that fail to deliver.
Businesses are used to creating strategy. They do it for sales and marketing, so why not for SEO?
The process of creating an SEO strategy is no more than creating an organisational structure of your website so that Google understands the content and the user’s intentions when coming to your web page.
Engaging the services of an SEO specialist will mean that they will help you make sure your website is fully optimised so it will show up in more places on Google search queries.
They usually focus on three aspects of your website.
On-Page SEO – basically what is on the web page itself and how that content can be organised and presented, so it’s rankings are boosted by the use of keywords.
Off-Page SEO – here, the focus is on links that may be pointing to your website(s) from other websites and the quantity and quality of those links.
Technical SEO – this will focus on what is known as the ‘backend’ of your website, or the coding behind the website structure. Google takes notice of this, so it has to be set up correctly.
The problem is that every situation and business is different. There is not a one size fits all scenario. An SEO specialist will consider a number of factors before launching an SEO strategy for your business.
Let us look then at the basics of a good SEO strategy.
- Related Topics and Search Terms
Think about what your customers would potentially input into Google search to look for businesses and related topics like yours. Get yourself a list together of relevant issues that might describe your business and what it does.
Investigate the search volume of each one of these terms and start to compile a list of keywords that you think are important and that people use when searching. Order these words in order of relevance to your business and the search volume they attract.
These are pillar keywords, and from these, we develop what is termed ‘long-tail keywords’ – these are easier to rank for.
- Long-Tail Keywords
No matter what you hear about keywords, they are still current and the backbone of any good SEO strategy. Having the right keywords for your business is the foundation of any good SEO campaign. You need to target the keywords that your customers are using.
We can then start to come up with 8-10 long-tail keywords from the pillar keywords that we have identified. These might be questions asked or longer word queries – hence why they are called long-tail. These form a cluster of topics that we can then start to produce content around on your website.
You will find that search engines like clusters as they connect searching customers with the information they are looking for.
- Create Content For Topics
So ideally, the pillar topics should represent how many different products or services and possibly locations you might have in your business.
The idea is to create one web page for each of the long-tail keyword sub-topics for each of your pillar keywords.
Each of these web pages will be created with relevant content for your prospective and existing customers in mind. They will include relevant images and other links to other website pages.
- Post These to Your Blog
If you don’t have a blog on your website, you should create one. Having a blog section allows you to rank for keywords and give credible, useful content to your website users.
The basics of each blog post will mention your long-tail keywords three or four times on the page. There will be a link to and from that page to your pillar web page.
This cements the relationship between the two pages and gives Google link juice.
- Develop Page Authority
Alongside producing content for pillar clusters, also consider creating content that you know your customers would find useful— content such as ‘How to’ etc.
To gain page authority, you need to upload a blog regularly, ideally weekly.
Make a list of the topics you think your customers would find useful and rank them in importance.
- Link Building
Another way to get your website content ranking higher is by link building.
Link building is all about attracting links from other websites to your website. Relevancy of the people linking to you and where they rank in page authority can also play a role.
Ensure that you share all your content on your social media channels and think about how you can share links with other local businesses.
- Website Speed
Another often overlooked factor is the speed of your website – how fast it loads. Website speed can be affected by many things, but images and video content can slow it down.
Make sure that all content is compressed to ensure a speedy load.
- Track Your Progress
It takes a great deal of time to create and implement an SEO strategy. Therefore, you must track the progress of your work.
The primary metric that you would be interested in would be the amount of traffic you are attracting from organic search results. There are plenty of tools out there to help you do that.
You also need to track each of your web pages to see where the pages rank for the particular keywords.
To Conclude
Although SEO can seem at times a never-ending process, it so important in that due to the COVID pandemic, now more than ever, more of your customers are going online.
Make sure that for 2021 you create an SEO strategy that you can handle or engage an SEO specialist to handle it for you.
If you have any questions or would like to discuss an SEO strategy for your business please do contact us.