A Detailed Guide to Create an Effective SEO Strategy

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the magic wand that can improve your website’s rank on the search engine result page, get you organic traffic, and boost conversions!

You know that. But what you may overlook is that a solid SEO strategy coupled with consistency is the foundation to driving traffic. You can find lots of SEO guides on the web and it can be overwhelming to select the most impactful strategies. Also, SEO trends are continually evolving following the search engine algorithm updates. It is normal to get overwhelmed in such a scenario.

No worry, we have discussed with the experts of SEO services and compiled a comprehensive list of effective SEO strategies. Follow the guide to get an optimal result from your SEO efforts.

How to Build the Most Impactful SEO Strategy - A Guide

Keyword Research - Do It Right

Keyword research is the first step of any SEO strategy. Other than using a keyword research tool, you can get keyword ideas from any search result suggestions. Let’s take Google Suggest, for example. Simply type a word related to a niche on the Google search field and it will show a list of suggestions.

For instance, when we typed “buy shoes” on the Google search field, we found suggestions like “buy shoes online”, “buy shoes for men”, “buy shoes for women”, “buy shoes near me”, “buy shoes without laces”, and so on. All these are excellent keywords because they come straight from what people are actually searching for.

Secondly, opt for long-tail keywords as these are less competitive and more specific. Though they have low search volume, they have the potential to drive quality traffic instead of random ones. You can also use geo-targeted keywords and optimize your content for local searches.

Optimize for Search Intent

You can optimize your website content with keywords, but most of your competitors are doing the same. So, what is the differentiating factor that is keeping one ahead in the race?

Satisfying search intent. The key step to ensure a positive user experience is to optimize your content for search intent instead of only keywords.

Search intent represents the aim of the searcher. Someone may want to learn something, buy something, or find something. Each of them has different search intents. And your content should satisfy the intent. This will be reflected throughout your content. For instance, a webpage training people “how to play chess” will be very different from a page encouraging people to “buy chess board online”.

As you can understand, the search intent you want to address will determine the keywords you have to choose. The search engines will crawl and index your site and feature it when someone looks for something with the same search intent.

Link-Building

There’s no end to acquiring backlinks. Backlinking helps you to gain more domain authority and directly improves the chances of people visiting your website as it appears on other reliable domains.

The best part? You can earn organic links simply by writing useful and engaging content. Other websites will link to your site or content if they find it useful. There are plenty of ways to help you speed up the process:

• Guest blogging - make sure to select a guest post site that has a high domain authority

• Answering questions on forums like Quora - make sure to be informative and not just promotional

• Designing Infographics - Infographics can generate 37.5% more backlinks than any standard blog post (source: QuickSprout)

Quick note: 51% of marketers have noted an impact within three months of implementing a link-building strategy (source: Aira.net). So don’t ignore it.

Technical SEO

According to the experts of digital marketing services, here are some of the technical SEO best practices you should implement:

Ensure not to block search engines from crawling or indexing a page that contains essential content - Here’s how to do that: Google Search Console > Coverage report > Blocked by robots.txt error. If there is any URL that shouldn’t be blocked, remove or edit the robots.txt file. Again, if your page has an x-robots header or meta robots tag set to “noindex”, the search engines cannot index the page. Fix these issues using a Webmaster tool.

Fix duplicate content issues - Duplicate content can cause issues like scraped or syndicated content outranking you, undesirable URLs in the search results, backlink dilution, etc. You can check the pages with duplicate content issues in the Coverage report in Google Search Console.

Use hreflang for multilingual content. Hreflang is an HTML attribute that specifies the language and geography targeted by a webpage. Hreflang helps to combat duplicate pages and also share ranking signals. Thus, it improves ranking.

Use HTTPS - HTTPS encrypts the data transacted between a website and the users. It is a ranking factor of Google since 2014.

Improve page loading speed - Slow loading speed annoys the visitors. Google took this very seriously and held page speed a crucial ranking factor on the desktop back in 2010 and on mobile in 2018. Google’s Pagespeed Insights tool can be a starting point for you. It shows a performance score from 0 to 100 on desktop & mobile and suggests areas that need improvement. You can switch to a faster DNS provider, minify JavaScript, CSS, & HTML files, install a caching plugin, and compress your images (without affecting quality) to improve your page loading speed.

Optimize for Voice Search

SEO practices are highly time-sensitive. The trends of 2014 are not relevant today. For instance, with the evolution of voice search, your SEO strategy must include it to stay ahead in the competition.

Statista reveals that “31% of smartphone users worldwide use voice search at least once a week.” Therefore, it’s time to optimize your content for voice search. And this demands you to move away from keywords in favour of a human-centric content writing practice.

An example will be helpful here. People may search with the term “weather London”, but while speaking, they may search for “how is the weather now in London”. As you can see, this is more conversational. Maintain this conversational tone of writing while optimizing content for voice search.

You can take an idea from the “People Also Ask” section in Google. There, you can find various questions people ask related to your niche. Incorporate these questions into your content and answer these in a way that’s not only bot-friendly but human-friendly - get the difference?

Closing Thoughts

As you can understand, search engine optimization is all about improving user experience. Search engines like Google prioritize user experience over anything. Therefore, if your content is useful, engaging, informative, and your site offers a top-notch user experience, you have nothing to worry about. Continue to implement white-hat SEO practices following the latest SEO trends, and obtaining an optimal result out of your efforts is only a matter of time!