SEO Strategy: Developing an Effective Strategy for Your Business

Organic search still remains the champion of driving traffic to websites. In fact, a recent study found that organic search accounts for 53% of all site traffic. This means if you’re not optimising for organic search with an SEO strategy, you’re missing out on valuable traffic to your site.

At the heart of any good SEO strategy is keywords. But how do you know which keywords are the best to target for your site?

That’s exactly what we’ll be covering in this article.

1. How Keywords Fit Into Your SEO Strategy

Your SEO strategy will usually breakdown into three key components:

• Off-page
• Technical
• On-page

Technical SEO refers to the things going on in the background of your website. This includes things like site speed, secure HTTPS connections and robots.txt files. Your technical SEO essentially shows Google that your website is in good health, so it can be crawled and indexed.

Off-page SEO is everything that doesn’t happen on your website. Most often, this refers to links to your website from other websites. Having links from relevant, healthy websites helps you build domain authority and climb the organic rankings as a result.

Finally, on-page SEO is all the optimisation carried out on your website. This includes content like copy, media, metadata, URLs and more.

Your keywords fit into the latter part of your SEO strategy.

To explain this, we’ll use an example, let’s say your website sells shoes. You would want your website to rank for keywords relating to that. Not only that but you would want certain pages to rank for certain keywords.

You wouldn’t want a product page for platform boots to appear when a user searches for trainers. This is where researching and planning your keywords comes in.

Keyword Research 101

Knowing the best keywords for your site all begins with keyword research.

It’s easy to immediately think you’ll jump into an SEO keyword research tool to do this, which you will at some point. But to begin with, the best place to start creating your keyword list by looking at your site itself.

Your most valuable keywords should be obvious from the content of your site. We’ll refer back to the example we used above again. If you sell shoes, your most valuable keywords will be related to this.

This can get a bit overwhelming for websites with hundreds of products targeting different keywords so an easy way to break it down is with topic clusters.

Topic clusters start with one all-encompassing broad term, such as shoes. Then from here, you build clusters of related content out of this term. So a related cluster in our example could be, women’s sports trainers.

In your clusters, you can have a bunch of related keywords. These will often be long-tail keywords that relate to your product pages, for example, “women’s pink Adidas Gazelle trainers”.

This can help you organise your keywords around your website in a logical and hierarchical manner.

Once you’ve mapped out keywords for all the various parts of your site, you can go further in-depth to find more keywords to target.

2. SEO Strategy Research Tools

You can do this by using keyword research tools. There are a huge variety of keyword research tools available to help your SEO strategy, both paid and free. Which you use is entirely your preference, but paid tools tend to give more suggestions and more insight into the potential value of a keyword.

The most notable free keyword research tool is Google Ads Keyword Planner. As long as you have a free Google Ads account, you can use it.

Keyword research tools aren’t the only way you can find new keywords, though. A great place to find new keywords is by looking at your competition.

To do this, go through their site and see what pages they might have that you don’t. This will often be not on product pages, but within their blog or resources pages.

You can also use Google itself for keyword research. Type in one of your keywords within the results page you’ll get “People Also Ask” and “Related Searches”. These are great for coming up with closely related keywords for your clusters.

You can also use social media for keyword research. Look for content, often from competitors, that performed well on social media and add those keywords to your list too.

After all this, you should be left with a fairly sizeable list of keywords. Now you need to figure out what to do with them all.

3. Figuring Out The Best Keywords

Different keywords have different values. The value of a keyword is affected by search volume and difficulty.

We’ll focus on search volume first. You obviously want to target keywords with at least some search volume. It might even seem like the best idea to target the keyword with the highest search volume.

For example, ‘shoes’ will have an incredibly high monthly search volume. So surely, you’d want to target that keyword?

Not quite.

Generally speaking, the rule of thumb is the higher the search volume the more competitive the keyword and the more difficult it is to rank for that keyword. This isn’t to say you should ignore these keywords entirely, anything is possible with enough time.

But with our ‘shoes’ example, your website would be going up against companies like Nike, Adidas and other popular e-commerce stores like Amazon.

To get around this, you want to find sweet spot keywords for the best SEO strategy. These are keywords with a decent search volume, but lower competition. Of course, they still need to remain relevant to your site, but this allows you a chance to establish yourself well in the rankings as you’re not fighting it out with sites with a much higher domain authority than your own.

The most consistent way to find these keywords with higher volume and lower competition is to search for long tail keywords, these long tail keywords are made up of multiple common keywords. An example of a long tail keyword would be “seo agency northampton”, attempting to rank for a long tail keyword like this will also mean you will rank for each term within the long tail keyword.

These sweet spot keywords should become your top priority to rank for. They give you the best chance of appearing in the top three results and increasing your traffic to your site.

4. Organising Your Keywords

Now you have a list and you know your top priority keywords, you can organise them.

By this, we mean planning out where they go on your site. This should be pretty straight-forward because you started your keyword research and structured it in topics around your site.

In your keyword list, match each keyword to a page.

As you’ll have identified new keyword opportunities during your research phase, not every keyword will do this. For keywords that don’t, plan for adding new pages to target these keywords.

The type of pages you add will depend on the search intent of the keyword. There are four main types of search intent:

• Transactional
• Navigational
• Informational
• Commercial

Transactional refers to where the user wants to purchase something. For these types of keywords, you would create a product page.

Navigational refers to when a user is searching with a specific website in mind, for example, Wikipedia or Facebook. These keywords are difficult to target unless you are the website the user wants to find.

Informational queries are where the user wants to learn more about something. For these types of keywords, you would create a blog post, guide or resource.

Commercial is a hybrid of transactional and informational intent. It’s when a user is investigating what product to buy. A good example of this type of query intent would be, “best women’s shoes for tennis”.

You can target commercial investigation intent with pages like blog posts.

All of this can help you plan your content strategy.

This should work hand in hand with your SEO strategy. So your content strategy should be informed by your keyword research, not the other way around. This way, you’re always creating content with clear targets in mind to give you the best chance of improving your organic SEO.

5.Focus on the content design

While finding the right keywords for your website is without a doubt extremely important, you need to make sure that the design of your content is perfect as well. The reason for this is simple, nobody is going to read your content if they do not like the way your content looks. For example if your content is just a simple block of text then there is a good chance people will not read your content because it is boring. However if your content contains images this would help make your posts look more interesting.

6. Analyse Your Results

Both your keywords and your SEO strategy aren’t a one-and-done kind of situation. The best SEO strategies set clear goals with deadlines. But then review and analyse whether those goals were met.

You should be reviewing how well your keywords are performing. You can do this by looking at your SERPs, but also by looking at how users behave once they land on your page.

If users are coming through, but immediately bouncing, you might be targeting the right keyword but they’re not finding the information they want. Whereas if a page has good organic traffic and that traffic is converting once on-site, your keyword is performing well.

You should also be trying to find new keyword opportunities regularly. Keep an eye on competitors and industry news and trends to discover new opportunities.

7. Improve and update your content

If you only needed to make content once and be done that would be perfect, you can leave your content once you have published but over a long period of time, that article will end up being clicked on less and less due to the outdated content. In order to prevent this from happening, you should update your content and keep it fresh, with new strategies that have been discovered related to the topic and general updates around the subject of the content. On top of this the Google freshness algorithm loves to show more updated content rather than old and aging content, to sum up fresher content will be higher in the SERP’s and older content will eventually end up lower and lower in SERPs, no matter how good the content is.

Get Help Finding The Best Keywords

Finding the best keywords takes time, but it’s a worthwhile endeavour. Both your SEO strategy and your content strategy should be led by your keywords. Remember you must consider both search intent and keyword difficulty when planning which to target.

Thank you for reading this article, if you enjoyed this article check out our posts on how to design and implement your content marketing strategy and 5 search engine optimisation tasks to do yourself.

For those who don’t have the resources or time to conduct keyword research and strategise, a digital marketing agency can help. So why not get in touch with WTBI.