Khushi Jobanputra
Just as the year 2023 is knocking at our gates, we must admit the stiff competition among websites for online visibility and traction. This is precisely why businesses need to improve their SEO strategies to outshine the competition.
Whether you hire professional SEO services or conduct SEO through an in-house team, for the SEO strategy to deliver awesome results in terms of search engine visibility, traffic, and lead generation, you may find the following tips useful.
Set SEO Goals
Setting goals for your SEO campaign is of extreme significance since against these goals only you can measure the success of your SEO campaigns. It is always effective to determine clear SEO marketing results and accordingly carry out backward processes to realize these goals.
Let's give some ideas about these goals.
Is the goal of your SEO to increase the sales of your e-commerce store? If yes, what products or services do you expect your eCommerce SEO experts to optimise your sales for?
Do you want to increase the market share within particular segments of the audience? What are the segments and how to keep track of your reach?
Is it your goal to generate increased website traffic? How much website traffic do you want to generate? How to evaluate your traffic for one particular web page versus the others?
Do you want to drive business conversion through lead generation? How to track business conversion through leads?
Carry Out A Website Audit
As soon as you have made a clear SEO strategy corresponding to the content, keywords, and topic clusters, this is time to conduct a thorough SEO audit. This will help you to discover the key areas for improvement and all the content that perfectly complements the targeted topic clusters. You also may need a Google ads specialist to analyse the effectiveness and impact of Google ads on search engine results.
When it comes to auditing content, segregate the existing content into three broad categories such as that need to be kept, the ones that need to be optimised and the content that needs to be removed. Duplicate and poor content should be deleted. High quality content should be kept as it is and all other content in between these two opposites should be optimised. By updating the existing content with relevant keywords, readability enhancements and links you can easily create material for better search ranks.
Ensure SEO Scalability
A key challenge many businesses encounter when creating an SEO strategy is maintaining scalability. It is probable that your website, despite having thousands of pages, does not have quality content and links across all these pages. This is when businesses hire a search engine marketing agency for a highly scalable SEO strategy.
The scalable SEO strategy is all about accommodating a lot of new keywords, streamlining keyword research and optimisation, scaling up blogger and guest post outreach and making in-depth SEO reports based on new goals.
Integration of key SEO tools to help scale up capacity and adhering to industry-acclaimed standards to ensure concerted efforts and collaboration are two key aspects behind the successful scalability of SEO efforts.
When it is a big company, keeping everyone across departments in sync regarding the SEO objectives and milestones is important to bring a concerted effort. This requires creating detailed dashboards showcasing various metrics and indicators from tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SEMRush, etc.
Make A Competitive Analysis
You always do not need to carry out all the research from scratch. You can just get into competitive analysis and keep track of what other companies are doing. For this just make a list of top competitors in your business niche and check out their SEO implementations.
Secondly, keep track of the keywords they’re targeting and the keywords they successfully rank for. Apart from this, you also need to check the volume of content your competitors are publishing and how lengthy those contents are.
For a detailed check, you can always use a few effective SEO tools and scan their websites as well as the backlink profiles. Just by going through their backlink profile, you can easily understand the areas to create backlinks and the ways to outperform them.
Keyword Research
Keywords research and keyword analysis play the most important role now in any SEO campaign. At first, you need to concentrate on the easy keywords that can be targeted for higher search ranks. Only when these easy-to-achieve keywords are targeted successfully, you can opt for more competitive and shorter keywords.
When you start from long-tail and low-competition keywords, slowly you gain on search ranks making things further easier to target short and highly competitive keywords. Many local SEO services focus primarily on long-tail local keywords first before targeting keywords for broader regions later. Based on the competitor’s keyword strategy and search rank you can also reverse engineer the strategy to achieve higher search ranks.
Publish High-Quality Content
Content is still the king for SEO and there is no better way to optimise your SEO output than publishing high-quality content. Make sure the published content is helpful and useful enough for the target audience.
To optimise the content quality it is important to provide useful tips, guidance, practical solutions for real life scenarios, in-depth analysis, visually engaging graphics and intuitive infographics. By publishing quality content you actually can improve the search engine ranking potential of your content and make a foundation for higher domain authority.
Have A Robust Link Building Plan
For a great SEO strategy in the coming year, it is important to have a solid backlinking strategy. Most SEO experts are of the opinion that links from high-authority websites of the related niche can be highly useful in achieving better rankings on Google.
For link building, you need an innovative plan so that other websites automatically feel it necessary to link your website to theirs. You must begin by encouraging small and local businesses to connect their websites followed by links from high-value websites.
To create a solid backlink profile it is also important to create a great blog post with frequently published high-quality content. This will increase the chances of other reputed websites and blogs linking their websites.
Optimise The Page Loading Speed
It is well known that by publishing a lot of content over a period of time you end up making the website heavier which results in a slower loading speed. On the other hand, a lot of memory consuming features and functionalities can also slow down website loading.
Slower websites and under-optimised user experiences are now punished by Google with low priority in search ranks. On the other hand, sluggish performance can also drive away traffic and make you lose a substantial volume of leads and businesses.
To optimise the loading speed, optimise the images, videos and other content types resulting in less memory and CPU consumption. Compress the code and ensure writing low footprint code for faster loading time. Lastly, take the help of the coding experts who can help increase the page loading speed by using additional code resulting in faster crawling by the search engines.
Set Quantifiable Performance Metrics & KPIs
The last and most important aspect of the SEO strategy is to establish objectives and metrics that can be easily measured with quantifiable data. The strategy can only be evaluated in a quantifiable manner when the objectives and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are clearly expressed through quantifiable figures.
In order to make your strategy clearly objective, mention the number of target users, lead generation figures and business outcomes in clear numbers. Make clear goals corresponding to the organic SEO output, the visitor footfall from both organic and inorganic sources, pay-per-click (PPC) ranking, CTR (Click Through Rate) rankings, etc.
Conclusion
All search engines including Google are always on the lookout for means of improvement and value additions to the web search experience. Naturally, not even for a single day, your SEO strategy can fail to stay on the front foot to embrace the latest best practices and means for SEO. Most of the SEO tips are fairly evergreen ones and they will continue to play major roles in the SEO strategies of 2023 and years beyond.
