SEO may seem complicated, but there are a series of repeatable steps you can take to implement an effective SEO strategy. These steps include defining your target audience, identifying relevant keywords, creating valuable content, generating backlinks, and optimizing your website’s performance. Let’s take a closer look at each of these steps.
1. Define your target audience
The first thing to do is to define your ideal audience who will be informed about the topics and keywords you are targeting. To do this, create an ideal customer profile or buyer persona that identifies demographics, psychographics, company statistics, and more. You can create one manually or using an online tool like HubSpot’s Make My persona.
2. Conduct keyword research
Once you’ve defined your target audience, the next step is to conduct keyword research to identify relevant search terms to target with high-quality content, such as blog posts. The best way to do keyword research is to use free tools like Google’s Keyword Planner or paid options like Semrush.
Search for related topics using any of the tools above, and note each topic’s overall keyword traffic and ranking difficulty. From there, put together a content runway of relevant keywords that have high traffic potential and a reasonable chance of ranking based on their difficulty score.
3. Create quality content
The next step is to write and publish a high-quality blog post that targets one of the main keywords on your content runway. To do this, start with an outline that identifies the overall header structure of your article and includes your main keywords in elements such as the title and related headers.
From there, optimize for your main keywords and add elements like images and statistics to create the entire piece. Use internal links on your website to link to related articles to help Google better discover your content.
4. Build quality backlinks
Backlinks are links from third-party sites that point to your content, which Google considers as a measure of authority. Once your blog post is published, implement off-page SEO strategies that generate quality backlinks, including direct outreach. For example, research relevant websites that would benefit from linking to your content. Next, find their contact information and suggest a link to your site.
5. Optimize website performance
Make sure you’re also improving the overall health and performance of your website, including loading speed and mobile optimization. Google uses Lighthouse Performance Scores to rank websites based on key performance metrics and assign a score out of 100. Also includes accessibility, best practices, and overall SEO scores. Your goal is to optimize your site to get these four scores as close to 100 as possible.
6. Iterate and improve
Check your SEO metrics monthly to determine how your strategy is performing. You can use SEO tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Google Search Console to track key SEO data like traffic and ranking positions. Iterate and improve your on-page, off-page, and technical SEO strategies based on your results.
7. Stay informed about changing SEO trends
Search algorithms are constantly changing, which impacts the SEO best practices you should follow. This is why it’s important to stay on top of changing SEO trends and how they impact your overall SEO strategy. Make sure you don’t miss any changes by subscribing to or reading online resources such as our newsletter Search Engine Journal.
