5-Step Guide to Building an SEO Strategy

Are you putting random keywords in your blogs and hoping them to rank higher without any strategy/research? You can’t create content aimlessly and expect to see the results without an SEO expert by your side. To yield high-quality and profitable leads that are coming from user searches, you have to consider proper content &SEOtactics. It can work wonders for you when done right or damage your brand when ignored.

Ready to take your content from zero to a properly optimized hero? Here is a 5 step guide to help you incorporate SEO strategy to your content.

Step #1 - Define your topic

Keyword research alone does not make an SEO strategy. Your first step is to choose the right topic for your content. Cover the areas that your target customers care about. Here are some ways that can lead you to an awesome content idea.

·         Reddit

On Reddit, head over to active subreddits where your target audience might be. Look for the topics that are discussed more and come up more frequently. These are the ideas that you can cover in your blog post or you can also create a video.

·         Competitor Blogs

Look at your competitors’ blogs especially the popular posts, videos, infographics, and other content. Look for what good points they have included, things they have in common, and what you can use in your blogs to improve them.

·         Personas

This refers to a buyer’s persona wherein you add general facts about the type of customer that is likely to be interested in your product/service. It helps find out the type of content, service, and products your target customers are searching for online. For example, if you are targeting a group of people that belong to the marketing field. Next, you need to understand what queries/problems they are dealing with and create a post to answer those.

Step #2 - Find Relevant Keywords

Your content should include keywords that reflect the topic and also should be those frequently searched by your target audience. Thus, for effective keyword research, you should combine knowledge (topic) search and target audience’s interests. Here are some ways which can be useful for your research:

·         Start with a broad search term

It falls under the industry expertise. For example, if you are going to talk about or sell sports shoes, you have to start with that the broad root term, i.e., sports shoes.

·         Narrow down the terms

Next, think about factors such as the bestselling features and look for variations of those keywords. Apart from including features, you can also look for terms around questions/queries that your target audience is frequently coming up with.

·         Put it all together

Draft a rough list of all the ideas and use those terms to look further into keyword research tools. For example, with the broad root term sports shoes, here is a list that you can get:

o   Women’s Nike sports shoes

o   Women’s Nike sports sneakers

o   Running sneakers cushioned sole

o   What kind of sports shoes should I buy it?

·         Check your tools

And now, when you have a list of potential keywords, use your favorite tool to jolt down some terms that you are actually going to use.Search each one of them to find the best opportunities by looking for terms with lower competition and higher search volume.

Step #3 - Write Comprehensive Content

Now, when you know what to write and what terms to focus on, you should move next to the writing part.If you want your content to rank on Google, it needs to be amazing. While awesome content is the key to success, a mere quality of language is not enough if you are not pulling the right strings. You need to frame the best result for a given search term/theme.

Publish Informative Content: Write and publish content that gives information to the one who is reading it. Also, comprehensive content tends to be longer than an average blog post as longer content ranks better.

The more the number of words, the higher is the scope to add more information about the topic. Besides users’ interest, it also makes Google feel that your page has relevant information for that specific keyword. Also, the length allows you to cover a lot more than a 300-word blog post on the same topic. This attracts more links, more social shares, and hence, more audience.

Step #4 - Optimize for Users

After writing the content, you should optimize it to make it reader-friendly. If your content is not easy to read and understand, it would not work. However, mere making it user-friendly also won’t work and you will need to make it search engine friendly as well. Here are some tips that you can use to make your content satisfactory for both the target audience and search engines.

·         Firstly, make the first few sentences of the content short and crispy.

·         Secondly, use media in your content such as video, charts, diagrams, infographics, and other interactive media. When you have quality content in addition to text, you satisfy a chunk of the people that come to your site.

·         Also, use subheading tags (H1-H6), meta descriptions, shorter sentences, active voice, and at least one subheading after every 200 words.

Step #5 - Publish and Promote

Now, publish the post on your website/blog and promote it on different platforms. Here are a few basics to help you begin.

·         Link building: This is an all-inclusive term and forms one of the important search engine ranking factors. Get links to your content from high authority, relevant sites.

·         Social Sharing: Share the content to your social circle and other groups/pages where your target audience is likely to be present and interacting.

·         RSS Submission Sites: Share your blog/article to sites that accept blog/article/RSS submissions to expand your outreach.

·         Hire an Expert: If you are not knowledgable/comfortable with the SEO or promotion part, you can also hire an SEO Specialist for better results.

Final Verdict

Creating content wisely while following all the steps, right from choosing the topic to defining your audience, writing compelling content and promoting helps reach masses and generate results. However, analyzing the results and user behavior through tools like Google Analytics and Heat Maps can help you get actionable insights for improvisation.