How to Design an Effective SEO Strategy in 5 Steps

With digitalisation at its peak, the internet is growing more rapidly and disruptively than ever.

Aug. 27, 2024

As billions of websites vie for visibility, how do you ensure that your website is positioned competitively and captures the attention of your target audience? The answer lies in search engine optimisation (SEO). Defined in simple terms, SEO is all about how you can enable search engines to improve the visibility of your website content through organic (non-paid) search. With a plethora of options available to customers, it becomes critical that your product or service offering can be easily discovered when they navigate on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Baidu. The higher your website ranks in the search results, the more likely it is customers will click, get directed to your website, and engage with you – highlighting the importance of effective SEO.

Unsurprisingly, one in every three marketers is leveraging SEO and website blogs as a key component of their overall marketing strategy in 2024.

Designing an Effective SEO Strategy

Most marketers recognise the importance of SEO but struggle to either kickstart or overcome the bumps along their SEO journey. Adopting a data-driven approach and understanding how search engines rank websites using different factors is a good starting point. A commonly used framework in SEO ranking is the E-E-A-T framework, which stands for expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

• Expertise – You are a subject matter expert in the given topic or field.
• Experience – You have personal experience to back up the content that you are publishing.
• Authoritativeness – Others see you as a credible and authoritative voice in the given topic or field and link your content on their websites.
• Trustworthiness – Your content is reliable, up-to-date, and trustworthy.

Here is a step-by-step guide to help you plan and execute an effective SEO strategy for your website:

Step 1: Goal-Setting and Resource Estimation

Before you plug and play with different SEO hacks, it is important to be crystal clear on the ultimate goal you are trying to achieve through your SEO efforts and quantify them using relevant SEO KPIs. Be it boosting keyword rankings, driving organic traffic growth and conversions, generating new leads, or effectively positioning your brand among your target audience, your goal should be aligned to your overarching business objectives. Once you have a clear picture of what success looks like, you can evaluate your current state and estimate what resources (people, technology and budget) you need to achieve your desired future. Whether you leverage inhouse capability to drive your SEO efforts, bring in external SEO experts, or outsource the entire initiative to a specialised SEO agency, without the right expertise and foresight in place, it is easy to falter and get lost along the way.

Step 2: Keyword Research

Conducting extensive research on keywords relating to your website content forms the backbone of your SEO strategy. This research will help you understand your audience, allowing you to personalise your content to their search patterns. Using different search tools, you can analyse the search volume and competition of different keywords and phrases, selecting the most appropriate primary and secondary keywords for your website content. By plugging these into your articles, blogs, and other website content, and using effective cross-linking, you can boost your sites visibility and overall user search ranking. Remember, while it is important to integrate these target keywords into your content, do not use them excessively or inorganically as keyword saturation can adversely impact your SEO.

Step 3: Keyword Intent

On top of using the right target keywords, it is important to understand the intent behind them. This has a direct correlation with how users search for content online, as the intent behind their search queries is detected by the search engine, which then ranks websites based on the content’s alignment with the user’s intent. Be it searching for cheap flights or finding a piano tutorial for beginners, it is important to understand what your users are looking for and trying to achieve from their search. With that intent in mind, you can then leverage different types of keywords, such as commercial, navigational, informational, or transactional, to tailor your content accordingly. This can help you design content that speaks the language of your target audience, addresses their queries directly, and as a result, increases your website’s visibility in the search results.

Step 4: Technical Aspects and Optimising for Mobile

The content and technical aspects of SEO go hand in hand. On top of using the right keywords in your website content, focus on improving your website speed and optimising your URL structure, headings, sub-headings, and meta descriptions. Ensure that there are no technical glitches while navigating across different pages. With the majority of all website traffic coming from mobile devices, it is essential that you tailor your SEO strategy to ensure your website works seamlessly on mobile devices. This includes tweaking content so it loads quickly by using techniques like browser caching and breaking up large chucks of content into easily accessible text and visual elements. Load times are correlated to bounce rates, which in turn impact your search ranking, so it is important that you pay attention to the nuances. Having a highly responsive, easily accessible, and mobile-friendly version of your website can go a long way to accelerating positive outcomes from your SEO and overall B2C marketing efforts.

Step 5: Learning Good Case Practices from Competitors

On top of fine-tuning your own SEO strategy, it is important to keep an eye out on what your competitors are doing from an SEO perspective. Leveraging different SEO tools, you can conduct an in-depth competitor analysis by looking at their commonly used target keywords, back-linking strategies, website traffic, and overall SEO performance. This can provide valuable insights on the effectiveness of different strategies and help you plug the gaps in your existing SEO efforts, as you constantly evolve and elevate your SEO game. Remember, what works for your competitors might not always work for you, so the onus is on you to evaluate the effectiveness of a particular SEO tactic and decide whether to persevere with it or pivot.

Similar to other digital marketing optimisation tactics, developing a powerful SEO strategy requires a well-calibrated approach and a belief in delayed gratification. You might not be able to see instant wins, but a solid SEO sets you up for long-term success, enabling you to outperform your competitors and gain prominence as a brand of choice for your customers.