How to Build an Effective Evergreen SEO Strategy!
SEO Strategy– In this blog we are going to show you, how to create an Effective Evergreen SEO Strategy. When it comes to building an effective SEO Strategy, most of the organizations and seo companies think at a tactical level.
Before jumping into the details let’s take a look at what a seo team does on a day to day basis.
• Do a Site Audit
• Identify the problems and what needs to be fixed
• Assign the task to the respective teams
• Verify the results
Most of the SEO executives work like this….
• What are the keywords we need to rank for?
• Optimize the website content for the keywords.
• Work on link building and get some links
• Check the rankings
• Rinse, repeat and keep improving.
This is an SEO Strategy. Right? “NO”
Some of them might go into SEO Tactics, but this is definitely not an SEO Strategy!
Looking at this way is a very old school thought of SEO!
Then how does an effective SEO Strategy look like? Before getting into the SEO Strategy, let us understand the big picture of search trends.
Understanding the Big Picture of Search Trends
We are going to talk about how you are going to a remarkable and amazing seo strategy for 2018. The first thing, I am not going to start with broad spectrum, strategic picture, which we will talk about little bit here and there and reference some of those, but is actually understanding the big picture in search trends.
SERP Features:
First things is that there is a huge rise in the SERP features, meaning Google is showing many types of data, and types of mark up, in the search results. We have 17 types which we have recorded.
Instant Answers:
As a part of that we are also seeing a rise in Instant answers. This is especially true on mobile, but true on desktop as well. Google is trying to answer a lot of the queries themselves and that can mean, they are taking away traffic from you or it can mean there is an opportunity to get into those SERP features for those answers.
Intent > Keywords
Well so seen this trend of that started with humming bird and now obviously continues with rank brain, around intent, searcher intent being more important than keywords on how we target our content. This does not mean you can remove keywords from the equation, you have to understand what the searcher has typed into the before you can serve their intent and very small variations in keyword structure can mean real changes in searcher intent. That is the critical part of how we craft content for people.
Multi device Speed/UX
Multi device speed and user experience. Google has been harping on this for several years now and what we are observing here is that speed is not the only user experience Google is taken action against. There are Overlays and pop-ups also. The site that have better user experience are garnering better engagement, doing better in the search results.
Voice Search
Voice search is clearly on the rise, not yet a huge trend in terms of addressable market, the search marketers can go after.
Machine Learning
Machine learning and deep learning, Google has clearly made a shift to that in the last 18 months, and we are seeing it affect the search results in terms of how they are considering links, how they are looking at keyword searches, how they are looking at content.
Multi Visit Buyer Journeys
Multi visit buyer journeys has always been important but I think we are now seeing the trend where not just search marketers but marketers of stripes recognize this and a lot us are optimizing for.
Which means that the competitive landscape now demands that you optimize for multi visit buyer journey and that you just don’t consider a single visit in your conversion path or in your optimization path and that means for SEO’s considering “what are all the queries that someone might perform as they come to and come back to my site”.
Bias to Brands
Bias to brands that is a continuing trend over the last few years, we are still seeing it and we are seeing it even when those brands have not necessarily earned tons of links which used to be the big dominating factor.
Undiminished Value of Links
But that being said we kind of feeling undiminished value of links. If you have built a brand , if you have done lot of these things successfully, links are certainly how you can stand out in the search results. That’s pretty much is true in now as it was in 2011-2012. Only caveat there is that the quality of links matter lot more.
Now let us get into action. Creating a Framework work for SEO Strategy
4 Steps to create an Evergreen Effective SEO Strategy
Let us break the Framework to create an effective SEO Strategy into 4 steps
First Step: Defining the Organizational Goals for the Year or Quarter
Step Two: Create the Game Plan for Achieving Your Goals
Step Three: Listing out the Tactics to achieve the Organizational Goals Using SEO
Step Four: Measurement/Analysis
Step 1: Defining the Organizational Goals for the Year or Quarter
This is first and most important critical step in creating an effective SEO Strategy. You need to have a goal and the SEO team should know how it is contributing to the organizational goals.
Let us take up an example of ABC Corp which has three organizational goals for the Year.
Goal No 1: Acquire New Enterprising Customers
Goal No 2: Reduce the Acquisitions Costs
Goal No 3: Create Awareness in a New Market
Each Goals are different and requires different game plan and SEO tactics to achieve them. At the tactical level there might be an overlap.
Let us proceed with the developing a Game Plan for Goal No 1 i.e Acquiring New Enterprise Customers.
Step 2: Game Plan to Achieve Goals.
Let us develop simple steps or the Game Plan to achieve the Goal No 1.
Create a New URL or Microsite:
You might want to create a new URL or a microsite to target the Enterprise customers. The Enterprise customers have a different nature and you might want to create specialized content to reach them.
Do a Keyword Research and Content Analysis:
Keyword research is the new market research for 21st century. Doing an in-depth keyword research will lead to new insights. How a B2B customer searches for products and services might differ from how a B2C customer is searching.
They might include words like “enterprise solutions” or “solutions provider” in their search terms while the end consumer just searches using the buy “product name”.
Don’t Forget to Put Lead Capturing Forms:
Creating lead capturing forms, specifically designed for Enterprise customers requires extra efforts and analysis. You might have to add fields like
Designation
Company
Marketing Budget for the Year etc.
Do not forget to add the lead capturing form in the web page or the microsite which you are designing to target the Enterprise Customers.
Now Develop the Content and Publish It:
The next step will be to develop the content based on the keyword research you did and publish the same in the page or the microsite. Remember! It is the user intent which is important.
Rank the URL (or) Microsite for No 1 Position in Google
The next obvious step is to rank the URL for No 1 position in the Google for the chosen primary keyword or a bunch of conversion keywords.
Remember! In order to meet the organizational goal, i.e Acquiring New Enterprise Customers, you need to more impressions to create brand awareness, increase the click to website to drive more traffic and capture leads.
Now as we have set the GAME PLAN, it is time for us to dive into tactics which is the most exciting part of SEO.
To Achieve Goal No 2, i.e Reduce the Cost of Acquisition, you can focus on creating New landing pages and optimizing them to rank in search engine results on top.
This will lead to increase in the number of leads generated in organic way, thus reducing the cost of acquisition through traditional means.
Similarly to Achieve Goal No 3, i.e Create Awareness in the New Market, you can create new website for the countries which you want to target with CLTD’s or Country Top Level Domain.
You can also add and optimize fresh content on your existing website and rank for the location specific keywords such as “enterprising solutions in usa” for example.
Step 3: Tactics to Achieve the Goals
So what goes into “SEO TACTICS”?
Tactics are the list of activities which you have to execute to put your game plan into action to achieve your Organizational Goals.
SEO Tactics keep changing and evolving as the search engine algorithms change and evolve. The SEO Technique which worked last year may not work this year.
You might want to uncover new ideas to put your game plan into action
For Example: Rank Your Microsite In No 1 Position in Google is part of your “Game Plan”
What should I do or what steps do I follow to do the same.
You Might want to
1. Optimize Your Site for Google Rank Brain Algorithm
2. Update, Upgrade and Republish Old Blog Posts
3. Find Broken Link Building Opportunities
4. Steal Your Competitors Best Keywords
5. Link out to Authority Sites and so on….
Broadly you can classify these SEO tactics or SEO techniques under two categories
1. On page Tactics
2. Off-Page Tactics
You can find a comprehensive list of SEO Techniques for 2018 here at backlinko.
https://backlinko.com/seo-techniques
So once you have listed them down, start assigning the work to the Team and get on with the job of executing them.
Step 4: Measurement/Analysis
Now you have put in all your SEO efforts. It is time to measure and analyze the SEO Results.
How to measure them? What parameters do I use? Is there a Dashboard where I can fit in my SEO work?
There is No One Correct Answer to these questions, but there are few tips which we can get from Neil Patel.
The following are the parameters Neil Patel suggests in his blog post.
1. Organic Search Traffic
2. Assigning Monetary Value to Your Organic Search Traffic
3. Measuring the Quality of Your SEO Traffic
4. Measuring SEO Efforts through Goal Completions.
Read this blog post by Neil Patel to get more Insights on measuring SEO Efforts.
https://neilpatel.com/blog/google-analytics-strategies-to-measure-seo/
So, hope this blog post has given you tips and trick in setting up your SEO Strategy up and running.
Let us know your thoughts in the comments section.