How to Build an SEO Strategy Even if You’re a Beginner
Business owners nowadays compete to make their website’s appearance on the first page of the search engine results. This is worthy enough since the maximum number of clicks goes to the websites that appear on the first page of Google. However, achieving this position is not that easy. You need to implement the top SEO strategy to skyrocket your website’s ranking in SERPs.
Ranking on Google is challenging for everyone whether you are an SEO beginner or an experienced professional. This requires an intentional SEO strategy. Don’t know where to start?
Take a peek at this post to kickstart the SEO journey for your business website with some simple SEO tips. But before we share the tips, let’s discuss some basics of SEO strategy.
What is an SEO Strategy?
An SEO strategy is an extensive process of optimizing your website’s content and structure so that its ranking increases in search engine results.
Business owners who want to gain organic traffic from search engines must create and implement an effective SEO strategy. In fact, this also helps you to stay on track while curating content for your target audience.
A basic SEO strategy includes some must-have techniques like keyword research, link building, on-page SEO and technical SEO optimization. This helps website owners in attracting more organic traffic to their site.
7 Easy SEO Tips to Create an Effective Strategy
The search landscape is continually changing and with the advent of AI in 2024, the SEO strategy for websites never remains the same. So, you need to curate new SEO strategies that will help your site stand out among its competitors.
Apart from this evolving search landscape, the good news is that there is some basic SEO strategy that remain the same. Here we will walk through some basic SEO strategies, implementing which might help your website gain much more organic traffic and visits than before.
1. Form a List of Selected Keywords
Whenever you will be building any legit SEO strategy, you have to begin with conducting keyword research. You can begin with typing your product or service-related keywords into the Google search field. This will provide you with a list of suggested keywords that are not just relevant to what you have searched but these are the keywords that people are searching for.
Once you have manually collected a list of keywords from the search landscape, take note of them. After this, you can also use some keyword research tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner, etc. to filter your list of keywords based on the search intent of the user.
2. Analyze the SERPs
Once you have found a handful of chosen keywords, it’s time to check the search engine ranking pages to determine who is already ranking for that keyword. It will be better if you choose a long-tail keyword for the search. This will filter out and provide you with a more accurate result.
Here is a list of the things that you need to keep in check while analyzing the SERPs:
- How many people are already ranking for this particular search term?
- What sort of pages are ranking for that specific keyword?
- What sort of companies or publishers are ranking?
- What SERP features does it include?
In case you find that the competition of the keyword is too high, then try to rank for a long-tail keyword. As an option, you can even continue to analyze the SERPs to find out some opportunities with the same search intent.
3. Identify Your Competitors
Immediately after you have examined the SERPs, it’s time to identify your top competitors in the industry. You can use various free and paid tools to analyze your top competitors that are organically ranking higher on SERPs.
Once you get them, you can analyze their website on the basis of several factors. These include:
- The type of content they publish
- Categories on which they put their focus upon
- The number of LSI keywords they have incorporated into their content
- The optimization techniques they have used for their website
- Whether the owners or publishers of this website are long-time industry players or mid-experienced ones?
After you have analyzed the qualitative attributes of your competitor’s pages, you will get to know about the basic SEO strategy that they have used to promote their website. You can plan to use those or some better SEO strategies to rank at the top of the SERPs.
4. Implement Some Better Strategies
After you have thoroughly scanned your competitor’s website’s strategy for SEO, now it’s time to curate some strategies for your website as per your business goals. You can do so in two ways- either you can create some better strategies or execute some different strategies.
Sometimes, you can optimize your content using the best SEO strategies and implement the Skyscraper technique so that your content stands out from the rest. For that, you must also ensure to publish content that is much more optimized and of higher quality than that out there.
5. Perform On-Page SEO Optimization
This is probably one of the most important steps of a successful SEO strategy. This involves creating optimized content for long-tail keywords. Though the process is a lengthy one, you can stick to some SEO basics for ranking your content higher in the SERPs. Like ‘first write content for humans and then for search engines’, including keywords in the page title, H1, meta description, compressing the size of the images and including keyword-rich alt-text into it, etc.
Apart from this, you also need to perform some core on-page SEO techniques in 2024 for better optimization.
- Internal Linking: Linking several pages of your website internally helps build a ton of authority. You need to just focus on linking high-authority pages to the one that requires more authority.
- Focus on Short URLs: As per the analysis of the Google search results, it has been found that shorter URLs outperform longer URLs when it comes to SEO. This is the reason why you should focus on creating short URLs that are effectively rich in keywords.
- Semantic SEO: Optimizing your content for semantic SEO makes your content much more search-friendly for your target audiences.
6. Focus on Search Intent
Another simple SEO tip that most SEO experts recommend is optimizing your content for search intent. For this, you can even use the Skyscraper technique to get more traffic to your site.
If you find that the keywords focused on your website’s content do not match the search intent of the user, it will not rank. So, ensure to optimize your content by keeping the search intent in mind. This will significantly lead to a boost in your website’s traffic.
7. Build Backlinks to Your Web Page
Backlinks are still one of the most interesting and authentic ways of building authority in your industry. The more quality backlinks your website has, the more authoritative it seems to Google’s algorithm.
Here are some top-notch link-building strategies that work really well.
- Publishing guest posts on other publisher’s website and link back to your websites
- Offer content to someone’s site as a replacement for their broken link
- Partner with other companies on other marketing campaigns
- Write helpful content that other sites want to link to
- Sponsor events and conferences
If you utilize these strategies to build quality backlinks, it often suggests to Google that your site is a legitimate source of information.
These are some basic SEO strategies for your website in 2024.
Wrapping Up
Ranking on Google might be challenging, especially when your strategy perfectly does not meet your business goals. This is why you need to focus on creating an effective SEO strategy that supports your business’s unique goals, especially if you want to achieve a top position in the SERPs.
As it involves a lot of techniques you can always take the help of a reputed SEO agency that can help you address the individual needs of your business. This will help you with greater marketing success and increased customer acquisition in the long run.