What Goes Into an Effective SEO Strategy?

There’s no argument when it comes down to the complexity of search engine optimization (SEO), and there’s definitely no denying just how intricate a strong search engine optimization strategy can be. It’s easy to get distracted by ranking factors, or focus on only one smaller aspect of SEO without taking the time to step back and focus on the bigger picture.

However, managing your SEO campaign successfully doesn’t have to be as complicated as it seems. In this article, we’ll discuss what goes into an effective SEO strategy, helping you and your business to achieve online success and improve your rankings within organic search results.

What Is SEO?

In order to fully understand the nuances of what goes into building a strong search engine optimization campaign, we first have to know what SEO is.

SEO can be defined as the process of optimizing a website through the use of various techniques to provide users with the best possible answer to any and all queries within the organic search results. This means that, in order to run a successful SEO campaign, businesses require a good understanding of popular search engines, such as Google, as well as their target market. With this knowledge of both the search engines and their customer base, companies can begin to implement various tried and tested SEO techniques to improve their rankings, increasing leads and organic traffic to their site as a result.

The Foundations of a Successful SEO Campaign

Put simply, a strong search engine optimization strategy can usually be broken down into four key areas, and these should work to form a strong foundation for any and all of your business’ SEO efforts. These four key areas are:

• Content
• Off-page SEO
• On-page SEO
• Technical SEO

Content

It’s no secret that content is one of the most important cornerstones of a successful SEO campaign. It helps your business tell potential customers who you are and what you do, as well as the services or products that you are able to provide to them. No matter how visually appealing the design of your website is, it is ultimately your content that tells your potential customers all that they need to know about you and your business, so it’s a vital factor that should not be overlooked.

For businesses that are providing services to their customers, the content that you choose to present on your company website should fall into one of these three categories:

• Service content that tells your target audience what your business does
• Authority content, detailing why customers should choose to work with your company
• Marketing content

Your content marketing efforts can ultimately make or break your search engine optimization campaign, but it’s easy to get overwhelmed when it comes down to ensuring that you are not only uploading high-quality content to your company website on a regular basis but also content that is valuable to both your readers and the industry in which your business operates.

Content marketing is a highly effective way to reach out to your customer base, letting any potential new customers know that you and your brand exist, but also working to remind your pre-existing clientele of what your company has to offer. For this reason, it’s vital to ensure that the content you’re writing will help to improve your business’s content marketing efforts rather than hinder them. There are a few quick and easy ways to improve your content marketing:

• Get to the point. One of the most important things to keep in mind when writing content for your company website is not only who you are writing the content for, but why you are writing the content in the first place. The key purpose of any content that you create should be to educate your readers on the topic at hand and answer any possible questions they may have, not to upsell or over-promote your business. This does not mean that your content cannot include links to your company services or blog posts, should they work to provide your readers with any additional beneficial information, but your content should not read like an advertisement for your business. Try to keep any content that you write precise and to the point.
• Do your research. In order to gain any authority or credibility within your field, it’s important that any and all of the topics that you write about are well-researched, ensuring you do not run the risk of providing your readers with fake news. Fact-checking should become a key aspect of your content marketing strategy and will help you to avoid the publication of any incorrect information to your company website, as well as boost your level of credibility as a resource overall.
• Remember the 5Ws. Though this may seem like a fairly simplistic tip, it is a quick and easy rule that you can follow in order to ensure that your writing is both informative and valuable to your readers. These 5Ws are: who, what, when, where and why. This is a rule that you should apply to all of your content writing efforts – not just your content marketing – whether you’re creating a new landing page, a service page or even a news article for your company blog. The 5Ws is a writing method that helps to make sure that no crucial information is missed or no question left unanswered, making it an ideal tool to keep in mind when carrying out any content marketing tasks.

Off-page SEO

Off-page search engine optimization entails working to build your site authority through the creation of high-quality links from relevant external sources, and this can often be a daunting task for those who don’t not know where to start.

Link building is often misinterpreted as a sure-fire way to improve your business website’s ranking position within the organic search results. However, it is more of a method for increasing your brand awareness and gaining authority in search engines’ eyes through the creation of relevant backlinks from other high-authority external pages where the information that you and your company have to offer might be of value. Working to provide high-quality, informative guest posts to other websites within your field is a great way to do this, helping to boost your site authority while also bringing your knowledge and expertise to a wider audience who may be interested in the products or services you offer.

On-page SEO

There are several on-page SEO elements that go into building a strong and successful SEO campaign that will help your company website to rank in organic search results, meaning it can sometimes be difficult knowing where you should start. However, on-page optimization can be a relatively simple and straightforward task, with these being the most important areas on which to focus your efforts:

• Calls to action
• Good content
• Keyword research
• Meta descriptions
• Title tags
• URL friendliness
• User experience and site accessibility

By focusing on these key areas, you can work to successfully optimize your company’s site, increasing your chances of ranking high and reaching your target audience.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO ensures that popular search engines such as Google are able to successfully access your web pages and navigate your website with ease. If search engines are unable to access the content that is live on your website, how will they know where to rank you?

Technical SEO goes hand-in-hand with on-page SEO – you cannot run a successful SEO campaign with only one or the other. For this reason, it is important to ask yourself the following questions to optimize your site’s technical SEO elements:

• Can search engines crawl your company website?
• Is your site mobile-friendly?
• Are the search engines able to identify the pages that you want to be shown in the search results?
• Does your site display a clear hierarchy of content?
• Is your website CMS search engine friendly?

To conclude, while there are many nuances that go into building a strong search engine optimization campaign for your website, there are four key elements that you should be focusing on in order to ensure that your SEO strategy is as strong as it possibly can be. By focusing on these key points, your business can work to create an effective SEO campaign that will increase your chances of online success.