As far as search engine optimization goes, everyone’s main goal is to rank for keywords that drive traffic to their site and increase revenue. But knowing this doesn’t always make the process simple or easy. Indeed, SEO can get pretty complicated if you take on too much at one time. It’s easy to get lost trying to figure out which ranking factors are the most important to Google. For this reason, it’s critical to develop an effective SEO strategy that makes it easy to improve your organic search traffic.
Keeping this in mind, we have outlined below the four basic steps that are the key to any SEO strategy in 2021.
1. Quality Website Content
Good content is important because it tells potential customers what you do, where you it, and who you have done it for in the past. Essentially, it tells people why they should use your business.
A well-defined content marketing plan contributes heavily to your overall SEO strategy because it is the most scalable way to reach your target audience. Because there is no cost per click, there is a great return on investment. In other words, you are are scaling your marketing without scaling your costs.
One rule to keep in mind is to optimize your content across the whole customer journey, so it fits with your marketing tactics.
2. Technical SEO
This refers to the steps you take to make sure that a search engine can read your content and navigate your site. Choosing the right content management system makes a big difference because it will take care of many of these technical details. Additional SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs can also help to pinpoint technical problems with your site.
Some of the main areas to focus on include the following:
Mobile – Is the mobile version of your site adapted to mobile users?
Crawl – Can a search engine crawl your site?
Indexing – Is it clear which pages a search engine should index and return?
Page Speed – Faster loading times are critical to acquiring and retaining visitors.
Hierarchy – Is your content properly structure on your website?
A big part of technical SEO is tied into your website design and development. The main thing is for your developer to design your site with these SEO principles in mind.
3. On-site or On-page SEO
This element focuses on how your website content is optimized at an individual page level. There is some overlap here from technical SEO as a well-structured content hierarchy is a good place to start.
The focus areas for on-page SEO are page titles, meta tags, descriptive URLs, and of course, keyword research. It also helps to have things like good UX design and strong calls to action.
When optimizing your web pages, the guiding principle should be to cater to your target audience. For instance, if you primarily deal with local customers, then you need to focus on local SEO and make sure that things like your address and location are featured prominently.
4. Off-site or Off-page SEO
This kind of SEO revolves around everything you do away from your website to build authority. When you hear people talk about link building, they are referring to the main objective of off-site SEO. The idea is to get links to your site from relevant sources.
However, in order to do that, you need to create something that deserves links. Basically, you need to start by developing content that deserves to rank and that others will want to link to.
Conclusion
You do not have to reinvent the wheel to have an effective SEO strategy. If you take care of the four main elements of SEO, then you will have a structured, easy-to-follow process that you can use to optimize your site.
