SEO is an important factor in boosting your marketing efforts, it stands for search engine optimisation and is the process of increasing visibility to a website and increasing traffic. Increased visibility means more visitors to your website when keywords and terms are searched relating to your business. 

 Search engines use bots to crawl through pages on the web to collect information and put the pages in an index to help searchers find exactly what they are looking for. Each page in the index is analysed using an algorithm, considering a range of ranking factors to determine which pages should rank higher on the search engine results pages depending on each search query. 

 SEO helps with organic search rankings, unlike paid search ads you can't pay to get ranked higher. So, putting in the work is important to get the results you want. This is done by producing high-quality content optimised with carefully chosen keywords. 

• SEO strategy
• Create a list of relevant topics
• Based on the topics, create a list of long-tail keywords
• Build pillar pages
• Make a blogging schedule
• Link building
• Compress media files
• Keep up to date with trends
• Analyse

SEO strategy

Developing an effective SEO strategy should be an integral part of your marketing efforts. Depending on what your business goals are may influence your strategy however, there are similar steps that all businesses should take. An SEO strategy is needed to organise a website's content in order of topic, this helps to increase the chances of it appearing in search engine results pages. Having a clear and concise strategy helps businesses stay on track when content is being created so that it's what your target audience is actually searching for.

Create a list of relevant topics

To create a future-proof SEO strategy you should first identify key themes drawn from the keyword research you’ve carried out. What topics are people looking for? Off the back of that, what content do you already have live on your site? Can this content be optimised to work harder? OK, now pull out the themes that you’re missing within your content. Now you should have a clear plan that is full of keywords and phrases most relevant to the goods and services you are promoting.

Based on the topics, create a list of long-tail keywords

For each topic you have identified, you should use the keyword tool to find around 10 long-tail keywords that provide more insight into the original topics. This helps to attract people who have similar interests or pain points to what you are offering. Your long-tail keywords provide a cluster relating to your original pillar topic. The more specific your content is, the more likely that relevant prospects will come to your site and turn into leads.

Build pillar pages

Creating pages that you hope to rank for, for different keywords is key to ranking higher on search engines. Using the pillar topics you have come up with and creating a page or post relating to this with relevant key terms will make it easier for prospects to find you.

Make a blogging schedule

Remember, constantly updating your content is key to staying relevant. Jumping on trending topics within the industry is a great way to keep readers engaged. With this in mind, not every blog needs to link to a pillar page, writing about tangible topics that are relevant to your target audience provides value and boosts engagement. Therefore, having set blogging days or targets for how many blogs you would like to produce each month is a great way to be consistent.

Link building

Link building has become increasingly important in outreach and is a fantastic way to future-proof your SEO strategy. The above stages are linked to on-page SEO, however, link building is considered off-page SEO and is used to attract backlinks. Sharing links and guest blogging are helpful opportunities to get links back to your site.

Compress media files

Despite this not having as much of an impact as other steps, it is still important to do. Page speed is a large factor in ranking search pages, as well as retaining readers. Once your site has more blogs and pages, that ultimately means more images and more images can slow down the site. Compressing media files is therefore crucial to do in order to keep your site at an optimal loading speed.

Keep up to date with trends

SEO best practices are continuously changing, so it's a good idea to stay up to date with everything SEO related. Resources you should take a look at include Moz, Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable.

Analyse

It can often take some time for your SEO efforts to pay off, so in the meantime, you'll want to know that your strategy is working. Tracking metrics, traffic, conversions, ROI, and indexed pages and identifying areas to improve will help you see what's working and what could be improved.


Ranking can be a difficult task, however by following the above steps your SEO strategy will be future-proof for the year ahead.

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