Create and execute a winning SEO marketing strategy

Start with research

Keywords help a search engine identify what your website is about, so your content reaches the audience looking for what you do at the right time. There are three types worth separating:

• Short-tail keywords: three words or fewer, sometimes called head keywords.
• Long-tail keywords: longer, more specific and less competitive.
• LSI keywords: latent semantic indexing terms, thematically close to your keyword.

It is common to hear a company say it ranks on the first page for certain terms, when those terms are extremely low volume and rarely searched. The sense of achievement is misplaced. Once you know your prioritised search terms, you can make sure they and their related semantic terms are used properly throughout your strategy.

Research and select the terms where your business would like to perform organically. This is usually a component of your wider marketing strategy and plan, and it should include:

• search volumes and trends
• keyword competitiveness
• your current position for those terms
• competitor organic and paid keyword research
• a split of primary and secondary terms, deciding which you will pay to appear for and which you will pursue organically
• an analysis of the content already performing organically for your primary terms

Backlinks and authority

A backlink is created when one site links to another. Backlinks from credible sources signal a level of trust, which is why building them is a core part of off-site optimisation. The value of a given link depends on the authority of the page, the anchor text, meta tags, whether the link is follow or nofollow, and the content around it.

When developing a backlink strategy, look at the backlinks your competitors have built and be clear about your own aims. Beyond the referral traffic, backlinks improve your site’s authority — a score tools calculate from the number of backlinks, referring domains, organic traffic and other signals. SEMrush and Ahrefs both publish authority checkers if you want a second view.

Tools

Good SEO tools save time: keyword research you can save and revisit, position tracking against chosen terms, and competitor research. Some are free, some are paid. At Epitomise we use SEMrush, which is a paid subscription, but SEMrush also publishes a list of free SEO tools with entry-level functionality. Because there are so many tools available, using a range of them gives you a toolkit where you can cross-check the data being served.

Create your SEO strategy

Search remains one of the most valuable places a business can be found, and the gap between the first result and the second page is enormous: on Backlinko’s numbers, to achieve a click-through rate above 5% organically you need to be at position 5 or better. That is what the objectives have to aim at.

Use the research to set the objectives you are targeting organically. My own preference is to target a specific number of marketing enquiries and work back up the funnel to the number and quality of visitors required to achieve it.

Then choose the search intent terms and keywords with appropriate volume that are not too competitive, develop the strategies around them, and define the content roadmap that supports the aim.

Execute: on-page SEO and quality content

On-page SEO is the process of optimising your pages for search: identifying the main keyword and thematic keywords for each page, writing meta descriptions and page titles, adding alternative text to images, and more.

Search providers are constantly evolving their algorithms. Businesses put significant effort into content marketing to give decision-makers and influencers valuable information during their discovery and exploration stages. For those people to find content that took real time and resource to create, it has to appear when they search.

High-quality content can perform reasonably quickly, in a matter of weeks, but SEO is typically a long-term play that must be worked on consistently. The following on-page approaches contribute to better organic results:

• Include your research keywords in URL titles.
• Create deep, high-quality content in the areas that align with your priority terms, using your chosen keywords and semantic terms carefully.
• Write for the person, not the crawler. With machine learning and natural language processing, search engines interpret the intent behind a query and read a page much as a person would, so keyword stuffing works against you.
• Aim for real depth in articles rather than thin posts.
• Include at least three links to external content and three to internal content on each page.
• Include chosen keywords in page header titles, and keep them short — most search engines truncate titles over about 70 characters.
• Add an FAQ section to your website.
• Use brackets, parentheses and numbers in article titles.
• Optimise title tags; 60 to 70 characters are typically shown in results.
• Write meta descriptions of around 150 characters to summarise the page.
• Watch your text-to-code ratio, typically between 25 and 70%.
• Use relevant anchor text on every link.
• Keep URLs readable and keyword-bearing.
• Give every image descriptive alternative text.
• Add social sharing to your pages so information is easy to pass on.

SEMrush’s analysis of 1.2 million blog posts found that very long articles — 7,000 words and above — attract around four times the traffic of average-length posts, and that list-format articles attract more page views than any other content type. WordStream’s guidance introduces the EAT principle for content development: expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

Consider SERP features

Search result features are results on a search engine results page that are not traditional organic listings. The most common include:

• Featured snippet: a box highlighting a section of a page, usually at the very top of results below the ads. Ahrefs has put featured snippets at roughly 8% of organic clicks.
• Local pack: the set of three local results shown for a local query.
• Knowledge panel: a preview of information about an entity — a business, person, place or event — drawn from the knowledge graph.
• Reviews: a source of trust for potential customers and a positive SEO signal. They add fresh content to crawl, contain relevant keywords, and give the business a chance to respond publicly.
• Site links: a list of links beneath a result, letting users jump straight to a page.
• Video: YouTube is the second most used search engine, and optimised video titles help you appear there.
• Featured video: a video shown instead of text in answer to a query, jumping to a specific point. Optimising with keywords and captions improves accessibility and gives crawlers content to read.
• Top stories: introduced in 2016 to surface factual, credible news. To be featured, the content must genuinely be news rather than generic content.
• People also ask: related questions other people have asked. Content answering “what is”, “how to” and “why is” questions helps you appear there.
• Images: visual search is increasingly important. Diagrams, flow charts and infographics that support your writing work best. Label the file name descriptively, choose the right format — PNG where transparency is needed, JPEG otherwise — export at the size you actually need, and always add alternative text.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO relates to the infrastructure of the website: whether it can be crawled, how fast it loads, how usable it is, and whether it can be indexed. It is the foundation of everything else — if the technical layer is wrong, it hinders every other improvement you make.

Mobile performance carries most of the weight here. SEMrush figures showed mobile traffic driving 66% of all site visits in 2020, so treat the mobile score as the real one.

The areas to optimise:

• Enable browser caching for JavaScript and CSS hosted on your site.
• Serve the site over HTTPS and make pages load rapidly on both mobile and desktop.
• Keep your XML sitemap up to date.
• Complete your meta descriptions.
• Use Google Search Console to analyse performance.
• Make sure resources are crawlable.
• Keep redirects to a minimum, and set up the ones you need correctly.
• Add breadcrumbs for better navigation.
• Configure robots.txt correctly so crawlers see the right content.
• Use hreflang for language and regional URLs.
• Keep duplicate content to a minimum and use canonical tags to flag the master copy of a page.
• Fix 404 errors. They harm SEO, and a crawler such as Screaming Frog will find them. Redirect broken URLs to a relevant page.
• Use structured data markup — Schema.org, microdata, Open Graph — so search engines understand the content and can render rich results.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals measure loading, interactivity and visual stability to judge the experience of a page. Three components matter most:

• Largest Contentful Paint: the time your largest piece of content, whether text or image, takes to paint relative to when the page started loading. It is a user-centric measure of perceived load speed.
• First Input Delay: the time between a user’s first interaction with a page and the browser being able to begin processing it.
• Cumulative Layout Shift: the total of every unexpected layout shift over the lifespan of the page.

A starting point is to check your PageSpeed Insights score. Each page you test returns a separate mobile and desktop score.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO is the work outside your website that changes your position in the results. The key areas are trustworthiness, backlink building, social media marketing, guest blogging and influencer marketing.

Being found by prospects searching for your products and services matters to most businesses, and many will spend significant money on search ads to be found quickly — there is a case for that, which we cover in the benefits of Google advertising. But a considered SEO strategy built along the lines above helps your business be found organically, which creates more engagement, more enquiries, and a better return from all the content and marketing you already produce.

Sources referenced

• Backlinko: Google click-through rate statistics — 31.7% for position one on desktop, 0.78% for page two
• SEMrush: free SEO tools, its analysis of 1.2 million blog posts, and its 2020 finding that mobile drove 66% of all site visits
• Ahrefs: website authority checker, and its finding that featured snippets take about 8% of organic clicks
• Moz: guidance on title tags and SERP features