A search engine optimization (SEO) plan is essential when creating a foundation for your business’s digital presence. SEO is necessary to help ensure that your business is visible and at the forefront of your audience’s interest. Because SEO strategies are always evolving and changing, making an SEO plan is just the beginning. You’ll want to routinely make optimizations within your plan to stay on-target and up-to-date with your business’s and Google’s latest changes.
Developing Your SEO Plan
SEO is a multi-faceted, long-term process, with several variables to be considered and managed. While it can seem simple to understand, more often than not, it’s very complex. An SEO plan requires considering everything from competitor and keyword research to on-site optimizations and developing a content strategy. Separately, these may not accomplish much, but when brought together in an informed, cohesive plan, they can make all the difference for your business. Read about these five strategies that you should make part of your company’s SEO plan.
Competitor Research
Understanding your position in the industry landscape starts with understanding your competitors. The best way to get the most insight into your competitors and their online presence is competitor research. Through using SEO tools to examine or cross-examine your competitors’ websites, you can get a good idea of what they are ranking for or how people are finding them. Competitor research will help you obtain a clear understanding of where you should begin to position your business to better optimize your site for search search engines.
Keyword Research
Keywords are fundamental in building a strong on-site SEO strategy, aiding in the development of websites, content, and other digital strategies. With a strong, search-or-intent-relevant list of keywords, a small business owner could, for instance, develop their SEO content strategy around them.
Using a list of keywords that you would like to rank for in addition to keywords that you’ve gathered from your competitors, you will develop a strong keyword strategy. Your keyword strategy can also lay the foundation for your keyword mapping.
Keyword mapping is when you layout your website and assign main keywords to the individual pages. Once you understand what keywords that you would like for your pages to target, this becomes a lot easier. Not only is it a good idea to do this with the main keywords, but also secondary keywords as well. Once you’ve completed your competitor research and keyword research, you will have better insights into how you’d like your site pages to rank for which keywords. This lays out a better foundation for your website rankings to improve.
Keyword research isn’t just something that you do once and never touch again. You have to continually update it and make sure that the list fits your brand and is full of keywords people are currently searching. What was searched last quarter may not necessarily be the same for this quarter.
On-Site Optimizations
Taking all of the keyword research and competitor research that you’ve done, you should use these to implement on-site optimizations for your website. By updating your site pages with page titles, targeted keywords, and meta descriptions, you can boost your site’s search presence through these small optimizations.
A strong title tag can help you stand out above local competitors. The keywords in a title tag can boost your relevance in search. Over time, as your site continues to draw clicks, its relevance grows and becomes the go-to site for those keywords.
As with the title tag, the implementation of relevant keywords can make all the difference. However, unlike title tags, meta descriptions have more room to fit those keywords.
Blogging and Content
Using keyword research as the foundation of your blogs allows you to develop content that is both more focused and relevant to your audience. Well-developed, focused content will build your site’s search presence, especially after consistent blogging. Whether it’s information about your product, industry updates, or best practices, blogging is a great way to build your company’s brand in the industry while, at the same time, strengthening your on-site SEO.
Listing Management
Listing management is a great off-site SEO strategy that you could use to get your site in front of more people. The more business-relevant directories your business is listed in, the more visible your business is on Google. This can be anything from bigger sites like Google and Facebook to smaller, more local directories. Regardless of the platform, covering more screen real estate is never a bad thing.
There’s a lot that you can do with SEO in both strategy and scope. However, as a business owner, you are beholden to a budget, and it’s important to be mindful of this when making decisions on where your marketing dollars are going. Prioritize where you spend your budget while, at the same time, understanding the potential returns on your investment in your SEO plan. You want to make sure that you’re getting the most out of your time, energy, and money.
Let Us Help You!
All of these, while parts of a whole, work incredibly well when brought together into an informed, cohesive SEO plan. It can be difficult to understand one part of the process, let alone all of them, so reach out to Marketing Refresh and let us take care of the heavy lifting. We’ll get your SEO strategy on-point, allowing you to focus on what you love most: your business.
