The world of online shopping has taken over!
While people still go to the shops and markets to get the stuff they need, the attraction of purchasing almost anything from the comfort of your own home is irresistible.
With just the touch of a button, you may have anything you desire without even leaving your house.
Even if your company provides services rather than products, there’s a good possibility that most of your customers will purchase your services online.
This implies that e-commerce should be a priority for all businesses that sell products. As a result, you’ll need to pay more attention to online traffic and hence e-commerce SEO.
After all, even if you have the finest website in the world, with cutting-edge design, optimised for the best user experience, and a copy that everyone envies, if no one ever sees it, it’s still useless.
You must be discovered. That is why SEO is such an important aspect of any current marketing strategy.
You want to get found organically by your target audience by ranking high in search engine results pages (SERPs).
This is, however, far easier said than done. This article is here to assist you, whether you’re an experienced expert wanting to brush up on the basics for a client or a total rookie trying to figure out how this whole SEO thing works for your company.
This article leads you through the planning, developing, and optimising of an SEO strategy that can propel your website to the top of the search results in no time.
What Exactly is an SEO Strategy?
An SEO strategy is your plan to make your website or landing page more attractive to Google and other search engines.
The objective is to climb the rankings and increase organic traffic and conversions.
It appears straightforward, but there’s a catch: search algorithms are always evolving.
Google’s algorithms are adjusted multiple times a year to improve the quality of its searches and give consumers better answers to their queries.
That means you can’t just set it and forget it with SEO. For any search engine optimisation, you must assess and course-correct frequently to ensure that you are using the most up-to-date SEO best practices and techniques.
That’s fantastic news for SEOs; otherwise, you’d be out of work in no time.
However, it will require some effort from you.
To keep up with the newest advancements in online searching, you must check with reputable sources regularly (like this one).
Fortunately, there are several sources of reliable information available. There are SEO materials for you, whether you like articles, seminars, or podcasts.
Is SEO Necessary?
You’ve hired someone to handle sponsored search or affiliate marketing for you, so you’re not sure there’s much use in spending so much time on organic search. Don’t be caught in that trap.
Organic search accounts for searches by more than half of all visitors to websites and should be a key component of any digital marketing plan, whether it’s for a large corporation or a small business.
It’s especially critical for sites that sell directly to consumers. By delivering valuable content, you’re not only establishing trust, but you’re also aligning your website with client intent, resulting in higher-quality leads.
Even better, you won’t be charged for each click, resulting in a cheaper cost-per-conversion.
So, even if you have the finest SEM tactics like pay-per-click (PPC) and affiliate marketing efforts in the world sending motivated buyers to your site, ignoring organic search means you have only won half the battle.
9 Steps to Developing an Effective SEO Strategy
Even while SEO necessitates a thorough approach, it may be broken down into achievable phases, which include:
Align SEO with Business Objectives and Establish KPIs
First and foremost, you must understand where you are now, where you want to go, and how you will assess your progress.
You should start by doing an SEO audit.
This is the road map that will lead you through the optimisation process and allow you to make comparisons with your present site.
You must consider several factors, including:
- Domain name, age, and history.
- Headlines, keyword and subject targeting, and user interaction.
- Organisation of content, content quality, and picture quality (no one trusts stock photography).
- Content duplication.
- Elements of designing a website such as architecture, schema, markup, and click-through rate (CTR)
- Website updates from the past and future.
- Inbound link quality.
- On-site variables such as sitemaps, image optimisation, and robots.txt.
It’s crucial to organise your timetable and assign finances and resources once you know where you want to begin.
You get what you pay for; this is a truth that also applies here. If you want something done quickly and cheaply, you won’t receive the same outcomes as if you put in more effort and money.
Your budget and timeline will be determined by your company’s specific circumstances, but be prepared to spend more if you want good outcomes.
You should also identify your key performance indicators (KPIs) at this point in the SEO process.
This is how you’ll assess the success of your new implementations and determine what’s working and what needs to be tweaked.
You should monitor the following KPIs:
- The organic sessions.
- The keyword ranking increases.
- The leads and conversions.
- The bounce rate.
- The pages per session.
- The average session duration.
- The page load time.
- The top exit pages.
- The crawl errors.
Conduct a Keyword Search
An algorithm determines search engine rankings by weighing a range of parameters to assess how effectively a website responds to a certain search query. Of course, the usage of keywords is a big component of that.
Keywords inform search engines about your content, from single words to complicated sentences. However, adding keywords is more complex than just typing in the product’s name or service you wish to offer.
To achieve keyword optimisation, you must do some research, which includes:
Search Intent
The richness of the English language is both its beauty and its curse for SEOs.
However, because words can have many meanings, it’s critical to consider search intent to avoid attracting those who are looking for something different.
Relevant Keywords
You must determine which keywords are significant to your targets once you’ve discovered them.
Targeting too many keywords can make it harder for the search engine to figure out what your pages are about.
Keyword Phrases
These are two- or three-word phrases that individuals put into search engines to find specific information.
Keyword Research Tools
The brainstorming process is a terrific location to start the keyword research, but you need to use a research tool to guarantee you’re targeting the proper audience and establishing your worth to search engines.
Most SEO experts use Google’s Keyword Planner for this, but it may be cumbersome to use, so try to look into alternative methods.
Longtail Keywords
People use these search phrases to discover an exact match for their question.
Search Volumes
This will show you the number of searches for a specific keyword over a set period, giving you a general notion of the term’s worth and competition.
Funnel Keywords
These are keywords that target customers at different stages of the sales funnel.
People at the top of the funnel are more likely to be drawn in by broad phrases, but those closer to making a purchase are more likely to be drawn in by specific terms.
Keywords are about your audience as much as they are about your content.
Define Your Most Important Pages
Every team needs an MVP, and your website’s MVP is your most valued page.
These pages handle most of the hard lifting.
These are often things like your homepage, services pages, or any pages offering demonstrations or other offers for non-e-commerce sites.
These pages will certainly be MVPs for e-commerce sites, but they will be supplemented with category and/or product-level pages.
Consider what your company is recognised for when determining which pages are the most significant on your site.
In which verticals will you compete? What problems do you resolve? Based on the high-level keywords you came up with within the previous stage, define or add.
You may focus your approach on improving and boosting your organic traffic once you’ve discovered the category and product pages that bring in the most visits.
Perform Competitor Analysis
There would be no need for SEO if there was no competition.
You must know what others in your field are doing to best position yourself for success. You must determine where you are outranked and devise strategies to reverse the situation. You should know which terms are the most competitive and where chances exist.
You should be familiar with the backlinking and site structure of your competitors so that you may optimise your site for the highest potential search ranking.
Make User Experience and Technical SEO Plans
Don’t underestimate the significance of your site’s structure, both technically and in terms of how visitors interact with it.
If your site is continually malfunctioning or so irritating to use that consumers abandon your page in disgust, even the finest content and keyword strategy in the world won’t result in a single sale.
To guarantee that visitors are doing the appropriate activities, you should carefully analyse your site’s architecture and user experiences.
You should also look for and solve any technical flaws, such as broken links, sluggish loading times, and a faulty site schema.
Assess Your Resources
SEO has an influence on many other aspects of your business, including marketing, sales, and information technology.
If you’re searching for a way to save money on SEO, you could find that some of your staff are already equipped to assist.
Your sales crew, for example, is likely to know which items individuals are most interested in.
Enlisting them in the formulation of your SEO strategy will aid in lead generation and the identification of new targets who are already qualified.
Similarly, SEO can inform your marketing team about the most popular sorts of content, allowing them to fine-tune their efforts. Likewise, your copywriters and graphic designers can create material that will assist you in climbing the search engine ranks.
Your website is probably already under the jurisdiction of your IT department.
To guarantee that website design and structure, development cycles, data structure, and basic philosophies are all aligned, your SEO strategy should be built around their knowledge.
These are just a few examples of how you may incorporate SEO into your present processes.
If you look attentively, you’ll find others, and you’re unlikely to have to start from scratch.
Examine your current software, technology, and employees to see whether you already have some elements in place.
If you need to increase output, you might try to channel more funding into your current divisions.
Match Your SEO Plan to Your Customer Funnel
Sales are the name of the game. There is no income without customers, which also means there is no business.
Your SEO approach should align with your customer funnel to help with the sales process.
Your sales funnel, also known as the customer journey, is a compilation of the interactions clients experience with your organisation as they go from awareness through to post-purchase.
Every stage of this cycle is well-suited to SEO:
The Awareness
In today’s society, many clients first learn about your company online, for instance, through a Google search.
The Interest
Customers begin their research at this point. And where better to do research than on your website?
The Decision
The buyer is ready to purchase and is deciding between you and your competitors. As your meta description mentions free shipping, it might be the deciding factor.
The Purchase
E-commerce is still growing. People will be more likely to buy if you have a search engine optimised point of sale.
The Post-Purchase
Customer reviews, whether on your site or a third-party site, are an excellent method to enhance trust and search relevancy.
Compile a Report and Set Realistic Goals
Reporting is necessary. You must accurately measure and report on your progress.
Reporting enables you to build confidence by providing consistent, precise facts.
It enables you to comprehend the aspects that influence your ranking and find areas where you can improve, not to mention demonstrating the importance of SEO to the organisation’s decision-makers.
Expecting immediate results is one of the most typical errors newcomers to SEO make.
It’s practically hard to establish an exact timetable because of the factors associated with competition, inbound connections, and the material itself.
You should go into the process knowing that SEO takes time and that the more competitive the keywords you’re targeting, the longer it will take to reach the top.
This must be communicated to stakeholders from the beginning to ensure that expectations are reasonable.
Document and Measure Your Strategy
You must track the metrics and show the impact of your SEO strategy once you’ve developed reports on how it’s functioning.
Organic sessions, bounce rate, top exit pages, and crawl errors are some of the most critical indicators to examine.
You’ll have a better picture of what your consumers want and what’s driving them away if you can identify these.
You may use a range of commercial and free tools to monitor and track conversions, as well as compare them weekly, monthly, or by any other timescale you want.
Simply choose one that fits your budget and requirements.
Conclusion
No one who has done SEO has ever said that it is simple. However, it is an essential component of every modern company’s strategy.
Even a total novice may drive their website to the top of the SERP with a good plan, a desire to learn, and a little old-fashioned elbow grease.
This article has outlined nine stages to get your SEO strategy off the ground. But, of course, this is only the beginning.
You require a one-of-a-kind strategy that is tailored to your industry and requirements. And if you think it’s too much to handle all by yourself, you can always hire an SEO expert to manage it all for you. As they understand the dynamics of the industry, they can surely give you a winning SEO strategy to take your business to newer heights.
