How To Build A Good SEO Strategy

While the idea of an SEO strategy might make you want to hide under your desk and tweet about how you want to go on vacation, our vision of search engine optimization at FatRabbit Creative is to make it easy and understandable for the client. In this article, we will discuss how we work together with our partners to build and implement a comprehensive, effective, and doable SEO strategy.

Why Do I Need An SEO Strategy?

If you’re asking yourself this question at this point, I’d like to thank you for sticking with us this long! It’s a great example of one benefit of having a good SEO strategy. We preemptively did some keyword research, found that people are searching for “SEO STRATEGY,” and wrote an article that addresses that need.

A thoughtful, prioritized, tactful, and ongoing strategy is the most effective way to get highly-targeted traffic to your website, stay there for a bit, and enjoy it.

Have A Third Party Look At The Website.

The first step in a successful SEO strategy is taking an honest look at the current state of your website. This is potentially the most important step because you could very well make it through your SEO strategy and realize that nothing changed because your website has a poor user experience. Maybe people get to your website through referrals, but upon arrival, they are turned off by the lack of quality. Here are some questions to ask yourself before beginning the SEO process:

• Is traffic really the issue?
• Would more traffic increase the conversion rate?
• What do people think of my website?
• If someone asked me for an example of a good-looking website, would I give them mine?

Being honest during this first step is paramount to SEO success. If you have questions about your current website and if it’s fit to optimize, take advantage of one of our FatRabbit Creative designers. They’d be happy to give you some advice or tips.

Identify Your Optimization Goals.

Having goals for your SEO strategy is fundamental to tracking whether or not it’s worth the investment (and if done well, it always is). Before you launch into implementation mode, you should create a list of factors that you’d like to see improvement throughout your SEO operation. Some of these might include:

• Organic traffic (overall, regionally, demographically, etc.)
• Impressions
• Conversions (sales, emails, subscribers, etc.)
• Links
• Social media activity
• Bounce rate
• Click-through rate

Keeping the data for these factors handy throughout the SEO process will help measure success. The SEO team at FatRabbit Creative is versed in tracking and reporting just how effective a strategy is and tweaking it along the way to get the best results for our clients.

Research Keywords And Competition.

This one is a bit of a doozy. Keywords are vitally important to how your pages get indexed into Google’s mythical filing cabinet, so it presents itself as a crucial facet of a good SEO strategy. This step is all about knowing which keywords you want a certain page to rank for.

• Competition Investigating: One of the most effective ways to find out which keywords are getting the most traffic is by checking out your competitors. You might be able to get some great ideas and new phrases that you’ve never thought of.
• Brainstorming Keywords: Spending some quality time with some business partners or friends and coming up with a variety of keyword phrases is also time well spent. Take the example of a car dealer. While optimizing a page for a keyword phrase like “cars for sale” might seem like a great idea, it’s a mistake due to the amount of competition in the market. Using resources like Google’s Keyword Planner or SEMrush will give you an idea of the amount of competition for certain keywords, as well as how many users search for those keywords. You might see that instead of something like “cars for sale,” a phrase like “low mileage Jeep Cherokee” might have a better chance of ranking high.

A quick heads-up about keyword tools: Some of these resources are free, but unfortunately they don’t do the job as well as paid-for tools. If you’re having any trouble using these tools or need some advice on keyword generating, feel free to reach out to one of FatRabbit Creative’s SEO specialists, we’d be happy to help.

Audit Your Website.

This step, while hard to complete on your own, is the most critical to the process. It is a complete, thorough, honest diagnosis of how your website looks presently through the eyes of SEO. While I can’t give away FatRabbit Creative’s secret SEO sauce, I can show you the general idea of what we look for during a website audit. We look at your website’s:

• Performance
• Mobility
• Links
• Local SEO
• Content
• Social Media
• Technical

After looking at these categories, we provide a thorough list of the issues on your website (and off it). Just like any other aspect of a productive SEO strategy, it’s important to be honest with yourself about your website and your business. Important questions would be, “Am I willing to make the changes necessary to have a successful SEO campaign?” or “Do I have the time to do all this by myself?”

Enforce Quick Fixes.

Some of the red flags that arise during the initial website audit will be simple and fixable. Most of the time, it’s the technical factors; a simple coding error, an alt tag missing, etc. Even though they might be quick fixes, there might be a lot of them, resulting in longer maintenance and repair times. Your SEO plan relies heavily on this step. This is what you came for ladies and gentlemen!

Content For Life.

After doing any of your own research into SEO, you’ll find that “content” comes up frequently and may seem important. It is. Content (along with building links) is the lifeblood of how search engines operate, so it’s imperative to write valuable, unique content that your users will want to come back to over and over again. Keeping in mind that content writing is an integral part of your SEO strategy, you should be prepared to write often.

Scheduling And Dedication.

Enhancing a website to be search engine optimized is not a quick or flippant task. It takes determination to the solution. Most of the time, the solution requires consistent and thorough work.

• Scheduling Content: Having a good SEO strategy is all about scheduling. It’s important to have a steady influx of valuable content on your webpage. Consistency and longevity are key here. Creating a good schedule for writing well-researched content is one of the most prudent things a webmaster can do.
• Scheduling Link-Building: We didn’t cover it much, but there are plenty of great resources online to help with strategic link-building. Side by side with content, link-building is foundational to how search engines rank your website. Spending intentional time networking or finding ways to build links can greatly increase your ROI.

In Summary.

You can see this is just a summary of the SEO process. In truth, your SEO strategy will be tailored to you, your business needs, your target market, and your resources. The point I’d like to stress here is that you need to have a plan. SEO doesn’t happen overnight and it doesn’t happen by accident. Your dedication to a strategy will determine the level of success you have with an SEO campaign.

No fear though! FatRabbit Creative offers a free report card to give you an idea of the current state of your website’s SEO! Contact us today.