If you want to have more organic traffic online, you need to develop an SEO strategy to improve rankings on the search engine results page (SERP). As a result, the customers can find you among the first results when searching for a business like yours and contact you for services. Finding appropriate keywords and integrating them into your content is only one part of the bigger picture.
For a strong online presence, you need to create an SEO strategy that will cover all the bases on-page, off-page, and backend architecture. So let’s go over how to do it and set your business for success in 2022.
1. Define the goals of your SEO strategy for 2022
Your SEO strategy should begin with your goals! For example, if you want to improve your e-commerce sales, decide on which products and services. SEO goals should be measurable endpoints that you plan to get to after a certain time. To help with that, start by defining the three main SEO goals first:
1. Increasing the visibility of your brand,
2. Increasing traffic on your website, and
3. Delivering ROI.
Each of these main goals can consist of more objectives, preferably in stages, so you can create a schedule to develop and implement your SEO strategy.
2. Decide on the topics
Your website needs to be structured and carefully planned, so you need to define its topics. After you researched your target audience, you need to create content to attract those demographics. However, you also need to pay attention to Google crawler and how to be on its algorithm’s good side for top rankings.
Even with figuring out what your demographics will like to read about, stop by your competition and see what you can do better. Visitors don’t want to see the same content over and over and they will lose interest if you are not offering fresh and original topics.
3. Find your keywords
Keyword optimization for your SEO strategy should include the following:
· Use tools, like Ahrefs and SEMRush, to obtain keyword-related data for both your website and social media accounts.
· See how each keyword will rank by running it through the keyword difficulty tool.
· Type the main keyword in Google Search and see what appears as suggestions before you execute a search.
· Analyze Google’s first page to see how both your short-tail and long-tail keywords rank. This will tell you what type of content to focus on for a specific keyword. For example, if the first 10 results are lists, then your content should also be one.
4. Prepare the content
When you plan SEO management strategies, you need to know what you already have, what to add, and what to improve. Basically, you will be doing what Marie Kondo does when decluttering a wardrobe: keep, update, and delete existing content. Improving the content you have is also a great way to gain quicker results as opposed to adding new content.
The best approach here is to create a content strategy to attract an audience and keep them coming back, even after they found what they were looking for. To be successful, a content strategy needs to satisfy your target audience, be different from competitors, and be published or shared on the correct platform, like YouTube or Facebook.
5. Set up a link-building plan
Link-building is an off-page SEO process that will bring backlinks from other websites to your pages. The higher the authority of that website, the better rankings you will get on Google’s SERP. To attract backlinks, you can exchange links with other businesses, especially on the local level to improve your local SEO.
Additionally, you can write guest articles for blogs that you will link back to your website, as well as share on social media. Despite developing successful cooperation with another website, you shouldn’t get backlinks only from one source. Diversifying backlinks by getting them from more high-quality domains will attract more audience than if you depend on a single source.
6. Add a blog to your website
Adding a blog to your website will bring more unique content and opportunity for better rankings in SERPs. Cover the topics your customer care about and try to keep a consistent publishing schedule of at least once a week.
Instead of being focused only on impressing the Google algorithm, make your audience the priority. Engaging with your website’s visitors this way will help you gain a higher ranking for the keywords, as well. Just remember to follow certain rules to avoid negative scores from the crawler, like not using a long-tail keyword more than three times.
7. Monitor and adjust the size of your media files
Your website has to open up without a hitch on both computers and mobile devices. If not or it takes a long time to load, visitors will leave and lose interest in what you offer. This means you should optimize images, videos, and other media files on your pages by reducing their size and keeping the quality.
Using compression tools, like TinyPNG and Google’s Squoosh, before you upload media files allows you to do this faster in bulk. Alternatively, you can edit those materials manually in the software of your choice, but it may take a while and you have to compress one file at a time.
8. Measure the success of your SEO strategy
Search engine optimization requires money, time, and effort to give results. Monitoring the strategy by observing specific metrics will give you an idea of what works and what doesn’t. Web analytics tools, like Google Analytics and Mixpanel, will show you how visitors navigate your website, their interactions, and what content was the most engaging.
Besides this, you can check on your SERP rankings regularly, conversions, and ROI to see what to adjust or find new topics to cover. Make sure to keep an internal record of the analytics result, whether as an Excel or Google Sheet, to monitor organic traffic and immediately fix negative trends.
Final thoughts
If you are working on an SEO strategy for 2022, try to be constantly in the loop with the newest trends and developments. In only one year, Google releases around 500 rules to respect if you want your website to be among the first dozen websites on SERP. While it’s impossible to follow through will all of these rules, recognize the ones important for your strategy and implement them quickly to avoid affecting your rankings.