How to Create an SEO Strategy in 2023 + Free Tools & Templates

They’ll also provide a starting point to learn the fundamentals, so you can raise your SEO traffic levels to new heights down the road. Monitor the results of your SEO campaign, referring back to your goal setting and KPIs on a regular basis to make sure your efforts are aligned with campaign objectives. Remember, executing a great SEO plan takes time, and it can take even more time to see results. Patience and diligence are your best friends when it comes to effectively implementing your SEO strategy.

Let’s say a swimming pool business is trying to rank for “fiberglass pools,” which receives 110,000 monthly searches. This short-tail keyword can represent the overarching topic for creating their content, but the business will also need to identify a series of related keywords to include in their content. For example, they could opt to use the “fiberglass pool prices” or “fiberglass pool cost” to achieve additional rankings for the overall keyword of fiberglass pools. Search engine optimizers (SEOs) optimize websites to help them rank higher on SERPs and gain more organic traffic. A search engine optimizer is a highly specialized content strategist who helps a business discover opportunities to answer people’s questions about their respective industries.

HubSpot’s SEO Marketing Software includes a content strategy tool that helps you discover topics that matter to you and your audience. You’ll learn keywords’ MSV, relevance, competition, and popularity, helping you identify a range of high and low-volume keywords to target. To do so, create posts that answer specific questions users have. The content within your featured snippet must be semantically relevant to the keyword a user searches for.

Organizing and Prioritizing SEO Tactics

Just as a well-tuned car can get you to your destination quickly and efficiently, a fast-loading website ensures a smoother user experience. Users today expect websites to load quickly, and search engines take site speed into account when ranking pages. On-page SEO is optimizing individual webpages to enhance their visibility in search engines and attract more organic traffic. While this is our current process, you don’t have to do it like us. In fact, if you’re a WordPress user, the easiest way to see which content needs updating is to install our SEO Anomaly free WordPress SEO plugin. Set a target keyword for each page, and it’ll tell you if rankings start to decline.

Optimize On-Page SEO

• Reviewing insights gathered from monitoring and reporting tools can identify areas for improvement, so you can make data-driven optimizations.
• Learn how search engines work, the importance of keyword research, and on-page optimization techniques to boost your website’s visibility and performance.
• By diving deeper into this data, you can identify what’s working and what’s not, allowing you to make informed decisions on improving your site’s performance and user experience.
• The tool also offers suggestions for fixing performance issues.

Instead, you need to make strategic updates if you want to see a measurable impact on your traffic and rankings. You can think of these as “linkable assets” or “link bait” — content that is largely designed to get backlinks. On the other hand, our voice search study gave bloggers and journalists data that they can EASILY reference. But you can optimize your new and existing content fairly quickly to improve your chances of getting featured snippets. If you run a marketing agency for example, you might analyze results across client accounts to identify trends — information your competitors don’t have. So, adding firsthand experience to your content is one key way to differentiate yourself not just from your competitors, but also from AI content.

Google reads this description when crawling the page to understand what it’s about. In other words, SEO works like a complex feedback system—to surface the most accurate, trustworthy, and relevant results for any given search using input from you, Google, and searchers. Your role is to produce content that satisfies Google’s experience, expertise, authority, and trust requirements (E-E-A-T), which satisfy its searchers’ requirements. As SEOs, there’s a temptation to look at organic channels as the cornerstones of a client acquisition strategy. Consider potential site conversions—do you want users to enter an email? Track these metrics (if you aren’t already) and run tests to encourage more people to take these actions.

While you should shift resources toward BoFu keywords, some top-of-funnel content still has value. Instead, fewer people are clicking through to websites for informational queries. Using simple language makes your content easier for your users to understand.

So you can create content that answers their queries and attracts them to your site. A sitemap is like a table of contents for your website that search engines can easily understand. When doing SEO for blog posts, you’ll want to add both internal and external links. What actually constitutes quality, targeted, EAT-friendly, and SEO-optimized content? But capturing 92% of the market share, the terms “Google” and “search engine” are synonymous for the intents and purposes of this post. SEO is about making improvements to your website’s structure and content so its pages can be discovered by people searching for what you have to offer, through search engines.

If you’re still unsure about how to create an SEO strategy that delivers results, drive more organic traffic to your website with help from SEO.com. We’re digital marketing experts with over 27 years of experience crafting successful SEO strategies for clients. Use your research to start creating content that’s better or different from what you already see ranking highly in the SERPs. As you create new pages or improve your existing ones, focus on the searcher first, not the search engine. Once you’ve created your SEO strategy, you should also build a process to continue optimizing for new keywords and evolving search intent.