How To Create A High Impact SEO Strategy [+Free Checklist]

One professional growth benchmark for an SEO is being able to strategize. In the beginning, you do what you’re told. Then you start solving small issues or even catching them before they happen, and make SEO plans. But being able to plan ahead – seeing the big picture of the market, the organization’s needs, and the site you’re working on – is a step toward any SEO’s professional growth.

Creating an SEO strategy is something you need to do when getting a new site, and every once in a while to see that you’re heading in the right direction

If you’re a marketer, an SEO expert wanting to grow, a blogger, or just someone who is looking to understand the world of SEO at a more in-depth level, this piece is for you. We’ll dive into what SEO strategy is, how to create a solid & effective Search strategy, and why it matters.

What is an SEO strategy?

Let’s start with the basics. SEO stands for search engine optimization. The goal of SEO is for a searcher, who goes on a search engine (most likely Google), to reach your website through an organic search (aka, you didn’t pay to be at the top of the page). Sounds pretty simple, right? The problem is that there is a lot of competition. There are approximately 2 billion websites out there and there are potentially hundreds or even thousands of sites competing over your niche. This is why it’s essential to build an SEO strategy to beat out the competition.

An SEO strategy is a process of planning exactly how you’ll get to the top of the SERPs. There are many factors at play that can influence your ranking and location on SERPs, many of which will be heavily influenced by how you shape and build on your SEO strategy.

Why is it important to set a clear SEO strategy?

Setting a proper plan in place is the first step to winning the SEO game. There are various areas that you’ll need to focus on when building a solid strategy including content SEO and technical SEO. Understanding each area will give you the ability to create an SEO strategy that boosts your chances of rising to the top of SERP.

If you don’t have a clear strategy and understanding of what needs to be done, there’s a good chance that you’ll waste loads of time and money on trying to improve your SEO, with no results. Before we jump into the most important steps in building your SEO strategy, let’s look at the importance of technical vs. content SEO.

Technical SEO is, unsurprisingly, the technical side. When setting up your website, the back end must support your hard work. What does this mean? You need to give Google’s algorithm and other search engines the ability to understand, read, and explore your site. If they can’t, they won’t know to promote you for being the best in your field.

In technical SEO, the emphasis is on ranking factors such as crawl (scanning your site), index (the pages should the search engine show), mobile (how friendly your site is for people searching on their phones), hierarchy (how your site is organized), HTML (schema markup, readability, etc.), and speed (how fast your page loads, this is crucial). Many of these factors also contribute to a positive user experience.

Ready to whip your SEO into high gear? This step-by-step guide will teach you how to create an SEO strategy to rank higher and reach your target audience:

Click here to get your FREE SEO Checklist

9 Steps to build an effective SEO strategy

1. Conduct a keyword research

Every SEO strategy starts with keyword research. First, you need to closely examine your site and identify the big topics and themes. Next, consider what keywords and phrases, or long-tail keywords, are related.

For example, a plant-based cooking blog will have different keywords than a plant-based cooking blog. The plant-based cooking blog will reach more people if there are long-tail keywords that are in line with what the target audience is looking for. For example, “whole foods”, “plant-based”, “plant-based protein”, and “animal protein vs. plant protein”.

This is why it’s important to identify the habits and interests of your target audience. There are different types of keywords to answer their interests, and your short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords should match their search intent. Done right, you can reach your target audience and maintain quality search traffic to your site.

You can use Similarweb’s Keyword Generator. These can help you identify related words of interest to your audience and understand what locations are driving the most traffic. You can also identify search volume – the average amount of times a search engine receives a search query a month. This metric is crucial to evaluate how much interest there is in a particular keyword. You may even decide, in some cases, to go with a keyword with less search volume if there is less competition.

The next step: Research your competitors’ keywords

Next thing, research your competitors’ keywords. Integrating competitors into your keyword research and SEO plan is a great way to discover which keywords are working in your industry. By looking at the keywords that your competitors use, you’ll be able to get inside information on which keywords convert best and which bring in the most relevant traffic. On the other hand, you may be able to see that certain keywords are highly competitive and not worth the effort. Or you may choose to focus on long-tail keywords with less search volume and less related content but offer a greater opportunity for you to rank higher on SERPs.

All of this information will help you choose the right keywords to track and optimize when blogging, working on your on-page SEO, and developing your content strategy, and website as a whole.

2. Benchmark your current SEO performance vs. competitors

Ok, you’ve figured out your keywords. Now, the big question is what you need to do with this information. How do you take your keywords and use them to your advantage in creating a great SEO strategy? First, you’ll need to understand where your SEO efforts currently stand.

The second step to creating a high-impact SEO strategy is benchmarking your current SEO performance vs. your competitors, also known as an SEO competitor analysis. This means evaluating your SEO practices both individually for your site as well as against your 1 to 3 top competitors. What does your current organic traffic look like? What are your strengths and weaknesses? How do they compare to your competitors? This is called benchmarking and requires metrics and data insights.

The best and most effective way to do keyword research is by using a keyword research tool. Similarweb allows you to analyze keywords for both your and your competitors’ sites easily and with accurate data. You can even break down how much market share you have versus your competitors for particular keywords by location and over time. This valuable information will help you prioritize and optimize accordingly.

For example, themediterraneandish.com (in dark blue) is behind its competitors: recipetineaus.com has 33.18% of the click share, and loveandlemonds.com has 58.82%.

But under “Opportunities,” we can see that themediterraneandish.com has 5,394 organic keywords for which it gets 1%-20% of the traffic share. Knowing these keywords allows it to choose whether to add them to its SEO strategy.

3. Website SEO audit

Now it’s time for an SEO audit. While this step might seem more monotonous than the rest, you don’t want to skip it. Of course, an SEO audit is only relevant for those businesses that already have an online presence. If you’re building a new website or brand, you can skip this step.

A site audit means reviewing your entire site, both on the content and technical sides. In most cases, this is a team effort between the technical, content marketing, SEO, and digital marketing teams.

You’ll need a tool, like Similarweb’s Site Audit tool to crawl your website to check that everything is working as it’s supposed to, the site is indexed properly, internal links and backlinks are intact and working, etc.

In terms of content, check that all of your pages have optimized meta tags. You can use it to check the length and look of your metadata. You should also check for duplicate content and irrelevant information.

Pro Tip: Extract a list of your web pages, you’ll need them for your SEO plan.

4. Build a solid SEO plan

It’s time to get down to business. After you’ve done the prep work, here comes the big moment: building your actual SEO plan. Don’t forget, SEO isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. You’ll need to build out your plan over time and continue building with more and more relevant high-quality content to improve your SEO strategy according to the market. Even when you’ve reached the top, it’s essential to monitor your metrics to keep improving and remain in the number one position.

Part of building your SEO plan is deciding which web pages on your site you want to optimize for which keywords from step one. Not only do you need to understand which target keywords you’ll need to promote, but you’ll also need to understand the search intent behind each keyword. This will help you choose the right content for each keyword. It’s also a good time to create an SEO roadmap.

Pro Tip: after you have a list of pages to optimize, think of off-page SEO: Work with other teams in the company to share the new and optimized pieces of content. The different social media channels and email marketing are the immediate go-tos here.

5. Craft a link-building plan

What do links have to do with an SEO strategy? Surprisingly a lot.

Links equal authority. This involves two types of linking: internal links (when you link to a different page on your website) and incoming links, AKA backlinks (external links from a different website to your content). When a high-quality website links to yours, Google recognizes you as an authority on a specific subject and gives you extra points. However, link building doesn’t just happen on its own, you’ll need to create a plan.

It all goes back to keywords, when making a link-building plan, you need to first determine which keywords you want to optimize and then make sure to add relevant links to your content. Link building should be both from internal and external sources.

One way to attract links is outreach. Find out who is linking to your competitors and reach out. These sites may be happy to link to you as well. Another method is broken links research – If you’re doing research and see broken links on another website, you can also contact them and suggest inserting your link instead. If your piece is good, many websites will be happy to agree.

You can also check your competitors’ backlinks with our Backlinks checker, see the backlinks gap between you – and reach out to the relevant sites.

The fourth way is by far the hardest to succeed in, but it is also known as the best of them all. It is actually the real organic method of link building – gaining links. To gain links you must create top-notch shareable content, you must create content that others will want to link to as a source of information, or a discussion. This usually takes much more time and effort. However, it gains the most value both in links and in visitors to your site.

6. Craft new compelling content

Now the fun begins. Let’s make some new content.

Start by deciding which content topics you want to cover first. These are most likely important topics that are missing from your site. Don’t forget to check out your SERP competition to see what they are covering to make sure that you stay relevant.

Your content doesn’t have to be 100% on the same topic as your product but relevant to your target audience and the keywords you want to promote.

For example, if you’re working for a clothing company, you’ll post content relevant to style and current trends. But, you also may want to post general lifestyle content as well, such as date night ideas and gift guides for holidays.

This is related content that your target audience will be looking for, and when they land on your site, they’ll be excited to see clothes that they can give as a gift or wear on their next date.

Next, organize your content into clusters. Content clusters consist of grouping your content together around a similar theme and match. These should be related to the keywords you’ve selected, so after you come up with a topic based on your needs, you do another round of keyword research to check for search volume and intent.

From there, you’ll create a pillar piece (hint: like this one) and then smaller pieces that go around it and support the pillar piece. The pieces link to one another and show Google’s algorithm that you’re an authority on the subject, pushing all of your content to the top. Clusters also make it easier for Google to crawl your site and find relevant information.

Pro Tip 1️⃣ : If your SEO and your content writer is not the same person, I strongly suggest working with an SEO content brief. It’ll help with meeting the expectations.

Pro Tip 2️⃣: Even if your content is great, no one wants to read it if it looks bad. Get a designer involved, add some pictures and graphics to make the piece really pop. Let your readers enjoy the experience.

7. Improve your on-site SEO

Part of any SEO word plan is on-page SEO. Going over your website pages and implementing on-page SEO best practices to boost their rankings. The first step here is to decide which pages you need to optimize. These are typically the most visited pages as well as the pages that convert the most visitors to leads.

Here are the six stages to follow if you want to optimize specific pages on your website:

1) Optimize pages for keywords

Decide which keywords you want to optimize each specific page for. Here user intent is of the utmost importance. Why? Because someone who is looking to buy NOW most likely isn’t looking for background information on a subject. By understanding user search intent, you’ll be able to promote the correct keywords that match where a searcher is in your funnel.

2) Update meta tags

Update meta tags – meta title and meta description – according to the main keywords. Don’t slack off on your meta tags. Google loves them. Writing meta tags should be like writing great copy for your website. You want to pull in a potential lead by writing attractive and descriptive meta tags (and URLs too). A meta tag should shout: “Hey, choose me! I’ve got your solution”

3) Include the keywords in your content

This one may be obvious, but we can’t stress it enough. Include the keywords in your content. Don’t stuff keywords everywhere. Google doesn’t like that either. But make sure they are in there and that your content is direct, to the point, and related to any given keyword.

4) Include your keywords in your heading tags

Write keywords in your H1, H2s, and H3s. Google loves seeing keywords in engaging and interesting headlines. Keywords in heading tags show that the content is relevant and most likely helpful to those looking for the keyword.

5) Use alt tags on images

Adding alt tags or alt text to your images sends more signals to Google that this text is relevant and high-quality.

6) Create internal links

Internally link to your blogs and product pages. As we discussed in step five, internal links are an important part of your optimization plan. By linking to your other pages, you’ll build a relevant network within your site which is great for SEO. The key is to link from high-authority web pages to pages that need authority.

8. Consider how AI Overviews and SearchGPT affect your market

AI Overviews are Google’s generative AI feature, announced in May 2024. It provides AI-generated summarized answers to search queries that are displayed above traditional search results. The answers often include link cards to related websites, appearing as concise articles, lists, or interactive elements.

According to Google’s guidelines, the best practices for AI overview are similar to the SEO best practices we know.

Research your market in AI Overviews to see where you should put in most of your effort: which search queries and search intent have AIO, how are your competitors doing, etc.

You can use our Rank Tracker to research the AI Overviews results for your tracked keywords.

Here the yellow bars show how many keywords within a keywords list have AI Overviews. Notice that it’s even filtered by search intent.

9. Measure and track your SEO content

It might sound exhausting, but SEO is never done, it’s a marathon, remember. You’ve built a strong SEO strategy plan, but you need to maintain it. This means continuously measuring and tracking your SEO content, identifying strengths and weaknesses, and always keep improving and creating more content regularly.

It’s essential to track the keywords that you are targeting, follow your rank progression, and identify any issues that may come up.

One way to do this is by using Google Search Console. That’s if you’re only interested in tracking your website. However, keeping an eye on your own stats isn’t enough when operating in a competitive environment. Also, you’ll want to establish a rank-tracking routine and need tools that provide more options.

Similarweb’s platform gives you access to all the metrics you’ll need to analyze your content’s performance against your competition and your industry or niche. Find out what’s happening around you to keep up and beat your competition.

When checking out your SEO stats, you’ll want to look at four main statistics:

1. Visit duration or Time on page: How long does the typical visitor spend on your website and each page
2. Pages per visit: the average page visits for a selected time period
3. Scroll depth: How far each visitor is scrolling on your site
4. Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors to your site that entered and left without visiting other pages
5. Conversion rate: The percentage of visitors who complete a certain goal (a sale, for example)

You’ll then want to keep track of all your important keywords’ rankings. A rank tracker tool makes that easy – no need to define what to track each time. The rank tracker keeps track of the keywords and metrics that you specify. You can build dashboards to routinely check the metrics and keep track of how all your keywords rank within the competitive environment.

Free SEO Strategy Checklist

Feel like you need a cheat sheet to keep up with everything? Have no fear! Copy our 9-step SEO strategy checklist here

Get to work (using the right tools)

In this guide, we’ve taken an in-depth look at how to create an SEO strategy.

Now what? Now it’s time to get to work and build the best SEO plan possible with the right SEO tools. It’s clear today that SEO is no longer a nice to have. With the internet getting more crowded by the day, businesses that want to remain relevant must have a killer SEO strategy. If you haven’t created one yet, or you haven’t seen results, don’t worry. An SEO strategy is dynamic, and you can always improve it, as well as your website and content. It’s never too late.

Check out our SEO strategy checklist for all of the info you need. Get it here:

FAQs

What is an SEO strategy?

SEO (search engine optimization) strategy is the process of improving a website’s search ranking in order to gain organic traffic.

Why is an SEO strategy important?

It is important to have an SEO strategy to effectively improve your search rankings. If you don’t have a clear strategy, there’s a high chance you’ll waste time and money, and end up with no results.

How do you build an effective SEO strategy?

You can build an effective SEO strategy in several ways, including conducting keyword research, benchmarking your performance against your competitors, and incorporating a link-building plan.