Key Areas To Look At Before Determining An SEO Strategy

A good SEO strategy can’t just be copied from one website to another and should take a number of different factors into consideration. With that in mind, this blog post looks at the different areas in which you need to look into before you determine the best SEO strategy, with the different elements being discussed making up our own onboarding process for new clients.

Goals

One of the first things you need to try and understand is what your goals for SEO are. Depending on your goals your strategy will change, for example if you’re a local business, looking to gain website traffic from a specific geolocation then your approach is going to be different compared to trying to rank at a national level.

Technical Audit

The technical audit is most likely to have the most impact on the early stages of the SEO strategy as it will determine how much needs to be completed before you move onto other areas. Having a solid plan for Technical SEO over the first few months will mean that you have a great foundation to work from. If left out it can limit the results you see from other activity.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is one of the most important aspects to look at when devising your SEO strategy. It essentially tells you which keyword terms you will be targeting taking into consideration a number of factors such as search volume, competitiveness and commercial/search intent.

When grouped together with your goals and available resources you should have a realistic idea of which keywords you want to target and the likeliness of ranking for them once the keyword research has been completed.

Competitor Research

Looking at what’s working well for your competitors is a great way in order to add some elements to your SEO strategy. This can help determine what content is working well for them as well as looking at things such as their backlink profiles.

It’s important to remember that this shouldn’t be the only element that influences the strategy, if you aim to just copy what your competitors are doing you’re always going to be one step behind.

Backlink Audit

It’s also important to look at your backlink profile. There are two main things you want to look at during the initial stages: whether there’s going to be potential issues and whether it keeps you competitive in your niche.

Potential issues can come from previous work on the website which goes against search engines guidelines. These can lead to penalties which can see your visibility on search engines greatly reduced. If there’s potential for issues it’s best to tackle these as soon as possible.

By checking whether your backlink profile is competitive you can then look at how much emphasis needs to be placed on linkbuilding for your overall SEO strategy.

Content Audit

There are a number of things you can look at during a content audit. The two main factors for SEO which need to be thought about early on are whether you have the content that people are searching for (based on your keyword research) and whether all the content on your existing website is needed.

Having a look at whether content is required will also help with other issues such as thin and duplicate content. You may also want to look at objective quality of the content whilst conducting the audit although this can be time consuming for larger websites.

You should now have an idea of the areas of what needs to be looked at when devising an SEO strategy for your website. If you’re looking for someone to complete your SEO for you, you can find out more about our SEO service here.