SEO Strategy

Without further ado, let’s look at the top steps to create a great strategy for your SEO.

Start with keyword research

All marketing starts with knowing your audience. In SEO, those audience insights include keyword research.

Keyword research takes the guesswork out of what pages to create and optimize. It’s the first task in a well-developed strategy.

Know your audience

First things first, find out what your audience is searching for.

While third-party tools are great, you can also learn a lot by using Google.

Search for things like the name of your service or questions your users may have.

As you're searching, check what comes up in the dropdown showing Google Autosuggest results.

Check SERP features like People Also Ask (PAA) to see potential questions you could answer — and the terms your audience uses to search.

Also, look at related searches at the bottom of the SERP for further ideas.

Enhance your research further by using free tools such as AlsoAsked that scrapes PAA results for you.

Or AnswerThePublic that uses Google Autocomplete to find common questions.

Cover the entire customer journey

When researching, cover the whole customer journey through the funnel with optimized content.

It’s no good targeting only commercial terms; you’ll miss the opportunity to introduce your brand while customers are still in the researching phase. 

Not only does this introduce your brand to them, but it helps build trust and positions you as an authority, meaning users are more likely to convert when the time comes to buy.

Group your keywords into categories

Keyword grouping is crucial, as it makes it easier to optimize a piece of content using a bundle of related keywords, and helps prevent keyword cannibalization.

By mapping keyword groups to individual pages, the content to include becomes clearer, preventing accidentally creating another page targeting the same keywords.

Once you finish mapping keyword groups to pages remember to add those keyword groups to your favorite rank tracker tool.

Don’t forget long tail keywords!

While long tail keywords tend to have lower traffic than more general keywords, they are highly targeted, often resulting in higher conversion rates and lower competition.

These are often seen as low-hanging fruit because the terms are usually much easier to rank for.

Perform a SERP analysis

Now you have your keywords set; it’s time to discover the intent of those keywords.

You can do this easily by searching each keyword on Google. Let’s look at "best face masks" as an example.

Determine search intent

Once we’ve brought up the SERP, it’s time to analyze the results and determine whether the results are informational or commercial focused.

If the answer is informational, create a blog post to target the user at the beginning of the buyer’s journey.

In the previous example, you can see it’s informational with the SERP filled with blog posts and news articles.

Analyze SERP features

While checking the SERP, also look for SERP features that you could optimize for. Key features that offer the most visibility include AI Overviews, Featured Snippets and People Also Ask (PAA).

But don’t forget to consider other features like video:

Image carousels:

Or even news:

You’ll also want to see how competing articles use structured data.

Are they including things like FAQ structured data to enhance their snippet?

Or including recipe structured data to provide more details on the SERP?

Review competitor’s content

At this point, it’s useful to check the types of content that competitors are creating and make notes on how you can do things better.

Some things to consider are: 

• The format, e.g., is it a listicle, video, long-form written content?

• Are there custom graphics and imagery? 

• Are there any quotes from experts?

• Is the article fact-checked?

• Is the content writing by a known expert in the industry?

• Are they using AMP? Or Web Stories?

It’s a good idea to follow a similar format and take things a step further. As they’ve shown up on page one, they must be doing something that Google wants to see! 

Alternatively, if the SERP is commercial, consider creating either a category/product page or services page on your site.

Again, analyze your competitor’s pages and ask yourself if they’re doing anything to add value to these?

Some things to look out for are:

• Reviews: They help to build customer confidence and add unique content to the page. 

• Internal linking structure: Are there links to related products? Where does the product sit within the site hierarchy?

• Structured data: Is the site including product structured data and acquiring rich results? 

Pay special attention to things such as review structured data.

This can have a significant impact on your Google CTR, including on image search:

While I’m figuring out query intent, I usually create two separate keyword research pieces, one for commercial and the other for informational terms.

While how you handle this is up to you, keeping them separate ensures you’re not creating the wrong types of content to rank for keywords.

Map keywords to pages

Now you understand the intent of keywords, map keywords with similar intents and SERP results to pages.

I mentioned earlier that mapping keywords to pages helps avoid keyword cannibalization.

It’s crucial to avoid keyword cannibalization, as this can come with a whole host of problems, such as:

• Lower conversion rates: If cannibalized pages perform better than your pages with planned out funnels and great UX, your CRO team won't be happy.

• Diluted PageRank: Authority gathered on the URLs will not be as strong as it could be. It’s better to have one strong page on a topic rather than two weaker pages.

By understanding the intent of keywords and creating a clear plan, you avoid all these issues.

Consider topic clusters and internal linking when planning.

A thought out internal linking strategy can drastically improve your SEO performance.

Benefits of internal linking includes:

• Improved UX 

• Increased average time on site

• Helps search engines crawl and index your site

• Helps spread PageRank throughout the site

First, I’d start by grouping pages on similar topics together into pillar pages and cluster pages.

A pillar page is a site page that provides an overview of a topic and links out to cluster pages.

A cluster page provides further details and targets long-tail search around that topic.

This is called a topic cluster structure. All pages within a cluster should be internally linking to allow users to navigate through your content on a topic.

Here are some more steps to follow to ensure you get the most out of your internal linking strategy:

Follow a flat site structure.

A flat site structure is when essential pages are one click away from the homepage. This is also positive for users, making it easier for them to find the content they’re looking for.

Link to high importance pages from high authority pages

PageRank on one page passes to the other pages that URL links to. So find your pages with lots of backlinks and make sure they have plenty of internal links to your important pages.

You can do this easily in most backlink tools by checking the top pages with external links. In Ahrefs, this is called the "Best By Links" report.

For the Advanced Web Ranking site, you can see we should improve internal linking on our CTR study post and our Google Algorithm Changes content as they have a lot of referring domains.

If you want to spot topically relevant internal links, use advanced search operators in Google. For our CTR post, we could search something like:

site:www.advancedwebranking.com ctr

What’s returned is a list of other content pieces on CTR we could be linking to.

If you want to find high-opportunity URLs, head into Google Search Console’s performance report, view both impressions and average position, and then look at data aggregated by page.

You then want to pick out pages with a high average position that also receives lots of impressions. Adding internal links to these pages could boost where you rank, increasing the number of clicks received.

Link together commercial and informational pages

Customers browsing your commercial page may still be just researching and not ready to buy. 

Make sure you give them informational content to help with their buying decision.

Travel sites implement this well, mostly due to the long buyer journey with multiple steps of research. Take TUI, for example. On each destination page, they list blog guides to help users decide where to go.

Alongside just being great for users, this helps PageRank flow effectively throughout the site.

Make your pages better than the competition.

Now you’ve got the research out of the way; it’s time to create your pages! 

You have two options here.

1. Create something better than the competition

2. Create something completely different

It’s tempting to try something completely different, but content showing on page one of the SERP means the format is already working and, therefore, a useful guide. 

Even when I do something different, I still try to include all the topically relevant information.

Some of my top tips to get the most out of your content are:

Make it well-designed and visually appealing.

An attractive page helps form a good impression and provides a better user experience.

Look at this page on how to create a website as an example.

Your content would be far more engaging if the page was a mixture of text, lists, video and includes imagery, like this page.

Make sure you add assets that make your page unique.

In many cases, the content you create will be very similar to the competition. Take this SERP, for example.

All the listings are similar and will cover the same information.

So how do you differentiate?

One way is by adding things unique to your business, such as:

• Custom graphics

• Unique data

• Expert quotes or interviews

• Videos

• Templates