Developing an SEO strategy is the start of any good SEO campaign. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail! This is one of those things that cannot be neglected or ignored. In this post, we will discuss how you can develop an SEO strategy to smash your competitors.
Start with analysis
Analysing your website and all your competitors in the search results goes a long way to ensuring you are on the path to success. When starting your analysis phase, You would audit your own site.
Things to take into account would be:
- Website speed
- Page layout and user Experience
- On-page content
- Blogging schedule
- Backlink profile
- What search phrases you are ranking for and would like to rank for.
Following this audit of your website, You would take a similar approach to your competitors. You would analyse the top 3 or 4 search results for each query and try to figure out how to beat them.
Things you would take into account:
- Their website speed
- Their page layout and user experience
- Their On-page content on their page and URL structure
- How often do they post blog posts
- Their Backlink profile
- Their ranking position for each query
Develop your plan and strategies
Once you have audited your competitors and cross-referenced the information with your own findings on your website, you can develop your plan.
For example, how much faster your website needs to be? Or how many blog posts need to be created? Do you need any additional high-quality backlinks?
From there, you plan it all out and implement the strategy. Most of these strategies require about 6-9 months of work in order to achieve your goals. This does depend on the actual search difficulty.
Improve technical Aspects of your website
After all the auditing and planning is complete, you need to start with the implementation of the plan.
First up, the technical SEO aspects of your site need to be fixed. These include your XML site map to improve the crawl budget or changes to your structured data. One of the biggest issues to come around in the last few years was the need for an SSL certificate and web page speed. Google likes fast websites. The faster the better. One way to get this right was to change your theme to a less bloated theme and use fewer plugins. A better way is to use faster website hosting like VPS hosting services.
Improve on-page content
Once you have decided on which keywords you would like to target you can start with your on-page content optimisation in order to improve your organic SEO rankings. You would create content clusters from your audit and build out individual service pages specifically for ranking that keyword with the most complete section of information.
Examples of on-page optimisation improvements include:
- Keywords in the URL
- Exact-match keywords in the H1 heading
- Exact match keywords in the H2 Heading
- Ensuring the search query has been perfectly answered in the most complete manner and offers useful and relevant content that is helpful to the searcher.
Optimise your Off-page content strategy
Next up, you would take those content clusters from your on-page content and start posting regular blog posts to ensure you have a steady stream of content that is being uploaded to your website and indexed. You would also want to start interlinking all these posts to help with your topical relevancy and improve the concept of “supporting content”.
The final phase would be to start a backlinking strategy and do guest posting for example to improve your website’s authority in Google.
Well, there you have it. A simple way to develop an SEO strategy that nearly everyone can do. This has been a simplified way of developing an SEO strategy to improve your organic rankings. I hope this helps. If you need any assistance or are looking to improve your rankings, please give us a call. If you require help with your SEO, consider our service SEO cape town in order to get a better understanding of what we do and how we help businesses.
