How to Build a Strong SEO Strategy (in 8 Steps)

SEO or search engine optimisation is a process of growing your website’s visibility via organic growth of your positioning for certain keyword phrases on the search engine results page. It involves proactively aiming to rank high on search engines for certain keywords. Building a website with a strong search engine ranking involves a trio of technical and UX/UI, copy and on-page content, and backlinks from external websites.

But, how does SEO work?  How much effort does each of these areas require to implement a successful SEO strategy on a website?

Here are the steps to follow to build a website that ranks high on organic search results not only for your chosen keywords, but also for the keywords that by doing an analytics analysis you will be able to identify as the right keywords to use in order to build-up a solid basis to begin positioning of your website on Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

1. Choose the right Content Management System (CMS)

The CMS you choose won’t determine how smooth and user-friendly, i.e how clean and uncluttered your website is. That is something that needs to be worked out on the UX / UI design phase, the level of empathy the UI reflects,  will have an impact on bounce rate and page views.

But here is when content and content architecture becomes a fundamental part of the user experience. Having the right content is fundamental to reduce the bounce rate (the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page), motivate interaction, and generate leads.

While there are several CMS like Drupal, Joomla and website builders like Squarespace and Wix, Curzon’s consultant Agustin Mouratoglou recommends using WordPress. “The technical benefits of WordPress mostly rely on the fact that the platform is built with PHP -with the right caching settings it can deliver pages as fast as a static site- and a series of modules that follow all the good practices that Google requires to correctly have visibility of websites. It has flexible and powerful URL manipulation and redirections, titles, meta tags, and built precise sitemaps.”

It is a platform empowered by a strong open source community that delivers a universe of plugins and tools that reduce the costs of implementation, he says. One such plugin is Yoast SEO, which Moz calls “a powerful tool that can help you make your site as search-engine-friendly as possible”.

A headless approach using WordPress also pays-off but requires a much higher investment in more costly developer hours, as you don’t rely on a ready-made CMS.

If you choose this path you can also rely on WordPress powerful REST API although they are other amazing tools like Strapi and paid ones like StoryBlok – but let’s be clear -the WordPress PHP template engine is definitely the good choice for developers and webmasters with technical knowledge, provides best SEO value.

2. Design the right UX/UI

Ok. Once you begin receiving traffic on your website, you need to channel these visitors in the right direction to convert them into leads. For this, user experience or UX, which focuses on how something works and how people interact with it, and UI or user interface, which focuses on the look and layout of a page, becomes important

This is made by performing continuous iterations, rows of redesign that include A/B testing, competitor analysis, and Google Analytics data analysis. Interviews and gathering feedback constantly from potential clients and current clients, is fundamental to provide the potential visitor the right experience, with the right answers to their most common questions. Empathic design is fundamental, changing is the nature of a good design. Starting all over again, is the act of making things better. The impact of these kinds of design changes that impact also on content architecture are crucial to build organic SEO over the years.

Here again the right CMS plays a fundamental role. But more important than that for any organisation seeking growth is having a dedicated team for the UX/UI development.

3. Research keywords to rank for

Before starting with keyword research, understand the business, its customers, and customers’ goals. Identify the personas and their context, to provide meaningful content build based on empathy and data … Google Analytics, Search Console, Google Trends, HotJar, among other tools, allow us to get valuable data to implement a strategy led by our findings.

Keyword research helps us know what people are searching for and how many people are searching for it, what keywords are providing traffic to the website, identifying your services related keywords and making sure that your copy is not missing them is crucial.

Choose the main keyword for your business, along with secondary keywords relating to your different services and products, but also identify the keywords that are working , the ones that actually bring some traffic to your site. These are “keyword opportunities”, monitor them regularly to find new opportunities and build content around them to boost overall SEO performance.

4. Create highly relevant content on sales pages

Using the keywords selected during the previous stage, find out the keywords missing from your service or product pages. Introducing these keywords will begin to show results over time.

“Create copy by combining keywords that represent services, your condition as a service provider (agency, firm, clinic, company), locations (city name, area, region, country) and sectors (B2B, B2C, media, publishing, entertainment),” says Mouratoglou.

Our strategy is to focus on keywords that work well — even if they are not our main service, he says. “That service keywords represent an opportunity to grow your SERP (Search Engine Result Pages) performance with your other service keywords, feed what works with more content and indirectly, it will benefit the whole of your website performance.”

Technically, heading tags should be used to represent the hierarchy and structure of the page to both users and bots.

5. Build Relevance via Content Marketing

Content marketing is all about offering free and helpful content to your potential customers in order to build trust with them so that they start to think of you as a go-to resource for any related questions. So that days, weeks, or months later, depending on how long it typically takes to convert a lead into a customer in your industry, when they are finally ready to buy, they purchase from you.

It is because a customer goes on a journey of researching a problem, researching a solution, and researching different vendors in their given solution before they make a purchase. It means they google for answers to their questions for a while before they ever get on a phone with your sales team.

It is generally believed that a typical buyer has 7 touchpoints with a brand before it buys from it.

It means the more helpful, informative, and educative content you can provide to your target audience by answering their questions, the better the chances that they’d buy from you when they are ready.

You can use blogging as a content marketing tool to provide answers to questions that your target audience is searching for.

How to know what they want to know about? If you are in a business where you interact with your customers regularly, you would know what questions are coming up again and again. Talking to your sales team to know about frequently asked questions also helps. You can also hold brainstorming sessions to come up with every question that your potential customer can ask around the main keyword and topic. Using Quora and Google Search Autofill feature can also provide relevant questions to answer in your blog content. Interviewing leads that are on the edge to becoming a customer can help give insights into what sort of assurances they want — for example, do they want to read more case studies, or see data, or maybe want a money-back guarantee.

This content that you’d create could take the form of a blog, white papers, case studies, testimonials, webinars, etc.

In general, people in the top-of-the-funnel, or also called awareness stage, are experiencing or expressing symptoms of a problem or opportunity. They are looking for educational content to answer their concerns or questions. Like blog posts, ebooks, how-to webinars, and social content.

In the middle-of-the-funnel or consideration stage, a prospect has clearly defined and given a name to their problem or opportunity. They are committed to researching and understanding all available approaches and methods of solving their problem or opportunity.  For them, create content that establishes you as an expert in your industry. Like demo videos, case studies, and FAQ articles.

In the decision-stage, they have decided on their solution strategy or approach. They are compiling a long list of all available vendors and products in their solution strategy. They are researching to shortlist the long list to a shortlist and make a final decision. So provide content like free trials, consultations, and articles that provide education on your products and services.

Google also recommends creating timely content that is relevant to the real world. Subscribing to strategically picked Google news alerts could be helpful in this regard, says Mouratoglou.

Doing this right will ensure that you have relevance, i.e, a measure of how well your content matches certain search queries.

6. Build Authority via Backlinks

Besides relevance, authority is another important factor Google considers when ranking websites for SEO.

Authority means how many people naturally want to link back to your content, i.e, consider you an authority in your field to link to your content.

This can be done by

• Creating high-quality content with original data and research that people naturally want to link to.
• Tell people about your content so they can easily find and link to it.
• Media relations or guest posting where you get to provide a link back to your website.

A backlink profile measures

• Number of backlinks to your website
• Number of unique domains that link back to your website
• Quality of those links

So the higher the authority of the website that links back to you, the better. When working to get backlinks, quality matters over quantity. In fact, a high volume of low-quality or “black-hat” generated backlinks will certainly get you penalised by Google.

It is important to remark that focus should be made on creating valuable, useful, attractive content by quoting other bloggers or celebrities or influencers, publications or brands: that will create natural backlinks. So the focus should always be on content. Good content automatically generates the link building.

You can use any of the websites like Moz, Ahrefs, Semrush to research your backlink profile, but the best tool to do this is Google Search Console. All others don’t necessarily provide much more valuable data than Google, and sometimes they even charge money for the same information you get on Google analytics for free and get your browser blacklisted for abusing Google’s search API.

7. Measure & Optimise

In SEO, measuring performance is crucial to success.

Using Google Analytics for data on bounce rate, which searches are leading people to your website, which blog posts are converting users and which are not would help improve the content marketing and SEO strategy going forward.

While you can use  Moz to check your backlink profile would show you what kind of backlinks you have, and where you can improve.

Using Google Trends to find the right keywords and adjusting the copy, headlines, and titles accordingly.

Monitoring competitors, subscribing to Google Alerts for specific keywords, allows having a good amount of resources to build optimised content.

8. Iterate the Loop

The key for optimising SEO performance is to iterate continuously over time, SEO results can be seen mid to long-term, as it takes time to settle and consolidate the presence of a website on Google. Also, this time depends on each particular market.

The process consists in Implementing 1- Research 2- Content development, 3- content architecture and UX/UI design changes and 4- SEO titles and meta-tag analysis – this sequence of actions needs to be supported with social media content, Quarterly reports and meetings to discuss the next steps to ensure the team is in sync is fundamental to carry on a successful content strategy.

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Curzon PR is a London-based PR firm working with clients globally. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact our Business Development Team bd@curzonpr.com