Achieve Your SEO goals With an SEO Strategy Plan for 3 Months
SEO (search engine optimization) is the fuel that energizes your website’s performance. It’s what makes your content searchable, by helping it to rank higher in search engines – attracting your target audience to the content that marks you out as different from competitors.
If your traffic, conversions, and revenues generated from your website are disappointing, it may be because your SEO is watery. What you need is to inject some rocket fuel. You can’t do this overnight, but with a strategic approach to SEO, and a sprinkle of tech know-how and content creation wizardry, positive results are around the corner.
12 steps to create a successful SEO strategy plan for 3 months
An SEO strategy plan is a roadmap to navigate all SEO tasks. These will take you from where you stand today, to a well-structured, higher-performing position in three months. Here are the 12 steps of a 3-month SEO plan for SEO success.
Step #1: Define your SEO goals
SEO is not just a set of rules, but a strategy that needs to be tailored to your company’s goals. A goal-oriented SEO strategy will help you to understand what you want to achieve and how you can take the necessary steps to get there. It’s crucial to be clear on your objectives. Do you want to drive more traffic to your site? Do you want to improve conversions? Is the creation of brand awareness most important to you?
Step #2: Review your core metrics
The second step is to review your core metrics. It is important to have metrics that you can use to measure the success of your marketing campaign. For example, if you are using ads, then the number of clicks or impressions is an appropriate measure. If you are using social media, then the number of likes, shares, or comments can be used as a metric for success. Effective metrics include:
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Organic traffic numbers
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Click-through rate (CTR)
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Bounce rate
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Keyword rankings
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Backlinks
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Page speed
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Conversions
Step #3: Conduct a technical SEO audit of your site
This is one of the most important steps in the SEO process. The technical SEO audit will help you identify potential issues with your site that can be fixed to improve your site’s ranking, including:
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Mobile optimization
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Page load speed
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Link health
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Duplicate content
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Schemas
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Crawl errors
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Image issues
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Site security
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URL structure
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404 pages
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301 redirects
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Canonical tags
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XML sitemaps
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Site architecture
Step #4: Analyze your target audience
If you don’t know your audience, you won’t create and publish the content that will attract and retain that audience throughout the customer funnel. Questions you should be able to answer about your target audience include:
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What are their biggest pain points?
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What do they want to know about your industry, brand, and products/services?
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What websites do they use to find answers?
Step #5: Perform keyword research
Keywords play a vital role in search engine optimization. They help search engines to find and rank your content for relevant queries. Keywords should be chosen based on the topic of your content, the audience you are targeting, and how often people search for them. In short, keyword research will tell you:
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What your audience is searching for
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What is bringing traffic to your competitors
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Opportunities for content creation
Step #6: Check your ranking
As you compose content with your researched keywords and revise content already on your site to include them, you’ll need to monitor the results of your efforts:
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Did your keywords improve or lose positions?
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Which pages or blog posts need more backlinks?
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Who took your position? What made their content better?
Step #7: Evaluate your competitors
The goal of this step is to identify your competitors and their strengths, weaknesses, and strategies — and then use this information to improve what you are doing. There are several tools you can use to help you with this and to learn:
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Keywords they are ranking for
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Pain points they are focusing on
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Their top-performing blog posts
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Sites linking back to their content
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Their content promotion strategy
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How their SEO strategy compares to yours
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Content gaps for you to fill
Step #8: Create an action plan
The main purpose of the action plan is to outline how you plan to achieve your SEO goals, and how you will fix what isn’t working. You’ll need to define the steps you must take, the tasks that must be completed, as well as who will do them, and when they must be done.
Step #9: Determine your content strategy
Content strategy is the process of defining the content types, channels, and topics to be used in a planned marketing campaign. Therefore, it should be defined before any marketing activities are executed. It is important to know what type of content you want to produce and where it will be published and align your strategy with your goals. This way you can make sure that your message is reaching the right audience.
As you complete this step, you’ll need to answer questions such as:
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What content do you need to create?
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What content do you need to refresh?
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What kind of content is working and what is not?
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What holidays or events do you need to prepare for?
Step #10: Prioritize on-page optimization
There are a few SEO tactics that will help your pages rank higher in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). On-page optimization means that content should be written in a way that will make it more likely to rank for specific keywords. It also means that these keywords should be included in the URL, title, and meta tags of the page and that you include suitable internal linking.
Why internal linking? Think of Google’s crawlers and spiders, searching for content. When they find your page, you’ll make it easier for them to find other content on your site by linking to it. This helps the spiders to view you as a subject authority and therefore boosts your ranking.
Step #11: Implement off-page optimization
Off-page optimization is a type of SEO that includes any activity that doesn’t involve altering the website but optimizing your website’s connections to other websites. It’s important because it helps search engines understand how relevant your site is for specific keywords or topics. During this process, you might consider:
Step #12: Track and measure your progress
Finally, track your progress. Set up a system to measure your results. Understand them.
SEO optimization is not a one-time thing, but an evolution. Over time, as your customers’ needs and wants alter, you will update your products and services. SEO is like this, too. As your target audience evolves, new keywords will become relevant. As technology progresses, new tactics will come to the fore.
By constantly monitoring your progress, you can keep up with subtle changes and evolve your SEO plan to maintain and improve your ranking against competitors.
Achieve your SEO goals
An SEO plan is a roadmap to achieve your goals. It’s not complex but does need the expertise to execute it successfully. You’ll need to remain updated with SEO trends to evolve your strategy and stay one step ahead of your competition.
If you want help with devising and executing an effective SEO strategy plan for 3 months and then embed that plan for long-term success, book a live demo of BlabberJax in action.