I have been wanting to address a topic that is recurrent in the initial conversation I have with people interested in a website budget: SEO strategy. Sometimes it happens that when you ask them if they are going to want us to design a SEO strategy for their web project.
In most businesses that want to make their way on the Internet, thinking that first they need a website and then their positioning strategy is to assume that first they have to put the stationery store and then check if there is another one next to it, or that first they have to put the hairdresser’s near another one and then decide how to compete with it.
The value of an SEO strategy
Although many people think they know their sector well, online marketing is a world apart. It requires an expert in online marketing, preferably a growth hacker, who studies the sector thoroughly and defines strategies to compete in it and then implements that strategy on the website. And that has much the same economic value as many websites, since it determines that the same web development is good for something or nothing.
No matter how beautiful the design of a website is, if it does not manage to climb positions in Google for words that have enough searches and affordable competition to be able to beat it, it will only serve to reach customers who already know about its existence.
Beyond congratulating us on how beautiful it is, they will not increase our turnover because we had already captured them before. It is a website that does not work for what it generally serves: to attract new customers. The network is full of failed businesses with beautiful websites.
Nowadays, a website stands out in Google basically because of its contents, conceived from a previous SEO strategy, and a good user experience (fast loading, fluid navigation, etc.). Without a SEO strategy, we will not climb positions in Google for the most searched words and with more affordable competition and they will only find us, either if we invest in advertising, or if they already know us, (i.e. users that you have captured on the other hand).
Some of the steps to follow to carry out an SEO strategy are:
STEP 1. How would we google the company’s product or service?
The first thing to do is to find a list of key words by which, if we were a user interested in the products or services offered by the company, we would search for those products or services.
STEP 2. How competitive are those words and what potential do they have?
Once we have a sufficiently extensive list of keyword combinations, we have to check our Google account to see what monthly searches they have, their level of competition and their evolution over time.
If a combination of words has many searches and a low competition but the trend of searches during the last two years has been downwards, it is a sign of the potential that combination or even that product will have. This happens, for example, when we search for “IP telephony”. We can deduce that the providers of this type of telephony could have a compromised future.
STEP 3. What is the competition offering?
By searching that list of words in Google, as if we were a user, we will check the market situation. If the pages that are well positioned by those words offer a good web design and good contents, or useful applications for the user like price calculators, customizers, comparators, image galleries or others, we will have to take note of it to try to improve them in the new web.
STEP 4. Can we find some hack?
The agencies that have growth hackers to design the SEO strategies usually find some hack or shortcut that multiplies the business options of a company. For example, perhaps a company does not initially consider offering its page in English, but the SEO strategy concludes that there is a market niche not much exploited in that language that is worth accessing.
STEP 5. What will be the tree of the page?
Trying to position a few pages within a website for many keywords is almost impossible. That’s why the ideal is that there are as many pages as there are keywords with a chance of getting to the first page of Google we have determined, and at the same time, they must coincide with the amount of products, offers and different locations the business has. This will make it much easier for potential customers and clients to find you on Google.
STEP 6. What ideas will we capture in the contents?
When we have decided on the tree of the website, we must plan what specific content each section or interior page will have. The contents of a website must be classified in horizontal sections, in which a certain idea is transmitted. One section, for example, can be the description of the service; another, can be its advantages; another, an outstanding feature, etc.
The implementation of the SEO strategy
The implementation of a SEO strategy consists mainly of working on the keywords chosen for each page in their SEO attributes, i.e. the ‘title’, the URL, the header content, the reiteration in the different paragraphs and secondary titles (called ‘h2’, ‘h3’, ‘h4’, etc.), the image attribute ‘image ALT’, etc., both on the web pages and in periodic blog posts.
We must remember that, once the contents of a website have been created, periodic content via a blog is a way of not limiting competition for keywords to the service or product pages that we have created.
It is necessary to use the secondary keywords that we have previously talked about in our periodic posts, to make our products or services and our sector interesting, not necessarily to potential clients but to users whose traffic will be reflected in Google’s metrics to reinforce our global positioning.
The bigger, more regular and more diversified our web traffic is, the more sharing and interactions it will generate and the more authority it will have with Google. This will make it easier in the medium term to position new content (it is not the same as publishing a new website, which is not known to be inactive in a short time, as publishing a website with a certain reputation).
The importance of quality in content
SEO is therefore a constant and long-term objective, which consists of persevering by making a constant investment, getting to know our target audience and offering quality content. That is why it is a good idea to leave it in the hands of those who know SEO techniques in depth, choose original themes and have creativity when writing and choosing images to illustrate the contents.