With so many factors affecting SEO performance, there are countless threads to pull.
How do you know where to focus your time and effort to have the greatest impact on your KPIs and show progress?
Here are some tips and strategies to prioritize first.
Building an SEO strategy
Every project you include in your SEO strategy should have a definite result.
There is a useful framework that I call “PIE”. It stands for Protect, Improve, and Extend.
protect
Seeking quick results, your first instinct may call for a staged visit immediately.
However, it is very important to take precautions to protect your site’s performance.
This includes making sure your site’s technical underpinnings are sound, and making sure you know which keywords and pages bring a lot of organic traffic to your site.
improvement
There are almost certainly keywords that already have relevant content on your site, but these pages are not yet ranking in a position to drive traffic.
By optimizing and ranking these pages before investing in creating new content, you can often capture this search interest and drive more page traffic with much less effort.
expansion
Enhancing your site’s content to drive more site visits is the final step your strategy should cover.
This includes identifying searches that the site can rank for with new content and creating content optimized for those terms.
Strategies to protect your SEO performance
Audit the technical health of your website
Neglecting to pay attention to the technical health of your site is like building a house on a bad foundation.
No matter how impressive it is. Everything can collapse at any moment.
When protecting your site’s existing performance, your first consideration should be to audit your technical health to ensure it reflects Google’s guidelines and advice on current and future ranking signals. .
As of this writing, current priorities include making content mobile-friendly and core web vitals, ensuring indexability of critical content, and eliminating redirect chains.
You should also continuously monitor your site’s technical health to catch issues before they impact search performance or user experience.
Ideally, look for a crawler that will alert you when things go wrong.
Understand your most valuable content
To maintain the SEO value of your site, you need to identify the top terms and pages that drive traffic to your site.
This data is available through Google Search Console and can help you monitor changes in your traffic.
By creating keyword groups and tracking their ranking positions, you can diagnose the reasons behind traffic fluctuations (for example, changes in interest and rank) and intervene if key terms are underperforming. can also be
Page segments help aggregate the performance of these key pages separately from the overall report.
Strategies for improving SEO performance
When discussing areas that need improvement, you should look for opportunities where content already exists but performance could be improved.
Identify keyword rankings that could be improved
There are two main factors to consider when identifying keywords that are likely to be optimized.
- of monthly search volume of conditions.
- of current standings of your content.
The number of clicks on search results declines rapidly the farther away you are from the first page of Google and other search engines.
Optimized content goals should rank within the top 10 results. This is because any non-top 10 traffic can be ignored.
If your content ranks in the 11 to 20 range for a ton of keywords, a little well-researched optimization can boost your rankings and bring more visitors to your site.
The best way to understand which optimizations work best is to look at content that Google already ranks highly for. Look for commonalities such as content breadth and idiosyncrasies, metadata, content length, and complexity.
Then tailor your content to fit these pages.
Adding contextualized internal links from other important pages on your site can help Google understand your page better, especially if you choose anchor text related to the terms you’re targeting.
Use Schemas for Opportunities in Rich Results
Beyond just looking for opportunities to rank in the top 10 standard results, there are often real benefits to owning rich results on the results page.
Review the types of results you see on the results page for the terms you’re targeting (especially terms owned by your direct competitors) and adjust your content structure to fit those results.
Strategies for Enhancing SEO Performance
Scaling performance usually requires creating new content. This means that this area of your strategy is likely to be one of the most labor intensive.
You need to identify keywords for which your site doesn’t have “bullseye” content (pages that exactly match the terms people are searching for).
Identify Keywords for Content Extensions
Identifying keyword opportunities for new content is much more complicated than finding keywords to protect and keywords that can improve your rankings.
This is because by their nature they are not included in the site’s keyword data. So where do you start your search?
- content mapping: There are several ways to segment your content – by category, by user type or persona, by customer journey stage, etc. .
- Competitor analysis: By studying your competitors’ websites and understanding their rankings, you can identify where you’re missing out on opportunities to appear in searches for the same users. If your research tool allows, you can roll up these terms to show your competitors’ most valuable pages to create equivalent pages covering multiple terms.
Create new content for SEO
When you create brand new content for SEO, you can use research on your competitors’ content to tailor your page with all the structure and on-page elements you need to rank well.
Brand new content, on the other hand, can take longer to be discovered and set in motion.
It’s important to consider seasonality and trends of interest, as well as ensure that new content is created in a timely manner, as well as ensure that it is properly integrated into the site via internal links. .
Other teams are often involved in creating new pages, so it’s important to establish a briefing process that ensures that SEO research is clearly captured and incorporated into new content.
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