Recipe for Setting Up an SEO Strategy: Step by Step Guide

You know what search engine optimization (SEO) is, BUT you’re not sure how to do it well? 

Galactic Fed to the rescue! We’re sharing our top-secret recipe for setting up an effective SEO strategy, step by step. 

We know a thing or two about building an SEO strategy that gets results. Earlier this year, we helped computer software company Gigster increase their keywords ranking in the top 10 by 67% and increase backlinks by 10%, with an SEO strategy tailored to their business needs.

Follow our 6 steps to rank higher on search engines and accelerate your business’ growth with the perfect SEO strategy.

What is SEO?

To refresh your memory, SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s the practice of finessing online content and your website so that search engines can find it easily and subsequently rank it higher on their results pages.

Why should you care about SEO? 

An effective SEO strategy will get you more engaged customers. It’s that simple. 

Here are a handful of stats to hit home just how powerful SEO is and why you want to get it right: 

• 68% of online experiences begin with a Google search
• 53% of all website traffic is a result of an organic search
• Only 0.78% of Googlers click on results from the 2nd page
• SEO drives 1000% more traffic than organic social media

The 3 types of SEO

There are 3 main types of SEO - on-page, off-page, and technical. 

On-page SEO relates to activity within your control on your website. Your site’s user experience, call to actions (CTAs,) your page copy, blog posts, and keyword placement can all be optimized to increase organic traffic and improve your search ranking. 

Off-page SEO relates to activity off of your website that affects where you rank on a search engine results page (SERP.) Backlinks and click-throughs from social media build page authority and help you rank higher with Google and other search engines. 

Technical SEO has some crossover with your on-page SEO and is essentially part of your web design and development. How mobile-friendly your site is, how quickly pages load, and how your pages are indexed can impact where you end up on the SERP. 

To learn more about the differences between on-page and off-page SEO, take a look at our Complete Guide. 

What’s an SEO strategy? 

An SEO strategy is your game plan for improving how people find your business online through organic search. 

Your SEO strategy should:

1. identify your audience and their needs 
2. test your website performance
3. outline a content strategy 
4. include keyword research
5. provide a link-building strategy, and
6. include benchmarks and metrics for measuring your impact. 

Now, let’s get cooking! Here’s Galactic Fed’s recipe for setting up an SEO strategy that gets results: 

Identify your audience and their needs 

All content marketing efforts should begin with research into your target audience. You need to know your audience and their needs. Customer behavior changes over time; it’s worth reviewing and seeing how customers engage with your content and who exactly they are. Relying on assumptions about who your audience is and what their needs are is risky; we recommend exploring the demographics, locations, and age of your current and potential customers regularly. Develop no more than 4 key personas to build your SEO plan around. Look to answer these questions:

• What do your key personas want?
• What problems does your business solve for them?
• Is any of your content stopping you from meeting your user’s needs?  

Test your website’s performance 

An often overlooked step in developing an SEO strategy is testing site performance. Your website’s usability and accessibility affects your search ranking and will only impact it more, as Google puts more emphasis on website accessibility through algorithm updates. 

A great place to start is putting your website’s URL into Google’s web.dev tool.

Web.dev allows you to see how your site performs across 4 areas: 

• performance 
• accessibility 
• best practices, and  
• search engine optimization 

Based on your results, the tool offers tips for improving the user experience of your site. Some of these tips will require technical fixes to your site; Galactic Fed recommends speaking with your web developer if you’re less skilled at updating your website’s backend.

Develop a content strategy 

Your SEO strategy should provide a plan for creating new (and tweaking existing) content to meet your customers’ needs better - based on the findings of your user research we explained at the beginning of this guide. 

This step goes way beyond your SEO; your content strategy should be at the core of your whole site strategy. But with a well-developed content strategy, you’ll be better able to meet the needs of your users and improve organic traffic by providing relevant, engaging content that’s impossible for your customers not to click on. 

Build a list of keywords 

Keyword research may be the most crucial step in developing your SEO strategy, in Galactic Fed’s opinion. Why? Because targeting the wrong keywords can act as a barrier to connecting with customers and growing your business through organic search. 

Keywords range from single words, like ‘rocketship’ to complex phrases, like ‘how to build a rocketship.’ These are commonly referred to as short and long tail keywords. The keywords you decide to target will vary in how competitive they are to rank with and how easy or hard they will be covert customers by using: 

Source: Backlinko

Get your head around short and long tail keywords, including how to optimize long tail keywords in 2020, by reading our Comprehensive Guide. 

We’ve also developed the definitive guide to SEO keyword research to help you start building your list of keywords today.

Build links to and from other sites 

Off-page link building can hugely impact where your business ends up within search results by contributing to your page authority. 

When another website provides a link to your website, it’s known as a backlink. Google crawls the internet and identifies links to your website provided by others. Depending on the site the link to your site appears on, search engines may see this as confirmation that your content is credible, reliable and worth promoting to people through their search results. 

You want a site with good domain authority to link to your website - this means it’s trusted and well-known to people, in addition to the search engines crawling it. 

You can check a site’s domain authority, including your own, with SEO Review Tools Website Authority Checker. 

Monitor and measure your impact 

SEO done well takes time and effort. Ensure you’re spending your time most efficiently by checking key metrics on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Keep your SEO strategy operating at peak performance and measure success using these common SEO metrics.

• Total organic clicks 
• Number of Goal Completions Via Organic Traffic
• Bounce Rate of Top Landing Pages
• Top Exit Pages
• Target Keywords and Their Organic Ranking
• Mobile Usability Report
• Lifetime Value For Users
• Crawl Errors 

Measure your site’s search traffic using Google’s Search Console tool, including running reports and fixing issues: 

Intergalactic growth, the Galactic Fed way  

There you have it - Galactic Fed’s step by step guide to setting up an SEO strategy. By spending some time at the start of the process researching who your users are and how they interact with your content, you’ll be able to build a content strategy that meets their needs and provides compelling click-worthy content, naturally.  

Building your list of keywords is an essential step that will help to drive organic traffic to your site from your target SERP. In addition, focus your efforts on building backlinks to and from your site to boost page and domain authority.

From earned white-hat link building tailored to your brand to Google best practices and click-through rate optimization, Galactic Fed would love to improve your SEO with a personalized gameplan for driving organic traffic to your site. Contact us today!