How to create an SEO strategy for more traffic

SEO is the main factor in your website’s appeal to your customer. The stakes have increased because Google’s algorithm is constantly evolving, which has a direct impact on your website’s SEO. The rules and guidelines for optimizing your website are changing.

This was announced by Google over four years ago, in 2018, which sets out the dynamics of Google’s intelligence working to improve your website by making it more focused on specific query results by committing to change and update its algorithms. SEO is the essential part of your business’s overall digital growth and Google’s algorithm changes have a huge impact on your SEO ranking.

For example, mobile optimization is an SEO tactic used by 80% of top-ranked websites, as around 70% of web traffic comes from cell phones according to a study by Canadian SEO agency YoomWeb. The figures you read above are studied and researched and only a few years old with mobile-first indexing starting in 2019.

This SEO has been enabled by default for all new websites (new to the web or previously unknown to Google search) by Google. Google’s algorithm works to create a better online environment for virtual traffic through its guidelines that incentivize SEO strategy. In this blog, you’ll learn how to build an SEO strategy step-by-step, but first, let’s understand what an SEO strategy is.

What is an SEO strategy?

You know that SEO supports your business by providing it with a platform for global discoverability, relevance to target customers and authority among your peers, which is achieved through organic traffic and search engine guidelines. Visibility, relevance and authority are the primary goals of any SEO expert seeking to make a business website successful.

Therefore, an SEO strategy is a process put in place to organize search engine tactics such as content by title, technical flaws and errors to improve a website’s search engine ranking, simultaneously bringing it organic traffic. Making SEO a key search engine marketing strategy that, when administered with the following SEO best practices, achieves the goals of gaining organic traffic via the SERPs.

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO is all about website content and optimization strategies, so that you can reach your ranking goals by following these steps,

• Title tags and Meta tags
• Expected keywords
• H1 tag optimization
• Image optimization and more

Relevant content and optimized pages help you achieve a better user experience based on search engine intelligence.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO aims to build authority by linking your website to other websites or platforms visited by your target users. Some of these SEO tactics are :

• Link building
• Content marketing
• Comments
• Social networking and more

These tactics generate natural links for your website from authoritative and relevant websites that create trustworthiness for your user as well as for Google crawlers.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is fundamental to the heart of optimizing a website for smooth navigation and engagement of your online traffic by eliminating flaws and errors and enhancing the “under the hood” aspects of a website. Some of these enhancements include:

• Canonization
• Page loading speed
• Hreflang
• XML sitemaps and more

These focus on how search engines can crawl your website, and how smoothly it can be navigated by targeted customers. This ultimately helps index your websites among other search engine SERPs. The ultimate collaboration of these three SEO techniques creates the foundation for SEO planning, which is first about winning over your target customers, then encouraging them towards new opportunities while attracting new prospects by any means necessary.

The graphic below shows the main elements of a search engine marketing strategy, which includes content, keywords and page organization right through to image optimization. Here, in this article, I’ve provided you with 9 simple methods to start your “How to create an SEO strategy for a new website” journey. So, let’s get started.

How to create an SEO strategy for a new website

Creating an SEO strategy, as an integral part of a digital marketing strategy, is constant work for SEO experts, but some of the concepts previously applied remain powerful, even in the wake of recently updated and added search engine algorithms. I’ve divided these SEO strategies into two main parts that relate to your website and its content representation in digital marketplaces.

Website optimization strategies

With the Internet reaching far-flung places around the world, it’s time you understood the scope of search engine algorithms that prioritize user experience in terms of accessibility. Accessibility is a factor responsible for Google’s smooth crawl and is a green card to boost your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts that improve your website’s organic search ranking with incoming organic traffic .

This means that your website must offer a better user experience with reliable elements so that the Google search engine algorithm deems your website worthy of ranking among the SERPs. Here are 8 SEO strategies that can help you in your SEO planning :

1. Check page load speed

The page speed of your website’s pages and landing page is a measure of how quickly content loads, which is also a factor in gaining online traffic and encouraging them to explore it further. This is particularly important when developing an SEO strategy, as “page load” is the main ranking factor used by Google.

Even though user engagement depends on the content they’re directed to, URL page load speed is the major part of SEO that can affect traffic. Because when a user clicks on your URLs, they’re immediately loaded with the specific web page. But the longer the page takes to load, the more you’ll face a very significant loss on a website. In fact, the longer the page load time, the more likely you are to lose leads, as the statistics below show, Your page load speed may be slow due to the absence of the following items that can reduce site speed, so taking action against these can help your website load faster.

• Reduce unnecessary CSS, JavaScript and HTML code
• Compress images, videos and other multimedia resources.
• Reduce redirects
• Use browser caching
• Use optimized visuals
• Prohibit the use of rendering JavaScript

These are just a few of the major factors that could cause your page to take longer to load than necessary, so check them out and add them to your search engine marketing strategy.

2. User-optimized themes

Themes should look like something eye-catching but not distracting, i.e. keep your user intent clear even if you’re performing a single website design task. The point is that templates are representative of your business, so a good business strategy and in digital cases, SEO strategy should include user-friendly fonts, navigation buttons, divisions and other sections of a web page that compel a customer to explore further.

3. Search intent

Search intent is when your users have a search query objective. In addition, search intent or user intent is Google’s primary goal for a better user experience by providing satisfying and relevant query solutions. This makes it important for a website’s SEO, as irrelevant information provided to users can result in a loss of online traffic for Google and other search engines, and therefore a disadvantage for your website if user intent is not satisfactory.

Think of it this way, a user searches for “boxing bag” and your website sells bags. Now, if your website doesn’t contain content related to such a Google is flagged and it looks for one that contains relevant information on the terms searched for. Here, the intent was an incompatibility and Google understands this, which is why if you’re a company providing SEO services, your company can’t provide content unrelated to your business.

4. Mobile-first approach

Mobile optimization is an indispensable SEO strategy that everyone, from beginners to experts, needs to apply to their desktop website. Today, every household has at least 2 smartphones that have access to the Internet and are used to exploring it. The mobile-first approach is becoming the most widely used technical SEO strategy and a metric used by Google that keeps relevance and user experience at the top. Mobile searches are frequent searches that have surpassed 50% of global population usage since the beginning of 2017 and have been on the rise ever since. Here are some well-documented statistics,

“77% of U.S. adults own a smartphone and spend around 5 hours a day on their smartphone.” “In Q4 2021, mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 54.4% of global website traffic, hovering consistently around the 50% mark since the start of 2017 before systematically surpassing it in 2020.”

The second statistic by statistica points to the thriving smartphone industry. This makes smartphones an asset for online businesses actively using SEO strategies. Because this technology has made access to information on everyday necessities available at the click of a button. Also, according to Blue Corona , “70% of web traffic comes from cell phones.”

Thus, mobile optimization is a key example of an SEO campaign that ensures your website and content are available and accessible to predominantly mobile visitors, providing targeted users with an SEO website experience and quality similar to that of desktop browsers. And finally, 70% of mobile searches lead to online activities such as shopping, research and services.

5. Retain basic Web vitals

Basic web vitals are the basic requirements of a website from search engines and online traffic. They simplify the digital landscape and help your website focus on the most important metrics for search engines. There are three main Web vitals:

• Performance,
• Responsiveness, and
• Visual stability

These are the three pillars of user experience and are Google’s user experience updates. They provide information about a site’s performance, which is based on how users actually use your site. This is a powerful element of search engine marketing strategy, and SEO strategy can use the data provided by these metrics to further improve the website.

6. Authority linking: backlinking

Backlinking is a highly demanding service that is essential for SEO in digital marketing as it builds your website’s authority among Google’s crawlers which helps you rank in the SERPs. The foundation of Google’s original RankBrain algorithms, backlinking is the hidden gem of Google’s algorithm which now puts the quality of these links first due to various blackhat activities that have led to irrelevant websites ranking. Here are some Backlink importance statistics by Ahrefs,

• “Most top-ranked pages get “followed” backlinks from new websites at a rate of + 5% to 14.5% per month.”
• “In general, the more backlinks a page has, the more organic traffic it receives from Google.”

Reading these statistics, you can see that the top SERP sites are getting “followed backlinks” per month, which has helped them generate more organic traffic for their websites. Placing you among Google’s algorithm metrics, backlinks are the vote of confidence it needs. So here are some activities that can help you speed up your backlinking process and build an SEO strategy for new websites,

• Guest blogging
• Posting on social networks (Facebook, Instagram)
• Replying to platforms (Quora)
• Creating shareable content (video, images, graphics, etc.)
• Using social networking platforms to make connections (LinkedIn)

By using these platforms and methods, you can create strong authority on your website URLs and direct some traffic to your website for further exploration.

SEO content strategy

As a new digital business, you should know that “content is king” in SEO strategy. And the CMI had confirmed this in its reports stating, “4% of B2B marketers think they are effective at content marketing” Well, a good content strategy helps your website adapt to your customers’ needs, which indicates your readiness to solve their problems and not just tell them to buy this or that on your website. So here are some SEO best practices for digital content,

1. Target long-tail keywords

Keyword research is the heart of SEO and the most essential SEO strategy for targeting organic traffic. Long-tail keywords are the lifeblood of content that are specific queries made by online users looking for information about a specific problem, service or product.

These are phrases of three to five words that are more specific than target keywords targeting industry targets, as Google recognizes them for their relevance when a search is performed and if they match the algorithm and semantics, your content is displayed in the SERPs. And according to Google’s ThinkwithGoogle report on “ensuring maximum coverage with a long tail strategy” for SEO within a website,

“The long tail could offer an untapped opportunity to connect with potential customers. Invest in these areas and see volumes grow.”

These lines give an insight into how creating a content strategy for SEO is more prone to long-tail keywords than those that are non-specific but broad-field keywords. So, here’s how you can target long-tail keywords in your content.

• Take the most relevant keywords with the lowest volume.
• Long-tail keywords should not have high competition with lower volume.
• Use tools such as Ahrefs, Google Keyword Plannerand People Also Look For, where you have the most frequently asked queries for topics.
• Choose keywords with a specific search intent rather than a generic function
• Insert keywords in URLs for crawler analysis and the relevance factor on which they rank content.
• Use keywords in metadata for a better customer experience, as well as appropriate CTAs so that users are compelled to click on your web page URLs
• Optimize visual data such as images, videos and other shareable content by using targeted keywords in their hyperlinks and descriptions.
• Keywords in the header and body of your content, because this SEO content strategy is a must in today’s competitive digital arena.

Here are some of the ways you can target your website content and Google’s crawlers will analyze your link with the specifications provided.

2. Write for humans

Algorithms measure the relevance, authority and trustworthiness of your website as part of an SEO strategy, but the fact is that when a search engine’s algorithm analyzes websites online, it’s to record user data, understand their new behaviors and modify the algorithm accordingly to deliver a better user experience.

Google is a service-provider search engine, so it’s more user-centric than most, retaining its leading position in the global search engine market with over 90% share.

So when you’re preparing content for your website to be published online, you’re writing content for blogs, preparing scripts for videos and illustrating infographics!!! These activities are done to encourage users to visit your website while providing the theme to the best of your ability query solution. User experience should be the top priority. Keep these SEO best practices in mind for digital content strategy,

• User-friendly content in communicative form
• Check internal links as well as external links for flaws or errors
• The readability and user-friendliness of your content must be accessible and navigable.
• If content fails to load, use alternatives (404), redirects and similar means to provide the best possible website navigation.
• Keep your content high-quality, with a 7-minute reading time of over 2,500 words. This keeps your users engaged and boosts your website’s authority.
• Use statistics, data, memes, images and quotes to provide your users with all the facts.
• Integrate related videos or blog links to keep readers engaged on your website.

All of these elements help create a content strategy for SEO and provide the best examples of SEO campaigns to keep users interested and engaged, and build their trust in your business and brand.

3. Improve existing content: update

Trends are constantly changing, as is Google’s algorithm, which has improved hundreds of times a year. This has been happening regularly for over a decade now since its first user-based algorithm update, The Knowledge Graph. You see, Google’s strong commitment to providing the best user experience has led it to become the world’s most used search engine with 91.56% of the global search engine market share in March 2022.

Google’s popularity is clearly visible on a global scale, the fact is that it didn’t come about easily, but after more than a decade or two of regular revisions and updates to old methods, content and data collected since its inception.

Google has collected online user data by crawling over 1.7 billion website URLs and analyzing their relevance and guidelines. This data, along with over 200 algorithms working together, has formed rules, algorithms and guidelines that make the user experience far better than it was 10 years ago for businesses and users alike.

Now, you don’t have to wade through billions of websites or deal with every single user. First of all, stay up to date with the ever-evolving search engine guidelines and algorithms. As such, Google has improved its algorithm over the past 5 years with the following updates

1. Voice search engines
2. Rich extracts , and
3. Semantic searches

Now, these updates are revolutionary as they have given various ideas for products and services such as chatbots, in-device voice search and meaningful content. This way, you can formulate your own customized content model for your website’s SEO planning. Secondly, keep updating old content, as many of your users access your website via your old content. Therefore, introducing a new report, other free tools and other relevant information allows users to learn more. With these two elements in mind, remember that SEO updates are a two-step process of updating old content and introducing new data in accordance with the rules and guidelines of Google’s algorithms.

Conclusion

SEO strategy has two basic divisions: website optimization strategies and SEO content strategy, which are products of interlinking, content and other SEO campaign examples: mobile-friendliness, clear search engine and user experience. With these 9 ways to create a high-traffic SEO campaign in 2022, you can start your professional SEO journey by applying these points. The key factor in all this is to optimize your website and its content for a better user experience.