What Makes a Great SEO Strategy?

Strat­e­gy, at it’s heart, is a mat­ter of oppor­tu­ni­ty. Under­stand­ing what strat­e­gy is, and how to cre­ate a good one, goes to the crux of all busi­ness — not just dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing and SEO specif­i­cal­ly.

Matt Roberts By Matt Roberts from Linkdex. Join the discussion » 5 comments

Strat­e­gy is one of those words many of us use often, but few use cor­rect­ly. The term can often be used too broad­ly, so what does hav­ing a good strat­e­gy real­ly mean? What is the thought-process behind cre­at­ing one?

With this in mind I want­ed to share some things that can real­ly help us under­stand how to cre­ate a great SEO strat­e­gy.


Exploiting Strengths and Creating New Ones

Most strate­gies build on mod­els such as SWOT, and tend to focus on encour­ag­ing us to use our strengths to exploit oppor­tu­ni­ties that have been iden­ti­fied.

In SEO exam­ples of typ­i­cal strengths could be aligned under the fol­low­ing cat­e­gories:

Business Goals

  • Our goals are achiev­able and real­is­tic.

Content Planning

  • Abil­i­ty to seg­ment sig­nif­i­cant vol­umes of key­words to form con­tent briefs that address key stages of the con­sumer jour­ney for your prod­ucts and ser­vices.
  • Abil­i­ty to ana­lyze and pri­or­i­tize oppor­tu­ni­ties based on poten­tial traf­fic and val­ue.
  • Abil­i­ty to cre­ate big idea / cam­paignable con­tent that is either stand-alone or inte­grat­ed with wider mar­ket­ing cam­paigns.

Content Creation

  • Out­stand­ing con­tent writ­ers that can cre­ate best in cat­e­go­ry con­tent based on briefs sup­plied.
  • Effi­cient pro­duc­tion resources that can cre­ate bril­liant image and video resources to sup­port con­tent plans.
  • A  con­ver­sion rate opti­miza­tion team that is able to opti­mize next clicks and actions, whilst not com­pro­mis­ing SEO require­ments that impact vis­i­bil­i­ty.

Content Publishing

  • A flex­i­ble and easy to use Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem that enables flu­ent cre­ation of con­tent for all stages of the con­sumer jour­ney.
  • Plat­form, and device agnos­tic pub­lish­ing frame­works that allow con­tent to be pub­lished to desk­top, mobile and app envi­ron­ments.
  • An  Infor­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture and Tech­ni­cal SEO team that is able to opti­mize for the con­sumer and search engines across mul­ti­ple devices, lan­guages, and coun­tries.

Content Promotion

  • Good ongo­ing rela­tion­ship man­age­ment with a net­work of dig­i­tal pub­lish­er / jour­nal­ists / blog­gers in your rel­e­vant sec­tor.

Teamwork, Process & Measurement

  • A high­ly engaged mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary team that achieves goals with min­i­mal con­flict.
  • Activ­i­ty is coor­di­nat­ed and man­aged with best prac­tice process­es and pro­ce­dures.
  • Activ­i­ty impact is mea­sured, report­ed on, and dis­cussed reg­u­lar­ly across all stake­hold­ers.

If we can agree that they are good strengths to have, then nat­u­ral­ly it makes sense for any orga­ni­za­tion in search indus­try too build towards hav­ing these strengths at their dis­pos­al.

Achiev­ing this how­ev­er, requires strat­e­gy. So what makes a great strat­e­gy?

NB: Inter­est­ing­ly, if we’re all in agree­ment about what strengths in SEO con­sists of, the above could even be the begin­nings of a score­card.

The Core of Great Strategy

My expe­ri­ence and research tells me that core of any tru­ly good strat­e­gy fol­lows a path as laid out below:

Great diagnostics

things-not-to-do

So what’s going on in your mar­ket? What are con­sumers doing when, where, and how? What is the address­able mar­ket we’re going after? Who are our com­peti­tors? Where are we rel­a­tive­ly strong? OK? Weak? What does great look like? Where are the 80/20 oppor­tu­ni­ties?

Direction

things-not-to-do

If the diag­no­sis has gone well, the direc­tion of trav­el for your strat­e­gy should be clear. In SEO strat­e­gy I am increas­ing­ly see­ing the gap between win­ner and los­er as being as sim­ple as the direc­tion being “we need to have the most and best con­tent in our cat­e­go­ry”. This can only be the direc­tion if you knew what the right amount of con­tent in your cat­e­go­ry is and its poten­tial val­ue.

The gotcha in set­ting a good direc­tion is that it needs to build on or cre­ate a source of advan­tage. So in the case of mov­ing towards hav­ing the most best con­tent then if con­tent prod­uct is a strength that’s great. If it’s not is it a strength that can be built?

Action

things-not-to-do

Win­ning your mar­ket in SEO is about build­ing on your diag­no­sis and direc­tion, and then get­ting things done. In a word: actions. Move in the direc­tion you set-out and you’ll get there.

To achieve this, set­ting real­is­tic and achiev­able objec­tives is crit­i­cal. So if your diag­nos­tics tell you that you need 200 page to address the most impor­tant 80% of the pur­chase jour­ney, and you’ve cur­rent­ly got 80 — your goal is then to audit the con­tent you do have, improv­ing as nec­es­sary, and then cre­ate the con­tent you don’t have.

Getting an Unfair Advantage

I’ve men­tioned the idea of cre­at­ing as well as build­ing strengths that can be used to your advan­tage. It’s pos­si­ble to devel­op this idea fur­ther and look to cre­ate unfair advan­tage in addi­tion — a strength that oth­ers would find hard to com­pete against.

These can some­times be part of the very busi­ness mod­el itself. Take Uber and Airbnb: they can dom­i­nate because of strong defin­ing resources and strengths. They may have the best peo­ple work­ing effec­tive­ly as a team. Or they could have the best tech­nol­o­gy stack sup­port­ing their dig­i­tal efforts.

Which ever you have or want to acquire, one thing is cer­tain, hav­ing even one ‘super-strength’ can give you a real­ly unfair advan­tage.

Discussion

I’d love to hear what oth­ers think about strat­e­gy and more specif­i­cal­ly SEO strat­e­gy. What does SEO strat­e­gy mean to you? And, as is often more inter­est­ing, what does­n’t it mean to you?

Matt Roberts

Written by Matt Roberts

Chief Strategy Officer, Linkdex

Matt has worked in marketing for over 20 years with SEO being his focus for nearly a decade. As Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, he is the driving force behind the Linkdex platform. Matt works with clients across the globe to discover opportunities to use data, insights, and processes to grow organic traffic and revenue – and give our clients an unfair advantage. Matt cycles and with a growing collection of road bikes, he is fast becoming a cycling geek.

Inked is published by Linkdex, the SEO platform of choice for professional marketers.

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