While our first five steps were dedicated to on-page SEO, link-building is the primary objective of off-page SEO. Link-building is the process of attracting inbound links (also called backlinks) to your website from other sources on the internet. As a general rule, sites with more authority that link back to your content have a more significant impact on your rankings. Ultimately, the number of topics for which you create pillar pages should coincide with your business needs, like the number of products and offerings you have. This will make it much easier for your prospects and customers to find you in search engines no matter what keywords they use. Use your long-tail keywords to create blog posts or web pages that explain the specific topics within the pillars you’ve selected.
Usually, such keywords have high search volumes, but also tough competition. You should analyze your SEO strategy every quarter with a more in-depth review once a year. Quarterly reviews strike a good balance between planning ahead and staying the course through the normal ups and downs of organic traffic. An SEO strategy should start with understanding your core customers, evaluating the current state of your website, and conducting competitor research to determine where to focus your efforts. Maybe they’re missing alternate intents (e.g., targeting only “best tools” and ignoring “free tools”).
Use Creative Seed Keywords
- Rather than writing, say, one piece of a specific topic, make it a ‘cornerstone’ article from which a number of other more specific ones spawn.
- Link building is difficult, especially if your content has commercial value.
- For example, some time ago I relaunched this list of SEO techniques.
- If you pick a narrow topic, you won’t have enough keywords to choose from.
If you’re looking for fast and cheap, you’re not going to get the results you would by investing more time and money. SEO is not a direct response style of marketing, and not all SEO strategies result in an immediate outcome. Knowing where you want to go and how you’ll measure progress ensures that your SEO efforts are focused and effective. Early in my tenure at Yahoo we tried to get into the site dev process in the early stages in order to work SEO into the Product Recommendations Documents (PRD) before wireframing began. But as a fairly new horizontal group not reporting into any of the products, this was often difficult.
Replicate your competitors’ directory links
On the other hand, tactics can be isolated or serve as components in your strategy. They are actions you would impart as a step in the plan, or used as a stand-alone, typically with limited resources. I read The Art of War in college, written by the Chinese general Sun Tzu (author of the quote above). While his actual existence is debated, his work is often considered as brilliant military strategy and philosophy. Thus, The Art of War is often co-opted into business for obvious reasons. Throughout the book, BHS Links you’ll realize tactics and strategy are not interchangeable terms.
You need to regularly analyze and course-correct to ensure you’re taking advantage of the latest best practices and strategies. See the screenshot below for some of the sections for specific recommendations that you can add which will provide the meat of the document. Keep in mind this is a very flexible document – add recommendations that make sense (for example you may not always have specific design considerations for a project). Each of these discoveries is potential content or strategy, and should be written up in your SEO Strategy document. Provide as much data and reasoning as possible for why you recommend this content. On one specific project, one of the SEOs on my team was brought in during the wireframe stage.
