What is an SEO Strategy?

SEO can be a complicated topic. As a website or small business owner, you probably know that SEO should be something that you need to invest time and energy into, but if you are overwhelmed, that can be tough.

We're here to slow down the topic for you and explain in-depth what an SEO strategy is, what types of SEO there are out there, and what the steps for creating an effective SEO strategy are.

This way, you can create an effective SEO strategy that will blow your competitors out of the water and generate thousands of dollars of revenue for your business. So, let's get started!

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Types of SEO Strategies

The first thing that you need to know if you want to learn about the various SEO strategies and how to create them is the types of SEO that you can use to build your business.

Not every SEO strategy is the same. Here are some of the most popular and most effective SEO strategies being deployed by the top SEO Hamilton and SEO companies around the world today.

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Local SEO

If you are a small business or website that is targeting a specific geographic area, then you need to be using local SEO.

Local SEO is the process of optimising your website and your online presence to rank highly for searches that are made by people in your geographic area.

This can be done through things like claiming and optimising your Google My Business listing, optimising your website for local keywords, and building citations.

Citations are listings of your business on other websites, like directories, that help to improve your visibility and your SEO.

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National / International SEO

If you are a website or business that is targeting a larger audience, then you need to be using national or international SEO.

This type of SEO is similar to local SEO in that you are still optimising your website to rank highly in search engines, but you are doing it for keywords that are targeting a larger audience.

This can be done through optimising your website for general keywords, building citations, and creating content that is relevant to your audience. This can be a big job and its advised before you start to get an SEO Audit conducted by a SEO Audit Service who can give you advice on where to start.

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Directory Linking

Another, lesser-known SEO strategy is directory linking which is an SEO strategy that allows you to gain more authority on your site by linking to larger websites. Boosting the rank of your site on a directory sites for your desired keywords you can appear higher in their search and gain traffic that goes to their site. You could do this on a site like Yelp, where you rank high in their internal search engine, but your own site can't outrank theirs. Link Building is a way of telling Google that your page or site is is full on valuable information worth ranking for.

This is not the most common way to conduct an SEO campaign, but it can surely be effective. You should consider making it a part of your SEO strategy as a local business.

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Social Media SEO

Another way that you can do SEO is through social media. Search engines are starting to take social media signals into account when they are ranking websites and businesses. This means that if you have a strong social media presence, you are more likely to rank highly in search engines.

You can improve your social media SEO by optimising your social media profiles, creating quality content, and engaging with your audience whilst linking back to your website.

The more you can get people to interact with you on social media, the better chance you have of ranking highly in search engines.

Not only does this have a bearing on where you rank in search engines, but you can conduct SEO on your social media profiles to rank high for internal searches as well.

For instance, you can optimise your Facebook business profile to appear for searches when Facebook members are looking for the goods or services that you offer.

Social media SEO is becoming an increasingly popular and important part of a good SEO campaign.

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Paid Search Engine Ads vs Search engine optimisation

If you want faster results compared to your SEO campaign, then you might try for paid placement to boost traffic to your website

Paid placement is the process of buying ad space on a search engine in order to rank higher for specific keywords. You can do this through things like Google AdWords, where you can bid on keywords in order to have your ad appear when someone searches for those keywords.

Paid placements are not always the most effective way to achieve success, but they can be helpful in getting you the short term results that you want.

Though this is a paid method to achieve your results, it doesn't mean that it can't be effective as a way to boost your business online. Learn more about the differences of SEO vs SEM in our blog.

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Steps for Creating an SEO Strategy

Now that you know all of the paths that you can take when you're gearing up to do an SEO campaign for your website or small business, you can start to think about what steps will go into creating a highly successful search engine optimisation strategy.

Here are the steps that you need to follow if you want to have success with search engine optimisation for your website or small business.

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Pick Your Niche or Business

The first step in your goal to make your search engine optimisation strategy and master plan is to pick your niche or business. If you don't already have a business, this is an important first step to ensure that you know what keywords you will focus on and what monetisation strategies you will pursue.

If you have the chance to start fresh, it would be good to conduct some keyword research to find soft spots in the search engines results pages.

Any good search engine optimisation strategy means doing the groundwork and research necessary to pick a lane that will be profitable and achievable for you.

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Search Engines Keyword Research

Part of that research means finding profitable keywords to target with your SEO campaign. This will take some time and effort, but it is worth it to find keywords that you can rank for easily and will be profitable for your business.

There are a number of keyword research tools that you can use in order to find these profitable keywords, including the Google AdWords Keyword Planner and KW Finder.

Both of these tools will help you to find profitable keywords that you can target with your SEO campaign.

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Competitor Research

Another important part of the research process is to take a look at your competitors. This will help you to understand what they are doing in order to achieve their search engine optimisation goals and how you can improve upon their strategies.

One way to do this is to simply conduct a Google search for your main keywords and see who shows up in the search results. Part of search engine marketing and what a great digital marketing Hamilton or New Zealand company does is doing great research. Using search engines, companies discover new keywords and topics that you can target. However, if you're doing competitor research yourself, with access to all the same tools, you can do great research too.

Once you have a list of your competitors, you can take a look at their websites and social media profiles to see what they are doing to promote their businesses online and in the search engine.

You can also use tools like Moz's Open Site Explorer and Ahrefs' Site Explorer to take a look at your competitor's backlinks that are visible in the search engine. This will give you an idea of where they are getting their link juice and how you can get yours.

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Technical/Back-End SEO

After you have done your research and set up your niche or business, it is time to start thinking about the technical aspects of your website. This includes things like your website's structure, header tags, meta data, and other back-end elements. These are all elements that are important to a search engine and will have an influence on your organic search results.

It is important to make sure that your website is set up in a way that is easy for Google and other search engines to crawl and index. If your website is not set up correctly, it will be difficult for the search engines to understand what your website is about and how it should be ranked. You want to make sure that your website talks and communicates effectively to a search engine so that users can find it in the organic search results. This is how search engines work!

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Creating Great Content

One of the most important aspects of any search engine optimisation strategy is creating great content. This is the bread and butter of SEO and what will ultimately help you to achieve your goals and achieve search engine optimisation.

Creating great content means writing articles, blog posts, and other pieces of content that are relevant to your keywords and target audience. It also means making sure that your content is well-written, informative, and engaging so that people continue to click on it when they find it in the search engines.

Before you start creating content, you're going to want to conduct extensive keyword research so that you can craft web pages that will grab on to various search queries and generate significant search engine traffic while climbing the search rankings. This is where your SEO efforts will come full circle.

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Search Engine Results Pages Rank Monitoring

One part of your strategy to dominate the search engines that you shouldn't ignore is the rank monitoring and optimisation aspect of it all. This includes things like keeping an eye on your search engine results pages (SERPs) position for your targeted keywords, as well as optimising your website for click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate as your web pages appear in search engines' search queries.

You can use search engines and tools like SERPWoo, Ahrefs' Rank Tracker, and Moz's Rank Tracker to keep an eye on your SERPs position. These tools will also help you to track your progress and optimise your website for better results.

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Working With a Professional to Create an SEO Strategy

Does all of this sound like a lot of work? Are search engines becoming more intimidating to you by the second? Managed SEO by an expert service that can help you create and execute an SEO strategy.

If you decide to go this route, make sure that you find an agency or consultant that is experienced and has a good track record of helping their clients achieve their SEO goals and working with major search engines.

You can use tools and search engines like Moz's Local Finder and Google's Local Business Directory to find agencies and consultants in your area.

When you are working with a digital marketing agency nz to help understand and dominate search engines, they will help you to create content, build backlinks, and do all of the other things that are necessary to dominate the search engines.

While it might cost you some money to hire a professional for your search engine strategy, it will save you a lot of time and effort in the long run.

Get in touch with us today for a free audit and SEO strategy to help boost your rankings.