Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial for driving qualified traffic to your website, but it can seem overwhelming if you don’t have a solid strategy. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the key steps for developing an effective SEO strategy from start to finish.
Follow this process to boost your search rankings, attract more visitors, and ultimately grow your business.
Conduct a Website Audit
The first step is performing a detailed audit of your current website. This allows you to identify any issues or opportunities to improve your SEO foundations before layering on more advanced tactics.
Some key things to evaluate in your audit include:
- Mobile friendliness – With Google’s mobile-first indexing, a mobile-friendly site is essential. Check that your site loads quickly on mobile and is easy to navigate.
- Site speed – Faster sites rank better in search. Use tools like PageSpeed Insights and WebPageTest to measure your current speeds and identify improvements.
- Technical SEO – Scan for any technical issues like broken links, improper meta tags, etc. Fix these to avoid penalties.
- Accessibility – Your site should be accessible to all users. Review the code and usability for compliance.
- Competitor analysis – Review competitor sites to analyze their SEO strategies. This can reveal opportunities for you to outrank them.
Conducting a thorough audit gives you a blueprint for optimizing the foundation of your site before moving to more advanced SEO tactics.
Research Target Keywords
The next step is conducting keyword research to identify the terms and phrases you want your content to rank for in search.
To begin, make a list of keywords that are relevant to your products, services, and overall business goals. You can develop this list directly from your knowledge of the industry or use keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner for inspiration.
Once you have an initial list, analyze each keyword for:
- Search volume – Look for decent search volume so the term is worth targeting. Avoid extremely high volume keywords that are too competitive.
- Relevance – Ensure the keywords tie directly to your offerings and align with business goals.
- Competitiveness – Check how saturated those keywords are and whether you can realistically rank for them.
- Commercial intent – Prioritize keywords where users are actively looking to purchase products/services like yours.
- Alignment with personas – Pick keywords your ideal buyer personas would use during their research process.
This research gives you a focused list of keywords to optimize for throughout your site and content.
Develop an SEO Keyword Strategy
Next, develop a documented keyword strategy to align your website content with your researched target keywords.
Your strategy should outline:
- Primary keywords – These are the main focus keywords you want the overall website to rank for. Often just 1-2 broad keywords that encompass your main offerings.
- Secondary keywords – Supporting keywords that are relevant for key pages/sections of your site. Include a few with decent search volume per page.
- Tertiary long tail keywords – More granular and specific keywords to incorporate into detailed content pieces like blogs.
With your keyword tiers mapped out, you can align keywords to pages and content in the next steps.
Optimize Website Pages for Keywords
A crucial part of executing your keyword strategy is optimizing individual pages on your site to target your focus keywords.
Here are some of the important elements to optmize:
- Page titles – Incorporate primary and secondary keywords from your strategy into concise, compelling page titles.
- Meta descriptions – Include secondary keywords in meta descriptions to summarize the page content.
- Headers – Format H1 and H2 tags around keywords where appropriate to emphasize them.
- Image file names/ALT text – Rename files and ALT text to include secondary keywords where logical.
- URL structure – If possible, update URLs to contain keywords for that page content.
- Internal linking – Link related pages together using anchor text with secondary keywords.
Optimizing these elements helps search engines understand the page content and what keywords it should rank for.
Produce Keyword-Focused Content
Your keyword research should directly inform the content you create and publish on an ongoing basis. This new content is where you’ll focus on aligning tertiary long tail keywords from your strategy.
Here are some tips for optimizing your content:
- Feature primary and secondary keywords in titles and introductions.
- Include related tertiary keywords throughout the content naturally.
- Link out to other relevant pages on your site using keyword-rich anchor text.
- Follow an editorial calendar to publish new content consistently, at least 1-2x per month.
- Produce different content types like articles, ebooks, videos etc. to attract searchers.
Over time, publishing content aligned with your keyword strategy will continue strengthening your search presence and rankings.
Track Your SEO Results
Once your SEO strategy is implemented, it’s essential to monitor your progress by tracking key performance indicators.
What metrics should you monitor:
- Ranking progress for target keywords – Track which keywords you are starting to rank for and how rankings change month to month.
- Quantity of ranking keywords – Count how many keywords your site appears for in search to gauge growth.
- Inbound traffic from SEO – Watch referral traffic from organic search to see how it changes based on your efforts.
- New targeted landing pages – Check which pages are attracting traffic and conversions as you optimize them.
- Click-through-rate from rankings – Measure how often searchers click your listings to evaluate relevance.
Analyzing these KPIs over time will reveal whether your SEO implementation is succeeding. If progress stalls, it’s a sign you may need to reassess your approach.
Continue Evolving Your SEO Strategy
The final stage in this seo step by step guide, is to keep learning and evolving your SEO strategy over time. Search algorithms and best practices constantly change, so you must continually audit and improve to maintain results.
By continuously honing your process, your SEO strategy will only get stronger and more effective. Here are some ideas to consider:
- Experiment with new content formats – Test podcasts, videos, interactive content etc.
- Expand your keyword scope – Add new related keywords as your offerings grow.
- Refine based on searcher behavior – Observe user metrics to identify new opportunities.
- Leverage emerging features – Utilize structured data, local SEO etc.
- Stay on top of updates – Monitor algorithm changes and best practices.
Conclusion
Developing an optimized SEO strategy takes effort, but following this step-by-step guide will get you the search visibility and traffic your business needs. Start with a website audit and keyword research to build a strong foundation. Then create high-quality, keyword-focused content on an ongoing basis. Track key metrics to gauge your progress and evolve your approach over time. With a disciplined SEO process, your rankings and traffic will steadily improve month after month.
Do you want to learn more
We are helping many healthtech clients grow their sales pipeline. If you found this SEO step-by-step guide helpful and you want to learn how to develop the most effective seo strategy for your business, let’s schedule a call.
If you liked this post and want to learn more…
- Check out more posts like this in the Healthtech MarketingLearning Center. It is chock-full of articles, use cases, how-to’s, and ideas to get you started on your ABM journey.
- Follow me or connect with me on LinkedIn. I publish videos and articles on ABM and healthtech marketing.
- Buy Total Customer Growth: Our book on how to win and grow customers for life with ABM and ABX.
- Work with me directly. Let’s book a growth session and we can explore ways you can improve your marketing using the latest techniques in account-based marketing.
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash