There are three types of SEO you need for a well-rounded organic search SEO strategys: on-page SEO, technical SEO, and off-page SEO. By breaking down your strategy and thinking about SEO as these three categories, it will be much easier to organize and execute your optimization plans.

How did Nelson do it? With a great strategy!

Creating an SEO strategy, or as I like to say “designing”, is something we don’t discuss often enough in the SEO world.

There are plenty of articles on the web that claim to be about SEO strategies but quickly venture into prescriptions (“focus on meta-titles”), which is not what a strategy is supposed to do. In fact, I haven’t found a single article that really explains how to set up a strategy. We often get lost in the day-to-day of SEO, but in this article, I want to cover the bird’s eye view.

The definition of an SEO strategy is a detailed plan that shows what is being optimized when, why and how. However, there is more to a good SEO strategy that I will explain throughout this article.

Having a clear strategy for SEO is crucial to being successful, whether you’re in-house or a consultant. A holistic SEO strategy allows you to figure out what resources (people, money, tools, material) you need, gives you a goal and provides clarity on what to prioritize.

As Sun Tzu, author of “The Art of War”, said

“The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand.”

What makes a good strategy?
When I started thinking about the topic and doing my research, it became obvious that nobody talks about what the indicators of a good strategy actually are. It’s not enough to just have a plan – you need to know what distinguishes a good from a bad one.

So, I looked at what successful marketing strategies have in common and translated that into the SEO space.

I identified 7 core attributes of a good (SEO) strategy:

Vision-driven.

You need a north star that the strategy is aligned to. A strategy should bring you from A to B but if you don’t know what B looks like it can’t work. This doesn’t have to be tied to a number or metric, it can even be a descriptive scenario.

Feasible.

You need to have enough resources and time to execute the strategy.

Tactical.

A good strategy can be sliced into tactics that are based on S.M.A.R.T. goals: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timely. The tactics of a strategy are referred to as “objectives”.

Progressive.

Not repeating past mistakes is a major component of good strategies that are often forgotten.

Robust.

A good strategy is easy to defend and justify. A helpful tool to make a strategy more robust is using “inversion”. Ask yourself “what would happen if we did the opposite (or something else)?”. Assessing the opportunity cost of each objective helps you to justify it. The cost of each objective should be lower than not having it in the strategy.

Relevant.

A good strategy is worth nothing when it’s not relevant to the business. It must be driven by business goals. One way to facilitate that is to tie your SEO KPI to a business KPI like revenue.

Considerate

Important stakeholders must be taken into account.

In application, not every attribute is always equally represented. A strategy can still be good without considering important stakeholders much, as long as it has high relevancy. Feasibility and relevance, however, have to be included. Without them, it doesn’t matter how visionary or considerate a strategy is. No attribute should be completely left out in your strategy, but some can take a more prominent position.

The difference between strategy, roadmap, and objectives
The core of an SEO strategy is the roadmap, a high-level plan of your objectives over time. Imagine you would bake a cake: the strategy is the type of cake for the right occasion, the roadmap is the recipe, and the objectives are the ingredients.

Strategy = roadmap + presentation x vision x transformation

Roadmap = objectives / time

Objective = component + goal

An objective could be to implement XML sitemaps by date x. Or optimize 75 meta-titles to get x% more traffic (more about traffic increases in a bit). The component is what you want to optimize.

If you would use Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle, the strategy would be the “why”, the roadmap the “what”, and the objectives the “how”.

Technical components of an SEO strategy
An SEO strategy consists of different “components” or fields of SEO. They determine the “what” (what to optimize?) in your strategy. Together with a quantified goal they form an “objective”. I separated components into technical and content, due to the prominent role content plays in SEO now (post-Panda and Penguin update).

What components you use and by what degree depends on your business and market. A locally-driven business, say a retail chain, needs to focus on different SEO components than a B2B site. A marketplace or social network is very different from an e-commerce business or publisher.

https://www.fair-news.de/2839417/how-haris-starts-an-seo-strategy
https://www.techsite.io/p/2133716/t/how-haris-starts-an-seo-strategy
https://fundly.com/how-haris-starts-an-seo-strategy