Did you know that businesses spend more than $65 billion every year on SEO? An effective SEO strategy allows enterprises to build fast, robust, and user-friendly websites that rank well on search engines.
Consequently, businesses reap benefits such as increasing brand awareness, generating leads, improving conversions, enhancing user experience, and developing brand credibility. Nevertheless, many companies struggle to create and implement an effective SEO strategy. This article offers a guide on how to create a powerful SEO strategy in 2020.
Creating a Powerful SEO Strategy
When creating an SEO strategy, you should focus on three aspects.
Below are seven steps on how to create a powerful SEO strategy in 2020.
1. Satisfy User Search Intent
Although Google has more than 200 ranking factors, the most important one is being helpful to users. In SEO terms, it refers to meeting user search intent. You can satisfy user intent in several ways. First, determine what you are offering your audience. Are you selling products, entertaining people, or disseminating news and research?
Second, identify your target audience –what kind of people do you want your site to attract? Having answered the ‘why’ and ‘who,’ you can proceed to the ‘how’.
2. Choose Keywords That Will Lead Users to Your Content
Identify the phrases that users type on search engines when looking for your products or services. When choosing keywords, consider the following.
3. Invest in High-Quality Content
Delight your audience with high-quality content on your website. You can do this by addressing the pain points of your audience, giving feasible solutions, making the content visually appealing, and offering in-depth content.
Quality content not only helps you rank for keywords but also engages your audience. With every blog post you create, you get an opportunity to rank in search engines. Remember that you are not creating content for search engines but your audience. Therefore, write about topics that interest your audience and include relevant keywords. The bottom line is to deliver value to your audience so that they notice you.
4. Develop a Link-Building Plan
If you want to create a powerful SEO strategy in 2020, you need backlinks. Research shows a positive correlation between links and first page Google rankings. As mentioned earlier, link-building is essential for off-page SEO. It refers to the process of attracting backlinks to your site from other sites on the internet.
To develop a link-building plan, start by devising ways you can attract backlinks to your site. If you are just starting out, you can have other local businesses link to your website while you link to theirs. Also, look for guest blogging opportunities. This way, you link back to your website. You can also get backlinks by blogging about current events and news. That way, you increase the chances of other bloggers and industry influencers linking to your articles.
5. Compress Media Before Uploading on Your Website
It is a vital step in developing a great SEO strategy. Google loves visual content, such as video, images, and infographics. While these visual assets have SEO value and are fundamental in attracting and retaining visitors’ attention, they can compromise the user experience.
When a video has a big file size, it makes it hard for the internet browser to retrieve your website. This slows your page speed –remember that page speed is among the crucial ranking factors for search engines. A smaller file size means that your page loads faster, and subsequently ranks higher on Google.
Before you upload any media on your site, check the file size first. Anything above 1 MB is too big and requires compression. It is best practice to keep your files in kilobytes (KB) to safeguard your site speed. There are many image compression tools online to shrink your file sizes to microscopic levels without compromising the quality.
6. Conduct a Technical Audit
Numerous issues can hurt the user experience on your website. They include broken links, server errors, missing meta tags, crawling problems, and page access issues. It is best practice to conduct a technical audit on your site to ensure that it is working optimally.
7. Measure Success
SEO can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. After spending time and effort refining your SEO strategy, it is advisable to track and measure your progress. You can use metrics such as organic traffic and page ranking to determine the performance of your SEO efforts. How much traffic is your website getting from organic search? How are your pages ranking for the keywords you are targeting?
Bottom Line
SEO is more crucial than ever before, as people spend more time online. Planning and implementing an SEO strategy is an excellent way to generate leads and sales while building online credibility.
With changes taking place every day on Google and other search engines, you should update your SEO strategy to accommodate changes.
The SEO strategy you designed in 2016 may not work in 2020. WEBITMD Growth Stack can help you create a powerful SEO strategy in 2020 to drive measurable business growth. Contact WEBITMD to learn more about it!
