They say that the good things in life take time, and so it is in SEO, a rigorous and consistent work process that is synonymous with patience, discipline and persistence .
SEO strategies have become one of the basic pillars in any inbound marketing strategy, and it is not for less, since they are essential for your website to be more visible and have greater authority in web search engines.
Carrying out a successful SEO strategy will help more people find your company's website and, thus, attract quality visits to your website and more potential customers.
We could say that the purpose of SEO is for your website to appear at the top of the first page of search engines, since we know that these are the ones that are most likely to be consulted.
In this post I will give you the indicated steps so that you can be successful in the SEO marketing strategy of your company's website or blog .
What is SEO?
SEO comes from the acronym in English 'Search Engine Optimization', and is understood by all actions that allow a natural improvement in search results . Or, put another way, it is an improvement in visibility in search engines, yes, always organically.
It is divided into two fundamental and equally important parts to perform:
On-page SEO . The first part, and the one that usually starts with, is the optimization of the site itself , since it is of vital importance that it is adequate to what users and search engines demand in order to be able to climb positions in them. To work correctly with SEO on page, it is necessary to take into account certain variables that influence your website to be correctly optimized. Thus, it is necessary to carry out a prior analysis of keywords to know which keywords to use, both in titles and subtitles as well as in the content and, of course, in the URLs. Loading time also needs to be worked on, as well as efforts to improve the user experience. And finally, don't forget about code optimization.
SEO off page . While it is true that SEO on page is essential, the off page part is gaining more ground and importance, so you should not neglect it at all. This part of SEO positioning is responsible for working beyond your own website. How? First, getting links that point to your website, where quality is preferable to quantity. In addition to this, you must work on authority in social networks, manage mentions in local media and strive to achieve a good CTR in search engine results.
15 SEO Strategies to be the first in Google
Having then understood what SEO is, we need to understand how to implement the strategy. Below we will describe the 15 key steps that will help you improve the positioning of your website and appear in the search results of search engines.
1. Set realistic goals
For an SEO marketing strategy to be effective, the first thing to do is establish realistic objectives , which will allow you to monitor the actions taken and, if necessary, introduce the relevant changes. The characteristics that these objectives must meet are summarized with the letters of the English word SMART . These have to be specific, measurable, affordable, relevant and time framed.
2. Create a buyer persona according to your business
Once these objectives are established, it is convenient to determine to whom a certain SEO campaign is directed. In order to have a more accurate understanding of who you are going to sell your products or services to, it is essential to develop your buyer persona , that is, the fictitious and generalized representation of your ideal client. This profile helps us relate to our customers as real human beings .
For example, you may know that most of your clients are women with an executive profile, but do you know what their specific needs and interests are? Do you know what their challenges and goals are, both personally and professionally?
Done, but how do you create a buyer persona? You can resort to research, surveys and interviews of your target audience. I recommend that, in the initial stage, you lean on your current customer base, as they have purchased your products or services in the past, and interview them, either in person or over the phone.
Some questions you can ask them :
- Demographic data (name, age, gender, education, profession, marital status, etc.)
- What are your short, medium and long term goals? (Personal and professional field)
- What are your challenges? (Personal and professional field)
- What is your daily routine?
- What media do you usually read and what social networks do you use?
- What are your qualities and weaknesses?
You will ask yourself: "But what does this have to do with an SEO strategy?" The user is the center of all marketing actions and it could not be different in the case of SEO. Knowing who your buyer persona is is important information that you must take into account at every step of any strategy. It is a task that not many give the priority it deserves and, without a doubt, can determine the success of your web positioning strategy.
3. Identify the keywords that satisfy the user's objective
When you already have your buyer person identified, the next step in your strategy is to analyze what type of searches they do and what are the best words to position your website .
Think that, when searching the internet, the user is looking for content that gives an answer or solution to their problem, so it is very important that your post is focused on solving their doubts. You must focus your efforts on discovering what topics interest your buyer persona, and then write with the focus on satisfying the objective that your user has. How? Creating interesting content for him on the blog, and in which the user feels satisfied with the results he finds.
Before creating the article, the first step is to find what keywords to use in order to position yourself and write the post that will solve the needs of users.
You can rely on the Google Trends tool , which allows you to see what people are searching for on Google, and if you have a Google Adwords account , you can also use the free Keyword Planner tool , which helps you find the right words. or phrases that users search for the most according to language and country.
A good rule to follow to speed up your work is to organize keywords by categories or services and in order of importance.
Tip : make sure to use your keywords in texts, URLs, categories, tags and in your meta descriptions, the text that appears below the title or link in the search results (SERP).
In the same way, you can include your keywords as topics in your articles, either in the title, in the headings or in the text (it is important not to saturate them or seem too forced). Another old technique, but still in use today, is to highlight keywords using bold, italics, or underlining.
4. Integrate SEO into the buying cycle
For the strategy deployed to be successful, it is desirable that it take into account the four phases into which this process is divided, summarized with the acronym AIDA (attention, interest, decision and action), and that it respond to the habits shown by the potential customer in each of them, ranging from the moment in which a user looks for solutions for a certain problem until he acquires a product or service.
5. Analyze your competition
After identifying the keywords you want to be associated with your website, it is important to look at which companies have authority in the searches where you want to appear .
A good tool to use is Screaming Frog , which can help you learn what words your competition is using and how your content is structured. If you want to start analyzing your competition, I recommend that you learn how to use Screaming Frog to make your life and SEO strategy easier.
On the other hand, you can also use MozBar , the free tool from Moz, considered the leading company in the SEO sector, to analyze relevant information about your competition. This tool is a bar that you can install in your browser that gives you instant metrics, such as page and domain authority, while you are on any website.
Nor should we ignore the existence of Semrush , this tool not only analyzes keyword ranking or SEO campaign, but also allows you to analyze your competition's SEM campaigns, make reports in great detail and perform searches and analyze the possibilities of your star keywords.
6. Take care of your images and the loading speed of the site
Your entire website should be SEO friendly , including images. When naming your photos, make sure you name the file correctly. For example: if the image is of a landscape of the Eiffel Tower, the file name should be "torre-eiffel-paris.jpg". The idea is that Google can know what the image is about, in this case, the keyword is Eiffel Tower, since it is the main subject of the photo.
Another factor to take into account is the loading time, since it is important for SEO. The faster the site, the easier it is to visit and index a page. Images influence the time a website loads , especially when a large image is loaded and displayed very small, such as using a 2500 × 1500 pixel image and displaying it at a size of 250 × 150 pixels. Here the ideal is to scale the image to the size you want to display it.
The immediacy on the internet has become practically an obligation, so you have to closely monitor the speed of your site.
The pages that take time to load have a much higher abandonment rate and, in addition, user satisfaction decreases, so it is possible that they will not return to our website.
So that this does not happen, you can go to the Page Speed tool and see what problems you must solve in order to enjoy a speed that is adequate for the standards that are demanded today on the Internet.
Tip : don't forget to add the alt text, in other words, the text alternative of an image or the descriptive text that appears when the cursor passes over it. This phrase will allow the user to understand what that empty space is about in case the image does not appear, and it will also make Google know what the image is about and can show it in the image results. This will increase the chances that your page will be found in more active search engines. Make sure the phrase is descriptive, relevant to the image, consistent, short, and includes the SEO keyword for that page.
7. Details make Google fall in love
The success of your SEO strategy is the accumulation of many small details that, little by little, add up points with Google. The truth is that a website must have certain specific configurations to carry out successful positioning in web search engines . Here are some details to keep in mind:
- Title : The first thing you should do is create descriptive, unique, useful and short titles. It is essential to describe what the user will find once they enter our site, which forces us to be precise in terms of the content we offer, considering that preferably this should not exceed 70 characters. It is convenient that the title we choose is unique for each page of our site, because in this way we define it exactly and avoid it being generic, related to other pages or being replaced by phrases such as "no title" or " New page". Another recommendation is to include the domain name, as this creates more trust towards the reader.
For example : “6 beauty trends that you will want to follow this 2022 | Company name".
- Meta description – This is the text that appears in the search results (SERP). The meta description does not affect your SEO directly, but it is an important tag because it influences the number of visits you receive from search engines . Therefore, when you write the meta description of your pages, it is very important to work on the main keyword and try to include a call to action ("get to know us", "visit us", "quote today", etc.). As with the title, the meta description must be unique for each page and, remember that it is only a summary, so it should not exceed 155 characters.
For example : “Discover the latest beauty trends in "company name". We have a selection of makeup, skin care, accessories and much more. Get in now!”
- URL : make sure to customize your links according to the content of each page of your website and including your keywords. These also have to inform users and search engines about what our website or page in particular consists of. An informative URL will allow users to understand what they will find before clicking on it. When creating your URL, separate words with hyphens and avoid making them too long and containing confusing numbers, symbols, or parameters.
For example : if a page talks about skin care products,
Publication date : it has to be up to date, the user will not trust results with an old publication date as much.
Create your favicon : The “favorite icon”, also known as a 'favicon', is the small image that appears in the address bar, favorites and bookmarks of your browser. Most of the time the company logo is used and it has a size of 16 px by 16 px.
8. Fix broken links
It has surely happened to many of us that we are visiting a website and then ending up on a 404 error page . These broken links are not only annoying but can also hurt your SEO efforts. Why?
When your visitors discover that they have broken links, they will not want to continue browsing other pages , and if your visitors spend less time on your site, web search engines will assume that you are not providing a good user experience and will lower your web ranking.
Therefore, it is important that you fix these links by redirecting them, permanently or occasionally, to other pages that are active.
9. Use your own links
When writing content for your website, especially when it comes to your blog, try to let one topic lead to another to prolong the time your readers spend browsing your site. How to do it? Use internal links , that is, the links that go from one page to another on your website .
If you write an article about skin care tips, try to link it to another article on your blog (for example: skin care for all ages) within the same text. You have to be clever in the writing and think about how you are going to link it so that it is consistent with the rest of the article.
For example , you can write it in such a way: “Your beauty routine must be designed for your needs, for this reason it is important that you adopt the best skin care according to your age ”. The sentence that is in bold is where you would add the hyperlink that takes the reader to the other article on your blog.
10. Include related topics
Google is getting smarter and smarter, and we have to take that into account when writing posts for our blog.
Search engines increasingly understand the context of searches, so when writing about a specific topic, we have to make sure that we also include in the post those words that are related to the main theme or keyword . If they are not included, the chance of ranking will decrease.
For this we recommend using the use of related categories to give relevance to the content, always taking care of the context of the keywords, to ensure that they are related to the theme of the blog and the topics.
11. Strengthen your content by providing unique value
Writing is not an easy task for everyone, even professional writers suffer from writer's block from time to time, a condition where they find it difficult to produce new and creative content. Still, the important thing is to understand that your audience comes first. Don't get obsessed with optimizing based on Google's algorithms, but think about your buyer persona first and then target the search engines. Remember that the buyer person is the center of our seo strategies , otherwise they would not make sense.
Your content must be useful, original and of quality . Before selling your product or service, think about how you can help your potential customers, then write a friendly article, well worked with examples and tips, with a tone that corresponds to the brand and that is 100% original.
The differentiation in the content is the key to be able to distinguish yourself from the rest of the pages that will appear when typing the same keyword in the search engines. It is necessary to create unique content, that no one else talks about it and that adds value.
In addition, the ideal is that it has a long extension (more than 1,000 words), since several studies have shown that the most worked articles tend to have better results in SEO .
It also verifies that your website has a responsive web design, in other words, that your content adapts to any technological device, whether from a mobile phone, a tablet or a desktop computer. It is worth mentioning that since 2015 Google penalizes any website that does not have this type of design.
More and more searches are carried out through mobile phones, so the content must be 100% optimized to be seen correctly on all types of devices . So much so that it is recommended that web pages be made first in the mobile version and, later, be passed to the web version.
Taking into consideration the most important part of the entire strategy, which are the details for your audience, it is time to also work on a good SEO strategy following the optimization guidelines for search engines.
After having included the keyword in the title, the meta description and the URL, you must also work it in the main header and the body of the texts.
Take the opportunity to work on variations of the main keyword and even other keywords that your users may be looking for and that can bring adequate traffic to your website.
In any case, do not ignore the meaning of the header, whose text should help define the page, both for users and for search engines. Headers also help make text digestible, easy to read, and capable of attracting the user's attention.
12. Implement a link building strategy
Google ranks important websites first, and considers links to define the importance of web pages. Which means that, to improve our SEO positioning and valuation, we must implement a good link building strategy that makes search engines see that we have many links.
A backlink is a link from another site that points to your website. They are considered very useful, since they are a way to demonstrate which pages have value for your website.
For example, if you have a page for beauty products, it is normal to link to major dermatologists or makeup artists, or to pages of beauty salons. They are like very important bibliographical references to build.
To carry out this plan there are two types of links: the so-called dofollow that confer authority to the page to which they point, and the nofollow, which are expressly marked with an attribute so that they are not taken into account by search engines at the time to transmit authority to the website in question.
Currently, the ideal is for a site to host a balanced combination of both types. To attract them, there are numerous techniques, such as starting a blog, asking the company's clients to include the web link on their site, writing articles and sending them to content aggregators or writing on the blogs of influential Internet gurus such as guests.
13. Create engagement and trust through UI, UX and branding
On the internet there are a large number of sites that users can access with just one click. This makes it essential to make efforts to create user engagement and trust, for which various techniques can be used.
The first of these is to make your domain known : if users don't know who you are or what you do, any subsequent effort you make will be in vain.
The next point to deal with is the optimization of the web , both at an aesthetic level and at a content level. Improving the user experience will make browsing the site as easy as possible, making them feel comfortable and therefore spend more time on it . Within this point, and closely related to it, we can also mention the effort that must be made to achieve an easy and intuitive website in which you do not get lost while browsing. So now you know, eliminate all those elements that hinder the visibility and user experience on the web.
Continuing with the list of what to do to break the barrier of the computer and generate more warmth in the users, the fact of providing testimonials, evaluations and all this type of action makes the user, when entering your web page, trust you more. and gain more credibility.
14. Analyze and measure your SEO strategy
A good place to get this information is through Google Search Console , formerly known as "Google Webmaster Tools", a free tool that helps you analyze, optimize and verify the status of your site in web search engines. It shows you all the errors that Google finds when reading your website so you can solve them faster.
Similarly, you can't forget to link your site to Google Analytics , Google's free web analytics tool. It is essential to have this tool to analyze all your online traffic and determine your marketing metrics ; Some that will help you evaluate your positioning are the number of sessions, traffic by channel, new and returning users or total conversions, among others.
15. He who perseveres, achieves
A web positioning strategy requires a lot of patience and dedication. You cannot expect great results if you are not willing to invest the time it takes. In order not to miss a beat, it is essential that you organize yourself, so develop a plan of monthly objectives with the different SEO tactics that you are going to implement to have greater control of your actions and thus be able to evaluate them.
Hopefully this article has been helpful to you in creating your web positioning strategy . If you liked it, don't forget to share it on your social networks! And if you want to learn even more tricks, download the free ebook The Secrets of SEO .
Top comments (0)