Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the major online marketing strategies that enable retailers to set up successful businesses online. It involves customizing websites in a manner that makes it easy for search engines to find and rank them highly. To do this, retailers hire the services of SEO experts to develop strategies for getting their sites ranked highly on search engines. Though ideally each SEO strategy should stand out from the rest, there are certain underlying elements that should not be assumed or excluded during development of an SEO strategy. If you are offer SEO services to clients, here are four things you should do when developing a strategy for your client:
1. Understand your Client’s Business
To develop a solid SEO strategy for a client, you need to understand the business very well. Understand the strengths that the business has so you can use that to leverage it and get most SEO value and identify the best tactics to use to build its brand’s identity online. Familiarize yourself with the unique selling points of the products being sold by the business, the weaknesses that exist as well as the vision that the business has. Of importance to understand about your client is the target audience. You can get information about this from your client or by surveying the business’s social media platforms.
2. Brainstorm the Strategy
When you are starting to develop an SEO strategy, you need to brainstorm. An east tool that would aid your brainstorming process is a mind map. With a mind map, you are able to develop categories that you’ll need to include in the strategy. Doing this as a first step enables you to lay a foundation for the strategy, moving from general to specific aspects of the strategy. The mind map isn’t necessarily a visual representation of the final strategy but a process that enables you to think through the strategy. With the map, you are able to envision the thinking process in a much easier way such that you combine ideas to generate a clear picture. In doing so, you reduce the work load and focus more on brainstorming various ideas as you write them down in a non-linear manner so you see everything in a structured way. This is a great place for SEO experts who want to help their customers develop strategies that produce results.
3. Create a Visual Image
As the strategy begins to shape up, you need to create more depth in the mind map bearing in mind that the strategy is basically a plan. What this means is that you need to develop goals and attach specific tasks to those goals in a logical manner. As such, you will have some tasks coming before others, sub-tasks that of course will increase with time and recurring tasks that need to be honed and repeated. Prepare these in a manner that will be easy to present to your client and in a simple format for parties to edit as well as understand. Consider using online tools such as Trello, Google Sheets, Basecamp or Workzone to do this. Generally, your visual presentation should enable parties involved identify the tasks required and who will perform those tasks, the flow of the tasks and status of tasks including those that are in progress, planned, finished and recurrent.
4. Develop Precise Goals
Goals become useful when they are precise. To develop precise goals, you need to focus on the working parts in terms of how well they fit together rather than the cost associated to realizing them. The reality is to increase revenue while reducing costs and so it is necessary to have a financial goal. Time limits also help in sharpening goals and so it is necessary to include those too. While considering these two aspects, always bear in mind that strategy has everything to do with achieving goals that will impact a business in a specific way including its future, its direction and the way it functions. This means that the metrics you develop should be a reflection of what is going on with individual working pieces. This may mean the authority and links, rankings or search traffic. The bottom line is for every party to agree on the metrics and see sense why they are necessary.