9 Steps to Building an Effective SEO Strategy in 2023

Want to be on the first page of Google so that people will find you online easily? Then you need to master the mysterious art of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.

SEO is all about using strategies that help to put your website on the first page of Google and other search engines where people can easily find your business, giving you a huge advantage over competitors who aren’t visible when people search for the products and services that your industry offers.

If you want to succeed, you will need a dedicated, data-driven SEO strategy. It doesn’t matter if you’re a small local business or an international enterprise with a presence on the stock market; leveraging data makes it easier to find areas where you can improve on your SEO as well as identify SEO goals for your team to follow with a careful strategy designed to put you on top.

What Is an SEO Strategy and Why Is It Important for My Website?

An SEO strategy is an all-encompassing game plan that has one goal: to push your website closer to the top of search results when people search for products and services like the ones your business offers.

You might have seen or heard people talking about SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). This is simply shorthand for how your site might rank – and typically, there is always something you can do to improve your SERPs. That might mean optimizing content that is already on your website, fixing errors in your technical SEO, link building, or developing a specific content strategy.

All of these can be found in a typical SEO action plan; what sets SEO strategy apart from short-term action plans is a greater focus on, well, long-term strategy! A good place to start is increasing your employees’ awareness of SEO – this might mean a little education, or simply adapting to some challenges to ensure that everyone in your organization is working toward the same goal.

One way to do this is to create a document that explicitly lays out your SEO strategy, outlining your priorities along with what people should (and shouldn’t!) do. These documents do not have to be in-depth, but they do need to provide guidance so that everyone is working toward the same goal.

Typically, you will want to include any SEO initiatives that you want to implement. That might mean creating more content to increase your SERPs for organic keywords. It might mean looking closer at your website, fixing any issues that might be affecting your UI, UX, or preventing search engines from fully crawling your website. It might be working harder on increasing backlinks from major domains and leveraging smart PR strategies.

The list goes on: what your SEO strategy looks like will very much depend on what your business needs and the issues that need fixing with your current SEO. Whether this is your first adventure into the world of SEO or you’re an SEO professional taking on a new client, an SEO strategy is essential for your eventual success in getting more organic traffic to convert to paying customers.

After all, as Benjamin Franklin said over 200 years ago, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” So, what can you do to plan and create a successful SEO strategy when it comes to your website?

How to Build a Better SEO Strategy for Your Business in 9 Steps

Building an effective SEO strategy can take time, but the results are well worth it. One key thing to remember is that your strategy must be attainable to avoid frustration when an over-ambitious game plan inevitably fails.

Below, we’ve put together an effective 9-step plan for developing an SEO strategy that delivers on the goals you set. The focus of these steps is identifying opportunities that you can leverage. We’ve also included insights that will help you to better understand why these steps matter.

1. Investigate Your Website for SEO Issues

Your first step is perhaps obvious, but it is often overlooked by people who simply start adding SEO to their website. Take a deeper look at your website as it currently is to uncover existing issues and fix them.

This might seem basic (and even boring!) but looking at and fixing existing issues will give you a strong foundation from which to build your future SEO strategy. Typically, this means an SEO audit and crawling your website to quickly identify those issues.

The results of these audits and website crawls are often technical. There are many tools out there that you can use – we like Moz, Ahrefs & Semrush. Alternatively, you may want to consider hiring a professional to conduct this for you. Website crawlers imitate a search engine’s crawl of websites (or, in plain English, they show you what websites pick up to display on their search results when they scan your website) and provide invaluable information on what pages are failing.

Similarly, a website audit investigates on-page and technical issues with your SEO, delivering a report that exposes your weaknesses. By completing this step, you’ll have a great overview of the SEO problems your website has, which gives you a good place to start your basic SEO strategy. Fixing these issues will be a core part of optimizing your website’s visibility in the future!

It is best to do this as your first step as website audits and website crawling can take time to complete. That doesn’t mean that you need to sit around twiddling your thumbs as you wait for the results – this is also a great time to jump into another essential foundation of SEO: researching your competitor’s SEO efforts.

2. Unleash the Power of Competitor Analysis for SEO Success

When it comes to SEO research, your fiercest competitors can be your best friends. Analyzing their websites is a great way to uncover the best keywords and uncover other little tricks they may have up their sleeve. Researching your competitors is also a great way to learn what realistic SEO goals you should set for yourself.

In many ways, researching your competitors’ SEO is no different from traditional market analysis. There’s no point reinventing the wheel – take what works and improve on it where you can. One example of how you can do this is by making sure that your website is leveraging important keywords in your industry with relevant pages, either by adapting existing pages or creating new ones.

One way to make sure you’re optimizing the time you spend here is to focus on a keyword gap analysis. This type of analysis looks at your website against a competitor’s website to find where there are missing keywords, or rather, a ‘gap’ that you can fill by creating keyword-rich content.

This can seem quite daunting at first, but it doesn’t need to be hard. The good news is that there are plenty of tools that you can use to help you do competitive keyword research and analysis. To get the best results, you may want to consider subscribing to a service like Moz for a few months to access all of the features and information. Don’t forget, you can also use these tools on your competitor websites – why limit your website audit to your own website when there is a wealth of data ripe for picking from your competitors?

Beyond keyword research, you should also be looking at what kind of content your most successful competitors are creating, and how they choose to demonstrate their expertise. Is it through a blog, over social media, or using video content? These are subtle indicators of what type of content works best for attracting leads in your industry.

You will also want to understand the overall SEO competitiveness of your industry. If many competitors aren’t putting that much effort into their SEO, you have a golden opportunity to push yourself in front of them with a smart SEO strategy. On the other hand, if your competitors are all focused on SEO and have a website with a solid technical SEO foundation, your task will be a little harder – but with research, you can find their strengths and make them yours, too. We’re only scratching the surface, but if this already seems overwhelming, here is a guide to choosing the right SEO agency.

3. Make a List of Your Goals – and Get Your Team on Board

No man is an island, and this is especially true when it comes to SEO. If you run a business, that means delegating tasks to various departments and ensuring that everyone is aligned with your SEO strategy. If you’re working alone, then you should consider hiring freelancers to help you get things done.

Let’s say that you’ve identified a keyword that is missing from your site; you will need a writer who understands SEO to create an article. That article subject should be chosen based on analyzing available data, which is best handled by a content writer or editorial team. You’ll also need a webpage to put this article on, which means a web developer needs to create the page. This is just one example, but it shows how SEO often requires the input of several professionals.

It is possible for one person to do all of this, of course, but bear in mind that trying to do everything does not often lead to the best results – by leveraging a team of experts, you are pulling together their strengths to create a powerful whole.

It’s important to make sure that everyone is on the same page for this to work well. Documenting what is expected and careful management is vital for the best results. Remember: you are trying to optimize your website by removing as many weaknesses as possible. Make sure everyone working on this project understands your goals and why they are doing this. Knowing your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses is useful here, as it gives you and your team a focal point of contrast, even a benchmark, from which they can work.

4. Prioritize Meaningful Impact Over Hard Work

SEO is a grind that never truly finishes. The good news is that at the beginning of your SEO journey, you have a lot of room to make decisions that will have more impact than you would if your website were already optimized.

What does this mean? Well, your site audit may have reported a huge list of SEO problems. That can feel overwhelming but take a breath and step back. Not all issues are critical, which means that you can prioritize high-impact items first. These critical SEO changes may be as simple as a few clicks to fix but have a big impact on your SEO strategy, such as meta titles. Other, less critical, fixes may require a lot more effort over a lot more time – an SEO content strategy is an example of this.

With all the research you’ve done, you should have a list of on-page and technical fixes that your site needs. Take a look at these items and decide where they fit on a chart that grades them on effort and impact. There are no right or wrong answers here, as every business has access to different resources that makes fixing some issues easier than others.

One area many businesses overlook is meta titles (also known as title tags), which are often not optimized or just missing on websites. This is easily fixed and should be, as it is one of the first things Google looks for when considering where to rank a website.

Meta titles are simply what you and other people see when searching on Google. A good meta title doesn’t just increase your ranking, it will also increase your click-through rates. You will want to make sure that they are optimized for your keywords. This isn’t a tough task, as modern CMS (Content Management Systems) often have dedicated fields for meta titles, as do many website backends.

Meta titles are a good example of something that need not be a major effort having a big impact; as you go through the results of your site audit and research, see if you can identify other opportunities where the impact of your efforts will yield the most results and prioritize completing these.

5. Build Out Your SEO Dashboard

By now, you should have a list of search optimization areas, ordered by priority, and a good idea of where you are and what you need to do. Your next step is often overlooked, but vital – to establish an SEO dashboard from which you can track your performance and progress over time.

In SEO, data is king, giving you insights into what is working and what isn’t. Setting up your SEO dashboard now can feel like a lot of extra work, but it will pay dividends in the long run as you will be able to make smart, data-driven decisions rather than optimizations based on guesswork.

The good news is that building your SEO dashboard doesn’t have to be complicated. Once again, there are many tools available to help you out here, such as Google’s Keyword Planner. You can use this tool in tandem with Google Console & Google Analytics so you can see the exact performance of your keywords.

If you’re ready to make an investment, it’s definitely worth shopping around for an SEO tool – there are many on the marketplace! Most tools like Moz & Ahrefs offer both free and paid options.

6. Don’t Forget Your Technical SEO

For many people, SEO means keywords and other on-page SEO. This is only half of the story; think of building and maintaining a website the same as you would a home. Before you can think about the color scheme of your bedroom, you must ensure that the foundation and frame are rock solid.

Without that foundation and frame, buildings crumble and fall. Your website is no different. The good news is that you’ve already done a lot of legwork for this step if you have followed this guide carefully! Take a look at the SEO audit and the chart you created showing which actions deliver the most impact for the effort. This will give you a good idea of where your technical issues are and what you need to do.

In particular, you will want to look for any problems that are creating critical website crawl issues. If you haven’t already, run your website through Google’s PageSpeed Insights. This will give you a baseline of information on your PageSpeed and Core Web Vitals (CWV) scores from which you can improve. PageSpeed Insights will also show you what you can do to make your website faster. What those tasks are will vary depending on the issues your site has, but typically, it might suggest something like caching images or reducing the use of JavaScript.

We recommend using PageSpeed Insights for two reasons: first, the information that you get is coming straight from Google. Second, this invaluable service is provided for free! Google is the biggest search engine in the world; it is the one place where you want to make sure your website has a strong position. By fixing the technical issues that Google points out, you’re getting one step closer to improving your website’s health and meeting your SEO goals.

7. Take a Closer Look at Your Content

Congratulations! All the work you’ve done so far means that you now have a solid foundation. You have a full list of SEO issues – and you know which ones to attack first. You have also started tracking your SEO, so anything you do will be measurable, making future SEO decisions smart and data-driven.

Now, it’s time to start optimizing your existing website content. This can feel a little daunting if you have a large website, but take a deep breath; this isn’t as difficult as it sounds.

You should aim to give all your core pages the highest possible score. Check the recommendations that your preferred SEO tool gives you and try to implement as many of them as possible. Remember: low effort, high impact is best. You don’t need to do everything now – but be sure to add any suggested optimizations you don’t complete to your list.

8. Don’t Forget to Make Use of Backlinks

Backlinks are links to your websites from other websites. This is an old SEO technique that still works in 2023, but there are caveats: you want to make sure that your backlinking strategy is solid; one wrong move can have a major negative impact on your SEO. In a nutshell, the more backlinks you have from high-authority websites, the higher your Domain Authority, a vital KPI for judging your website’s overall ability to rank.

Ideally, you want backlinks from high-authority websites, particularly in your niche or industry. High-authority websites are typically the ones that everyone knows – Wikipedia, the New York Times, and Reddit to name a few. In your niche or industry, a high authority website is typically one that everyone in your niche or industry refers to for the latest news and information.

So how do you get backlinks from such places? The best way is to simply create great content that people want to read and share. Don’t just create and publish, though. Make sure to promote your content on social media channels. Some of the best platforms today for sharing content are TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram. If your target market spends a lot of time on another social media website, such as Facebook, you should also promote your content there. The aim of this is to get people talking about and sharing your article organically. This might not help with your backlinking strategy with backlinks from high authority websites (although with enough buzz, you never know!), but it will help to establish and build brand awareness, brand reputation, and potentially increase search volume.

If your website is brand new and has a low Domain Authority, then you may want to consider a manual link building strategy. This is quite a bit of work, but it has a great payoff. For a new website, this is one of the best things you can do for growth.

9. Never Stop Optimizing: Make Data-Driven SEO Decisions

Think of SEO as a game of cat and mouse. Google is constantly changing its algorithms as SEO experts and website owners try to find the best ways to rank on that shifting sand. Your company is also likely to evolve and change over time, too. An effective SEO strategy for 2023 may suddenly be foiled by a change nobody could foresee – or because of a simple oversight.

It’s not comfortable, but SEO is a place where change is the only constant. If you want to stay on top, then you need to constantly track your keywords, measure their performance, test new keywords, and optimize your pages depending on the information you get back.

This is important, and you’ll want to make sure you have at least one tool in your SEO arsenal that is tracking your keyword performance. You will also want to make good use of Google Analytics to keep track of your website’s growth. While these tools need time to fully come into their own, after a while you will notice where your website is strongest, and where it keeps falling down.

Whatever happens in the world of SEO, you can use this data to make sure that you’re consistently publishing content and playing to the strengths of your site. At the same time, you can continue to fix issues old and new. While SEO is never truly finished, done right, it is a constantly improving work in progress pushing you higher up the search engine ranks.

Start Empowering Your Business with an Effective SEO Strategy

If you have followed these nine steps, then you are well on your way to SEO success with an effective and adaptive SEO strategy. Congratulations – you’re doing a lot better than the majority of your competitors, and your hard work will pay off in the long run! All of this methodical work gives you a solid action plan that is focused on achieving your measurable goals through clearly defined tasks – and away from projects that don’t help you.

Don’t forget, there are many free SEO tools out there to help you. We’ve already mentioned a few in this article, but keep an eye out for others that can help you with your search engine optimization strategy. Different tools will help you spot different opportunities, further helping you to plug any gaps in your SEO strategy.

71Three works with small businesses to improve their every day, and we can help you, too. Our SEO Specialists have decades of experience and are up-to-date with the latest in SEO and best practices. If you don’t have the time to dedicate to building your own SEO strategy, then contact us today to find out how we can help optimize your website for long-term SEO success.