7 Steps to Create a Successful SEO Strategy: A Complete Guide

Download your essential SEO action plan ebook and checklist now to unleash the full potential of your website. This will provide data-backed input for 2025 planning to support continuous improvement. With our SEOLeverage app, you can analyze how Google’s algorithm updates have affected your site using the Impact Checker tool. That way, you can immediately tweak your SEO strategies to comply with these changes. Based on the reporting insights, optimize underperforming areas and capitalize on what works.

Step #1: Create a List of Keywords

• And you should build your content plan based on your keyword research, competitive analysis, and audit results.
• Start by identifying websites in your niche with solid domain authority (use tools like Ahrefs or Moz).
• Learn what search engine optimization is, why it matters, and all the need-to-know basics to start yourself off right.
• Effective keyword research means finding terms your target audience actually searches and that you have a shot at ranking for.
• If I’m writing anything, be it an article or a piece of music, I’m bouncing back and forth throughout the piece as inspiration strikes.

Constant updates and battling with your competitors means that there’s always work to be done, not to mention that you can still improve on what you’ve done already. If you haven’t been using SEO properly already, going back and updating content with keywords, backlinks, and better readability is a great way to get started. You can even ensure that pages that have been performing better maintain traffic growth or build upon that standard by regularly updating them. Over a third of Google’s total search queries feature four or more words (i.e. long-tail keywords). Not only are these keywords less competitive and therefore easier to rank for, but they can also still drive plenty of cumulative traffic organically.

These visual assets help retain your visitors’ attention, but it’s easy to forget that these files can be very large. Since page speed is a crucial SEO Anomaly ranking factor, it’s important to monitor the size of the media files you upload to your site. Jane Friedman, who ranks #3 for the term “publishing blog,” is a well-documented industry veteran.

Analysis of Existing Content

Use the search suggestions report to find related keywords and their respective data. The first one focuses on valuable content and overall user experience, so, everything that’s on your page. Learn everything you need to know in our free SEO copywriting guide. From optimizing your content to improving the user experience.

It doesn’t take much work, and it’s one of the best ways to build quality links. To quickly find pages that could benefit from getting more links, start by entering your domain into our Organic Research tool and clicking the “Positions” tab. A good starting point would to look at the traffic and links a piece of content gets. Just plug in the URL of the page in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and look at these numbers in the Overview report. Before you even start localizing, step back and map your goals.

Look at your competitors’ pages, and keep their qualitative attributes, such as their history in the industry, in mind. Even if we managed to rank on the first page, our click-through rates would probably be lower because this is such a competitive term. Click-through rate refers to the number of people who see your search result compared to the number of people who actually click on it.