What is an SEO strategy anyway?
Hubspot defines in 2022 an SEO strategy as the following: “An SEO strategy is the process of organising a website’s content by topic to improve the likelihood of appearing in search results. Essentially, it is the process you follow in order to maximise the opportunity to gain organic traffic from search engines.”
To make it simple: when a prospect writes keywords in the search engine (Google, Bing, etc) - also called Zero Moment of Truth - related to what you offer and stand for, a list of pages will be shown to him. Your objective is to appear in the top results. Once your prospect notices your page, he clicks on it and lands on your website, becoming a potential lead for your business. This was done through organic search and this user is now part of your organic traffic.
But all of this will not happen by accident. The competition is thriving, and without any SEO strategy, your organic traffic can go downhill, letting new contacts and leads go to your competitors.
How do I implement keywords or SEO strategy?
It all depends on what your objectives are. But there are 3 types of SEO you should focus on:
On-Page SEO: that is the content on your webpages, and also your blog. If you haven't yet, you need to set up a blog - it adds relevant content to your website, Google loves continually refreshed websites! You need to stay on point and show your expertise in your field through your content strategy. Choose the right keywords and talk about them to grow your website’s ranking to the top of SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
Off-Page SEO: that can be the tricky part. First, you need to hyperlink authoritative websites to your pages, but you need those main websites to link to yours. What does it mean? That Google will see your website as a trustworthy and expert one, meaning you are the one who knows what you’re talking about in your field, therefore your voice is trustworthy. It will also make your website’s ranking grow even more.
Technical SEO: the tricky but necessary part of your SEO strategy. Make sure your website is optimised for desktop and mobile, has a good page speed and its architecture is on point. Google cares about your back-end architecture as much as it does for your front-end. Make sure to add meta-tag descriptions and titles so it can fully understand what your website is all about.
Employer Branding & SEO strategies
Both go hand in hand, and we wanted to talk about this, as at GenerateLeads, we saw how important it was for our clients' success.
In 2021, research shows that 75% of active job seekers are likely to apply to a job if the employer actively manages its employer brand. So to get the best employees, you need an employer branding strategy. Your employees are your greatest brand evangelists, so you want them to be out there conveying a very positive message about your organisation. You need your employees to say the best about you, and your content should show who you are - your core values and your unique story.
But first, your job seekers should easily be able to find you online. This is where your employer branding and SEO strategies combine. Leverage your current employees and incorporate them in your content strategy. To do so, you can use great content - emails, videos, blogs, articles. Don’t hesitate as well to use this type of content to tell your business story and value proposition.
Encourage your employees to talk about you online, engage with you, tag you on social media and to possible prospects. Search Engines love trustworthiness, and when analysing the correlation between your company and positive feedback; it will only help to rank you even higher in SERP.
SEO strategy tools to use for your business
We strongly recommend hiring an SEO strategist to build your business. He will be the one able to optimise it through a strong expertise. As well, an SEO strategy can take a long time to implement and you might not have that time… So best to hire someone who knows best about it.
But we also want to share with you some simple tools to use if you want to go solo:
PageSpeed Insights: Google can help you analyse the speed of your website and find out what needs to be optimised. From then on, all you have to do is well… Optimise!
Website Grader: Hubspot created an interesting tool that analyses your website and finds out what needs to be fixed.
Google Analytics: this is the best way to gather data about your traffic and what they do on your website. From then on, you can understand what attracts them, what works well and build your content strategy through it.
Google Search Console: connect it to your GA (Google Analytics) account, and see what pages are mostly visited or attract the most traffic.
Google Trends: a great tool to understand SEO trends such as topics you should work on.
So yes, an SEO strategy is necessary for your business. But if you want to learn more about it, you can download our SEO playbook. It contains more details and tips on the matter!
If you want to hire an SEO specialist, we will be happy to talk to you about it.
