A 10-Step SEO Plan for Higher Search Rankings in 2019

Planning your SEO strategy will give you set milestones for success. Having an organized strategy will help you and your marketing team stay on track. It will also help you measure the rate of success/failure in a systematic fashion. Studies show that over 51% of the total website traffic on an average comes directly from organic search. These figures are proof that having a leak proof SEO strategy is critical for the growth of every online business.

Here is a concise 10-step actionable SEO plan that will help you get higher search rankings in 2019.

Step 1: Understanding the Base of SEO

Before diving deep into the technical nuances of SEO, you need to understand the reason why SEO is important. You also need to understand the different ways in which it will directly affect your business. Understanding the base of SEO may take you few hours to a few days.

Do not try and learn everything about SEO in the first step. Instead, consider the learning as a gradual process and scrape the surface of the subject.

Step 2: Understanding the Technical Nuances of SEO

Once you have understood the basics of SEO, you can start defining the different ways in which it will affect your business. At this point, you might want to hire professional help and get in touch with an SEO consultant to understand SEO in depth.

Step 3: Talk to Your Customers

Novice digital marketers often commit the mistake of designing a full-fledged SEO strategy before listening to their customers. They do not take the needs of their direct customers and prospects into account. Understanding the needs of your target audience is the first step towards the success of every digital marketing strategy. You can easily host campaigns and webinars to interact with your target audience. You might need to incentive the enrollment process if you don’t get a lot of prospects in the first few webinar sessions. Over 51% of internet consumers use mobile and tablet devices to access the internet.

Step 4: Perform Market Research

It is important that you talk to your customers before performing market research. This helps you get an unfiltered opinion. If you do perform market research before talking to the customers, you might end up with highly opinionated and one-directional vision. This is also the step where you gauge the needs of the market at a high-level and identify the market trends. Market trends suggest that the companies in the U.S. alone will spend over 72.02 Billion dollars on SEO.

Step 5: Perform Competitive Analysis

Identify your business proposal’s USP (Unique Selling Point) and perform competitive analysis to develop a SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat) analysis for the product/service.

Step 6: Curate a List of Topics

Now that you have a list of your USPs and the market trends in place, you can easily curate a list of topics for content that will suit the needs of your target audience. Creating a long list of topics for the content will ensure that you do not run out of ideas any time soon. 45% of companies consider content marketing as the key component of their SEO strategy.

Step 7: Develop Content Strategically

You cannot afford to ruin a trending topic for an article with bad content. Therefore, you should have a good content management system in place. This powered by a strong team of content developers can easily help you engaging content for the audience.

Step 8: Optimize Content for Search Engine and Get Listed

You don’t always need to develop fresh content for your website to get higher search rankings. Instead, you can optimize the existing content too. Revamping the existing content with more SEO-friendly pointers will help you bring down the overall cost and get a better ROI.

Step 9: Focus on Promotion

Developing great content is not enough. Instead, you need to lay enough emphasis on the promotion aspect too. A balanced focus on organic and inorganic SEO methods will help you get the best results in the long run. Leverage all the social media and blog channels that you have, to divert more traffic to the website organically.

Step 10: Focus on Backlink Generation

The most popular websites on the internet have backlinks from reliable sources. You need to garner the same amount of respect and reliability by acquiring more backlinks from these sources. Various websites like MOZ and SEMRush can help you get a list of all the backlinks that your strongest competitors have. Over 41% of large companies think that link building is the toughest SEO tactic.

Apart from these steps for SEO, you also need to invest time into good web development practices to keep the customer engaged for a longer period. You can learn the critical SEO skills on the internet by participating in online SEO courses. Some popular websites that can help you learn SEO at a technical level include Udemy, SEMRush, MOZ, etc.

Author: Robert Walk