Building an effective SEO strategy into a website

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The first step in any successful SEO plan is to analyse the current state of your website and understand if it promotes a good user experience. If your website doesn’t do what it says on the tin, potential customers will go elsewhere. Being honest with yourself at this stage is crucial to the success of your SEO strategy.

Here are some questions to ask yourself before beginning the SEO process:

• Is your page speed affecting your conversion rates?

One single factor such as page speed can make a huge difference when it comes to conversions . Your bounce rate can actually double, meaning you could be losing an enormous amount of visitors, right from the start. Slow loading time doesn’t only affect your incoming visitors, it also potentially deters future visitors from shopping on your website.

• How would you describe your site?

After you’ve spent time analysing your website and creating your own keyword bucket based on what you’ve read, describe your website. Just because you may understand your content and technical jargon, doesn’t necessarily mean that others will. This will help give you a focus and highlight what needs to change.

• Why would someone choose yours over a competitor?

A very important question to ask yourself. What makes your product/services unique? These are keyword conversion type of questions. Answering them correctly will ultimately dictate if you come up in searches compared to your competitors.

• How search friendly is your website?

After all the trouble you go to making your website work well on the iPhone and iPad, don’t forget to make it search engine friendly as well. Search engines score sites based on the words and images on web pages and on how well their content matches the keywords that are searched.

If you want to go a step further and evaluate what terms and phrases search engines can see on a website, you can try SEOMoz’s tool Term Extractor. It shows words according to their frequency on the site.

• What are your most important keywords?

This question will help you back away from the mistaken belief that you have to rank for thousands of keywords. Don’t waste your time as there are generally only ten really important keywords.

After you do a general evaluation of your content on your blog, another meaningful way to see where you stand SEO-wise is to find out how you measure up to your competitors.

So, why is keeping tabs on your competitors important? Well, for one thing, it’s kind of like getting a free SEO insight. Your competitors, especially if they are big brands, will probably have spent tens of thousands of pounds to achieve their rankings. You can then see what works and what doesn’t work without having to spend all the money.

Keywords are vitally important for your ranking on Google and there’s a few steps you can take to make sure you nail those killer ones!

If Google offered you 1,000,000 visitors each month or 1,000 which one would you take? Your gut is probably telling you to go with 1,000,000, but the reality is you don’t have enough information to make an educated decision.

The keyword game isn’t just about traffic. It is also about quality. You have to look at conversion rates to make an educated decision. This means you have to look at larger goals and breakthrough keyword volume.

When you research for keywords on your own site, it’s a lot easier to do because you know the content inside out. Check the estimated search volumes and make sure they match what you expect. Using resources like Google’s Keyword Planner or SEMrush will give you an idea of the amount of competition for certain keywords, as well as how many users search for those keywords. You might see that instead of something like “flowers in Worcester,” a phrase like “Florists in Worcester” might have a better chance of ranking high.

Now that you have compiled a list of important keywords and phrases that your audience use to search on Google, you should naturally incorporate them into your content.

When a site has great content, it draws in lots of organic traffic.

Blog pages are more engaging and are more likely to attract leads than product pages, so they can really help increase authority for your site. Product pages however, can serve as both SEO content and a pay-per click landing page. 

If your content is informative and well written, it is more likely that Google will rank your website higher, allowing you to pull in a steady audience of loyal, consistent visitors.

Google web crawlers are looking at a lot more than just the content on your site, so you must ensure that you use a well-rounded approach when optimising individual pages.


Widely considered the best SEO resource, Google’s Search Quality Rater’s Guidelines is an in-depth guide that will help you optimise the ‘behind the scenes’ aspects of your website.

Optimising your website also involves squeezing keywords into what’s going on behind the page. That means you need to use keywords in your:

• Title tags
• Header pages
• Image alt text
• Meta descriptions

Backlinking is as important as on-page optimisation is to any SEO strategy.

The process involves having other websites linking back to your website, which shows Google that your website has authority and gives you a boost in their search rankings. Huge websites like BBC News, Sky News, government agencies, and big e-commerce businesses tend to get a massive number of organic backlinks, giving them an edge over smaller websites.

Boosting your website’s profile with backlinks doesn’t happen overnight. It’s all about building a relationship with the other players in your industry, which means you need to have quality content and a good reputation in your community.

Here are some backlink strategies that you could implement:

• Become a guest blogger for larger sites

Building guest blogging connections and getting your content published on other websites will not only help drive traffic back to your website, but also build your site authority.

For this backlink strategy, the benefit is ultimately gaining a long-term relationship with a more established and authoritative website and brand.

• Engaging with social media influencers related to your industry

Backlinks from influencers are extremely powerful because their websites tend to be high in authority and can give you a ton of traffic.

• Provide a testimonial

Many businesses offer you the chance to outline your experience using their products/services. This is a great opportunity for you to get a backlink and potential traffic from that site and it usually has a much higher approval rate than your standard link request e-mails.

• Get listed on directories

Traditionally an older method for backlinks, but it is still as important to show up in directories. These are usually high-ranking and highly trafficked, so take advantage of them, but remember, find those best-suited for your industry, rather than blanketing to hundreds of sites just for the backlinks.

When it comes to building and implementing your SEO strategy, it’s important to remember that one size doesn’t fit all. Your plan will be tailored to you, your business needs, your target market and your resources. Your dedication to a strategy will determine the level of success you have with a SEO campaign.

The process can be time-consuming, but if you don’t start off with a proper plan, you’ll just end up flushing your money down the toilet.

And as always, a successful SEO campaign requires perpetual maintenance, so be sure to keep up with trends as they unfold.