It’s no secret that organic search plays a huge role in your business’ online presence and success. Do you know that Most people, about 75%, only check the first page of search results. So, if your website isn’t near the top, you might not get many visitors, potential customers, or money for your business.
Although organic search does not require direct monetary investment, the investment in key elements is critical for obtaining results.
Creating a successful SEO strategy requires a combination of resources: the right people, effective platforms, and expertise. In this digital age, in which online presence has become synonymous with success, it is necessary to understand the components that make up a successful SEO strategy.
So, if you are planning to establish a Search Engine Optimization team or to reevaluate your existing search campaigns to increase search-driven revenue, a well-stocked arsenal of resources will be essential.
This following guide outlines the resources necessary to build a solid SEO foundation. So let’s crack open the components of a powerful SEO strategy, to help you achieve visibility and generate revenue.
Essential Resources for Building a Great SEO Strategy
There are various resources that should be considered when developing a solid SEO strategy. Let’s break down the essentials:
Developing an effective SEO strategy requires a substantial amount of human resources. For some big companies, they have specialized SEO teams, while smaller businesses may integrate SEO responsibilities into marketing, web development, or product teams.
1. Expertise and People
One of the most critical components of your marketing strategy is having a dedicated person who oversees SEO. This SEO leader will coordinate the various activities necessary to boost your organic search performance.
In any case, whether you hire in-house SEO experts, enlist the services of a professional services team or consultant, or hire an SEO agency, having a champion on your team is crucial. In this manner, you can ensure that SEO efforts within your organization are given priority and that the planned strategies are successfully implemented.
An individual with SEO expertise can play a significant role in aligning the organization with SEO goals and facilitating the effective implementation of SEO strategies.
Now, let’s break down the specialized individuals needed for various SEO aspects:
1. SEO Project Lead
They’re the person in charge of making sure everything runs smoothly for your website to be easily found on the internet. They work with different teams like content creators, tech experts, and data analysts to improve your website’s performance in search engines.
Their job is to plan and oversee all the tasks needed to boost your website’s visibility and make sure everyone is working together to reach the same goal.
Their responsibilities include:
- Figuring out what needs to be done to boost the website’s visibility on search engines.
- Making sure everyone on the SEO team knows their role and is working together.
- Deciding what the SEO team should achieve and when.
- Fixing any issues that pop up along the way, like if the website isn’t ranking well.
- Keeping an eye on the latest trends and changes in how search engines work, so the team can adjust their strategy.
- Sharing updates with the higher-ups or the rest of the company on how the SEO efforts are going.
2. Technical SEO in-charge
A Technical SEO In-Charge is responsible for managing and overseeing the technical aspects of a website to ensure optimal performance in search engine results.
Their primary focus is on the technical foundation of the website, addressing factors that influence how search engines crawl, index, and rank web pages.
Here are the key responsibilities of a Technical SEO In-Charge:
- They make the site load fast, so visitors don’t have to wait.
- Ensuring the website looks good and works well on phones and tablets, not just on big screens.
- Helping search engines easily explore and understand the website by fixing any obstacles in their way.
- Setting up the website structure and links so that search engines can navigate smoothly.
- Identifying and fixing any technical errors that might confuse search engines, making the website error-free.
- Cleaning up the code of the website so that it’s neat and tidy.
- They always keep updated on the latest things search engines use to decide which sites to show.
3. Content Lead
An SEO Content Lead develops and executes content strategies to improve a website’s search engine visibility.
Here are some characteristics of content leads:
- Content leads play a key role by creating and updating website content with a focus on SEO.
- They ensure content is rich in keywords, adheres to SEO best practices, and can rank well in search engine results.
- Finally, they conduct research to identify content gaps and analyze the site for internal linking opportunities. This helps in spreading ranking equity to the most important pages of the website.
Also, the Content Lead works with different teams to make sure content meets both user needs and search engine algorithms, driving organic traffic and improving rankings.
Other Supporting Roles & Responsibilities
To create a strong plan for boosting your website’s visibility on search engines, you’ll need help from various teams:
- Website Development Team: Work closely with your website developers to make sure they implement the SEO strategies effectively on your site.
- Public Relations Team: Collaborate with your PR team to get more websites to link back to yours. Media coverage and relationships with influencers can help with this.
- C-Suite (CEO, CMO, etc.): Get support from your top leaders (like the CEO or CMO) to get the tools and resources necessary for managing your SEO efforts successfully.
2. Expertise in Different Types of SEO
To boost your online presence and attract more visitors, it’s crucial to grasp the three key types of SEO, which is a powerful tool in digital marketing.
With the right knowledge and skills, achieving a high Google page ranking becomes easier. This knowledge, combined with expertise mentioned above, allows you to pinpoint your target audience and effectively implement optimization strategies, ensuring success in search results.
So, basically there are three different types of SEO:
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
- Technical SEO
Let’s take a closer look at these and explain how learning these SEO types can benefit your company.
1. On-page SEO
On-page SEO, also known as on-site SEO, is the process of optimizing web pages and their content for both search engines and users. It can help pages rank higher on Google and drive more organic traffic.
Some tasks associated with on-page SEO include:
- Optimizing for search intent
- Title tags
- Internal links
- URLs
- Headings
- Content comprehensiveness
- E-A-T signals
- Content usefulness
- Image alt text
- Schema markup.
Having effective on-page SEO drives targeted organic traffic by improving user experience and visibility in search engine results.
2. Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that involves actions taken outside of a website to improve its search engine rankings. The goal of off-page SEO is to make search engines and users see a site as more trustworthy and authoritative.
A few key elements include building backlinks from reputable sites, using social media, and managing your online reputation. The strategy aims to establish credibility, trust, and relevance in the eyes of search engines by showcasing a website’s popularity and influence across the broader web.
Off-page SEO enhances a site’s online presence by engaging in activities such as guest blogging and influencer outreach, which ultimately increases its visibility and ranking in search engine results.
3. Technical SEO
Technical SEO involves optimizing the technical infrastructure of a website to enhance its search engine performance. It includes activities such as improving site speed, ensuring mobile responsiveness, fixing crawl errors, creating XML sitemaps, implementing structured data markup (schema markup), and optimizing website architecture.
Technical SEO aims to make a site more accessible and understandable to search engines, ensuring efficient crawling, indexing, and overall site health. It’s important to address these technical aspects on a website so that it can enhance its visibility in search results and provide a better user experience.
To optimize your SEO strategy effectively, it’s crucial to focus on all three sub-categories within SEO to attain optimal results in organic search.
3. SEO Platforms & Tools
After you’ve gathered your team, it’s important to give them the right tools to do their jobs effectively. Building a strong SEOstrategy requires the right tools and platforms to help you analyze, optimize, and track your website’s performance.
Nowadays, there are lots of SEO tools available that can assist your team in carrying out their different tasks. Here are some essential SEO platforms and tools you may need:
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool within the Google Marketing Platform. It offers essential statistics and analytical features for optimizing websites and marketing efforts.
Accessible with a Google account, it tracks website and app performance, providing insights into user interactions and marketing campaign effectiveness.
The data collected by Google Analytics helps improve user experience, increase traffic, and increase sales and revenue through informed decisions about pageviews, visit details, and user properties.
2. Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool that helps website owners monitor and improve their site’s presence in Google Search results. It can also help users measure their site’s traffic, see keyword performance, fix issues, and receive messages from Google about their website.
GSC can help users:
- Monitor and maintain: View referring domains, mobile site performance, rich search results, and highest-traffic queries and pages
- Troubleshoot: Confirm that their website is ranking and that Google can access their website
- Optimize: Optimize their site’s organic presence
- Improve: Improve their site and get more traffic from Google
- Fine-tune: Fine-tune their SEO strategy and grow their blog traffic
GSC reports on a variety of metrics, from search appearance to user experience. It can help users understand how they are performing on Google Search, and what they can do to improve their appearance on search.
3. SEMrush
SEMrush is a versatile SEO tool that facilitates in-depth website analysis. It is one of the most popular tools. As of August 21, 2023, SEMrush has 471,000 active users, including 67,000 who pay for its services.
It offers features like comprehensive keyword research, competitor assessment, backlink tracking, and site auditing. It helps marketers find valuable insights into their online presence, enabling them to make informed decisions to boost search engine rankings.
You can use this tool to optimize your content strategy, identify high-performing keywords, and stay on top of the competition.
4. Yoast SEO
In WordPress, Yoast SEO is an important plugin that simplifies the process of on-page SEO. It optimizes content by suggesting improvements to titles, meta descriptions, and content structure.
Yoast acts like a virtual SEO assistant, guiding users to create search engine-friendly content by providing real-time feedback. It also helps with readability, ensuring that your content is not only optimized for search engines but is also user-friendly.
This plugin is a must-have for WordPress users, offering a user-friendly interface for enhancing their website’s visibility and performance in search engine results.
For those starting out or running smaller businesses, Google provides helpful free tools like Google Trends, Google Lighthouse, and Google Data Studio. These can be a good starting point. However, for larger companies, especially those at an enterprise level or running extensive websites like news media or eCommerce sites with numerous URLs, SaaS SEO solutions become crucial. These tools help implement SEO strategies on a larger scale.
When choosing tools, factors like website size, industry, and specific goals matter. The good news is that we’re in an era with plenty of excellent options for SEO platforms. By using top-notch SEO technology, businesses can achieve greater efficiency, gather better data, and gain the insights needed to stay competitive in organic search.
4. Patience
SEO is a continuous and long-term process that requires consistent effort and adaptation. Given the dynamic nature of the internet, staying abreast of changes is crucial for customizing your website and SEO strategies.
Success in SEO is contingent on sustained and well-executed practices. It’s not a quick-fix marketing strategy, and short-term attempts may not yield visible results due to the time it takes to see even minimal impacts.
Search engines like Google are always working in the background, looking at websites to find new information and update their algorithms to give users better results. The internet is huge, so it takes time for search engines to notice changes on your website and show the results in search rankings. It might take a month or even longer to see the impact of your improvements. SEO and keeping your website healthy are things you do over time.
As you make your website better with optimized content and follow SEO best practices, your site gets stronger in the eyes of search engines. This helps your brand get noticed and can keep bringing in customers for a long time.