How to Create a Powerful SEO Strategy in 2020

Did you know that businesses spend more than $65 billion every year on SEO? An effective SEO strategy allows enterprises to build fast, robust, and user-friendly websites that rank well on search engines.

Consequently, businesses reap benefits such as increasing brand awareness, generating leads, improving conversions, enhancing user experience, and developing brand credibility. Nevertheless, many companies struggle to create and implement an effective SEO strategy. This article offers a guide on how to create a powerful SEO strategy in 2020.

Creating a Powerful SEO Strategy

When creating an SEO strategy, you should focus on three aspects.

On-page SEO: it focuses on the content on your page and how to optimize it to rank higher in search engines.
Off-page SEO: it implies links directed to your website from the internet. The number of backlinks and their publishers helps you build credibility with search engines and hence rank higher.
Technical SEO: it refers to the architecture of a website.

Below are seven steps on how to create a powerful SEO strategy in 2020.

1. Satisfy User Search Intent

Although Google has more than 200 ranking factors, the most important one is being helpful to users. In SEO terms, it refers to meeting user search intent. You can satisfy user intent in several ways. First, determine what you are offering your audience. Are you selling products, entertaining people, or disseminating news and research?

Second, identify your target audience –what kind of people do you want your site to attract? Having answered the ‘why’ and ‘who,’ you can proceed to the ‘how’.

2. Choose Keywords That Will Lead Users to Your Content

Identify the phrases that users type on search engines when looking for your products or services. When choosing keywords, consider the following.

i) Use keywords that reflect what you offer. Avoid short and vague keywords because they have high competition and risk attracting the wrong audience. For instance, rather than using keywords like ‘buy boots,’ use ‘buy winter boots for women.’

ii) Go for keywords with a high search volume. You can utilize SEO tools such as Google’s Keyword Tool to determine the search volumes of keywords.

iii) Use long-tail keywords. Research shows that long-tail keywords have a 3-5% click-through rate than generic keywords. The most desirable thing about long-tail keywords is they have low competition and hence increase your chances of ranking for the keywords. For example, although SEO is a popular acronym, it is difficult to rank well on Google. Therefore, you have to create content related to SEO to rank well. You can develop content on conducting keyword research, optimizing images for SEO, and creating an SEO strategy (like this article), or any other subtopic within SEO.

3. Invest in High-Quality Content

Delight your audience with high-quality content on your website. You can do this by addressing the pain points of your audience, giving feasible solutions, making the content visually appealing, and offering in-depth content.

Quality content not only helps you rank for keywords but also engages your audience. With every blog post you create, you get an opportunity to rank in search engines. Remember that you are not creating content for search engines but your audience. Therefore, write about topics that interest your audience and include relevant keywords. The bottom line is to deliver value to your audience so that they notice you.

4. Develop a Link-Building Plan

If you want to create a powerful SEO strategy in 2020, you need backlinks. Research shows a positive correlation between links and first page Google rankings. As mentioned earlier, link-building is essential for off-page SEO. It refers to the process of attracting backlinks to your site from other sites on the internet.

To develop a link-building plan, start by devising ways you can attract backlinks to your site. If you are just starting out, you can have other local businesses link to your website while you link to theirs. Also, look for guest blogging opportunities. This way, you link back to your website. You can also get backlinks by blogging about current events and news. That way, you increase the chances of other bloggers and industry influencers linking to your articles.

5. Compress Media Before Uploading on Your Website

It is a vital step in developing a great SEO strategy. Google loves visual content, such as video, images, and infographics. While these visual assets have SEO value and are fundamental in attracting and retaining visitors’ attention, they can compromise the user experience.

When a video has a big file size, it makes it hard for the internet browser to retrieve your website. This slows your page speed –remember that page speed is among the crucial ranking factors for search engines. A smaller file size means that your page loads faster, and subsequently ranks higher on Google.

Before you upload any media on your site, check the file size first. Anything above 1 MB is too big and requires compression. It is best practice to keep your files in kilobytes (KB) to safeguard your site speed. There are many image compression tools online to shrink your file sizes to microscopic levels without compromising the quality.

6. Conduct a Technical Audit

Numerous issues can hurt the user experience on your website. They include broken links, server errors, missing meta tags, crawling problems, and page access issues. It is best practice to conduct a technical audit on your site to ensure that it is working optimally.

7. Measure Success

SEO can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. After spending time and effort refining your SEO strategy, it is advisable to track and measure your progress. You can use metrics such as organic traffic and page ranking to determine the performance of your SEO efforts. How much traffic is your website getting from organic search? How are your pages ranking for the keywords you are targeting?

Bottom Line

SEO is more crucial than ever before, as people spend more time online. Planning and implementing an SEO strategy is an excellent way to generate leads and sales while building online credibility.

With changes taking place every day on Google and other search engines, you should update your SEO strategy to accommodate changes.