Managing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is developing, directing, and modifying a company or agency’s search engine optimization strategy. The goal is to improve a website’s positioning in search engines to increase its visibility and organic traffic. From more qualified traffic to better digital marketing campaigns, the value of SEO is immense. Learn more about the importance of SEO and some important steps toward successful SEO management.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process used to optimize a website’s technical setup, content relevance, and link popularity so that its pages are easily findable, more relevant, and popular to users’ search queries and, consequently, ranked higher by search engines.
Search engines recommend SEO efforts that benefit the user search experience and page ranking by presenting content that meets the user’s search needs. It includes using relevant keywords in titles, meta descriptions, and headlines (H1s), presenting descriptive URLs with keywords instead of strings of numbers, and using schema markup to specify the meaning of page content, among other SEO best practices.
How do search engines work?
Search engines provide results for any query a user enters. To do this, they study and “understand” the vast network of websites that make up the web. They use a sophisticated algorithm to determine which results to display for each search query.
What is SEO Management?
SEO management, or Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is the process of optimizing a website to appear in the top search results of search engines. It is achieved through a series of techniques, strategies, and disciplines that are applied to the site’s technical configuration, content, and links.
Top 8 Steps toward successful SEO management
Let’s see how you can improve your SEO with the following keys:
#1. Set goals
The first step in developing a web positioning strategy is determining the objectives you want to achieve.
The objectives must be realistic and specific.
For example:
- Increase turnover by 20% in 6 months.
- Increase the number of form submissions by 30% in 1 year.
- Reach 2nd position for your business’s main keyword.
- Etc.
Once you have determined the goal to be achieved, you must specify the KPIs that allow you to monitor the achievement of the set objectives.
#2. Identify your Buyer Persona
Before you jump headfirst into the world of SEO, you need to know exactly who you’re targeting.
Conduct in-depth research on demographics, lifestyle, preferences, and wants and create a profile of your ideal customer.
It’s about designing a fictitious and generalized profile to draw the thread. The more information you gather about their personal and professional goals, qualities, concerns, and everything else that lets you know how to attract them, the better.
To identify your Buyer Persona, you can start by looking at your current client portfolio. Use your CRM, but also research, surveys, interviews, sociodemographic studies, and, why not, intuition, psychology, and imagination.
Believe me! It is vitally important for your SEO strategy to be a success.
#3. Find profitable and low-competition market niches.
Determining whether a niche is highly competitive or offers a wide profit margin can evaluate the complexity of your SEO strategy. It will also affect the budget needed to face the competition and position your website above it.
However, there is life beyond niches, and although competition and profitability are essential aspects of the success of a business, they are not factors that prevent entry into a market.
And that is the “magic” of SEO, in that it always offers an alternative to position terms in the top positions even if you compete with giants that beat you in budget and presence in the environment.
Focusing on positioning long-tail keywords or search terms with low traffic volumes that other companies don’t consider attacking but that hide more specific and segmented search intentions can help you reach a quality audience similar to your buyer persona. Interesting, right? Don’t miss out on other keys to competing in SEO with the big guys.
#4. Create a level of Keyword Research.
Based on your buyer persona analysis, you need to analyze what type of searches they perform and, therefore, what the best words are to position your website and make them find you.
In other words, you need to do good keyword research. With this selection of keywords for your positioning strategy, you will be able to structure the content of your website and blog to respond to user searches.
Countless tools will help you identify the best keywords for your business, such as Sistrix, Ahrefs, Semrush, and Google Keyword Planner, among many others.
If you’re wondering which keywords are essential for your SEO strategy, the answer is “it depends.” Don’t just be guided by search volume or competition; put the user at the center to find the answer.
Choose those keywords that help you understand the topic you want to discuss, organizing them by sections, categories, or services and in order of importance.
This logical order of terms also helps Google better recognise the content of your page and compare it with other publications to assign it a position in its ranking.
However, always keep in mind the user’s search intent when choosing keywords. We often choose keywords that attract the wrong users because we don’t see what they respond to beforehand.
It will be useless to propose an SEO strategy based on keywords in which we are in TOP 1 if the user immediately leaves the website because they cannot find what they are looking for.
#5. Analyze your competition in the SERPs.
Once you have a clear idea of how you want to enter the digital world, before we get into the purest aspects of SEO strategy, it is important to know the competition we have.
Put the global terms that you associate with your business into Google and see what results come up. Those are your competitors.
Once you detect them, analyze what type of content they make, how they structure their websites, if they follow the same pattern, and the keywords they attack … You will be able to see all this better if you have tools such as SEMrush, Sistrix, Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, among others, at your disposal.
This will allow you to find out which keywords other companies or brands in your sector are ranking for and getting traffic from. With this, you can get inspiration to design an even better positioning strategy, which includes higher quality and more optimized content and a better network of links to stand out in the eyes of Google (and, of course, the user).
#6. Strengthen your content
Writing original, useful, and valuable content is no easy task. But the rewards are worth it.
A basic but vital tip is to open your mind, be creative, and focus on your audience, which you should keep in mind just as much as Google’s algorithms.
And as we said, add value. Before focusing solely and exclusively on selling your product or service, think about how you can help your buyer persona meet their needs, solve their existential doubts, and ultimately, meet their expectations in your content.
So, you are now ready to create interesting content for your SEO management. Be careful! Also, think about your brand’s most appropriate tone and style and connect with the user.
Ideally, you should put in the work, give examples, give tips based on your experience, and stick to long lengths. For example, write at least 1,000 words for blog articles since many studies claim that more elaborate articles usually offer better results for SEO management.
#7. Information vs. transaction
You have to consider what is informational content and what is transactional content.
Service and product pages will have a more transactional objective, acting by the user: a purchase, a call, a contact…
The blog content will be more informational: answering users’ questions, sharing experiences… giving them information that they don’t know and that solves a specific problem but brings them closer to what you offer and a possible future transaction.
The content you work on always has to be of quality.
#8. Internal linking
Internal linking is one of the fundamental parts of SEO.
Proper interlinking allows for proper crawl ability and distributes authority between pages appropriately.
Therefore, establish the most important pages in your business and those you want to prioritize within your strategy.
For example, sales landing pages for a business vertical.
Improve your linking, prioritizing that they receive more links than those other URLs with less relevance.
And use different keywords when including the anchor text.
Conclusion
Take care of ALL the details that make Google fall in love with you .There is no doubt that the success of your SEO strategy depends on many small and important details that help you score points with Google. We have already given you some keys to improve your SEO.
