Building a strong SEO for your website in many ways strengthens the chances of your website succeeding. In the times that we are living in, you cannot do away with SEO. It in many ways runs parallel to the core of your website.

Reforming an SEO strategy for your existing website can be quite different than creating a strategy for a new website. But how do you create one from scratch in the first place?

Well, in this guide we will be walking through the steps to create an SEO strategy for your business from scratch. This is not about SEO tips and tricks you could use but about building a strategy from bottoms up. In case you wish to learn powerful SEO tips, you can read this article.

Preliminary Steps

Before actually going to the crux, we need to follow a few preparatory steps which will help us make the most of our actual SEO work. The first thing that we’ll do is to make our new website crawlable. Google search engine crawls and indexes websites through their HTML text format. However, the engine can’t read pictures, audio, and video content.

Why many websites weaken their SEO is just because Google cannot read through their media and it drops their ranking tremendously. However, it doesn’t take much to make your website crawlable. Do these 3 things that’ll make your entire website crawlable:

• First, add alt text to all the images on your website. Alt text or alternative text basically is a brief description of what the image is about. It lets the engine read an image virtually through the text you provide.
• Similarly, for audio files and video files, provide a transcript. The same principle of letting the engine read the work virtually works here.
• Instead of text being a part of an image, you can also let CSS styles on the image replacing the text.

Once you are done with these steps, there are some wonderful tools that let you know where your website stands in terms of searchability. Either you can use Google Cache or Mozbar to see the elements that are readable by your website. Mozbar offers a 30-day free trial, which is a wonderful thing for people starting a website.

Learn from the competition!

We will be beginning our research and implementation part soon. However, there is one more additional step that might give you clarity and an extra edge when you go into it. Research a little bit about your competitor’s SEO strategy. See where their website stands and which metric they are using in their SEO strategy.

For one, it gives you an idea of what’s working in your specific niche, and second, you can learn from their mistakes and leverage from their strengths.

You need to understand that outranking the competitor that is located on search results right on top of you requires you to study every aspect of their digital marketing. This means looking at the number of links that your competitor has and building more than them for effective outranking. For example, plastic surgery marketing for a brand requires the business to work with an agency that can help them with creating great content, engage with high-quality link building and carry out on-page technical optimizations.

Creating Audience profiles

This is one of the most important aspects of your research. It is important to have a crystal clear idea of who your audience is. Why does it matter? Only if you know who exactly your audience is, what they search for, where do they spend their time, and what exactly are their pain points, you would be able to come up with a successful keyword plan. Otherwise, you’ll be shooting in the dark.

This is what we call profiling. Here you segment your audience based on different parameters and for each segment you make, you get a homogenous group of individuals. However, from these groups, you need to make a more specific profile and identify which profiles are your core audience.

How can you do segmentation and profiling? Well, look for the following parameters.

• Demographic details
• Communication patterns
• Social media usage patterns
• Interests (Likes/Dislikes)
• Socio-economic parameters

What you did was to collect user data and put basic analytics to it to create different personas. This gives you an idea of what they want and what kind of phrases appeal to them.

Keyword Research

Through keywords, you let the users navigate their way through the web and come straight to you. To simply, good keyword research means that you use keywords with a high search volume but low search density. This means that a keyword which most people look for but is not much used by bloggers and website owners.

I suggest that Google Keyword Planner is one of the best tools out there to look for keywords. SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Uber Suggest are some of my other recommendations.

There are two kinds of keywords you would want to focus on initially:

• Short-tail keywords
• Long-tail Keywords

Short tail keywords are merely two-three words like ‘make a website’.  However, Long-tail keywords are longer phrases that people use like, ‘make a website that’s SEO friendly. Your SEO strategy should be a combination of both. Select appropriate words and phrases from the keyword planners we mentioned above based on their search volume and competition.

Using keywords On Your Website

A common mistake people do is to overuse the keywords on their website. Keyword stuffing on the contrary can drag your rankings down. It is best to use your keywords as naturally as possible on your website. If you make it look too promotional or out of place then it’s not a good thing.

It is best to use keywords on headings, subheadings, page descriptions, URLs, meta descriptions, and the body of your pages. Try to keep the keyword density from 0.5% to 2% which means if out of 1000 words your keyword can appear only 20 times.

Backlinks and SEO-Friendly Web Hosting

By now, you are done with the basic principles of creating an SEO strategy. However, if you are creating a new website, you must make sure that you have an SEO-friendly web host. Various hosting providers offer tools for SEO like link building, keyword research, etc. A good web host is also important because if you choose a host which has a clumsy service and bad service, Google will naturally pull your rankings down.

Brainstorm how you are going to create backlinks to your website. Backlinks are essential links to your website posted on other websites. Posting on social media can be a good way since it gives you eyeballs and chances that someone posts your link to their site. You can also look for partnering and collaborating for content to create backlinks.

Conclusion

SEO though integral is not too complex. With basic guidance, you can begin SEO for your website. Creating an SEO strategy involves a preliminary step and deep research before you could put it to use. Give yourself time to research enough and also make sure to add other methods like backlinking, social media engagement, and high-quality hosting service to boost your SEO.

Author’s Bio:

Kiera Hayes is a passionate Blogger and Marketer. She enjoys reading and writing articles whenever she gets time from her work.