6 Effective SEO strategies and the way to do it

To have an effective SEO strategy for each website is something that any SEO manager is very interested in. After a long time learning and researching, Bizzvn saw a very methodical and good SEO strategy from SEO expert Kaiserthesage. Let’s take a look at this strategy to have successful SEO campaigns in 2020.

The SEO strategy is only effective when all the work is done to significantly improve the overall quality of the website or the website’s brand presence.

SEO strategies come in different forms, because the focus of each approach will always vary depending on the area of ​​the site / industry. But basically, the strategies can be classified into the following:

• Content-focused (Content-driven – navigating with high-quality Content)
• Technical Focus (UX, Load fastest, Navigation, Clean and Clear presentation)
• Brand-centric brand

But why invest in these strategies when there are so many online channels that you have access to digital marketing?

First, Search Engine Optimization is one of the most powerful marketing channels for businesses because of the specific targeting of people who are in need of products, services or information (via search).

Second, based on the following persuasive statistics:

• 6,586,013,574 searches per day (InternetLiveStats)
• 4,5 billion searches in Google every day
• 91.4% of searches occur in Google products (Google Search, Maps, Images & YouTube) – according to JumpShot
• 94.95% of searchers click on natural search results – SimilarWeb
• Although recent studies show a drastic change in organic CTR in 2017 (compared to 2015): -25% of desktop clicks and -55% on mobile devices.
• TOP 1 (position # 1) CTR for non-brand search is 35% -Smart Insights
• Google accounts for 62.6% of visitors introduced on the web – Jumpshot
• The SEO industry is estimated to be worth $ 72 billion by 2018 – Search Engine Land

In the end, a lot of people, businesses and organizations have really benefited from it over the past two decades. Whether it is through revenue generation or enhanced brand awareness.

SEO, as an industry, is huge! Like other types of marketing, it is also facing more difficulties.

Most successful SEO campaigns in the world fit most of the key aspects Google offers for optimization – based on Webmaster Guidelines and Google’s Search Quality Assessment Guidelines:

• Architecture: Help Google easily find, crawl, index and understand the important pages of your website.
• Content: Establishing Expertise, Authority and Reliability (EAT – Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness).
• Links: Building a positive reputation for your website.

1. How to develop effective SEO strategies:

Most seasoned SEO consultants often start a campaign with thorough website auditing.

And there is a good reason for that, because website auditing techniques allow us to really understand what is needed to make the website reach its intended goal.

But what to do in an SEO audit includes:

• Keyword analysis and search results page (SERP)
• Research and analyze competitors
• Technical analysis and the entire page
• Analysis of page level and separate content (Page and Content)
• User Experience Analysis (UX)
• Link analysis

In a nutshell, auditing a website can help you find answers to the following key areas of strategic development:

2. Understand the field and target market

Understand Website, Business Areas, GOAL MARKET, CURRENT SITUATION AND REAL NEEDS.

The first step for any successful SEO campaign is to understand everything about your client’s website. This phase sets the goals of your campaign, through identifying:

• Website Area (and Size) – is it e-commerce, publishing, community, business or small business?
• Nature of business – What is the business or type of business? Is it highly competitive? Who is the leading competitor? How long has this industry / business existed? Will it be needed in the next 10 years?
• Target market – which demographic group? Do they target local, national or global audiences?
• Current situation- How long has it been in operation? How is its sales / revenue? What are top competitors doing right (and wrong)? Has the site been affected by an algorithmic penalty?
• Actual Needs – Restore a punishment? Grow organic search traffic? Improve Sales? Or just to build brand awareness?

3. Determining Issues And Challenges

It will be easy to identify these issues as soon as your initial audit is completed.

• Site issues – most of you will explore through audits using checklists. Here are some SEO Checklist checking techniques that you can get started (depending on your client’s profile / needs):

o SEO Techniques – Distilled, Webris, Annie Cushing

o Local SEO – LocalSEOChecklist, Moz, Research on Moz’s local ranking factors

o E-commerce SEO – Backlinko, BigCommerce

o International SEO – Aleyda Solis, Martin Kura

o Mobile SEO – Bruce Clay, Moz

o Auditing association – Distilled, BuiltVisible

o Penalty Diagnosis – Google Algorithm Change History

• Budget – is the budget allocated sufficiently to build or implement a competitive SEO campaign? How many hours (per month) will the team need to be able to perform all the necessary tasks?
• Competitiveness – From 1 to 10, how difficult is it to rank for the top target keywords? Do they compete directly with big brands? Did the top competitors invest heavily in SEO and link building? What do the competitors do? Can we overcome the opponent?

4. Find Opportunities

Once you consider the issues, challenges, and resources that are definitely up to you, you will easily find and identify opportunities that can be performed through these processes:

Keyword research – which set of search queries do a website have a chance to rank better in a short time? Which keywords are you not a good competitor for? Useful guides on keyword research:

• Backlinko
• Ahrefs

Smart competition – What are the categories your competitors are not focused on? What are the topics they excel in creating content around? Can you do it better? Which websites or publications are linking to most of your competitors? Which sites or publishers that you have not built a relationship with yet? Useful guides on competitor analysis:

• Moz
• GotchSEO

Content gap – perform an audit of the main content of the website, what basic content / platform do they lack? The type of content does not exist or the relevant subject area is not covered? What topics or content is missing from competitors? Can you beat your competitors’ informative content? Useful guides for analyzing content gaps:

• Moz
• ScreamingFrog

5. SEO Solutions

Generally, SEO and traffic related issues are usually easily solved by combining the following results from audits and reviews:

• Actions we should take to address what the site really needs.
• Fix major website issues.
• Know the opportunities we can leverage to build motivation.

Make sure you spend a lot of priority on items that will achieve both quick victory and long-term success of the campaign. Putting all of these insights together will allow you to design and develop to drive SEO strategy results.

6. Define Your Strategic Goals

Each task and action in your strategy must be consistent with the business goals of the customer (business owner, website owner).

Ensure that all of your weekly goals will positively impact the long-term goals of the campaign (build to create small wins to get big wins).

• Earn more money (or build awareness) through strong search visibility.
• Improve organic traffic by significantly improving the quality and overall experience of the site.
• Significantly improve the overall quality of the site through optimization of architecture, content and reputation (links).
• Carry out all the important tasks to effectively optimize the site’s architecture, content and reputation.

With the right mindset, approach, and strategy, whatever the goal, they should be feasible and achievable.

7. Sample SEO Strategy

Here are the strategies we have focused on implementing for some of our clients over the past few years.

Although, we strive to continually improve each SEO approach, provided that you need to truly adapt in this business.

1. 10X CONTENT CAMPAIGN

It basically provides Content and better experience than 10 top ranking results in SERP for a given topic.

The core of this strategy is to create content around keywords that are really important to your business and that are:

• Really helpful and / or educational
• Regular content delivery (Evergreen)
• Better than the top 10 currently ranked results (first 10 results in the SERP)
• Opportunity to attract and earn high links (attach and earn links)
• And you can confidently promote on a large scale through outreach (or paid social campaigns).

ACTIVITIES TO DO:

• Define keyword information: medium to high search volume you can build content around.
• Check if the topic is really linkable (validate your content idea by checking the number of links of the top-ranking pages for this topic).
• Review the leading competitor approach to content development.
• 10x better Content / topic creation.
• Reach out to people who have shared and linked with competitor’s content.
• Promote your content through outreach (through guest blogging, broken link building, source link building, social media or PR public relations).

2. COLLECTION OF BUDGET PRIORITY INFORMATION

Each site has a designated crawl budget from Google, mostly based on popularity / authority and size of the website.

Optimizing your website crawl budget is usually based on how you prioritize the pages that Googlebot crawls and indexes.

The best way to start this process to optimize your website is to reorganize your website structure. And to ensure that the main pages of your website are easily accessible to search engine users and spiders.

1. Compare the number of pages indexed with the number of pages from the sitemap to the average number of pages crawled by Google on the website daily.

This will help you understand whether your page has crawling / indexing issues.

2. Build more internal links for the pages that you want to be crawled regularly (so these pages also have a better chance of ranking).
3. Make sure that the website has a well-organized and thematic information architecture (refer to the article Building a good website structure for SEO and Content Hub Content).
4. Build overall website link mechanism to improve crawl rate (higher PageRank = higher crawl frequency) – through building more reliable links for deeper pages.
5. Prevent crawlers from accessing / indexing low value URLs and poor content pages on your site. According to Google, these pages may fall into the following categories:

• Pages that navigate or identify sessions
• Pages with duplicate content
• Error pages
• Hacking pages
• Poor quality content, outdated content and spam content

Here are some ways to stop transferring link value and ranking for these pages:

• Use the rel = “noindex” directive
• Block access to directories / pages by disallowing the crawler in Robots.txt
• Eliminate low quality pages and spam content (404)
• Use rel = “canonical” tag
• Redirect 301 corrupted or outdated pages to related pages.

6. Improve website speed (because it can also increase the site’s crawl rate).

– Low page load time may lead to increased page crawl rate

ACTIVITIES TO DO:

• Compare # page numbers in sitemap with indexed pages.
• Compare the number of pages collected versus the number of pages indexed
• Make the site easier to navigate. Make sure all the main pages of the website have at least 2-3 places to click from the homepage.
• Build internal links for the pages you want to rank. (note: diverse anchor text)
• Build high quality links to pass many link / ranking values ​​to the website.
• Block crawlers from accessing and indexing duplicate pages and poor-quality content (using “noindex” or through Robots.txt).
• Improve web page loading speed.

3. OPTIMIZE THE CONTENT

The content level optimization process usually begins by creating an inventory of the website’s pages / assets that can have a strong impact on branding, traffic, affiliate earnings and conversions. when improved.

These pages may be:

• Sites that are low performing (in terms of organic traffic and good engagement rates) but target medium to high search keywords.
• Content that covers key subject areas for business but is outdated.
• Sites that are powerful and informative, but cannot attract or earn high value links.

In updating / refining old content and turning them into valuable assets, here are some areas we need to focus on:

1. Upgrade the whole content – the main purpose is to create a more logical sequence for its structure.

And try to answer as many questions as possible, related to the topic, content structure using Heading 1-6, presenting compelling content that is easy to scan, clean and clear. See the presentation of content in the slide https://seothetop.com/download/Huong-dan-Viet-bai-chuan-SEO-2017.pdf

2. Optimize title tags for better CTR in SERP.
3. Build relevant internal links (contextual)
4. Optimize content for TF-IDF (https://imfromthefuture.com/tfidf/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf-idf). You can use tools like the Cognitive SEO Keyword Tool to create content suggestions.
5. Improve targeting for secondary keywords. Review and analyze keyword data of each content from the Google Search Console to find out which sub keywords are driving higher quality traffic to these pages.

The idea is to perform optimization processes on multiple pages as needed, to significantly improve search engine visibility for your site.

ACTIVITIES TO DO:

• Update / upgrade old web content in terms of depth, quality, readability and experience.
• Optimize title tags of content for better CTR in SERP.
• Building new internal links
• Content optimization for TF-IDF
• Target multiple secondary keywords through meta data and Content.

Other actions recommended:

• Deploy Schema / Structured data on your main pages
• Improve site speed
• Provides more content and multimedia formats (for example, visual content, videos, infographics, etc.)
• Optimizing content layout for mobile users.

You can also check out the full guide to content optimization.

4. OPTIMIZING SNIPPET

Featured snippets in search (or Rank # 0) basically display direct answers to specific queries or details and are placed prominently on search results.

The code snippet usually shows a summary of answers in paragraphs, lists, or tables (extracted from one of the top-ranking pages for the target search term).

Things to do:

1. Make a list of search queries that you have ranked between # 1 to # 20.

Note: Google mostly retrieves prominent snippet results from the top 10 ranking pages for search queries. And the results from the featured snippets are often those that are served to users using voice search (basically this strategy is one of the best methods to optimize search by voice).

You can use tools like Ahrefs (via the Organic Keywords feature).

2. Identify queries that display featured snippets – as well as pages from your site ranking for those terms.
3. Reconfigure content to compete for featured snippets results:

• Optimize your content for better interaction (improve readability, page load speed, user experience, etc.).
• Provide questions that can be excerpted and correct for the target query. Make this section clearly visible to users (Google will easily extract).
• Write a copy that is better than what is currently ranked for outstanding snippet results
• Build more links to your content (use partially appropriate anchor text).

5. EASY WINNING WITH LONGER KEYWORDS

Motivating your campaign is important, especially when you’re working on a website in a highly competitive industry.

One of the best ways to do that is through targeting low-level opportunities to get a quick win – and eventually build on that (momentum-building step).

The core of this strategy is basically creating or optimizing existing content that covers topics with less competition.

And the whole process will rely heavily on keyword research, SERP analysis, and your opportunity discovery phase. Here is a brief overview of the process:

1. Keyword research:

Find low-competitive keywords in your space using Keyword Planner, Search Console data and Google Search Hints.

2. Search Results Page Analysis – SERP:

Confirm if it is possible to rank for a topic / keyword by analyzing the top-ranking pages for the target search term.

If more than half of the competing pages (in the top 10) come from relatively weak domains, you will have a better chance of ranking for your keywords.

3. Discover opportunities:

Prioritize those that you can easily copy and edit. Then find more about them.

Build on small wins to create a steady momentum in growing organic search traffic (through long-term keyword searches).

These small steps will eventually help you rank for more competitive search terms as you progress (Google will gradually see you as a topic authority).

ACTIVITIES TO DO:

• Find 10-20 long tail keywords that you can easily rank and compete.
• Build content to specifically target those topics.
• Build strategic links with each newly created content.
• Internal links to upstairs pages for which you want to rank higher.

6. BRAND, PRESTIGE AND BUILDING LINKS UNDER RELATIONSHIPS

Google is gradually understanding the entities and relationships.

And link development is a very small part of how Google understands and responds to queries, emotions and reputation with websites and brands (links are one of the three most important ranking factors that Google confirms).

With all the graph-related link algorithm updates Google has rolled out over the last decade, Google is definitely getting smarter at link evaluation.

Right now, it’s only capable of counting links from high quality sources (including links based on content and relationships) – and ignoring spam links and low-quality links.

That begs the question, what is the best way to approach link building today?

The answer is quite simple. Every time you try to get a link, you have to ask yourself the question:

Will this link help our business if Google doesn’t exist?

Because in the first place, having the right mindset is always the best way to approach link building. This way, you will always be able to invest your time and effort into that prospect:

• Related
• Branded and authoritative
• Has high / significant traffic