The title above is misleading, because there is no generic SEO strategy that works for every website. Each one will have its own challenges based on business objectives, target audience and competition.
To help produce an ad hoc strategy for every site, we have produced this guide by imagining the following scenarios: a blog, a small business, ecommerce and even the site of an SEO expert. If you don’t recognize yourself in this list and would like us to discuss SEO strategies adapted to your type of website in the future, let us know by contacting us.
The full guide may be useful for an agency or SEO who will have to deal with lots of scenarios. If you own and manage your own site, you may be tempted to jump to the chapter dealing directly with your type of site. Don’t do this just yet though! Keep reading this chapter as we go through some common elements of SEO strategy everyone needs to read.
Understanding the goals of a website
If you are a web developer, building a site for a client, you may automatically ask your clients the following questions. It seems a very good place to start. If you are the website owner, take some time to think about the answers.
- What are the business objectives of the site?
- Who is the target audience?
- What are the SEO goals?
- Who are the competition?
There is often a confusion between business objectives and SEO objectives. An eCommerce site owner may say that getting more traffic from Google is his main priority, but in reality, their main business objective is to sell the products they have in stock. More traffic does not necessarily lead to more sales. An SEO specialist can only be expected to reach SEO goals.
Target audience is important to understand. One very important factor for SEO is the geographic target. Ranking in Google worldwide is often an ambitious project. Only needing to be visible for a local audience (in a specific town or region) can also present its own challenges.
Keyword research is essential for good SEO strategy
Creating an SEO strategy inevitably involves doing keyword research. There are some specific types of keywords to look for according to the type of site and we will go through these in later chapters. To create a good SEO strategy, you will need to be competent at keyword research and you may need some specialist tools.
If you need to learn more about keyword research, you can download our free eBook Keywords and SEO, everything you need to know also see the article Competitive Keyword Research When You Are Rich which discusses some free and premium SEO tools that you will find useful for keyword research and more. If you need to do keyword research just once, you may consider getting in professional help.
Producing high-quality content is important for SEO
Organic results in Google, including AI Overviews, are based almost entirely on text. If you want to rank in Google today, especially if you are not a major brand or institution, then you need to provide a lot of written content on your website.
Basic SEO advice says that product pages should have at least 300 words of text; category pages, 100 words of text; blog posts 1000 words of text. Implementing any SEO strategy will therefore involve a lot of writing. Product pages and blog posts also need unique and high-quality images to rank successfully in search features such as Google Products or Google Discover.
Recent updates from Google and our own research suggest that using AI to generate content is not a solution. A human needs to spend time writing and you may need to invest in the production of images (photographs, illustrations, etc.) to make your pages attractive to Google.
Determine who will produce content early on in a project and make sure they have sufficient time to do it. Thousands (if not millions) of websites are never finished because the agency is still waiting for the content from the client.
If you are an independent developer, you may want to associate yourself with a freelance writer and photographer whose services you can offer to your client.
SEO features for WordPress
WordPress is a good CMS for SEO, but the core system lacks some basic SEO features. Adding an SEO plugin like SEOPress will be essential for editing TITLE and META Description tags, optimizing permalinks, adding redirections, sitemaps and adding structured data schema.
Choosing a good theme is highly strategic decision that may impact your SEO success. Special attention needs to be paid to themes to ensure that they are SEO-friendly. Specific things to check are that themes are responsive, working well on mobile without hiding any important page elements compared to the desktop version. If you know how, check the HTML code to make sure that themes respect the correct use of H1, H2, H3 tags.
Themes may slow down sites and page speed is an issue for SEO. You may need to optimize a WordPress site for page speed using a plugin like WP Rocket, but also see our tips on How to pass the Core Web Vitals (without a WordPress caching plugin). It is always better to make sure that your hosting and your theme are fast out of the box rather than having to optimize this later.
Time to build backlinks and social networks
Link building is often the least favorite job in SEO. Having a structured approach to getting backlinks can be very important for SEO success in some fields so you need to define the strategy adapted to the site you have to promote and set time aside for outreach and directory listings.
Effective link building is akin to public relations, and it will often bring into play the existing relations of a website owner. The job can be a lot easier when the website owner is an influential person in their field of work or already does a lot of PR work.
Links from social networks do not influence ranking in the same way as links from other websites, but they can play an important role in convincing Google that a website is an important resource. It is often a good idea to associate SEO work with social media. At least make sure that visitors to your website can easily share content by providing optimized OpenGraph and Twitter Card meta data (you can do this with SEOPress).
Monitor performance
Use tools like Google Search Console to monitor visibility and traffic in Google over time. In some cases, it will be interesting to compare results this year with the previous year. Google Search Console, Google Analytics (and the alternative Matomo) can be easily integrated into WordPress with SEOPress.
Also consider adding SEOPress Insights to monitor ranking for your most important keywords and also monitor backlinks earned over time. This will report on performance from within the WordPress Admin.
Keep abreast of SEO news
Good SEO strategies tend to be long-lasting. Creating good content and authoritative links has tended to be a good strategy for ranking in Google for a long time now. However, ranking is sometimes volatile and it is important to stay up to date with changes as they may affect strategy or tactics.
SEOPress is one of the most reliable resources for Google update news. We give you monthly updates on SEO news from our newsroom. You will also get product updates and expert tips on using WordPress and SEOPress.
Step 1: Install SEOPress
We may repeat this a few times, but we believe that something true is worth repeating. The first step to designing a winning SEO strategy when you are working on WordPress is to install SEOPress PRO. This is a complete all-in6one solution that is truly for everyone. We do also offer a free plugin, but we feel that the added features of PRO will help make you the most productive, ensuring that you can implement the best SEO strategy for your site.
