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Connect your World has its own SEO strategy. The website visitor and possible customer must be able to find your website. The website has to be visible with a high ranking on Google. That’s why you need a SEO strategy.
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It should be meaningful for the customer to make use of your website and services. That is why relevant and quickly readable content is important. An ultimate goal is to captivate and bind the visitor of your site and to ensure that the visitor becomes a (returning) customer. (Contentmarketing) Therefore Search Engine Optimization and Contentmarketing are firmly connected and mutually reinforce each other.
SEO is like a form of art and changes constantly and adapts to new insights. It is important to find a balance in the SEO strategy between focusing on the searchability of the content and ensuring that your content acquires and maintains a certain credibility. A vision within the marketing strategy is called ‘Thought Leadership’. It is based on the content knowledge within the organization in a specific field. Organizations try to become an authority in certain knowledge areas and bring knowledge to the customer.
In order to use ‘Thought leadership’ as an SEO Strategy, you first have to take a step back. Back to the basis of your company’s strategy. What is the vision? And how exactly do you carry it out right now? It will be necessary to translate that vision into your own vision for your SEO Strategy.
Naming the great strength of your company around knowledge is the most important step. Perhaps your company has a lot of data from research, or huge customer behavioral insights in the market; a combination of behavior on obtaining new knowledge. Or do you have visionaries on board, who shape the future of the market? Whatever it is, this great strength (seen from the expectations of the target group) is the basis for working towards ‘Thought leadership’.
‘Thought leadership’ is closely related to SEO & Content Marketing, or comes from a combination of the two. If you look at the definition, it is about becoming an authority on a certain topic. And you become an authority not only through the use of Content Marketing. It means that your knowledge and vision must be carried and spread through all channels.
Describe or rewrite the vision of your company. From the vision comes a theme that ‘Thought leadership’ is about to turn. Rewrite the vision once again, with in mind that it is propagated through search engine optimization and content. That means that it becomes more of a mission. That is as concrete as possible. Example: “We do not want anyone to die or hunger in 2030.” Describe the strategic points that reinforce your vision and drive the content. Three to four points are enough. These points ensure that your mission is realistic and credible.
Among those strategies are the actions and research which have been done within the market (stakeholders, keywords, leading media, etc.). Based on this you can further develop the entire strategy for SEO and ‘Thought Leadership’.
SEO is indispensable to get visitors to your website. Almost all websites you visit can be found through a search in Google. There are few websites, of which you know the URL by heart and which you type in immediately.
That is how it works for your target group. Every day, Google processes more than 3.5 billion search queries. This is an average of 40,000 search queries per second! How many of the seekers looking for your product or service are currently coming to your competitor? Can you persuade these searchers to become customers with you?
Technology, communication and marketing are necessary on a good website. I regularly come across websites that are not very well optimized, because of a bad ‘user interface’ and / or a moderate ‘usability’ (UX – / UI – Design). The website basics must be good before you start an SEO project.
Every branch is different and has its own dynamics. Especially inbranches where there is a lot of competition, you will have to work much more firmly with a tailor-made SEO strategy. It is not impossible to score then, but it takes a longer breath. The search for the ‘sweet spot’ or the gap in the market finding requires extra good research. Research of your competitors will be more extensive.
In addition, it also makes a difference whether you sell a consumer good or a more exclusive product where a lead usually costs more. Or a customer not only wants to focus on increasing organic search traffic, but also considers investing in a paid campaign. The intake interview is important to find out what you want as a customer. Together with the industry survey and the 0 measurement of your site, there is a good basis from which further actions could take place.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is largely about offering relevant content to your target audience. This content must be accessible and indexable for search engines. To realize this, the technology behind your website is important. This determines, among other things, the speed with which search engines can crawl pages of your site, the amount of content that is indexed and the extent to which search engines correctly understand the content.
The advantage of a digital world is that everything is measurable. Therefore the SEO strategy of Connect your World is ‘data-driven’. We start with an introductory and intake interview. Then we determine how the website stands for with a 0 measurement. It is important that we have access to Google Analytics and Google Search Console. The SEO – baseline is a measurement moment, a collection of numbers, that say something about the findability of your website and the behavior of your visitors.
For example, the baseline measurement may show that your website scores poorly in Google on certain keywords. Or that your website visitors do not stay for long. On the basis of the baseline measurement it quickly becomes clear what your weak points are, but also where your chances lie.
A high position in Google takes time. You can have a good website, but still have a bad position in Google. To find out why your website is hard to find, the first step is to determine the key performance indicators (KPIs) and your website objectives. This is the start and also the end of your SEO strategy. In this first SEO analysis, you will deal with the key question: what are your expectations for the use of SEO and what objective do you have in mind?
A common mistake in this process is that the goal is to ‘get higher in Google’. While the objective should be: more online results (from organic visitors). In other words, rather a hundred visitors, who convert, than a thousand who leave the website within 10 seconds. Obviously, you achieve the objective by going for the highest possible position in Google and placing interesting and binding content on your website.
Formulating a concrete objective is of great importance for a successful SEO process. These KPI’s provide insight into where you are now, where you want to go and whether you will have achieved this later. In the next phase you will start by mapping the three most important building blocks of your website SEO technique, content and authority. First of all, you analyze the current state of these building blocks at this stage.
Better information leads to better results. The first step in a successful SEO strategy is to gather information that you need to make informed decisions. The free tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Google My Business contain a lot of information.
• Goals and objectives – What do you want to achieve? How do you perform now and what specific benchmarks do you want to achieve?
• Target segments – Who are you trying to reach? What are their pain points? How is their ‘buyers journey’ look like?
• Competitors – Who do you compete with? And how do they compete? Your offline competition may not be your online competition; you need a clear view of the competitive landscape so that you know what it takes to compete.
In phase two you have submitted your website to a comprehensive technical analysis by means of an SEO Audit. This has translated into a clear advice for the web builder, who builds or adjusts your website. Now the time has come to put things into practice, so your website can be indexed in the right way by the search engines.
But the technology in the SEO field is constantly changing. It is necessary to keep a close eye on all developments from now on. The SEO technique of your website must remain up to date for optimal indexing by Google. You can achieve this by keeping a close eye on the technical performance of your website with periodic analysis of figures. In this way your website remains structurally optimized. Keep in mind that this will result in an extra workload for your web builder. SEO is an ongoing process, because the competition is not sitting still either. That’s why Connect your World has a monthly subscription in which 1 day in the month the SEO of your website is tracked and optimized. Click here for more information.
To determine all these things, some of the tasks in this phase include:
Choosing the best goals does not only mean analyzing traffic levels, but also the goal of the searcher (search intent), the level of competition and the stage of the marketing funnel. Please give some attention to longtail keywords.
An SEO audit answers the following questions to determine how well your website is built. Are there infrastructural topics that affect your site speed? Are you affected by any penalties? How well are you currently performing on searches?
Because links are a huge factor for a good SEO ranking in Google. Even if you are liable and are hit by a penalty, links are something to be reckoned with. It is wise to make an assessment of how many links you have, where they came from and what the anchor text profile tells about the past of your website.
Directing traffic to your site is only the first step. Feeding this ‘traffic’ with compelling content and setting up your pages to convert is crucial. These audits look for gaps in your content that stop people from converting and you also examine how well your current conversion is.
If you do not know where you are going, you may end up in an undesirable place. Setting smart targets and benchmarking current performance gives you a barometer of how well your SEO is performing along the line.
If all these issues have been assessed and everything has been recorded and the KPIs have been determined.
It is not enough to get traffic to your website. It makes little sense to make a big investment in SEO if your website is not built to sell. That is why ‘Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)’ is an important consideration when drawing up an SEO strategy. During this part of the process, you should analyze important pages on your website where people first contact, buy, sign up or ask questions to determine how well the design and the overall user experience work. All this in order to be able to change leads in customers. Then you take these insights with you and you build your plan on the basis of the strategy that has been laid down during the first phase. Finally it starts optimizing, testing and measuring.
Start by making an inventory of how well your pages are performing, looking at the important statistics such as traffic, bounce rates, time on site, micro conversions and the measures taken.
Mapping your content by the marketing funnel is the best way to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement. Once you have done this, you can prepare a priority strategy.
Content should not only be optimized for SEO in order to achieve the greatest return. In order to find your best variants, you need to split alternatives – testing and choosing the most important elements to have them tested against each other on the basis of best practices.
Just like the above, focus on the landing pages to find opportunities for improvement in all parts of the copy, design and layout, and proceed to action.
After collecting the knowledge gained so far, it is time to create mock – ups of the proposed changes, to make it more understandable for all stakeholders.
A website is only successful if it is findable and fits the expectations of the target group. This is achieved by the content and this is one of the most important features on which Google indexes websites. Content is more than text alone. Images, tools, videos and so on are also seen as content. Content is what the buyers get through the marketing funnel. It is what makes your site end up high in the search engines, earns attention on social media and eventually communicates your brand to the world.
In the ‘content analysis’ you first have to visualize which search terms your target group is looking for. But also with which keywords you will achieve the most potential. Of course you want to be number 1 on the main keyword, but that is what all your competitors want. Therefore it is especially important to define the keywords also called the ‘Smart Spot’, where there is potentially a great deal of results and where the competition is bogged down. Maybe less volume, but you realize a better result.
Why write texts, if you do not know which ‘keywords’ are the most promising result for you? We then carefully integrate the desired keywords and terms into your website at a later stage of this step-by-step plan. But in this phase you should not only look for keywords. It is advisable to also analyze the entire content of the website. What content do you already have? Companies often forget how much valuable knowledge they already have. Why produce new content, if there is still so much that you can reuse? Keep in mind that content is never finished and is more than just text! In the end it is the sum of the parts. The process of content optimization never stops. Google loves content, in fact; Google likes new and qualitative content a lot. Make sure your content stays dynamic and up – to – date.
Therefore it is important to monitor sharply with the help of various tools such as Google Analytics, what your pages and keywords have for development. Does it read nicely? Is the message clear? And does it meet the expectations of the visitor? To succeed with content, you need to work on consistency of your brand (voice and tone) across all channels while creating channel specific strategies to increase engagement and increase conversions.
• Blog content
• Whitepapers, e – books, guides and educational resources
• Viral content
• Landingpages and sales pages
• Product copy
• Visual content (infographics, photos and memes)
• Video content (explainer videos, ‘how – tos’ and vlogs)
• Webinars and slideshares
• Podcasts, Press and media releases, Text and display ads
When we talk about ‘optimization’ as a pillar, we refer to the tasks of optimizing your website, in a way that search engines can categorize them and arrange them accordingly. This is a data – heavy and analytics driven part of SEO. Every website consists of pages with images, content and links. For you it may look very structured, but the question is whether the search engines see your website in the same way. Search engines (and their ‘robots’) depend on the source code of your site. If there is a lot of sloppy, incorrect or unnecessary code here, the search engines will not understand your website. Time must be spent testing, fine – tuning and updating as the campaign progresses.
The goal is a well – built site, which is relevant, loads quickly and is easy to index and search for search engines. In the technical analysis, you can check whether your (hired) online specialist would like your website such as Google. In this way you will gain insight into whether your website technology meets all SEO conditions. Even if you think your website is still technically good, this analysis almost always provides a long list of areas for improvement.
In addition to the technology and content of your website, there is one last important pillar, which deserves attention. That is the authority of your site. Is your website often mentioned online elsewhere? Would you like to link to your website or webshop? And do they also appear to be relevant websites? Then you rise in the ranking. Through various tools you can measure how your authority is and what you can do to improve it. Quality is the most important factor in this. Because ‘popular’ in the light of the search engines means that Google judges your site as important. .
‘SEO Linkbuilding‘ is obtaining external links for your website. Linkbuilding is a way to tell the search engines that the information on your website is clear and useful. The search engine finds this a good sign and thinks that your reputation in your industry is of a high level, and that you have a reliable site. This is not only about quantity, but also about quality. SEO Linkbuilding is very important for your SEO strategy.
By being active on social networks, you not only increase your brand awareness, you make yourself more and more beloved. And that is exactly what Google likes to see. Facebook and Twitter have an increasing influence on your findability. Good presence on social media ensures higher rankings in Google. Read search engines in which you are interested, but also what you and your friends like (LinkedIn and Facebook) and or Tweet. Social reviews also count. There are plenty of social opportunities for your SEO Strategy, but it requires time, knowledge and SEO expertise to tackle this well. It is important to find a balance between social presence and the capacity that it costs to keep up with these media.
Time: does your team have the time to do the SEO campaign yourself or is it just a new set of tasks, which they get added to the existing workload?Expertise: does your in – house team have sufficient knowledge about SEO to put the implementation into effect properly? Some elements of the implementation are simple, but even though your in – house team has been part of the strategy formation, they may not know how to implement certain points.
Do you have the budget to hire help? In – house implementation may seem cheaper at first sight and if you already have all the expertise and time at your disposal, this may be the case. But that scenario is rare. If that is not the case, then struggling your employees will actually cost more than hiring professionals who know exactly what they are doing. A good strategy can be spoiled by poor execution, so honest reflection is essential. Do you want to know what a particular term means? Look in the SEO & Content Marketing dictionary.
Each year Connect your World from The Hague will follow the latest SEO trends. Take a look at this page about the newest SEO trends.
The owner of SEO agency Connect your World located in The Hague is an experienced (local) SEO specialist and Contentmarketing expert. Want to know more about the owner.