Key Elements of SEO
A winning SEO strategy is key to bringing in high-quality, qualified leads, and eventually winning new clients – and to have a winning SEO strategy, you need to consider the key elements, making sure that they’re on hitting the mark.
Whether you are a business that specialises in architecture for homes and consumers, or a business that provides outsourced IT support London businesses pay for, you will find that an SEO strategy helps you get in contact with the right type of customer. If you are unfamiliar, SEO is the practice of optimizing your website and other branded content, so that it gets favoured by search engines (hence search engine optimization, ‘SEO’).
SEO is a large field and there are lots of different consideration. It is difficult to narrow down the most important elements of SEO, and even the key elements are countless. If you’re beginning to think about developing a strategy, or else improving an existing one, below are some elements that are a good place to start.
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Table of Contents
Industry and Audience
The first thing you should thing about is your industry, and who your audience are. Without defining these two things, you will have no direction to steer your SEO strategy. To help yourself find that direction, you can ask yourself some question to help focus your efforts:
- What is your industry?
- Who is your ideal customer?
- What platforms/content does your ideal customer engage with?
- Who are your competitors?
- What do your competitors’ SEO strategies look like?
There are many more questions that you can ask yourself, but these will help you figure out what your next steps are, and how to plan your strategy. Once you have defined the steps, you can begin to move forward with your plans, and eventually your SEO strategy will come together.
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Keyword Research
The reason defining your audience and your industry is so important is that it will help you with the next important element: Keyword Research. Looking into keywords that related to your audience and your industry will help you define user intent (aka, what your ideal customer is searching for on social media).
Keyword research is very important, because you need to remain clued into not only what your audience is searching for, but also how they search for it – both of these factors affect what keywords are relevant each day/week/month. In-depth keyword research will allow you to adjust your SEO strategy to the nuances of audience search trends, and that can be the key to a successful keyword targeting campaign.
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User Intent
Tying into keyword research is the principle of user intent. In simple terms, user intent refers to what an individual user is looking to achieve, or find an answer to, with their search query.
For example, one user might search for something along the lines of “PC repair near me”, and another user might search for “DIY PC repair”.
Both of these search queries give you a pretty good idea of the intent of the each respective user. If your company specialises in PC repair, you could either focus on attracting user searching for “PC repair near me” by creating content that promotes your services. Or, you could potentially double your impact by creating content that educates users on PC repair, thus targeting the users who are searching for “DIY PC repair”.
By following the user intent, you can potentially discover new keywords that can help widen your audience – and a wider audience can potentially help generate more leads.
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Mobile SEO
The shift to mobile over the last few years has led Google to prioritise its mobile-first index, meaning that the way it crawls and indexes websites, and ranks them in its database, is heavily informed not only by whether they have a mobile site or not, but how well-optimized the mobile site is.
With the rapid growth in mobile phone usage, it now means that the lowest common denominator (aka, where most people are accessing Google and other search engines from) is via mobile. The mobile-first index still includes desktop sites, of course, but it is no longer the priority. This means that web design will be increasingly geared towards ensuring one’s site works well on Android and iOS browsers, and that is something that, as a business looking to leverage SEO, you will definitely need to take into consideration as part of your SEO strategy.
