Developing an SEO strategy

The place of referencing in the online marketing strategy

The vast majority of Internet traffic comes from the major search engines: Google, Bing, Yahoo! This is especially true if you do not have or very little budget to invest in Google Adwords for example.

The contribution of search engines via SEO is all the more important as they generate targeted traffic with Internet users looking for what you offer. So, if your site can not be found and analyzed to be referenced in the search engines, you will hardly be able to increase traffic to your site. And this statement is all the more true if you are positioned in a competitive sector. Optimizing your SEO to be ahead of its competitors is an invaluable investment.
In addition, investing time or money in SEO optimization is very important because it offers a higher return on investment than other acquisition channels. Indeed, SEO costs less and most importantly allows you to remain independent compared to paid channels like Adwords or Affiliate.
You must therefore develop and optimize an SEO strategy .

How to set up an effective SEO strategy?

We can distinguish 5 major steps in the development and optimization of a "home" referencing strategy, ie a strategy developed and carried out by you, without going through an agency specialized in referencing.

1) SEO strategy: the choice of keywords to target

Any SEO strategy begins with the choice of which keywords to target for each of the pages to be referenced. This is a lot of work but consider it an investment that will be largely amortized!
At this stage the main rule to respect is to avoid targeting too different keywords on the same page. For example:

Keywords 1: "Buy apples"
Key words 2: "Buy carrots"

Here you have to make a choice: target the sale of apples or carrots. The choice will be based on what you really offer on your page. And if you propose both articles, you will have to separate them and thus target each keyword on dedicated pages. You will be able to attract both Internet users interested in apples and carrots.
Then we will weigh our analysis according to several criteria (non exhaustive list):

the resources needed to achieve the objective: time, budget, staff.
the level of potential traffic to be generated: do people type this word? How many are they ?
the quality of the potential traffic to generate: are the users who are looking for this keyword in my target?
etc ...

2) SEO Strategy: Optimizing Content

Editorial content is one of the most important variables of SEO. It tells the search engines what your page is talking about.
Be careful though not to fall into the trap of writing only for search engines.
Indeed, remember that if you want to reference your site it is in order to generate targeted traffic and quality!
Thus answering both the imperatives of SEO and the expectations of your target remains a difficult discipline, which requires real editorial skills: it must be relevant, respond to the users' query, be complete.

3) SEO strategy: the technical optimization of the page

As you probably know, search engines do not read the contents of websites in the same way as humans. They should be helped to read and analyze your pages. To do this we must intervene on the HTML code of your pages. The elements to optimize are the following (non exhaustive list):

The html code
The title tag
The meta description tag
The urls
Redirections
The charset
etc ...

When optimizing these technical variables always keep in mind the keywords you have chosen to target.

4) SEO strategy: linking (link strategy)

In this step, you will work the popularity of your site. Search engines rate your popularity based on what other sites think and say about you:

How many sites are you talking about? For this point privilege the quality to the quantity.
What popularity do they have in turn? The popularity of these sites is evaluated in the same way as for yours: the vote of the external sites.
What are they talking about in their own content? Here the engines try to find out if you have a real point in common with the sites that point to you. If it is yes it is good for you, if it is not, then not terrible!

5) SEO Strategy: Balance of Optimizations

As with any strategy, arrives at the moment of the balance to determine what has worked and what requires new optimizations.
The SEO strategy does not derogate from this rule. Especially as the techniques, the good practices evolve, it is necessary therefore always to be up to date.
The assessment is made in two stages:

The technical assessment that takes place from the implementation of the optimizations, to be sure that there are no oversights, "breaks". Ex: Are all redirects in place? Are there alt tags forgotten ...
The positioning balance must be in the form of regular "points" but spread out over time.

This is a positioning statement of the keywords you worked on.
This phase could either be done manually, but be careful it may be very time consuming, or be automated, this is the case for SEO agencies.
What to analyze:

Your positioning before optimizations and afterwards, for a list of keywords you would have worked on. Record your position at each survey to assess progress
The number of urls / pages referenced to make sure that the whole site is accessible.
The number of sites pointing to you and their quality.
The increase in traffic generated by referencing (see analytical tool)
The keywords that generate traffic
Time spent by keyword (to evaluate the relevance of the keyword)
etc ...