6-Step SEO Strategy (That Works in 2024)

in this video i'm going to show you how to develop an seo strategy that actually works so watch this entire free training because the second method is the key to long-term first page rankings let's dive right in hey i'm nathan gotch and i'm the founder of gotcha seo and i've led hundreds of successful seo campaigns and trained thousands of seo professionals in my program gotcha seo academy so if you're new here this is part four of my free seo mastery training course all of the previous lessons will be below this video so make sure you watch those after you finish this one and don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell button because you'll get first access to the next video in this training series let's jump right in so the first part of developing a proper seo strategy is to understand the three quadrants of the seo process first you have the what second you have the how and third you have the who let's start with the what and the how first so the question is simple what seo opportunities exist for your website and how do you optimize for them so this question can only be answered by performing a complete seo audit and make sure you watch the previous video in this series because i dive into performing a proper seo audit but with that said here are six high impact seo opportunities you should look for on every single website number one do you have low hanging fruits and these are keywords ranking from positions number two to number fifteen and these are the keywords you should attack right away so go into scm rush into your domain and go to the organic keyword section and then click on the positions drop down and go to the custom range enter 2 and 15 to see all of your low hanging fruits and to take it a step further filter the set of keywords based on kd percentage start with 0 to 14 in the very easy range to find the lowest competition opportunities now the question is how do you actually optimize for these low hanging fruits well there are a few ways and i'll start with the easiest tactics as far as time and resources first number one optimize for organic ctr so first sort the list to see the top ranking keyword at the top then copy the keyword and open google in incognito window confirm the ranking position and if it isn't ranking number one then there's work to do now open up google search console go to the performance section and click on search results click the filter drop-down click on top queries and enter the target keyword then click on the keyword and click on average ctr if the ctr is below 1 then you need to optimize now keep in mind there are many variables that affect organic ctr like the intent of the keyword you're targeting your position the presence of serp features and the presence of google ads for example if you're targeting a keyword that has instant answer intent like what time is it in st louis then your ctr will be extremely low or if you're targeting another brand's name like sem rush your ctr will also be very low i would avoid even trying to optimize ctr for these types of keywords however in other cases you can almost always improve ctr and i consider any page with a ctr below one percent a really good target and especially if it's ranking from position 5 or higher so the biggest lever you can test is going to be your title tag and your meta description and i recommend testing many different title tags to see which one produces the highest ctr just benchmark your current ctr come up with 10 to 15 title variations and then push the variation live and let it collect data for at least two or four weeks then just repeat this process over and over until you find a winner now your next question might be what should you test in your title tags i recommend injecting power words and here's a list of some that i like to test and numbers because they tend to produce a better click-through rate which is why news outlets use them with such high frequency the second way to improve rankings for low-hanging fruits is to number two upgrade your content and optimize so i'll show you how to find on-page seo opportunities in a second but the simplest question to ask is is this content long enough so sometimes just adding more content to a page will be enough and as you'll see in a second scm rush will give you a target word count based on the competitors but word count is just one piece to upgrading your content you can also dramatically improve the perceived quality and value of your content by creating 100 unique images adding more visuals creating dedicated video around the topic embedding it and even improving the general design of the page so the next method you can use to improve rankings for low hanging fruits is to number three create more internal link coverage so find relevant pages on your website and build internal links to your target page and if you don't have relevant pages then it's an indication that you don't have enough topical authority and that brings me to seo opportunity number two in this seo strategy process which is do you have clustering opportunities so keywords from positions number 51 to 100 are what i personally call clustering opportunities so if a page isn't ranking in the top 50 then there's a good chance that the ranking page isn't targeted enough for example look at this keyword that semrush is ranking outside of the top 50 for how to add person to facebook business manager and notice that the page is about the ultimate guide to facebook business manager this page isn't targeted enough to rank for this long tail keyword phrase and this is a clustering opportunity because you can create a dedicated page for this particular keyword phrase and it will rank much better the next seo opportunity you need to look for when building an seo strategy is number three is your site architecture optimized now there are a few core tenets of internal linking first your pages shouldn't be more than three clicks deep into the architecture otherwise it could hurt crawlability and indexability so the best thing to do is run an audit with semrush and then once the audit is done go to the crawled pages tab in the actual audit click on more filters select crawl depth from the drop down and then select four plus clicks from the second drop down now you'll know what pages you need to push further up into the architecture the second part of optimizing your site architecture is to identify pages with poor internal link coverage so the fastest way to find such pages is to use scm russia's internal link rank in the seo audit first while on the crawled pages tab click on the drop down and select internal link rank this is a proprietary score mechanism created by scmrush which gauges how much authority and link equity a particular page has so if a page has many internal links from pages that have many backlinks the ilr score will be high and a low score is an indication of poor internal link coverage so on the second drop down you can select less than 10 and you'll see some pages that need more internal link love now the next seo opportunity to look for in your seo strategy is to number four does your website have keyword cannibalization keyword cannibalization is when you have two or more pages targeting the same exact keyword phrase and it's detrimental to your seo performance because it forces google to decide which pages are best for the target keyword and you don't want google making those decisions it's our job to direct google and in fact john mueller the search advocate at google said this about keyword cannibalization we just rank the content as we get it if you have a bunch of pages with roughly the same content it's going to compete with each other kind of like a bunch of kids wanting to be first in line and ultimately someone else slips in ahead of them personally i prefer fewer stronger pages over lots of weaker ones don't water your site's value down so the quickest way to identify keyword cannibalization is to use semrush's position tracking tool go to keyword research and click on position tracking and then click on new position tracking to start a new project enter your target keywords and once the scan is complete open up the project and then click on the cannibalization tab this will show you instances of keyword cannibalization for the keywords you specifically entered the fifth seo opportunity for your seo strategy is have you done on-page seo the right way now at the most basic level your primary keyword should be in your url title h1 tag first sentence and last sentence but to take things up another notch i recommend using scm rush's on-page seo checker so go to the on-page and tech seo section click on the on-page seo checker and start a new project then click on import keywords and pages and then select your preferred option in this example i'll use manually enter your target page and the exact keyword phrase you want to rank for and then click collect ideas schmush will then show you how to optimize the target page from a strategy content semantic technical ux and even link building perspective so make sure you benchmark your performance today and then execute on these recommendations and lastly the sixth seo opportunity to find for your seo strategy is do backlink gaps exist so your overall website authority which is dictated by the quality and quantity of backlinks you have is one of the biggest ranking factors and that's why it's critical that you compare your website against your competitors to see if there's an existing gap and if there is you'll need to work to narrow that gap so go to semrush's backlink gaap tool enter your domain and four of your top competitors in organic search now you'll be able to see the authority score and total referring domain growth over the last 12 months ideally both of these should be growing at a steady pace and if they're not then it's an indication that your website isn't producing anything worth linking to or you're not promoting your assets enough now keep in mind you must narrow backlink gaps on both the domain level and the page level to compete for your most important keywords in fact you can narrow the backlink gap on the page level and still not rank because your overall website authority is weak relative to your competition so to see if you have backlink gaps on the page level just use semrush's keyword research tool enter your target keyword into the search bar and then scroll down to the server analysis you can then get an average for referring domains and see how your page stacks up so now that you know how to optimize for all of these seo opportunities who should be responsible for doing this work well let me explain a lean seo team will have the following members number one an seo strategist number two project manager number three copywriter number four developer and number five a virtual assistant or va now here's the funny part you might wear all of these hats in the beginning and that's okay but as you grow you should begin to fill these positions so if you're doing all of the heavy seo work then you need to slowly transition into an seo strategist or manager that means you aren't doing the actual physical labor instead you're developing the best strategy based on the unique needs of the target website then you're training and leading your team to success i always recommend bringing on a va as soon as possible because you can offload many of the time consuming tasks that don't add much value to your seo campaign for example exporting and importing data from sem rush to a google sheet may only take a short amount of time however compounded over the course of a year it's likely hundreds of hours spent on an activity that doesn't produce any economic value and that valuable time could have been spent on high impact activities like planning seo content campaigns or building out link acquisition campaigns so get a va as soon as possible then slowly fill in the other roles like a reliable copywriter a developer who can make technical changes and even a project manager to make sure that deadlines are being met and work is staying organized so that is how you build an seo strategy that actually works in the next video in this series i'm going to show you how to do on-page seo like a pro so if you've got value from this video please like it and subscribe right now because you won't want to miss the next video in this series thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Semrush

Views: 72,425

Keywords: seo strategy, seo, search engine optimization, seo strategy 2024, how to do seo in 2024, seo strategies, seo strategies for beginners

Id: N0bbTH9G4OU

Length: 11min 39sec (699 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 25 2022