Your SEO strategy should not focus on keywords
A very common cliché among the digital marketers is that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is not really what it once was. And here is a truth that you do not get to hear very often either: Your Search Engine Optimization strategy for this year should not focus on the keywords.
Nowadays, most of the businesses have a very good understanding when it comes to the basic concepts around SEO and why it is so important. However, when you come around to executing and developing a good strategy for your SEO efforts for the business, just getting down to create content for the sake of keywords that you think your customers are going to search for is both strenuous and wrong.
SEO Strategy – What is it all about?
In the modern days, an SEO strategy is all about the process of getting into the organization of the content of a website by topic, which will help search engines such as Bing or Google to understand the intent of the user while searching.
If you optimize your web page with respect to the topics to begin with, you can very well find yourself ranked high enough for even the long-tailed keywords that are related to the given topic.
Given below are some steps that will ensure that you have all your bases covered:
Have the topics listed down
Keywords form the heart and soul of SEO, yet they should not be your first steps towards the path of an organic growth anymore. The very first steps you should be taking is to create a listing of the topics that you would like to cover from one time period to the other.
To begin with, create a list of around ten very short terms and words that are usually associated with your service or product. You can take help from the keyword tool of Google in identifying their search volumes and in coming up with the variations that would make sense in the case of your business.
You are going to associate the topics with the most popular short tailed keywords, as you can probably already see, but what you are not going to do is dedicate individual blog postings for these keywords. The keywords are just simply way too competitive for you to be ranking highly for at Google if you are just now starting in optimizing your site for search purposes.
Create a list consisting of long tailed keywords for these topics
Here is where you will begin to optimize the pages for some specific keywords. You must have identified some pillars by now, use your keyword identifying tool to find out about five to ten long tailed keywords which dig deeper into the topic with the original keyword.
For instance, we all regularly create contents for the topic as SEO, however, it is still an uphill task to rank anywhere close to the top on Google search for such popular topics or just on this acronym by itself.
We are also at risk for competing against our very own created content if we end up creating multiple pages which all target the same exact keyword. Therefore, we should also be creating content on conducting research for keywords, looking at optimizing our images for the purposes of search engines, having an SEO strategy in place, and other topics within SEO.
Use some subtopics in trying to come up with webpage ideas or blog posts which are in a direction of explaining a given concept which falls under the larger topic that you had identified in the previous steps. Now go ahead and plug in these subtopics in your tool for keyword research and work towards identifying long tailed keywords on which you would like to base all of your blog posts.
When used together, all of these subtopics end up creating a cluster. So, if your collection has ten pillar topics, then they should all be ready to support a cluster consisting of five to ten subtopics. This model of doing SEO is called the topic cluster; most modern algorithms used in search engines actually so depend on these in connecting the users with the kind of information they are looking for.
Keep building pages dedicated to each topic
When we talk about the websites and their rankings on search engines, trying to have just a single page rank well for a given set of keywords can be a task that is almost impossible. But this is where the actual test really happens.
Start with the ten pillar topics that you had come up with in the previous steps and start creating a dedicated page on the website for each of the outlined topics at a higher level by using the long-tailed keywords that you had come up with for each of the clusters in the previous steps.
A pillar kind of a page for SEO, for instance, would describe SEO in very brief sections which introduce the concepts of keyword research, optimization of images, strategy around SEO, and the other subtopics as and when they get identified. You may consider each of these pillar pages as a summary of your contents, where you are going to brief your viewers on the subtopics that you will be elaborating on during your blog posts.
Now you can fall back on your list of keywords to figure out how many various pillar pages should you need to create. At the end of the day, the number of the topics for whom you will be creating the pillar pages need to coincide with exactly how many various offerings, products, and locations your business caters to. This shall make it a lot easier for your customers and prospects to look for you in the search engines irrespective of what keywords are used by them.
Each of your web pages should be including the relevant information for your customers and prospects, and it should also include graphics and links to the pages on your website for enhancing the experience of the user.