SEO strategy

Why is it important to have an SEO strategy?

An SEO strategy is vital for all SEO work. The strategy helps to ensure that you put the right resources into the things that will help you reach your goals. With an SEO strategy, you will have a clear overview of the work that has been planned. It also makes it clearer how SEO can interact with your company's other campaigns and activities. Without a strategy, there is a much greater risk that you will invest your resources in activities that generate little return and that it will be difficult to measure if your work produces the right results.

The field of search engine optimisation is constantly evolving and requires a well-thought-out plan where there is scope for flexibility. Since SEO consists of 3 different components - content SEO, technical SEO and link building - your strategy needs to be designed so that the overall plan for all your SEO is clear, while also specifying the steps for each specific part. With clear priorities and approaches, everyone involved has a process to follow that leads you towards your goals.

An SEO strategy gives a clear picture of:

• What goal(s) you are working towards
• What must be done to get there
• What activities are the highest priority
• How the work is to be carried out
• When each task is to be performed
• How the resources are to be allocated

Who needs an SEO strategy?

All companies that work with or are considering working with SEO should have a strategy. A clear direction for your optimisation and an understanding of why each task is carried out make it easier for everyone involved to work towards the same goals.

A common mistake is to start reading up on SEO and then do a few things here and there without any real plan. It is also common to think what you are doing is not making any difference and to give up working with SEO too soon, because the results are seen later than for other digital marketing. Unstructured SEO work can lead to duplication of work, that the most important aspects fall through the cracks and that you waste time on the wrong things.

If any of the following apply to your company, you should design an SEO strategy:

• You are just getting started with SEO
• You work with SEO but things are going slowly
• You work with SEO but don’t have measurable goals
• You work with SEO but do not know why you are doing it or who is responsible for what
• You have a website that you are updating but you are not working with SEO, so you are not visible to your target group in organic search results
• You have worked on SEO without having a strategy but gave up because it took up too many resources and the results were difficult to measure
• You are going to build a new website or migrate to a new platform. In this case, it is more important than ever that you keep track of your SEO. Mistakes here can have disastrous consequences.

How Beet works with strategic SEO

All the SEO work we do at Beet is strategic SEO. The strategy we design is based on detailed SEO analysis to build up a clear picture of where you are now and what potential exists. Using the technical SEO analysis and keyword analysis, we create an SEO strategy together with you based on the following:

RESOURCES

Early in the process, we go through what the roadmap should look like together with you and discuss who should do what. Common questions before the work begins include:

• Who will write the content?
  Do you already have a resource, do you need to employ someone or should Beet write the content?
• What SEO competence does your company have?
• It is important that everyone involved understands why the SEO work is being done and what the purpose of the work is. We offer SEO training for everyone involved in the project to ensure that everyone has the knowledge the company needs.
• Who will implement the technical SEO?
  It may be your own developers or an external agency.
• How much of the work can you do yourselves?

We can help with most of the things you need. However, it often pays to do a lot of the work yourselves to ensure that it is compatible with the company's other frameworks and processes e.g. factual content and the tone of the writing. You are the experts when it comes to your industry and markets.

PRIORITIES

Clear priorities are an important factor to provide support and structure during the course of the work. Priorities may change as the SEO work proceeds, but having a clear overall plan to follow from the beginning makes things easier and more efficient for everyone involved and reduces the scope for misunderstandings. It is common to work with several aspects of SEO in parallel, (content, technical and links), as these are dependent on each other in order for them to perform optimally, and to have priorities within each specific area.
Some of the key aspects when setting priorities are:

• Which SEO area is the most critical to deal with?
• Is there an upcoming season we need to focus on? Does it make sense to work with a certain product type because it has better margins?
• What does the competition look like?
• Is it worth focusing on highly competitive keywords? Do you have a new website that has significantly lower domain strength (link power) than your competitors’?
• Where can we improve your ranking the most with the least effort? Where is the lowest-hanging fruit?
• Can we improve your ranking simply by changing the wording in an existing heading?
• Can a page start ranking by removing an error tag in the code?
• Which keywords currently rank on page 2? If we optimise those, we may soon appear on page 1.
• What does the company want to achieve in the long term?
• Large and time-consuming measures can be crucial to achieving the long-term goals.
• Does the menu need to be restructured in order to be able to rank higher for the most important keywords?
• Could a major technical change be decisive for achieving high rankings?

PLANNING

As SEO is long-term work that requires a lot of forethought, the future is a key factor to take into account in planning. It is important to be at the forefront in order for SEO to be able to deliver the best possible results. If you intend to launch a new product next year or need to prepare for a seasonal campaign, we will include that in the planning well in advance. It is important to be able to synchronise our SEO work with your other processes, e.g. your campaign calendar, so that the SEO can be in place at the right time.
Examples:

1. You are going to launch a major new product in January. The September before, we start planning and producing articles on topics related to the product that will hopefully rank organically when the product is launched and can encourage the reader to buy.
2. Black Friday marketing is important for your company. Plenty of time ahead, we make sure that there is a Black Friday landing page in place that cannot yet be reached from your menu structure, but that it is live and can be indexed by search engines.
   The planning includes action plans, results reports and technical follow-ups and a calendar showing when these are to be delivered. Deciding exactly what should be delivered is shorter term, because SEO is fluid work where decisions are made continuously as you see the results.

Goal setting

The goals of your SEO are based on how SEO can contribute to your company's overall goals and where there is potential to appear organically. How can increased organic visibility contribute to your brand awareness, increased sales of a certain product category or more traffic to your website? We look at how we can work with SEO throughout the customer's purchasing journey to cover visibility for all the steps the potential customer may take, and place extra focus on bringing in visitors at exactly the stage you want to have them.
The goals of SEO can generally be broken down as follows:

PRIMARY SEO GOALS

Primary SEO goals are goals that are affected first and foremost by the SEO work itself. The number of completed purchases or how long a visitor stays on a landing page are examples of goals where factors other than SEO also have an impact, such as user friendliness and attractive product descriptions. The primary objectives of SEO are therefore based on the following:

• Identifying relevant keywords and search terms related to the business
• Optimising existing content (both technical and content) from an SEO perspective for it to be visible for these keywords
• Measuring improvement in rankings in organic search results and increases in organic traffic to the website

SECONDARY SEO GOALS

The secondary goals of SEO are aspects that the SEO work can have a major impact on, but which are often determined by other factors. Using SEO to generate more conversions, i.e. more sales or leads, is an example of a secondary goal. Whether someone completes a purchase can be influenced by product images, the product description or the ease of use at the payment stage, while completing a form can depend on how the form is designed. These goals are every bit as important, and this is often where SEO fits into your overall goals for all digital marketing. By reaching your primary SEO goals, i.e. ranking and traffic, we can contribute to your secondary goals, i.e. conversions.

Synergies with other channels - part of the SEO strategy

SEO interacts with other digital channels. As a full-service digital marketing agency with deep competence in each channel area, Beet is able to maximise the synergies between different marketing channels. We:

• Use articles written specifically for SEO visibility on paid social for branding campaigns
• Use pages created for SEO to drive traffic through SEM
• Learn from SEM about which keywords work well and which keywords are too expensive to bid for
• Work to reduce SEM costs by optimising landing pages. Landing page experience is one of the decisive factors for pricing in SEM.
• Exploit new articles for e-mail campaigns etc.

Beet can help you to set your SEO strategy

Setting an SEO strategy can be a huge challenge. What is best for your company may be radically different from what works for another. Beet has long and broad experience of working with SEO in a wide range of industries, for organisations of all sizes, both B2B and B2C. Our data-driven approach ensures that your strategy is always designed according to our latest insights. This means that our SEO work is nimble, flexible and continuously optimised in order to reach your goals in the most efficient way.

Before we work with a client, we offer a free micro health check, where we take a closer look at your website to identify any potential for improvement. Contact us using the form below and we will be happy to tell you more.