Marketing for Search Engines isn’t easy, so you need an SEO strategy playbook, a step by step process for turning your Website into an Inbound Marketing powerhouse.

In this article, I leverage SEMrush to perform all the research needed to build and execute a SEO strategy that wins.

Want to streamline your SEO routine and focus on building the perfect strategy to dominate the SERP?

For over half a decade, the team at Peritus Marketing has been working to create SEO strategies and game plans to make SEO simple and straightforward. How does it drive organic traffic, build the brand, and, most importantly, deliver revenue? Our vision to help startups and small-medium businesses leverage SEO and Content Marketing to drive more business. We streamline the time it takes to get the necessary insights to make smart content marketing decisions.

With our partnership, clients receive services and intelligence that will fast-track your Website to the top of the search results without breaking your bank.

In a perfect world, you want to place all of your SEO tasks on autopilot:

• Pick the best keywords to target in your campaigns, optimize your content, and get 100% accurate daily rankings data in every major search engine across multiple locations.
• Outrank your competitors by finding out what keywords they use to drive organic and paid traffic and the marketing strategies that work best.
• Check and monitor any site’s backlink profile to set up a powerful link-building plan.
• Get rid of all on-page technical issues that are keeping your Website from the top of the SERPs.
• On top of that, you need software or partner that gives you a quick panoramic view of your Website’s SEO progress and its impact to reach your goals.

Below is an exceptional checklist offered by SEMRush. Peritus Marketing leverages the list, but we also use their software to manage every client’s SEO, Paid Media, and Content Strategy.

A great way to begin your SEO strategy is to start the discovery and alignment phase in terms of clearly understanding your business objectives. An example, the Strategic business goal is to grow the business by 20%. The SEO goal is to execute activities for the Website to generate enough leads to contribute 10% of that growth. For SEO, you need to start with baselines – organic traffic, leads and, revenue (if none, start at $0). The next steps are to determine the magic number of traffic volume to hit that will convert enough leads to meet that goal. You’ll also need to track the conversion metrics track going forward.

SEO and content marketing form the backbone of your digital marketing programs, and if they’re not healthy, chances are you’re not getting the results you should be from any of your marketing channels. Without data and purpose-driven content marketing, SEO will not provide positive business results.

The SEO Playbook

Below are seven steps for activating your SEO program and dominate the SERPs and your competition.

1. Identify your Top 3 Competitors – Comparing your website’s current state to existing competitors provides opportunities for your business to take advantage of their weaknesses in Search Rankings.

2. Perform Competitive Research – The digital landscape is constantly shuffling. Your business cannot be reactive, so how do how do you gain leadership positions. Being on top of your market landscape and competitor activity is important to your SEO Strategy’s success. The goal is get discovered, educate, convince, and convert.

» Domain Overview
» Traffic Analytics
» Organic Research
» Keyword Gap Analysis
» Backlink Gap Analysis

3. Perform Keyword Research – An essential part of your SEO strategy are Keywords and Keyword phrases because this is what your potential customers are searching on the internet. Keywords are also different based on the buyer stages (Awareness, Consideration, Decision). At the top of the funnel (Awareness), buyer intent is around business problems. In the middle of the funnel (Consideration), search intent is around comparing vendors (aka competitors). And at the bottom of the funnel (Decision), search intent can be around pricing options and ROI.

» Keyword Overview
» Keyword Magic Tool
» Keyword Manager
» Organic Traffic Insights

4. Link Building – As your posting new content, you must think strategically. For example, posting using the skyscraper technique or listicle articles are highly effective for generating more backlinks. Link building is about getting best links, not the most (higher ranking, bringing the right traffic, etc.), not the most links.

» Backlink Analytics
» Backlink Audit
» Link Building Tool/Campaigns

5. Perform On-Page & Technical SEO – If your Website is not technically sound, Search Engines will make it difficult for it to be found. You need to continually audit the Website to make sure load times, on-page optimization, and several other technical aspects are fully optimized. The report below indicates 85 pages on this Website have technical issues that need to be fixed.

» Site Audits
» On-Page SEO Checker
» Listing Mgt (Local SEO)
» Log File Analyzer

6. Developing/Integrating your SEO Content strategy – Identify short-term and long-term priorities such as building pillar content or focusing the blog around topics you must rank for. For example, your resource center on your Website may not address business problems, so create an FAQ, long-form articles around solving problems. Educate your audience, so they stay longer on pages.

» SEO/Keyword Summary & Analysis
» Recommendations for content strategy.
» Set goals for content (lead gen, traffic, etc.).
» Create SEO-Driven Editorial Calendar
» Produce Data-Driven Content that Converts
» Integrate SEO Data into Paid Advertising
» Prioritize Efforts by Impact and Return
» Amplify Content Performance through Paid Promotion
» Content can be repurposed into Sales & Marketing assets

7. On-going Management – Create dashboards and reports for different stakeholders. The management team needs to see high-level activities benchmarked to its 20% business growth objective. The marketing team needs to see SEO activities moving the needle.

» Ongoing Weekly/Monthly Reports – Traffic, Leads, Revenue (conversion metrics) for Management Team
» Position Tracking
» Rank Tracking
» SEO Key Performance Indicators

Conclusion

Your SEO strategy can provide insights into the strengths and weaknesses of your Website, competitors, and help you develop winning Content Marketing Strategies to educate, nurture, and convert more prospects into customers. Eighty percent of buyers are searching the internet for your product, but your Website is not dominating the search engine’s first page, you’re missing a huge business opportunity. My firm gathers SEO insights and research competitors to assist in creating the right searchable content at the right time along your buyer’s journey. Get found, educate, and convert more customers.

#SEO #searchmarketing