Your search engine optimization strategy and campaign should always be geared to reach your business objectives, and goals. When creating a SEO strategy for your business, you clearly need to identify what you want to accomplish with your strategy, the keywords you are going to target, a list of your competitors, and ways on how you are going to measure success.

Once you have identified your goals with your SEO plan, you will have a clear idea on what you must do to accomplish those objectives. SEO is so much more than just a once off strategy that you can do and be done with it. It takes careful planning to succeed with SEO, especially in a competitive niche. Find below a couple of tips to help you create an SEO plan that converts.

SEO planning tips

Goals: What do you want to achieve with your business? Do you want to improve your organic rankings? Interested in generating sales or leads? SEO can attract targeted traffic to your website that are interested in your services and products. Identify your goals before you start with SEO.

Keyword research: Keywords are still the driving force of Google. Which keywords are you going to use in your SEO strategy? Which of those keywords will be more likely to convert targeted traffic into sales or leads? When people are looking for something or they have a problem, they turn to the search engines to find information. Can your website answer them?

Competitors: Select one of your top keyword phrases and search for it on Google. All the results not of your own will be your competitors. Analyze what they are doing and their website, the domain age, structure, and the number of pages they have indexed. This can give you a good indication of what you are up against.

Your website: How does your website compare to other websites in your niche? Is your content magnetic in which it draws people in or are you only focusing on pushing content out? Do you have visible call to actions that your visitors can complete? Does your website design look professional?

Measurement: How are you going to measure the success of your SEO plan? Are you only going to look at your organic rankings? Use Google analytics where you can measure your progress and to find areas of improvement. Always keep your SEO strategy agile where you can change your plan depending on the results you can analyze to reach your goals.

Having a solid SEO plan is the same as planning your business.