DIY SEO #10: Planning Your SEO Strategy
By Kurt Steinbrueck
June 9, 2011 
2 Comments
Having a good SEO strategy is very important. In many cases it’s the difference between a company succeeding or withering away. It can greatly influence a ministry’s reach and effectiveness. It’s time to decide on your SEO strategy.
SEO doesn’t just happen. It must be planned out and then implemented. In order to create a good strategy, you must first gather the necessary information so you know what keywords people are searching for, how competitive those keywords are, and how competitive your competition is. We’ve done that in the first nine steps of the DIY SEO series. You now know the lay of the land and you’ve seen the strength of your competition. It’s time to use that information to form your SEO strategy.
Below are four factors that you must consider as you put together your SEO strategy:
1. Your Resources:
As you form your strategy you are going to need to decide how much time, effort and money you are willing to commit to the search marketing of your website. This is something you need to decide and commit to. Are you going to commit to 1 hour a week? 10 hours? 20? How much time do you realistically have? Are you willing to put in the extra effort in order to produce excellent work or is good enough…well…good enough? This will especially make a difference with link building. You can write an article that’s decent and get some links or you can write an article that’s great and get lots of links. I’m not trying to challenge or criticize with this question. It’s simply a choice you need to make. Do you have a budget? Are you willing to spend some money on tools and services to accomplish your SEO goals more quickly and effectively. Having a decent budget can make up for not having much time.
Be Honest!
You need to be honest about these things. No one is judging you here. If you only have a couple hours a week you can commit, then don’t plan to do 20 hours a week. If you don’t have any money to spend, then acknowledge that as you plan. There are strategies that work for your situation, but what won’t work is to choose a strategy that requires you to spend a lot of time and money and then not actually spend the time and money. So, be realistic and honest with yourself.
2. On-Page Optimization:
How much on-page optimization will you be able to do? There is always a battle between the sales team and the SEO team over the content of the pages of websites. The sales team usually wants less text, more graphics, and specific sales language while the SEO team wants more text, don’t care much about graphics, and want to stick the targeted keywords in all over the place. How much optimization will you be able to do?
In addition to the Sales / SEO battle, there are other factors that can limit on-page optimization. Does the content of your site lend itself well to optimization. If your site has a lot of pages with little textual content or putting keywords into the content is going to make it awkward, it’s going to limit how much optimization you can do. If you have a Flash site, you may be limited in the optimization you can do, or you may have to do a significant amount of work to allow for more optimization.
How much on-page optimization can you really expect to be able to do? The less on-page optimization you can do, the more you will have to rely on link building.
3. Number Of Pages:
Do you have a large site or a small site. If you’re site has hundreds of pages, you may not have to make many choices regarding the targeted keywords. Instead of deciding which keywords to target, you can target all of them and the only choice you have to make is which page targets which keyword. If you have few pages on your site, then you are going to have to be picky with your keywords because you can only target a few keywords on each page.
In addition to the number of pages you have the opportunity to optimize, you also need to consider the time involved with optimizing the pages. You may have 500 pages at your disposal, but if you only have time to optimized 1 or 2 pages a week, it doesn’t really matter because it will take you years to get to all 500 pages.
Are you going to be able to optimize a lot of pages in a reasonable amount of time?
4. Link Building:
Are you planning to do a lot of link building? Do you have any experience link building? If you are planning to do a lot of link building and you have the experience to know how to build links quickly and effectively, then you can target keywords on pages with little or even no on-page optimization. Or you can target keywords that are currently too competitive and quickly bring them into your reach.
If you are planning to do a lot of link building, but you don’t have much (or any) experience link building, it’s probably going to take a little while to figure out what link building strategies work best for you. So, you probably want to target less competitive keywords at first. Alternatively, if you have budgeted some money for your SEO, you may be able to hire an SEO who can either help you plan an effective link building strategy or do the link building for you.
If you know now that you are not going to be able to do a whole lot of link building, then you are going to need to be able to fully optimize the content of your pages and you should target keywords for which you can rank well now.
Putting Your Plan Together:
We’ve looked at the different things you need to consider as you create your SEO strategy. Now it’s time to write it down.
How much time are you willing / able to commit?- Are you going to put the extra effort in to get the best results or are you satisfied with getting the job done? Again, this isn’t a criticism. This is a choice. We all have to decide our priorities and doing the best possible SEO work may not be a priority right now.
- How much money can you budget? Remember, most of the SEO work can be outsourced. So, decent budget can make up for a lack of time and experience.
- How many pages do you have to optimize? Will you be able to optimize for every keyword you find or will you need to develop a keyword strategy?
- How much optimization can you do on your web pages? Will you be able to fully optimize or will you need to rely more on link building?
- How aggressively are you planning to link build?
- Do you plan to focus more on on-page optimization or link building? You may be thinking you’re going to do both, and you should, but there’s always something else you can be doing for either on-page SEO or link building. So, there is usually a trade off and you need to decide whether you want to make link building the priority or on-page SEO.
We’d all love to burst onto the SEO scene in a blaze of glory, optimizing hundreds of pages and implementing an elaborate and amazingly effective link building strategy. But the reality more often is that we have limited resources and other work to do. By taking an honest look at your situation and your priorities you can create a realistic SEO strategy that fits your situation and get you off the bench and into the search marketing game.
Today’s Task:
- Create and write down your SEO strategy.
Photos by Matthew Burpee, origamidon, Horia Varlan, and jjpacres
Did you have any difficulties creating your SEO strategy?
SEO’s are there other elements you consider when creating an SEO strategy?
DIY SEO #9: Determining Local Competition <- DIY SEO: Main -> DIY SEO #11: Choosing Your Keyword Strategy
Thanks a lot for sharing this, Kurt. You are right, planning is imperative if you want to succeed in your SEO efforts. Getting your website to rank number one is a harsh battle, and you should never go to battle without a proper plan. It always pays to be prepared. But remember, planning your SEO strategy is one thing, implementing it successfully is another.
Andrey,I did not want to read 32 pages of tutorial; but once I got into it, I found it clear and enggaing enough to complete. I can say that all of it was easy to comprehend.Two things struck me the most :1)How tedious and repetitive the steps of proper and thorough SEO have to be. I guess you SEO guys actually work for a living.2)I previously thought that SEO demanded more “creative genius” than it would appear to demand according to your tutorial. I guess you just copy what has been successful and then try to outdo them just a little more. Genius?3)That off-site SEO plays a relatively small role in the highest rankings, eventhough onsite SEO is worthy of detailed attention.After listening to about two and a half lectures on SEO this quarter, this tutorial actually gave me a much more definitive step-by-step process to follow than the previous ones. You wrote with authority and I’m going to hold you accountable for the knowledge you’ve shared with me when I attempt to employ it on a site. You’re tutorial is something for any of us to keep on hand for the futureWhat I found most helpful in reading your tutorial is that you spent more time explaining what to do rather than why to do it- thank you! You did not engage in any lofty debates or asides that I think would have been over my head at this point. I actually preferred reading it in its PDF format. The graphics you used were very clear and matched the text as I expected them to. Including a “What we have learned so far” summary was a great idea; it helped me feel confident that I hadn’t missed something.It was a lengthy document and I’m sure you would have needed to spend a great deal of time formatting it over 32 pages. However, your formatting could have been improved for more visual organization. Some important points were missed or some lesser ones overstated because of your choice of font sizes and font colors. This tutorial is good enough to warrant some more time designing it as a cleaner presentation.Your hired! Unfortunately I can’t pay you until you go out and get me some rankings.Larry Fiedler