1. Always start with an audit of your own website.

If a company website already exists, it is essential to understand the starting point by running a website audit.

How is the site positioned right now? Which factors affect its positioning?

This step serves to quickly identify what works on the site and what needs to be changed (the critical issues), which content to refine and how.

The SEO audit carried out on the site should focus on the technical side, meaning the analysis of the structural elements of the site (HTML code, link network…) that support bot crawling, and on the content and its SEO suitability.

2. Set your goals and KPIs for the SEO strategy.

A good SEO strategy can aim at very different goals.

For example, it can focus on the need to increase contacts, or traffic to your site.

Not only that: climbing the SERP for a set of keywords or maximising the conversion of visitors into leads are other valid goals.

The key thing is to know where you want to get to and to identify the KPIs related to this goal, that is, the performance indicators.

The main indicators to consider in an SEO strategy are ROI, that is the return on investment, conversions, organic visibility, organic sessions, keyword positioning, backlinks and the average time spent on the page.

3. Analyse your target audience to research the right keywords…

Choosing the right keywords is an important part of a successful SEO strategy.

However, finding the perfect keywords involves a previous step:target audience analysis.

In fact, you need to identify what the ideal customer thinks, which problems and needs they have and how they might look for a solution to them.

Which questions or phrases do they use in search engines?

Starting from the demographic analysis of the target audience and defining it in ever greater detail, it will be possible to understand which keywords to use, and not only that.

4. … and the topics to cover!

Knowing who you want to reach is also important to offer interesting content more easily.

This is because knowing the needs and desires of the audience makes it possible to align with their requirements, increasing the number of visits and also the ranking on search engines.

This is because a good SEO strategy also depends on the reputation that search engines attribute to a site, based on user behaviour.

In particular, data such as the time spent on the site and the interaction with links are taken into account. These confirm the match between the content offered and the user query.

5. Study the competition to understand where and how to outperform it.

The competitors are a constant source of inspiration.

Studying them makes it possible to understand how the professionals in the relevant sector operate, which keywords they rank for (and what kind) and the level of user experience they offer their customers, including potential ones.

For example, when it comes to user experience, a detailed analysis of the competitors’ websites makes it possible to understand the experience of a potential client, the link buildingstrategy, the communication and positioning one, but also to identify gaps that can be filled to offer a similar or, why not, better experience.

Once you have identified the competition, its strengths and weaknesses, having carefully studied the target audience and your own starting point, you can begin to create content to leverage for your SEO strategy.

6. Create content that can attract (and keep!) the target audience…

The content of a site is essential, the very backbone of an SEO strategy.

By content we mean the texts (SEO Copywriting), which must be designed to be easily read by search engine bots, but also to be able to respond to the needs of users.

There are some rules to follow, for example the distribution of keywords must be well thought out, dense but not excessive and without risks of self-cannibalisation.

Titles, subtitles, keywords and the most important concepts in bold are equally important, as is the inclusion of the meta description, SEO title, meta tags and keywords in the accompanying graphic content too. These are the elements of on-page SEO, in particular.

These, together with other elements, are also important to make reading easier for the user, who must be able to understand the text easily and scroll through it with ease.

Moreover, quality is more important than quantity, but bearing in mind that a text under 350 words (roughly) will not be enough for Google.

7. …also designed to offer a great user experience.

The best text, with all the titles and subtitles well set up and the best images and infographics, is not enough if the user experience is poor.

For this reason, a good SEO strategy must also take into account the simplicity of the site, designed to help users navigate it intuitively, including on mobile and with an excellent loading speed.

8. Without forgetting internal links and backlinks, both essential in every SEO strategy.

The backlinking is a part of the SEO strategy that consists of building a network of inbound links coming from other websites into the site you aim to optimise.

If these links come from reliable sources, they are able to increase the authority of a site for Google.

The parameters used by Google to decide whether a link is authoritative or not are unclear and changeable, but they certainly include: popularity, relevance and prestige of the source site, geographic and content relevance.

Internal links within the site are important too. These have the function of connecting several internal pieces of content to one another or an internal piece of content with an external, authoritative link.

The internal ones allow Google bots to move within the site, jumping from one page to another through them.

In fact, if the crawl is not made complex or impossible by the structure of the site, Google tends to reward it with a climb up the SERP.

To optimise the SEO strategy as much as possible, it is also important to crawl the site frequently to check whether there are any broken links.

9. It is important to keep an eye on new trends and optimisation opportunities.

Once you have created a site with a good on page SEO and off page SEOstrategy, the work is not over.

In fact, it is important to pay attention to the results you are obtaining, in relation to the predetermined KPIs.

There are many tools that can help to monitor the success of an SEO strategy, creating periodic reports on the positioning of the predetermined keywords (which may also need to be updated, every now and then!) and on the progress made over time.

Detailed reports on SEO performance are essential to help companies and professionals continuously improve the strategy, for example by understanding which content works and which does not, which keywords are able to really attract organic traffic and rank the site well and which instead are a waste of time, and not only that.

Moreover, to write or optimise content for a website you also need to pay attention to new trends and to Google updates.

A good positioning in the SERPs comes from a good rating by the Google algorithm, and this is updated periodically.

For this reason, the SEO strategy and the way content is written must be able to adjust to the new features introduced, to be flexible.