Feeling overwhelmed by SEO? As a marketing director with a small team, you’ve got a lot on your plate. SEO can feel like a confusing mess of tasks and technical terms, making it hard to know where to start or if your work is even paying off. You want results, but the path to getting there feels unclear.
But here’s the good news: you don’t need to know everything about SEO to make a difference. The trick is to focus on a few key areas that really matter. Therefore, by concentrating on these important steps, you can simplify your strategy, lower your stress, and see real results without overwhelming your team.
In this post, we’ll break down the essential SEO processes that will help you take control and make smart decisions. We’ll start by talking about prioritizing your SEO efforts through an SEO audit to identify quick wins and critical issues. Next, we’ll dive into keyword research, on-page SEO, and technical SEO—focusing on the most impactful elements to boost your site’s performance. We’ll also cover content creation, link building, and how to measure your success to ensure you’re on the right track.
By integrating these SEO tactics within a well-defined digital marketing strategy, you can enhance your online visibility and engagement effectively.
Prioritizing Your SEO Efforts: Where to Start
In a perfect world, you’d have a large team dedicated to every aspect of your SEO strategy—content creation, technical fixes, keyword research, and more. I wrote about all the SEO roles you’d need to execute SEO to the fullest. But in reality, you’re managing with limited resources, so you need to make every effort count. This means being strategic about where you focus. Instead of trying to do it all, it’s better to zero in on the activities that will have the biggest impact.
Conducting an SEO Audit: The Quickest Way to Identify Priorities
Start with an SEO audit. It’s the quickest way to see where your website stands and what to focus on first. An audit is like a check-up for your site, showing what’s working, what needs fixing, and where you can improve.
Tools like Google Search Console, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Sitebulb, and Screaming Frog help you identify quick fixes, technical problems, content gaps, and keyword opportunities. Keyword research tools like Ahrefs and Moz are essential for identifying relevant keywords that can drive traffic to your website and for effective keyword prioritization based on search demand and competition.
Remember, an SEO audit isn’t just about finding problems; it’s about setting a clear path forward so you know where to focus your time and energy. As of today, that still requires an experienced SEO to translate.
Creating a Prioritization Framework
After your audit, create an SEO plan to prioritize tasks. Start with quick wins—simple changes that can deliver fast results, like fixing broken links or optimizing high-traffic pages. Don’t worry about the headlines you see on the internet. You’re a scrappy team and need to build momentum ASAP.
Next, address critical SEO issues that might be holding your site back, such as slow page load times or major content gaps. Fixing these ensures you’re focusing on what’s most important.
Finally, consider your long-term marketing goals. SEO isn’t just about quick fixes; it’s about building a solid foundation for the future with ongoing content creation, link building, and regular updates.
Look into prioritization frameworks such as the RICE scoring model or impact vs effort matrix to help you.
Implement a Phased Approach
Now, create your SEO roadmap. This will guide your team through each phase of your SEO plan, helping you use resources wisely and set realistic timelines.
Start with the quick wins for immediate results, then move on to fixing critical issues. Finally, focus on long-term tasks to keep your SEO strategy strong.
Taking it step by step helps you manage your workload, keep your SEO plan on track, and achieve real results without feeling overwhelmed.
Doing Keyword Research: Know What Your Audience Is Searching For
Don’t let headlines about keywords becoming less important distract you. Keywords are the foundation of SEO, and keyword research tools are essential in understanding what your audience is searching for. They connect your content with what your audience is searching for, helping you reach the right people at the right time. By understanding and using the right keywords, you can ensure your content aligns with user intent, making it easier for search engines to match your pages with relevant searches. Your goal at this stage in the process is to learn what your audience is seeking that is relevant to what you offer.
How to Do Keyword Research
Effective keyword research helps you uncover the terms and phrases your target audience is using to find your company. Here’s how to get started:
- Use the Right Keyword Research Tools: Start with keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or SEMrush. These tools provide valuable insights into search volumes, keyword difficulty, and related terms. DO NOT worry about data accuracy here. These tools will help you learn what keywords are searched more than others.
- Identify Relevant Keywords: Look for keywords that are relevant to your industry, and company offerings and resonate with your audience. Focus on a mix of broad and specific terms to cover different aspects of your content.
- Analyze Search Intent: Consider what the user is trying to achieve with their search. Are they looking for information, a product, or a service? Understanding intent helps you choose keywords that match your content’s purpose.
- Group Keywords: This helps you digest the thousands of keywords down to topics and themes you’ll be able to wrap your head around. A lot of SEO tools and LLM AI tools are simplifying this process.
Prioritizing Keywords for Quick Wins
Not all keywords are created equal. Some are easier to rank for and can bring in more targeted traffic. To prioritize:
- Focus on Long-Tail Keywords: These are longer, more specific phrases that are less competitive and easier to rank for. For example, instead of targeting “shoes,” you might target “best running shoes for women.” This is critical if you’re a smaller player in your space.
- Identify High-Intent Keywords: These are keywords that indicate a user is ready to take action, such as “buy,” “best,” or “discount.” High-intent keywords often lead to higher conversion rates.
If you can find keywords that fulfill both, that’s a goldmine. You’ll achieve quicker results and drive more qualified SEO traffic to your site.
Implementing Your Keyword Strategy
Once you’ve identified your keywords, it’s time to integrate them into your content:
- Create a Keyword Map: Organize your keywords by mapping them to specific pages on your website. This ensures each page is optimized for the right terms and helps avoid keyword cannibalization, where multiple pages compete for the same keyword. This will also help you identify content gaps.
- Integrate Keywords Naturally: Avoid keyword stuffing, which can harm your rankings. In other words, don’t spam keywords. Instead, use keywords as naturally as you can within your content, including in headings, subheadings, meta descriptions, and throughout the body text. There are more advanced on-page SEO techniques, but don’t worry about that for now.
By following this approach, you’ll ensure your content is both user-friendly and optimized for search engines, leading to better visibility and higher rankings.
On-Page SEO: Focusing on the Essentials
On-page SEO directly impacts your rankings and how users engage with your content. Search engines look at various on-page factors to determine the relevance and quality of your content. Well-optimized pages not only rank higher but also keep visitors engaged, leading to better user satisfaction and higher conversion rates.
Strategically placing keyword phrases on a web page can significantly enhance search engine ranking. The prominence of keywords, such as positioning at the beginning of the first paragraph and using formatting techniques like larger font sizes and bolding, can impact the ranking of the page.
Remember, you have TWO audiences to optimize for: search engines and people.
Key Elements of On-Page SEO
To get the most out of your SEO team’s on-page SEO efforts, focus on these key elements:
- Title Tags: Craft compelling, attention-grabbing, keyword-rich titles. It’s harder than it looks. Your title tag is one of the first things both users and search engines see, so it should clearly convey the content of your page while incorporating relevant keywords. Optimizing title tags is crucial as they impact the ranking of web pages by signaling their relevance to search engines.
- Meta Descriptions: Write descriptions that drive clicks. While meta descriptions don’t directly impact rankings, they influence click-through rates. A well-written meta description should be persuasive, concise, and include your target keywords.
- Headers: Structure your content with proper heading tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.). Headers help organize your content, making it easier for users to navigate and for search engines to understand the hierarchy and key points of your page.
- Content Optimization: Balance keyword usage with content quality. Your content should be informative and valuable to the reader while naturally incorporating keywords. Overloading your content with keywords can harm your rankings, so focus on quality and relevance.
Best Practices for On-Page Optimization
To ensure your on-page SEO is effective, follow these best practices:
- Use Keywords Strategically: Place your primary keyword in key areas like the title tag, first paragraph, headers, and throughout the content. However, avoid keyword stuffing—use keywords naturally and in context.
- Make Content Easy to Read: Ensure your content is skimmable by using short paragraphs, bullet points, and clear subheadings. This improves readability and keeps users engaged.
- Optimize for Mobile: With more users accessing websites on mobile devices, ensure your pages are mobile-friendly. Responsive design and fast load times are crucial for both user experience and SEO.
Implementing On-Page SEO
To effectively manage on-page SEO, make sure your SEO team or SEO agency consider the following steps:
- Create an On-Page SEO Checklist: Develop a checklist that covers all the essential elements—title tags, meta descriptions, headers, content optimization, and more. This ensures consistency across your site.
- Conduct Regular Audits: SEO is not a one-time task. Use your initial SEO audit to measure your progress. No matter how strong your SEO team is, this inevitably happens. Regularly audit your pages to ensure they remain optimized. This includes checking for broken links, outdated content, and opportunities to improve keyword usage.
Simplifying Technical SEO: Let Google See and Save Your Content
Search engines favor well-optimized sites, so taking care of technical SEO is essential if you want your site to show up in search results and keep visitors happy.
Implementing technical SEO practices can significantly enhance rankings in organic search results by ensuring that your site is easily indexed and crawled by search engines.
However, it’s important to note that technical SEO alone won’t typically drive obvious SEO results unless there’s something very wrong with how your site is indexed or crawled.
Key Technical SEO Areas to Focus On
To keep things simple, focus on these important parts of technical SEO:
- Site Speed: A fast website keeps visitors happy and helps your search rankings. The faster the site, the quicker search engines can find all your content. It also correlates with conversion rates. If your site takes too long to load, people might leave before it even finishes. Your dev team will often be focused on this as well. For search engine optimization, what you want to avoid is being the slowest of your peers.
- Mobile-Friendliness: A mobile-friendly site adjusts to different screen sizes, making sure everyone has a good experience, whether they’re on a phone, tablet, or computer.
- Crawlability: Crawlability is about making sure search engines can easily find your site’s content. If search engines can’t crawl your site, your pages might not show up in search results. Fixing broken links, creating a clear site structure, and submitting a sitemap can help improve crawlability.
- Indexability: Indexability is ensuring that search engines can actually save your site’s pages to be ranked in their search results. If your pages aren’t being indexed, they won’t appear in search results at all. This can be due to issues like improper use of robots.txt, noindex tags, or problems with your sitemap.
Graphic Designer
- How: Creates visually appealing and SEO-friendly graphics.
- What: Designs images, infographics, and other visual content that support SEO strategies.
- Where: Across all visual content platforms.
- Likelihood of Separate Hire: Moderate.
- Alternative Role: UX/UI Designer
- With SEO training, a Multimedia Specialist can create visually appealing content that supports SEO strategies and engages users.
Tools to Help with Technical SEO
You don’t have to do all of this on your own—there are free tools to help:
- Google Chrome Lighthouse: This tool checks how fast your site loads and gives you tips on how to make it faster. It also shows how well your site works on mobile devices and offers advice on how to improve it.
- Google Search Console: This tool helps you monitor your site’s performance in search results. It can also alert you to crawl errors, security issues, and other problems that might affect your site’s performance.
There are more advanced SEO tools, like Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, and Ahrefs, that go far more in-depth, but that’s for your SEO team to get comfortable with. You should not be involved in those tools as the marketing leader.
Fixing Technical SEO Issues
Once you’ve identified technical issues, it’s time to fix them:
- Start with the Big Stuff: Focus first on fixes that will have the biggest impact on your crawlability, indexability, and mobile friendliness. Can Google see all your most important content? Then, look at site speed and user experience.
- Work with Your IT Team: Some fixes might require more technical knowledge or access to your site’s backend. Work with your IT team or a technical SEO expert to make sure these changes are done right.
By focusing on these key areas and ensuring your site is indexable, crawlable, mobile-friendly, and not the slowest compared to your competitors, you can simplify technical SEO and keep your site competitive without breaking the bank.
Creating and Optimizing Content: Giving Users What They Want
Content is the heart of SEO. High-quality content gives your audience what they need—answers, solutions, and valuable information. When your content is helpful, people spend more time on your site, share it, and link back to it. All of this improves your SEO.
A well-defined SEO process is essential for enhancing a website’s visibility and efficiency in attracting organic traffic. This structured approach involves sequential steps, a detailed strategy, ongoing monitoring, and iterative improvements to achieve and maintain high search rankings.
Guess we notices that? Google.
They start ranking you for keywords you wrote content for. By including the right keywords, you tell search engines that your page is relevant to what people are searching for. But remember, it’s not just about cramming in keywords—it’s about making your content useful and interesting first and foremost.
Developing a Content Strategy
To create effective content, you need a plan that matches your SEO goals and connects with your audience:
- Pick Content Themes: Start by identifying the topics your audience cares about. What questions do they have? What problems are they trying to solve? Focus on themes that align with what they’re searching for and what you can offer. Point your team to perform keyword research around these themes.
- Make a Content Calendar: Plan your content with a calendar. From personal experience, this is an absolute must if you’re serious about creating content. This keeps you organized and ensures you’re consistently creating content that supports your SEO goals. Include topics, keywords, and deadlines to stay on track.
Writing SEO-Friendly Content
You can write content that ranks well without sacrificing quality. Here’s how:
- Use Keywords Naturally: Add your keywords in a way that feels natural. Place them in the title, headings, and early in the text, but don’t overdo it. The content should read smoothly and still be optimized for search.
- Include Related, Variation, and Supporting Keywords: Don’t allow your team to rely on the primary keyword. Search for related keywords, variations, and supporting terms to improve the topical relevance of your content. This is key for covering the topic fully and ranking better. Don’t assume your team knows all the relevant words—make sure they actively search for and incorporate these keywords as naturally as possible.
- Focus on Value and Engagement: Make sure your content is valuable to your readers. Answer their questions, solve their problems, and provide insights they can’t find elsewhere. Engaging content keeps readers on your page longer and encourages shares and backlinks.
Content Optimization and Refreshing
After publishing, keep your content fresh and optimized:
- Optimize Old Content: Review your older content and find ways to improve it. Add new keywords, update outdated info, improve readability, or enhance visuals. Optimization can boost the performance of content that’s losing ground.
- Update Content Regularly: Keep your content relevant by regularly updating it. Refresh statistics, refine your message, or expand on topics to reflect the latest trends. Times change and so should your content.
By focusing on creating and optimizing content, you ensure your site stays valuable to your audience and continues to rank well in search results.
Link Building: Earn Votes of Confidence
Backlinks are like votes of confidence from other websites. When reputable sites link to your content, it signals to search engines that your site is a reliable source of information. High-quality backlinks not only drive traffic to your site but also help improve your search rankings by establishing your site’s authority and trustworthiness.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing organic traffic and enhancing web visibility through various strategies, including link building.
Strategies for Acquiring High-Quality Backlinks
To build a strong backlink profile, focus on acquiring high-quality links through the following strategies, but not limited to:
- Guest Blogging on Industry-Relevant Sites: Writing guest posts for reputable websites in your industry is an effective way to earn backlinks. Choose sites that are relevant to your niche and have a strong domain authority. In your guest posts, include links back to your site where appropriate, ensuring they add value to the content. Be wary of sites that were created solely for guest post backlinks.
- Building Relationships with Influencers and Industry Leaders: Networking with influencers and thought leaders in your industry can lead to valuable backlinks. Engage with them on social media, participate in industry events, and collaborate on content. These relationships can result in natural backlinks from their websites or social media channels.
Avoiding Common Link Building Pitfalls
While building backlinks, it’s important to avoid common mistakes that can harm your SEO efforts:
- Steer Clear of Low-Quality, Spammy Backlinks: Not all backlinks are created equal. Links from low-quality or irrelevant sites can do more harm than good. Avoid purchasing backlinks or participating in link farms, as these practices can lead to penalties from search engines.
- Understand Google’s Guidelines on Link Schemes: Google has strict guidelines against unnatural link-building practices. Familiarize yourself with these guidelines to avoid penalties. Focus on earning backlinks organically through high-quality content and legitimate outreach.
Implementing a Sustainable Link Building Strategy
A sustainable link-building strategy focuses on long-term growth and maintaining the quality of your backlink profile:
- Create Link-Worthy Content: The best way to attract natural backlinks is to create content that others want to link to. This could be in-depth guides, original research, infographics, or any content that provides real value. The more valuable and shareable your content, the more likely it is to attract backlinks naturally.
- Regularly Monitor Your Backlink Profile: Keep an eye on your backlink profile to ensure the quality of your links. Use tools like Google Search Console or Ahrefs to monitor who’s linking to your site. If you spot any low-quality or spammy links, take steps to disavow them to protect your site’s reputation.
- Network for Partnerships and Link Opportunities: Networking is key to building strong partnerships that can lead to great link-building opportunities. Attend industry events, join relevant online communities, and participate in discussions where you can connect with like-minded professionals. These connections can result in valuable collaborations and natural backlinks from trusted sites.
By focusing on quality over quantity, building strong relationships, and consistently monitoring your backlinks, you can create a robust link-building strategy that enhances your site’s authority and improves your search engine rankings.
Measuring and Reporting on SEO Success
Simply put, measuring your SEO efforts shows you what’s effective and what isn’t. Tracking performance helps you make better decisions about where to focus your efforts. Over time, these insights let you tweak your strategy, improve your content, and get better results. Without measurement, you’re just guessing if your SEO is working.
Appearing on search engine results pages (SERPs) is crucial for SEO success, as it directly impacts your site’s visibility and the likelihood of attracting organic traffic.
Key SEO Metrics to Track
To understand how well your SEO is performing, focus on these key metrics:
- Organic Traffic: This metric shows how many visitors come to your site from search engines. Watching your organic traffic helps you see if your SEO efforts are bringing more people to your site. If organic traffic is growing, your SEO is likely working.
- SEO Revenue: This measures how much revenue is directly generated from your SEO efforts. Tracking SEO revenue helps you see the financial impact of your SEO strategy and whether it’s driving real business results.
- Search Market Share: This metric shows your site’s visibility compared to your competitors in search engine results. Increasing your search market share means more people are finding your site over others, indicating strong SEO performance.
For a deeper dive into more key SEO metrics to track, check out this post on SEO Metrics.
Tools for Tracking SEO Performance
Here are some free tools to get your team tracking and analyzing your SEO performance:
- Google Analytics: This tool gives you insights into your site’s traffic and how visitors behave. You can see where visitors come from, which pages they visit, and how long they stay. Google Analytics is key for understanding your audience and how they interact with your content.
- Google Search Console: This tool helps you monitor your site’s performance in search results. It provides data on your site’s visibility, click-through rates, and any issues that might hurt your SEO, like crawl errors or security problems.
Reporting to Stakeholders
Creating clear, simple reports is important for showing the impact of your SEO efforts to others:
- Show the Impact: Highlight how your SEO efforts are helping the business. Focus on improvements in organic traffic, SEO revenue, and other key metrics that matter most.
- Tailor Reports to Your Audience: Different stakeholders have different interests. Executives want to see high-level results like ROI, SEO revenue, and overall traffic growth. Team members may need more detailed insights into specific strategies and tactics. Customizing your reports ensures that everyone gets the information they need in a format that’s easy to understand.
By measuring your SEO performance and clearly communicating the results, you can make informed decisions, stay on track with your marketing goals, and demonstrate the value of your SEO efforts to the entire organization.
What’s Next
We’ve explored the essential SEO steps to help you streamline your strategy: conducting an SEO audit, focusing on keyword research, optimizing your pages, simplifying technical SEO, creating impactful content, building quality links, and tracking your progress.
Leading a small marketing team with limited resources, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by SEO. But by focusing on these key SEO areas, you can simplify the process and start seeing real results. Remember, you don’t need to do everything—just the things that will make the biggest impact. You’re doing great work, and every small step forward counts.
If you’re ready to make SEO even more manageable, we’re here to help. Check out our audit by clicking on the banner, or book a call. Let’s work together to make your SEO strategy as effective and stress-free as possible.
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