Why SEO should start with strategy, planning? | CodewithHarsh

 Why SEO should start with strategy and planning? with CodewithHarsh

Want to avoid spending a lot of time, resources, and energy on SEO with no results? Then you need an SEO strategy and plan.

Disciplined thinking and focus are required to get the desired results.

If you dive into the weeds too early, you may find that hours or days have passed and you've spent time in areas that may not have any real impact in the end.

While agility is important in SEO on an ongoing basis, it is equally important to have a solid strategy and plan in advance.

SEO Planning

A strategy and plan with a clear direction and baseline allows for:-

• Meaningful objectives have to be set.
• Management is expected.
• Adjustments have to be made along the way.
• It's important to be both proactive and reactive (within a moment), whether you're working for yourself, your boss, or your customers.

Goal Setting with CodewithHarsh

"What is your aim?"

This is the first question you should ask when someone reaches out for SEO support.

define them. document them.

Knowing what you need SEO to produce is important. Goals are an important filter for all strategic and tactical planning.

Goals can be:-

• E-commerce sales.
• Lead.
• Pageview.
• The specific type of engagement.
• Some other conversion or metric.
• When you don't know what the end goals are - and how to reach them - you can waste a lot of time and resources guessing or swimming from SEO strategy to strategy.

Define Target Audience with CodewithHarsh

you are trying to reach and how they search and behave online.

Once you've done that, you can map out conversion paths, funnels, and ways to target and engage them.

In addition to knowing who you want to reach, it's also important to know the size of the net you're pouring.

Target Audience

Sometimes, the goals may be too big for the opportunity presented by SEO. Reaching a certain audience can be very ambitious. Or maybe the competition is too great to get meaningful results.

Keyword research tools, industry/market research, and sources from your industry can help you research and define your target audience as well as personality development.

Competitive Research with CodewithHarsh

When you know who your audience is and which topics and keywords match your conversion goals, you have a narrower competitive landscape to review.

Get an in-depth look at who owns SERP real estate for the terms and topics you want to drive traffic to your site.

Use SEO tools to identify, set up monitoring, and ongoing planning to track down competitors. This will give you a reference point and can help you understand why they are ranking.

KPI Definition with CodewithHarsh

Goals and KPIs are not the same. Yes, you can have a single KPI tied to an end goal, but you can measure multiple data points that may be closer to or farther from a conversion goal.

Don't get into your action plan before defining important KPIs based on your goals, target audience, and funnel.

While average position and impressions may not be close to the end goal of a lead submission or e-commerce transaction, they are essential to get there.

Important Define all KPIs. Emphasize and prioritize those that will be indicators and progress metrics versus those directly tied to end goals.

Be consistent with them and map them out beforehand.

Baseline and Benchmark with CodewithHarsh

It's important to understand your current performance, using what you know about the audience, competitors, and KPIs that are important to you.

You want to objectively measure the return on investment and the outcome of your efforts over time.

Now is the time to capture your own performance baselines and benchmarks of how they stack up against the industry. Plus, we can compare them to our end goals and see how far we need to go.

Baseline and Benchmark

It can range from visibility to ranking and average position to impressions to visits and conversions. There are engagement metrics that you can view as well as see how visitors are progressing through a defined funnel.

To get this data, you can use SEO tools or Google Analytics benchmarking reports.

Be sure to document benchmarks. These metrics will become your baseline and define your starting point so that you can further evaluate your efforts at meaningful intervals.

Reporting Setup with CodewtihHarsh

Now is the time to set up your reporting infrastructure. Whether you're configuring Google Analytics as your data source, leveraging Google Data Studio, or using third-party software, you want to get everything done right now.

Don't wait until you stop and run. In many cases, if you don't have clean data, filters, and segments, you can go into details later.

Build Authority Online to Stay Ahead of Your Competitors with CodewithHarsh

When everyone is online, the competition is fierce. And there is no sign of digital marketing losing traction anytime soon. As Google's search engine becomes the new yellow page, it's important to have a spot on the top page. But getting to page #1 is only the beginning. You also need the right procedures to be there.

Over the years, the more SEO work you do, the more Google will see that your website is leading your key search terms and therefore will happily keep your ranking high. Therefore, no matter what other businesses are within your industry, you will be able to stand out from the rest by being consistently on the first page.

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