Develop an SEO strategy: Instructions in 3 steps

In online marketing, almost everything revolves around the right SEO strategy! Strategies form a set of rules on the basis of which marketing measures are taken. If you have an SEO strategy, you know how to carry out online marketing step by step. This is how you achieve your goals.

 

Marketing without a strategy harbors several risks. For example, there is a risk of taking measures at the wrong time, so that they fail to have the desired effect. Mistakes like these waste time and money.

 

As experts in search engine optimization, we at SEO-Agentur Specht GmbH are very familiar with the development of SEO strategies. We know how to develop customized concepts for companies and implement them step by step.

 

In the following step-by-step guide, we explain how you can develop a customized SEO strategy to boost your SEO success.

 

Create an SEO strategy: Basic info to get you started

"Strategy is defined as the fundamental, long-term behavior (combination of measures) of the company and relevant sub-areas towards their environment in order to achieve long-term goals."(Gillenkirch, 2024; in Gabler Wirtschaftslexikon)

 

This definition emphasizes an important aspect of strategies: the combination of measures. The individual components of an SEO strategy are the SEO measures. For the strategy to be successful, the SEO measures must be combined with each other. This creates a cohesive behavior that contributes to the achievement of your goals.

 

In SEO strategy development, it is important to combine the following individual measures:

 

Technical SEO (part of on-page SEO):

 

• Servers, infrastructures and hosting
• SSL certification
• Mobile optimization
• Loading time of the website
• Crawlability and indexing
• correct formatting
• error-free links
• speaking URLs

 

Onpage SEO:

 

• all aspects of technical SEO
• Keyword research, keyword analysis and keyword implementation
• Title tag and meta description
• Content creation
• Optimization of images, videos and other media formats if necessary
• Duplicate content and canonical tags
• URL structures
• internal link building

 

Offpage SEO:

 

• Creation and optimization of a Google company profile (formerly: Google my Business)
• External link building in industry directories, forums, press releases, online magazines and other sources if necessary
• Local Citations
• Social Signals

 

Any other SEO measures are disregarded at this point. These elementary areas of search engine optimization alone make it clear what a comprehensive task you are facing if you want to develop an SEO strategy.

 

In order to increase the visibility of the website and generate more organic traffic, comprehensive packages of measures are required. The individual measures must complement each other as part of an SEO strategy.

 

On the one hand, the combination of measures is important in order to exploit the synergistic effects of the measures with each other. For example, optimizing the website through on-page SEO has a positive effect on the visibility of the company profile, which is actually part of off-page SEO. In this example, on-page SEO and off-page SEO complement each other synergistically, which is more conducive to achieving your goals.

 

On the other hand, the combination of measures is important because some measures are directly related. For example, if you choose keywords that do not match the target group or that are too competitive, you will find it difficult to build backlinks. In order to prevent negative effects from one area of SEO on another area of SEO, a coherent and well thought-out SEO strategy is required.

 

We've come this far: if you want to be at the top of Google, you need an SEO strategy. Within this strategy, all individual SEO measures must be combined into a functioning whole. An SEO strategy essentially consists of three elements: Technical SEO, on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

 

In the following three steps, you will learn how to combine these three elements into your individual SEO strategy.

 

 

Step 1: Research and analysis of keywords

Although technical SEO measures are of fundamental importance and help to ensure that you have a technically flawless website on which you can carry out your entire strategic search engine optimization, technical measures are not the first priority. First and foremost, it is important to develop a keyword strategy.

 

The importance of keywords in search engine optimization is still immense. Although search engine algorithms no longer weight keywords as heavily and consistently punish excessive practices such as keyword stuffing, this has not changed the relevance of keywords.

 

For you the keyword research and keyword analysis are important for you when developing an SEO strategy because they help you to find topics and terms that are relevant to your target group:

 

• Potential customers actively search for products or services using specific search terms. By identifying these search terms and providing content for them, you increase the likelihood that your clientele will find you on the Internet.
• There is at least one intention behind every keyword: Do users want information (informal keyword)? Do users want to buy a product or service (transactional keyword)? Are users looking for a local offer and want to be navigated (mix of transactional and navigational keyword)?
• When developing a keyword strategy, the aim is to create helpful content. This should be adapted to the user's search intention. By selecting keywords (informal, navigational, transactional, local), you have the opportunity to choose keywords with intentions that promote the achievement of your goals.

 

Let's assume that you are pursuing the goal of more sales. Now you select keywords that match the sales intention, i.e. transactional keywords. You create web pages with content for these keywords, mostly product pages and special landing pages for your ads. Is this the right approach?

 

Not quite. The problem is that this keyword and content strategy only reaches users who have the intention to buy. As you have competitors on the web, you don't even reach all of these users. It is therefore important for you to also reach users without the intention to buy. Even if they don't buy on your website straight away, they will at least generate more traffic and help grow your brand awareness.

 

In order to reach as many users as possible, we will now give you tips on how you can use the entire marketing funnel in your keyword research and analysis as well as in your entire keyword and content strategy.

 

Keyword and content strategy for the entire marketing funnel

 

"With a funnel (The aim of a funnel is to turn a prospective customer into a valuable customer by passing through several touchpoints in order to carry out a certain action at the end, e.g. complete an order." (Author unknown, 2024 on onlinemarketing.de)

 

Informal keywords have the advantage that you can use them to expand your target group. Instead of only offering helpful content to users with the intention to buy, as is the case with transactional keywords, you can also reach interested parties with the help of informal keywords.

 

Prospects are characterized by the fact that they are interested in the basic topic of your website, but do not necessarily have the intention to buy.

 

By offering users not only sales-promoting content, but also informative content, you cover the topic of your website more broadly and reach more people. These people may not all be interested in buying your goods or services, but what is not can still be...

 

Informative content helps users to remember your website or brand positively. They may visit the website again, generating more organic traffic and increasing your visibility. This in turn increases the likelihood of even more website visitors.

 

At some point, or perhaps even on their first visit to your website, some of the users decide to buy from you without intending to buy. Goal achieved!

 

 

When researching and analyzing keywords and developing a keyword and content strategy, the focus should not only be on transactional keywords. As the graphic shows, the start of a sales funnel is all about attracting the attention of the masses. You do this by selecting a number of different keywords.

 

If it suits your company, your website, your offer and your goals, you should give preference to a broad diversification of keywords. We recommend covering informal, transactional and local keywords wherever possible.

 

By providing content on various types of keywords, you cover the needs of all interested parties - regardless of which phase of the marketing funnel they are in. Our final recommendations for keyword selection are based on this and the other findings from this first step of strategy development.

 

Select keywords: Concrete recommendations for action and example

 

1. Choose keywords in line with the goals and offers of your company, your target group and your website.
2. Cover as many keyword types as possible to provide users with suitable content for each phase of the marketing funnel.
3. Use powerful SEO tools such as Ahrefs and Sistrix as well as the tools provided by Google (e.g. Keyword Planner) for keyword analysis.
4. First of all, choose the keywords you need to create your homepage and all subpages of your website (e.g. product pages).
5. Supplement your keyword set and your content plan with informative blog and glossary articles on informal keywords.
6. Initially, choose keywords that tend to have a high search volume with the lowest possible level of competition.
7. The more visibility and authority your website gains, the more you can switch to keywords with high search volumes and lots of competition.

 

To go into the last key points in more detail using an example: Let's assume you have a service offering for the whole of Munich, such as "Roofer Munich".

 

With a completely new website, it will be difficult to achieve good rankings for a page with this main keyword given the high level of competition. Nevertheless, since it is the only main keyword that makes sense for your homepage, create a homepage with the main keyword "roofer Munich".

 

To push your homepage and quickly gain visibility with other pages, create subpages for narrowly defined catchment areas . Use the keyword "roofer Munich [district]". In this way, you build up subpages and content for different parts of Munich, making it easier for you to achieve good rankings than is the case with "roofer Munich".

 

You also create informative content in a blog. The blog allows you to create advice pages and demonstrate your expertise as a roofer. In connection with the created service and blog pages, not only the main keywords are important, but also secondary keywords - especially the long-tail keywords.

 

Powerful SEO tools such as Ahrefs and Sistrix show you long-tail keywords that you should also include in the text. You can also use keyword tools such as SurferSEO, Termlabs and the free WDF*IDF tool to analyze relevant terms for the main keyword. You can also include these on your pages.

 

Step 2: On-page SEO through technical measures and keyword-optimized content

As soon as you have decided on a keyword set that matches your business goals, your offers and your target group, you can consistently work through your on-page SEO from the basics to the details. The following SEO measures will first and foremost create a technically solid basis with a high level of usability:

 

1. Choose a well-known hosting provider (e.g. STRATO, WordPress) to ensure high quality and reliability. Also opt for a hosting package with sufficient storage capacity. Smaller packages are usually sufficient, but if you store a lot of images and videos in your content management system (CMS), you will need more storage capacity.
2. Choose a domain name that matches your company, your offers or other features of your website. A strong domain name increases SEO relevance and is rewarded by search engines. Also make sure that your domain has an SSL certificate, as this is a very important ranking factor for search engines.
3. Use a template that contains as many important functions for your web design as possible - otherwise you will have to use a lot of plugins, which will have a negative impact on page speed - and is responsive. The latter means that the web design should automatically adapt to mobile devices.
4. Develop a meaningful menu structure that includes the main keywords of the subpages. The menu structure should reflect the hierarchies and relationships of the keywords and the associated content. Also set up an XML sitemap, as this will help you to easily explain the structure of your website to search engine crawlers. You can also define rules for crawling and indexing pages in the sitemap.
5. Fix errors such as broken links or 404 messages by removing the links or setting up redirects. Non-functioning links have a negative effect on search engine optimization.

 

Helpful tools for technical on-page SEO are the Google Search Console, Google Analytics and Google PageSpeed Insights. However, on-page SEO is far from complete with the measures described above. A significant part of further on-page SEO revolves around the creation of new content and the creation of new pages.

 

 

Speaking URLs have several advantages for your SEO strategy!

The URLs are closely linked to the keyword strategy, menu structure and crawlability. These are addresses that users use to navigate to your website and the associated subpages. Search engines also register these addresses in the course of crawling.

 

The use of descriptive URLs is desirable. An example of such a URL is: www.beispiel-schuhshop.de/anzugschuhe/loafer. This URL shows that our example shoe store has the category "Suit shoes" and below it the product or shoe type "Loafer". Speaking URLs like this have several advantages:

 

• Integration of main keywords in the URLs to increase thematic relevance
• Insight into the website structure, as a new hierarchy level of the menu begins after each slash "/"
• Optimized crawling for search engines and possibly better orientation for users

 

Title tags are one of the central elements of a keyword strategy!

Another technical SEO measure is the integration of keywords in the title tags.

 

Title tags (also known colloquially as "meta titles") are page titles to which search engines attach great importance. In addition, title tags are displayed very prominently and large in the search result snippets, which is why they are also a conversion-promoting aspect.

 

You should always make title tags part of your SEO strategy, as they also influence your off-page SEO to a certain extent by appearing in the search results snippets. Furthermore, they are just as important or even less important for search engines than the main headings of your pages.

 

• Always use the main keyword in the title tags.
• The meta descriptions, which are displayed below the title tags in the search result snippets, play a subordinate role in the SEO strategy. In these descriptions, simply try to include the main keyword and a few secondary keywords.
• The functions for inserting title tags and meta descriptions are provided in your CMS system.

 

New content with correct formatting and high information density

Last but not least, the correct formatting of content must be observed in on-page SEO. Main headings (H1) and subheadings (H2, H3 etc.), bold (b), bulleted lists (ol or ul) and other formatting should be set correctly with an opening and closing tag.

 

Otherwise, they cannot be read by search engines and are displayed incorrectly for users, which worsens the visual impression of the website.

 

Now we come to content marketing, which is essential for SEO success: as soon as you have implemented the optimizations mentioned so far, you optimize your existing website content and also create new SEO content.

 

When adding new SEO content to your website , always ensure that you adhere to the aforementioned qualitative principles of on-page SEO , including the use of descriptive URLs, keyword integration in title tags and correct formatting.

 

When you create new content, always make sure that the main keyword, secondary keywords and any other terms you analyze using tools such as Termlabs or WDF*IDF are integrated naturally. Natural keyword integration means that your texts sound as if they were written for humans.

 

Keyword stuffing is consistently penalized nowadays, which is why you do not necessarily have to integrate the main keyword and secondary keywords as an exact match in your text, but can also use filler words or the respective keyword in a grammatically adapted variant. Also note the following tips when creating quality SEO content:

 

• Maintain a high information density: Don't repeat yourself several times, but try to offer users new added value with every sentence.
• Break up your texts by using subheadings, regular new paragraphs (every 3-5 sentences), tables, bulleted lists and bold formatting.
• Formulate particularly important content briefly and precisely with sentences of a maximum of 10-12 words to get a chance of a featured snippet or placement in Google's question box.
• Also consider long-tail keywords in your SEO content strategy. These are made up of at least 3 words, are usually very specific and are associated with a lower level of competition. Create subpages to promote your organic traffic.
• Cover every phase of the marketing funnel with your content.

 

To attract interested parties to the top of the funnel, it is worth creating a glossary with definitions of terms. Blog posts are also well suited for the upper area of the funnel and also for the middle area: Here you cover either very general (upper funnel area) or more specific topics (middle funnel area).

 

Finally, the money pages with a focus on transactional keywords serve to provide the right content to users who have decided to buy. Objection handling plays an important role in connection with money pages. Think about what objections users might have to your offers and provide appropriate content for this.

 

The Money pages can also be pushed by advertisements. Ads increase your visibility temporarily and are suitable for supplementing your SEO strategy. Ads for Money pages increase your sales figures and generate revenue.

 

Step 3: Keyword-oriented off-page SEO with link building and company profile

For website operators who have a company, institute or other organization with a local branch, it is important to create a Google business profile. The Google business profile used to be called "Google my Business", but has since been renamed - the principle remains the same:

 

• Company profiles are displayed at the top of Google's search results in the "Companies" feature. A Google Maps section and a list of company profiles appear there.
• The company profiles increase local visibility strongly and quickly; the effects of Google my Business SEO occur far more quickly than the effects of other SEO measures.
• A placement in the Local Pack is coveted - this refers to the first three places in the Google Maps ranking.

 

In our blog post "Improve Google Maps ranking", we went into detail about setting up and optimizing a Google company profile. At this point, we would like to refer you to this blog post instead and not go into more detail about the company profile. You can seamlessly apply the instructions from our blog post on Google Maps ranking to the development of your SEO strategy.

 

You use the keyword set selected for your SEO strategy for your company profile. When building the backlinks that are important for your website authority, you should also be guided by your keyword and content strategy. Generate backlinks that match your target group, your goals, your products or services and the other content on your website.

 

In any case, the link building is the most important component of off-page SEO. Google itself acknowledges that content and backlinks are the most important ranking factors. A strong backlink profile is therefore a key competitive advantage for companies. This is how you should gradually build up backlinks:

 

1. For non-authoritative websites with few to no backlinks, start by building links in business directories, forums and press releases.
2. If your website already has some of the backlinks from the first step or is very authoritative, you can carry out link building via guest posts in online magazines, for example.
3. Another component of the SEO strategy is social signals, i.e. links from social media posts to your website.
4. Local citations - i.e. mentions of your website, your company and/or your offers with a local reference - are also part of off-page SEO.

 

Building up local citations yourself is a complicated topic and usually cannot be influenced directly. For this reason, the first three key points mentioned above and the Google company profile are crucial for your off-page SEO.

 

If your website is particularly strong, you can analyze the link profile of your competitors. After analyzing the competition, copy the links of your competitors by contacting their link providers and generating a backlink from them as well (e.g. through guest posts or link purchases).

 

You can also build more backlinks by following the example of your competitors and contacting other potential link providers.

 

The importance of coordinating the individual measures in search engine optimization can be seen in the following example: If you also take local keywords into account when selecting keywords, you can not only create subpages for these, but also use them to promote your visibility on Google Maps.

 

You can also obtain backlinks from more local online magazines. Here again, the synergistic effects of a holistic SEO strategy are noticeable.

 

However, if you limit yourself to general transactional keywords, you will provide yourself with a weak template for building a high-reach Google company profile and an even weaker template for link building.

 

Conclusion and further information on the SEO strategy

In order to develop a well thought-out SEO strategy and promote individual SEO success in the best possible way, you need a keyword set. You create subpages on your website for this keyword set. These should be both informative and transactional pages in order to reach a wide range of interested parties.

 

For keyword research and analysis, it is best to use a mix of powerful tools. Examples include Ahrefs, Sistrix, the Google Keyword Planner and Termlabs. Expand your website and optimize it technically to achieve a high level of attractiveness for users and search engines.

 

In addition to content creation and content optimization as well as other SEO measures on your website, you also carry out optimizations outside of your website. Link building and - if you have a local branch - the Google company profile should play a major role in your SEO efforts.

 

Even though the three-step guide on this page provides a holistic and professional view of SEO strategy development, there are also different concepts for creating SEO strategies. Classic funnel marketing is not the only solution for customers from certain industries or for companies above a certain size.

 

Linear marketing - from the top of the funnel to the bottom - is not always the best recipe for top positions on Google and co. For large companies, it is more important to create a high number of customer touchpoints and strengthen brand awareness and website authority when developing an SEO strategy.

 

If you want to develop an SEO strategy, our professional SEO agency is the right place for you. We offer you a professional SEO audit in which we put together a customized package of measures based on analyses of your website and your goals.

 

Contact us and we will be happy to support you individually if you would like to delegate the creation of an SEO strategy and, if necessary, its implementation to a professional partner!