by Dr. William Sen | CEO and founder of blue media

SEO Strategy: What Every Manager Should Know

How to Create the Perfect SEO Marketing Strategy

It is important for SEO managers to have a formidable SEO Strategy to help stay on top of their campaigns or else projects don’t gain traction.

An SEO manager can set monthly or quarterly SEO Strategy Ideas for the company neatly entered into a spreadsheet. Organic SEO Strategy sounds simple but it involves the amalgamation of various tips and tricks to get your website up in the search engine rankings through a concerted effort by SEO experts and the company’s stakeholders. 

Difference between SEO Strategy and SEO Tactics

Tactics and strategy are not  interchangeable terms, and many SEO campaigns confuse SEO strategy with tactics. It’s an honest mistake by managers usually in a quandary about SEO strategy.

Typically, the SEO strategy is a long-term plan and more importantly works towards a specific goal. This can include a general idea of what needs to be done, without specific tasks to action on yet.

Tactics on the other hand are decisions to steer a specific campaign, for instance, getting your site ranking closer to the top in the eyes of Bing or Google. Tactics are action items like image optimization, backlink building or Meta Description optimization.

An SEO Strategy defines, describes, and presents the overall goal of a campaign while tactics are ways and methods of running campaigns. The strategic picture influences the specific tactics that you use.

Role of the SEO Strategy

Ideally, every campaign marketing and digital marketing effort ought to be in line with the goals and visions of the company. When a company sets its digital marketing goals, SEO strategies are necessary to reach those goals.

However, marketing campaigns are more thorough and practical. A digital campaign sets the bar high to tap into the trends by telling engaging stories and using various themes to capture the imagination of the audience.

Therefore, the company can integrate the SEO strategy when they launch a new product in the market with all channels working together holistically as part of the larger company goal or objective.

The objective may be to disseminate the information as much as possible and increase site visits.

Requirements for an SEO Strategy

• Strategy Awareness
  As much as most businesses understand how an underlying SEO strategy is vital for their growth, it is important to know where to start. Are the key decision makers aware of the company’s high-level strategy and the marketing strategy? The knowledge should be successfully transferred to the SEO company because they are able to define and create an SEO business strategy in compliance with all the other company goals. In addition to that, SEO strategies are dependent on the size of a company and the effective communication between departments.
• Demand
  An SEO Strategy can only be created when the company is strategy-driven and understands the demand and need for different ideas in different departments. It wouldn’t make sense for an SEO to create a thorough strategy when the company itself is not strategy-driven or not being shared due to a company’s suboptimal culture.

Components of an SEO Strategy

• Strategy Meeting
  An SEO Strategy relies on communication with the company’s SEO teams and other relevant stakeholders. Before creating an SEO Strategy, gain a full picture of what the overall marketing and digital marketing strategy are all about. Usually,  the need for strategy is addressed by high-level executives teams and product teams. The first attempt to create a comprehensive strategy, therefore, is not to just developing a shiny PowerPoint deck with all strategic components and action items, but to have a meeting with the marketing or digital department first to understand the intended overall goals.
• Determining Strategic Items
  Depending on the needs and requirements of the departments included in the SEO process, an SEO marketing strategy meeting will eventually have to come up with a list of items that can be templatized as the overall SEO strategy. These items, however, do not necessarily include the specific action items such as “Write more content about renewable energy plans” but more likely include things such as ”SEO Content Strategy”, “SEO Keyword Strategy”, “SEO Website Strategy”, and more.
• Determining Specific Action Items
  Once items of the SEO marketing strategy are agreeable to all stakeholders the next thing is to determine which specific action items to work on first. Do you need to complete a blog redesign or fix the entire site for example? Maybe changing the tone of voice for content production will help to engage your audience more. Sales funnels may help generate numerous fresh leads. Or embedding GEO intelligence/GEO funnels will drive traffic based on your customers’ location.
• Prioritization
  Usually different marketing campaigns are already in place in most companies. Since a company is driven by people with diverse backgrounds, expertise and knowledge, action items may vary. Here are some examples: the IT department may be more interested in having features on the website fixed, the social media experts might feel the need to have more fans, subscriptions, and sales through social media channels, while the product manager is focused on the e-commerce plugin on the website. However, once the overall strategy of the company is clear, prioritization of items can be established easily. Based on the findings a list of priorities is created by the SEO agency. This is the first step in creating a roadmap.
• Roadmap
  A roadmap is usually a Gantt chart that will show when certain campaigns will be launched and accomplished. A thorough roadmap usually includes MVPs to make sure that larger campaigns can be launched before they reach 100% completion. That way campaigns can be rolled out beforehand and lessons learned can be used to steer the campaign to success.
• Overall Message
  Based on all the above items, a deck should be able to link and explain the SEO strategy in place. However, the role of the deck should not be to create the strategy, but more likely to explain it by providing an excellent overview. The deck usually includes the key takeaways from the SEO strategy meeting as well as an explanation why certain SEO strategies and activities have been rolled out.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr. William Sen CEO and founder of blue media

William Sen has been an SEO since 2001 and is a Software Engineer since 1996, and has been working as an Associate Professor in Germany for the University of Dusseldorf and Cologne. He has been involved in developing custom SEO tools, large website and software projects. William has a PhD in Information Sciences and has worked for brands such as Expedia, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Bayer, Ford, T-Mobile and many more. He is the founder of blue media.