In today’s competitive and increasingly digital landscape, SEO has become more crucial than ever for brands. In 2018, one-third of U.S. consumers began their online purchases using Google or another search tool—more than three times those who started at retailer sites or apps, and second only to Amazon searches. To succeed in organic search results, brands need a strong SEO strategy. To elevate your SEO, it’s essential to understand your current standing and the steps needed to improve. Let’s explore four fundamental components you can utilize to develop a more competitive SEO program for your B2C or B2B brand.
Crawlability: Establish Your SEO Foundation
For your site to appear in search results, it must be discoverable by search engines. If you’re starting from scratch or haven’t engaged in SEO yet, your primary task is to make your site visible to search engine crawlers. A frequent issue, which is also easily resolved, involves your site’s robots.txt file. Retailers and brands often overlook this small file, but adding instructions to it guides crawlers on which pages to index and which to ignore.
Additionally, showcasing your site’s structure to crawlers for better indexing is crucial. This may involve updating and expanding your sitemap or creating one from scratch. An ideal sitemap for SEO includes all of your site’s categories, subcategories, and product pages. If you’re concerned about the time needed to map or update thousands of product pages, tools like Screaming Frog can generate a sitemap you can link to in your robots.txt file. After updating robots.txt, submit it to Google and other search engines for a prompt re-crawl of your site.
If your site uses outdated plug-in technology like Flash or Silverlight to display content, you’ll face a bigger crawlability challenge. These content types are invisible to search engine crawlers, meaning they won’t appear in search results. You’ll need to convert this content to an indexable format, such as HTML5 or JavaScript. The conversion process may take several months, and you may require new software and coding expertise to accomplish it. Once conversion is complete, you can map the content, update your robots.txt file, and submit it to Google.
Content Optimization: Leverage Your Existing Assets
Once your robots.txt, sitemap, and crawlability issues are resolved, the next SEO building block is content optimization. This involves effectively using your current assets to improve rankings for specific keywords. Google Keyword Planner can help you develop a list of target keywords based on volume and ROI. You can use this list to enhance your meta tags and content, starting with top-level pages, moving through categories and subcategories, and finally focusing on product pages.
An alternative approach is to optimize a few select pages. For instance, if product category “Page A” performs reasonably well, use Google Search Console to evaluate its performance. Does the page align with particular keywords? If so, optimize the category page for those keywords to boost its performance, enhancing but not replacing your programmatic SEO tools.
Offsite: Build Links and Brand Engagement
The next phase of building your SEO program involves offsite strategies like link-building and developing relationships with social influencers. It’s not mandatory to wait until all your existing content is optimized to start offsite work, but the more complete your content-optimization process is, the more SEO benefits you’ll gain from link-building and influencer efforts.
Link-building requires research, and it’s advisable to review Google’s link-building ethics and best practices before starting. The most efficient way to find potential links is by using a tool that shows where your competition’s backlinks originate, providing a list of potential sites for link requests. Narrow this list to high-quality sites with strong traffic and social media presence. Don’t expect a massive response; a 10 to 15 percent response rate is considered good for link-building campaigns.
Identifying the right influencers also involves research. You need to understand your product, your audience, and identify social media users who have established a following in your industry or niche, along with their audience. It’s important to remember that the most famous influencers in your niche may not offer the best ROI. Instead, you could collaborate with micro-influencers—individuals with tens of thousands of followers who possess significant trust and authority within their group. Depending on your niche and goals, micro-influencers could be more cost-effective.
Content Creation: Expand into Knowledge Topics
If your company’s SEO program is mature, you can focus on content creation at a new level. This stage involves expanding your content beyond product and service descriptions to address consumer questions about your offerings. For example, instead of merely creating more content about the shoes you sell, develop content on selecting shoes for various occasions, caring for leather shoes, and more. Determining which topics to focus on requires keyword and competitor research.
Utilize a tool to conduct a content gap analysis based on your products, segment, market, and relevant search phrases. For example, a watch retailer’s keywords may include basics like “men’s watches” and “women’s watches,” but there are other popular search phrases they can leverage, such as “watch repair” and “types of watches.” Typically, this analysis can generate between 750 and 6,000 keywords for creating non-promotional content.
You’re not going to use all the keywords; the next step is segmenting your new list of keywords and analyzing your performance for those phrases compared to your competition. This sifting process can take from a few days to a full month. The time invested leads to a content roadmap for your SEO program. For instance, prioritize keywords where you have a competitive opportunity and focus on them for your content creation in the coming year.
In summary, to reach this level of SEO, you must first build up the foundational levels. Crawlability provides the groundwork for optimizing existing content. Optimization enhances the effectiveness of link-building and influencer marketing. Knowledge-content creation is the culmination of these steps. Combined, these building blocks provide a durable SEO strategy to help you gain organic search traffic.
