The Impact of Strategic SEO
Spoiler alert: SEO is effective.
When implemented strategically, targeted SEO can yield significant results for the right pages. The key is having the “right” pages, which means they must be optimized, linkable, and possess opportunities for growth.
Understanding Search Opportunity
Search opportunity is influenced by various factors such as audience reach and competition. The extent of this opportunity dictates potential outcomes—the greater the opportunity, the better the results. Essentially, it boils down to the potential organic traffic you could receive from ranking for specific search terms.
Recently, we collaborated with a client to optimize a page on their site that ticked all the boxes: it was optimized, linkable, and centered on a topic with search potential. Our SEO efforts led to extraordinary results, increasing monthly organic traffic from around 200 visits to approximately 30,000 in six months!
In this post, I’ll outline our strategies and processes, offering takeaways for your own projects. The steps include:
- Identify organic traffic opportunities.
- Create or optimize a page.
- Secure valuable backlinks.
- Repeat the process.
Let’s delve deeper.
1. Identify Organic Traffic Opportunities
The first and most crucial step is identifying organic search opportunities. While crafting valuable content and earning authoritative links are essential, targeting the right opportunity is pivotal.
This begins with competitive analysis. Understanding how competitors gain organic traffic can inform your own strategy. For our client, we analyzed competitors’ top pages based on:
- Monthly organic traffic.
- Content type and format.
- Volume and types of backlinks.
- Organic traffic share across domains.
- Ranking keywords and search intent.
By examining these aspects, we gained insights into our client’s search audience and content strategies, highlighting gaps and opportunities for our client’s website.
2. Create or Optimize a Page
Our competitive analysis revealed key terms capable of driving qualified traffic if our client could rank well for them. We then audited the client’s site to determine whether existing pages could be optimized or if new pages were necessary.
We discovered a client page featuring a useful calculator—a typically highly-linkable asset—relevant to a key term with significant search volume and responsible for 11% of a competitor’s organic traffic. However, the page was under-optimized for the target term.
To optimize the page, we recommended:
- Adding the term to headers.
- Expanding topic-related information.
- Converting static images into crawlable text.
- Adjusting page organization to enhance linkability.
These adjustments positioned the page to better meet the targeted search query.
Common optimization recommendations include:
- Enhancing internal linking.
- Introducing new formats (visual, video, audio).
- Reducing promotional language on informational pages.
- Using variations and long-tail versions of key terms.
- Adjusting site structure and relocating pages.
- Linking to trusted external sources (e.g., scientific studies, educational institutions).
Sometimes, a page may just need minor tweaks to target new terms more effectively. In other instances, building an entirely new page might be necessary. Always ask: How does this address search intent? How am I using the target keyword? What variations can I include?
3. Secure Valuable Backlinks
Once you have an optimized page, focus on earning links. Valuable content and on-page optimizations are crucial, but links validate your page as a trusted resource, enhancing its visibility in search results.
For this project, we aimed for a quarterly goal of fifteen links, considering competition, niche linking tendencies, and the page’s optimization for intent and citations.
With a page featuring a tool, we leveraged resource page link building—promoting an existing resource to earn links on third-party resource pages. While not always applicable, the calculator’s utility made it a viable option.
Limiting prospecting to resource pages focused on the main topic would have exhausted opportunities quickly. Instead, we targeted related niches where the tool was applicable—health-related, student, and parenting resource pages.
Linking these niches through the need for adequate sleep expanded opportunities. Finding tangentially relevant audiences is vital for broadening your prospect pool and securing sufficient links to make an impact.
We also identified blog content on the client site with internal linking opportunities. By internally linking these posts, we directed link equity to the target calculator page.
4. Rinse and Repeat
The beauty of this process is its scalability. We applied the same process to another page, increasing traffic from nearly nothing to over 500 visits per month within a similar timeframe.
The key is identifying critical search opportunities and the pages addressing them. Consistently applying this strategy across multiple pages will significantly enhance your site’s organic performance.
Remember, competition dictates how quickly results are seen. Even with an optimized page, securing enough links to be competitive takes time. Once attained, Google will recognize these links’ authority, resulting in improved rankings and increased traffic flow.
SEO is not a short-term strategy. However, with strategic planning and consistency, the results can compound, boosting your website’s organic performance over time.
