How to Create an SEO Strategy for 2022

What is an SEO strategy? How do you create one? And why is it so important for modern businesses?

If you’ve got those questions, don’t worry. In this post, we’ll talk about how to create an effective SEO strategy for 2022. Because if you want better organic Google rankings for your website, then your SEO marketing strategy is crucial.

However, like with most digital marketing tactics, search engine optimization is always changing. What worked just a few short years (or even months) ago won’t necessarily work anymore.

So if you want free, relevant traffic that turns into more revenue for your business, keep reading.

In this post you’re going to learn:

• What is an SEO strategy?
• What are the Benefits of an SEO Strategy?
• 3 Areas to Focus On for SEO
• 5 Steps to Create a Solid SEO Strategy
• 4 SEO Tools to Implement

Without further ado, let’s get started.

What is an SEO strategy?

An SEO strategy is the roadmap and specific steps to take when improving your organic ranking in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

To put it another way, it’s the process you implement to get more organic traffic, as opposed to paying for traffic via ads or social media shoutouts.

What are the benefits of an SEO strategy?

An SEO strategy provides incredible value to your business, such as:

• Generates High Quality Traffic – The biggest benefit of SEO is attracting highly relevant traffic to your brand. 60% of marketers say that inbound organic content provides the best quality leads. With hyper-specific targeting, you can ensure that only people who really need your help are finding your content.
• Builds Trust – Ranking on the top page of Google is a big trust indicator. It communicates that your brand is professional, savvy, and helpful to people searching those keywords. You can’t pay for the top organic spots on Google, so SEO lends way more credibility than a Google Ad.
• Provides Impress ROI – It almost seems counterintuitive that SEO would have a higher ROI than paid ads. However, 94% of clicks are on organic rankings, with only 6% going to ads. That means organic ranking efforts generate the most traffic (and therefore potential conversions) for outstanding ROI.
• Offers 24/7 Visibility – A solid SEO marketing strategy will ensure that your website, blog, and other content work for you every second of the day. SEO content doesn’t have to take time off — it markets your business forever, after a little bit of upfront work.
• Contributes to Other Marketing Strategies – Even if you invest in PPC, your competitors will too. So when it comes down to making their decision, your target market is more likely to go with the brand with organic and paid results, since it implies more relevance to their needs.

3 Areas to Focus on for SEO

SEO is a vast collection of tactics and strategies. In fact, almost no one is an expert in every area of SEO. And you shouldn’t try to be. But, there are 3 main areas that make up the bulk of any great SEO marketing strategy:

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing your website’s content to improve rankings and traffic. Three important aspects of on-page SEO are:

• Keywords – Doing keyword research and choosing the right keywords and phrases in your content that your target market is using, such as “restaurants near me” or “SEO marketing services’
• Tags – Title tags, and headings (H1, H2, etc.) should include your main keyword and variations of it.
• Linking – Linking to both internal pages (on your website’s domain) and external pages help to boost rankings and searchability.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO involves activities outside of your actual site that contribute to organic rankings. This includes:

• Promotion – Social media marketing, podcasts, and other strategies to boost general brand awareness.
• Backlinks – Getting links back to your website from other sites / domains, which act as a “vote of confidence” in Google’s SEO ranking algorithm.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the process of making your website’s infrastructure more friendly for SEO, such as:

• Sitemaps – Submitting a sitemap to Google, which tells the search engine what your site is about and how it is structured.
• Navigation – Ensuring that every page on your website is linked from another page on your site, to provide for navigation by people and search bots.
• Page Speed – The faster your website loads and operates, the better your rankings will be.

If you focus on these 3 areas above, you’ll be able to get faster and more effective SEO results. However, you still need a gameplan to apply these concepts. Let’s talk about creating your actually SEO strategy:

5 Steps To Create a Solid SEO Strategy

Follow these steps to create a powerful 2022 SEO strategy from scratch:

1. Source Your Keywords

One of the best ways to start your keyword research is by heading right to Google and typing in your keyword. Notice the dropdown menu of related keywords that appear as you type.

This is Google Suggest, and it’s an excellent way to find keywords with proven demand that Google knows people are looking for.

These suggested keywords also tend to be long-tail (“espresso machine repairs”) vs. short-tail (“espresso”), making them easier to rank for.

2. Snoop the First Page

Do some manual competitive analysis on your keyword. What kind of sites, and just as importantly, what kind of content are ranking for your keyword? Are the top 3 results listicles, image galleries, blog posts, or something else?

It’s best to mimic the type of content you see in the top ranking positions, while improving on it. Speaking of which:

3. Write Your Content

Now you know what keyword(s) you’re aiming for and what type of content you want to rank for. For instance, let’s say you want to rank for “how to make an espresso” and the top results all include a step by step list.

In order to compete, you should also write a list using the “how to make an espresso” keyword and related keywords like “espresso frothing” and “types of espresso beans” — in other words, add more content on your page that adds value to the searcher. It will not be superfluous to consult with specialists in writing content such as Ivory Research.

More related keywords means more opportunities to be found, even if they weren’t using your primary keyword.

4. Optimize On-page SEO and Keyword Usage

It’s good practice to include your primary keyword once every 100 words or so. Therefore, in a 1,000 word blog post you want to use it about 10 times.

In addition to that, place your primary keyword in important positions like the Title Tag, H1 tag, and other headings, as well as the first 100 and last 100 words of your article.

And be sure to add images with keyword-based titles (“espresso.jpg”) and Alt descriptions (“Barista making an espresso.”).

5. Build Links

Having the best on-site SEO won’t do much good without backlinks.

If the top 100 websites in the world all link to a page about “espresso”, but that page only has average on-site SEO optimization, it will still outrank your 100% perfect on-site SEO page with only 2 backlinks from low quality sites. There are different ways you can use to acquire backlinks, but the most proven way to get them is through outreach link building. Send custom emails to every relevant website, influencer, or blog you can think of and ask for a backlink. Backlinks can come in the form of guest posting, creating a more valuable resource (so they’ll link to your page instead of another one), or even finding mentions of your brand that don’t have a backlink yet.

And the most proven way to get great backlinks is old fashioned: cold outreach. Send custom emails to every relevant website, influencer, or blog you can think of and ask for a backlink.

Backlinks can come in the form of guest posting, creating a more valuable resource (so they’ll link to your page instead of another one), or even finding mentions of your brand that don’t have a backlink yet.

And there you have it. The 5 steps above will put you on the fast track to improving your overall presence and organic traffic. But no professional goes to work without the right tools:

4 SEO Tools to Implement

There’s a notion in the SEO marketing world: “SEO is not hard, but it is time-consuming.”

Even with a solid understanding of SEO strategy and tactics, the sheer amount of time required to perform the menial tasks for search engine optimization is overwhelming.

That’s where the importance of using SEO tools for yourself or your team come into play, saving you hours of time every week.

Here are four tools every business owner and marketer should implement for SEO:

1. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is arguably the most popular SEO tool available right now. Its expansive website crawlers are second only to Google, and that’s saying a lot. With Ahrefs, you can perform site audits, competitor analysis, keyword research, and backlink analysis to streamline your SEO strategy.

2. Mailshake

Backlinks are absolutely essential for SEO in 2022. And like we mentioned in the step-by-step strategy section above, the most tried and true method of getting quality backlinks fast is to perform cold email outreach.

Mailshake is a great outreach tool that enables you to send cold, but personalized emails at scale. You can reuse templates and responses, while inserting custom information for each prospect.

3. SEMRush

SEMRush is another all-in-one SEO tool similar to Ahrefs. It also provides in-depth keyword research, backlink profiles, site audits, and ratings to determine the difficulty of ranking for particular keywords. Here is a SEMrush review for you to check out.

By using these tools above, you can achieve higher organic rankings in a fraction of the time it would take you to do it manually. And that means you can focus on the higher level SEO marketing strategy, which is more important.

It’s worth noting that none of these three tools can track rankings on Bing. Ahrefs only tracks Google positions, and Semrush only tracks Google or Baidu. If Bing performance represents an important part of your strategy for 2022, consider picking up a separate Bing rank tracker like Nightwatch in addition.

4. Keyword.com

Keyword.com is a search engine rank tracker that will help you monitor your website’s organic rankings in Google. Monitoring is important since it will help you measure your ROI based on your SEO efforts. This way, you will improve your strategy based on your performance. This tool not only gives you live rankings data but also gives you access to historic ranking data so you can check rankings over time.

Conclusion

Now you know how to build an SEO strategy for 2022. But knowing the steps is just the beginning. Executing an SEO marketing strategy takes a lot of work, patience, and evaluation of your results.

The sooner you start setting the stage for better organic rankings, the better. That way, your business can enjoy interested, loyal visitors and customers — without relying on paid ads or word of mouth.

Want to grow your SaaS company even faster with proven, powerful SEO strategies? Get in touch today.