A lot of SEO companies won’t tell you what their strategy is for your company. And the ones that do will want to collect your email address and pester you with salesy emails to get you to sign on.

We believe a core SEO strategy template should be free and shouldn’t require you to give your information or your sanity to get it. It should also be easy to understand.

What is SEO and why is it important?

Before we dive into the strategy itself, for those who are new to SEO, let’s identify what it is.

SEO stands for search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization is the process of getting your company or personal website ranking in Google SERPs (search engine results pages) by completing a series of actions approved by Google.

There’s no exact science to what gets you to number one but unless you follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, you really don’t have a shot at ranking your website.

If you follow Google’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide, you’ll see that there are over 200 recommended actions to make sure your website shows up in their results.

Those 200 actions can be simple or complex and are best trusted to a professional search engine optimization company rather than doing it yourself but here are the three umbrellas those actions fall under.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO focuses on the structure of your website. This work makes sure you have all component parts that are required to help your website succeed.

Some important features that fall under this umbrella are:

A secure site
A fast loading site
An XML sitemap
Robots.txt file
Page titles of proper length and optimization
Meta descriptions
Alt tags on images

There are a wealth more of technical components--which is why it should be trusted to a professional SEO agency--but these are the main ones.

On-page SEO

It’s all about what’s on the page. On-page SEO is the actual content that populates your web pages and these will play a vital role in your SEO strategy.

Here are on-page SEO features:

Pages
Landing pages
Blogs
Calls to action
Images

Off-page SEO

This is how you build trust with the search engines. Off-page SEO focuses on linking back to your website from elsewhere.

It’s not just about quantity when it comes to linking. Google cares tremendously about the quality of these links and uses things like domain authority to help give your website credibility.

The idea is if you associate your website with other websites through high quality backlinking, you’ll show Google your credibility and Google likes to rank credible websites.

Now that you know the gist of SEO, keep in mind that each SEO strategy should be tailored to your industry and business goals.

There is no one-size-fits-all in the SEO industry, so make sure when trusting a professional digital marketing agency to handle your SEO that you’re getting a custom strategy.

It’s the agency’s job to get to know your business and your goals and get results.

With that in mind, our SEO strategy template should be considered a really helpful tool but not the absolute law on how to help your business rank online.

While each business is different, these are some really good guidelines to help you get started.

Here’s an SEO strategy to get you started

We really like HubSpot’s SEO strategy but we’re going to adapt it a bit for what we have found works best for our customers as well.

Here is a list of what the strategy will include:

Identify important topics for your business
Get more specific with these topics via keyword research
Build pillar pages of core topics
Blog on specific keywords pointing to pillar pages
Have a link building strategy
Optimize all website media
Track all of your actions

1. Identify important topics for your business

You may have heard the phrase that “keywords are dead”. And largely for 2020, 2021 and beyond, this is true.

To be successful online anymore, you don’t just go after random keywords that make sense to your business and start trying to rank for them.

That’s a wild goose chase, not a strategy.

What you need to do is identify the most important products or services to your business.

The best way to do this is to write them down and think of it as a funnel.

Start with core things you want to be found for, then move onto more specific items.

If you’re a cold storage construction company that might look like this.

CORE TOPICS: cold storage, cold storage construction
MORE SPECIFIC TOPICS: cold storage construction company in Tucson, cold storage construction for food industry
HYPER SPECIFIC TOPICS: grow room cold storage construction in Tucson, high speed cold storage door construction, metal building cold storage construction companies

The core topics would be considered pillars or super important to the business because that’s the main thing they do.

The more specific topics and the hyper specific topics are there to actually support the core topics.

The reason for this is because core topics are almost always going to be much more competitive to rank for online and therefore harder to get to page one of Google, whereas specific topics will be easier to rank for.

The same funnel works for a brand that sells into a single country. The brand name is the core topic, the country turns it into a more specific one, and the money questions people in that country ask are the hyper specific layer.

Take a forex broker that serves Kenya. A page built for a search like fxpro kenya earns its traffic by answering the $100 minimum deposit, whether the account can be funded in Kenyan shillings and how a withdrawal comes back, not by retelling the company history.

Let’s go into how you can know for sure though.

2. Get more specific with these topics via keyword research

To truly identify what you want to go after, you’ll want to figure out the following:

How many people search this phrase every month?
Where am I currently ranking for this phrase?
How competitive is this phrase?

Phrases = keywords. So they’re not entirely dead.

You need these keyword phrases to help identify what you should focus your strategy on and the best way to find out how many people search it and how competitive it is by using a keyword research tool.

We like to use SEMrush but there are a whole bunch of other ones out there like SpyFu, KWfinder and Ubersuggest.

For instance, if you sell pavers and you’ve identified that “patio pavers” is one of your core topics, you’ll find in SEMrush that it’s an extremely competitive keyword.

patio-pavers-Overview-Keyword-Overview - Exley Co.png

Over 40,000 people search “patio pavers” every single month.

Now, to get more specific and find a keyword less competitive, you’ll be able to use SEMrush to find something that is much more achievable like “wholesale patio pavers near me”.

wholesale-patio-pavers-near-me-Overview-Keyword-Overview - Exley Co.png

Is it competitive still? You betcha. But it’s a lot more specific and dedicating a blog post to this keyword to support your core topic of “patio pavers” will go a long way with Google.

This content strategy uses Topic Clusters to help your content rank.

The specific keywords are the topics that help support your pillar pages (or your core topics). Having enough topics to support your pillars will turn that into a cluster and having a cluster for each one of your core topics gives your site the best chance to rank.

Still not sure what we mean by using topic clusters? Here’s a helpful video from the people who invented the idea:

We recommend having a minimum of 5 core topics (pillars) with each of those having a minimum of 5 more specific (long tail) topics pointing back to it.

3. Build pillar pages of your core topics

Now that you know what your core topics are, you’ll need to build those pages on your site.

It’s not enough just to have a homepage and a few products or service pages on your site. If you’re truly looking to make an impact, each core topic (pillar) should have its own page.

Remember, these pillars are where all of your specific keywords are going to point back to.

So, what do your pillar pages need? Think of these pages as a table of contents for all of your specific, long tail topics you’re going to write about.

You’ll want to include those specific phrases on your pillar page and make sure that they are linking to those long tail topics. This completes the topic cluster and makes a lot of sense to Google.

SEMrush should have helped you identify what topics you want to cover for each pillar.

Here’s an example of just a few pillars and their long tail keywords for an IT company.

topic clusters IT company - Exley Co..png

4. Blog on specific keywords pointing to pillar pages

Now we said that your pillar pages need to link to the specific, long tail keyword posts you’re going to do.

What we mean by that is you should have a blog post for each one of your long tail phrases.

As you see with the IT company example, “IT infrastructure” is a pillar. That’ll be a page on your site.

The supporting topics that will make up the cluster will all be blog posts pointing back to the IT infrastructure page.

That means that “what is IT infrastructure”, “IT infrastructure services”, “IT infrastructure monitoring”, “IT infrastructure consulting” and “IT infrastructure security” will all be their own individual blog posts pointing to the IT infrastructure pillar page.

It’s a lot of content but it not only allows for the individual blog posts to rank but helps boost the pillar page as well.

5. Have a link building strategy

Everything prior to this step was all about on-page SEO. But the reality is without off-page SEO, it will be difficult to have your plan succeed.

You need link building. If you haven’t learned by now, link building (also known as backlinking) is having websites from elsewhere link to your site.

So how do you build these links?

First, you want to make sure you’re getting links from high quality sources. Quantity of links doesn’t matter nearly as much as quality.

If quantity was the only way to rank online, Amazon, Target, Wal-Mart and other big superstores would be the only one’s ranking on page one for millions of products.

That’s simply not the case. You can get some serious traction for your small business with just a few high quality links to your blogs or pillar pages.

It’s not easy to get great links to your site but there are some simple things you can do like linking your blog posts to social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

You can also write some of your topics on current events and share them. It’s possible this will have industry leaders link to your content and help you build links that way.

6. Optimize all website media

To make sure your website is fast and appealing to search engines, you need to make sure they can crawl over it quickly and efficiently.

Here are some of the best ways to make sure your website speaks to Google:

Have a working sitemap
Make sure images don’t exceed 1 MB
Don’t have too much CSS on the site
Don’t have too much extra code on the site
Make sure page titles and meta descriptions are of the appropriate length
Make sure Robots.txt is filtering out spam traffic
Make sure your site is mobile responsive

These are just a few and there are so many more but your website really needs to have a great user-experience. Without it, it doesn’t really matter what you rank for.

7. Track all of your actions

There are 3 things you should really be doing here:

Create a case study for yourself
Track all of the web traffic via Google Analytics
See your growth in keyword rankings using a keyword research tool

Creating a case study for yourself allows you to see where your actions may have had an impact.

Timestamp when you post a blog, when you change an image, when you add a form or call to action. All of this helps give more context to potential rises and falls in traffic.

Tracking all web traffic in Google Analytics allows you to actually see where the traffic is coming from and generally what they are doing on the site.

Google Analytics is a third party tool that adds just a tiny bit of code to your site but then records all of the site’s interactions. You can see the source of the traffic, what pages they went to, how long they were on those pages and most importantly, where they left the site.

Seeing your growth in keyword rankings measures how successful you’ve been with topic clusters.

It would be completely pointless to do all this work and then not pay attention to the results. Using tools like SEMrush will help you quantify how well your on-page SEO did for you.

Summary

So there you have it. The basic SEO strategy template.

SEO doesn’t yield results in a matter of hours or days. It takes weeks, months and years of honing the craft, writing the content and building the links that helps your company website rank for the products and services you want to be found for.

What’s important is that you’re creating quality information that consumers want to find. Google will identify you as a resource worthy of ranking and you’ll see the traffic role in.

About Exley Co.

Exley Co. is a full service digital marketing agency that specializes in search engine optimization. Exley Co. exists to eliminate the turnover that is so prevalent in the industry. We keep clients at record rates and do so by putting their needs and successes before our own.

To learn more about Exley Co. and how we can help you, read up on us.