An effective SEO marketing plan is the foundation of long-term success for B2B agencies. It doesn’t only outline actionable steps to improve keyword rankings. It also ensures that your website remains visible in search engine results by refining your strategies regularly and staying up-to-date with the latest trends and SEO tools.
In this post, we break down the key steps to creating a comprehensive SEO marketing plan checklist. We also discuss important elements like target keywords and blog post creation.
SEO Marketing Plan: Understanding Your Current SEO Landscape
Before developing your SEO strategies, you must first understand your website's current state. A comprehensive analysis will help you identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. This will allow you to set realistic goals and tailor your tactics for optimal performance.
We can break down this analysis into three main components:
Website Audit and Performance Review
A website audit is the starting point for any robust SEO strategy. You can examine your site’s technical health and overall performance through this.
Here are some key elements to focus on (and we’ll discuss them further later):
- Technical health: SEO tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or Ahrefs can check for issues on your site. These include broken links (linking to pages that no longer exist), duplicate content, or crawl errors. For example, running a site audit with SEMrush might reveal that several pages are returning 404 errors, which can negatively impact your search engine rankings.
- Page load speed: Speed is important both for SEO and user experience. Google PageSpeed Insights lets you measure how quickly your pages load.
- Mobile optimization: Today, a lot of website traffic comes from mobile devices. Ensure your pages are optimized for various screen sizes. Use large buttons and clear call-to-actions (CTAs) within thumb's reach. The text should be simple so visitors don’t have to zoom in to read.
- User experience: Check readability and content layout. A well-organized site should have a clear, uncluttered menu so that users won’t struggle to find key pages, like the contact page.
Competitor Analysis
Understanding what your competitors are doing well and where they’re lacking can provide valuable insights for your SEO efforts. These factors help you dive into competitor analysis:
Keyword rankings
StoryChief’s Keyword Generator gives you an analysis of the keywords for which your competitors are ranking. You also receive a list of relevant keywords you can use to get better rankings. The best part? It’s all automated.
Content Strategies
Analyze the content quality and type your competitors publish. If they regularly produce blog posts that target relevant keywords and address user search intent, consider doing something to fill any gaps. If your competitor has an article on how to improve organic search visibility that receives a lot of traffic, consider writing an in-depth guide with additional related topics.
Backlink Profiles
A strong backlink profile is one of the factors you need for high rankings. Tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs help assess the quality and quantity of backlinks that competitors are earning. If they’ve earned a lot of high-authority backlinks, you could reach out to reputable websites and look for link building opportunities so these can link back to your website in their content.
Data and Analytics
Evaluating your current performance using data is crucial for identifying what works and where to improve.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Review metrics, like search volumes for target keywords, organic traffic, and conversion rates. If a keyword has a strong search volume but your content isn’t ranking, this is a clear indication that you have to optimize your content further to reach first results in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Historical Trends
Historical data is a great way to track patterns and trends. If you have a travel blog, you may notice that engagement is high in summer, when people are planning vacations, but drops in winter. This data allows you to adjust your content calendar to offer seasonal guides during off-peak months to maintain engagement.
User Behavior
StoryChief’s Content Analytics feature provides insights into how users interact with your site. Look at metrics such as bounce rate and how long visitors spend on a page. A high bounce rate might indicate that your page design isn’t very engaging, so you’ll have to optimize it further.
Defining and Setting Clear SEO Objectives
Once you have a better picture of your current position, it’s time to define your objectives. And here’s where we recommend using the SMART goals framework to ensure your objectives are:
- Specific: Don’t aim to “improve SEO." Define what aspect you want to enhance, like “increase organic traffic to the blog section by 20%."
- Measurable: Track your progress to analyze bounce rate percentages and keyword rankings. Set a new goal to improve the position of top target keywords from position 12 to position 7 within five months.
- Achievable: Aim for realistic targets. Let’s say your website currently attracts 5,000 organic visitors per month. It might sound unrealistic to aim for 50,000, but a 20% increase is more feasible.
- Relevant: Your goals should support your business’s objectives. To attract potential customers, focus on metrics that lead to conversions. These can include engagement rates and organic traffic.
- Time-bound: Assign deadlines. For example, your SEO team might have to boost organic search rankings by 20% within six months." This indicates a clear timeframe to help you achieve your SEO goal.
Save this somewhere and share it with your team so everyone remains focused while working on your SEO marketing plan and efforts.
Developing and Implementing Your SEO Strategy
Let’s say you want to create an SEO marketing strategy for StudioSuits’ Tweed Jackets collection.
First, you must conduct thorough keyword research to identify search terms with a high volume, such as “custom tweed jackets” and “buy tweed jackets online." Then, you have to optimize product pages with these keywords and write high-quality and engaging content for these pages. Also, add a meta description and a user-friendly URL to make the brand visible in search engines.
The next step is to improve domain authority. Strategies include encouraging other brands to mention and link to StudioSuits’ website and updating its content by providing seasonal trends to keep customers engaged and improve overall SEO performance.
So, why is a keyword’s search volume important? What tactics can you use to reach out to brands for mentions? What other techniques help boost a website’s SEO?
We answer these questions below and provide insights to help you maintain a high position in SERPs.
Comprehensive Keyword Research
Identify short-tail keywords (e.g., “cybersecurity software”) and long-tail keywords (e.g., “affordable cybersecurity software for startups”) that align with your business objectives.
You might want to aim more for long-tail keywords, as they offer more precise information to answer the search intent. They’re also less competitive. Ahrefs recommends selecting keywords with a 10-100 search volume per month.
When using a research tool, look at the keyword density (KD). This tells you how difficult it is for a key phrase to rank in SERPs.
For example, if the keyword density is between 1 and 8, this means that it’s easier for a keyword to rank compared with search queries with keyword density between 70 and 100.
On-Page SEO Tactics
Known as on-site SEO, it involves optimizing your web pages and blog content to achieve a high ranking on search engines.
It includes:
Meta Tags Optimization
Write an engaging title tag and meta description. These should be up to 60 and 160 characters, respectively. Incorporate the main target keyword naturally.
Content Structure
Use header tags, such as H1, H2s, and H3s, and add internal links (when you link to a page on your site). These guide both users and search engines through your content.
To enhance readability, use shorter sentences and aim for no more than four lines per paragraph.
StoryChief’s Readability Score checks your content to make it more engaging and easy to read. It looks at sentence structure, language simplicity, and natural use of keyphrases. StoryChief’s tips help create content that’s both SEO-friendly and easy for audiences to understand.
Image Optimization
Images should have descriptive alt text. This explains to search engines what the visual is about and guides users relying on screen readers.
Keep the text short, up to two sentences. You don’t have to include “image of.” But you can say if you’ve attached a logo, painting, or illustration.
An example would be “girl preparing homemade dinner.”
When relevant, your alt text should include primary or semantic keywords.
If you’re using StoryChief editor, you can easily include the alt attribute by clicking on the image and selecting the eye icon.
High-Quality Content Creation
As part of your content strategy, craft blog content representing your brand so that viewers see you as a trusted source. For example, Alan’s Factory Outlet is a company that sells metal structures, such as carports and sheds.
To inform customers about the cost of building a shed, they created a blog post titled "How Much Does a Shed Cost? A Complete Pricing Guide (2024).” This post offers valuable information and answers frequently asked questions.
Off-Page SEO Techniques
These are actions that take place outside of your website. They help improve your search rankings and affect how visitors find and react to your content.
Off-page SEO techniques include:
Link Building Strategies
Through various link building strategies, you get reputable (authoritative) websites to link back to your content. To do this, you can offer to write guest posts for sites within your industry. In search engines, you can enter keywords like “fashion guest bloggers wanted” or “finance write for us."
You’ll receive recommendations of brands open to guest posting.
Influencer Marketing
Collaborate with influencers. These are content creators who can post reviews or mention your services or products on their social media channels. They might, for example, create a “how to style” video where they mention your new waterproof mascara.
Local SEO
This is when you optimize your services for local search intent. For example, if you have a hair salon in Los Angeles, your Google My Business Profile might help you reach the top rankings for users living in that city. Potential customers might search for “hair salon near me” or “hair salon in Los Angeles."
Social Media Marketing
This involves promoting your website content or brand on your social channels. Target platforms where your potential customers are most active, and share relevant content to attract new followers. Make sure to respond to comments and messages.
Technical SEO Efforts
Technical SEO is key to enhancing your website’s performance. It ensures that everyone can access it—whether using a smartphone, desktop, or tablet. It covers technical aspects to create a positive user experience and enhance search engine crawling.
Key areas to focus on when it comes to technical SEO tactics include:
Site Speed
If your website loads slowly, you might risk getting poor rankings. In a 2022 study, Portent found that if your site loads in one second, its conversion rate is 5x higher than sites loading in 10 seconds.
To improve page speed, consider the following:
- Compressing images
- Using HTTP caching for your browser
- Limiting redirect usage: This is when you forward your page visitors to another page. Redirects are sometimes needed, but don’t overdo it.
Mobile-Responsiveness
Before making your website public, test that it works and is viewable on any device. This is where mobile-first indexing comes in. Google prioritizes websites with a version for mobile users in search engine rankings. (You should perform a separate keyword research to analyze the top keywords mobile users search for).
Duplicate content
This can happen if two web pages have similar content, like these URLs:
- https://companyname.com/resources/content-creator-checklist/
- https://companyname.com/library/content-creator-checklist/
Search engines don’t penalize your website for duplicate content. However, you may have a problem ranking in SERPS. For example, Google might not show all of your URLs targeting the same keyword.
To fix this, you can use a canonical tag. It indicates which URL represents the master copy of a page.
You don’t have to worry about canonicalization. If you’re using StoryChief, the multichannel publishing tool takes care of this for you.
Creating an SEO Marketing Plan and Workflow
An effective SEO marketing strategy requires detailed planning and coordination among team members.
Here’s what to do:
Develop a roadmap: Outline a clear roadmap that details specific tasks for each element of your SEO marketing strategy. Assign responsibilities to your content creators, technical SEO experts, and outreach team. Create deadlines and milestones. Project management software can help you track progress.
Create standard operating procedures (SOPs): These can help document each process, such as keyword research and content publishing. Share them when hiring new employees.
Balance quick wins and long-term projects: Identify low-effort, high-impact opportunities that can provide immediate improvements. This could be updating outdated meta descriptions or optimizing a blog post. Invest in long-term initiatives, such as backlink strategies.
Monitoring and Analyzing Key Metrics
The final step of your SEO marketing plan is to monitor performance and fine-tune your strategy continuously (based on results).
Set up analytics: Track important metrics for your strategy. These include organic traffic, keyword rankings, bounce rate, and user engagement. StoryChief works great for in-depth performance analysis. Use the data to write valuable content around high-performing keywords.
Schedule regular audits and performance reviews: These allow you to assess your site's technical and content elements, evaluate the effectiveness of your SEO strategy, and update your target keywords and content based on the latest industry trends.
Create feedback loops: These let you gather insights on the implementation process. Use this feedback to refine your tactics and ensure your SEO marketing plan evolves and aligns with changing algorithms and user intent.
Wrap Up
When building an SEO marketing plan, you need careful analysis, strategic planning, and continuous fine-tuning. When following our checklist, SEO managers can develop an effective strategy that enhances search rankings and organic traffic. It also aims to deliver measurable results.
Every element, from keyword research and optimizing for search intent to refining your on-page and off-page strategies, doesn't only attract potential customers. But it also helps you build more credibility and establish authority in your niche.
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