SEO plan is a dynamic, ongoing process that evolves with changes in search engine algorithms, user behavior, and business goals. It’s an essential component of any SEO strategy to ensure that your website ranks well and provides a great user experience.
What Is an SEO Plan?
An SEO plan is a comprehensive, strategic roadmap designed to improve a website’s visibility on search engines. It involves a set of actions and steps that affect SEO ranking factors, like: content, structure, and links.
The goal of an SEO planning is to enhance a site’s ranking for relevant search queries, thereby increasing its chances of being discovered by users searching for information, products, or services related to the business.
The Benefits of SEO Planning
Well-crafted SEO plan is a good solution for any website owner. According to your SEO strategy you need to divide each task into several small ones or several actions. All you need to do is to follow the steps that you set previously.
SEO planning allows you to be organized and structured. You won’t have to waste time on unrelated tasks or divert your attention to secondary tasks. Focus on performing clearly defined actions.
Over time, you will find that you are using your time productively and have enough energy and capacity to think about how to improve and grow your business.
How to Create an Effective SEO Plan
Creating a successful SEO plan requires a systematic approach that encompasses multiple steps and strategies.
Here are details to help you develop an SEO plan that drives results:
Action 1: List of Keywords
Identify a list of relevant keywords that align with your homepage, product, service, or content. Focus on search terms related to this specific item to capture the overall keywords intent. Organize these into a group for effective targeting.
Methods for Keyword Research
- Brainstorm with Your Team: Engage your team, especially customer-facing members, to gather a comprehensive list of potential search terms. Their insights can be invaluable;
- Google Suggestions: Use Google autocomplete to expand your initial list. Enter your main keyword and explore suggestions by cycling through the alphabet (e.g., Marketing a…, Marketing b…, etc.);
- Google Search Console: If you have an existing website, review the search terms you already rank for. Focus on terms related to specific pages, leveraging Google’s data to refine your keyword list;
- SEO Tools: Keyword Planner, Ahrefs or SEMrush to find keywords with search volumes and difficulty scores.
What to Do?
- Document your findings in your one-page SEO plan;
- Identify several related short and long-tail keywords;
- Organize these keywords in a spreadsheet with their search volume and difficulty metrics. It would be your website’s semantic core.
Action 2: Search Intent
Evaluate the user intent behind each keyword. Determine if the content needs to be informative or commercial. This insight helps tailor your content to meet user expectations as Google has already optimized results to match user intent.
In search results you will see some of the content types:
- Snippets;
- News Articles;
- FAQs;
- Videos;
- Images;
- Webpages;
- Local Businesses.
Analyze Existing Results
Check the current top results for your keywords to understand the preferred content format.
Find any gaps or opportunities for creating superior content.
What to Do?
- Note the search intent (informational or commercial) in your plan;
- Document the types of content returned in search results;
- Detail specifics like list-type articles or actionable tips.
Action 3: Strategy
Conduct an analysis of existing content to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Research what types of content competitors are linking to and create something similar and significantly better or different from what currently exists.
What to Do?
- Note gaps and opportunities in your one-page SEO plan;
- Detail your strategy, including original research, new statistics, or actionable checklists.
Action 4: Content Creation
Develop useful content based on your strategy by yourself or with the help of a copywriter. Ensure it offers unique value or significantly improves upon existing resources. If you are a dental business owner, showcase images of your recent work or testimonials.
What to Do?
- Outline the content you will create;
- Plan any additional assets like videos and case studies.
Action 5: Optimization
Optimize all on-page elements such as page titles, descriptions, headers, file names, alt text, and keyword placement. Ensure your optimization enhances the content without being overtly noticeable to readers.
What to Do?
- List all optimized on-page elements;
- Detail how many times you will use your keywords.
Action 6: Promotion
Implement internal linking between website pages through the anchor text that specifies the direct page. Try to get high quality external links to your website that are related to your page content. Use a manual search of the websites in Google search results. Select chosen articles and find emails to reach out to webmasters.
What to Do?
- List internal articles for linking between them;
- Identify external high quality websites for outreach.
Action 7: Track Results
Define SMART SEO goals for your website using framework. Monitor KPIs to measure success and align SEO efforts with business objectives.
What to Do?
- Write down your weekly results into Google sheets;
- Use external tools, like Looker Studio if you prefer graphs and charts.
Conclusion
Investing time and effort in SEO planning is a smart move that will save you time and money. Moreover, such planning will increase your online presence and revenue in general.
Follow this structured approach to create a comprehensive and effective SEO plan that improves your website’s visibility and drives organic traffic. Optimize your efforts and make sure that every action you take is in line with your main goals.
