When you’re doing SEO, there are many elements you must balance. You need:
- Content
- Backlinks
- To target the right keywords
- A well-designed website
- And more
It requires effort across the board to ensure success.
This article will show you exactly which elements you should be mindful of and how you can optimize your SEO strategy accordingly.
The 6 Key Balancing Acts for SEO
1. Content Creation
Content is a crucial element of any search marketing strategy. A website without it can’t rank for anything. Even when you have authority and are ranking for specific keywords, your visitors won’t convert if what’s on the page isn’t good or relevant.
Therefore, you should have a content creation strategy to ensure your website has high-quality landing pages, location pages, product descriptions, and blog posts that attract visitors and generate sales.
How Do You Build a Content Creation Strategy?
When I work with clients, I take an in-depth approach to determine the best content strategy for each company’s needs. That process includes:
- Website audit: A full website audit consists of assessing elements like current traffic, keywords you’re ranking for, competitor analysis, technical SEO analysis, on-page SEO analysis, and overall content effectiveness.
- Needs/goals identification: Before designing a content strategy, it’s also essential to determine your current needs and goals. That can include pain points, marketing objectives, and understanding your target audience.
- Target keyword selection: It’s important to target keywords that align with your goals. For example, if a landscaping company wanted more people coming to their website with purchasing intent, covering keywords like “lawn care service in Minneapolis” would be a good idea.
- Create a content map/calendar: Once you select keywords, there should be a scheduled process in place to ensure everything gets done on time. I often like to create content maps (usually displayed as mind maps) that show topical clusters of similar keywords that should be interlinked, and a schedule for each post to the website.
- Analysis: Once new content is being published or old pages are revised, you should take time each month (or quarterly) to analyze how your changes are affecting things, such as where you’re ranking for specific keywords and new traffic coming in.
It should be noted that when you’re assessing the results of this process, SEO takes time. It’s often 3-6 months before you see noticeable results since you must build “trust” with Google’s algorithm. However, once you start ranking for targeted keywords, you’ll see consistent traffic coming in from them month over month for the long term.
2. Domain Authority
The next element you must balance when doing SEO is domain authority. You can have the best content strategy in the world, but if your website doesn’t have authority, you won’t rank for any of your target keywords.
What Is Domain Authority and How Do You Get It?
Domain authority is essentially a measurement of your website’s reputation in your industry. You’ll typically see it displayed as an estimate in content tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs as “authority score” or “domain rating.”
The main element taken into account when calculating domain authority is backlinks. A backlink is when another website links to a page from your website as a reference within their content.
Some authority can be built simply by posting quality and useful information that people find and naturally link to. However, if you have zero authority, you won’t be ranking for keywords in the first place, making it hard for anyone to find your posts.
Therefore, you do need to do outreach and networking with website owners in your industry to build initial backlinks that get your pages ranking. You would typically do this through things like guest posting, pitching stories to news outlets, or responding to journalists looking for expert quotes on platforms like HARO.
3. Conversion Optimization and Improving Existing Content
At times, websites may have a lot of existing content that isn’t driving enough traffic or converting the visitors who are finding the pages. This is pretty common with things like product/service pages.
In that case, you’d want to optimize those existing pages before creating new content for the site. The intent is to have everything on your website optimized to avoid any obstacles that will cause customers to leave or decide to not purchase.
Improving existing pages is also important if you have a lot of old content with outdated research or industry information. Think of something along the lines of the healthcare field, where new research is always being published, and treatment methods continuously evolve. Those old pages should be updated regularly to ensure your visitors get the right information.
4. Technical SEO
At this point, your pages may be optimized, and your domain may have lots of authority. However, if you notice you still aren’t ranking or converting, it could be due to technical SEO issues. Some of the most common are:
- Slow loading speeds
- Indexing errors
- No XML sitemaps
- Incorrect robots.txt
- Duplicate content
- Broken links
- Visitors are being sent to the wrong pages
All of these issues and more can affect a lot, so getting a full technical SEO assessment is a great idea to ensure top performance.
5. Web Design
Just like technical SEO can affect conversions, so can a poorly designed website. For example, if your website looks like it was created in 2005, how well do you think it’ll convert today?
Your website should be sleek and modern, well-branded, and help visitors navigate it to find what they are looking for. As the common marketing phrase goes, “don’t make me think” applies well here. The moment your visitors start scratching their heads about where to go next, they’re much more likely to leave.
Your website will likely evolve over time as you create new content, expand your business, or as industry standards change. Therefore, you’ll want to continuously improve and assess your website’s design.
6. Analytics and KPIs
Last but not least, as I mentioned briefly before, you need to assess how your SEO efforts are performing over time. The best way to do that is by defining some key performance indicators (KPIs) that are most important to your goals. For example, website traffic, rankings for targeted keywords, and new sales generated are all essential KPIs for most companies.
You can use many tools to help in this process, such as:
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Serpfox
- SEMrush
- Ahrefs
- HubSpot
When you have someone or an agency working on your SEO strategy, it’s typically a good idea to request monthly or quarterly reports to get an idea of how they’re impacting things. That said, just be mindful that it takes a bit (3-6 months) for most SEO strategies to really start showing significant results.
How My Services Can Help You Balance Your SEO Efforts
If you’ve made it this far and you’re wondering how you’re supposed to balance all these elements on your own, my answer is that you don’t have to. My services can help with many of these elements, such as creating and executing a content strategy, conversion rate optimization, and analyzing performance metrics.
To learn more, contact me today, and we can discuss my content writing and SEO strategy services in more detail.