SEO strategy: why is it important and how to create it?

Search engine optimisation has become the cornerstone of any business that wants to succeed, and setting this cornerstone requires some groundwork, or SEO strategy, to begin with. Without an SEO strategy, search engine optimisation efforts lack planning and focus, and may only yield short-term gains without developing a bigger picture.

I hope this blog will take you forward and you will learn how to bring your website into the search engine optimisation decade. It should always be remembered that Google’s algorithm changes daily. SEO measures that were considered good years ago can now even be detrimental to the organic visibility of your website.

In the following, we will go through what SEO strategy means today, and how the importance of measurement and following the MRACE® model is becoming a more important part of this digital marketing channel every day.

A brief introduction to the history of SEO and how search engine optimisation has changed
It is good to understand that SEO today is very different from the SEO of ancient times a few years or decades ago. We have come a long way from the days when Google’s search results were determined mainly by who could mention a keyword most often in their content and HTML tags. In the old days, if a page topped the search results with 100 mentions of a relevant keyword, the competing SEO strategy was essentially to create a landing page with even more mentions. Fortunately, from a user experience perspective, things are moving on!

While many digital marketers today know not to engage in the aforementioned keyword stuffing or overuse of keywords, Google’s algorithm, which changes daily, still poses a huge challenge even for professionals.

We often come across the misconception that, for example, the inclusion of keywords in the meta description has an impact on organic rankings, even though this criterion is no longer part of Google’s way of determining rankings. Meta description is an important element of a page in terms of click-through rate, but it does not affect the ranking itself. It should primarily be written in a way that attracts clicks, not so that the keyword is mentioned in a particular way or in a particular place.

Another problem we often encounter on websites is over-optimisation, which certainly goes back to the days when a keyword had to be mentioned as often as possible on the desired landing page. Nowadays, you can get to the top of the rankings with just a couple of mentions of a keyword, as long as the content of the page is of high quality, it matches the search intent and the site is otherwise skilfully optimised.

Another big turnaround in search engine optimisation has been the acquisition of links. Of course, external links have always been important, but the change has been about what those external links can and cannot be. Whereas a few years ago it was important to acquire as many external links as possible in terms of quantity, and sometimes to use dubious means of acquiring them, such as buying them for money, nowadays the quality of external links must be taken into account. Nowadays, it is more a question of earning links rather than acquiring them. A tip – create content that others want to link to, even without being asked.

Another big, holistic and permanent change in search engine optimisation has been the fact that globally, 58% of all Google searches are now done on mobile devices. Naturally, this also means that websites need to be optimised for mobile first and foremost. Things like responsiveness were certainly not optimised for in the early days of search engine optimisation, and even today it is not difficult to find websites that lack mobile-friendliness.

Whereas at one time in history search engine optimisation was determined by three different criteria, today the ranking of a single landing page is determined by more than 200 different criteria. In addition, these few hundred criteria have different weights, so it is good to be constantly aware of which ones will make the biggest changes and to weigh up the cost-benefit ratio.

Avoid these in search engine optimisation, for example, these days:

Excessive use of keywords
Overuse of search engine queries
Optimizing for desktop users only
Focusing on only a few SEO criteria
Forgetting quality and unique content
Failure to follow SEO strategy
The challenge, and at the same time the fascination, of creating an SEO strategy and optimising search engines is that it is constantly changing, requiring constant monitoring and reacting to changes. It also seems that the future will bring new technologies faster than ever before. Artificial intelligence, for example, could soon give Google’s search results a whole new lease of life.

Why is it important to constantly monitor how search engine optimisation is evolving?
Search engine optimisation is often lumped together in companies with, for example, keyword advertising. In these cases, both digital marketing channels are handled by the same expert, but this is not the right way to work and often creates constraints and slows down the development of both channels.

How you rank in Google organic search is determined very differently from how you rank in Google paid search. And with time resources tied up in two different channels, keeping up with algorithm changes is almost impossible.

It’s even more efficient to monitor and improve if you have a larger team of search engine optimisers behind you. Google doesn’t offer a tray with instructions on which criteria produce the biggest gains, so a larger team can experiment with different approaches to see what works and what doesn’t.

If your business has seen a slowdown in organic traffic, it’s worth reflecting on whether you’ve been able to take account of what’s happened in the ever-changing world of search engine optimisation. For example, if a major algorithm update has gone unnoticed, it may be that competitors who have noticed the update have already fled far away and it will be a challenge to catch up.

Historically, search behaviour has also changed and will certainly continue to change in the future as technologies evolve. And they are evolving at a furious pace. As an example, the age of corona has made remote and hybrid working search terms commonplace, even though these topics were little known before 2020.

In addition, search terms such as voice search and voice search have lengthened as new smart devices with voice search have entered the market. Today, more than 45% of all Google searches on smartphones are already voice searches. If it’s been a few years since your company’s strategy and keyword research, it’s worth looking at how the world has changed since you did them.

Artificial intelligence in SEO
It’s clear that content creation will change with AI, but that doesn’t take away the role of a good writer. Search engines will certainly continue to evolve so that quality and useful content will rank the highest. As a result, Google will limit AI-generated content that does not add value for users. However, all this does not mean that AI is just a nuisance.

From a search engine optimisation perspective, AI brings opportunities to automate analytics and identify trends. For example, AI enables more efficient use of schema by automatically finding new potential data types on a site. AI also speeds up the creation of content clusters by finding content that lacks internal links. And let’s not forget AI’s ability to automatically create meta descriptions or headings, for example.

In other words, tasks that used to require manual time and the creation of complex Excel files will in future be done automatically by AI.

Will SEO strategy still be made for Google, even though we live in an age of video and AI revolution?
Much has been said about how TikTok and YouTube in particular are being used by young people as their primary source of information, which would see Google’s role in information retrieval diminish. This in no way means that Google should be forgotten in your SEO strategy.

I’m not denying that TikTok and YouTube provide excellent visibility, but from a business perspective, Google is still the core and without Google’s visibility, it’s as if the business doesn’t exist.

Your TikTok or YouTube video can get you noticed, but then there is often a demand for more information, which is still often found on Google. In addition, leads are still acquired primarily through your website, which should have good organic visibility on Google.

Keep up with change and maintain your SEO strategy
By creating an SEO strategy, you’ll be better able to see the big picture and how to develop your organic visibility over the long term. It also means you don’t get bogged down in the shuffle when optimising with a longer-term plan and goals in mind.

An SEO strategy is effectively a war plan that focuses on developing your search engine visibility and thereby increasing your organic traffic. In practice, it is a broad to-do list divided into different areas, and priorities of tasks. It takes into account all of Google’s best practices, and also reveals exactly where, for example, there are the biggest problems with those practices. The strategy is a way of moving from one big theme to another big theme, rather than jumping back and forth each month on different ad hoc problems.

An SEO strategy should be as broad as possible, even so broad that it becomes a blur and you lose sleep over it. If too narrow a strategy is implemented, it will quickly become just a scratch and eventually lead to sloppy search engine optimisation or the same issues being revisited over and over again.