What does an SEO Strategy look like?

Over at Mediaedge:cia we’ve been developing a SEO training programme entitled the MEC SEO Academy.  Something that I think is very cool and hopefully adds to what will be a framework where true excellence in SEO is encouraged.

We’ve got a load of print-outs from our favourite SEO websites and a number of SEO books laying around but there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of a summarised version of the items to consider when building-out a SEO strategy.  So, I’ve quickly whipped-up a number of items that I thought could help to provide a framework for approaching SEO strategically.  As such it’s a work-in-progress, but would be interested to hear your thoughts.

I’m hoping this sort of SEO strategy / thinking could prompt a fairly versatile and integrated approach to SEO, e.g. how does the company consider temporal factors – maybe through ongoing link-building, up weighting link-building in line with other channel’s activity or releasing content to the website.

The SEO Strategy

Click SEO strategy to enlarge.

Analytics & Reporting

Laying out the framework for what should be analysed and reported on as part of any SEO activity naturally helps factor in accountability and clarity regarding activity, outputs and opportunities in order to develop a more informed SEO strategy.

Ranking Factors

As SEO’s, we know better than most what factors could be feeding in to rankings and visibility of websites online.  This though, is a prompt to consider how these ranking factors are evolving, in the case of Google, at the rate of 300 changes per year.  In addition to the core algorithm changes we are also seeing huge shifts in how the search results are considering a broader array of display and ranking factors, such as Universal, personalisation and real time.

Geo-targeting

Local SEO and international SEO consider on-site factors and off-site factors…but so too should they consider things like mobile devices too.  For example, people that access your content in transit, looking up information on their iPhone, might have quite different intent to those using a desktop computer.

Geo-targeting (and temporal factors) could indeed be considered an relevancy factors but I just wanted to draw extra attention to them considering the different levels of intent and approach to marketing required.

Temporal Factors

Importantly, recently What is deemed successful in the Spring may be quite different to that seen in the Winter.  Conversely, patterns from trend data are not always so apparent if they are new to develop, however getting a foothold in a niche early on can have huge gains.  So too can regularity – by releasing content on a regular basis you can help establish yourself in a niche, gain regular links, benefit from return visitors, and from fresh visibility from a fresh range of terms.

Consumers / Personalisation

Understanding consumers, profiling their needs and responding accordingly is the centre-piece of so many marketers’ campaigns.

Naturally, all needs can’t be responded to in this way and some degree of anticipation / speculation is required to get ahead of the game.

But there are so many ways of profiling users considering items such as referrals, analytics, click path analysis, link-profiles, brand citations, SearchWiki, internal searches, demographic profile tools such as Quantcast, Hitwise data, user interviews / questionnaires, etc etc…

Online Visibility / Multiplier Effect / Assets

This is where pulling together the strategy begins to see outputs in taking advantage of

Here, one of the greatest areas of value will come from the USPs of the business, a consideration of where genuine value can be delivered to the user of the website, and the relationships harnessed both SEO relationships and business relationships.

Budgets, Business Goals & Brand Development

Direct visitors are the cheapest after all, so a thread of brand awareness can hugely beneficial as part of the SEO strategy.  Ultimately it comes back to the business goals.  1 million visitors might be a goal for the website but if these are blog visitors, then the over-arching business goal to increase turnover by 20% might be unachievable considering this traffic type.  As such, consideration of how one feeds in to the other, where the priorities lie, how the budgets are allocated and how long-term growth can be achieved is vital.

Competitors

AND, hugely important is what the competitors are doing across these strategic areas.  Is it likely they are not considering all areas, quite possibly, but what areas of their SEO strategy are these most keenly developing?

External, Environmental Factors

Using the PESTLE (Politics, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Legal and Environmental) points you can begin to speculate, plan or simply prepare yourself for unknown changes in the environment that you operate in.  So many items in search, marketing and business can’t be prepared for but a model that factors these considerations on a fluid basis is still important in my view.

The Wrap Up

So these are my thoughts, what would yours include?  This is a diagram that’s certainly open to being developed…are there any glaringly obvious factors that should be included?  What would your diagram include?

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