Strat­e­gy is one of those words many of us use often, but few use cor­rect­ly. The term can often be used too broad­ly, so what does hav­ing a good strat­e­gy real­ly mean? What is the thought-process behind cre­at­ing one?

With this in mind I want­ed to share some things that can real­ly help us under­stand how to cre­ate a great SEO strat­e­gy.

Exploiting Strengths and Creating New Ones

Most strate­gies build on mod­els such as SWOT, and tend to focus on encour­ag­ing us to use our strengths to exploit oppor­tu­ni­ties that have been iden­ti­fied.

In SEO exam­ples of typ­i­cal strengths could be aligned under the fol­low­ing cat­e­gories:

Business Goals

• Our goals are achiev­able and real­is­tic.

Content Planning

• Abil­i­ty to seg­ment sig­nif­i­cant vol­umes of key­words to form con­tent briefs that address key stages of the con­sumer jour­ney for your prod­ucts and ser­vices.
• Abil­i­ty to ana­lyze and pri­or­i­tize oppor­tu­ni­ties based on poten­tial traf­fic and val­ue.
• Abil­i­ty to cre­ate big idea / cam­paignable con­tent that is either stand-alone or inte­grat­ed with wider mar­ket­ing cam­paigns.

Content Creation

• Out­stand­ing con­tent writ­ers that can cre­ate best in cat­e­go­ry con­tent based on briefs sup­plied.
• Effi­cient pro­duc­tion resources that can cre­ate bril­liant image and video resources to sup­port con­tent plans.
• A  con­ver­sion rate opti­miza­tion team that is able to opti­mize next clicks and actions, whilst not com­pro­mis­ing SEO require­ments that impact vis­i­bil­i­ty.

Content Publishing

• A flex­i­ble and easy to use Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem that enables flu­ent cre­ation of con­tent for all stages of the con­sumer jour­ney.
• Plat­form, and device agnos­tic pub­lish­ing frame­works that allow con­tent to be pub­lished to desk­top, mobile and app envi­ron­ments.
• An  Infor­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture and Tech­ni­cal SEO team that is able to opti­mize for the con­sumer and search engines across mul­ti­ple devices, lan­guages, and coun­tries.

Content Promotion

• Good ongo­ing rela­tion­ship man­age­ment with a net­work of dig­i­tal pub­lish­er / jour­nal­ists / blog­gers in your rel­e­vant sec­tor.

Teamwork, Process & Measurement

• A high­ly engaged mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary team that achieves goals with min­i­mal con­flict.
• Activ­i­ty is coor­di­nat­ed and man­aged with best prac­tice process­es and pro­ce­dures.
• Activ­i­ty impact is mea­sured, report­ed on, and dis­cussed reg­u­lar­ly across all stake­hold­ers.

If we can agree that they are good strengths to have, then nat­u­ral­ly it makes sense for any orga­ni­za­tion in search indus­try too build towards hav­ing these strengths at their dis­pos­al.

Achiev­ing this how­ev­er, requires strat­e­gy. So what makes a great strat­e­gy?

NB: Inter­est­ing­ly, if we’re all in agree­ment about what strengths in SEO con­sists of, the above could even be the begin­nings of a score­card.

The Core of Great Strategy

My expe­ri­ence and research tells me that core of any tru­ly good strat­e­gy fol­lows a path as laid out below:

Great diagnostics

So what’s going on in your mar­ket? What are con­sumers doing when, where, and how? What is the address­able mar­ket we’re going after? Who are our com­peti­tors? Where are we rel­a­tive­ly strong? OK? Weak? What does great look like? Where are the 80/20 oppor­tu­ni­ties?

Direction

If the diag­no­sis has gone well, the direc­tion of trav­el for your strat­e­gy should be clear. In SEO strat­e­gy I am increas­ing­ly see­ing the gap between win­ner and los­er as being as sim­ple as the direc­tion being “we need to have the most and best con­tent in our cat­e­go­ry”. This can only be the direc­tion if you knew what the right amount of con­tent in your cat­e­go­ry is and its poten­tial val­ue.

The gotcha in set­ting a good direc­tion is that it needs to build on or cre­ate a source of advan­tage. So in the case of mov­ing towards hav­ing the most best con­tent then if con­tent prod­uct is a strength that’s great. If it’s not is it a strength that can be built?

Action

Win­ning your mar­ket in SEO is about build­ing on your diag­no­sis and direc­tion, and then get­ting things done. In a word: actions. Move in the direc­tion you set-out and you’ll get there.

To achieve this, set­ting real­is­tic and achiev­able objec­tives is crit­i­cal. So if your diag­nos­tics tell you that you need 200 page to address the most impor­tant 80% of the pur­chase jour­ney, and you’ve cur­rent­ly got 80 — your goal is then to audit the con­tent you do have, improv­ing as nec­es­sary, and then cre­ate the con­tent you don’t have.

Getting an Unfair Advantage

I’ve men­tioned the idea of cre­at­ing as well as build­ing strengths that can be used to your advan­tage. It’s pos­si­ble to devel­op this idea fur­ther and look to cre­ate unfair advan­tage in addi­tion — a strength that oth­ers would find hard to com­pete against.

These can some­times be part of the very busi­ness mod­el itself. Take Uber and Airbnb: they can dom­i­nate because of strong defin­ing resources and strengths. They may have the best peo­ple work­ing effec­tive­ly as a team. Or they could have the best tech­nol­o­gy stack sup­port­ing their dig­i­tal efforts.

Which ever you have or want to acquire, one thing is cer­tain, hav­ing even one ‘super-strength’ can give you a real­ly unfair advan­tage.

Discussion

I’d love to hear what oth­ers think about strat­e­gy and more specif­i­cal­ly SEO strat­e­gy. What does SEO strat­e­gy mean to you? And, as is often more inter­est­ing, what does­n’t it mean to you?