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?