How to Make an SEO Strategy and Generate Traffic in 2022

Table of Contents

• What is an SEO Strategy?
• Benefits of an SEO Strategy
• How to Build an SEO Strategy
• Effective SEO Tips – Technical SEO
• Effective SEO Tips – On-page SEO
• Effective SEO Tips – Off-page SEO
• SEO Strategy for 2022 – Key Tools
• Key Takeaways
• Conclusion
• FAQs

The basics of how to make an SEO strategy begin with understanding what SEO is and how it can be helpful in business. Search Engine Optimization or SEO, a subset of SEO marketing, includes certain techniques and methods to optimize your website performance in the context of search engines. 

This means that you have to design and develop a website that can rank high in search engine results. And how does an SEO strategy for 2022 help? It improves the quality and volume of website traffic generated through search engines. Ultimately, all this results in conversion for your business. 

This article will delve into some effective SEO tips to help you unfold how search engines work and how you can optimize your website design to retrofit the same. For example, search engines like Google typically update their relevancy algorithm more than ten times in one month! Sometimes, a change in your SEO ranking may be due to algorithmic shifts that are out of your control. This is why you must learn how to make an SEO strategy to retrofit such changes that are not in your purview. 

What is an SEO Strategy?

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Before getting into how to make an SEO strategy, let’s first understand what an SEO strategy for 2022 is. In the simplest sense, it is a curated plan to improve your website’s search engine rankings. This is done to increase organic traffic to your site and enhance the user experience. An SEO strategy includes technical SEO, local SEO, content SEO, on-page, and off-page SEO. 

To create a robust SEO strategy, you need to list down the steps that will help you execute the strategy properly. This may involve coming up with a checklist of to-dos, laying down objectives and outcomes, and even using a certain template to plan out the deliverables, along with timelines. 

Benefits of an SEO Strategy

An effective SEO strategy can benefit your business in more ways than one. 

• The biggest benefit of SEO is the significant increase in organic traffic for your brand if done well. Use hyper-specific targeting to only reach out to people relevant to your business.
• A high SEO rank builds credibility and trust. How often do you ignore the top results on a search engine? Rarely. That’s right. The general tendency to pause your search at the top 3 or 5 results is great for your business if you are on top of that list.
• Organic rankings generate the highest traffic compared to paid ads on search engines.
• A good and well-thought-out SEO strategy will work for you round the clock, even when you don’t.

How to Build an SEO Strategy?

The next step is to understand how to make an SEO strategy. Follow these steps to come up with a thorough SEO strategy. 

1. Audit your site

When you audit an existing website, you can identify gaps in performance and plug those into your SEO strategies.

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From an SEO audit, you can cull out data on user-friendliness, website loading time, the performance of backlinks, etc.

2. Correct keyword usage

While searching for a product or service, keywords are words, phrases, or expressions visitors type in. If you want to be the first one to be found on Google or other search engines, you have to identify the right keywords to match your offering. And then insert it into your SEO strategy and website content. We recommend that you use a combination of long- and short-tail keywords, along with local keywords. 

3. The power of great content

Effective SEO strategies are built on the foundation of great content. You may have cracked keywords and SEO tactics. But if your content is not up to the mark, your visitors will not come back to your brand.

4. Mobile-friendly sites

The entire world is hooked onto their phones and tabs, apart from their computer systems. A 2022 SEO strategy must consider that most people engage with online content on the go. This translates to designing mobile-friendly websites. In fact, Google has also amended its algorithms to make the search results mobile-friendly. Note that this also improves your ranking in terms of SEO.

5. Embed backlinks

Another key element of how to make an SEO strategy is to create backlinks to your website. These clickable links are present throughout your content and will take the visitors to other relevant pages or sites. This also impacts your SEO ranking.

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You can conduct a site crawl from time to time to check if the backlinks are broken and fix them accordingly. Broken links are unsuitable for an SEO strategy for 2022 or your brand.

6. SSL certificate

If you are a business that deals with sensitive data like personal user details or credit card information, then it is non-negotiable to get an SSL certificate. SSL or Secure Sockets Layer enhances the credibility of your site by indicating that it is genuine and provides the much-needed layers of security and protection to your clients and business alike.

7. Use of schema markups

A schema markup is a code that you fit on your website, permitting search engines to search and send helpful information to clients when they search through search engines. It is, by far, the most powerful SEO method. A schema markup automatically chooses to show highly relevant and essential data on the search engine finding itself, as is shown in the image below – 

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8. SEO-friendly URLs

Your SEO ranking will decrease if your website has a lengthy URL with random numbers and letters. Create URLs that are easy to read and give a sense of the page content. Try to include target keywords, but not all of them. Your URL should be simple, short, and informative, to an extent. 

9. Monitoring and evaluation

You might be doing everything right for your 2022 SEO strategy but not achieving the desired results. This might be attributed to a lack of monitoring progress and making evaluations to correct the strategy from time to time. This is another of the most effective SEO tips that let you track the success of your SEO strategy and make necessary course corrections.

Effective SEO Tips – Technical SEO

If you want to know how to make an SEO strategy to generate organic traffic, you need to be well-versed with the three pillars of SEO planning. The first one is technical SEO, or the foundational aspects of your website need to be monitored and corrected. You can do this by scheduling site crawls at regular intervals, using tools like Google Search Console.

Things to remember

When it comes to how to build an SEO strategy for technical SEO, there are certain non-negotiables. 

• Error pages or 404s are not good for your SEO ranks. And if you do end up having one, make sure that it is well-designed and catches the eye. You should also look to embed your brand values in the design of error pages alongside links to other relevant pages.

• Avoid duplicate content by implementing a 301 redirect to the original piece. You can also add a rel = ”canonical” link for search engines to index the relevant page easily.

• Fix redirect chains, especially if you have multiple redirects in place. Search engines are not massive fans of redirect chains. And it will, in all likelihood, adversely impact your SEO rank. Best to reduce the number of redirects and keep things simple. 

• Take care of the website load speed. It is needless to say that a slow-loading website doesn’t go down well with viewers and could become a menace from a marketing and sales perspective. You will not be able to retain customers or viewers, sending a signal to the search engine to reduce your organic ranking. The easy fix is to compress image files, clean up your code, and leverage browser caching. 

• Make your web pages easily discoverable by visitors and search engines.

• Use Google Search Console to identify possible mobile errors so as not to be flagged by Google’s mobile-first indexing. 

Effective SEO Tips: On-page SEO

These include upgrades that improve your content’s search engine visibility, UX, and organizational structure. It provides ways to improve your existing content to optimize performance. Use the following effective SEO tips to achieve this. 

• Optimize all pages like blogs, product lists around strategic keywords. This means that your title, meta descriptions, and subheaders should all contain thought-through keywords. 

• Optimize CTR using Google Data Studio. Identify pages that have higher impressions but low CTR. 

• Invest your efforts in optimizing pages that rank 5 to 10 as against 1 to 4 to improve organic clicks.

• Keep recycling and updating your content. There might be higher-ranking pages, but they may have become dormant due to outdated content. 

• Google has a soft spot for well-organized content. Try to publish pillar pages with in-depth articles and not one-off blogs from time to time. And then interlink them to form a cluster.
• At the intersection of UX and SEO is the optimization of top bounce and exit pages. Focusing on improved bounce rates will only help build a positive aura around your brand.

Effective SEO Tips – Off-page SEO

These include indirect methods to improve the reach and authority of your website. How to make an SEO strategy that does this?

• Identify links that have similar content to get an initial outreach list. 
• Look out for resource pages that can be linked to a particular topic on your site. This can help you generate quality referral traffic to build your marketing and sales pipeline. 
• Try to publish original research backed by data and have shareable links. 
• Amplify your content through collaboration with similar brands or influencers. Co-branded content has a much higher chance of going up the SEO ranks than otherwise. 

SEO Strategy for 2022 – Key Tools

If you are looking for advice on how to make an SEO strategy, then your journey should ideally end with the knowledge of four tools marketers use to implement SEO strategies.

1. Ahrefs

The most popular SEO tool of 2022, Ahrefs, offers an expansive array of website crawlers. Use this tool to quickly perform site audits, keyword search, backlink analysis, and other vital components of your 2022 SEO strategy.

2. Mailshake

This SEO tool allows you to send customized emails to cold leads. This is essential to get quality backlinks, which is one of the most critical elements of how to build an SEO strategy.

3. SEMRush

Similar to Ahrefs, SEMRush offers an all-in-one solution to building an SEO strategy for 2022. You can conduct keyword research, site audits, backlinks checks, etc., with this tool to improve your organic traffic through a higher SEO ranking.

4. Keyword.com

This tool helps you monitor your website’s organic ranking on Google. Using this data, you can change your SEO strategy over time. 

Key Takeaways

• Search Engine Optimization or SEO, a subset of SEO marketing, includes certain techniques and methods to optimize your website performance in the context of search engines.
• Search engines like Google typically update their relevancy algorithm more than ten times in one single month.
• An SEO strategy is a curated plan to improve your website’s search engine rankings. 
• An SEO strategy includes technical SEO, local SEO, content SEO, on-page, and off-page SEO. 
• The different components of an SEO strategy include site audit, correct keyword usage, great content, mobile-friendly sites, quality of backlinks, SSL certification, SEO-friendly URLs, progress tracking, and using schema markups.

Conclusion

So, if you are confident about how to make an SEO strategy, then improving organic traffic should follow automatically from here on.

FAQs