How to write an SEO Strategy

With the New Year approaching, it’s time to put plans into place to fuel your business’ growth in the New Year. For driving organic traffic, you need to write an SEO strategy for ecommerce websites.

But what should you include in your SEO strategy?

In this article, we’ll break down five areas you need to think about when writing an SEO strategy for ecommerce websites.

Let’s get into it.

Why should your ecommerce website prioritise SEO?

When it comes to driving growth, many ecommerce websites turn to paid solutions. Google Ads and Facebook advertising are both powerful tools for many businesses. They provide a shot in the arm in terms of traffic, which can often lead to a spike in sales if your user experience is on point!

But what happens when you turn off your ads?

The chances are that your traffic and your sales would drop off.

The benefits of SEO is that the traffic you acquire is more than likely going to stay at a consistent level no matter your activity.

That’s because organic search provides sustainable growth for your ecommerce website.

The organic traffic you acquire is also free – you’re not paying for the clicks through to your website.

The first step to write an SEO strategy for ecommerce websites is to set your goals

When writing an SEO Strategy for your ecommerce website – or any website for that matter – you want to first consider what you want to achieve.

That goal should inform the strategy you write. Every part of your strategy and the tactics you use should connect back to your goals.

As with any strategy, the goals you set should be SMART. That is:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time Bound

This will help you keep your goals focused and achievable.

Keyword research is a key aspect when you write an SEO strategy

Keyword research is the bread and butter of any SEO work, but it’s about more than just identifying a few keywords to write about.

Keyword research should inform your SEO strategy, giving you clear target growth areas for your website.

When you start to write an SEO strategy, you should consider all types of keywords, including primary and long-tail keywords.

But how does keyword research help you to write an SEO strategy?

Well, first of all it helps you to understand where your site is currently at.

What terms are you ranking for? What ones are you not? Which keywords drive traffic? Which ones drive revenue?

Answering these questions will help you to understand the areas of priority for your strategy.

The next step should be to consider your goals and analyse your keywords to understand which ones will help you achieve those goals.

Your competitors should dictate your strategy

As I wrote in my guide to ecommerce SEO strategy for 2022, you have to consider your search engine results page (SERP) competitors when writing your SEO strategy.

Why?

Because they currently rank for search terms you want to rank for.

So consider what is working for them and how you can do it, but better.

You should also consider what makes you stand out compared to your competitors. Do you have a USP that differentiates you? Do you rank for high-value keywords that they don’t?

By analysing your competitors, you can identify strengths and weaknesses, as well as opportunities for growth, which should fuel your strategy.

Complete a technical audit

While it’s great to focus on areas of growth as you write an SEO strategy, you also have to understand whether you currently have any major issues stopping people from finding your website on search engines.

The best way to do this is to run an SEO audit.

But what should you consider?

First, consider whether you have any issues stopping your website from being crawled.

Next, is your website being indexed?

Finally, consider whether anything impacts your website from being ranked.

As I wrote in my guide to running an ecommerce SEO audit, there are a number of free SEO tools that you can use to run a quick audit on your website.

The final step is to analyse your on-page optimisations

The final step as you write an SEO strategy is to analyse your on-page SEO.

But how can you do this with so many pages?

I’d recommend analysing your top pages only to start with. These are the pages that get a good amount of traffic and drive revenue.

By going into Google Analytics, you can see each page’s value in the ‘All Pages’ report. To access this, go to Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages.

Once you’ve whittled down your scope to just your top pages, you should analyse the on-page SEO for these pages.

There are countless on-page SEO checklists to use – we’d recommend this Ahrefs on-page SEO checklist – but we’ve summarised three things to look at below:

1. Check your internal linking – you should add internal links to other pages when it is natural and useful to the user to do so
2. Use headings – you should use headings to create a hierarchy on your page. A H1 tag should be used to define the main theme of the page, other tags, such as the H2 should break content into logical sections
3. Does your page contain your keyword? – If you want a page to rank for a certain keyword, you want to make sure you include it where appropriate on your page

Final Thoughts

SEO, of course, is just one channel of many digital marketing channels. It should be part of your overall digital marketing strategy.

However, when you write an SEO strategy we hope these tips and insights will help set you up for success.