The First Stages of SEO

While SEO is incredibly helpful and an essential aspect of online businesses, it is not necessarily easy. It all depends on what results you want and how much search engine optimization you want to incorporate into your website. Regardless, before you being any of your SEO endeavors, forethought and planning are critical to ensure the best results.

First, you must consider all stages of website development such as the sight architecture, marketing strategy, and selection of content. This guide will walk you through the 3 foundational steps for any of your current and future SEO projects.

The Major Components of Planning

Every SEO wizard will tell you that you need to incorporate your SEO strategy into your site long before it ever goes live. While it’s not always possible to begin from scratch, there are a few major components that need thorough attention and research before you start crafting keywords. These include your:

• technology such as hosting
• the market in which you’re competing
• researching content

Technology

SEO is not merely keywords mashed together randomly. Even with well crafted and high competitive keywords, there are still technical aspects that impact your technological choices. For instance, not every CMS platform allows for titles and meta-descriptions to vary from one page to the next or allows you to duplicate hundreds of pages of the same content, only thwarting all your SEO efforts.

Do your research based on your plan and how much SEO you want to incorporate into your website. Choosing the right CMS and web server are essential to facilitate your SEO strategy.

The Market

Always research the nature of the market you plan on competing in. It will give you a good idea of how competitive the market is, and with a little more digging, what the SEO environment looks like.

In some markets such as weight loss or dating, a natural search shows intense competition. Now, it doesn’t mean you should redirect the focus of your business if you’ve already stepped into the market. But it might profitable if you focus on less competitive niches that still generate quality traffic and leads.

One great method to get a quick glance at your competition is to use Google’s Keyword Planner to see how many searches your keywords get monthly, how strong the competition is, and what your cost per click would be in the target phase of a PPC campaign.

The Content

The bread and butter of every SEO campaign is the quality and volume of your content. If you’re content is nothing more than the average, run-of-the mill rehash found on dozens  of other websites, it will not attract many users. Thus, quality content is always the best route to ensure you drive in traffic.

If redeveloping an old site, take a look at the content already on the site and find the resources or generate new ideas to develop new, original content. After, you can match this with your keywords and begin the next step: the back-linking process.

If you’re still having trouble with your SEO or you’re ready to go to the next step, contact us and speak with one of our experts who can help you today.