This is how I customize the SEO - Search Engine Optimization strategy for my clients.

You want to invest more time in your SEO marketing strategy.
But you don't know where and how to start. In this article, I'll address that.

What is meant by SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is one of the most important factors for the success of your website. And it is definitely worth spending time and continuously working on it, so that your website is indexed as well as possible in the search results of Google .

SEO is also a great tool to market your service or offer(content marketing). People ask Google to find a solution or an answer. They want to click on one of the search results and get ahead.

That's why it's essential to understand the needs or problems of your customers. This way you can create content that addresses these Google queries and offer solutions to these problems. Once you offer a solution, the chances of closing a deal are much better.

Unlike advertising with paid ads, commercials or advertisements, with content marketing you don't put your product in the spotlight, but you offer useful information and demonstrate your expertise and know-how through content instead of just asserting it. This is important to understand for a successful SEO .

It's best to run through an example of how a potential client might search for you.

1. Problem aware: When your potential customer knows their problem and is specifically looking for a solution.
2. Solution aware: When your potential customer knows that there is a solution to their problem and is looking for it.
3. Product aware: When your potential customer knows that your offer is available, but is not sure if it is the best one for them.
4. Super aware: When the potential customer knows that your solution or product exists and is only looking for the price.

This could look like this for me as a web agency.

• Problem aware: create new website.
• Solution-oriented: web designer for SMEs
• Product aware: Webflow Designer Switzerland
• Super aware: prices Kasan web design

In digital marketing, we speak of a funnel, in which the goal is to turn a prospect into a customer. The customer must go through several stages until he concludes a certain action at the end. This would be the purchase of your product or a contract for your offer. One describes this funnel also as AIDA. Many prospects enter at the top, but few customers exit at the bottom.

The four stages of your SEO strategy.

I use the following principles to build your SEO strategy for your website. Ask yourself what a potential customer thinks.

1. the SEO settings of your website serve as a basis.

2. who am I and what is my offer.

3. how I can help you solve your problem.

4. why you should accept my offer.

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1: The basics - the SEO settings of your website - (Onpage Optimization)

When creating your website you should make sure that your website is optimized for SEO and make sure that you set up the right tools so that the Google crawler will enjoy and crawl your website. Important are:

• Creating a sitemap and pointing out Google that you have provided one for the site crawler.
• The structure of your internal links (URL) and your page architecture.
• Onpage SEO
• Technical SEO

- Sitemap

Depending on which system you work in, you should create a sitemap. I create this automatically, so that I do not forget any page. This sitemap is so to speak the table of contents of your website and helps Google crawl through your website.

This sitemap can then be submitted to Google Search Console and this will result in faster indexing of your website. This sitemap helps enormously and it goes much faster until your pages appear at Google .

Also, the sitemap is used so that Google quickly recognizes when something has changed on your website. You create new pages and so on...

- Page architecture

It is important to choose them correctly from the beginning and, in the case of a CMS system, to make sure that the pages offer the respective correct structure. For example, that all blogposts lead to the subfolder Blog. All graphics projects under graphics and so on.

- Onpage Seo

Onpage optimization is how you structure your content on the website. This also helps Google to better understand what your website is about.

This includes using your keywords (keywords for Google search) in the headlines.

Include the keywords in the URL slug. Slug is what comes after the slash at the end of your domain name. For example: https://www.kasan.ch/blog here blog is the slush. This one should make sense.

The correct structure of the headings of H1 / H2 / H3, etc.

- Technical SEO

This is about making sure your website is "clean".

So that all links on your website work properly and do not lead to nirvana. Check all your internal links.

Then the canonical tags should be set properly on the website. A canonical URL is the URL of the page that Google assumes is the most representative of several duplicated pages on your site. Here Google explains.

Integration of schema markups snippets (structured data) on your website for your business. These can vary depending on your business or offer. Here's the website from Shema. They have released a great Google chrome extension that makes creating the schemas a lot easier. https://schema.dev/ Here is the direct link to the extension.

Make sure that the meta tags and meta descriptions for each page are chosen correctly and check your metadata for errors and that they match the page titles.

Avoid any duplicate content. This messes up Google .

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Technical SEO is an enormously broad area and I could write for hours about it and there are also different opinions. The mentioned points are the most important measures that your website should have.

Big websites like Microsoft, Apple, Adobe and so on, of course go much further. But they also have the wherewithal for the specialists. For my customers, I do very well with the points mentioned above.

2: Who am I and what is my offer.

This is the meat on the bone, so to speak, and the most important thing to get right so that the website visitor eventually becomes a customer. And by that I mean the content of the website. You might think that the content page with the offer are not so important for a successful SEO. But this is not the case.

Let's assume a potential customer searches for your offer and Google links to a subpage from your blog. There you build up the necessary trust. But in the next step, when he wants to profit from the offer and you actually have him on the hook, he is deterred from buying by an amateurish product page or offer page and you lose him again. He jumps out of your funnel.

These pages are not so important for search engine optimization, but for closing (conversion) they are the most important and must not be neglected. Otherwise, all SEO efforts will bring absolutely nothing.

3: How I can help you solve your problem.

Here you show how the user can use your products or services. Always remember that the content of your website is the most important thing, as I just explained. Search engine optimization is just the process of getting your content to rank as well as possible in search results. But without meat on the bone, everything is useless.

For my web agency, that looks like writing this blog post here, for example. Or the post about website redesign, where I explain what to look for in a redesign.

Such contributions give added value to the customer. If you sell pans, provide cooking recipes. If you sell wine, blog about the regions where your wine comes from and the people behind it.

If you offer a yoga class, run a blog explaining why your yoga is cool and what's behind it. Or expand the blog with video tutorials and so on. I think you understand what I mean. It's about creating value for the visitor.

In addition, that you include links to your offer on your blog pages. As you can see, I have two banners that point to my web design offer.

4: Why you should take me up on my offer.

This section of your SEO strategy is about growth, but that requires the three phases mentioned earlier. Otherwise, this phase will not work.

I divide this area into three parts:
PRODUCT COVENANT | SOLUTION COVENANT | PROBLEM COVENANT

- Product conscious

At this point, the user knows that you exist and tries to assess whether your offer is suitable for him. There you have the best chance that it comes to a conclusion. Maybe the visitor knows your website through a recommendation. In any case, these people are ready to make a decision.

For search engine optimization, it might look like this.

• Pages that compare products like my post on why I work with Webflow and not WordPress.
• Why it pays to hire a professional web designer, wherein I weigh my service against the building blocks like Wix and Squarespace.
• Or posts where I use my background as an art director to stand out from the web designer who comes from programming.

- Solution conscious

Here the user searches for a solution that is suitable for him.

• For me, for example, my blog post > Web Design Trends 2022.

As you can see, Trends 2022 is the deciding factor here and web design is secondary. You know that someone is looking for a trendy and cool website.

When choosing keywords for your blog, be sure to use ones that are not directly related to your competition.

Try to find a niche, the chances are much higher to be indexed quickly and better. The Google Search Console helps you with this and also Google Analytics is helpful for this keyword research.

- Problem aware

Here I talked about the importance of understanding your potential customers or target audience. That's why it's important to use keywords that leave questions unanswered.

For example, for this article, it might look like this:

• Can you make SEO yourself?
• What does a good SEO optimization cost?
• How does it work with SEO?
• Why is SEO so important?
• How long does it take before I see results?
• What is meant by SEO?

You see these questions do not address web design at all and there is a chance that this will attract users to my offer.

Search engine optimization made simple.

This is a pretty simple area that I'll try to explain here and that you can follow.
It should be noted, however, that this process takes time for your website to appear prominently in Google searches.

Also, you should invest time in your blog to feed it with the relevant keywords.

It can be helpful to set a plan and do keyword analysis/keyword research. It also helps to set goals, so that you say to yourself, I'll write a post every one or two weeks. That way you will certainly see progress in half a year. This process simply does not take time to give up.

Here is a great tool for keyword research from Google.

- Consider SEO as an investment

The easiest way to do this is to see the time you spend writing your blog posts as a business investment and save money you would otherwise spend on Google Ads campaigns.

Online marketing/search engine marketing with Google Ads campaigns is a wonderful web measure where you can get results quickly with a relatively small budget. As a webmaster, I recommend my clients to go two ways in the beginning. Write a blog and Google Ads online marketing as a multipack.

After a certain period of time, which depends on so many factors that it can't be simply defined across the board, you can cut back on the Google ads and hopefully eventually drop them altogether. Make sure that you don't do any keyword stuffing (too many keywords repeated too quickly) in your blog posts. Google doesn't like that at all and it doesn't help you in the organic search results.

Now you can reverse the funnel and see what's really going on.

1. Super aware: Highest chance of closing a deal - lowest traffic.
2. Product aware: High chance of closing a deal - low traffic.
3. Solution aware: Medium chance of closing a deal - medium traffic.
4. Problem aware: smallest chance to close a deal - lots of traffic and the highest bounce rate.

Further measures to be taken into account for successful search engine optimization.

- Offpage optimization / OffpageSEO

For a successful indexing in the search queries of Google it is enormously helpful that you operate social media channels at the same time. Like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or whatever fits your business model. These are helpful backlinks, which Google rates highly and with which you gain credibility (domain authority) with the search engine. I know myself how tedious and time-consuming the maintenance of these social media profiles is, but it is worth at least once in a while to post something.

- Backlinks

To increase these backlinks (linking from other sites to your own website), I recommend that you also make business directory entries for your company. You can create free entries on most sites and thereby increase your backlink count easily and seriously.

However, backlink is not to be understood simply as backlink. They have a value factor. Just as your website gets the Domain Authority from Google , there is also a Link Authority. This is often referred to as link juice and refers to the number and quality of backlinks.

The websites with the highest Domain Authority are:

• youtube.com
• www.google.com (it's obvious)
• apple.com
• www.blogger.com
• support.google.com
• linkedin.com
• microsoft.com

Source >https://moz.com/top500

In addition, Google works with a link velocity, where it is measured how quickly these links are created to prevent abuse. You can also buy easy backlinks on the Internet. I can only advise you against it, because most of the time the shot backfires and you have links on pages with which you have nothing at all to do. These are then bad backlinks and Google punishes you. It is almost impossible to get rid of them, or do you want to explain to a website operator in India or Kuala Lumpur that he should please delete your link.

For this reason, it is also worth making a Bing or entry, although "no one" needs this search engine. But it helps with link building and in Google ranking for your own page.

Here you can request an entry at Apple in their map tool. However, this only works for stores that have a storefront.

Here is an interesting article about how you can build serious backlinks. This is called link building.

- Keep an eye on the loading times of your website.

Google also rates your website according to how fast your page loads. To perform well with your keywords in search results, it's also important to keep an eye on your website's loading times. Personally, I consider this like a budget that is handled carefully.

You can control these loading times by compressing the images as good as possible and try to work as little as possible with transparent PNG files. Most of the time SVG (Scalable Vector Graphic) files are smaller in size, unless they are very complex.

I work a lot with Lottie files, which of course are top in the amount of data to be transferred. Here is a link to the ultimate Lottiefile source.

You can easily measure the loading times of your website with this Googletool.

For more detailed analysis, it is recommended to work with the Chrome extension Lighthouse from Google .

In addition, your website must also be optimized for mobile devices. This factor also plays a decisive role in the ranking factors at Google .

- Create a Google company profile entry.

To strengthen your Local SEO , it is definitely worthwhile to make an entry at Google My Business.

This increases the indexing in your area enormously and can increase your local SEO factor. You can also ask your customers for reviews. Which is also helpful for the credibility of your business or services. And in search queries in the area you quickly appear high and prominent in the Google index.

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I hope I could give you some helpful tips to rank your own website better in the organic search results.

Pay attention to the user signals continuously, so you can increase the search volume for your website and hopefully also the conversions. Because as written many website visitors who do not buy from you in the end, also bring nothing.