![Beginner's Guide to planning and implementing SEO [2023]](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.sanity.io%2Fimages%2Fd80bvtux%2Fproduction%2F432eef909c8f7785a03cf7da8a7a375c055a6fd3-1800x675.jpg%3Fw%3D1200%26h%3D450&w=3840&q=75)
Planning SEO for a foreseeable future is extremely important for any online business, and this has become crucial, especially in recent times when Google is churning out update after update without any prior notification.
The months of July, August, September & October of the Year 2022 are a great example of the statement above, as each of these months saw a Google Update, whereas the month of September saw two of these ‘Core Google Updates’.
Having an SEO plan is essential because it helps you create and maintain goals when optimizing content. Instead of just blindly creating/optimizing the content on what you think people are looking for.
A good strategy will ensure that you’re creating content that people are looking for. But, a great SEO plan helps users discover what they need.
This is why it is important to have an SEO plan laid out.
Types of SEO Plans
SEO plans are of three types:-
Yearly SEO Plan (A plan for the entire year)
Half-Yearly SEO Plan (A plan for each of the 6 months)
Quarterly SEO Plan (A plan for each of the 3 months)
What is the BEST SEO Plan
Each type of SEO Plan has its benefits and use cases. Let’s dive a little deeper.
Quarterly SEO Plan
This is the best SEO plan to get started with as this plan is the most dynamic among all of the SEO Plans. This dynamicity involves more reporting more reviews and better ability to tackle the downfalls suffered from Google Updates. All-in-All a great Plan to get started with.
Half-Yearly SEO Plan
This plan is best for businesses that have had SEO performed previously or perform reasonably well in Google Organic Search Results. This is usually for businesses that have a good hold in their niche and/or a good offline market (that is, word of mouth).
Yearly SEO Plan
This plan is best for established and highly authoritative businesses that already have performed SEO and reaped good benefits from it. These businesses dominate the niche and have a great reputation among search engines.
Out of all the three types of SEO plans the most beneficial to have is the ‘Quarterly SEO Plan’ when starting SEO.
As this plan takes into account the Google Core Updates and if necessary can improve or change the SEO strategy for the upcoming quarter due to the nature and the number of reviews after a short period of time, that is 3 months as compared to the other SEO plans in which the reviews are made either once a year or only twice a year.
How To Implement SEO Plans
Now, we have gone through the importance of having an SEO plan and the benefits of each of the different types of SEO Plans. Let’s delve into how we plan out the SEO Plan.
Gather your current statistics
To measure an increase you need a base to start from. The following are some major metrics that need to be measured before implementing any SEO strategy or plan.
Domain Authority.
Google Rankings.
The state of the traffic being received (organic traffic only).
The average number of clicks received in the last 3 months (for a quarterly SEO Plan).
The average click-thorough-rate (CTR) for the last 3 months (for a quarterly SEO Plan).
The average bounce rate for the last 3 months (for a quarterly SEO Plan).
Number of Backlinks (both dofollow and nofollow).
Core Web Vitals.
Number of pages and the number of blogs.
Once the above metrics are measured, we can begin implementing the SEO plan.
Keyword & Competitor Research
Keyword research is a cornerstone of any SEO plan. This helps us understand the user’s search intent. Based on the intent we can map our keywords accordingly.
But, keyword research itself is not enough for a complete robust solution. This is where competitor research comes into play.
Competitor Research is the process of recognizing other online businesses that are competing in the same niche as yours and analyzing the areas of their expertise and figuring out what makes them excel in the organic search results.
With the help of the above research, we should be able to create topical maps for your website or online business and each topical map will consist of three types of keywords.
Head or Broad keywords
Medium-tail or intent-focused keywords
Long-tail keywords
Once, we have finished with our keyword and competitor research, we can move forward to the optimization.
Search Engine Optimization
With all our keywords, and the base metrics in place we can begin with our website’s Search Engine Optimization.
But, what is Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization (or SEO), is the process of increasing a website's visibility. This in turn drives more traffic to the website, making it more visible in organic search results.
The main focus of SEO is to improve a website's ranking. The higher you rank, the more chances you have to get noticed by a user, which will likely generate sales.
So, how does SEO work?
SEO is of 3 types:-
On-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO
Technical SEO
On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO focuses on the content of the website or online business. This is the initial part of the SEO.
During this phase of the SEO, we create and optimize content based on the topical maps and keywords we have created during Keyword & Competitor Research.
The following sections of a website are of great importance when it comes to On-Page SEO:-
The title tag
Meta description
The h1 tag
h2 - h6 tags
Image alt & src
Body text
Bold body text
Anchor text
Schema Markup
The title tag
The title tag is a website element that represents a webpage’s title. The title of a website is what is shown in the organic search results when performing a search.
A title tag should be created around a topic and target keywords.
The title tag directly corresponds to the CTR(Click through rate) of a website, as the more clickbaity it is the more clicks you get and with more clicks the higher the CTR.
Meta Description
The meta description is a summary of the webpage. It helps in describing the context of the page. The meta description should always be relevant to the webpage it is built for and just like the title tag should be built around the topic and the target keywords.
The h1 tag
The h1 tag is usually the very first piece of content that is crawled by the search engine which makes it very important to have an equally important to optimize. The tag should be descriptive and not too long. The tag should also be relevant as Google sometimes uses this tag instead of the title tag in the organic search results which means almost the same optimization rules as that of the title tag.
h2-h6 tags
These are the heading tags which are used for creating content hierarchy. These are used to sub-divide a given topic or topics into other smaller topics for uers to explore.
Image alt & src
The images are the most crucial part of the website other than the content as these are what holds a user to the webpage. So the images themselves have to be low in size which makes them faster to load, need to have an important subject relevant to the page.
The alt text of any image is what is used by the search engines to check the relevancy of the image to the webpage that is being loaded. Not only that, but the image filename or the src attribute should also be some readable text and not some random string of characters.
Body text
The body text is the core content of any webpage this is what leads to a conversion, this content is essentially what a user wants. So, it should be curated very carefully and should always be built around the specific niche topic, the page relevancy, and the target keywords.
This is where the competition analysis that was performed earlier comes into play. As, we not only have to replicate what the competition has done but on top of that improve it in such a way that it gives our website or webpage the edge to overtake the competition and start ranking above them.
The body content for a page can not be altered in such a way that it changes the context or adds some other context to it.
If this happens chances are that the crawler or the search engine will get confused which will result in a loss in rankings, which will turn into a loss of traffic.
Bold body text
This content is the highlight of the core body content. When a specific keyphrase is supposed to catch the eye of the visitor, to hook them into a specific content of the page.
These are usually the targetted keywords, but for better results, this should be the search term that the page should be relevant for.
Anchor Text
These are the website’s links that are used to take the user or the visitor from one section of the website to another section or from one page to another page. These are used for interlinking different pages together.
Note: Only relevant pages should be linked with each other. Typically pages with the same topic are interlinked together.
Schema Markup
Search engine crawlers use Schema Markup to fetch information about the webpage to make them understand the website or webpage better. This further helps the search engines to better represent the website or webpage in the search results. This type of representation is also known as a Rich Snippet Result.
Schema Markup can be implemented site-wide or only for a specific page.
Off-Page SEO
Once the On-Page SEO is performed we need to proceed with the Off-Page SEO. But before that what is Off-Page SEO?
Off-Page SEO is an SEO strategy that involves creating links to external websites that link back to our website. This helps in creating a reputation for our website that will turn into authority.
So, how does Off-Page SEO works?
This link-sharing aspect which is the core concept of Off-Page SEO can be divided into the following categories.
Link Building: It is the process of earning backlinks from high-authority websites that helps the position of your website as an authority. These links are earned through the process of social bookmarking, profile creation, and posting articles on DA websites
Brand Building: This is the process of increasing your brand’s awareness in Google searches by increasing the relevance of your website to the niche’s search terms.
Content Marketing: This is the process of creating and publishing high-quality pieces of content. The content can be in the form of Blog posts, infographics, Research Papers, and eBooks.
Local SEO: This type of SEO relates to the optimization of your website for a specific region with the help of region-specific keywords also, known as long-tail keywords. This helps increase the website’s authority and expertise for a specific region and then the optimization can be branched out for a bigger region. This involves the creation of a Google My Business profile and Local citations.
Social Media: Another great technique to increase brand awareness and attract more eyeballs is using social media. Creating social media profiles and updating them regularly with quality content is very helpful in bringing more traffic to the website and increasing the website’s domain authority.
Now, we reach the last type of SEO which is Technical SEO
Technical SEO
This involves optimizing the website’s technical aspects. So, that the website is always readily available to the crawlers and also provides visitors of the website with a pleasant experience.
The main working aspects are:-
Making the website fast, on average more than 50% of users leave the website if it takes more than 3 seconds for the website to load.
Making the website crawlable, means making sure that the website doesn’t have any rules that block the crawlers to enter the website.
This is usually fixed by creating a robots.txt file and checking for meta robots tags and fixing the 404 pages.
Make sure the website doesn’t have any duplicate content and if it does then use the canonical tags to fix this issue.
Make sure the website has an SSL certificate installed which makes the traffic secure.
Make sure the website has a sitemap, a sitemap is used to tell the search engines what pages we want to be crawled, discovered, and ultimately indexed by it.