Creating A Comprehensive SEO Strategy in 2023 for A New Website‍

When building a new website, creating an SEO strategy carries the most significance if the organic reach is given importance.

While every SEO specialist has their way of executing the strategy, there are a few steps that are a must-have for each online brand’s or website’s strategy.

Search engine optimization has greatly evolved. It is nothing like what it used to be in the late 2000s. Even much of what SEOs did a few years back has become obsolete.

This tells us that search engines, especially Google, are getting smarter with each passing day. Whether you are building a brand for app development, web design or development, or e-commerce, the foundations remain the same.

New algorithm updates and in-depth content analysis have forced webmasters to ensure more authentic steps toward building an online presence.

If you ever relied on shady or Blackhat tactics, you won’t stand a chance in today’s ever-competitive market.

When you take charge of SEO – you need to take more concrete steps to pave the way towards strong online visibility and decent organic traffic backed with authority that uplifts the game.

To create the ultimate SEO strategy for 2023 – you will have to go through a lot of things, and surely, we cannot cover them all here. But what we can do is include all the essential steps that will not only correct your course but make sure that you get where you want to be.

So, without further ado, let’s walk through these essential steps and learn to create an SEO strategy for 2023.

Essentials For Creating a Comprehensive SEO Strategy for 2023: 9 Steps

Depending upon the brand, website, or niche, there can be thousands of changes to strategy, content, and design, but when we talk about doing the basics right, there are a few essential steps.

These are so significant that missing them might cost you that precious ranking on a premium keyword you have worked for day and night. Let’s discover more in detail.

1. Do Extensive Niche Research

The first step when doing anything these days is only one, and that is research. Whenever launching a new website or creating an SEO strategy, research is the prerequisite to creating a winning plan.

When researching, there are multiple factors that you need to consider. Let’s quickly have a look at them.

• Study your competitors, understand and document what they are doing to get traffic and business
• While researching and skimming through your competitors, note their ideation and targeted keywords, and targeted audience
• You must also compare your USP with theirs, for that plays a vital role in the short and long-term success
• Note any positive pointers while assessing off-page and on-page activities, and don’t be shy to take inspiration
• Identify your interests and where you think your audience might
• Notice any vague ideas; trim them where necessary
• Define profitability keywords and channels and prioritize your plan
• Don’t forget to have a look at the trends; forecast what is coming and what has the past been

Niche research is a gradual, time-consuming, and necessary stage that cannot be skipped. If done right, it can go on to help in the long term.

Also, the outcomes of your niche research define what your next phases will look like, so don’t blink an eye and ensure perfection.

2. Define Topics to Be Covered

The next step is where you define a list of topics that you will be covering. These have to be pertinent to your industry and relevant to the times so that you get the traction you are looking for.

There are multiple ways of researching the topics. You can use SEO tools like SEMRush, Moz, or Ahrefs to find topics by entering a few keywords relevant to your topic.

This way, you will get several topics to be covered that you can prioritize and begin creating content.

The other way can be to review and assess what your competitors are up to and take inspiration from their tactics to create relevant content. You can create pillar content and generate a list of topics under a parent topic.

For example, if your niche is app development, you will have to look for the variations involving this keyword – in both short-tail and long-tail forms.

3.Comprehensive Keyword Research

Once your second stage is concluded, there comes the keyword research phase, where you identify which keywords you will be targeting.

This will be a mix of short-tail and long-tail keywords. Once you have the keywords, you will then use them appropriately with the content topics that you have identified.

At first, you might not be able to find the right keywords right away; but research is important. The more you research, the more you will understand what keywords you will be targeting.

Moreover, identifying the keyword intent is significant. Depending on your goals and industry, a mix of transactional, navigational, informative, and other kinds of keywords may be used.

Whichever keywords you target, just make sure you target the right keywords, and the right traffic will inevitably come to you.

4. Get Quality Backlinks

After you are done with keyword research, the next step is to get backlinks for your website or brand. And just not any backlinks. You have to acquire or buy quality backlinks.

When you go for cheap backlinks, they often hurt your website more than help it, which is why you need to be careful.

SEOs have multiple options for getting the links. The best strategy is to keep creating quality content while maintaining a balance of quality and ordinary backlinks to keep the site progressing.

Moreover, you don’t have to go for backlinks at once – it is a gradual process, and you will need to have weekly, monthly, and quarterly tasks or targets to uplift the website while you track results.

5. Build Content Marketing Plan

The fifth stage is where you build a content marketing plan. This is a multi-faceted plan defining how you will be moving ahead with content marketing.

The content marketing plan involves not just writing or people familiar with SEO. Specialists from other domains will have to pitch in as well.

This way, you will be able to create a plan that is lasting and generates an impact.

The type of content that you might strategize will include:

• Onsite SEO Content
• Offsite SEO Content
• Guest Posts
• Offsite Articles
• Web 2.0s
• Whitepapers
• E-books
• Case Studies
• Marketing Collaterals

These are a few content marketing tangents that you will be touching. You will vast your domain as you grow and expand, covering even more topics to build authority.

6. Improve UX

Today, everyone is talking about how tech giants are spending hefty sums and focusing on amazing user experience. That is because the better experience your users have, the more chances of growth you have.

There are multiple ways one can improve the UX – contemporary techniques and tools make it pretty convenient to have unique and yet simple use of the website.

UX is a composite of multiple factors. It includes the content, the design, features and functionalities, ease of usability, and more.

Improving the UX or user experience is a continuous process, so there’s probably no end to it, but what is a must? Sustainable growth for your brand or site and happy users.

Tools like Hotjar and others are used to identify how you can improve the design and which folds or sections need to be worked upon.

Take an example of an app development brand. You need your user experience customized for an app platform so that it compliments the services.

7. Initiate Data-Driven Updates

After you have set your priorities on user experience, the next step is to initiate data-driven updates for your pages and other activities.

Google Analytics, HubSpot Marketing Suite, and other tools available in the market provide sufficient data on the website.

Through this, data-driven decisions can be made very easily, allowing for great performance and flawless progress toward the execution.

By setting goals and creating deadlines, you can extract useful data and use it for various purposes to increase business for your brand and optimize your content.

8. Frequently Create Content

After all the above steps have been initiated or followed, then comes content creation. When you are done with optimizing your website and ready to progress, you have to begin creating and publishing content.

There must be a set weekly frequency of rolling out the content. Through this, the search engines will begin to understand the behavior of your site and bring it atop.

Also, a better strategy is to create content on multiple topics and allow for better coverage of the content.

This will enable audiences of multiple to get attracted, and you will begin to cater to the needs of the quality of content.

9. Measure, Track and Update the Content

Last but not least, you have to measure, track and update the content. Many might not know, but updating and repurposing the content is extremely important.

There are many benefits of measuring the content performance, tracking its emergence, and updating it accordingly.

Not only does it become more accessible, but it also allows for improved decision-making and enhanced efficiency across all formats.

Once you make a habit of doing content, tracking it, and improving it with time, the traffic and lead count will surely rise.

Again, Google Analytics and HubSpot are the two best tools to track your performance on multiple domains and execute one's comprehensive strategy.

Takeaway

If you talk to someone about creating a brand or website in an extremely competitive online niche, they will most likely deny you, as if it is a cardinal sin.

They will throw facts and figures that may convince you that the market is saturated and you won’t make a penny.

While that may be true to an extent, there is always room in the market for new entrants with novel ways of capturing the market.

You can go towards aggressive performance marketing in the start, but not everyone can bleed enough money and have good returns.

This is where SEO jumps in. A comprehensive SEO strategy can provide you with a way of getting in front of the right audience and capturing their attention. If you decide to build a web or app development website, both might have varying SEO requirements.

Also, SEO does not bring you overnight success. It takes time and needs the effort to get your rightful place. So, if you have the patience, you can have your own SEO strategy that will suffice for at least a year and provide you with the direction.

Lastly, these might differ a bit for some industries, brands, products, or services, but the main idea remains the same.

Author's Bio

Muhammad Bin Habib is a computer science graduate passionate about technology, writing, and automobiles. He writes on emerging technologies, mobile apps, cyber spheres, fintech, and digital marketing. He prefers watching documentaries covering military strategy and technology, international security, warplanes, and reading books that fall under the same domain in his leisure time.