A remarkable 61% of B2B marketers believe that SEO is the key to online success. No wonder why modern businesses allocate around 41% of their marketing budget to driving SEO campaigns. Doubling down on your SEO strategy can really amplify not just your organic traffic but your business as a whole.
From keyword research to technical SEO to link building, we’ll talk about how you can supercharge your SEO strategy across the board.
What is an SEO Strategy?
SEO strategy refers to a comprehensive plan designed to gain organic traffic from search engines. It encompasses both qualitative content principles and technical enhancements to rank higher in the SERPs (search engine results pages).
Unlike paid ads that require continuous spending, the right SEO strategy can help your site drive a stream of free, organic traffic in the long-term.
How to Create an Effective SEO Strategy
Since Google has over 200 ranking factors, it’s hard to create an SEO strategy that works equally well for every site and every niche. After all, it’s not just a series of boxes to check off but a strategic and long-term investment that requires patience, continual learning, and adaptability.
The good news is, there are clear, actionable tips to help you create an SEO strategy that shall pay off over time. From content strategy to link-building methods, we’ll go over every component of a successful SEO strategy.
SEO Content Strategy
Content strategy is your high-level approach for creating and marketing content. And it’s not just about attracting eyeballs and delighting readers. It’s about driving actual, profitable traffic and generating high-quality inbound leads. All of these require careful planning and a thoughtful SEO content approach.
The following are the main pillars of a successful SEO content strategy:
1. Keyword research
Not doing keyword research is one of the biggest SEO mistakes. Many webmasters create content at random and expect organic traffic.
The thing is, keyword research is foundational and should be front and center of your SEO content strategy. If you’re gearing up for keyword research in 2025, here’s what to keep in mind:
● Long-tail keyword targeting
This strategy continues to drive better and faster results, not to mention conversion value. There are many keyword research tools that can help you discover more of these hidden opportunities.
● Avoid keyword stuffing
In the olden days of search engines, the more keywords you used, the better a page would rank. Today, keyword stuffing is considered a very dangerous game.
Google rolled out numerous algorithm updates to devalue and even penalize keyword stuffing. Google’s spam detection system has become incredibly advanced and unforgiving—it’s not something you want to risk crossing.
Mindless keyword stuffing is then a big no-no, but responsible keyword usage should still be a part of your keyword and SEO strategy. The goal is to just follow Google’s incessant advice of creating ‘people-first’ content; that is, “helpful, reliable information that’s primarily created to benefit people”, not just to gain search engine rankings.
There’s no magic number when it comes to optimal keyword density, but you don’t really have to use the same keyword again and again throughout the article. You can use long-tail keyword variations, also called ‘keyword stemming’. Adding LSI keywords also helps to improve the topical depth of your content, allowing search engines to better interpret its context.
● Prevent keyword cannibalization
To prevent keyword cannibalization, make sure to avoid targeting similar keywords multiple times. Instead, chunk similar long-tail keywords together and strategically use them in one value-packed article that Google can’t resist but rank. You can easily find all variants of a long-term keyword using browser add-ons like Keyword Planner.
● Do SERP and competitor analysis
SERP analysis is important to determine if and how you can rank for a target keyword. It also allows you to verify the search intent and look into the actual SERP landscape and features.
One of the most efficient ways to do SERP analysis is using our AI SEO reports. In a matter of seconds, you’ll get a breakdown of the search intent categories of the top-ranking pages and analyze whether or not you have an actual shot at competing for the target keyword.
You can use the rankability feature below to identify the minimum Domain Authority, Referring Domains, and Referring Backlinks for a stronger likelihood of ranking for the search term.
Read Full Tutorial: SERP Analysis Through AI SEO Reports: Keywords Everywhere
2. Content
High-quality content is the building block of effective SEO. The following are actionable tips for creating top-notch content that attracts both Google and human readers.
● Create high-level content
Make your content so comprehensive that readers won’t need to look anywhere else. When the search engines notice how much time readers are spending on your content, that’s a signal of engagement and quality. If you keep that up across all of your web pages, you’ll see a boost of discoverability and ranking in no time.
You can follow the Skyscraper Technique which is essentially about creating something bigger and better than what’s already out there. If that means adding infographics or graphs and charts, any effort that’s likely going to make your content 10x better will be worth it.
● Craft magnetic titles and descriptions
It’s one thing to write pro-level copy, but writing killer titles is entirely another story. If you want to stand out in search engine results and boost click-through rates, you need to start paying attention to crafting click-worthy blog titles.
The tricky part is that keywords still have to be used, and it takes finesse to turn bland (and sometimes even awkward) keywords into compelling blog titles. You need to play around emotional triggers and even tactfully pique people’s curiosity to compel them to click through.
If this isn’t quite your strong suit and you want to just create simple yet striking titles that are SEO-friendly and on par with the competition, you can use the same AI SEO Report mentioned above.
Just click “Analyze Titles for SERP” under the Run SEO Report widget:
And the tool will instantly create a helpful report with an effective title suggestion:
● Mind E-E-A-T
E-E-A-T may seem like one of those painful SEO acronyms you need to work around, but it’s a necessary complication. After all, it represents what we consumers want and deserve– that is, authentic insights, tried-and-true advice, and unique opinions that matter.
Google has been harping on E-E-A-T for quite some time. It used to be just E-A-T “Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness”, but in 2022, Google added another E for Experience to make the game more inclusive in the growing landscape of creator economy.
To follow Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines, consider the following:
- Follow strict editorial standards and make sure that your content is clear, well-edited, and fact-checked.
- Credit your content creators since Google highlights ‘expertise’ and values content produced by someone with demonstrated knowledge or experience in the subject matter. This is especially applicable to “Your Money or Your Life” topics that can affect people’s health, finances, and well-being.
- Build your authority through PR and link building efforts since “Authoritativeness” is still the name of the game. Build your reputation and thought leadership and focus on adding value through and through.
To clarify, E-E-A-T is not a confirmed Google ranking factor, but it definitely raises the bar when it comes to content quality and credibility. It all boils down to the final criterion “Trust”, a signal of helpful, reliable, and genuine information.
● Use different types of multimedia
Research shows that the human brain processes visuals faster than text. Visual information is easier to scan and so users can absorb a lot of your message and are even compelled to stay longer and go deeper.
Since Google algorithms clearly show a preference for whatever attracts and engages people, there’s no reason not to integrate multimedia content into your SEO strategy. Instead of posting huge blocks of text, add images, tables and charts, video, infographics, and even quizzes and other interactive elements.
● Focus on evergreen content
If you want consistent presence in the search results, it’s best to focus on targeting evergreen keywords. This does not apply to sites that require covering news and trends, but the rest of the sites can benefit from focusing on topics with more consistent search demand. You can use Google Trends for SEO to verify the popularity of any given keyword over the years.
● Update old content
Users generally prefer the most current information available, and updating your old content is a cost-effective way of adding value and generating results without having to create entirely new content. Even if a previous article did rank well, multiple factors can cause a drop in rankings. Fine-tuning your content allows you to apply the latest SEO best practices to boost SEO results.
It could be a simple tweak in titles, meta descriptions, or internal and external links. Or it could be more significant updates such as the following:
- Optimizing posts for featured snippets
- Including the latest industry stats & best practices
- Converting articles into listicles
- Making use of schema markup
- Adding TL;DR
You may even modify the search intent and format to match the actual SERP landscape. As for which content you need to update, you can prioritize freshening up pages that:
- Have high bounce rates
- Have experienced a drop in page traffic
- Generate little to no traffic
You can update pages, but it’s best to keep the original URLs since the existing ones have already been crawled and indexed and may have even earned backlinks already. If you change a page’s URL, it will take time for the search engine to discover, index, and rank it again.
There are also pages that don’t need an update but direct removal. Deleting content, on the other hand, should be a last resort. Only consider removing content if they are not getting traffic and backlinks and have no relevant information.
3. On-page Optimization
On-page SEO refers to the optimizations you make to individual web pages, so search engines can better crawl, understand, and rank your content. These on-page components signal both relevance and quality.
The factors mentioned above already encompass on-page optimization, but there are other tweaks you can apply to ensure page-level optimization. These include:
- Descriptive URLs: Add your main keyword to the url and keep it simple yet descriptive.
- Page title: Use your primary keyword naturally in the page title as well
- Meta description: To enhance your click-through rates, write a concise, informative, and engaging meta description.
- Content optimization: Use the primary keyword, its variations, and LSI keywords naturally throughout the content.
- Header tags (H1-H6): Structuring your content using header tags improves user experience and informs search engines what the page content is about.
- Structured data markup: For better and richer search engine results, annotate different types of content using structured data markup.
- Alt text: Adding alt attributes provides more context for search engines, not to mention enhance accessibility, user experience, and image traffic.
- Image compression: Compressing and resizing large images speeds up data transition, optimizes bandwidth usage, and improves overall website load speed.
- Internal linking: A robust internal link structure not only improves navigation but also distributes link value across your website and helps search engines discover, index, and rank your content.
Overall, your SEO content strategy should be optimized for both people and search engines. Just take note that Google gets smarter by the day. As people try to find clever loopholes and magic formulas to outwit search engines, Google is also working extra hard on detecting practices that are implemented for the sheer purpose of gaming the system.
Just write for humans first then search engines second. Make your SEO content strategy quality-focused– creating content that readers trust, engage with, and return to.
Local SEO Strategy
Standard SEO and local SEO are closely related, but local SEO has specific distinctions that make it worth addressing separately. In fact, local SEO has unique ranking signals, including:
- NAP citations
- The exact location that the user is searching from
- Presence of Google Business Profile listing
- Keywords used in GBP
- Number of “check-ins” at that location
- Shares on social media
- Online reviews
- Keywords used in online reviews
- Google Maps star rating for that business
When done correctly, local SEO can boost local awareness about your business and bring the locals a step closer to conversion.
Local searches make up a huge chunk of the SEO world, and since the goal of Google is to serve up the most relevant search results, its algorithms are set to verify the local intent behind the queries. Even if the user does not specify the location in the search box, if the keyword has a local intent, Google’s geotargeting will give precedence to which business is the nearest.
For instance, if someone types in the term “coffee shop”, the results will be tailored to where that person is standing.
To make sure that your business is visible and gets priority on the first page of local search results, one of the main steps is to claim your Google Business Profile. Your Google listing is like the front-door entrance to your business on the internet, so make sure that it’s fully optimized and up-to-date. Include all the links, photos, and information that would be valuable to the searcher.
Even better, making it to the Google Map Pack (the top three local business listings) can definitely help you cement your local presence. To rank in the local pack, consider implementing the following:
● Create Citations
Simply put, local citations are any digital mention of your business name, address, and phone number. You can build NAP citations and get listed in a lot of different places where people look for information about local businesses. It could be business directories, the core data aggregators in your industry, social networks, and other social websites. In the US, some of the core sites include:
- Apple Maps
- Yelp
- Bing Places
- YellowPages
- BBB
- Foursquare
It’s not just about SEO rankings, it’s about optimizing sources of traffic. Since these business directories generate a lot of traffic and rank high on SERPS, these citations are always a great starting point in local SEO.
● Ensure consistent and updated NAP citations
Your business name and address should be written out the exact same way on your Google Business Profile. Even the spelling and abbreviations matter. So if “Avenue” is spelled out fully in your GBP, make it consistent across all other citations.
If your business changes its physical location, name, or phone number, make sure that all citations are updated and consistent as well. Your NAP on sites like Yelp are citations you can easily change yourself, but if there are mentions of your company on other local blog articles or resource pages, make sure to reach out to them one by one to politely ask for a manual change.
● Mind your review signals
Google reviews matter, especially the legitimate, lengthy, positive ones from your customers that ideally include photos. To encourage your customers to leave Google reviews, you can:
- Train your team to politely request reviews after a positive interaction.
- Make it easy and simple for customers by sharing a direct link or QR code to your Google review page and even including a quick guide on how to leave a review.
- Post a subtle or direct request on your social media platforms by featuring other reviews or by just being genuine about your messaging. You can use language like “Help us grow” or “Your opinion matters…”.
- Consider running a Google Review email campaign to automate the process and make the follow-up process more streamlined.
- Use text message marketing which is gaining more and more traction in the past few years.
- Reply to every single review on Google, be it positive or negative. Not only does Google’s algorithm factor businesses that are more active and engaged, but responding to reviews also inherently helps build customer trust and brand credibility.
It’s not advisable to incentivize positive reviews, especially if you make the incentive conditional on a positive rating. Considering there are risks involved, it’s best to focus on making the review collection process a part of the customers’ experience with your brand during opt-out, the sales call, or even the invoicing process.
Besides incorporating specialized local SEO techniques, following standard SEO practices can still impact your local rankings. According to Google, “Your position in web results is also a factor, so SEO best practices also apply to local search optimization.”
To amplify your local SEO game, the following are other local SEO strategies you can apply:
- Do local keyword research; target specific, long-tail keywords; and sprinkle location terms naturally. Keyword stuffing is a big no-no.
- Make sure to write unique content for every location landing page. You can’t just swap out city names and a few pictures then call it good.
- Use original or actual photos instead of stock photos when creating location-focused pages.
- Embed a Google Map on your About Page
- Highlight local professional organizations you belong to or mention location charities and organizations you support
If you run a brick-and-mortar business or provide services in specific cities, towns, and states, optimizing your site for local SEO is a big must. When done right, local SEO can help you establish greater brand visibility, more website visitors, better leads, and so much more.
Technical SEO strategy
Technical SEO is all about making sure that your website is crawlable, fast, and secure. As long as you take care of the following, you’re off to a solid start:
● Crawling and Indexing
Can search engines explore your site? No matter how awesome your content is, if your pages are not accessible to search engines, your efforts will be in vain. To make sure that your pages are crawlable, you can:
- Submit a sitemap to Google Search Console. It’s basically a file that outlines the structure of your website; that is, the list of all your website pages and the relationship between them. With or without submitting a sitemap, your site can still be indexed, but it may take longer for Google to find and understand the hierarchy and importance of your site pages.
- Check your robots.txt file as well to see if there are misconfigurations that are blocking search engines from crawling your site’s important pages. To preserve crawl budget, you can use the ‘disallow’ directive to block access to unimportant pages like your login pages, staging pages, archived content, and CMS pages among many others.
- Ensure proper canonicalization to help guide the search engine to the original pages you want it to prioritize.
- Eliminate redirect chains and internal redirects to avoid crawling and indexing problems. You can use SEO Checker to automatically detect redirect issues. The tool also instantly checks for broken links, URL problems, and even speed and security issues.
- Check for duplicate content to avoid confusing crawlers. Lots of duplicate content issues may also lead to SEO penalties, so it’s best to create unique pages to make sure that your pages are indexed and ranked.
- Avoid thin content because it won’t add value, and it could be one of the reasons your pages are “crawled but not indexed”.
● Mobile Experience
Besides optimizing your site for search engines, technical SEO also involves user experience factors like ensuring fast page load speed and mobile responsiveness.
In 2016, Google introduced mobile-first indexing, and in 2023, they transitioned to 100% mobile first index. This means that Google will rank the search results based only on your website’s performance on mobile devices. Not taking care of your mobile SEO could seriously hurt your rankings.
● Site Speed
Again, Google’s overarching priority is the satisfaction of the users, and slow-loading sites are just a big no-no in terms of user experience. Site load speed has been a confirmed ranking factor on Google since 2010, and it has only become more important since then. To optimize page speed for SEO, make sure to:
- Optimize images to reduce load time
- Minimize pop-ups or optimize them
- Clean up your code and remove unused or unnecessary lines
- Compress CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
- Cut unnecessary plugins that are resource-intensive
- Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
- Implement Browser Caching
- Remove Redirect Chains
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
If you’ve done everything you could do and your page load times are still not improving, you may consider finding a faster hosting service as it’s also possible that your speed problems are due to poor hosting performance.
In the end, you want to ensure a more holistic approach to SEO. On top of content and technical optimizations, it’s crucial to prioritize user experience (UX) as well. That means avoiding messy site structures, dead links, error pages, or any hiccup that takes people away from your site.
SEO Link Building Strategy
Link building is still one of the major factors in how Google ranks web pages. In fact, it’s the most quantitative way to build authority in your industry. However, quality now matters more than quantity. Search engines are better able to determine the relevance of links, which makes link spamming a thing of the past.
The following is a thorough list of all link building strategies for your SEO campaign in 2025:
● Local Listings & Business Directories
This is a no-brainer, but if you still haven’t made the most of all high-quality local listings relevant to your business, you’re missing out. Make sure your business is listed everywhere it matters, especially those that focus on your state or city.
Some of the best web directories you can tap include:
- BOTW
- AboutUs
- Yelp
- Local.com
- Foursquare
- Bing Places
- Yellow Pages
- Chamber Of Commerce
- Hotfrog
- Nextdoor
- JoeAnt
- BBB directory
● Ask People You Know for Links
You may have relatives, friends, colleagues, employees, or business partners with websites relevant to yours. If there are, it wouldn’t hurt to reach out and ask. Just make sure to check their websites before you ask since spammy ones will only do more harm than good.
If you have business partners or are a member of certain organizations, they could also be great opportunities to tap. For example, you may ask them to announce your partnership on their blog, list you on their clients/donors page, or publish a testimonial you provided. If they are your business supplier or vendor, you can even agree to do a case study about your engagement.
● Ask Publishers to Link Your Unlinked Brand Mentions
There may be blog articles mentioning your business naturally. Reaching out to their websites and politely asking for a link can turn those mentions into valuable backlinks.
● Maximize social media
Claim your brand’s handle on any and all relevant social media platforms, optimize your profiles, and share relevant content regularly to drive engagement.
● Guest Posting
Guest blogging is one of the oldest link building strategies, but it still proves to be effective in naturally building your link profile. You can find guest posting opportunities using the following Google Search Operators:
- “[your keyword]” + “write for us”
- “[your keyword]” + “guest post/blogging guidelines”
- “[your keyword]” + “contribute”
Another easy way to find these opportunities is to follow one of the top influencers in your industry. Type in “Guest post” + “[influencer name]” on Google to instantly view all the websites they have tapped so far. Add those websites to your list of prospects and start reaching out with tailored pitches.
● Try Broken Link Building
While guest posting can be very effective when done right, crafting a killer pitch and writing rockstar content that makes the cut can take a lot of time and effort. One of the low-effort ways to attract links is broken link building.
All you have to do is find dead or non-working links on other websites and reach out to their web admins to suggest working links to your website. With this approach, you’re essentially offering a solution instead of asking for a favor which makes website admins more inclined to accept the suggestion. You can instantly find broken links using tools like SEO Checker.
● Do Coupon Link Building
If you have an ecommerce site, this is one of the link building strategies that could work. There are lots of sites that curate discounts, and if you have these promotions, you can reach out to these platforms to let them know about your offers.
● Encourage Product Reviews
There are also lots of sites that test out products and write reviews about them. You can find platforms relevant to your business and send these bloggers your product in hopes of a backlink. Google does not approve exchanging products for backlinks, but as long as you’re not making the sample conditional on a backlink and as long as you have the budget for this campaign, you should be good to go.
● Intern/Job Postings
Another easy way to earn links is simply posting your job or intern opportunities on relevant sites. You can even attract easy .edu links this way.
● Make Donations or Sponsor Events/Venues
Industry events are a mainstay in any locality, and they’re constantly looking for sponsors. If there are donation or sponsorship opportunities that involve mentioning your brand and linking to your website, that could be worth looking into.
● Q&A Sites and Forums
Although these are mainly nofollow links, they can still support your link building efforts, not to mention drive extra traffic to your site. Sites like Quora and Reddit can be great places to start, but if you can tap niche ones relevant to your industry, all the better.
● Link Out
All of the link building strategies mentioned so far involve linking “to” your site. Linking “out” and to other websites can also prove to be helpful as long as you’re linking to high-quality pages and resources that really supplement your content. The key is to send outreach emails to websites you’re linking out to, so they’re made aware and may even reciprocate. Even if they don’t, that’s a relationship-building effort that could still do you good down the line.
● Respond to Media Requests
There are sites like Connectively (formerly HARO or Help a Reporter Out) where you can connect with website admins or journalists looking to make useful articles, expert roundup posts, product roundups, or even text or podcast interviews. Just reach out to the creators with your proposal, and if you qualify, they will respond and feature you in their content.
● Work With Niche-Specific Link Builders
If you want the easier way and have the budget to hire link builders, at least be extra selective and work with link building specialists who have a solid experience in your industry. That means they already have their little black book of contacts and network that can make the pursuit more effective and rewarding for you.
● Earn links
Building links is one thing; earning them is a different story. In fact, acquiring links you did not ask for is the nirvana of SEO. It’s also the most sustainable way forward.
The key is to just put in the work and make your website or content link-worthy, and you can do that by creating linkable assets including:
- Detailed how-to guides
- Infographics
- Original research
- Complete lists
- Statistics roundup posts
- Timely/Seasonal Content
- Ebooks
- PDF Guides
- Videos
Simply put, before building links, you need to have something of value to build links to. Using the “Skyscraper Technique” can be a good way to create something better and more complete, compelling people to choose your content over others.
An even better way of making it more compelling to link to you is by building your brand. It’s a long-term game, but it’s one of the best ways to cement your reputation in the industry. If you successfully establish your foothold in your niche, content creators are more inclined to choose your brand when adding links. For instance, if you’re running a health blog, you most likely wouldn’t think twice about linking to resources from WebMD.
Takeaway
If there’s a magic formula to cite, it probably would have to be “focusing on creating value”. Besides, what works today may not work tomorrow. Google is constantly and actively trying to find ways to discover how websites are manipulating search results through poor-quality content, low-quality links, and other black hat SEO efforts. Google has rolled up multiple updates over the years to make webmasters understand that it only wants anything “helpful”. Your SEO campaign will become a much easier endeavor if your foundation is solid, and you’re creating something truly valuable that people find useful or share-worthy.
The final and most important thing is to always measure and track the success of your SEO strategy. Analyze important measures such as traffic, rankings, click-through rates, dwell time, bounce rate, and social engagement. SEO is not something that you can just set and forget. You need to adapt to Google updates and changes in the search landscape to stay competitive. There’s no real finish line, so you need to constantly revisit and refine your SEO strategy to play the long game.