Advanced SEO Strategy

The Professional's Guide to SEO presents you with a lot of information. That’s an obvious statement — after all, it's designed to help bridge the gap between a basic understanding of SEO concepts and confidence in your advanced expertise. But for those of us who work every day in the digital marketing industry, that information alone isn’t enough to make us successful in our roles. We need to be able to translate it into a coordinated approach and prioritization that have real business impact — into strategy.

Strategy is what separates a person with advanced knowledge of SEO from an advanced SEO lead, manager, or director. Whether you’re working in-house, at an agency, or freelance, interviewing for a new position, presenting before company stakeholders, or planning a kickoff call with a new client, designing and communicating a strategy that moves beyond a list of tactics will not only set you apart professionally, it will move the needle in ways most organizations have never experienced.

Compared to a more basic (and likely less impactful) strategy that may resemble a list of tactics, an advanced SEO strategy incorporates both a more nuanced understanding of the way search engines work, and a broader range of SEO and non-SEO capabilities.

Acquiring that nuance means diving into resources, like this guide and the wealth of other available expertise on the web, that help you understand search algorithms and the ways they interact with websites in greater detail. It also means building real experience over time, of what has worked, and why, and fitting that into your broader understanding of SEO — without overgeneralization, of course.

In the beginning stages, it’s easy to audit a site and come up with long lists of pie-in-the-sky ideas for content, link building, technical work, and so on. Most sites, especially those that have never been handled by a dedicated SEO, need a lot of work, and any strategist arriving on the scene often gets pulled in several directions by various teams seeking their expertise, buy-in, or political weight.

Prioritization of the tasks you’ll undertake and the tactics you’ll employ is often your first goal, in order to have immediate impact and correct the course. This prioritized list and plan of action does qualify as some sort of strategy, and it’s something you should get good at in any case.

But know that this is only the first step — you should be ready to revisit this prioritization, repeatedly, once you have developed a fuller strategy, and also simply in reaction to unexpected events, developments, and new data.

As your laundry list of potential SEO improvements begins to form, it’s time to make a list of recommended tactics and further prioritize that list by likely impact weighed against required effort.

Create a matrix like the one above, perhaps in a meeting with relevant stakeholders. The likely impact of a tactic could be small, medium, or large, and the same scale will apply to the level of effort required to complete it. Plot each planned tactic into its own cell. Your list of tactics for the quarter, the year, or whatever time frame is dictated by your organization can include granular tasks as well as larger-scale projects — just make sure you’ve broken down any bigger ideas into pieces that make sense within the plot.

Prioritize high-impact, low-effort

Taking urgency into account, tackle the tactics that will have the highest impact and require the lowest effort first. You may also want to set in motion some more demanding, high-impact tactics at kickoff if they can be chipped away at simultaneously. Low-impact, high-effort tactics can often be reevaluated - perhaps there are alternatives, or perhaps the benefits have not been properly understood.

Things to keep in mind

There’s some important life lessons to keep in mind when comparing these lists of competing ideas, most of which will be the pet project or darling child of some stakeholder within your organization:

1. First, don’t assume that anyone is always right — even at the highest level, CEOs, CMOs, and other business leaders are, to a degree, winging it, and having to make decisions on instinct, or based on hearsay.

2. On the other hand, though, don’t assume anyone is an idiot, or inherently wrong-headed. If someone is suggesting an idea that seems like a mistake to you, keep in mind there is a perspective from which it seems right. Try to understand that perspective, and what has led to it. Perhaps by combining your knowledge with theirs, a better solution can be found.

3. That said, there is inherently a degree of politics here. You need to be mindful of the people whose buy-in will be needed later, and be prepared to trade and compromise on competing priorities, even if the result does not always reflect your best judgment.

Many SEOs would develop their prioritized list, call it a strategy, and pat themselves on the back. Indeed, a simple approach like the one above can yield great results, especially in the short term.

However, a truly brilliant strategy must be greater than the sum of its tactics. It must leverage the business’s strengths and unique advantages, demonstrate a deep understanding of competitors and customers, resonate with stakeholders — thus motivating them to drive it forward, and unite the business behind simple beliefs and achievable objectives. Rather than just ordering a list of activities, it should make it very obvious what needs to be done, but also what will not even be attempted.

This all sounds very grand, and initially, very far off. But there are a few ways to generate the ideas that will inspire all this coherent thinking and action.

Imagine you’re an Italian chef. Your restaurant sells delicious, fine-dining, Italian fare, but is losing business to a newly-opened Chinese takeaway nearby. Do you pivot by also offering Chinese takeaway? Do you offer takeout options for your Italian dishes? Do you cut dine-in prices to compete with the lower cost of takeout food?

Generally speaking, most people would not advise the Italian restaurant to offer Chinese food, or to slash its prices down to the level of takeout. Why? Because it needs to fight where it’s strong. It needs to find its own opportunities, rather than lean into its weaknesses. It needs to counter threats, rather than enlarge them.

The more nuanced questions will require a better understanding of the business: are you, the Italian chef, actually any good at making some other kind of fast food, such as pizza? Would offering competitively priced takeout lower your margins?

What does all this have to do with SEO strategy? It may feel old-fashioned, but the classic SWOT analysis we’ve just done (identifying Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) is a great way to quickly understand the position and beliefs of a business.

As you explore the opinions of stakeholders, jot down your thoughts in a document or notepad that you can return to whenever you discover something new:

• Strengths: What is already working well? What high-value terms does the site already rank for? What SEO metrics do you crush competitors in? Do you have a very capable development team, widely recognized and beloved brand, or enormous email list?

• Weaknesses: What is the site lacking? Is it difficult to navigate? Are its sitemaps and robots.txt file messy? Is the organization lacking insight because it doesn’t make use of basic reporting tools like Google Analytics? Does it have a lackluster content?

• Opportunities: What’s on the horizon that could be capitalized on as part of your strategy? Is there a highly valuable asset that’s already been created and is now begging for distribution? Is a tough competitor lagging behind in a certain content area?

• Threats: What’s on the horizon that could be harmful to your search visibility? Is there an up-and-coming competitor with an obvious wealth of SEO resources? Is there a platform migration looming? Is the site likely to fall victim to the next algorithm update? Are the development team playing whack-a-mole with a litany of performance and technical issues?

The answers to these questions are not in themselves a strategy. They are probably not even everything you need to know to build a strategy. But they will give you the context you need, or let you stumble upon that shocking revelation — “Wait, we have what ready to roll out and never properly launched?”, “Our brand is how much better known than our nearest competitor?”, “We have how many more content writers?”, and so on.

Of course, it takes a deep knowledge of SEO to translate the epiphanies from your prioritization and SWOT analysis into keywords, rankings, landing pages, robots.txt rules, and so on. That said, you might be noticing that some of the questions, strengths, or hypothetical epiphanies above don’t have much to do with SEO at all. The business likely already has a commercial strategy, and a good SEO strategy needs to be aligned with it. For some heavily-online businesses, SEO may even entirely dictate the business strategy.

Again, you’re going to have to be savvy about the politics here. If the business already has a compelling strategy and narrative for where it’s heading, your SEO strategy needs to reflect and lean into that. If, on the other hand, the business’s strategy is incompatible with SEO realities (for example, they’re moving into areas where they need SEO revenue, but can’t compete in the SERPs), then that message will have to be delicately delivered.

Similarly, if a business strategy calls for short-term, rapid investment and quick returns, certain SEO tactics (such as beginning to invest in a blog) may not yield results quickly enough, and as such are incompatible. Rather than answer difficult questions later about why your channel isn’t yielding results, either produce a strategy that, based on your experience, will lead to quicker returns, or have a frank discussion about which digital marketing channels will have to carry the weight until you can ramp up.

Let’s explore, very briefly, a hypothetical example.

A legacy business identifies that it is losing its once dominant market share to new, agile competitors. They employ you, an SEO strategist.

Although the new entrants can’t compete with your Domain Authority, they are building topical authority and brand recognition from informational pieces, and chipping away at your advantage in these areas. Their lower cost of business provides an edge, too, as does their more agile web development.

At the same time, your employer’s overall marketing strategy is to present itself as trustworthy experts, playing on the more established brand, and pushing slightly upmarket.

An example of a top-level SEO strategy here might be to combine all these problems into a solution — you can leverage your (for now) stronger brand recognition and domain strength to crowd out the new competitors in the informational SERPs where they’ve been getting a foothold, at the same time leaning into the “expertise” angle that is being pursued by the broader marketing strategy.

From this strategy follows tactics and choices. The actual tactics will need to be about how to position these new sections on the site, how to get them written, how to best leverage and promote them, and which keywords to target. Importantly, some other tactics are implicitly deprioritized — you’re not simultaneously focusing on unpicking the legacy codebase, for example, as that isn’t a priority of this strategy.

From the other angle

What if you’re the new entrance in this case? Your strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities are very different. For now, your strategy has been to compete where the big incumbent does not, making the most of your advantage in agility. If they wade into these spaces, you may eventually have to pivot — perhaps you’ve built enough authority to leverage your better price, UX, and technical performance on more commercial keywords. You could even push the price angle in your metadata, so that you still attract traffic whilst ranking just underneath the incumbent (which eventually, Google and users alike will recognize and reward). But you shift focus away from the informational content, unless you can still do a notably better job than the larger, older, more authoritative site.

The commonality between these two albeit brief perspectives is that the businesses are leveraging their strengths and sidestepping their weaknesses. They are finding a strong point (better agility, or lower prices, or a stronger brand) to lean into, and avoiding a fight on their weakest fronts, at least beyond the minimum needed to keep ticking over.

Simple, right? Well, not necessarily.

Regardless of how urgent the need is or how simple a task seems to you, the difficulty of transforming a strategy into real impact will vary from organization to organization. The plausibility of executing your strategy depends largely on your company’s search maturity, or how fully they understand and integrate SEO at all levels of the business. Of course, it’s your job to improve this, but that won’t happen overnight.

Heather Physioc’s search maturity guidance helps diagnose where your organization falls along the maturity spectrum, and is an absolute must-read at this stage in the strategic planning process. Not only does using this model help you solidify your recommendations, it also makes it more likely that those recommendations will see the light of day, because it allows you to communicate with stakeholders on their level.

How much buy-in can you expect from your department, your direct manager or client contact, and the rest of the larger team all the way up to the C-suite? If SEO has been socialized across the organization and is already a part of the company culture, you can probably expect your recommendations to be met with excitement. If not, you may experience some pushback when asking for necessary resources. At an agency, you’ll be dealing with the confines of existing SEO packages as well as the amount of time you’re expected to spend on each client each month. As an in-house SEO, you may have more autonomy but must often answer to more stakeholders and navigate more red tape.

How difficult will it be to get recommended changes implemented? If the content team has an existing calendar that tends to be jam-packed, new assets may not get slotted in as quickly as you’d like. If the web devs are slammed, working back-end fixes into their sprint cycle can be challenging.

What resources will be available for SEO? Resources come in many forms, and the most scarce of them tend to be headcount and tools. Are there writers on staff who are capable of creating best-in-class content? Does the marketing team have dedicated developers, or are the folks with access to the site’s code in a totally separate department? What tool subscriptions already exist, and how much budget is available to add to your tool kit? None of these questions should be assumed to have fixed answers. There is always something you can say to your CEO or MD that will cause them to reconsider, but it’s naive to rely on dramatic overnight change.

There’s a phrase from a earlier in this chapter, which is doing a lot of work:

…produce a strategy that, based on your experience, will lead into quicker returns, or have a frank discussion about which digital marketing channels will have to carry the weight until you can ramp up…

“Based on your experience.” This is a big deal for SEO strategy — you need to have a good idea how different tactics will play out in the ecosystem, and of course, it’s not like you have access to the inner workings of Google’s algorithm. So you’ll need to get a feel for what works, and how much, how quickly, and why.

There are some shortcuts here:

Industry conferences

Digital marketing conferences feature speakers and content at the cutting edge of the field. Not every talk you hear will apply directly to you or your work, but there is no better way to absorb the energy and ideas of the brightest minds in SEO than to be right there in the room with them.

The real value, though, is not in the scheduled talks. They only set a common starting point for the bit that you can learn the most from, which is networking with your peers, getting face time with those you admire most, and learning about new tools and tactics make the best marketing conferences well worth the ticket price.

Many conferences now offer virtual attendance options, which will save you some cash and trouble (although attending in person still has its considerable advantages). Of course, we’re biased, and think MozCon is a great choice for beginners and experts alike, but there’s a full slate of SEO-focused conferences around the world each year for all specialties and levels of expertise.

Regular reading

News sites, blogs, and newsletters that feature regular updates on SEO are some of the most reliable ways to keep your finger on the pulse of the industry. It’s easy to miss a bit of news in a field that moves and changes as quickly as SEO does, but checking your favorite sites each week or subscribing to a good newsletter will keep you in the know. The Moz Top 10 is a good jumping-off point as it sends a roundup of the most relevant recent articles to your inbox and acquaints you with some of the more respected outlets in SEO.

Community engagement

While there’s always been a rich community of SEOs congregating on various social networks and web forums — we are a digitally native bunch, after all — the social distancing requirements of the COVID-19 pandemic pushed communities in most industries even more solidly into virtual spaces. Platforms that allow you to interact with your SEO peers in near real time are more valuable than ever, and it’s now nearly impossible to be fully “where the action is” without engaging with at least some of them.

Twitter

As with journalism, advertising, and other industries that revolve around up-to-the-minute commentary and iteration on current events, the tech sector and especially digital marketing is full of heavy Twitter users. Addictive and often toxic as it may be, SEO Twitter is the place to find shared articles, hot takes, and conversation around the issues of the day. If you’re joining in, you’ll get more traction from actually contributing to and sharing others’ threads rather than simply scrolling and reading.

Reddit

The front page of the internet is often the best place to find human answers to complex questions, and those abound in SEO. The subreddit r/marketing is the largest digital marketing community on the site, but not all content there will be specific to search. r/SEO and the slightly smaller r/bigseo are more specifically targeted, and there you’ll find your peers asking and answering questions and sharing their experiences with tactics you may be considering.

LinkedIn

The sharing and engagement functions on LinkedIn feel a bit more disconnected than on Twitter or Reddit, but the business-focused platform is still fantastic for networking. Professionals with “SEO” in their job titles are likely to receive an inordinate number of connection requests from strangers and unsolicited sales messages, but you can keep your connections list more manageable by changing the primary button in your profile from a “Connect” CTA to a “Follow” one (do this in Settings & Privacy > Visibility > Followers and toggle the “Make follow primary” button to Yes).

You will want to seek out connections with people on your team as well as others you’ve worked with either directly or tangentially. Consider connecting with the SEO experts at the tools you’ve demoed, even if you didn’t buy their products. Folks you’ve met at conferences or who are working on projects to which you’ll be contributing are also great connections.

Slack & Discord

Shared Slack workspaces and custom Discord servers exploded as virtual water coolers during COVID-19 — spots where people with shared interests can hold near-synchronous conversations in ever more esoteric subthreads. If there’s a social media-based community around a topic, you can be sure there are one or more Slack or Discord communities dedicated to it as well. Women in Tech SEO on Slack is a great example for female-identified search marketers, and you can find dozens more in roundups across the web. Few other platforms offer as much opportunity for crowdsourcing opinions and gaining personal access to the who’s who of SEO.

Check out Aleyda Solis's Whiteboard Friday - The Ultimate Low-Hanging Fruit SEO Strategy.

A strategy that focuses on a single maxim or area of focus is very different to the 30-page prioritized list that many would think of when they imagine an SEO strategy. But that’s no bad thing, and of course, in larger organizations there may be the potential to have a strategy that has broader and bolder aims.

The rest of this guide should walk you through some of the options you might consider, and how to evaluate them. So, without further ado…

Next up: All About Google: The Algorithm

Understand how Google thinks.

This chapter on Advanced SEO Strategy was written by Kavi Kardos, Moz alumnus and Director of SEO at Corporate Finance Institute, and the Moz Team.