Everything I know about…creating an SEO strategy

28th March 2021

SEO is one of my favourite areas of content strategy. Why? Because, with the right strategy in place, it can create abundance. The first company I ever worked for saw a £1million deal come in from a leading fashion retailer. The retailer’s CEO had googled one of our key terms, found a blog we’d written, and the rest is history.  

In my most recent company, ScreenCloud, the organic search strategy we implemented brought in 47% of new MRR each month. At another past company they grandfathered the product for five years, and new ARR still kept increasing because self-serve leads continued to come in via organic search.

SEO requires clear goals, strategy and execution upfront, but the effects compound over time and lead to a long-lasting growth effect. So, when companies deem SEO strategy as too expensive or time-consuming to execute, I worry this is incredibly short-sighted. 

When you get the right company who wants to invest, the results are incredible. 

Here, I’ll walk you through how to create an SEO strategy from scratch to really nail this area of your content strategy. Note: my expert area is B2B and particularly SaaS, so this guide will focus on those areas. If you have a B2C company or are in ecommerce, there’s definitely a different approach to take so I’d advise looking for a more specific blog post. 

How to create an SEO strategy for your B2B company

1. Research the audience

Every strong SEO strategy starts with an in-depth understanding of the audience. Without this, you’ll be guessing at topics, or worse, regurgitating a version of the blogs your competitors are writing. The below maps out a traditional persona audience research project. Often, customers already have their customer personas mapped out. This is a good starting point, but I find you can’t really get into the weeds of customer pain points without doing a similar exercise yourself. 

Reading a document telling you the age of an ideal customer isn’t the same as listening to the language they use to describe the company, which is really important to which keywords and topics you target later. 

So how do you do your own research on the audience? Here are the steps I take as part of SEO planning:

Interview the company founders and stakeholders

When I begin researching an SEO strategy, my first step is to interview the people who run the company. Usually, they’re very close to the customers and they understand the pain points which is really what you’re searching for.

To do this, I schedule calls with many people in the company (or do this in person, when possible 😉 ). I’ll interview, at minimum, the founders, marketers, sales people and anyone in customer success. These calls take 30 minutes – 1 hour each and I’ll record, transcribe or take notes to refer back to later.

Information I’m looking to gather would be:

All of these questions help to build a strong picture of who the customer is and the types of interaction they have with the company. You’ll also get different answers from those in customer success vs those in sales or marketing, for instance, which can help you to segment your strategy later across the funnel or different buyer types.

Interview customers

Next, I’ll ask to speak to 3-5 customers on the phone or in person. Here’s a great example of an email one of my clients sent when asking their customer to be involved in the creation of the SEO strategy:

“Could I ask a favour – we have a marketing consultant Beth (ccd) who is helping us to build out our marketing. Would you be able to spare her 30 mins to talk through a few questions about your experience engaging with [company] to help us improve our new website?” 

Once I’m booked in with the customer, I’ll ask questions such as:

Pay particular attention to the language these customers use. In an SEO project I worked on recently, the way the customer described the product was completely different to how anyone in the team had described it to me. This is important, as if I’d only spoken to the CEO and built an SEO strategy around the keywords he’d used, this wouldn’t have bought in more customers. 

Educating customers on category creation is part of the content process, but this will be difficult if your customers can’t find you to begin with. 

2. Create a competitor gap analysis

Next, I begin to look at 3-5 competitor products or companies. Here, I’ll begin by doing a broad sweep and read-through of their websites, looking at:

I’ll also run what’s called a competitor gap analysis at this point. For this, I use SEMRush which has a great competitor analysis tool, but there are plenty of other similar SEO tools you could use such as Moz and AHrefs. These are all paid tools but it’s worth it to really get a feel for which keywords your competitors are targeting.

Here’s what a competitor gap analysis looks like in SEMRush (image source):

A screenshot from the SEMRush platform, ranking keywords at adidas.com as an example.

You can see in this image how the competitors are compared side-by-side. If the company I’m building a strategy for already has some ranking (i.e. it isn’t a brand new company or website) I’ll rank them alongside the competitors. You can then see a complete view of the keywords that all five competitors rank for and how these compare.

For example, in the sports brand example above, you can see that Nike ranks in position #5 for “sneakers” but that Adidas ranks in position #82. If this was a term that was important to Adidas (likely if they were targeting the US market) then you would know to include that as part of your SEO strategy. 

3. Audit your existing website and blog

Now you have the outline of your strategy. Next, you can learn where your current website and blog is against where you’d like it to be, to see how much work is required. If you’re completely starting from scratch with a new website or company you can skip this step and move straight to step five. 

It’s important to note here that there is a difference between content SEO and technical SEO. If you have a website that’s been around for some time, you have a big bank of content or you’ve already written a ton of content which isn’t ranking how you’d hoped, that may signal a technical SEO issue.

This could be things like slow page load speed, cannibalisation of your own content and/or Google not being able to read your sitemap. Many content SEOs (like me!) will be able to highlight basic technical elements which need work, but for very complex problems (like Google penalties or international SEO) it’s best to pair up with a technical SEO specialist.

When it comes to content SEO, begin by doing a content audit of your existing website and blog. Here you should be looking at:

Within this audit you may want to begin looking for “quick wins” vs longer wins. For example, if you have a few blogs that are all ranking in position 20-25 for the same topic, you could merge those blogs together into one “pillar” piece for that topic and find yourself in position 10 with that revised blog. This is what I would consider a quick win. Building out a new content pillar from scratch would be a longer win.

4. Map out your content topics

Once you understand the company, the product and the audience, you should hopefully have a rough idea of the topics you need to target. This is where I start to think about “content pillars” that will make up the SEO strategy. I tend to document this in a Google Sheet, but you can use any type of calendar or project management tool that you’re comfortable with. 

SEO topic frameworks

There are two frameworks I use for this part of the SEO strategy that help me to organise my content pillars:

Subject vs customer sector SEO framework

An example of how a subject vs customer framework might be structured

If your company serves various different industries you may want to customise your topics to each customer type, as shown in the image above. Here, you can see that our content pillars are “metrics”, “shopper marketing” and “customer success”, but how we cover those topics will change depending on the audience. This allows us to drive website traffic for all three audience groups, using targeted SEO content for their individual pain point and use case.

If you’re limited on resources you can always choose your most profitable or easy converting customer type to begin with, then expand the strategy at a later stage.

Top to bottom of funnel SEO framework

As well as subject vs sector content, you’ll also likely want to create content that serves potential customers at each stage of the funnel, as shown here:

An example of how a funnel framework could be structured

This ensures your SEO strategy targets customers who are ready to buy, but also places your content in front of customers who may eventually buy somewhere down the line. This expands the amount of leads you can capture and sets you a wider net.

Use these frameworks to build out a full calendar of content that you need to create. Document this as a list of pages or blog posts which you can then split across the time and resource you have available. 

5. Create a website roadmap

Now you have your rough content topics and pillars and you know what you’re working with on your existing site, you can create a website roadmap. This is to detail any website changes that need to happen for you to be able to execute your SEO strategy.

For example, if you don’t even have a blog on your website, this would be step one in the roadmap. You may also need to create landing pages, which can be really useful for keywords around your core topics. As an example, a customer success tool may want landing pages for “customer success”, “chatbot tool” and “customer support inbox”.  

The roadmap’s purpose is to get any development and design resource you need so you can move towards completion of your SEO strategy without any roadblocks.

6. Determine blog and page topics

In my opinion (and many of those I’ve interviewed on Content Makers will agree with me) a successful SEO strategy doesn’t need thousands of blogs to be effective.

In fact, I’ve seen many successful websites grow their traffic and leads month-on-month, with between 10 and 25 blog posts or pages. Most organisations will shy away from this because they believe one of the biggest content myths: if you don’t create new content all of the time, then you won’t rank. Many content writers and SEOs add to this myth, as naturally, a website which doesn’t need new content every month has little need to hire a content writer!

If you’re at the beginning of your SEO strategy, especially, look to cover the core topic areas with one pillar page and a few links out to topic clusters. This will be enough to start gaining some traffic and traction, which you can always expand on at a later date.

Pillar pages and topic clusters are a relatively new SEO blog framework where you create a single page or blog that covers a topic in-depth (“How to build a customer success team”) with smaller, niche topics which surround that topic. The pillar page will then have internal links to the topic clusters, which broaden a very long-tail topic within the wider pillar piece (“How to write a job description for a customer success manager role”).

7. Write and publish SEO content

Once you know what you’re writing, you can create an editorial calendar detailing the content you’ll need to create for your SEO strategy. Then you can begin working through the content, either yourself or with the help of a writer. 

I’d start with the pillar pages, then the topic clusters, so everything can be linked together nicely.

Begin writing each blog or page using on-page SEO best practices; write for your audience; use lots of nice headings to break up your text; answer questions and use your company’s expert knowledge, rather than just regurgitating the top five results in Google. This is what will create great SEO content, not keyword-stuffing or bland pieces of content. 

Ensure that no piece of content sits alone when you publish it. Thanks to the framework you’ve created, each piece of content should fit into your content structure. This helps you to achieve internal linking on your website, which is one of the most underrated SEO content tactics.

8. Measure, review and adjust your SEO strategy

Once your content is live, you can begin doing some monthly tracking to see how well it’s performing. For this, I tend to use Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Yes, you can also use paid for tools such as SEMRush to track your rankings – but if you’re operating in Google’s playground, then why not use Google’s own tools to tell you how things are going?

To measure an SEO strategy, I would be tracking these basic metrics at the end of each month and storing this in an Excel spreadsheet or in a dashboard:

Of course, these steps are the very 101 basic level of your SEO strategy. A great place to start but, once implemented, there are plenty of other routes to explore and areas of SEO to target to really build a moat around your company.

For example, this might include building a backlink strategy via digital PR, or looking at incredibly niche, low-competitive search terms to target. A good SaaS strategy is to look at what your product competes with – and by that I don’t mean competitor products, I mean workflows or basic tools, such as Excel – and write content to compete with that.

But they are all tactics for another day…