When evaluating your SEO strategy, are you working as efficiently as possible? Adopting and maintaining an ongoing holistic SEO strategy is the approach to take in order to stay as relevant as possible as Google continues to shift focus and preferences. While many business owners take the time to focus on a few specific areas of SEO, few invest the time and effort to create an all-encompassing strategy. Below, we’re exploring the components of a holistic SEO strategy and listing key concepts that you can implement today in your current strategy.
What is a holistic SEO strategy?
Holistic, in this case, shows that a business has thought out every single component of its SEO initiatives. This is preferable, rather than working in a piecemeal approach that only addresses one or two main focuses at a time. Viewing your SEO plan as a whole rather than portions ensures that you are fully conscious of how one element affects the other at any given time. This helps you to maintain a more agile and relevant approach as you work to build your strategy.
What are the elements of a holistic SEO strategy?
In our definition of this type of strategy, we recommend that you consider and plan for the following elements of SEO:
- On-page optimization: This is a blanket term that covers the improvements that you can do on the website’s page to naturally boost your ranking. This is one of the main areas of focus for most business owners.
- Technical optimization: This can relate to any website or server changes that you make for the purpose of improving your organic reach. While on-page focuses more heavily on content-related areas, this shifts the focus just slightly to the website itself.
- Core web vitals optimization: Acting on data from Google’s core web vitals reading should be a part of every SEO strategy, enabling you to be far more effective.
- Off-page optimization: This is optimization that has nothing to do with your on-page elements. Similar to technical optimization, this area focuses on elements such as backlink creation and boosting your authority.
You can always choose to learn how to optimize every element of your SEO strategy. However, it may be more cost and time-efficient to work with a marketing group. SEO experts can help you identify areas of vulnerability in seconds, and also are able to keep their finger on the pulse of the dynamic algorithmic changes that Google continues to roll out.
While content is a key part of SEO, and there are a lot of ways that you can choose to optimize it, it isn’t recommended to rely on this to be the backbone of your strategy. Especially now, there are so many other ways that you can boost your rank naturally.
What key concepts should I consider as I build my SEO strategy?
Before implementing any changes, it can help to sit down with your team and identify your strengths and weaknesses in your SEO strategy. Doing this can streamline your process and help you to estimate the overall cost and time that you’ll need to spend for the next leg of your strategy session. It can also help you to identify new sets of KPIs to maintain as you continue to optimize.
If you’re just starting out, or are looking to reinforce your business’ optimization on the basic concepts, here are some great methods and strategies we recommend that you consider.
Ongoing competitor analysis
While this is a simple concept, many businesses choose to abandon it as a regular practice. Regularly checking in can show you new keywords to rank for, new styles to try, and overall can boost the quality of your content and on-page work. It also shows you new areas of opportunity to shine in your space, where your other competitors may be falling short.
Keep your website at higher speeds
Speed is an often overlooked area of SEO efforts but contributes massively to technical and Core Web Vitals optimization. If you’re looking for a quick way to give your site a boost, we recommend:
- Compressing your images. Large images that are unnecessarily dense can slow your site to a halt. Compress the images or make simple swaps that can boost your site’s speed. Also, optimize your images based on the parameters of your site’s image spaces as a best practice.
- Improve your server response time. Often, a lack of optimization on your server can affect the overall speed of your site. Following your host’s recommendations for optimization is a great place to start and reduce your overall site speed.
Be accessible
Using clear, correct, and engaging content is a great way to start your SEO strategy. You should also take the time to add alt text to your images as you go through to compress and optimize them.
