Before we get into the details, let\u2019s look at how my organic traffic improved over the years.<\/p>\n Note: What you see on the left is the number of keywords the website is ranking and it\u2019s not the actual search traffic. What is important to note from this graph is the steady increasing trend in organic traffic.<\/em><\/p>\n As you can see in the screenshot above, success did not come overnight. It\u2019s the result of hard work for a number of months.<\/p>\n The good news for you is that you don\u2019t have to wait for months to achieve the same progress.<\/p>\n You don\u2019t even have to wonder or spend your time trying techniques that work only in theory.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not easy. It takes time to successfully execute the plan and a lot of hard work but its proven to work.<\/p>\n Before we get into the actual steps to follow, it\u2019s necessary to understand what do we mean by an SEO strategy and why it is important to have one.<\/p>\n What is SEO strategy?<\/strong> An SEO strategy is a high-level plan of action to achieve higher rankings in search engines for the keywords that matter for your website.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n From the above definition you should note two things:<\/p>\n What is the Importance of having an SEO Strategy? <\/strong><\/p>\n If you don\u2019t have a specific blueprint to follow, you will end up ranking for the wrong keywords or with no rankings at all. Either way, this is not what you want.<\/p>\n I always tell my students and clients that doing SEO<\/a><\/strong> without a solid plan, is like driving with your eyes closed. You still move forward but it\u2019s a matter of time to hit a wall or engage into an accident.<\/p>\n So, your action plan should focus on how to get higher rankings and traffic for the keywords you want<\/u> and not for any keywords, and we will see below how to achieve this.<\/p>\n Among other things, in this article I will introduce the concepts of creating pillar articles<\/strong> (Step 5) and building Topical relevancy<\/strong> (Step 6).<\/p>\n Both steps are vital for the successful execution of this strategy.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s dive in.<\/p>\n Here are the 13 steps to follow to make your SEO stronger and improve your search engine rankings.<\/p>\n Towards the end of the article, you can also get an answer on how long it will take you to get to 100,000 visits per month.<\/a><\/p>\n For many people this can be a surprising first step but I will explain below why this should be your first course of action.<\/p>\n It is more than certain that hundreds of websites are competing for the same keywords as you.<\/p>\n Some of these websites may have more pages indexed, more content and a stronger link profile.<\/p>\n Getting the right answers to the above questions, will help you adjust your SEO strategy accordingly.<\/p>\n For example, after analyzing your competitor\u2019s rankings, you may find out that the traffic for one of your target keywords is less than what keyword research tools are showing.<\/p>\n From my experience this is a very common scenario. Keyword tools tend to get the numbers (search volume) for a keyword wrong, especially for low volume keywords<\/strong>.<\/p>\n What is the problem with that?<\/strong> You will end up targeting keywords that won\u2019t get you the expected levels of traffic and you might be ignoring keywords that can generate targeted traffic.<\/p>\n A better way to get a more accurate picture of which keywords to target, is to analyze the traffic of the webpage that ranks in the first position of Google for a particular keyword.<\/p>\n You can use SEMRUSH<\/strong><\/a> (or other similar tools) to find out the rankings and traffic of any website for any keyword.<\/p>\n A correct analysis will give you a better indication if this is a keyword worth targeting.<\/p>\n This finding alone can help you change your strategy and go after other more popular keywords (that you might didn\u2019t know before).<\/p>\n Here is your action plan for this step.<\/p>\n Once you have a clear idea of who you have to compete with, the next step is to create a detailed report about your website.<\/p>\n Why? Knowing where you stand in comparison to your competitors, will help you set up realistic SEO goals.<\/p>\n At this stage what you are looking for is answers to the following questions:<\/p>\n Add this information into a spreadsheet and try to compare your performance with your closest competitors.<\/p>\n If you have a SEMRUSH subscription<\/strong><\/a>, you can use the Keyword Gap<\/em> report to get this information in a table format that is easy to analyze.<\/p>\n At the end of this step you should have a list of keywords that includes:<\/p>\n Now that you are past the phase of analyzing your competitors and your website, the next step before start making any changes to your website is to start an SEO Log.<\/p>\n What is an SEO Log?<\/strong> It\u2019s a simple spreadsheet to take note of all SEO related changes you will be making to your website.<\/p>\n Why is this important? SEO takes time to work<\/a> <\/strong>and the only way to keep track of your changes and their impact on your SEO is to know what you have changed and when.<\/p>\n I use Google sheets for this and my log has a very simple structure (date, SEO change made, comments).<\/p>\n The next step is to get your hands dirty and start evaluating the technical SEO performance of your website by performing a technical SEO audit.<\/p>\n What is a technical SEO audit?<\/strong> Is the process to follow to check that the technical SEO infrastructure of your website has no issues.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Through a technical SEO audit, you will ensure that search engines can index your content without any problems.<\/p>\n The most important things to check are:<\/p>\n Don\u2019t worry, you don\u2019t have to be a technical person to do an SEO audit. These three guides can help you pass this step successfully.<\/p>\n Keyword research is a very important component of your SEO strategy. This is the part to combine the information gathered in Step 1 and Step 2 with a comprehensive keyword research analysis.<\/p>\n Let me explain how this works.<\/p>\n In Step 1 you have identified which keywords bring traffic to your competitors and in step 2 you have identified which keywords bring traffic to your website.<\/p>\n Now, it\u2019s time to use this information and create your master keyword list. The list should include:<\/p>\n In other words, your master list has ALL the IMPORTANT keywords you want to rank for.<\/p>\n The next step is to sort the list by volume of traffic. The top 10 Keywords of the list are the most valuable keywords for your business and these are the keywords to use to create pillar content. <\/strong><\/p>\n What is Pillar content?<\/strong> It\u2019s content that targets a particular keyword (or phrase) and has the following characteristics:<\/p>\n Why use the concept of having pillar content and not treat all content equally?<\/strong><\/p>\n The first reason is that you cannot rank for everything<\/em> you want. The competition is so big for any keyword that is impossible for one website to rank for all<\/em> the important keywords of a niche.<\/p>\n So, instead of targeting all possible keywords and hope for the best results, you can follow this strategy and increase your chances of ranking for the keywords you really<\/em> want.<\/p>\n When evaluating a website, search engines<\/a><\/strong> are looking for the best available content on the particular website. These are the pages that usually have better rankings than the rest of the website pages.<\/p>\n By giving more attention to specific articles or pages, it\u2019s like giving search engines clues about the keywords you want to be known for.<\/p>\n If this is backed up with social shares, comments and incoming links, you will eventually be able to rank higher for the keywords that are important for your business.<\/p>\n Let me give you a real example to understand the concept of pillar content better.<\/p>\n After doing my competitors analysis and keyword research, I identified that one of the keywords that I want to achieve a high ranking is \u201cSEO Strategy\u201d.<\/p>\n So, my plan to get there is the following:<\/p>\n My goal is to give all necessary signals to search engines to help them understand that this article is important for my website.<\/p>\n In Step 5 you identified the top 10 keywords from your master list and created top-notch content (pillar content) to target each and every keyword in the list.<\/p>\n The next step is to re-analyze those keywords one by one and find long tail keywords you can target.<\/p>\n By doing so, you will be able to:<\/p>\n In addition, it gives you the opportunity to build<\/em> topic relevancy<\/em> \u2013 something very important if you are targeting high volume competitive keywords.<\/p>\n If you search for any high-volume keyword on Google, and take a few minutes to analyze the top results you will find out that Google tends to rank websites that have a lot of good content about a specific topic (and not just keyword).<\/p>\n For example, if you search for content marketing<\/em> you will notice that contentmarketinginstitute.com dominates the results.<\/p>\n One of the reasons is that over time, they managed to build topic relevancy around content marketing<\/em> and this helps them rank high for that term and a lot of other related keywords.<\/p>\n Here is the process to follow to find long-tail keywords:<\/p>\n Method 1<\/strong><\/p>\n Search Google using your target keyword and scroll down to the \u201cPeople also ask\u201d section and to the \u201cRelated Searches\u201d.<\/p>\n For example, if you enter \u201csearch engine marketing\u201d into Google you get the following the \u2018People also ask section\u2019.<\/p>\n And this in the \u2018Related Searches\u2019 section:<\/p>\n The highlighted search phrases are perfect candidates for creating articles targeting long-tail keywords.<\/p>\n Assuming that you already have a pillar article on search engine marketing<\/a>,<\/strong> you can add internal links from the supporting articles to make your pillar content stronger.<\/p>\n Method 2<\/strong><\/p>\n Use the TOPIC RESEARCH<\/strong><\/a> function of SEMRUSH.<\/p>\n SEMRUSH is a great tool for keyword research. One of the functions they have is called TOPIC RESEARCH. Basically, you enter a keyword and the tool will give you a lot of ideas of long tail keywords you can target related to your main keyword.<\/p>\n What you should do with the long tail keywords?<\/strong><\/p>\n Here is a recap of steps 5 and 6 to make it easier to understand.<\/p>\n While creating content for your pillar and supporting articles, you need to ensure that your on-page SEO is optimized to the fullest.<\/p>\n The primary goal of on-page SEO<\/a><\/strong> is to help search engines understand your content and its meaning.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n With on-page SEO you deal with things like:<\/p>\n Besides creating new content, one of the tasks you need to perform to make sure that your existing content is in synch with your SEO goals, is a content audit.<\/p>\n A content audit is the process to follow to analyze each and every page of your website and decide whether:<\/p>\n The overall goal of a content audit is to make a website stronger by eliminating pages that have no rankings, traffic, or links.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n You can read my previous guide on how to identify thin content<\/a><\/strong> but as a general advice, don\u2019t be afraid to remove content from your website if it\u2019s not up-to the standards you want.<\/p>\n Having less but higher quality pages is better than having many low-quality pages.<\/p>\n If you have reached this point and you are ready to work on Step 9\u00ad\u00ad\u00ad it means that:<\/p>\n This is great! What\u2019s next? Now it\u2019s time to deal with off-page SEO<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n Off-page SEO in short refers to SEO techniques that go beyond the content of the website.<\/p>\n![\"Results](\"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/semrush.png\")
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Step 1: Get to know your niche and competitors<\/h2>\n
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![\"competitor](\"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/competitor-analysis.png\")
Action Plan<\/h6>\n
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Step 2: Get to know your website<\/h2>\n
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![\"Keyword](\"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/keyword-gap-analysis.png\")
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Action Plan<\/h6>\n
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Step 3: Start an SEO Log File<\/h2>\n
![\"Example](\"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/seo-log-file-example.png\")
Action Plan<\/h6>\n
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Step 4: Perform a Technical SEO Audit of your website<\/h2>\n
![\"Technical](\"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/technical-seo-checklist.png\")
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Action Plan<\/h6>\n
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Step 5: Identify for which Keywords to create pillar content<\/h2>\n
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Action Plan<\/h6>\n
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Step 6: Build Topic relevancy – Identify long tail keywords (supporting articles)<\/h2>\n
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![\"Achieve](\"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/topical-relevancy.png\")
![\"Longtail](\"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/people-also-ask.png\")
![\"Longtail](\"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/related-searches.png\")
![\"Topic](\"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/topic-research.png\")
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Action Plan<\/h6>\n
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Step 7: Master On-Page SEO Optimization<\/h2>\n
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Action Plan<\/h6>\n
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Step 8: Perform a Content audit<\/h2>\n
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Action Plan<\/h6>\n
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Step 9: Promote your brand online<\/h2>\n
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![\"Importance](\"https:\/\/www.reliablesoft.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/brand-mentions.png\")