and how to make yours stronger.
Weak SEO strategies don’t get strong results.
To ensure victory, your strategy needs:
- Clearly defined goals
- A defined course of action to achieve those goals
Without these?
- Stressed team
- Low excitement
- Slow results
- Cut budgets
Nobody wants that.
So, how can you tell if your SEO strategy is weak?
Here are three quick tests you can do (if you fail a test, that’s a sign):
1/ The Content Test (Can you justify every piece of content to your CFO?)
When you’ve predefined clear goals for your SEO campaign, all your actions should be justifiable.
When the CEO or CFO asks, it should be truly easy to say:
“We are doing this task to achieve that goal and here is why we expect that to work.”
When your strategy is weak, it’s often easy to get bogged down with menial tasks that don’t *actually* contribute toward the goal.
Want to do a quick test?
Bring up your end goal (if you have one).
Then go through your existing library of content and/or your content pipeline and next to each piece, note down two things:
- Out of 10, how likely is it that this searcher is our target audience?
- Out of 10, how likely is this searcher to convert after reading this article?
If your scores are low…it’s going to be pretty hard to justify your thesis as to why you created that article.
P.S. CFOs are actually pretty friendly if you can explain (ideally with some evidence) how your work contributes to revenue growth.
2/ The Success Test (Can you tell if your SEO campaign is successful?)
Great strategies must have clear goals.
Otherwise, how do you know if your “defined course of action to achieve those goals” is working?
In my article on SEO reporting, I recommended reporting on goals in a “phased” approach, which acknowledges that long-term goals and short-term goals are different for an SEO campaign.
By months 6-12, you should have some idea of whether the “defined course of action” is a good way of achieving your goal.
Not working?
It may be time to reevaluate and update the plan of action.
Not sure if it’s working? You probably have a weak SEO strategy.
3/ The Internal Link Test (Is it easy to add internal links?)
This is an admittedly loose test I came up with when publishing some content for a client recently.
When I publish a new article for a client, I always do a round of internal links— adding 7-10 internal links to and from the article.
I highly recommend this, and have a premium-only SOP on internal linking here, as it makes content rank faster.
When publishing this particular article, it was SO easy to find them.
We had 10s of blog posts that already mentioned the core keyword, which I could use as anchor text with zero additional effort adding them in.
I had a little “aha!” moment, that reminded me I’d built a pretty solid SEO strategy (woo me)!
Why?
Because we’d planned this.
All the content was produced under clearly defined topic pillars.
All of the content was, in some way, related to each other and focused on the same audience.
Perfect.
That's a sign that our SEO strategy was strong to start with.
What Were Those Three Signs Again?
- Can you justify every piece of content to your CFO?
- Can you tell if your SEO campaign is successful?
- Is it easy to add internal links?
—Benny ✌️
