Turning Insights into Action: Benchmarking & Strategic SEO

SEO is not just about optimizing for search engine rankings. It’s also about understanding your audience’s needs and providing solutions through your website or landing page.

Google alone processes over 100 billion searches a month. So, if you get your strategy right, the potential to reach new customers through search is immense.

But here’s the catch: Search algorithms are always changing. The recent introduction of generative AI directly in search has shaken up how users interact with search engines.

What that means for SEO is that you can’t just set it and forget it – your SEO strategy needs to adapt to these changes to stay competitive.

You need to regularly analyze and course-correct to ensure you’re taking advantage of the latest best practices and strategies.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the steps for creating an effective SEO strategy that aligns with both search engine algorithms and user expectations.

1. Align SEO With Business Goals & Define KPIs

It’s crucial to align your SEO strategy with your overall business goals and define the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you measure success.

Knowing where you want to go and how you’ll measure progress ensures that your SEO efforts are focused and effective.

Your SEO goals should support your business objectives, whether that’s increasing brand awareness, driving more traffic, generating leads, or boosting sales.

During this planning phase, you’ll want to define your KPIs.

This is how you’ll measure the success of your implementations and figure out what’s working for you and where you need to make adjustments.

Some of the SEO KPIs you should be tracking are:

• Visibility in search (segmented by search features such as AI Overviews, featured snippets, Local Packs, etc.).
• Traffic from search (organic traffic).
• Keyword rankings.
• Branded searches.
• Quality backlinks.
• New and returning users.
• Leads and conversions.
• ROI from organic channel.
• Pages per session.
• Average engagement time on page and bounce rate. (Bounce rate is not a universal metric for everyone, but is 100% dependent upon the events you set up).
• Core Web Vitals.
• Crawl errors.

Keep in mind that these are internal SEO KPIs that you can track in analytics.

Higher-level executives may be more interested in overall business impact, such as SEO-supported attribution and how SEO contributes to the customer journey.

It’s also important to convey that SEO is a long-term strategy that may take time to show significant results.

2. Set Realistic Expectations

One of the most common mistakes people unfamiliar with SEO make is expecting overnight results.

SEO is not a direct response style of marketing, and not all SEO strategies result in an immediate outcome.

Because of the variables involved with competition, inbound links, and the content itself, it’s nearly impossible to provide a definite timeframe.

You need to go into the process with an understanding that SEO takes time, and the more competitive the keywords you’re going after, the longer it will take to climb to the top.

This needs to be conveyed to stakeholders from the start to ensure expectations are realistic and to establish consistent, accurate data that earns trust.

SEO can be part of the entire customer journey.

Someone might find your site via organic search, then later see a paid ad, and finally make a purchase. Or they might see an ad first, then search for your brand and find you organically.

This is where multi-touch attribution comes into play. Using multi-touch attribution tracking tools like Triple Whale can help you understand how different channels contribute to conversions.

3. Conduct SEO Audit

Now that you’ve aligned your SEO strategy with your business goals and set the right expectations, it’s time to understand where you currently stand.

You’ll want to begin by performing an SEO audit.

An SEO audit serves as the roadmap that will guide you throughout the entire optimization process and allows you to benchmark against your current site.

You need to examine a variety of aspects, including:

• Domain name, age, history, etc.
• On-page SEO factors like headlines, keyword & topical targeting, and user engagement.
• Content organization, content quality, and the quality of your images (no one trusts stock photography).
• Duplicate content.
• Backlink profile quality.
• Website architecture.
• Technical SEO factors like sitemaps, image optimization, and robots.txt.
• Implementation of hreflang tags for multilingual sites.

For a step-by-step guide on how to perform this audit, we have an excellent series that will guide you through it.

Once you have a clear understanding of your current SEO status, it’s time to plan your timeframe and allocate budgets and resources.

This is yet another area of life where you get what you pay for. If you’re looking for fast and cheap, you’re not going to get the results you would by investing more time and money.

Obviously, your budget and timeframe will depend on your company’s unique situation, but if you want good results, be prepared to invest accordingly.

For an idea of how much you should be spending, consult this article.

4. Perform Keyword Research

Search engine rankings are determined by an algorithm that evaluates a variety of factors to decide how well a website answers a particular search query. And a huge part of that is the use of keywords.

From single words to complex phrases, keywords tell search engines what your content is about. But adding keywords isn’t quite as simple as just plugging in the name of the product or service you want to sell.

You need to do research to ensure keyword optimization and avoid cannibalization, and that means considering the following:

Search Intent

Words often have multiple meanings, which makes it crucial to consider search intent, so you don’t attract an audience that was searching for something else.

For example, if you sell hats, ranking highly for ‘bowler’ will attract users looking for 10-pin bowling in the U.S., or in the UK about cricket and not someone shopping for a bowler hat.

Relevant Keywords

Once you’ve identified the search intent of your target audience, you can determine which keywords are relevant to them.

By aligning your keywords with search intent, you can produce relevant content and increase your chances of ranking higher in SERPs.