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A well thought-out SEO strategy for optimal referencing

Think you know everything about SEO strategy? I bet you'll STILL learn some tips with this article! Thanks to a concrete example, you will see that it is possible to be highly visible in search engines, in a short time and by spending zero money.

Anne-Laure CompainAnne-Laure Compain

Anne-Laure Compain

Graphic designer at Snoweb

1. What is SEO?

The acronym SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. The SEO allows to act on the traffic of a website obtained with its natural referencing. That is to say a traffic acquired from search engines without any advertising. SEO is based on three principles which are :

The technique

We are talking about the whole development of the site and its technical optimization. The code must be clean, optimized and allow a page to load ultra-fast. Then, the elements of the pages must be structured, the titles must have specific tags and each web page must have a title and a meta description.

Technical optimizations

The content

In SEO, when we talk about content, we mean quality content. The content of a page must be relevant to the name of the page and the meta data filled in. It must also be relevant to the overall content of the site. The content must also be unique and better than your competitors. Duplicate content will be penalized.

Writing methodology

The notoriety

Do you know about netlinking? Well, according to the external links that point to a website, Google will give a popularity score. This is called "domain authority". The goal is to have external links that are in the same theme as the site and have a good popularity score, otherwise they will not bring weight.

The popularity of a site

2. What is an SEO strategy?

Now that we know what SEO is, let's move on to SEO strategy. An SEO strategy is simply the way we will proceed to reach our target in the search engine results. In general, we make an SEO strategy when we want to acquire quality traffic and therefore conversions.

The SEO strategy must be thought out, because if the new traffic obtained is not of quality then the number of conversions will not increase and the turnover will not increase either. Even if some SEO strategies do not give convincing results, for some, it is quite the opposite!

It is important to know that once the objectives are achieved, they remain and are sustainable in the long term. The SEO of the site will then have a solid foundation and can develop at lightning speed! Well, let's not exaggerate, it won't happen in days, but rather in months 😉

Small example. If your strategy is well prepared and solid, then if you aim for 3,000 visits per month to your website, you will get 3,000 visits per month, and this over several months. It's not just the first month and then nothing, it's a stable and sustainable data.

2.1 What is the difference between SEO and SEA?

As mentioned above, SEO allows to acquire continuous and long term traffic for a website. It will allow to create a notoriety and a continuous traffic. The SEA, on the other hand, allows to acquire traffic on a short term basis. For example for a promotional campaign, a product launch or an event. Moreover, the SEA is based on paid acquisition, that is to say thanks to advertisements in search engines, as Google Ads allows.

3. How to define the objectives of your SEO strategy?

Objective 1: Define a budget

Zero budget is possible

  • For businesses that don't have a budget for their SEO, don't worry, it's still possible to do something right. To do so, your business or what you sell must belong to a niche. That is to say, a sector with little competition where you are almost the only expert in your field. You also need a website developed in an optimized way and if possible with an optimized CMS. Finally, you will have to write blog posts yourself. Why do you need to do this? Simply because having a blog about a specific topic allows you to show Google that you know this field and that you bring quality content to your readers.
  • If you have a little budget to allocate to SEO, it is interesting to start with a budget of 1 000€ per month, that is to say 12 000€ for the year. This budget will be used to buy links to websites with a good reputation and having the same theme as yours. These popular websites will point to your website, which will increase your own reputation in the eyes of Google.
    Secondly, and still with the idea of developing the SEO of your website, you can work with experienced writers to write articles for your blog. You should know that writing a blog article can cost between 100€ and 800€. Finally, in addition to all these things, there is the need to have an efficient website developed with the SEO constraints imposed by Google in mind.

Objective 2 : Know your target

Know who you are talking to

Knowing your target is a luxury that not all companies have. It is important to know who you are talking to in order to direct your messages in the best possible way.

If you don't know your target yet, don't panic! There are many tools to define it. But the most important thing is to do the persona exercise. Here is a complete questionnaire that will help you define your persona.

Define your persona

Objective 3 : Find the right keywords

Knowing the search intentions of your target

For this third and last objective, you will have to put yourself in the shoes of your target customer. The goal is to be able to bring out all the keywords that the target can type in the search engines. Once we know all these keywords, we can position ourselves on them in order to appear in the first search results.

Go, it is to leave, we put ourselves in condition. We put ourselves behind our keyboard and we think of everything that can pass through the head of our target so that it can fall on your website and buy your services or your products.

Here is our advice. Go for a high volume with a simple difficulty rate (less than 25%). On the other hand, if your sector is competitive and you have the budget, then you can aim for a higher difficulty, because your content will be of quality.

How to choose the difficulty of a keyword?

Choose the difficulty of a keyword according to your budget. A relevant keyword combined with a good budget allows you to create quality content and buy high reputation links. These two things combined will improve the reputation of your website.

DifficultyEstimate of the reputation budget

Between 0 and 35%

0€

From 35% to 50%

5 000€

More than 50%

+ 10 000€

In the best case scenario, if you are working to get a total volume of 10,000 visitors per month to your website, you can tell yourself that you will get 10-20% clicks. That's 1,000 to 2,000 clicks per month.

4. What tools should I use for my SEO strategy?

4.1 To analyze the market: Semrush

To analyze everything that happens on the web in France and internationally, there is a great tool: Semrush

To explain briefly, Semrush is an online tool that allows, among other things, to know the volume of a keyword, but also its percentage of difficulty. For each keyword, we have :

  • The choice of country and language
  • The search intent. Whether it is informational, transactional or commercial
  • The search volume. It indicates the number of times the keyword has been searched on search engines in one month.
  • The trend curve. Be careful, prefer a curve that does not vary too much, it means that the keyword is still attractive.
  • The percentage of difficulty. This percentage tells you if there is a lot of competition.
  • Similar keywords
semrush dashboard

Semrush is a paid tool, but you can use the one week trial version to do all your in-depth research. Once this intensive week is over, you can cancel your subscription.

4.2 To create a site: an optimized CMS

It's all well and good, we've been telling you for a while now that using an optimized CMS helps your SEO. But what is an optimized CMS?

First of all, a CMS is a good solution for the common man who knows absolutely nothing about development. Indeed, a CMS is an online tool that allows you to create a website without computer knowledge. Just by using page and block templates and injecting text and image content. For the curious and those who do not know CMS, discover our CMS guide.

Then, when we talk about optimized CMS, we talk mostly about code, and a little bit about design. You will understand:

  • On the code side, the optimized CMS is designed taking into account the constraints of Google. That is to say a clean code without superfluous and with the least possible greedy library. It is also a CMS that, when a page is loaded, will only display what is necessary for the elements to appear on the screen in record time. Then, an optimized CMS allows to create a simple and clear site architecture and to generate a clean sitemap so that it is readable by Google. Finally, an optimized CMS allows its user to add metadata and structured data to bribe 🤫, satisfy Google.
  • On the design side, an optimized CMS has been designed to display ergonomic pages. This means that the user experience comes first. Everything is done so that the user, once on the site, can easily find the information and can navigate on the site without hindrance. There is also a work on the colors, the size of the texts and many other things, but it is not the subject of the day! To learn more I let you discover our article on the ergonomics of a website.

5. How to succeed in your SEO strategy?

campagne seo redaction

Writing

The quality of writing a text, a page or a blog post is very important. The text must have linking words, it must contain the keyword, but not in great quantity or the titles must be concise and descriptive.

campagne seo liens

Keywords

For each keyword, you need to know what Google expects as a result, examples or a definition for example. Type your keyword in Google and look at the search results but also the suggestions available at the bottom of the search.

campagne seo positionnement

Content

Offer unique content. Don't go looking for information on other blog posts, it's useless. It's good to look at what others are doing for inspiration or to try to do better, but don't make a copy and paste article.

campagne seo structure

Structure

When we write, we must structure our text. As in this article for example, there is a summary, titles, subtitles, paragraphs and buttons. It is thanks to these various elements that the reading will be more pleasant and understandable.

campagne seo concurrence

Diversity

To help the reading of the text and to lessen eye strain, you should vary the elements. A title then a text and underneath a photo then a video or even a Gif. Large blocks of text do not work! They tire the reader even before they have read.

eye

Call to action

You bring quality content to your target and that's fine, but then what? Do you direct them to a sales page? To a contact form? To a product to buy? Put a call to action at the end of your articles to send the reader elsewhere.

6. Example of a 0€ SEO strategy

For this example, I'm going to tell you about an e-commerce site launched in October 2021. This online store sells kuksa. These are wooden cups handmade in Finland.

This sales sector is a niche. As explained above, this means that there is little competition in the market. Since it is a niche and there is very little competition, there is no difficulty in positioning yourself on the main keyword "kuksa". Therefore, it is not necessary to buy links to increase the reputation of the site.

For this Kuksa Shop e-commerce site, the choice of the domain name was clear: kuksa.shop simply.

kuksa shop product sheet

6.1 Keywords

After a search on Semrush, here are some keywords selected in the United States with their volume and difficulty.

Mot-cléVolume (per month)Difficulty (in %)

Kuksa

1 300

28

carve a kuksa

170

20

kuksa carving tools

70

7

best woord for kuksa

40

0

For this example, we have a total volume of requests equal to 1580 per month. This gives us approximately 150 to 200 clicks per month.

After reading these keywords, the list of blog posts to be created was made by itself. The articles that the Kuksa site would display would be :

  • How to make a kuksa?
  • What are the tools to make a kuksa ?
  • What is the best wood to carve a kuksa?

In order to help his three articles, other articles in the same theme have also been written as :

  • The origin of the kuksa
  • The conservation of a kuksa
  • How to recognize an authentic kuksa

Moreover, if you wish, you can view the articles related to these keywords.

6.2 Languages

Then, a second Semrush study was done to see in the world, which countries the keyword "kuksa" was the most popular. With this information, the 6 languages of the site were established and all articles were translated into these languages:

  • French
  • English
  • German
  • Dutch
  • Italian
  • Spanish

6.3 The performance

So here is the curve of Kuksa Shop from its launch in October 2021 to today, April 2022.

kuksa curve on search console

On its first year, the site to counted in the Google Search Console:

  • 2500 clicks
  • 30 500 impressions
Personally I wouldn't like to ride that curve on my bike 😉
On a more serious note, what comes next looks promising for Kuksa Shop. Especially for an e-commerce site that has done no advertising and already counts many international sales. And this, only thanks to SEO and Google search engine

Conclusion

As you have seen, establishing an SEO strategy is not that complicated and it does not necessarily cost thousands of euros. You just need to know what to do and when to do it, use the right tools and above all BE PATIENT. SEO can't be done in a few days, it's not possible. But, in two or three months, we already start to see the results of our efforts.

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