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SEO Strategy Basics 

Every SEO specialist has slightly different recommendations for what your SEO strategy should include. Neil Patel, a New York Times bestselling author and widely renowned digital marketing expert, recommends that everyone include the following elements in a successful SEO strategy:

Understand user intent: Craft your content with the understanding of the searcher’s end goal so you can help them accomplish their goal. 

Develop a customer avatar: Audience, audience, audience. Any SEO strategist starts by learning more about who your reader is, what they like, what they dislike, and why they’re there.

Break up the text: Keeping it simple is key, as most people have short attention spans and limited time. Break up copy with bullets, images, headers and short sentences. 

Make it actionable: Your content should both give the searcher what they are looking for and guide them to the next steps. That way they have both an answer and an actionable outcome. 

9 Core Elements of SEO

As you move into the world of digital marketing and SEO, people will start throwing around terms and phrases that you don’t understand. With all that jargon, it helps to have a quick glossary of SEO elements and terms. Here are some of the most common:

Audience: Audience, sometimes referred to as the target audience, is “a group of consumers characterized by behavior and specific demographics. Target audiences are a pillar of most businesses influencing decision making for marketing strategy, such as where to spend money on ads, how to appeal to customers, and even what product to build next.” Determining the target audience will influence nearly every other aspect of SEO.

Searcher Intent: This term is used interchangeably with user intent and audience intent, and it refers to the purpose of an online search. There are four types of searcher intent: 

Informational intent

Navigational intent

Transactional intent

Commercial investigation

Keywords: Keywords are “any search term entered into Google (or another search engine) that has a results page where websites are listed.” The term is slightly misleading, as a keyword can be a singular word or a phrase that has multiple words in it. Keywords are used by marketers to optimize website content to help sites and pages rank higher.

Meta Description: Meta descriptions get a bit more into the technical aspect of search engines, but they greatly influence SERPs. Meta descriptions are “an HTML element that provides a brief summary of a web page. A page’s meta description tag is displayed as part of the search snippet in a search engine results page (SERP) and is meant to give the user an idea of the content that exists within the page and how it relates to their search query.”