My SEO Approach

Updated: July 22, 2023

Before I go into the details, I want you to know that my SEO approach is always custom-tailored to suit your business goals. There is no one-size-fits-all SEO strategy. I’m all for transparency, effectiveness and an eye for detail. Therefore, I would involve you in the whole process as much as possible. Different clients have different objectives. SEO can help you find more customers! Sites come in all shapes and forms;

With this in mind, I’ll come up with the best SEO strategy and tactics to match your business goal.

I’ll carry out the below steps when on-boarding a new client;

STEP 1: Initial Analysis to Understand the Business

My first step is to understand your business goals and your current site performance in terms of strengths and weaknesses.

When kicking off an SEO project, I start by diving deep into your brand, website, industry and competitive landscape. Knowing your competitive landscape will help understand what you are up against. Knowing who your real organic competitors are will influence my SEO strategy and help me come up with a realistic timeline for the SEO roadmap.

I would review each of your top competitors on SERPs. By doing so, I can make some rough estimates on how much time and work it requires for your site to dominate Google rankings. In this step, I may also ask you to share the history of SEO activities, competitors that you see as core competition, know your business priorities, access to your reporting etc. By the end of the first step, you should know the key enablers for SEO.

STEP 2: Comprehensive Keyword Research

As part of On-page SEO activities, I’ll carry out keyword research to identify keywords/keyword themes that are most relevant to your business. This is a key step that includes determining your target keywords, analysis of your competitor keywords, identifying content gaps and opportunities as well as a lot of filtering and analysis. In the end, I’ll come up with a final list of target keywords to track and report your SEO rankings. The target keyword list will form the basis for reviewing and optimising metadata and sitewide content to improve rankings.

A SERP analysis of your target keywords is important. 10 blue links are now a very small part of the search landscape. We now have many rich opportunities in the form of improving our online presence for images, videos, Q&As, featured snippets etc and I optimise for all these. This is what sets me apart from the other SEO freelancers who provide SEO services in the UK.

STEP 3: Technical SEO Audit

In this step, I’ll start by performing a crawl of your site to gather all the site data. I will then interpret the data and provide recommendations – quick wins, and short, medium- and long-term actions. My top prioritised technical SEO and content optimizations will include findings around Googlebot stats and crawl budget wastage, indexation review, page speed recommendations, structured data/schema review, re-direct checks, duplicate content fixes, and internal linking and site architecture recommendations, mobile-first checks, sitemap audit etc. You can find my technical SEO audit checklist here.

STEP 4: Improving Conversion Rate

User experience can have a massive impact on almost every aspect of your business including conversions, rankings, bounce rates, your brand’s reputation, etc. Therefore, it’s crucial for me to make recommendations so your site meets Google’s and your customers’ high UX standards.

I’ll review your site architecture & navigation, mobile-friendliness, speed test and everything else to make your customers never want to leave in accordance to search intent. The aim here is to achieve higher conversions and lower bounce rates.

STEP 5: Quality Backlink Audit

In this step, I’ll analyse the current backlink profile to spot any harmful links pointing to your site. I’ll weed them out where possible and go through your top competitors’ backlink profiles to find quality link-building opportunities. Owing to Google’s various Penguin algorithm updates, link building needs to be taken seriously and brands must ensure links must be acquired from authoritative and trustworthy sites.

Since link-building for a brand is a large undertaking, I don’t provide link-building services due to time constraints. I, however, can help you with identifying poor-quality links as part of the link detoxification process, so you end up with a natural link profile. Quick win: Look for unlinked brand mentions.

STEP 6: Content Quality Review & Working out a Content Strategy

In this step, I will review the effectiveness of your existing content through a content audit of all on-site content, including product and category pages, blog posts, content marketing assets and landing pages. A content audit is an essential foundation for a good content strategy.

“One-size-fits-all” is totally not the approach I follow when creating a content strategy for your brand. Instead, I work out content recommendations that are 100% custom and fit your business goals perfectly. I’ll provide recommendations on “how-to”, FAQ content and content that you optimise for featured snippets aided by keyword research.

STEP 7: Performance Measurement and Reporting

I strive for results and transparency. That is why I will report on performance on a weekly and monthly basis. These would be easy-to-understand reports to monitor the key SEO KPIs and metrics and a summary of what has improved and how the whole process is going.

Following the keyword research, competitor analysis and review of existing technical SEO and content, I will be in a position to provide a detailed SEO strategy for your brand to align with your high-level business goals and objectives.