What's the best way to create and execute a long-term organic search strategy?

1 Define your goals and KPIs

Before you start any SEO work, you need to define your goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) for your organic search strategy. What are you trying to achieve with SEO? How will you measure your success? Your goals and KPIs should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, you might want to increase your organic traffic by 20% in six months, or improve your conversion rate by 10% in a year.

2 Conduct a comprehensive audit

The next step is to conduct a comprehensive audit of your website and your current SEO performance. An audit will help you identify and fix any technical, content, or user experience issues that might be affecting your organic search ranking and visibility. You should check your site speed, mobile-friendliness, crawlability, indexability, site structure, URL structure, meta tags, headings, keywords, content quality, duplicate content, internal links, external links, and more. You can use various tools and resources to help you with your audit, such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Screaming Frog, Moz, Ahrefs, etc.

3 Research your audience and competitors

Another essential step for your organic search strategy is to research your target audience and your competitors. You need to understand who your ideal customers are, what their needs and pain points are, how they search for information and solutions online, and what kind of content they prefer and trust. You also need to analyze your competitors, their SEO strengths and weaknesses, their keywords, their content, their backlinks, and their social media presence. You can use tools like Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, BuzzSumo, etc. to help you with your research.

4 Create a content strategy and calendar

Based on your goals, audit, and research, you need to create a content strategy and calendar for your organic search strategy. Your content strategy should define your content topics, formats, tone, style, and distribution channels. Your content calendar should outline your content plan, schedule, and deadlines. Your content should be relevant, engaging, informative, and optimized for your target keywords and audience. You should also consider different types of content, such as blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, ebooks, etc., and how they fit into your buyer's journey and sales funnel.

5 Implement and optimize your SEO tactics

Once you have your content strategy and calendar ready, you need to implement and optimize your SEO tactics for your organic search strategy. This includes on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. On-page SEO refers to optimizing your content and HTML elements for your target keywords and user intent. Off-page SEO refers to building your authority and reputation through link building, social media, and other external signals. Technical SEO refers to improving your site performance and usability for both search engines and users. You should follow the best practices and guidelines for each SEO tactic and use tools like Yoast SEO, Google PageSpeed Insights, etc. to help you with your optimization.