Our guide to defining the perfect objective for your SEO plan

SEO plan: the marketing strategy asset I need for my website

Why do I need SEO?

A website's performance isn't simply measured by its elegant design or user-friendly navigation: it must also be visible on the Internet. By this we mean that it must be easily found in the results pages of search engines such as Google, so that it brings you traffic and potential future customers. Think of a prospect looking for a company like yours, only to come across all of your competitors. You have almost no chance of converting them into a customer if they simply can't see you anywhere.

SEO involves a series of techniques implemented by an agency or SEO expert to help you gain visibility and move up the results pages. These can range from correcting errors on your site that Google's algorithms penalize, to optimizing and enriching your content to match the queries users type to find you on the Internet. These SEO interventions take time to bear fruit, months in fact, which is why we say that it's a long-term job. If there's one piece of advice we can give you, it's that you shouldn't overlook SEO and that you should tackle it early on.

How can an SEO plan help me?

SEO is no different from any other marketing strategy as it's almost impossible to achieve effective results if you don't know what your objective is and how to reach it. To put together an SEO plan is to create a key document in which you determine your main goal, divided into smaller objectives that will be medium to short-term, and finally to describe the steps and interventions required to ensure that your strategy runs smoothly. Thanks to this SEO plan, you'll be able to start the machine that will make you more visible on search engine results pages.

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Defining my dream goal and developing my SEO plan

Setting an achievable and adapted objective

The main goal of your SEO strategy needs to be defined in advance and carefully thought out so that it's tailored to your situation and totally achievable. Simply saying that you want to be top 1 on Google in your sector within 6 months is not a good example of an ideal goal, especially if competitors have been there for years!

So be careful not to be too greedy or impatient, otherwise you'll be in for a disappointment, and your entire SEO strategy will feel like a bitter failure. We recommend implementing an SEO plan with scalable objectives, so that you're always making progress.

Laying the foundations with an SEO audit

For an existing site, any SEO strategy should include a professional SEO audit. This comprehensive analysis of your website is the first step in your plan, as it provides you with a clear picture on which you can identify areas for improvement.

A complete SEO audit will assess various aspects of your site, such as rankings on relevant keywords, technical errors, competitors, your content, and on-site and off-site characteristics. This valuable data will help you understand your strengths and weaknesses.

Setting SMART objectives

Because every strategy is built one stone at a time, it's important to define the stages of your SEO plan. We recommend breaking down your end goal into SMART objectives, which will be easier to track over both the short and medium term. These are based on the SMART acronym:

• Specific: the objective must be clear and precise, and easily understood by all.
• Measurable: the objective should be identifiable and quantified, allowing a value or threshold to be determined. This makes it easier to assess whether the objective has been fulfilled.
• Achievable: the objective must be achievable, in the sense that it should be ambitious enough to offer a challenge, but not too far-reaching.
• Relevant: the objective must not be trivial or optional, but necessary to the achievement of the overall target. It must be of real interest to the company.
• Time-bound: the objective must have a deadline, to allow a more consistent and meaningful assessment of progress.

Some key elements of my SEO plan

If your SEO plan is tailored to your needs and those of your website, there are a number of key elements that should be considered to be successful.

Identifying the most suitable keywords

One of the first things your SEO plan should include is a section on ranking your website using the right keywords. This means conducting a study to determine which queries users are typing into search engines to find you, and selecting those with the best ratio between search volume and ranking difficulty due to competition.

There are a number of tools and applications, most of them paid or freemium, to help you find your keywords, but we strongly advise you to have a competitive analysis conducted by a web agency to make sure you choose the most appropriate keywords.

Setting KPIs according to your objectives

Once SMART objectives have been established within your SEO strategy, it's time to define KPIs - key performance indicators. These can then be tracked and used to evaluate the progress of the SEO intervention. Some examples of KPIs are:

• General bounce rate
• User conversion rate
• Time spent on page by visitors
• Number of pages visited by users

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Working on the structure and technical aspects of my website

The structure and all the technical aspects of your website must be optimized for SEO, so that the search engine algorithms can fully understand your site and index it appropriately.

Some examples of key aspects to look out for:

• The site's structure and arborescence, which should be coherent and relevant.
• The website code should be error-free to avoid penalties.
• The site should have an optimized load speed, and should be compatible with all the different platforms used by visitors.
• The markup, titles and meta tags on each page of the site should be accurate and optimized.

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Making my content SEO-friendly

The content of your site is also an excellent way of positioning your keywords and including a semantic field, i.e. a set of words that are linked to a given query and will give your page's content a considerable SEO value.

Good quality content is, for instance:

• Content with sufficient text volume: pages with a few hundred words at most will have little added value for Google.
• Content optimized for keywords and semantics, neither too sparse nor too obvious for Internet users or Google's crawlers.
• Detailed, explicit text content with information that users can understand, so that they instantly grasp the nature of your business or what you're talking about on your page.
• To take things a step further, set up a blog space featuring high-quality articles related to your business, which will boost your traffic.

Optimizing and acquiring links

One of the most effective approaches for your SEO plan is to optimize the links on your website, but also to acquire new ones. Links indeed reflect the site's popularity to search engine robots. You can thus:

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• Optimize the website's internal linking to help link pages together and provide a coherent architecture.
• Optimize the site's outbound links, which are, in Google's words, "a great way to provide valuable information to users".
• Acquire backlinks, i.e. links from other sites pointing to yours, which should be achieved through a netlinking campaign.

Our advice to help you make sense of it all

While SEO is a great way to boost your visibility and your business, it's a broad and complex subject for anyone with no experience. Even the precious algorithms of Google's robots are kept secret! Fortunately, this doesn't mean we're in the dark when it comes to SEO - quite the contrary.

At the Studio, we have the skills to help you work on your website's SEO by intervening on key issues and tracking traffic using our analysis tools.