How to Create An Effective SEO Plan, According to the Experts

An effective SEO plan involves routine audits, maintaining a healthy backlink profile, competitor monitoring, high-quality content production with solid pillar planning– and tracking your efforts. Here’s what the pros say to include to make your SEO strategy successful.

Everyone wants to appear first in Google search results, but earning that coveted page 1 placement takes time and planning.

You need a full-fledged SEO strategy to make your website rank in relevant search engine results. And this requires knowing how to build an SEO plan with all the right components to make it work for you.

If you’ve never built an SEO plan before, then this is a great place to start.

What is an SEO plan?

A solid SEO plan is comprehensive, incorporating technical SEO, content, and off-page SEO efforts to ensure you’re improving all aspects of your website to increase its rankings in Google search.

It’s a digital marketing strategy that uses content marketing and user experience (UX) optimization to appeal to people and search engines.

“I often think about it like human health,” says Madison Scherner, SEO manager at HawkSEM. “Cardio, diet, and strength training are all important and should all be incorporated into a health plan.”

“But depending on needs and lifestyle, some categories may be more advantageous than others. SEO success takes time and an even perspective bird’s eye view and daily efforts.”

The advent of AI and search generative experiences (SGE) has completely changed the search landscape. To remain relevant and competitive, website owners need to adapt by building and executing a strategic SEO plan.

How to create an SEO plan: 7 steps

To create an effective SEO plan, you need to follow a systematic approach that encompasses multiple steps and strategies. Here’s a breakdown of the key components.

1. Conduct thorough research
   • Audit: Find your website’s toxic traits
   • Backlinks & competition: Build a better information superhighway
   • Content: Pick the low-hanging fruit
     • Identifying new keywords
2. Set specific goals
   • Defining specific and measurable goals
   • Setting realistic timelines for achieving goals
3. Perform on-page optimization
   • Optimize website structure and navigation
   • Improve website speed and mobile responsiveness
   • Optimizing meta tags, headings, and URLs
   • Create high-quality and keyword-rich content
4. Perform off-page optimization
   • Build high-quality backlinks from relevant websites
   • Engage in social media marketing and content promotion
   • Monitor and manage your online reputation
5. Don’t forget technical SEO
   • Provide proper website indexing and crawlability
   • Implement structured data markup for enhanced search visibility
   • Optimize website for voice search and mobile-first indexing
   • Develop a content calendar and publishing schedule
6. Use monitoring and reporting
7. Incorporate continuous optimization
   • Monitoring algorithm updates and industry trends
   • Conducting regular website audits and performance reviews
   • Making necessary adjustments and optimizations based on data

1. Conduct thorough research

Before you start making grand plans to change your website, find out what’s working for you— and against you!

This step is crucial in understanding what you need to add, edit, or leave alone. Take note of your website’s content, current search engine ranking, organic traffic performance, and the competition.

Just remember your ABCs (Audits, Backlinks, Competitors, and Content). Here’s a breakdown of the first steps in your SEO planning:

Audit: Find your website’s toxic traits

Google has high standards — which is why your website isn’t ranking (no offense).

If users are quickly leaving, if your site doesn’t load fast enough, or if you’ve got thin content, Google will “swipe left” faster than you can say, “Did I do something wrong”.

To avoid getting ghosted by Google, you need to find and fix your site’s weaknesses. Evaluate your website’s performance, user experience, and technical aspects, such as site speed and mobile responsiveness.

Identify and fix any issues that may hinder search engine crawling or user engagement.

Red flags that Google looks for:

• Bloated page load speed: Users don’t like to wait… so they won’t. According to ThinkWithGoogle, the probability of bounce, or a user leaving a webpage, increases 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds.
  • Find with Google Search Console’s Core Web Vitals or PageSpeed Insights;
  • Fix with your development or SEO team.

• Dead-end pages: While this technically doesn’t cause a loss of traffic, 404 pages are not useful, do not include content or internal links, and will almost certainly increase your bounce rate.
  • Find with Google Search Console or Screaming Frog;
  • Fix with redirecting broken pages to live URLs.
• Pages older than 6+ months with no traffic: If users aren’t visiting a page, there’s always a reason. There may be something wrong with page accessibility or content.
  • Find with GA4 and Google Search Console or use Semrush;
  • Fix by reviewing crawl depth, improving internal linking, or building backlinks to the URL.
• Non-indexed pages older than 6+ months: Large amounts of non-indexed pages could indicate issues with the content or crawl configuration.
  • Find with Google Search Console;
  • Fix with optimizing your crawl configuration, removing and redirecting or optimizing the content, and adding it to your sitemap.

While this doesn’t cover the full scope of how Google analyzes a website, it’s a solid start for building the technical aspect of your SEO plan. If this seems overwhelming, we can help. Reach out to find out how.

Backlinks & competition: Build a better information superhighway

Backlinks are like the paved roads of the web. Just as roads are platforms for drivers, backlinks are pathways that guide users and search crawlers to your brand.

When done properly, you can build your own information superhighway that leads relevant traffic straight to your domain.

If your competition has better routes to their website, that may be what tips the search scale in their favor. With this in mind, you need to stay aware of your competitors’ link-building strategies and the types of content they’re producing.

For this portion of your SEO plan, you’ll need to research your competitors’ SEO strategies, keywords they target, and backlink profiles. This analysis provides valuable insights into their strengths and weaknesses, allowing you to identify opportunities to differentiate and outperform them in search rankings.

You can use a tool like Semrush to analyze competitor content and uncover their most successful backlinks. You can even see which pages or blogs attract the most traffic to their website.

Content: Pick the low-hanging fruit

Before you change any content on your website, find out which pages have the best chance of earning page 1 placement.

Checking which keywords your pages currently rank for (and the average search engine positions of those terms) can be a great way to find content worth updating. This type of SEO audit will help you decide which pages to keep, update, or remove.

1. Go to Google Search Console and select “Search results” in the left sidebar under “Performance”.
2. Click “Average position” to show position data, then click on the “Position” column header to sort by position.
3. Look for search terms between positions 11-20. These pages are good candidates for content updates, as they are on page 2 of Google search results. With a bit of optimization, they are prime candidates for tipping onto page 1.

Identifying new keywords:

If your content isn’t ranking for the right terms, you’ll need to update it with fresh keywords and more useful information relevant to your product or service.

Use keyword research tools like Google Search Console or Ahrefs to identify a list of keywords with high search volume and low competition. Focus on long-tail keywords that align with your target audience’s search intent.

“SEO managers identify keywords by truly understanding the target audience and sales funnel of a company,” explains Scherner.

“Asking questions that define your target audience and recreate their search history. Half of the battle is matching the content to the search intent of the keyword. Meeting the consumer where they are in their discovery journey is the most powerful way to capture any audience, not just organic.”

2. Set specific goals

To ensure the success of your SEO plan, it’s important to set specific and measurable goals. This involves:

Defining specific and measurable goals

Set goals, such as increasing organic traffic by 3%, improving search rankings by February for target keywords, or boosting conversions by 10%. Ensure your goals are realistic, achievable, and aligned with your overall marketing objectives. Specific goals provide clarity and help you track your progress effectively.

Setting realistic timelines for achieving goals

Break down your goals into smaller milestones with specific deadlines. Regularly track your progress and make necessary adjustments to stay on track. By setting realistic timelines, you can make steady progress toward your SEO goals.

3. Perform on-page optimization

On-page optimization involves optimizing various website elements to improve its visibility in search engine results. Here are some best practices.

Optimize website structure and navigation

Ensure a logical and user-friendly website structure with clear navigation. Optimize internal linking to improve crawlability and distribute link equity.

A well-structured and easy-to-navigate website enhances the user experience and helps search engines understand your content better.

It’s also ideal to include internal links within blog posts and web pages. Make sure the anchor text for the links is relevant to the page they’re pointing to.

Improve website speed and mobile responsiveness

Optimize images, minify code, and leverage caching techniques to improve website loading speed. For example,  you can use browser caching to load web pages faster and reduce server load.

It’s also ideal to use a responsive website design to ensure a seamless user experience across all devices.

Tools you can use to test your website speed include Google PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix, and Pingdom.

Optimizing meta tags, headings, and URLs

Craft compelling meta descriptions and page titles that include target keywords and entice users to click.

Use descriptive headings (H1, H2, etc.) to structure every piece of content and improve readability. Create SEO-friendly URLs that are concise, descriptive, and include relevant keywords.

“Choosing a singular keyword to target across metadata and headings is more fruitful than targeting an umbrella of keywords half-hazard,” advises Scherner.

Also, don’t forget to add alt text to your images for accessibility. This way, your text description appears if the photo doesn’t load on a visitor’s screen.

Create high-quality and keyword-rich content

SEO won’t go far without content your audience wants to devour. You can create this by focusing on:

• Developing informative, engaging, in-depth, and shareable content that aligns with user search intent. For example, content that answers searchers’ questions and addresses common pain points helps build trust and loyalty.
• Incorporating target search terms naturally throughout the content, including in headings, subheadings, and body text
• Using relevant multimedia elements, like images and videos, to enhance the content
• Crafting new content regularly to keep your audience engaged in topics they care about

“Using bullet points, visuals, headers, and subheaders are great ways to break up long overwhelming text and get the user to understand/interact with the content easier,” adds Scherner.

4. Perform off-page optimization

Off-page optimization involves activities that take place outside of your website to improve its visibility and authority in search engine rankings.

Here are some best practices for off-page SEO.

Build high-quality backlinks from relevant websites

Backlinks from authoritative and relevant websites can boost your search engine rankings. To build high-quality backlinks, consider the following strategies:

1. Identify authoritative websites in your industry and reach out for guest blogging opportunities or link collaborations. Guest blogging allows you to contribute valuable content to other websites while including a backlink to your own site.
2. Create valuable and shareable content that naturally attracts backlinks from other websites. When you produce high-quality content that provides value to readers, other websites are more likely to link to it.
3. Monitor your backlink profile and disavow any low-quality or spammy backlinks that may negatively impact your website’s SEO. Regularly review the websites linking to your site and disavow any links from low-quality or irrelevant sources.

Engage in social media marketing and content promotion

Social media platforms provide an opportunity to reach millions of online users. But only if you know how to get their attention on these platforms.

Here’s how you can leverage social media for off-page optimization:

1. Share your content on social media platforms to increase visibility and encourage engagement. Create social media profiles for your brand and regularly share your blog posts, articles, videos, and other valuable content.
2. Engage with your audience by responding to comments, messages, and mentions. Actively participate in relevant industry discussions and provide valuable insights and information.
3. Collaborate with influencers and industry experts to amplify your content’s reach. Partnering with influencers or experts in your niche can help you reach a wider audience and attract more backlinks and social shares.

Monitor and manage your online reputation

Maintaining a positive online reputation is crucial for your brand’s credibility and search engine rankings. Here’s how you can manage your online reputation effectively.

1. Regularly monitor online mentions and reviews of your brand. Set up Google Alerts or use social media monitoring tools to stay updated on what people are saying about your brand.
2. Address any negative feedback promptly and proactively. Respond to negative reviews or comments in a professional and helpful manner, demonstrating your commitment to customer satisfaction.
3. Encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews and testimonials. Positive reviews can help counterbalance any negative feedback and improve your brand’s reputation.

5. Don’t forget technical SEO

Believe it or not–what goes on behind the curtain of your website can impact its visibility and performance. Here are some key aspects of technical SEO to consider:

Provide proper website indexing and crawlability

To ensure search engines can discover and index your website’s pages effectively, do two things:

1. Submit an XML sitemap to search engines to help them understand the structure of your website and index its pages more efficiently. An XML sitemap acts as a roadmap for search engines, guiding them to all the important pages on your site.

1. Use robots.txt files to control search engine crawling and prevent indexing of irrelevant or duplicate content. The robots.txt file tells search engine bots which pages and directories to crawl and which ones to exclude.

Implement structured data markup for enhanced search visibility

Structured data markup provides additional context to search engines about your content, helping them understand and present it more effectively in search results.

Here’s how you can implement it:

1. Use schema markup to provide search engines with structured data about your website’s content. Schema markup helps search engines understand the type of content on your site, such as articles, events, products, and more.
2. Implement rich snippets to enhance your website’s appearance in search engine results pages (SERPs). Rich snippets add extra information, such as star ratings, reviews, and images, to your search listings, making them more appealing and informative.
3. Test your new markup using a schema validation tool such as Google’s Rich Results testing tool or Schema.org’s structured data validation tool.

Optimize website for voice search and mobile-first indexing

As voice search and mobile usage continue to rise, optimizing your website for these trends is essential. Here’s what you can do:

1. Optimize your content for voice search queries by focusing on natural language and long-tail keywords. Voice searches tend to be more conversational, so optimizing your content with question-based queries and long-tail keywords can boost your appearance in voice search results.
2. Ensure your website is mobile-friendly and responsive to provide a seamless experience for mobile users. Mobile-first indexing means search engines prioritize the mobile version of your website when determining search rankings. Ensure your website is optimized for mobile devices and loads quickly on mobile platforms.

Develop a content calendar and publishing schedule

To effectively execute an SEO plan, you need a content calendar and publishing schedule. This lets you plan and organize your content creation efforts, ensuring a consistent and strategic approach. By creating a content calendar, you can map out the topics, formats, and timelines for your content production.

For instance, if you’re running a blog, you can use a content calendar to schedule weekly blog posts, ensuring a steady stream of fresh content for your readers.

By determining the frequency (every Monday) and the timing (at 9 am) you establish a predictable publishing schedule your audience can rely on.

6. Use monitoring and reporting

Track keyword rankings, organic traffic, website analytics, and user behavior for valuable insight of your website performance. Then you can make data-driven decisions to improve its visibility and engagement.

Popular SEO tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz provide comprehensive keyword-tracking features. You can input your target keywords and regularly check their rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Google Analytics is another powerful tool that provides detailed insights into your website’s organic traffic. It allows you to analyze metrics, such as the number of sessions, pageviews, bounce rate, and average session duration.

By examining these KPIs (key performance indicators), you can identify pages receiving high traffic and those requiring optimization.

Analyzing website analytics and user behavior also identifies pages with high bounce rates or low conversion rates. These pages may indicate areas where users aren’t finding the information they need or where the user experience can be improved.

For example, maybe you notice a high bounce rate on a specific landing page. By analyzing user behavior, you may discover the page has a slow load time or lacks relevant information.

Improving its loading speed, adding more engaging content, or optimizing the call-to-action could reduce the bounce rate and improve user engagement.

7. Incorporate continuous optimization

If you’re not optimizing your site continuously, then you won’t find new ways to improve your outcomes. To ensure the effectiveness of your SEO efforts:

• Monitor algorithm updates and industry trends
• Conduct regular website audits and performance reviews
• Make necessary adjustments and optimizations based on data.

Let’s explore these practices in more detail.

Monitoring algorithm updates and industry trends

Search engine algorithms are constantly evolving, and staying updated on these changes is crucial for maintaining a strong SEO strategy. By keeping an eye on algorithm updates, you can adapt your SEO tactics to align with the latest ranking factors and guidelines.

For instance, if a search engine releases an algorithm update that prioritizes mobile-friendly websites, you can adjust your strategy to ensure your website is optimized for mobile devices.

Similarly, if you notice a growing trend in voice search, you can optimize your content to target voice search queries and capture that traffic.

Conducting regular website audits and performance reviews

Regular website audits help identify technical issues or areas for improvement that may impact your SEO performance. By conducting audits, you can uncover issues such as:

• Broken links
• Slow page load times
• Duplicate content
• Poor site structure

For example, during a website audit, you may discover that your website has a high number of 404 error pages. By identifying and fixing these broken links, you can improve user experience and ensure search engines can crawl and index your pages effectively.

Making necessary adjustments and optimizations based on data

Data-driven decision-making is a key to continuous optimization. Reviewing insights gathered from monitoring and reporting tools can identify areas for improvement, so you can make data-driven optimizations.

This may involve adjusting keyword targeting, optimizing on-page SEO elements, improving website speed, or enhancing user experience.

For example, if your monitoring and reporting indicate certain keywords aren’t driving the right traffic, you can adjust your keyword targeting strategy by researching and incorporating more relevant keywords.

Benefits of an SEO plan

Implementing a well-structured search engine optimization plan offers numerous benefits for your online presence. By optimizing your website for search engines, you can:

• Drive targeted traffic: An effective SEO plan improves your website’s organic visibility, attracting relevant visitors who are actively searching for your products or services. This targeted traffic increases the likelihood of conversions and business growth.
• Increase brand awareness: Higher search engine rankings increase your brand’s visibility. When your website appears on the first page of organic search results, it generates trust and credibility among users, leading to improved brand recognition.
• Achieve long-term results: Unlike pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, which requires continuous investment, SEO focuses on long-term strategies. Once your website ranks well for targeted keywords, you can enjoy ongoing benefits (e.g., high click-through rates) without additional advertising costs.
• Enhance user experience: An SEO plan involves optimizing various aspects of your website, including its speed, mobile-friendliness, and user interface. These improvements not only satisfy search engine requirements but also enhance the overall user experience, resulting in higher engagement and lower bounce rates.
• Gain competitive advantage: In today’s digital landscape, competition is fierce. By implementing an SEO plan, you can stay ahead of your competitors by outranking them in search results, attracting more customers, and establishing your brand as an industry leader.
• Improve conversion rates: Targeted traffic, combined with SEO content and user experience, increases the likelihood of conversions. When your website appears in front of the right audience and provides valuable information, it encourages visitors to take desired actions, such as making a purchase or filling out a contact form.

Common SEO plan mistakes

One of the biggest mistakes we see beginners and businesses make is building and executing an SEO plan without the knowledge of SEO best practices to do so effectively. According to Scherner, this often leads to mistakes like:

• Not setting realistic goalposts
• Not putting enough hours into research before starting
• Thinking about SEO midway through a website redesign
• Following the plan to a T

“I often see businesses make a plan and then struggle to get the content or item tackled because they’re held up by how something is worded or in minute detail,” shares Scherner.

“If it’s taking too much time, skip it and apply all of the other changes while discussing the one hangup.”

For example, stop checking rankings weekly, in some cases, even monthly. Look quarter over quarter. Take any industry seasonality into account. If you sell Christmas sweaters, you can’t expect June to be as good as November.

SEO plan checklist

Here’s an SEO plan checklist you can use as a template to guide your strategies:

1. Research:
   1. Perform a technical SEO audit to identify and fix any website issues that may impact SEO.
   2. Conduct an indexation audit to ensure search engines can properly crawl and index your site.
   3. Perform a competitor audit to analyze their SEO strategies and identify opportunities.
   4. Conduct keyword research to identify relevant and high-value keywords to target.
2. Present Research:
   1. Silo opinions from different teams (dev, content, marketing) and focus on data-driven insights.
   2. Share the research findings and have discussions to align everyone on the SEO plan.
3. Planning:
   1. Plan for a year, but allow flexibility for adjustments and changes.
   2. Organize tasks based on effort (low to heavy lifts) and impact (low to high).
   3. Include at least one high-impact project per quarter and fill in other times with low and medium-lift tasks.
4. Reporting:
   1. Generate monthly or quarterly reports to track progress and performance.
   2. Highlight wins and losses to learn from them and improve future strategies.
5. Add to the Plan:
   1. Continuously build and refine the SEO strategy throughout the year.
   2. Leave room for new ideas and growth to keep the SEO plan aligned with goals.

Remember, this checklist is a general guideline, and it’s important to customize it based on your specific needs and goals. If you’d like a more detailed explanation of our planning process, our SEO team would be happy to develop an SEO plan for your business.

Recommended tools to execute your SEO plan

When it comes to executing an SEO plan, having the right tools can make a significant difference. Here are some recommended tools that can help you effectively implement your SEO strategy.

• Keyword Research:
  • Ahrefs
  • Semrush
  • Google Keyword Planner
  • Google Trends
• Content Analysis:
  • Screaming Frog
  • Google Search Console
  • Google Analytics
• Technical SEO:
  • Screaming Frog
  • Google Search Console
  • PageSpeed Insights (LightHouse)
• Backlink Audits:
  • Ahrefs
  • Semrush
  • Google Search Console

According to our SEO expert, Semrush and Ahrefs are the lifeblood of SEO. Semrush is known for its position-tracking capabilities, making it ideal for monitoring keyword rankings and tracking progress over time.

On the other hand, Ahrefs provides excellent backlink and competitor data, allowing you to analyze your competitors’ backlink profiles and gain insights into their SEO strategies.

For site crawls and technical analysis, Scherner recommends using Screaming Frog. This tool allows you to crawl your website and identify any technical issues that may affect your SEO performance.

“In my opinion, experience is the best SEO tool you could have.” While tools provide valuable data and graphs, the interpretation and next steps should come from an experienced SEO professional who can effectively respond to the data.

At HawkSEM, we not only have a team of seasoned SEO experts who can understand data and what to do with it.

We also have our own proprietary software, ConversionIQ, that pulls the right data from your campaigns to guide our decisions and content strategies.

Monthly SEO plan execution

Implementing a dedicated SEO plan allows you to prioritize your efforts, making your work more effective in increasing traffic.

Conduct keyword research

Even if you know what page you plan to update, you’ll need to conduct keyword research for that specific URL.

Use Google Search Console and other keyword-tracking tools to see how (or if) you’re appearing in search engine results. When adding or editing keywords, make sure you’re focusing on terms relevant to your industry, products, or services.

Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer feature is incredibly helpful in discovering the organic search volume of a specific term and its related search terms.

Record blog post ideas

When analyzing page content and keywords with Google Search Console, Semrush, or Ahrefs, you’ll inevitably discover new terms.

Create a list of these new keywords (especially long-tail terms with high organic search volume).

You can use these keywords to inspire new blog topic ideas. Add these new pages or blogs to your SEO plan.

Update existing content

When updating the content identified during your SEO audits, always focus on enhancing topical relevance, internal linking, and media.

Conduct a Google search to see which results appear first for that term. That’s your competition for that keyword. Analyze the top 3-5 articles on page 1 to determine how you can produce better content that’s more unique and helpful.

As always, before you make changes, take a log of all of the terms the page is currently ranking for (and the average organic search engine position) so you can track your progress.

Build backlinks to new content

While it’s not necessary, a great way to encourage indexing and invite user traffic to new pages or blogs is by building backlinks on high-authority websites.

Create keyword-focused anchor text that links back to the URL. This can be particularly helpful for local SEO and ranking location pages on localized websites (such as local directories, chamber of commerce sites, or local magazines).

Monitor progress

Always check on your Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console, as it can help you identify technical issues and opportunities for improvement.

Review and track your organic traffic, along with keyword and page positions. Whenever you identify a new keyword, add the term to your keyword tracking tool of choice.

Don’t be reactive if you do see negative signals when reviewing a month-over-month analysis.

However, if you’re consistently losing traffic, you’ll need to adjust your SEO plan. Start at the beginning of your SEO plan checklist, or contact an SEO agency for assistance.

The takeaway

Crafting an effective SEO plan is necessary if you want to improve your brand’s visibility and organic traffic. But it requires the right tools, strategy, and skills to make it work.

Without experience, businesses can potentially waste money and time on their SEO efforts without seeing any results.

If you need expert guidance, HawkSEM can create an SEO plan and, if needed, we’ll execute it for you. Reach out to our experts today for a free consultation.