Think you know everything about SEO strategy? I bet you'll STILL learn some tips with this article! Thanks to a concrete example, you will see that it is possible to be highly visible in search engines, in a short time and by spending zero money.
Anne-Laure Compain
The acronym SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. The SEO allows to act on the traffic of a website obtained with its natural referencing. That is to say a traffic acquired from search engines without any advertising. SEO is based on three principles which are :
We are talking about the whole development of the site and its technical optimization. The code must be clean, optimized and allow a page to load ultra-fast. Then, the elements of the pages must be structured, the titles must have specific tags and each web page must have a title and a meta description.
In SEO, when we talk about content, we mean quality content. The content of a page must be relevant to the name of the page and the meta data filled in. It must also be relevant to the overall content of the site. The content must also be unique and better than your competitors. Duplicate content will be penalized.
Do you know about netlinking? Well, according to the external links that point to a website, Google will give a popularity score. This is called "domain authority". The goal is to have external links that are in the same theme as the site and have a good popularity score, otherwise they will not bring weight.
Now that we know what SEO is, let's move on to SEO strategy. An SEO strategy is simply the way we will proceed to reach our target in the search engine results. In general, we make an SEO strategy when we want to acquire quality traffic and therefore conversions.
The SEO strategy must be thought out, because if the new traffic obtained is not of quality then the number of conversions will not increase and the turnover will not increase either. Even if some SEO strategies do not give convincing results, for some, it is quite the opposite!
It is important to know that once the objectives are achieved, they remain and are sustainable in the long term. The SEO of the site will then have a solid foundation and can develop at lightning speed! Well, let's not exaggerate, it won't happen in days, but rather in months 😉
Small example. If your strategy is well prepared and solid, then if you aim for 3,000 visits per month to your website, you will get 3,000 visits per month, and this over several months. It's not just the first month and then nothing, it's a stable and sustainable data.
As mentioned above, SEO allows to acquire continuous and long term traffic for a website. It will allow to create a notoriety and a continuous traffic. The SEA, on the other hand, allows to acquire traffic on a short term basis. For example for a promotional campaign, a product launch or an event. Moreover, the SEA is based on paid acquisition, that is to say thanks to advertisements in search engines, as Google Ads allows.
Zero budget is possible
Know who you are talking to
Knowing your target is a luxury that not all companies have. It is important to know who you are talking to in order to direct your messages in the best possible way.
If you don't know your target yet, don't panic! There are many tools to define it. But the most important thing is to do the persona exercise. Here is a complete questionnaire that will help you define your persona.
Knowing the search intentions of your target
For this third and last objective, you will have to put yourself in the shoes of your target customer. The goal is to be able to bring out all the keywords that the target can type in the search engines. Once we know all these keywords, we can position ourselves on them in order to appear in the first search results.
Go, it is to leave, we put ourselves in condition. We put ourselves behind our keyboard and we think of everything that can pass through the head of our target so that it can fall on your website and buy your services or your products.
Here is our advice. Go for a high volume with a simple difficulty rate (less than 25%). On the other hand, if your sector is competitive and you have the budget, then you can aim for a higher difficulty, because your content will be of quality.
Choose the difficulty of a keyword according to your budget. A relevant keyword combined with a good budget allows you to create quality content and buy high reputation links. These two things combined will improve the reputation of your website.
| Difficulty | Estimate of the reputation budget | |
|---|---|---|
Between 0 and 35% | 0€ | |
From 35% to 50% | 5 000€ | |
More than 50% | + 10 000€ |
In the best case scenario, if you are working to get a total volume of 10,000 visitors per month to your website, you can tell yourself that you will get 10-20% clicks. That's 1,000 to 2,000 clicks per month.
To analyze everything that happens on the web in France and internationally, there is a great tool: Semrush
To explain briefly, Semrush is an online tool that allows, among other things, to know the volume of a keyword, but also its percentage of difficulty. For each keyword, we have :
Semrush is a paid tool, but you can use the one week trial version to do all your in-depth research. Once this intensive week is over, you can cancel your subscription.
It's all well and good, we've been telling you for a while now that using an optimized CMS helps your SEO. But what is an optimized CMS?
First of all, a CMS is a good solution for the common man who knows absolutely nothing about development. Indeed, a CMS is an online tool that allows you to create a website without computer knowledge. Just by using page and block templates and injecting text and image content. For the curious and those who do not know CMS, discover our CMS guide.
Then, when we talk about optimized CMS, we talk mostly about code, and a little bit about design. You will understand:
The quality of writing a text, a page or a blog post is very important. The text must have linking words, it must contain the keyword, but not in great quantity or the titles must be concise and descriptive.
For each keyword, you need to know what Google expects as a result, examples or a definition for example. Type your keyword in Google and look at the search results but also the suggestions available at the bottom of the search.
Offer unique content. Don't go looking for information on other blog posts, it's useless. It's good to look at what others are doing for inspiration or to try to do better, but don't make a copy and paste article.
When we write, we must structure our text. As in this article for example, there is a summary, titles, subtitles, paragraphs and buttons. It is thanks to these various elements that the reading will be more pleasant and understandable.
To help the reading of the text and to lessen eye strain, you should vary the elements. A title then a text and underneath a photo then a video or even a Gif. Large blocks of text do not work! They tire the reader even before they have read.
You bring quality content to your target and that's fine, but then what? Do you direct them to a sales page? To a contact form? To a product to buy? Put a call to action at the end of your articles to send the reader elsewhere.
For this example, I'm going to tell you about an e-commerce site launched in October 2021. This online store sells kuksa. These are wooden cups handmade in Finland.
This sales sector is a niche. As explained above, this means that there is little competition in the market. Since it is a niche and there is very little competition, there is no difficulty in positioning yourself on the main keyword "kuksa". Therefore, it is not necessary to buy links to increase the reputation of the site.
For this Kuksa Shop e-commerce site, the choice of the domain name was clear: kuksa.shop simply.
After a search on Semrush, here are some keywords selected in the United States with their volume and difficulty.
| Mot-clé | Volume (per month) | Difficulty (in %) |
|---|---|---|
Kuksa | 1 300 | 28 |
carve a kuksa | 170 | 20 |
kuksa carving tools | 70 | 7 |
best woord for kuksa | 40 | 0 |
For this example, we have a total volume of requests equal to 1580 per month. This gives us approximately 150 to 200 clicks per month.
After reading these keywords, the list of blog posts to be created was made by itself. The articles that the Kuksa site would display would be :
In order to help his three articles, other articles in the same theme have also been written as :
Moreover, if you wish, you can view the articles related to these keywords.
Then, a second Semrush study was done to see in the world, which countries the keyword "kuksa" was the most popular. With this information, the 6 languages of the site were established and all articles were translated into these languages:
So here is the curve of Kuksa Shop from its launch in October 2021 to today, April 2022.
On its first year, the site to counted in the Google Search Console:
Personally I wouldn't like to ride that curve on my bike 😉
On a more serious note, what comes next looks promising for Kuksa Shop. Especially for an e-commerce site that has done no advertising and already counts many international sales. And this, only thanks to SEO and Google search engine
As you have seen, establishing an SEO strategy is not that complicated and it does not necessarily cost thousands of euros. You just need to know what to do and when to do it, use the right tools and above all BE PATIENT. SEO can't be done in a few days, it's not possible. But, in two or three months, we already start to see the results of our efforts.
The subject of CMS fascinates you, so these articles should also interest you.
Anne-Laure Compain
Alexis Le Baron
Anne-Laure Compain
Alexis Le Baron
Alexis Le Baron
Alexis Le Baron
