OCA’s SEO Strategy — 2022
After rebuilding OCA’s website, there are lot more issues that I need to solve. Since the company development team's power is limited, it’s challenging to execute the whole SEO strategy.
Since I got promoted as Lead SEO Specialist, I have focused more on the bigger picture. It’s ranging from new SEO keyword clusters, technical SEO, website A/B testing, content, backlink, and SEO reporting. Let’s break it down.
SEO Keyword Clusters
After searching for the most suitable keyword research strategy for OCA, I decide the keyword cluster is the one. Keyword clustering is a practice search engine optimization (SEO) professionals use to segment target search terms into groups (clusters) relevant to each page of the website.
I might say keyword clustering takes a lot of effort and steps, but the result is satisfying. The result I mean here is the keyword bank, detailed and easier to understand.
First thing first. I discussed my company target, competitor analytics, and last year’s winning keywords. From this, I get the bigger picture of what products the company wants to promote, what the most competitive keyword in the market is, and what the target customers want to search for.
Then I start the keyword collecting. I used my beloved Ahrefs. It provides sufficient data for keyword competition, search volume, and keyword suggestions.
I search for 14 different seed keywords. I collected about 15 thousand to 18 thousand keywords. That’s too much! I know. So, in the next step, I filtered those keywords by how much the search volume and relevancy to OCA’s market niche.
Now, this is the fun part. After narrowing down the raw keyword collection to 1,943 keywords, I performed the Array formula to assign a value to all those keywords. The goal was to find the most important keywords (by how often the keyword appears and the interest of the company) and also the grouping for the clusters. So, this is what it looks like:
As the result, there are 18 keyword groups. So, now I can just pick and match all the keywords.
Managing the technical SEO
I just realize how fun managing the technical SEO. Overall, my scope is finding SEO technical issues, providing the solution, and passing it to the development team to solve.
Along the way, I sharpen my side skills like HTML, tool mastery, and communication with the development team. The best thing is I understand how to solve those problems. Since solving it is not my scope let’s just discuss how I deliver the technical SEO issues delivery.
Let’s talk about the tools. For technical SEO I rely on Google Lighthouse, Ahrefs, and ScreamingFrog. Google Sheet is used as the issues record system, so the development team can check it anytime they want.
It’s not that hard once you understand how to find SEO technical issues. Just use the tools and voilà we found the issues! Luckily, Google is kind enough to provide a to-do list to solve those issues (Google Web Vitals for example). Then, I just have to collect all the things in one Google Sheet like this:
Until today there are hundreds of issues have been solved. Happy to help!
Website A/B Testing
Never ever satisfied with your existing website. A website always needs some polishing here and there, but you can’t just change it. You need data-based reasons to change your existing website. A/B testing using Google Optimize is our hero!
There are a lot of assumptions that you can use to propose A/B testing. For example, new target keywords, experimenting with copywriting, microcopy, better CTA, and many more.
For this case, a better tone of voice is my assumption to do the A/B testing. I need to gather data to prove that renewing the tone of voice can deliver better conversion.
So, I made three alternatives for the home page using Google Optimize. All I did was rewrite the copy to match certain brand voices. My winning condition is if one of the alternatives is having a better conversion (register is the most important conversion) than the original one. So, this is the result:
As you can see the “Casually Caring” tone of voice probability better than the original is 86%. There you go, I win! I was able to prove using data there’s a better tone of voice that can gain more conversion. This data can help my team to decide where to polish our website.
Content Strategy & Quality Content
Let me tell you, doing SEO, content strategy, and writing content all at once is not an easy job. So, I back off from dedicating myself to content production. I propose a better strategy.
In a month, the marketing team has to upload 4 quality content, which we called Premium Content. For boosting the SEO I propose some freelance writers to help us.
This is simple and basic. All I have to do is manage the content writers and plan an editorial for SEO content. This is how my editorial looks like
I still write tho, only for the high-quality content. I’m still pretty good at writing :)
Backlink
This is not my forte, to be honest. I don’t really know how to execute backlinks with the best strategy out there. I still do my best, here is how:
- Pay some web with good DA to write my content
I think that’s it! Simple right?
The result? Here:
Look at that healthy growing graph. Oh yeah, we kinda stop the backlink for a while, that explains the decline at the end.
SEO Reporting
Let me brag a bit. I develop my own reporting system :)
Here is a sneak peek:
So this is a very detailed, holistic, easy-to-read, and semi-automatic SEO reporting template. Yes, I create it on my own. As a Lead SEO Specialist, I realize I need to create an easy-to-understand report.
This report covers:
- Traffic profile for daily, monthly, and growth from the last month.
- Technical issues that solved
- Impression, Click, Avg CTR, Average Position, DTP Search Avg Engagement Time, and Blog Search Avg Engagement Time.
- Weekly top keywords
- Total keyword rank
- and Backlink
There are also graphics and analyses too.
Well, that’s all I can share for now. Let’s do more!
