SEO Game Plan: Definition, Goals and Development

You’ve probably heard happily married people saying something like “Love is hard work”. The same applies to SEO. And this work is only meaningful and purposeful if you have the right (or any) SEO game plan. Only with this solid foundation, you will be able to sustainably improve your ranking on Google, optimize your website and make it more user-friendly.

By the way, SEO is not only done for Google — you should never forget that. As part of the many SEO measures, you also improve the experience of your website visitors in particular. So, not only will you end up with better rankings, but your visitors will be happier too, which is a great win-win situation. Please keep in mind, there are even more reasons why blogging for business is important.

In this post, we’ll explain what an SEO game plan is and what it entails, we’ll give you an insight into the goals of your SEO efforts, and show you step-by-step how to develop a good game plan. Thanks to very practical examples, you will surely quickly realize the necessity of an SEO concept.

What Is an SEO Game Plan?

Firstly, it is crucial not to be intimidated by the term “game plan”. A game plan is something positive — for smaller companies, sometimes all it takes is one page to put all your actions down on paper.

With a strategic approach, you’re simply sorting through your thoughts, setting goals, and trying to take everything into account up front. It’s like the saying, “Someone who keeps order is too lazy to look for something.” So, be lazy and organize yourself to the best of your ability.

The one and only SEO game plan that applies to all websites does NOT exist. Rather, all SEO measures and the process in doing so are very individual, albeit limited to some extent by the Google SEO guide and its algorithms. However, these areas generally include:

1. Definition of Your SEO Goals

Ask yourself what you want to achieve by optimizing your website. Make clear to yourself which exact goals you are pursuing with your planned SEO measures. Only those who know their goal will find the right path, as the Chinese philosopher Laozi said in the 6th century BC.

2. Analysis of All Important Parameters

By analyzing the most important parameters of your website, you can already identify possible optimization potential:

• Record the current situation: Where does your website rank for the most important keywords in Google’s search results?
• Check all SEO-relevant on-page parameters
• Review all relevant off-page options
• Keyword analysis: With which keywords do I hit my target group best? Which keywords have the best potential to be ranked high?
• Target group analysis: Who do I want to address? Who fits to my products? Which customers do I want to attract with my SEO game plan?
• Content planning: With which content do I target my readers? What gaps does my content consist of? Where is potential for new content?
• Backlink analysis: Check the state of your existing backlinks and constantly build new ones — actively and passively. Actively by entering into cooperations, passively by creating high-quality content.
• Competitor check: Keeping an eye on your competitors is always essential. Identify new industry trends and gaps that you could fill with your content.

3. Derive SEO Measures

From the previous two points, you now derive your measures. For example, if you are a real estate agent and have noticed that your competitors are writing very little on the subject of real estate valuation, this is your big opportunity. Another example would be if you want to expand to another country. The target group there might speak another language and therefore SEO translation might be the way to get them to your page.

In this context, also create a priority list, since not everything can be tackled at once. And since you can’t do everything on your own, you should determine who should take on which tasks.

4. Implementation and Measurement

In the last step of the development of your SEO game plan, the developed measures are implemented, and the success is measured continuously. This way you can quickly see if your game plan is right and if you should continue your work or adjust something.

Your SEO game plan can’t be squeezed into any tight corset. It’s your own personal catalog of measures that must be highly individualized to your goals, your company’s mission, your target audience’s needs, and your products.

What Is Not an SEO Game Plan?

Developing and having a game plan is important, but it is not a cure-all. If you have the wrong business model, even the best SEO won’t help you. SEO can be the fuel for a rocket, but it only adds value if the rocket works properly. Otherwise, it might just explode because of all the new fuel.

Are you wondering how your business can go awry from too much fuel? The answer is simple: if you’re selling an inadequate product and your new SEO game plan suddenly drives a lot more customers to your website, there’s also a lot more potential for complaints and bad reviews on social media. If previously only a few customers complained to your support, they may now be overrun, leading to further dissatisfaction.

Furthermore, an SEO game plan shouldn’t be your only way to attract new customers. Search engine optimization is important, but your house should stand on several pillars. How to develop a content marketing game plan? Position yourself as broadly as possible and use social media marketing, email marketing, PR, and more to attract new customers.

Why Should You Have an SEO Game Plan, and What Makes a Good Game Plan?

To help you understand why you should have an SEO game plan, let’s use a descriptive acronym:

S	Search events have to be improved	The ultimate goal of an SEO concept is, of course, to improve your ranking in Google search results.
T	Trends have to be identified	By taking a planned approach and observing your competitors, you will more quickly identify trends that you can use both for your SEO efforts and in product development.
R	Realize your potential	Because of the SEO process, you can take full advantage of the massive potential of the Internet in terms of new customers.
A	Analyze the current situation	The basis of a good SEO game plan is the analysis of the current state. In doing so, you may identify other weaknesses or areas that need to be improved.
T	Topic clusters have to be developed	Thanks to your SEO measures and the findings from your analysis, you can identify topics that are of interest to your website and your customers.
E	Enhance results	In the end, everything boils down to one goal: to improve your company’s sales and earnings. SEO gives you a great opportunity for this.
G	Gaps have to be closed	After analyzing your content and competitors, you know exactly the gaps that need to be filled in terms of content. On the one hand, to make your website more relevant, and on the other, to offer your visitors real added value.
Y	Your ideals have to be implemented	Within your SEO game plans, you can express your company’s ideals, vision, and mission. If you stand for honesty and transparency, you should not have shady backlinks just to possibly gain an advantage from them.

What Makes a Good Game Plan?

A good SEO process will help you to …

• not lose sight of your goals,
• do no harm (yes, that’s possible too!),
• understand your customers better, and
• generate more revenue eventually.

A Good SEO Game Plan Is Always Tailor-made

There is no run-of-the-mine template, and those that exist are useless. At most, you can use them as a guide so you don’t forget anything. You can use them as an inspiration, but not to adopt them one-to-one. Every business, every website, every customer and every company’s mission statement is different. Only if you coordinate everything ideally, your measures will be crowned with lasting success.

A Good Game Plan Sets Priorities

After analyzing the current situation, the next step is to put the identified measures into the right perspective. For one website, building backlinks may do a lot, while for another, speeding up image load times and optimizing the mobile site will be more beneficial.

After you figure out which subpages and content are the most important for your purpose, you should start optimizing them. At first, don’t bother with pages that get few visits because that will be of little advantage. On the other hand, optimizing exactly these low-visited pages can be essential if they consist of content that is (actually) interesting for you and your target audience.

A Good SEO Game Plan Starts With the Right Keywords

Identifying the most important keywords for you, your target group, your company, and your website is an essential step. This is because the keywords also determine the content — and as we all know, content is king!

Always keep in mind that finding the right keywords is about meeting your customers’ needs. If you know what your customers are looking for and what they want at what point in their journey, you know your keywords.

What Are the Goals of an SEO Game Plan?

Before we take a look at how a good SEO game plan is developed in detail, we would first like to look at the goals. Meanwhile, it should have become clear that there are no prefabricated, generally valid goals here either. Rather, the goals are highly individual, which is why each website owner will see them somewhere else.

However, one thing is actually common to all post-target search efforts: the SEO goals should be aligned with the company’s goals and ideals. Only then does a harmonious process emerge, whereby SEO, content, and brand really do fit together well.

Goals Always Have to Be S-M-A-R-T

And one more commonality can be found: Goals should always be subject to the SMART principle. According to this, goals must be …

• Specific,
• measurable,
• achievable,
• realistic, and
• time-bound.

Here are two examples of your possible SEO goals:

Bad	Good
We want to attract more website visitors.	We aim to increase website visitors by 25% by the end of Q2.
We want to generate more revenue.	We aim to increase revenue from organic search by 10% year-on-year by the end of the year.

Goals Can Be Expressed Excellently Through Key Figures

Key performance indicators — also known as KPIs — are ideal variables for defining goals. They are easily measurable and can be significantly influenced by SEO measures. The most important KPIs include:

• Clicks: How many users click on an organic search result to get to your website?
• Impressions: How many times has your content been viewed?
• Visibility: How often do users see your website (or a subpage) in search results?
• Conversions: How many visits to your website actually resulted in a purchase?
• Leads: How many of your visitors interacted with the website and, for example, subscribed to the newsletter or made a price request?
• Sales from organic searches: How much revenue was generated from a click on an organic search result?

The list of possible KPIs is endless, which is why you can analyze yourself to death here. Proceed with caution and an open mind, and identify the KPIs that really make sense for you. Again, there are no general guidelines. Only you decide which numbers should play a role for you.

How to Develop a Good SEO Game Plan?

Although there is no one-size-fits-all recipe for creating a good game plan, we would like to show you one possible way that may help you find your path. The path shown below was developed by us and has proven to work well. It can be applied to many situations and websites with the appropriate customizations.

Step 1: Perform a Website SEO Audit

A website audit is the beginning of your sometimes rocky road. Here, you determine the current situation and identify initial keyword and content gaps. You’ll find out what’s wrong with meta titles, meta descriptions, page load speed, alt tags and many other metrics.

You learn about your competitors, identify performance weaknesses, the status of your backlinks and internal links and much more. All of this is used to derive the appropriate measures for improvement.

Step 2: Set Goals and KPIs

After you know how your website is doing in detail, you can set your goals and define KPIs to improve. Remember the tips in the previous section when setting goals.

Step 3: Develop Keywords & Content

In step 3 and 4, the SEO pyramid plays a key role. This expresses which measures are important in SEO and form the foundation for a good website. In particular, the content and the technical metrics such as metadata, structure, sitemap, code, etc. are the basis. This is followed by keywords, and finally by backlink building and social media as off-page measures.

Everyone sets different priorities, as mentioned before. For Blogtec, content is right at the top. A well-thought-out content game plan is already half the battle.

Step 4: Other On-page and Off-page SEO Measures

The list of all other possible measures on the page itself or around backlinks (i.e., on other pages) is long. Therefore, based on your prerequisites, you need to look at what you want to work on. An indication of possible areas and tasks can be found in our article on “Why SEO?” as well as our article on the SEO audit.

Step 5: Prioritize, Plan, Measure

Once you have collected all the data, defined your goals, derived possible measures and done your homework thoroughly, the prioritization phase follows. You already know all the possibilities — now you just need to put them in the right order and plan everything in detail.

You have to identify actions that will have the greatest impact and find people who can make it happen. In parallel, you put all your plans into a timeframe and start measuring success early.

Examples: This Is What an SEO Game Plan Can Look Like

We have already mentioned that an SEO game plan is something very individual, and that everyone has to find the measures they think are most suitable. However, to give you some examples of possible SEO measures, we have compiled some practical sample cases below:

Examples of On-page Measures

On the website itself, there are countless points of attack for your SEO efforts. Google works with around 200 parameters, all of which could be optimized if you knew them. Here, the search engine giant holds back lots of information, which is why you can only guess which levers are involved.

• Indexing: To make the Googlebot’s work easier, a correct sitemap should be available and meaningful URLs (permalinks) should be assigned.
• Clean up links: Remove links that lead to 404 errors and check your website for broken links.
• Improve structures: For one thing, Google doesn’t like directory trees that bury articles in fifth place. Make sure your structure is tidy and not too deeply branched. Moreover, in the articles themselves, a good structure with subheadings can make for a better result.
• Metadata: Optimize all metadata and alt tags, i.e., meta description and meta title for better ranking.
• Internal linking: Linking to other pages on your website shows Google which articles are important to you and also provides further structure.

Examples for Measures in the Content Area

Analogous to Konrad Hilton’s statement about what is most important for a hotel (namely the location), for a website, it is the content. Here are some ways to improve it:

• Pillar Pages: This pillar content — pages that contain content that is particularly important to you — should be given special care. Also called hub pages, you map out a main topic, which then links to many other subtopics on additional pages.
• Shop categories: Many stores don’t take advantage of the great potential that lies in the description texts of their store categories. Write good texts with added value, and refrain from stringing together SEO keywords.
• Fill gaps: Through competitor analysis and your knowledge of your customers’ customer journey, you can fill content gaps that have fallen short so far. In doing so, you may manage to be perceived as an authority or expert.
• Text length: Any pages that are less than 500 words, or better yet 600 words, should be reviewed for relevance. If they are not that important, delete them. If they are important, increase the number of words.
• Duplicate Content: Google is highly allergic to text repetition. To the search engine, this looks like you just copied text from somewhere and put it on your page. This will be penalized accordingly, so make sure you have generic text that is unique.

Examples of Backlink Building

Backlinks are important indicators to Google of a page’s relevance. With the right (and the emphasis here is on RIGHT) backlinks, you can achieve quite a lot in terms of improving your site’s position in search results.

• Good Content: The most sustainable way to build valuable backlinks is good content. If you have this, other websites will be happy to link to your content.
• Link baits: Create baits that will get other website owners to link to you. These can be interesting infographics, videos, tutorials, or sweepstakes.
• Active backlink building: You can also target other sites and ask them to link to you. This works even better if your content is a good complement to the text there and, for example, goes into more depth on a detail.

Blogtec Helps You to Get a Sustainable SEO Game Plan

The opposite of sustainable is short-term. If you want to drive a quick and short-term SEO game plan, then reading our post was for the birds. If, on the other hand, you want to think long-term, sustainable and holistic, then Blogtec as your SEO Partner is the right choice for you.

You might also think that this article was written by a completely over-motivated SEO editor who has lost sight of reality — but that’s definitely not the case.

It’s simply not enough to tackle the issue at times, sporadically looking at what you could do in the keywords section or adding an alt tag to images in places. If you really want to improve your ranking in search results permanently and generate more sales, a sustainable SEO game plan is undoubtedly what you need.

Blogtec helps you with this — from SEO audit to content creation and content optimization to technical SEO, as well as building backlinks. In all areas, we employ true experts in their field who can help you.

Contact us right away and get a free and non-binding consultation.