Introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and SEO Roadmap

Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, is the process to increase Organic Traffic and overall website quality, so that users and Search Engines easily browse to our website. 

As the name is Search Engine Optimization which is self-explanatory, it means an optimization process for a website that helps to make a quality website so that Search Engines read or understand your website efficiently.

Why Search Engine Optimization Required?

Generally, We can create a world-class website or product but if no one knows our awesome website or product then our all efforts would be useless. So to collect eyeballs on our product or website we generally do marketing.

In early days marketing usually meant using “Holding, Print Media, TVC,” etc. but now in the world of the internet, Digital Marketing is a major channel to do our product or website advertising.

Smart Phones and Internet Revolution

Due to Smartphones and the Internet Revolution from the last few years, Internet users are increasing regularly and respectively Digital Marketing too. 

Although we can do a lot of marketing activities in the digital marketing and each activity has its own pros and cons, but, to scale marketing efforts generally Search Engine Optimization is the best option for long term benefits.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps to increase the visibility of a website or product in Search Engines. Because these days Search Engines are the major source of digital traffic so SEO will help us to increase traffic for the website.

SEO also refers to natural or organic results and helps for the improvement of unpaid results.

SEO for All

Search Engine Optimization is not a term for only textual content results in Search Engines, but also it may target different kinds of searches like image search, video search, news search academic search, and industry-specific vertical search.

After May 2015, The mobile search had surpassed desktop search because of smartphones and the affordable internet connections boom. Since SEO is also changing and moving from Desktop to Mobile platform drastically.

Role in SEO

The Major role in SEO is to analyze how do Search Engines and its algorithms work, and how can we apply Search Engine quality guidelines on our website.

In other words, SEO means to do an analysis regarding what people are looking or searching for in Search Engines and how can we optimize our relevant page for those queries so that if someone searches for queries in Google then our relevant pages rank in Google Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) and we will get traffic as well as conversion for our business.

So, the main goal of SEO is to optimize a website on relevant traffic oriented keywords to get traffic on the website from Search Engines to increase conversion for a long time.

Let us Learn Together

Although there are a plethora of Websites, Blogs, Vlogs, Tutorials, etc available in the market which will elaborate on all aspects of SEO, related elements, best practices, etc. that will work for our SEO campaign. But still, I want to explain what all I have learned so far and how can we start an effective SEO campaign.

Although we can get ‘n’ number of articles and content on the internet regarding what exactly we need to do for best practices in SEO. But occasionally it fails since the most of the mandatory best practices are industry or a website specific.

But still before starting a particular SEO campaign we need to create a structural tasks roadmap so that we can run our SEO campaign smoothly using best practices as well.

Now before listing all the elements that are necessary for any particular website in terms of SEO, here I want to share my experience in the form of a case study.

So, I am sure each and every SEO Person right now is struggling to decide what all best practices we need to follow, how we need to structure them, and how these all best practices can show our company’s owners or clients in the form of a proper SEO road map.

Let us Start Digging Deep

If I am saying, I have a website and we need to start an SEO campaign for it. So, First of all, I think what all broad level elements we need to consider as the most important factors for our SEO campaign, So let us discuss first broad level elements then we will come up with a detailed list of ‘SEO Roadmaps’:

I am summarising a high-level SEO plan to clear our future vision in the below mentioned 8 factors or we can say these 8 factors are important factors for SEO Ranking and at least we need to focus on:

1. Information Architecture
   • Information Architecture
   • Content Internal Linking
     
     
2. Speed
   • Overall Website Speed
   • Crawl Budget Optimization
   • Log Analysis
   • Index Size Optimization
     
     
3. Structured Data
   • Structured Data for Complete Website
     
     
4. UI/UX
   • Focus on UI/UX
     
     
5. SEO Basics
   • Implementation of Phase 1 Roadmap (Will tell further in this post) on all the sections of the website.
     
     
6. Content
   • Regular Content Updation
   • Vernacular Site Optimization with All Phase 1 Roadmap Items
   • Discussion Forum
   • Comparison Pages
   • Manufacturer Page Optimization
   • Need to target relevant niche categories – Which is not directly but indirectly related to our brand.
   • Long Tail Targeting
   • Optimize for ‘Near Me’ Searches
   • Incorporate User-Generated Content
   • Early mover advantages in Dynamic-area of Industry
     
     
7. Coverage issues in Google Search Console
   
   
8. Backlinks
   

So, whenever we are going to create an SEO campaign we need to first analyze the current status of the website in terms of the above factors, else we will check how these above Important factors we can implement efficiently. 

Before starting on these broad level elements we need to create SEO roadmaps for basic SEO items which are anyway related to these broad SEO items because we can not move forward without detailing anything.

Now, here I am going to divide these important SEO factors into 3 phases because we can’t do all the items in one go. 

Phase1 SEO Roadmap: This will help us to implement Information Architecture, Website Speed, Structure Data, SEO Basics, etc.

Phase 2 SEO Roadmap: This will cover Content Optimization and other areas from where we can improve our website traffic.

Phase 3 SEO Roadmap: This will cover what all new happening in the SEO world and how we can implement it. We need to keep our eye open at the time of Phase 1 and Phase 2 Roadmap implementation and need to timely update our Phase 3 Roadmap as per industry updates.

Here is the detailing of all three SEO roadmaps.

Phase 1 SEO Roadmap:

S.No	SEO Task	Impact	Effort
1	Title Tag Creation, Optimization or Changes	High	Low
2	Meta Description Creation, Optimization or Changes	High	Low
3	H1 Tag Creation Optimisation or Changes	High	Low
4	Other Header Tags (H2-H6) Creation,  Optimization or Changes	Medium	Low
5	URL Structure	Medium	Low
6	Breadcrumb Improvement	Medium	Medium
7	Structured Data Implementation	Medium	Medium
8	Site or Page Speed Performance (Mobile/Desktop)	High	High
9	Site Internal Linking (From Content)	High	High
10	Google Analytics or Other Website Analytic Tracker Implementation	Medium	Medium
11	XML Sitemap Creation	High	Medium
12	HTML & CSS Errors Rectification	Medium	Medium
13	Mobile Friendliness Implementation	High	Medium
14	Canonicalization Checking	Medium	Medium
15	Canonical Tag Implementation	High	Medium
16	Robots.txt File Creation	High	Medium
17	Pagination Optimization	Medium	Medium
18	Viewport Meta Tag Implementation	Medium	Medium
19	No Follow Tag Optimization	Medium	Medium
20	Keyword Density Optimization	High	High
21	JavaScript/CSS File Externalization	Medium	Medium
22	Site Architecture (Information Architecture)	High	High
23	Redirection – Redirection Rules Optimization	Medium	Medium
24	Crawl Errors Optimization	High	High
25	Linking Logic Optimization– Why a Product or SKU or category link upfront on top position	High	High
26	Last Updated Date Implementation	Medium	Medium
27	Duplicate Content or Page Issue Optimization	Medium	Medium
28	Schema Automation for Content Internal Linking	High	Medium
29	Schema automation for Category Page Content and Internal Linking	High	Medium
30	Solution of Crawling issues (GSC and LOGS) for both desktop and Mobile	High	High
31	Reduce Bounce Rate for Mobile and Desktop	High	High
32	Uses of Social Media Sharing	Low	Low
33	Reviews and Ratings System	Medium	High
34	Crawling Ratio, Render Ratio Optimisation	High	High
35	Optimisation for Featured Snippet Boxes	High	High
36	Mobile vs Desktop Content Similarity	High	High
37	Content Freshness on SERP, Product page, Home Page.	High	Medium
38	Proper use of HTML and HREF LANG tag	Medium	Low
39	AMP Page Requirement Analysis	High	High
40	Footer Content	Medium	Medium
41	Avoid Excessive 301 redirects	Medium	Medium
42	Thin Content Management	High	Medium

The Above Phase 1 Roadmap will help to manage SEO basics but to increase traffic we need to pull these upcoming growth levers:

Phase 2 SEO Roadmap:

S.No	SEO Task	Impact	Effort
1	Focus on Native Languages and Optimize Vernacular Site with All Phase 1 Roadmap Items	High	High
2	Discussion Forum Creation and Optimization	High	High
3	Comparison Pages Creation and Optimization	High	High
4	Manufacturer Page Creation and Optimization	High	High
5	Focus on UI/UX	High	High
6	FAQs Section Creation and Optimization	High	High
7	Need to Target Relevant Categories – Which is not directly but indirectly related to your brand.	High	High
8	Index Size Optimization	High	High
9	Early Mover Advantages in Dynamic area of Industry	High	High
10	Long Trail Targeting	High	High
11	Voice Search Optimization	High	High
12	Site Structure Silos	High	High
13	Log Analysis	High	High
14	Crawl Budget Optimization	High	High
15	Organize SEO Metrics by a Hierarchy of Silos, Entry points & sub-categories	Medium	Medium
16	Automatically detect patterns in the data to prioritize the actionable issues & insights  identified	High	High
17	Develop a framework to A/B test SEO changes by GEO or body of pages	High	High
18	Create alerts for notification and tracking for MTTR (mean time to resolution) for identified issues.	High	Medium
19	More accurate Search Intent Analytics & Share of Voice Dashboards (90% Correlation to actual traffic)	High	High
20	Applied best practices such as for fetching and rendering 3rd party Javascripts code	High	High
21	Site Availability and Performance Owners with SLAs	High	High
22	Expanded Local Data & Local Experience Teams to Win SEO in Each Local Market	High	High
23	Optimize Images	Medium	Medium
24	Optimize for ‘Near Me’ Searches	High	Medium
25	Incorporate User-Generated Content	High	High

Phase 3 SEO Roadmap:

S.No	SEO Task	Impact	Effort
1	Technical SEO: After Phase 1 Roadmap and Phase 2 Roadmap Implementation we will test technical SEO checklist once again	High	High
1	SEO Actionable Including Google Rank Brain and Google BERT Related Items	High	High
2	Data Driven SEO	High	High
3	New Page creation to target more keywords	High	High
4	Always Think, How to Steal Organic Clicks from Industry Giants	High	High

If, we will implement these above roadmaps sincerely then I am sure we can get desired results Soon.

Because this post is now getting so long so signing off for now. Will detail out each point of roadmaps in my later posts.

Cheers!