There are so many different aspects to SEO, from technical considerations like schema markup to content, keywords, and local strategies.

So when you’re putting together your SEO strategy, it can be difficult to know where to focus.

Rather than getting overwhelmed with all the possibilities, ask yourself these three questions to help you prioritize your SEO efforts. 

 

1. What will have the highest impact on your goal with the least effort? 

There’s no shame in starting with some quick wins. In fact, it’s a great opportunity! Waiting for new content to rank or working on a link-building outreach strategy can take time. And while it’s important to do those tasks, there could be some low-hanging fruit that will start making a difference sooner. For example: 

Goal: Improve your web presence by ensuring your company information is accurate on all the important platforms.
Start Here: Optimize your Google My Business (GMB) listing and add or update your information on all the major local directories. 

Goal: Bring traffic to your website and increase your authority.
Start Here: Perform a content audit and updating your existing content before you plan on writing new blog posts. 

Goal: Build a sense of trust with potential customers (which in turn leads to more bookings).
Start Here: Spend some time replying to Google Reviews, both positive and negative. 

2. What will benefit your website and business the most? 

Any SEO effort you make will benefit you in some way, whether it brings in more traffic or increases your conversions. But if you only have time to focus on one tactic, think about what is the most pressing and will benefit you the most. For example: 

• If your website is not mobile-friendly, updating it should be at the top of your priority list. Google now bases rankings on the mobile index of your website, which means that if it’s hard to navigate on mobile, your rankings will suffer. 
• If your competitors are consistently outranking you, your time could be better spent doing competitor analysis to find optimizations you can make to move up the rankings.
• If you’ve recently done a major overhaul of your website or even changed your domain name, prioritize implementing any necessary redirects to make sure searchers aren’t landing on a page that no longer exists.

3. What will be more easily supported by management and your team?

Once you know what you want to prioritize, you may need buy-in from management to dedicate the necessary time and resources to your plan. Or if you have a small team, you might be doing all the work yourself and need to justify the time spent. Here are some considerations to keep in mind:

• You might need some proof of how much SEO will help your business before you invest in any paid tools. Begin working with some free SEO tools first, and once you start reaping the benefits, you can decide whether it’s worth upgrading to paid plans.
• Local SEO is one of the most important aspects of your strategy. Many travelers look for things to do at their destination with “near me” searches, and you want your business to be ready to capture these customers. If you want to show some results to justify your SEO efforts, start optimizing for local SEO by focusing on your GMB, citations, and targeting location-specific keywords.
• If you’re running PPC ads, you can use SEO forecasting to get an idea of which keywords will give you the best chance of success before you spend any of your budget.

Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll have a clear plan of action and can get to work on your chosen SEO tactics. Remember that SEO is a long game that requires patience and staying informed about new trends and tools. Keep an eye on our SEO guides to stay up-to-date on what’s going on in the world of search engines!