In this episode, Carmen Rodríguez shares her insights on developing a comprehensive SEO strategy.
She discusses the need to understand;
From aligning strategies with business objectives to leveraging powerful tools, she reveals key tactics that drive results.
A huge thank you to Uproer for sponsoring our 5th Technical SEO cohort and making these trainings accessible to BIPOC folks in developing countries!
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Name: Carmen Rodriguez Dominguez
What Carmen Does:h at
Noteworthy: Carmen has over 7 years of experience in digital marketing, specializing in content, translations, and digital PR before focusing on SEO.
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🗝️ Understanding the Importance of SEO Strategy.
An SEO strategy is crucial for tracking and measuring the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. It helps ensure that all activities are aligned with the business objectives and provides a clear roadmap for achieving SEO goals. Regularly reviewing and adjusting the strategy is essential to keep it effective and relevant.
🗝️ Client and Market Understanding
Before diving into technical SEO, it’s important to understand your client and the market. This involves knowing the client’s business objectives, the products they offer, and the audience they target. This foundational knowledge helps tailor the SEO strategy to meet specific needs and challenges.
🗝️ Audience and Conversion Metrics
Understanding your audience and what drives conversions is key. Identify the pain points of the audience and tailor your content and SEO efforts to address these. Different types of businesses will have different conversion metrics, and it’s important to align your strategy with these metrics to drive meaningful results.
🗝️ Auditing and Keyword Research
Regular audits and thorough keyword research are fundamental to an effective SEO strategy. Conduct technical audits to identify and fix issues, content audits to ensure relevance and quality, and keyword research to find opportunities and gaps. Competitor analysis is also crucial to understand what keywords competitors are ranking for and how you can compete.
🗝️ Organization and Tracking.
Staying organized and meticulously tracking your progress is crucial for SEO success. Keep detailed records of changes made to the website and use tools like SEO Clarity or spreadsheets to monitor performance. Regularly review and adjust your strategy based on performance data to ensure continuous improvement.
🗝️ Keyword Selection and Intent
Selecting the right keywords and understanding user intent behind them is vital. Map keywords to specific pages and understand their role in the sales funnel. Avoid overloading pages with too many keywords with different intents, as this can confuse users and search engines. Use keyword gap analysis to find opportunities where competitors are ranking but you are not.
🗝️ Technical and Content Audits
Regular technical and content audits help maintain the health of the website. Check for technical issues like broken links, slow page speeds, and mobile usability. Ensure content is up-to-date, relevant, and optimized for target keywords. Use tools like Screaming Frog for technical audits and content analysis tools for content audits.
🗝️ Setting Up an SEO Strategy
Creating a comprehensive SEO strategy involves understanding the client’s business and market, conducting thorough audits and keyword research, and mapping out a plan that includes technical fixes, content updates, and link-building strategies. Set SMART KPIs to track progress and break the strategy into manageable time frames to ensure it remains effective and aligned with business goals.
🗝️ Reporting and Client Communication
Regular reporting and clear communication with clients are essential. Set up automated reports using tools like Looker Studio to track key metrics. Tailor reports to show the impact of SEO efforts on the client’s bottom line and explain the long-term nature of SEO to set realistic expectations. This helps build trust and demonstrates the value of SEO efforts.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 0:08
Everyone can see cool. So why to do an SEO strategy now there are lots of people that do SEO strategies just because they need to present it to the client. The client are really picky. You don’t have comms, and you need to have cons, frankly, to have an SEO strategy, even if you don’t need to present to your client. So you are just doing it for you.
Is going to make it way easier for you to track all the work that you have done, and for you to actually have a proper a proper trail of the things that you need to do, let’s say, for one year, one year and a half, I like doing my strategies on a yearly basis, and splits into three months, six months, so I can report to my clients or to my boss if I have to report you, or actually to just simply track that the work that you’re doing is working.
Sometimes you might have a one year strategy, but if you don’t check periodically, you don’t know if your strategy is working. We know that SEO takes time to to work, but still do check that the work that you’re doing is, in fact, having an impact. So the first thing that we need to do is actually understanding your client and understanding the market.
It sounds silly that I’m saying this, but there are many times where you get a new client, or you start working in your company, and you go directly to look into technical SEO, you go directly into looking into Google Search Console, and you get wrapped and and you get into the data, but you don’t, you don’t look outside the data. Many times the things the reasons why you your strategy is not working is because it might be that the users are not searching in the way that you think they’re using. Or it might be the competitors are doing something much, much better than you.
Or it can just be that your competitors have a way bigger budget than you, which is a classic, you have a way bigger competitor that has a lot of money. They can buy a lot of links, it will happen more often than not, or they have more budget to write contents. So the first thing that you need to do always is understand your client or your the company that you’re working for and the markets.
So understanding what your client does, understanding your the business objective of your client, and that is very important, because if you don’t understand the objectives of your client, you might focus on something that doesn’t give any revenue to your client, or, let’s say your client is selling boots, but suddenly they have created a new product that it’s ankle boots.
They have never done it before, but that’s the new product, and they want that product to be the first one ranking. Understand the business objectives overall, because they’re going to have a massive impact in whatever you do from the SEO perspective, understand your audience and understand the pain points. Now we are in a technical SEO course.
It’s very typical that technical SEOs just get there to look into the code and nothing else but understanding the audience and understanding what the audience care about for one client or another, might have an impact, because it might be that your clients are really picking to the images. If you are e commerce, your clients will want to make sure that what this they that they see the images, what they’re buying, that they have all the the specs, and the Google can’t find these specs if you’re in an E commerce, but if you are selling, I don’t know, an app, or you’re selling a a service, you need to make sure that you might have videos of the service, or you have guidelines of the service, or you have the right links to the app, or you have images of the app.
So maybe a client for an E commerce don’t care so much about reading more about scene, but a client about SAS cares more about reading and understanding the content and cares less about the images, because the images are not going to say anything about the program. So understanding the audience and the pain points in terms of what your product is trying to solve is going to be key into how you prioritize your work.
And then as well, what does a conversion look like? I think I’m gonna, I’m going point by point, but it’s important that we understand this, because if a convert, a conversion for an E commerce, is not the same as a conversion for SaaS so or even a conversion, a final conversion for E commerce, it might not be the same like a mini conversion.
So we can Class A conversion, buying the products, but we can also Class A conversion signing up to a newsletter. So depending of what your conversion is for your client, you will follow one strategy or another. If you what you want is your product to be, is. So you’re going to make sure that you prioritize product pages in your E commerce sites.
But what you want these people to join your content hub, you are going to prioritize the content hub receiving the right internal linking. Hopefully, that makes sense and equally and the last point is you under you need to understand the countries that your clients are going after, because if your client is going after only clients that is speaking English, only countries that speak in English, you don’t care about your translated websites.
But if your client is looking after different areas, you need to understand is hrif implemented or not? Can Google understand my international sites, so you might need to put more priority into fixing nature of plan and international SEO than actually focusing on your products. So that is also really important to understand. So to create a winning strategy, first, you need to think of as a marketer, and then you need to think, think about SEO. First, you need to understand the issues of your client, and then how you solve them through your channel.
So classic, check your competitors, check the industry, but mainly, and foremost, speak to the client. Ask the right questions. All the questions that I said before we need to ask the client. We need to ask for context, because the situation where we are with Stephanie’s website, for example, is the lack of understanding of what happened previously, or the lack of understanding the limitation that we have with security.
If we don’t talk to the client, we are blind, and if we are blind, we cannot make the right decisions. So once we have understood the context, then we do the auditing. So we look into keyword research, we look into Google Search Console data, we look into what, what keywords our competitors are ranking that we are not ranking for, and if we have paid colleagues, we also take talk to paid why?
Because in paid we’re going to be able to see the keywords that they’re paying for, that they’re having a good impact. So we can see if we are getting out of money from this topic. Can we rank higher for this topic so they pay less money and we are more in the SERPs, or we know that we care really very much about this topic, but they are not performing very well in paid Why is it?
Can we do something for organic paid is going to many times give you hints into what you can do for your organic strategies. So let’s keep the conversation open. And the more and more complex the SERPs get and the most competitive people are, which is the case everyone wants to be on the internet, particularly since COVID, the more useful it’s going to be that you work together with your paid colleagues.
And also outside of all these these bits, it’s very important that we understand seasonality. If you are selling boots, you are not going to sell boots in summer, or at least not not in the countries where it’s summer. So can you look into how this seasonality looks like, and then you plan your work based on the seasonality. For example, the sample of the client with the boots. I’m not going to have a lot of clients on my website in summer. Can I make it redirects in summer? Can I do a migration in summer?
Yes, makes more time for me to do all of that in summer, when my users are not going to come, they do them in January, when I know everyone is buying on my websites. So it does have an impact. Google trends as well is going to tell you if there are new trends coming up for your clients. So I know that red boots were getting really popular because Emily in Paris was wearing red boots.
Can I create a URL for red boots and get people to sign the interest see if I want to create a red boots? Boots? I said boots three times. So yes, you can use Google terms as well to uncover new opportunities. And finally, lots of facials. Do not look into brand attempt. But brand terms are important because, you know, nav boost is part of the Google algorithm, and understanding how Google sees your brand is going to be key into changing or adapting your strategy.
carmen domínguez rodríguez 9:19
So and also, and foremost, being organized is almost everything, because if you don’t follow every process in the right way, you might miss opportunity. You might miss a massive issue that is is causing your website not to be crawled. You might miss Robox txt blocking yourself, so you need to check but one by 1am, keeping in top on top of everything, as well as keep track of everything.
So if you are changing the canonicals in one part of the website, you need to know which date you change that canonical. You need to know why, and you need to go back and see EV work or not. Sometimes, when you are doing a lot of changes in one in a website, if you don’t keep track of all the. Things that you’re changing you might forget and you might not be able to use data then to see if your change worked or not.
So it’s very important that we keep track of everything. You can. Sometimes keep track of things in SEO, monitor SEO clarity, or tools that you use, if you don’t use any old fashioned or spreadsheet, is going to help you. So again, typical, there’s a difference between competitors that your client give you and your Serb competitors. There’s always your clients will always want to look like somebody that is super fashionable.
They will always want to be like the favorite famous competitors, but that doesn’t mean that they serve competitors, or the ones that you are competent on the internet are the same. So yes, do check these competitors, but do a classic, old fashioned Google search to see that the competitor who are the competitors that you see in your your keywords look specifically, what are the USPS that you have that your competitors don’t have, because those are the ones that are going to make the difference.
And if you don’t have any USP that makes the difference, you need to come up with one, because that’s what’s going to make you shine against your competitors, whereas at the beginning, first, think as a marketer, then think of as an SEO is what’s going to make the difference. Step two, narrow down your keyword sets and bench benchmark benchmark performance.
So once we understand the context, once we understand where we are versus our competitor, when we understand where we want to get to, that’s when you start seeing the things that are limiting your growth and that you can use to increase your growth. Limiting problems that we see in technical SEO, problems that we see in our contents growth is the changes that you need to make to get to where you want to. So these are all the questions that you will need to ask yourself whenever you are selecting keywords.
Again, we in the SEO industry talk about keywords a lot, but at the end of the day, what we care is conversions. It doesn’t matter what the conversion is, is it revenue is in a newsletter, but it’s really important that keywords, we use it as a guidance and not as a KPI, because if we focus only in keywords, we might end up not bringing the right traffic, or we might end up missing a huge point is, okay, we’re bringing all this traffic to our sites, but people cannot convert because the links to convert are broken because it’s the the user journey is not clear for the for the user to convert, or something that have happened to a lot of people, they focus so much on creating a lot of content that people come to the site, read the contents, and then leave because they Go to a competitor that is cheaper, so we need to choose the right KPIs for first and foremost.
However, keyword gap analysis, keyword research, all of this is what is going to tell you where you have a gap, where you can try to get clients to convert, and what you can offer to these users that competitors do not offer. So make sure that you understand your keywords, and if you guys want, we can also do a training on how to organize keywords in an effective way.
It is not considered technical SEO, but again, for me, they’re all connected, so we can do one on that as well. And this is one of the templates that I put, I put for you, which is the organizing the keywords. We need to make sure that we have specific keywords against specific pages. Awesome. So we need to make sure that we have the keywords that we want to rank for the specific pages, and we need to understanding which part of the funnel they are. There’s not the same ranking for the keyword that you exactly selling so red, fluffy leather boots, that’s the keyword that you want to sell.
How to look after rather red leather boots is different parts of the funnel. Right one is interest, another well or awareness, and another one is a head term to buy. It’s super important that we track the intent behind the keywords against the right page, and we don’t put too many keywords are different in one page.
The more spread the intent is, the more difficult it is for for the user to navigate our website. So that’s why it’s really important that we organize these pages properly. We know what keywords we are trying to go after, and then we. Put the situation these pages are in. For example, you did a technical audit into product pages, and you know that currently, this happened to me, currently, my product pages have five H1s.
So if you page has 5 H1s, there’s something wrong with your page, because you should have one so that it seems like silly, but I only realized when I started looking into the keywords I wanted to put into my into my page. Because when you do technical audits, you should do them by templates. How is my product pages looking like? How is my blog pages looking like? How is my home page looking like? So this is the things that you need to do whenever you map your keywords, once you have selected your keywords. And I mean, I talk about SEO monitor, but we can do it in same rush you can do in SEO clarity, se ranking.
Se ranking is my favorite one that I’m using recently because it allows you to look into AI overviews. Whenever you do that, make sure that you start tracking the groups, the keyword groups, so you know that you have your shoes, you have all your product pages, wherever you want to organize it. Make sure that you organize it so you can track the performance. Whenever you look at the performance, you can look at it from topic, but you can look at it from page type. Very another example. Recently I rewrote all so I made all the technical changes in this page where I found several H ones I managed to with the developer, put just one h1 a few H2 and lots of H3.
And then I rewrote the product contents. So obviously I made lots of changes in my product content, so where I’m tracking foremost is the product content performance. I’m not ranking at what type of product. I’m not tracking what type of products, I’m not tracking what type of keyword. I’m making sure that my product pages and the changes I made in my product changes are my product pages are working. So same with you. Whenever you make changes to a specific product, pages, track them, monitor them, and finally, understanding what areas you need to focus on.
And this is almost the same thing that I’ve been saying all the time. When we are SEOs, most of the time, we focus on what is it that we need to work straight away, without understanding the context. Now, we have understood the contents, we find the errors, and we do the strategy. So we can put together SEO strategy if you haven’t assessed the situation first, which is all we have been doing up to now. Up to now, we have learned how to use Google Search Console to identify problems. We have learned how to use Google Search Console to identify opportunity through keyword research.
We have learned how to use Screaming Frog and how to identify problems with the websites. Now that we have the problems, then we go into the solution. How do we find the problems? Classic with audits. We do a technical audit, we do an internal link analysis, we do a content audit, competitor analysis, external link analysis, and external link intersects and serve an intent analysis.
So you see a lot of analysis, and always, honestly, sometimes the first two months that you have a new client, or you’re working on a company, your clients are going to be telling you, when are you going to start improving the rankings? When, when, when? Unless you have these points here, unless you know your audits and you know all these contexts, you’re never going to be able to do fully an implementation.
You might do a few hacks, classic, I’m going to change this here, here. I’m going to change this in there. But that is not a strategy. That is what clients like to call quick wins. You can do quick wins. It’s always good, but you need to do a strategy first. So whenever you know how to do or you have done all of this
carmen domínguez rodríguez 19:03
again, we start with a strategy. If the the best technical foundations are now in place, we have already talked about this. It doesn’t matter how much you change content on how many links you get, if the technical things are not there, you cannot get any strategy. So that’s why we’re doing this course, but you need to have everything. So talking about these foundations, we know are the technical issues or not how we understood everything? Is the content relevant or not? Is my client understanding the content? Is it my content better than our competitors.
Is my user experience? Okay? Is it poor? Is the website really slow? Are the images moving core web vitals? So then, if we already fixed the technical issues, the contents and the UX, is it that we don’t have enough External links? And that’s what. We started doing external link strategy. Sometimes you might be able to do the four of them at the same time, if you are just one person you want.
So we need to look into all these things. This is exactly what I was saying earlier. Do not jump into tactics before having a clear understanding of what the situation is, is tactics, quick wins, they might give you a increase in in rankings, but they are not sustainable. You might get little little improvement, but it’s not improvement in the long term, and when we have done all of those things.
So we now know the issues with know the context. Let’s get with the strategy. We get a as I said, I like doing my strategies for a year with a break into every three months to to check that is work. It is not working or not. There are clients that ask you to report on a weekly basis. Working on a weekly basis for SEO mental makes no sense. Push back. Oh, that’s my recommendation.
Explain the SEO takes time is a long term game. Is not something that you change in one week, because it might be that Google doesn’t grow your your pages in, I don’t know, a month, unless you force it. So explain to clients why you cannot report into a weekly basis if they want to see a monthly report, okay, but frankly, when you start seeing changes is at least into every three months. Start with smart KPIs, which is, I know that you know what it is, because we’ve been talking about that, but make sure that you have your keywords, that you look into conversions, that you will look into CTR, little rates.
All of those are beyond just keywords, because the clients will want to see that the traffic is coming. And finally, whenever you have your plan, you have your road map for the six months, you know what you’re doing, then you need to start showing the client that your strategy is working. So look into setting up a report with looker studio. Most of the tools that you use for keyword tracking will give you, if you connect it with your GA or Google Search Console, we connect rankings with CTR and with any sort of conversions.
But again, I recommend you using looker studio, because you can actually decide to work APIs you want to to report, and then if you put it automatically, you can send to your clients in the dates that you want with the commentary that you want. There are few very good data analysis for SEO training, La Serena, that’s a great one if you guys want to follow her, she’s the best to see how to do SEO reporting and tracking.
But I can also give you a basic looker studio report if you want what makes a good report? I look into different parts. I start with what my client wants to see first, which is money. Am I making money through organic? That’s the first slide that I put and then I go from the top level to more specific. I move from GA and money into which pages are making the most money, then which pages are ranking the most and then am I getting, for example, is my contents performing better or worse this month than the previous one?
And a final one where we do a benchmarking with competitors. You look at where you were and what your competitors are, and show potentially a growth if you have grown or not and if you haven’t grown, then prepare to explain why. So in a nutshell, if you say, I have increased organic visibility, most of your clients are going to say, so what? What does it even mean? If you say to your clients, I have increased the ranking of one keyword, they’re going to say, Okay, where’s my money. So make sure that your KPIs are the right ones, and make sure that you are understanding and proving the value beyond this keyword, proving the value of the work that you’re doing.
And as I promised at the beginning here, there’s a few templates that you can use, so SEO strategy templates and a keyword research opportunity and mapping templates in here. And you can actually, as I said, split the keywords by topic or intense, put the opportunity that you see in each of them. Is it the contents? Is it the. The technical SEO, whatever it is, put everything in there, and it’s going to make your life way easier whenever you want to do anything. And that’s it. That’s my training today.
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