Setting goals and key performance indicators is perhaps the most important part of creating an SEO strategy.
You need to know where you want to go so you can put an action plan in place to get there, but also so you can measure your success and know when you’ve achieved your goals (as well as track your progress against them and know when it’s time to change focus).
But let’s look at the difference between goals and KPIs, because you really need to define both.
Goals = the end result you want to achieve
- ICP = the metrics that demonstrate the progress you have made towards your goals
Although these terms are often used interchangeably in SEO, you should define both when creating your strategy.
To give an example, it might look like this:
Our SEO goal is to increase organic revenue by $500,000 over the next 12 months. The KPIs we will track to show progress towards this are organic impressions, organic traffic (including an increase in non-branded traffic), and rankings.
4. Define your primary keywords and pillar pages
Once you have defined your goals and key performance indicators (KPIs), it is time to move directly to keyword research and, most importantly, define the main keywords of your site that you will target with the pillar pages.
But let’s quickly look at the concept of pillar pages in a little more depth before we move on to keyword research.
If you’re not familiar with the concept, a pillar page italy telegram data serves as the foundation for a topic cluster built around it. You can learn more about topic clusters here or you can check out our guide on the 3 types of pillar pages .
To summarize, topic clustering helps you focus on SERP ownership over topics. This method, unlike focusing on single keywords, has proven to establish tight topic relevance across sections of your site.
That’s why it’s a good idea to define your topic clusters early on so you can build a content and keyword strategy around them.
In practice, topic groupings are structured increase the financial valuation of the company as below, and at this stage you will be looking to identify topics for the pillar (middle).
These keywords define broad topics, such as “shoes,” “sales software,” or “student loans,” rather than more specific long-tail keywords or subtopics.
This first involves identifying the topics around which you will build the clusters, and for this, our Topic Research tool is a great place to start.
Go to the tool and enter a topic that matches your business and specific growth goals in certain areas.
5. Find long tail keywords and define aggregated content
From there, you’ll get a list of content ideas to help you identify potential subtopics or determine if a topic is deep enough to be grouped.
You’ll want to start by mapping out the topic clusters you can build around certain topics. You’ll then notice that the Topic Finder shows the estimated search volume associated with each of them.
Some of these suggestions may not be relevant to your business, so ignore them.
Click on the ones you think are relevant to. Get more ideas for subtopics and potential. Areas to consider when creating your topic cluster.
Don’t forget to validate the keywords you’re going to optimize your pillar page for using the Keyword Overview tool . At this point, it’s basically defining the main target keywords for multiple pillar pages.
Once you complete this step, you should have a list of topic groupings that is relevant to your site.
Once you’ve identified your main topic clusters and pillar page keywords, you need to build your content strategy in clusters. These subtopics and complementary pieces of content expand on a topic and sit around your pillar page.
While there is no set number of grouped content items to create for a particular topic, it is likely to be anywhere from 15 to 25 items, depending on the importance and nature of the topic. Sometimes many more, sometimes fewer.
While pillar pages are typically focused on broad, high-search-volume terms, cluster content is more often focused on long-tail keywords.
Think of content that delves into a specific part crawler data of a topic. This could be answers to questions, guides to specific areas, or even opinion pieces on a trend.