When taking on a new role or client — from local businesses to niche online retailers to enterprise-level Fortune 500 companies — the first thing I do is put together a new SEO strategy and organic search measurement plan. I lead this process with data, which highlights opportunities for improvement and instantiates goals to rally your organization around common objectives. Even with Moz being the team of data-driven SEO rockstars it is, strategy is still where I began my new role, And today, I’ll share the process. What is an SEO strategy? An SEO strategy aims to improve a website’s visibility in search engines such as Google and Bing. An SEO action plan, on the other hand, typically involves a combination of on-page optimization, technical SEO fixes, content strategy, link building and SEO reporting. A strong SEO strategy will: Improve your website’s rankings for any existing keywords for which you are currently ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). Increase the awareness and influence of SEO within your organization. Consider budget and resource challenges to get the most value and SEO improvements out of your team. Prescribe some combination of SEO initiatives, potentially including: Widening the scope of your ranking organic keywords through content marketing. Fixing any technical website issues that could be negatively impacting page load times (ex. PageSpeed), search engine crawlability or user experience. Increasing the number of backlinks from high quality domains to your site, through effective social amplification and digital PR strategies. Imply or explicitly state priorities or beliefs that guide future action — especially what you will not do. Whether you’re a website owner that is new to search engine optimization or a seasoned SEO taking on a new project or client, creating and following a clear SEO strategy is absolutely crucial for improving your site’s organic traffic and conversions. 10 steps towards a better SEO strategy Like any other kind of strategy, to form an SEO strategy you need to understand the state of the game, set attainable goals, and plan to iterate. Below is a 10-step plan for finding those opportunities and insights to get you started. 1. Crawl your site to identify on-page and technical SEO issues The best place to begin an SEO strategy is by initiating a website crawl to see if there are any issues that you need to remedy in order to maximize your SEO visibility. There are many options for technical auditing tools that will emulate a search engine crawl of your website, and most SEOs have a favorite. Of course, here at Moz, we have our On-Demand Crawl. Moz’s tool will allow you to view all detected technical SEO issues on your site, and all of the impacted URLs. The data you will get from the On-Demand Crawl can be viewed within the UI of Moz, or exported into a CSV. This focuses on essentials to help kickstart your SEO strategy.