How to Build an SEO Strategy That Fits Your Business

You know SEO matters, but you are not sure where to start. You’ve read about keywords, backlinks, technical audits and AI search, and it all feels like a list of chores with no order. An SEO strategy fixes that. It tells you which few things to work on, in what order, and why.

The short answer: start from what your business needs (calls, sales, sign-ups), find out how your customers search, fix anything that stops Google reading your site, then build and improve the pages that match those searches. Write it down, measure it, and review it every few months. Below is the process I use, step by step.

What an SEO Strategy Is (and What It Isn’t)

An SEO strategy is a plan for getting the right people to your site from search, so they become customers. It connects business goals to the searches, pages and tasks that support them.

It is not a keyword list. It is not a checklist of 200 technical fixes either. Those are tools you use inside a strategy. A checklist tells you what could be done; a strategy tells you what is worth doing for your business right now.

A good strategy answers four questions:

• Who are we trying to reach?
• What are they searching for when they are close to needing us?
• Which pages should answer those searches, and do they exist yet?
• How will we know it is working?

In my experience, most sites that “do SEO” but see no results have tactics without these answers. They publish blog posts nobody searches for, or chase traffic that never turns into leads.

Start With Your Business, Not Keywords

The biggest mistake I see is opening a keyword tool on day one. Keyword tools show you what people search for. They can’t tell you which of those searches makes you money.

Pick One or Two Business Goals

Write down what you want SEO to do for the business in the next 6 to 12 months. Keep it to one or two goals. For example:

• More phone calls and quote requests for your main service in your city.
• More online sales for one product category.
• More demo requests from a certain type of company.
• More newsletter sign-ups from readers in your niche.

“Rank number one on Google” is not a goal. Ranking is only useful when it leads to one of the outcomes above. I always ask “what happens after the click?” before I agree to target anything.

Match the Strategy to Your Business Type

Different businesses need different strategies. A plumber and an online shop should not follow the same plan. Here is how I think about the main focus for common business types:

If you fit more than one row, pick the row closest to where your revenue comes from. That becomes your main track, and everything else supports it.

How to Build an SEO Strategy in 8 Steps

These steps work for a small local business and for a larger company. The difference is how much time you spend on each one.

1. Record Where You Are Now

Before you change anything, write down your starting numbers. Without a baseline, you can’t tell later whether your work helped.

I check these first:

• In Google Search Console: total clicks and impressions for the last 3 and 12 months, your top queries, and your top pages.
• In the Page indexing report: how many pages are indexed and whether important ones are missing.
• In Google Analytics 4: organic sessions and the key events (conversions) that come from organic search.
• Your Google Business Profile, if you are a local business: calls, website clicks and direction requests.

Save these in a simple spreadsheet with the date. It takes less than an hour and it saves arguments later.

2. Understand Your Customers and How They Search

Talk to the people who talk to customers. Sales staff, support staff and the owner usually know the questions buyers ask better than any tool.

Write down:

• The problems customers have before they find you.
• The words they use. Customers often say “boiler not working”, not “heating system diagnostics”.
• The questions they ask before they buy: price, timing, comparisons, risks.
• What makes them choose you over others.

This list becomes the base for your keyword research. It also gives you content ideas that competitors often miss, because they only look at tools.

3. Research Keywords and Group Them Into Topics

Now use keyword tools. Start with your customer list and expand it with Search Console queries, Google autocomplete, People Also Ask boxes and a keyword tool of your choice.

For each keyword, note the search intent (what the searcher wants to do). There are four common types:

• Informational: they want to learn (“how to fix a leaking tap”).
• Commercial: they are comparing options (“best accounting software for freelancers”).
• Transactional: they are ready to act (“emergency plumber near me”).
• Navigational: they want a specific site or brand.

Then group keywords that mean the same thing into one topic. One page can rank for many related terms, so you don’t need a page for every keyword. I usually find that a list of a few hundred keywords turns into a few dozen topics once grouped.

Don’t ignore small keywords. Specific, longer searches often have low volume but clear intent, and they are easier to win for newer sites.

4. Look at Who Actually Ranks

Your search competitors are not always your business competitors. For many searches, you are competing with directories, big publishers or marketplaces.

Search your most important topics and study the first page:

1. What type of page ranks: a service page, a product category, a list, a guide, a video?
2. How big and well-known are the sites ranking?
3. What do the top pages cover that yours doesn’t?
4. Are there AI Overviews, maps, videos or shopping results pushing the normal results down?

This tells you which topics are realistic now and which need more time and authority. A content gap analysis is a structured way to do this across many topics at once.

5. Fix the Technical Basics

Good content doesn’t help if Google can’t crawl (visit) or index (store) your pages. You don’t need a perfect site, but you need a site with no major blockers.

The basics I check on every site:

• Important pages are indexed and not blocked by robots.txt or a noindex tag.
• The site uses HTTPS and redirects old URLs properly.
• Pages work well on mobile.
• Pages load at a reasonable speed and pass Core Web Vitals (Google’s page experience measures) where possible.
• Each important page has a unique title and a clear main heading.
• Duplicate versions of pages point to one main version.

Google’s SEO Starter Guide covers these basics in plain terms and is worth reading once. My rule is simple: fix anything that stops pages being indexed first, then move on. Don’t spend months chasing small speed scores while your service pages are thin.

6. Plan Your Content Around Topics

Now decide which pages to create and which to improve. I sort every topic into one of three groups:

• Create: nothing on the site covers it.
• Improve: a page exists but is thin, outdated or aimed at the wrong intent.
• Skip: low business value, or too hard to rank for right now.

Start with the pages closest to money. For most businesses, those are service, product or category pages, not blog posts. Blog content then supports those pages by answering questions and linking back to them.

Grouping related pages into clear topics helps both visitors and Google understand what you know. Pillar pages and topic clusters are a practical way to plan this structure.

Whatever you publish should be written for people first. Google’s guide on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content has a set of self-check questions I find useful before publishing anything.

7. Plan How You Will Earn Links and Mentions

Links from other sites still help Google judge which pages are trusted. But a strategy should focus on earning them, not buying them. Paid links that pass ranking value break Google’s spam policies.

Realistic ways to earn links and mentions:

• Get listed with suppliers, partners, trade bodies and local organisations you already work with.
• Create something worth citing: original data, a useful tool, a clear guide on a common problem.
• Answer journalist and industry questions where you have real expertise.
• Sponsor or take part in local events, if you are a local business.

In my experience, a handful of relevant links from real businesses in your field does more than a large number of random directory links.

8. Decide What You Will Measure

Pick a few numbers that tie back to your goal. I split them into two levels:

• Business results: leads, calls, sales or sign-ups from organic search.
• Early signals: impressions, clicks, rankings for target topics, and the number of pages indexed.

Early signals move first. Business results follow later. Report both, so you can see progress before revenue changes.

Set expectations honestly. SEO is slow, and results depend on your site’s history, your competition and how much work you put in. I explain what a realistic schedule looks like in how long SEO takes.

How to Prioritise When Time Is Short

Most businesses can’t do everything at once. When I have a long list of tasks, I score each one on three things:

1. Impact: how close is it to leads or sales?
2. Effort: how many hours or how much money will it take?
3. Confidence: how sure am I that it will make a difference?

High impact, low effort tasks go first. These are often things like fixing an important page that isn’t indexed, rewriting titles on pages that get impressions but few clicks, or improving a thin service page.

Large projects, such as a site redesign or a new content section, go into a later quarter with a clear reason. I’d rather do five things well in three months than start twenty and finish none.

A simple order that works for many small sites:

1. Fix indexing and major technical blockers.
2. Improve existing money pages.
3. Create missing money pages.
4. Add supporting content that answers customer questions.
5. Work on links and mentions steadily in the background.

Where AI Search Fits in Your SEO Strategy

Search is changing. Google now shows AI Overviews for many queries, and at Google I/O in May 2025 it announced that AI Mode is rolling out to everyone in the US. ChatGPT, Copilot and other AI assistants also answer questions and cite websites.

My view: you don’t need a separate “AI strategy” yet. Google has said its normal SEO best practices still apply to its AI features. Pages need to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet to appear as a supporting link. I’ve summarised Google’s own guidance in Google’s advice on succeeding in AI search.

What I would add to a strategy now:

• Make sure your pages answer common questions clearly and directly, near the top.
• Make it easy to understand who you are: clear about pages, author details, contact information and consistent business details across the web.
• Watch for queries where impressions stay steady but clicks drop. That can be a sign that answers are shown on the results page.
• Value leads and conversions over raw traffic, because some informational clicks will go down over time.

Write It Down: A One-Page SEO Strategy

A strategy that lives only in someone’s head gets forgotten. I put it on one page so anyone in the business can read it in a few minutes.

Include these sections:

• Goal: one or two business outcomes, with a time frame.
• Audience: who you want to reach and what they search for.
• Priority topics: the 5 to 15 topics you will focus on, each linked to a page.
• Technical fixes: the few blockers to fix first.
• Content plan: pages to create and improve this quarter.
• Links and mentions: the two or three ways you will earn them.
• Measurement: the numbers you will report and how often.
• Owners and resources: who does what, and the budget or hours available.

The “owners and resources” section is the one most people skip. It is also the one that decides whether anything gets done. If nobody has time to write content, a content-heavy plan will fail, so plan around the hours you really have.

Common SEO Strategy Mistakes

These are the patterns I see most often when a strategy isn’t working:

• Chasing volume over value. High-volume keywords look good in reports but often bring visitors who will never buy.
• Blogging before fixing money pages. Ten blog posts won’t help if the service page they link to is weak.
• One page per keyword. This creates near-duplicate pages that compete with each other.
• Copying a big competitor’s plan. A large brand can rank for things a small site can’t. Pick battles you can win.
• Changing direction every month. SEO needs time. Constant changes make it impossible to know what worked.
• Measuring only rankings. Rankings move daily and differ by location. Leads and sales tell you more.
• Publishing at scale without care. Mass-produced pages with little value, written by people or AI, can go against Google’s spam policies.

How Often to Review Your Strategy

I review the plan in two rhythms. Every month, I check the numbers and the task list: what was done, what moved, what is stuck. Every quarter, I review the strategy itself.

In the quarterly review, ask:

1. Are we closer to the business goal?
2. Which topics are gaining impressions and clicks, and which aren’t?
3. Has anything changed in the business, such as a new service, a new location or a new competitor?
4. Has anything changed in search, such as a Google core update or new result features?
5. What will we stop doing?

That last question matters. A good strategy drops what isn’t working, so time goes to what is.

Final Thoughts

A good SEO strategy is simple to explain. It starts with a clear business goal, focuses on the searches your customers really make, fixes what stops Google reading your site, and builds the pages that answer those searches better than anyone else.

Your next step: spend an hour recording your baseline in Search Console and GA4, then write your one-page plan using the sections above. Pick the three tasks with the highest impact and lowest effort, and finish those before you add anything new.