A good organization is the foundation for successful SEO. This digital Marketing tool is known for its effectiveness and for giving results in the long and medium term. That's why ensuring that all your efforts are worth it, requires a bulletproof plan.

We all know that SEO is a reliable strategy to develop the positioning of our website and improve its accessibility. However, this valuable tool requires long work to show results at medium and long term.

That's why it's crucial to have a clear idea about our objectives and steps to follow. For this, it is necessary to draw up a detailed plan. This way, we can avoid losing purpose halfway through.

First things first, you have to know the search the public is using to find you. That is, study the keywords that we must include in our content in order to be found.

Reasons to elaborate a plan

As we mentioned above, because the SEO strategy is successful if you invest time and organized effort, it is natural to start with a plan. You have to foresee things like changes in the market, what the customer is looking for, and being aware of what the competition is doing to stay current and succeed.

If you want your online presence to grow and your website to make sales, you need to make sure that everything you do when it comes to SEO has direct purpose.

Search terms and keywords

Today, 70% of the buyer's journey starts on the internet. This happens through the use of keywords. They are nothing more than the search terms used by the audience.

In order to generate relevant content, we need to follow four steps:

1. Identify the search terms that our target audience uses.
2. Know how often they use them.
3. Establish its relevance to the objectives of our project.
4. How competitive they are (to assess whether or not it is convenient for us to position them).

Don't forget that each search term has its main results. This means that it is up to us to surpass others in every aspect to become the new number one.

Your SEO plan should include keywords that relate directly to the product or service you want to position.

If you choose a keyword that is too vague, you will have to compete with all kinds of websites, from online competitors to Wikipedia entries. So, it is imperative to continuously refine our list of keywords. 

How to find keywords

To find new functional keywords, we have to think like a customer or a potential customer would. 

You can start by making a list of all the things you have to offer, be it a service or a variety of products. Once you have a detailed list, you can do the following.

Ways to get keyword ideas

The traditional way to find keywords is to use your list of products and services and think of all the ways in which the audience can find those things. This is about generating questions from the perspective of the audience. People who enter a search engine with the intention of making a purchase or inquiring about a service.

This option is something you can work out individually, but it can be more productive if a team of people is involved.

Another option is to use software tools to look for additional ideas. With the help of a software, you can get synonyms of your keywords, similar terms and word combinations. When it comes to choosing these tools, it is more advisable to turn to what the search engine itself has to offer.

After all of this, you have to evaluate the search volume of these terms and their level of competition to discover useful keywords. To perform this evaluation, we need to know the difference between long-tail keywords and general terms.

The general terms are, for example: car, House, legal services. These three examples are widely used, for this same reason they cover a large number of results. So, its level of competitiveness is very high. 

On the other hand, long-tail keywords are very specific terms or terms with many words. While these have a lower search volume, it is easier to position ourselves with them due to their low level of competition. 

They also fit more to the needs and problems of potential clients. If we are the first choice of these terms, it is more likely to get direct sales.

How to distribute keywords

Once you have obtained a list of keywords, you have to organize the way in which you will work with them. Distributing keywords on your website is important to avoid "keyword cannibalism". This is the repetition of keywords in the page links. 

This would make the links compete with each other in the SERP and the search engine will ultimately only choose one. Which would leave the remaining link outside the SERP.

Spiders move between pages through links. These links might be your landing page, categories, as well as blog articles and products. Following a clear structure will make navigation easier for the user and for search engines.

It is then that the distribution of vague keywords and long tail keywords will be from general to specific. You should use general keywords in categories and long-tail keywords in blog articles and products.

For a more specialized organization, you can consider the silos distribution. This consists in separating all content in categories and subcategories in a way that they are not linked to each other in any way. 

Validating the content, you produce with keywords that drive traffic to your page can only be the initial phase of a functional SEO strategy. But a plan will lay a solid and reliable foundation to generate content that positions you in the first place of the SERP.