It’s no secret that, when done well, search engine optimisation or SEO will improve the online visibility of your website, and in turn increase awareness of your brand with those people searching online for your products or services.
But, how do you go about creating and implementing an SEO strategy; how do you find keywords for luxury SEO and how do you “do” search engine optimisation?
Before becoming a full-service digital agency, Relevance started out as a team of search engine optimisation consultants and experts, and we still consistently achieve incredible SERP (search engine results page) rankings for our clients. So, we wanted to weigh in by sharing how we manage keyword research and set SEO strategies for our clients.
The Relevance process: SEO for luxury goods, services & experiences
Whether we are looking to optimise an existing website, or we are starting from scratch with a brand-new website that we have built or are tasked to optimise, Relevance approaches SEO as a two-phase process.
This article will focus on Phase 1: the onboarding phase, where we get to know our client and their SEO objectives. It is during the Phase 1 SEO process that we jump head first into keyword research. But, before we even open up Google’s Keyword Planner or any other keyword research tools, we start gathering insights.
Insight
First meeting/Brainstorming session/Kick off meeting
During our first Phase 1 SEO meeting, we will start with a brainstorming session with the key members of your team. We will want to know:
- About your business – who you are, what you do, what makes you unique?
- About your products/services – how do you talk about these to your clients?
- Your business and marketing goals – what are you trying to achieve?
- Your current clients – who are they and what do you know about them?
- Your target market(s) (if different to your clients) – who you are trying to reach and why?
- Who is on your team and who will we be working with?
- Your marketing and SEO efforts to date – what has been done so far?
- Your known competitors – commercially, and who you admire?
- Your KPIs – what does success look like to you?
Competitor research
Before starting with any keyword research for your website, we spend time looking at your competitors’ SEO and rankings. We will look into your commercial competitors – those that you know well and will have shared with us in our initial meeting – and those that you may not have considered – your online competitors who are ranking well for the main keywords in your niche or industry.
Selecting 5 to 6 of these competitors, we will look at their top 50 ranking keywords to inspire a list of relevant keywords and keyphrases as a jumping off point for our keyword research. This may uncover terms and combinations that you may not have considered for your website before, and also help us to spot any opportunities and content gaps on your website. We will also spend time studying the SERPs for these terms to further build our list of keywords and terms to look into. This will help identify the ways in which people are searching for your products and services online.
Keyword research
Now that we have our initial list of keywords and phrases to research, we will open our SEO tools to get an idea of the historical average monthly search volume for each keyword in the right geographic area, and to discover more relevant keywords that could be interesting to your business or brand. This will allow us to collate a long list of keywords and their average monthly search volumes over a period of two years or more, meaning we can identify seasonal peaks and troughs of note. We will then begin to categorise this list to help us to understand which department(s) or revenue stream(s) each keyword is relevant to, e.g. for a yacht broker, this may include yacht sales, charter, and management.
Strategy
SEO strategy & recommendations
Once we have done exhaustive keyword research, we will begin to interpret the data; keyword research is about much more than just average search volume. Before we look at creating a keyword strategy, we will consider how each keyword balances search volume with:
- The relevancy of search terms to your business – while a keyword may have a high number of average monthly searches, it may not be all that relevant to your business, which can result in few click-throughs from organic search results, and perhaps an increased bounce rate caused by those that do land on your site. That is, if search engines even decide to rank you in a worthwhile position for these terms online.
Which leads us to:
- Competition within organic search results – how likely is it that your website and/or preferred web page or content will rank well for the keyword over time, and in what kind of timeframe can we expect to achieve worthwhile results? After all, SEO takes time and will not land your website page 1 of Google (or Bing or any other search engine) overnight, especially if yours is a brand-new website that needs to build backlinks and increase authority.
If the keyword passes these two points, we will then start to think about:
- The perceived search intent and convertibility of the user – what do the keyword and current search results returned tell us about the search intent and convertibility of users entering this term? Do they appear to be from people who are just starting their search in the awareness phase, people looking for more information to justify their interest (consideration), or people looking to pull the trigger on the purchase (action). This helps us to identify which kind of page the keyword should be assigned to on your website, e.g. a top-level page, an informative article or product comparison post, or a product page.
Implementation
SEO sitemap
Once we have agreed the SEO Strategy and considered opportunities and recommendations, and you have the competitor research, keyword research and keyword strategy and recommendations documents from us and have signed these off, we will begin to build your SEO Sitemap and allocate keywords to your new and existing web pages according to our agreed SEO Strategy and recommendations.
The SEO Sitemap is a document that lists:
- All of the pages on your existing website (if applicable)
- New pages that should be created to take advantage of keyword opportunities
- The website structure and page hierarchy
- And the keyword(s) allocated to each page, along with the average monthly search volume
- We will also look to record the optimised URL structure and metadata on this document for reference
On-Page optimisation
Once you are happy with this document, we will look to implement our findings with on-page optimisation of your metadata, webpage copy and images. Depending on the scope of our project, we may also look to add or update the website code, with things like schema for improved performance.
From there we move into Phase 2, which typically consists of monthly SEO and content work to continue boosting your SERP rankings, depending on your unique requirements.
Contact Relevance to learn more about our SEO strategy
If you have any questions about our phase one methodology, or are interested to hear how Relevance could help raise your brand’s online presence, please get in touch today.