The key ingredients of an SEO sandwich

It’s British Sandwich Week this week. Whilst feasting on your favourite meal deal, why not have a look at the key ingredients of the perfect SEO sandwich. Whilst it may seem unusual to compare SEO strategies and sandwiches, it’s actually a very helpful analogy for understanding the different layers in SEO.

According to marketing agency Varn, there are 6 key ingredients for your organic and paid search marketing strategy:

Focused data and reporting

This is the bread that holds everything together. It’s simple before you start to add extras you first need to have a good base.

In relation to SEO, this means you must first look at what has worked well in the past and where improvement could be made in order to establish what you need to focus on next. At the end of your strategy, you must then go back and re-evaluate this so that changes and improvements can continue to be made throughout the strategy – the other slice of bread.

Search Intent Modelling

Search Intent Modelling represents the butter in your sandwich. Whilst it isn’t the most exciting layer, it helps lay a foundation for the other elements.

This is all about taking a look at your customers or target audience and establishing what they need or want and what their intentions would be when trying to find your products. After getting an idea of user intent, you can then start to tailor your strategy around this.

Search intent modelling helps you establish which keywords to target and highlights the potential low competition keywords or phrases that you have a good chance of ranking for.

Identifying your content gaps

Whilst this may not seem like the most important part of an SEO strategy, it does make up the main bulk of it. Think of this as your main filling choice, such as the meat (or falafel if you’re veggie).

Identifying your content gaps will be a large part of establishing good SEO. You could either do it yourself or you can consider hiring professional marketing services like Hooked Marketing, for example, that could help you work out where improvements could be made and strategize how to make these improvements going forward.

Creative content outreach

Your creative content outreach can be seen as your condiment. When included it lifts the whole thing up a level and makes everything a bit more interesting.

Creative content is the part of your strategy that you should enjoy doing. To a certain extent, you can have some fun with your content whilst driving backlinks and traffic to your site. If you find a post has particular success, and you want to add to it, you can learn how to duplicate a WordPress page or post so that you’re able to make the necessary additions, but all the settings from the original post – including SEO settings, are preserved. Creative content outreach also allows you to build up good relationships with other bloggers, businesses or press which will help with any future projects and content promotion.

Personalised paid search strategies

Personalised paid search strategies are equivalent to your tomato, lettuce or cucumber in a sandwich. Whilst nobody really eats them completely on their own, they work well as part of an overall strategy.

This is an important addition to your strategy and shouldn’t be ignored. If managed correctly it can prove invaluable not only for driving a positive ROI but to also unearth interesting user behaviours and keywords you may not have otherwise considered.

Paid search can be used to target services, products or keyword and content gaps that you’re not currently visible for. The data you gather from this will prove invaluable.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO can be viewed as the crust on your sandwich, not everyone likes it but it’s extremely good for you.

Whilst you need to ensure you have good content and a good understanding of areas you need to build on, technical SEO is just as important to consider when trying to rank in search engines.

A well-built website that performs well and has a good usability and good crawlability will further your chances of having a successful SEO strategy.
You could consider obtaining the services of a web development company that might be able to help you build an exhaustive SEO plan for maximum benefit. Companies such as Classic Informatics may have solutions not only for website design, but also for other adjacent requirements like paid search and content outreach that can help in increasing your ROI.
In short, these companies could be the perfect sandwich-makers for you.

Now you know how to construct the perfect SEO sandwich that will help your future marketing strategies.

Kelly Tate