Developing a show-stopping SEO campaign requires plenty of hard work and hours of thankless perseverance. There’s also stages to follow which all bring their own challenges and rewards. At the end of it, you’re left with a sense of achievement (and exhaustion). Does this sound similar to another time-consuming hobby which many of us try to avoid on the weekends?
Surprisingly, SEO has many similarities to planting a garden. We’re actually not kidding either! Take a look at these 6 crucial steps we all must go through on the SEO journey and how they relate to the simple task of gardening.
Planning
Creating a sanctuary of relaxation and fulfilling your botanic goals requires thorough planning. You can’t start planting trees or installing new decking without having a visual representation to aid in the design. It’s essential for any successful landscape project and keeps everything within budget from concept through to completion.
The same can be said for an SEO campaign which always requires a game plan. Certain techniques must be utilised before choosing the best suited strategy. Whilst persona analysis can show which content will be necessary for the website, keyword research can pin point those words that must be included. These are just a few of the many methods which need to be utilised during the planning stage.
Preparing the ground
After the planning stage, comes the initial work on the ‘foundations’. In gardening terms, it’s essential to have nutrient rich soil to provide the best conditions for young roots to grow.
Websites must also follow suit and have the initial architecture to support and sustain growth. All this should be developed with the search engine algorithms in mind. Appropriate use of metadata, URL navigation structure and effective coding are just a few of the fundamentals. Get these wrong in the initial stage and your ‘garden’ certainly won’t flourish.
Planting & sprouting
When planting a variety of shrubs and trees, each species may require a different method. Without tailoring the approach, a garden can quickly become a disaster and lack in potential.
Similarly, SEO requires an acute level of optimisation for each individual page. Focusing on a primary keyword & a single topic on any given page is important for higher SERP’s. As with the sprouting stage of plants, this process will continue throughout the initial campaign stages.
Feeding
A well-nourished garden is a happy garden. Adding fertiliser may not be essential but it can have a major impact – protecting plants, encouraging growth and improving the overall beauty. In SEO terms, this would be the constant application of relevant and engaging content to a website.
Not only should this continue to attract visitors as other websites or social media pages link to it, this quality is also recognised by the search engine bots. Always looking to rank the websites which offer the best user experience, it’s essential to have original and meaningful content.
Pruning & maintenance
As mentioned earlier, gardening is a thankless task and doesn’t finish once the landscaping has been completed. To keep a garden looking good, it requires an ongoing level of care. The SEO equivalent to pruning and maintenance is clearly the editing and reviewing stage.
Search engines always assess the last date of content revision to understand how up-to-date and therefore worthy of high rankings a website may be. For this reason, it’s important to edit and update non-evergreen content to continue making it relevant for your users. At this stage, other SEO tweaks can be made to ensure you stay at the top of your game.
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