SEO strategy: a step-by-step guide

A clear SEO strategy brings several benefits:

• It helps you avoid keyword cannibalisation.
• It shows which work to prioritise, and when.
• It shows what you are missing compared with your competitors.
• It gets key decision-makers on board.
• It pins down the KPIs you will track, so you know what to follow up.

In short, a clear SEO strategy helps you understand what customers actually search for, and set relevant KPIs and keywords on that basis.

Many companies budget for SEO as a marketing expense, on the same line as advertising. That is the wrong way to look at it.

SEO works more like compound interest: the right work done early pays back exponentially over time, not in a straight line. Pages that rank well keep bringing in traffic without you paying per click.

First Page Sage’s 2025 benchmarks for thought-leadership SEO put the three-year average return at 702 per cent for B2B SaaS companies and 317 per cent for ecommerce, with break-even after seven and nine months respectively. Returns vary widely by sector and starting point, but the shape is the same: slow at first, then compounding.

In short, companies that treat SEO as a one-off pot of money or a quarterly experiment lose out over time to competitors who treat it as a capital investment.

The first phase is work you usually only need to do once. If you have worked on SEO before, you may already have some of it covered.

The foundation of search engine optimisation is knowing which keywords you want to rank for. Our guide to keyword research explains how to do it.

A few tips on keyword research as part of your strategy:

• AI search engines now break a query down into dozens of underlying sub-questions (query fan-out) when they look for answers. Companies with original data, their own research and fact-based content get cited, while those that repeat what everyone else already says drop out of sight. Choose keywords where you can genuinely add something that is not on your competitors’ pages.
• You will never win on every keyword, so prioritise carefully. There may be a local market you should win first before you move on.
• Understand what a keyword is worth, and do not base your priorities on search volume alone. In the keyword research guide linked above, we set out a method for choosing the right keywords.

A content plan becomes the foundation of your SEO strategy. It sets out which keywords belong on which pages, and it is what you will work from.

You need to understand the search intent behind every keyword. If Google expects a blog post, that is what you need to create, and some keywords belong together on the same page. A simple spreadsheet is enough: one row per keyword, with columns for search volume, landing page and status (not started, written, published).

Analysing competitors is a good way to understand:

• Which keywords they target (feed these into your keyword research)
• Whether they work actively on SEO
• How often they update their website
• What they have done recently
• How strong their website is

Find out what your competitors’ SEO strategies are and how they perform today. When you plan your SEO strategy, you need a realistic plan for how you will catch up. If you do not understand the gap between you and them, you are working blind.

In an SEO project, we expect the following to happen, in this order:

• Average positions start to rise on important keywords
• Estimated traffic starts to rise
• Organic traffic increases
• The number of leads grows

Judging the project on leads at an early stage is not reasonable, just as average position may in the end be irrelevant if traffic and leads are growing anyway.

Set up traffic and conversion tracking early, so you can follow growth over time. We recommend doing it with Google Tag Manager.

One of the first things we do is make sure there are no serious technical bottlenecks.

• Can every URL be indexed?
• Are there any warnings in Search Console?
• If you have one of the larger SEO tools that can run a technical audit, we recommend a broad check. At this stage, ignore a title that is slightly too long and the like – look only for serious warnings.

The aim is not to start on everything within technical SEO, only to check that the website works as it should.

Before you start on traditional SEO – working keywords into your pages – you should build a degree of trust with Google.

Not everyone needs this step. If you have already done it, skip ahead.

Say you sell running shoes. Rather than going straight to working keywords into the page you want to rank for ‘running shoes’, start by writing about subtopics: running technique, how to avoid injury and how long running shoes last. These pages then link to the page you want to rank. Read more about internal links for SEO.

As well as creating new pages, you should establish EEAT. It is a general concept, not a direct ranking factor.

Today, though, EEAT is about more than what is on your own website. AI-driven search engines judge your credibility by how you are mentioned on other platforms: forums, reviews, niche websites. Without consistent, positive mentions beyond your own domain, you lose algorithmic authority. We call this Perception Drift.

In practice, PR, customer reviews and taking part in industry discussions are now part of SEO work rather than a separate activity.

Content ages faster today. An article that is left untouched can lose ground to fresher competitors, even if the facts in it are still right. Google wants to see that you keep your website up to date, and if you do not, it will show your competitors’ pages instead.

Updating is only part of it, though. Sometimes it is better to remove pages altogether.

It looks roughly like this:

Page A (merge in content from page B if it improves the page)

Page B → 301 redirect → Page A

This removes keyword cannibalisation and concentrates authority and user signals on one page.

Start with your XML sitemap and check when each page was last modified. That is the first place we would look.

Earlier, we checked that there were no serious indexing problems. Now we work through the technical side more thoroughly, which Google tends to respond well to.

At this stage, we would prioritise:

• Internal links
• Keyword cannibalisation
• Thin content
• Duplicate content
• Page speed (Google PageSpeed)
• Mobile usability
• Orphan pages
• Heading structure
• Meta titles and meta descriptions
• Structured data
• XML sitemap
• Hreflang
• Canonical tags
• URL parameters
• 404 pages
• 301 redirects
• Crawl budget

Now comes the part of an SEO strategy that many people start on too early: targeting important keywords directly.

If your content plan includes priority keywords where you have no relevant page and rank poorly, now is the time to create those pages.

In some cases this step can come before you start writing about subtopics. We advise against creating too many of these pages at once, though – choose carefully.

You do not need to overdo the on-page optimisation and squeeze the keyword into every sentence. Focus on making the pages good enough that you could use them as Google Ads landing pages for the same keywords. Your on-page SEO needs to be right, but do not overdo it at this stage.

This is the part many start on too early: traditional on-page optimisation for keywords.

• Does your page match the search intent of the pages that rank?
• Is your page as comprehensive as the ones ranking at the top?
• Do you use the exact-match keyword in the same way as the competitors ranking above you?
• Is the keyword in your meta title?
• Does your meta title make people want to click?
• Is the keyword in your headings and opening paragraph?
• Once you have drawn traffic to your website, the job is to turn visitors into customers.

According to SparkToro’s 2024 study, around 60 per cent of Google searches end without a click: the user gets the answer directly without visiting a website. That changes what you should measure and how you should write.

Does that mean SEO is finished? No. It means you have to own the answer box as well as the link position.

How to do that in practice:

• Answer the query directly in the first paragraph of the page – Google lifts paragraphs, not pages
• Use structured data so that Google understands exactly what your page is about
• Build original data and insights of your own that AI search engines have to cite

AI Overviews (Google’s AI-generated answers) currently appear on a small share of commercial searches, but the trend is clear. Companies that invest early in original, fact-based content build a position that is hard to compete with later. Whatever your ad promises, your landing page has to deliver, and the same goes for the answer you give in a featured snippet.

AI agents are starting to make purchases on users’ behalf without the user navigating a website. This is called agentic search. An agent searches, compares and completes a transaction entirely on its own.

It sounds futuristic, but it is already changing what decides whether an online shop wins or loses.

What it demands of your technical set-up:

• Very fast server response – agents give up if a page is slow
• Clean HTML structure without heavy JavaScript dependencies
• Semantic product data that an AI can interpret without ‘seeing’ the design

Weak internal linking and incorrect canonical tags are among the most common problems we see on online shops. That is already a problem for human visitors; for AI agents it can be a hard stop. Fixing it now builds a lead that competitors cannot buy with an advertising budget.

Ranking first for a keyword means you are the best option for that particular search. Only one page wins, so everything has to be right.

Basic on-page SEO is not difficult. It is a given, and a precondition for ranking at all. The winner is whoever also does the harder things best.

It is surprising how little time companies spend on their technical structure, when that is exactly where the competitive advantages are hidden.

We wanted to raise this early, because it lays the foundation of your SEO strategy.

If you are serious about SEO, you need a user-friendly website that is easy to update when needed. It should be fast from the ground up, and the other Core Web Vitals should be in good shape.

• If you have an old website you do not like and want to start on SEO: rebuild it.
• If you have an old website that holds up and competition is low: keep it until you have more reasons to change.
• If you have a new website: good, you are already under way.

If a rebuild is on the cards, plan the SEO side before launch. Our SEO checklist for a new website covers what to get right.

Much of the above is groundwork that needs to be in place. But what resources should you set aside for ongoing SEO work? SEO needs continuous attention to stay current and relevant. Here is what that involves.

Keep creating SEO landing pages for the important pages in your content plan.

The most common advice in the industry is to ‘blog consistently’. At Sunbird we like to be concrete, and that advice is too blunt.

Producing an endless stream of articles in the hope that some of them rank is a drain on resources. Work instead with a closed, tightly optimised portfolio of pages that actually drive business. That means picking the 50–150 pages that matter most to your business and making sure each one is the best answer on the internet for its query.

How to choose which pages go into the portfolio:

• Transactional pages (Buy/Commit): product pages, category pages, service pages – always prioritised
• Evaluation pages (Evaluate): comparisons, guides, case studies – these drive the decision
• Information pages (Solve): answers to specific questions where you have unique knowledge

Leave purely informational keywords with no connection to your business to the AI search engines. They will win those anyway, and those searches do not bring you customers.

Tip: review your priority pages with key decision-makers every quarter. The point is to make sure the right pages are in top form, rather than to produce more.

Tip: make a habit of updating old posts whenever you learn something new.

Links, as part of off-page SEO, are a factor of declining importance and one that carries risk.

A common mistake is to start on them too early, or to buy poor-quality links.

There are usually relevant lists and directories your competitors appear in. You want to be there too. There are also general business directories that collect contact details. Check that your details are correct: search for old addresses, phone numbers and company names, open everything that comes up and correct any errors.

We try to keep the strategy easy to follow. But in some industries there are important lists that should be prioritised earlier, and they can be seen as part of EEAT.

Once that is done, you can look for relevant websites to appear on, for example through guest posts. This is more common in some industries than others.

SEO takes time. But time on its own is not what is needed; it takes work and time together. If your website has gone without updates for a long time, Google will not start ranking you highly because you write a couple of posts. It is when you have done good work over a longer period that Google is willing to spend its resources indexing you and showing your content to its users. Read our answer to how long SEO takes.

Once you have invested in SEO, you have more and more to maintain. If your focus shifts once you start winning, you risk losing the positions you have worked for. Maintaining is always easier than building up.

There is always extra work at the start, and a high pace early on is common. But once the work starts being put off, competitors can catch up. As with the point above, it is easier to maintain rankings than to build them up.

It is not unusual to think your own copy and website are far better than your competitors’. Try to look at yourself and your competitors as impartially as you can.

In less competitive industries you do not need to aim very far ahead, and you can often go straight for important SEO landing pages. When competition is fierce, long-term thinking matters more in your SEO strategy.

• Update your website so it earns better user signals
• Create genuinely good content that users like and that attracts links naturally

In our experience, the order you choose is decisive. Doing A before B, or B before A, does not always give the same result.

Push ahead too hard in the wrong way and it can take time to catch up. If you lose rankings quickly, or see a slow downward trend, you should respond differently – but as a rule, you need to start doing everything in this strategy and then wait for the next Google core update (put simply, a major change to the algorithm).

Good luck with your SEO strategy! If you would rather not do the work yourself, we can help. See how we work as an SEO agency, or start with a free search audit of your website.