When it comes to digital marketing, SEO is one of the most complicated services. Most brands understand they need to rank higher on Google; however, there is a difference between an SEO strategy and the SEO tactics required to implement it.
Especially in the UK, where the competition for every keyword is so fierce, many businesses get their ideologies wrong.
This creates confusion, often resulting in wasted budget, poor rankings, and frustration. In this UK SEO guide, we will break down the difference between strategy and tactics, explain where most UK companies go wrong, and illustrate how to fix it with a simple long-term vision.
Let’s get started!
What is an SEO Strategy?
An SEO strategy is a long-term plan that outlines how your business will increase visibility on search engines like Google. It is your high-level roadmap.
It tells you who your target audience is, their search behaviour, the keywords you need to target, the content you should create, how to build your domain authority over time, and which metrics matter the most to your goals.
Strategy involves knowing your industry and the competition, as well as the efforts for increasing traffic, leads, and conversions, which is an important consideration for SEO for UK businesses.
What are SEO Tactics?
While the strategy lays out your direction for moving forward, tactics are simply what you do to move forward.
SEO tactics are the regular and continual work that puts your strategy in motion. Writing a blog post, increasing the speed of your website, and optimising a page for the keyword you want to target: these are all tactics.
Tactics can all be grouped or logically organised into three main areas.
Your first area is technical implementation, or making sure that your website is actually working and can be easily crawled or indexed by search engines. You must have a solid technical SEO strategy for this tactic to do its job.
The second area is on-page SEO, or making sure that you are using the right keywords, organising the content of your pages appropriately, and that your metadata is relevant. Here, your keyword research strategy plays a very important role.
The third area is off-page SEO, which involves link building and increasing brand mentions throughout the web.
So, all of these tactics are important, but they must align with a much bigger goal. Without a strategy, these tactics often become disconnected tasks done with little or no return on time or spend.
How to connect strategy and tactics?
To avoid falling into the above trap, UK companies need to ensure, where possible, that their long-term strategy is aligned to some extent with their short-term action.
This starts with assessing the current site and identifying gaps. It then follows that we should understand what our desired audience wants and create content that meets this need.
It goes without saying, as per efficient SEO tactics, each article, landing page or product description should have a distinct purpose, and this purpose must exist in relation to business aims and objectives.
It helps all of this to have a clear keyword research strategy.
Instead of guesswork around what customers might type into a search box on a website, businesses can use (forgotten about) tools and data to identify specific terms that are both relevant and carry buyer intent.
These keywords may help with content planning for articles, page structure, and navigation of the site.
Once we are clear on the keywords, we can then start dealing with technical issues, content clustering around key topics and getting links from reputable websites. These are the tactics of SEO, and they work only in relation to the strategic opportunity.
Building domain authority, getting rankings and generating qualified traffic won’t happen overnight. However with a logical and well-structured on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO strategy in place, every action is part of a purpose and is measurable.
How to create a realistic strategy for SEO for UK business?
An effective UK SEO guide does not start with tools or templates; it starts with goals.
Every business must know what SEO should achieve for the business. Are you looking to create leads? Are you selling e-commerce? Do you want to improve your brand visibility?
Once you have the goals in mind and written down, you can identify market data. Knowing which keyword types your ideal customers use to find you and knowing where your competitors rank for those keywords is the next step.
This is where you start researching keywords, and this gives you a foundation for efficient efforts for SEO for UK businesses. After researching keywords, you need to identify how you will structure your site.
Think about what types of pages you need to have and publish. You will have your core services pages, education blog posts, local pages for local search, etc.
You will also consider on-page SEO, every page you publish should be linked to a keyword theme, have logically structured content, and have real value.
Off-page SEO is equally important. You must start link building from high-authority domains, placed in meaningful citations, and develop an online brand presence as your future rankings depend on it.
Off-page SEO helps search engines view your site as trusted and relevant.
At last, businesses require a regular review process. SEO isn’t a one-shot deal. Algorithms adjust, competitors evolve, and audiences change.
As with other business plans, adopting a follow-up to your performance, identifying fresh opportunities and considering updating old content, all contribute to keeping it alive and effective.
Final thoughts
SEO for UK businesses is important for a strong engine for growth, but only if done effectively.
The main reason for most failing is not their lack of effort or resources; they simply skip the planning stage and go straight to doing, without distinguishing between movement and progress.
Strategy will always come before SEO tactics. Without it, you could do everything correctly, but find that you don’t get the outcomes you expected.
A plan that is informed and considers customers, the foundation is sound, and they have content to accompany it, is always going to outperform a random set of blog posts or a number of backlinks to your brand.
If you are serious about search visibility being part of a long-term strategy, spend time asking the right questions with your plan. You can always refer to this UK SEO guide whenever needed.
Don’t be afraid to understand your audience. Choose your keywords wisely. Design a structure that would functionally aid both a user and search engines. After this, you can start with the tactics.
Remember, the route to success starts with a solid SEO strategy.
