How to Build An SEO Plan From Scratch

If you were to start optimizing a site for search engines from the ground up, what would you do?

Years ago, dominating rankings often meant cranking out pages and building lots of anchor-text links.

SEO isn’t that simple anymore. What worked then won’t necessarily work now.

Google continually updates its systems to reward useful, satisfying content and great page experience. That’s a big opportunity for anyone willing to stay current and keep refining their strategy.

Below are the core elements that matter most today. Bake these into your plan and you’ll keep pace—and often pull ahead.

Read on to learn how to create a killer SEO plan from scratch in 14 practical steps.

Step 1 – Assess How Search-Friendly Your Site Is

Before you change anything, establish a baseline. Confirm that your content is discoverable, crawlable, and indexable so search engines can actually list it.

If your primary content is in standard HTML text, you’re in good shape. Images, video, and JavaScript-rendered elements are fine too—so long as you expose meaningful text alternatives and avoid blocking resources that Google needs to render the page.

When all essential copy exists as HTML, search engines can see it. If you rely on non-text formats, make them understandable to crawlers. For example:

Give images descriptive alt attributes and helpful captions where appropriate. Use modern formats (e.g., WebP) and keep filenames meaningful.
Ensure JavaScript-generated content is rendered server-side or is easily rendered by Google (don’t block JS/CSS in robots.txt). Critical content shouldn’t depend on user interaction to appear.
Provide transcripts for audio/video and consider adding structured data (e.g., VideoObject) so search engines understand what the media covers.
Use clear heading hierarchy (H1?H2?H3), descriptive title tags, and meta descriptions to reinforce topical focus.

Even if you think everything is indexable, double-check. Make sure important pages aren’t accidentally noindexed, canonicalized away, or blocked by robots.txt. Validate what Google can see using your preferred crawling tool and verify coverage in Search Console.

If you want to evaluate which words and phrases your pages emphasize, tools like the ones on Moz’s free SEO tools can surface prominent terms on a URL.

Compare what shows up most often with the topics you actually want to rank for. If there’s a mismatch, refine on-page copy, titles, and headings accordingly.

Step 2 – Evaluate Your Competitors

After auditing your own site, benchmark against competitors—both the obvious brands and the niche specialists taking up SERP real estate.

Use top SEO tools to identify who owns the SERP features you care about (top 10 blue links, People Also Ask, video, images, local pack), compare content depth and freshness, and analyze off-site signals like digital PR and links.

Why watch competitors? Their wins reveal the bar you must clear. You can reverse-engineer what’s working in your space—intent coverage, content quality, technical health—without burning months of trial and error.

Step 3 – Generate Profiles of Your Target Audience

Next, understand who you’re serving. Go beyond age and location: map jobs-to-be-done, pains, motivations, and buying triggers. Where do they search? What blocks progress?

For a structured approach to personas and task analysis, see usability.gov’s methodology library. Use surveys, interviews, chat logs, and Search Console queries to ground assumptions in real data.

Your SEO should target the audience’s problems, not just keywords. Ask: what outcomes do they want, and what evidence do they need to trust you?

We cover audience before keywords for two reasons—content strategy and keyword research.

Content Strategy

Publish to solve concrete problems. That naturally earns engagement and links. On this site, we focus on analytics, blogging, running a business, and SEO. When we hear founders struggling to use social media efficiently, we write guides that remove friction. A strong content strategy starts with knowing exactly what your audience wants…and giving it to them.

Keyword Research

Once you know the pains and goals, discover how people search for solutions. Build topics and keywords around intent—learn, compare, do—then cover those intents completely with helpful, credible content (not stuffed with keywords).

Step 4 – Create an Effective Keyword Plan

Would you rather get 1,000,000 visits or 1,000? You can’t choose wisely without context.

Volume alone is a vanity metric. The goal is qualified traffic that converts. Measure potential by intent fit, revenue impact, difficulty, and your ability to create the best page for the query.

This means aligning topics to business goals and breaking through “headline” volume to the specific queries that drive conversions.

Building a high-converting keyword plan should be non-negotiable.

Keyword Research For SEO

Auditing your own site is easier—you know the topics and language. But for a new or unfamiliar site, start broad, then narrow.

As you scan existing pages and SERPs, think through:

Terms or categories you don’t fully get – Google them. What kinds of results appear (how-to, tools, products)? That reveals intent.
Does the SERP match your offer? – If the top results don’t align with what you sell, the keyword may never convert. Focus on terms where your solution is a natural fit.

Prune non-converting themes and expand those aligned to your core value. It’s fine to begin with many categories—you can consolidate once patterns emerge.

Check search volumes and trends to validate assumptions.

For example, do more people search for “SEO consultant” or “SEO services”? “Florist” or “flowers”? “Washer” or “washing machines”?

You might prefer “SEO services,” but if “SEO consultant” is what buyers actually type, mirror that language on the page (naturally).

Use these five questions to sharpen your plan:

How would you describe your site? After skimming content and building a keyword bucket, explain the site in plain language. If it sounds jargony or misaligned with real searches, you know what to fix.
Why would someone choose you over a competitor? What’s uniquely valuable? These are conversion-driven prompts. Your differentiators suggest the modifiers to target (e.g., “fast,” “affordable,” “enterprise,” “local”).
What products are like yours but not direct competitors? Adjacent alternatives reveal comparison keywords you should cover.
Do you have a flagship product? Is it most profitable? Why prioritize it? Focus your earliest ranking efforts where they’ll produce outsized business impact.
What are your most important keywords? You don’t need to rank for thousands. Identify the handful that matter most, then build clusters around them.

Once you have a base list, use it to spot white-space opportunities. Keyword research doesn’t just grow existing lines—it can reveal new markets and content plays.

Keep it efficient: focus on data that informs decisions about products, pages, and expansion.

Keyword Research for Semantic Understanding

Beyond head terms, build a library of semantically related phrases—questions, attributes, synonyms, and subtopics users expect within a comprehensive page. Advantages include:

Higher CTR – When your titles and content match real language and intent, more people click.
Lower paid costs – Tight alignment between query, ad, and landing page improves quality and trims wasted spend.
Quality signals – Covering related concepts deeply helps search engines understand topical relevance and authority.

How to find these semantically related terms:

Mine trends – Use tools like Google Trends to spot rising topics and seasonal demand, then reflect that language in content.
Study tags and communities – Look at how people categorize and discuss topics on forums and social platforms. Their words reveal the angles your audience cares about.

Don’t dump every phrase into a page. Curate. Semantic research is as much about understanding the customer as it is about collecting keywords.

When you truly mirror how people think and talk, your SEO performance improves.

Creating Keywords For Conversions

After exporting data from multiple tools, consolidate everything into a single master table so you can sort, filter, and prioritize efficiently.

Do this:

Combine all keywords into one file.
Group by topic, then by word count and search volume.
Flag short, commercially meaningful phrases (<3 words) that match your offer.
Note phrases embedded in longer queries so you can build clusters and internal links.
Set traffic and difficulty thresholds relative to your site’s current authority. Ambitious is good; impossible is not.
Discard anything irrelevant, even if the volume tempts you.

Copy your finalists into one table. Those are your target candidates.

The golden rule: every keyword must map to a specific target page. No page, no keyword.

Then, measure performance with metrics that reflect modern search behavior:

Clicks & impressions – Track query-level data in Search Console for each mapped page.
Query-level CTR – Are your titles and meta descriptions earning the click relative to position?
Ranking distribution – Monitor how many queries sit in positions 1–3, 4–10, 11–20, and beyond. Move pages up the curve.
Keyword coverage & diversity – Are you earning traffic from variations, questions, and long-tail terms within a topic cluster? If not, expand or improve your page.

Step 5 – Put Mobile First

Mobile is the default context for most searches.

Design for mobile first, then scale up. That doesn’t mean abandon desktop—just ensure the mobile experience is complete, fast, and frustration-free.

Mobile-first SEO in practice:

Use responsive web design (RWD) so content and structured data are equivalent across devices.
Eliminate intrusive interstitials and anything that blocks primary content.
Simplify layouts, keep tap targets generous, and use readable font sizes.
Minimize redirects and client-side bloat; ensure navigation is clear and crawlable.

Step 6 – Go Warp Speed

“Fast” isn’t fast enough anymore.

Users expect pages to feel instant. Speed affects satisfaction, engagement, and conversions.

Focus on Core Web Vitals—especially Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and Interaction to Next Paint (INP). Aim to pass on the majority of real-user visits.

Practical wins include: next-gen image formats, compression, caching/CDN, preloading critical assets, deferring non-essential JS, and reducing third-party scripts. Clean, lightweight pages win.

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) framework still exists, but it’s optional. Many sites achieve excellent performance without it. If you already use it, maintain it well. If not, prioritize modern performance best practices and Core Web Vitals over adopting AMP solely for SEO.

Step 7 – Address Voice Search

Voice and conversational queries keep growing.

It’s practical, fast, and often safer on the go. Optimize to match how people speak and ask questions.

Create content that answers natural-language questions directly and concisely, then expands with detail.

Think in terms of long-tail phrasing and question formats readers actually say out loud.

Examples: “Where is a pet store in Albuquerque?” or “How do I speed up WordPress without breaking plugins?”

Focus on the question patterns people use most.

Who
When
Where
How

Write conversationally and clearly. It makes answers easier for users and increases your chances of appearing in rich results.

Bonus: the more natural your tone, the more personable your brand feels.

That warmth helps people remember you and return.

Step 8 – Think Scannable Content

Scannable (“snackable”) content helps both users and search engines.

Readers can quickly find what they need, which improves time on page, shares, and conversions.

Use sub-headers, short paragraphs, bullet lists, visuals, and callouts to break up walls of text.

Structuring content this way also helps search engines understand sections and context, which can improve search visibility.

SEO isn’t just keywords and links. The best strategies start at the foundation: helpful content designed for real people.

Build that foundation first—everything else compounds.

Step 9 – Write Awesome Content

Blogging still moves the needle. It’s why we publish consistently.

Start a blog and commit to quality. You won’t see miracles overnight, but a year of steady, helpful publishing can transform your organic presence if you’re writing great content.

Follow a repeatable process for ideation, drafting, editing, and promotion. The promotion part matters—without it, even excellent content gets ignored. With it, your blog can outdraw your main site.

If you’re starting a blog from scratch, devote some time to regular posts—but invest heavily in comprehensive, evergreen guides that become references in your niche. Think big, detailed resources like The Advanced Guide to SEO. When the content is dialed in, consider a professional design to elevate trust and usability.

Step 10 – Focus on Conversion Optimization

Conversion optimization has gone mainstream for good reason. Traffic keeps getting pricier; squeezing more value from every visit is essential.

Start by surveying visitors to uncover friction and objections. Tools like Qualaroo make it easy to deploy intent-focused questions.

Use findings to prioritize tests. When A/B testing, run experiments to statistical significance and track the right metrics (not just CTR). Consider complementing with session replay and heatmaps to see why users behave the way they do.

If a change moves conversions dramatically, you’ve likely identified a sensitive lever—double down on similar elements (e.g., headline clarity, risk reversal, offer framing) rather than nibbling at microcopy that barely registers.

Chase big wins. Bold hypotheses beat tiny tweaks.

Need inspiration? Try ideas like those in this A/B testing roundup and adapt them to your audience.

Step 11 – Build links

Once you know the topics to target, earn links to the best matching pages. You don’t need aggressive anchor text; you do need relevance and quality.

How to find relevant prospects? Start with pages already ranking for your target terms. Those sites—and the ones linking to them—are likely thematically aligned.

Many will be competitors, but plenty won’t. Use outreach thoughtfully and offer something worth linking to: original research, data visualizations, expert commentary, or genuinely helpful tools.

Point earned links to tightly related internal pages (not just the homepage). If you sell dog food, link to the category page that showcases dog food, not a generic catalog.

Repeat across priority terms and you’ll grow organic traffic steadily.

Step 12 – Hire a PR agency

Links and mentions from high-authority publications (think major tech and business outlets) carry serious weight. How do you get them?

Consider a PR partner—especially one fluent in digital PR for earned media. If budget is tight, performance-based options exist, but vet them carefully for quality and ethics.

Focus your PR efforts on:

Launches – New features or services are newsworthy when they’re truly useful or novel.
News – Fundraising, partnerships, or notable milestones often earn coverage—even if not always in the biggest outlets.
Guest posts – If you or your team can write with authority, have your PR pitch relevant bylines. Expect rejections; one strong placement can still be worth it.
Interviews – No celebrity resume? Share compelling data or insights and let the story lead. Reporters love credible, unique angles.

These tactics grow links, brand searches, and revenue.

For more help with public relations, check our favorite reputation management companies.

Step 13 – Put More Attention On Local Search

Google heavily personalizes and localizes results for queries with nearby intent.

Local pack rankings shift based on proximity, relevance, and prominence. That makes local SEO critical for any brick-and-mortar or service-area business.

Here’s how to strengthen local visibility:

Diversify location keywords. Don’t stop at “pet store albuquerque.” Also target “pet store albuquerque NM,” “albuquerque pet store,” and neighborhood modifiers.
Keep your Google Business Profile current—categories, hours, services, photos, and attributes. Post updates and respond to reviews.
Ensure NAP (name, address, phone) consistency across citations. Add location pages with unique, helpful content for each city or service area.

Expect results to vary by where a searcher is physically located—IP/GPS signals influence what shows up.

Visual examples of shifting local positions are common, especially in competitive metros:

And patterns like these often emerge when the local algorithm updates or when competitors improve their profiles:

Bottom line: treat local SEO as an ongoing program, not a one-time task.

Step 14 – Calculate the ROI of Your SEO Campaigns

You must measure your results.

Historically, many teams struggled to tie SEO to dollars.

It’s tough to tell if you’re losing or making money without a clean model.

Paid search stuck because ROI is obvious. But you can calculate SEO returns, too.

Attribute revenue to SEO using a consistent framework. Track assisted and last-click conversions from organic, map them to landing pages/topics, and compare against content and technical costs.

Simple view: (SEO revenue ? SEO cost) ÷ SEO cost. Refine with multi-touch attribution if you have the data. The key is to measure consistently over time and invest where the curve is steepest.

Conclusion

A fresh, user-first SEO strategy compounds over time.

Don’t try to rank for your most competitive term on day one. Earn trust with genuinely helpful content, strong UX, and smart technical hygiene—then scale.

Follow the steps above and you’ll set yourself up for durable, defensible growth.

The planning is worth it. Start with a solid blueprint or you’ll waste time and budget.

And remember: SEO is ongoing. Keep shipping improvements, track impact, and adapt as search evolves.