How to Create an Actionable SEO Strategy with @bertiecharlton #vcbuzz

How to Create an Actionable SEO Roadmap with @bertiecharlton #vcbuzz

SEO is one of the most challenging tasks any website owner is going to face.

It is extremely scattered, evolves too fast to keep up and often technical.

This is why so many businesses are struggling with creating an actionable SEO strategy, i.e. the one they will actually be able to act upon.

Today’s host has a new approach to SEO that is based on action and transparency.

Let’s learn from the best

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About Andrew Charlton @bertiecharlton

Andrew Charlton @bertiecharlton is an independent SEO consultant and founder of Crawl.

With over 10 years experience in SEO, Andrew has evolved a unique strategic approach that will help you unlock growth opportunities in search.

Questions we discussed

Q1 How did you become an SEO? Please share your career story!

Weirdly my career in SEO got started over 10 years ago when I started a record label with my cousin. We had no budget, so I had to learn everything about web development and marketing from scratch. That included SEO.

Following that, my journey to now running my own SEO consultancy has went from freelancing as a WordPress developer, picking up a role as a digital marketing exec in a large software consultancy, to leading an agency SEO team as a Head of SEO

Q2 What is an SEO Strategy? Where to get started with creating one?

Let’s start with what it’s not – tactics. It’s ironic, search for ‘SEO strategy’ on Google and you’ll be presented with a set of top ranking results that only include tactics. Repeat the same tactics across every website and success will be rare.

To understand SEO strategy, you need to understand strategy. The best book I’ve ever read on strategy is ‘good strategy, bad strategy’ by Richard P. Rumelt

He states the kernel of a good strategy contains three elements:

  • Diagnosis: what problem are you trying to solve?
  • Guiding policy: what’s your overall approach to solve the problems?
  • Coherent actions: how will you implement the guiding policy?

As a quick example: 1. D: “there’s growing international demand for our product” 2. GP: “expand search visibility in X,Y,Z markets” 3. CA: “redevelop the website with int. subfolders, hreflang…”

Q3 How to make your SEO Strategy actionable?

Defining ‘actionable steps’ should be easy, but it’s not because SEOs are rarely the ‘implementers’ If you want to make your strategy actionable, you need to convince people to take action

Here’s some tips for doing that:

  • Deliver less recommendations.
  • Speak your stakeholders lingo.
  • Align them with biz and personal objectives. SEO is selling. If you can’t sell, you won’t get action.

Q4 What are some common mistakes to avoid when creating your SEO Strategy?

SEOs don’t understand the problem, or don’t spend enough time breaking down the problem. What are you really trying to solve? If you don’t know that, what’s the purpose of your strategy?

Q5 What are your favorite SEO tools?

Too many to mention:

  • Ahrefs
  • Frase
  • Sitebulb

Are core to what I do. Oh and Keywords in Sheets, which is coming soon (shameless plug ?)

Our previous SEO chats:

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