How to Create an SEO Strategy in 2025

If you’ve ever felt in the dark about what your SEO agency is actually doing, then unfortunately you’re not alone. 

Too many businesses get stuck with generic SEO audits, vague reports, and no clear connection between SEO activity and real business results.

That’s why you need an SEO strategy.

An SEO strategy is a practical document that aligns your business objectives with SEO action items and results.

This strategy helps you focus on what matters and ignore what doesn’t, so you’re making the most of your valuable SEO budget.

This is not just a keyword list or a monthly report.

And it’s not a technical SEO audit that’s full of complex jargon.

An SEO Strategy is a clear plan of action built around your goals, your audience, and what’s going to driving meaningful results.

Where many agencies treat SEO like a black box of complexity, our job at SGD is to open the lid, be transparent, deliver real value and make SEO work for you.

That’s why with our SEO services, we start with strategy.

Here’s How to Create an Effective SEO Strategy

A great SEO strategy includes these four key elements:

1. Clear Business Goals

To create any strategy, you need to start with the end in mind and then work backwards to create the plan to achieve it.

What would be an ideal result from your SEO campaign?

More leads? Better quality enquiries? Increased visibility in specific markets?

Your SEO plan should support these business goals, not distract from them.

2. Competitive SEO Analysis

SEO is a competitive game.

The fastest way to get SEO results is to reverse engineer what the top performers in your industry are doing and then apply those strategies to your business.

Start by doing a competitive SEO analysis for your industry.

This can be done manually by reviewing your competitors websites, or it can be done using tools like SE Ranking, Semrush and Ahrefs.

The purpose is to understand what the top performers to well, what they’re ranking for, where they’re weak, and what you can learn from their approach.

Where are they strong? Where are they weak?

What are the best performers doing so you can replicate their approach and their results?

A good place to focus your analysis is by using The Four Pillars of SEO.

3. SEO Assessment

Now that you’ve learned from your competitors and top performers, let’s see how your own website performance stacks up.

We want to identify your strengths, weaknesses and biggest SEO opportunities.

Where do you currently rank? What’s holding you back?

What is the gap between you and your competitors?

This sets the baseline for future improvement.

4. SEO Action Plan

With your research complete, now it’s time to turn your SEO weaknesses into strengths by planning your SEO actions.

This is a step-by-step breakdown of SEO activity, focused on building trust, improving content, driving traffic, and increasing conversions.

You’ll want to end up with 6 months of SEO action items planned out and written down.

This plan should be clear enough to follow, and detailed enough to hold your SEO agency accountable.

Download the SEO Strategy Template

We’ve built a free SEO Strategy Template to help you structure all of this.

You can use it internally with your marketing team or with your SEO agency.

Download the SEO Strategy Template here.

Action Steps

• Download the SEO Strategy Template
• Review your current SEO activity against it

Ask yourself: is what your current SEO strategy aligned with your your business goals?

If not, it’s time for a change!

If you’d like guidance with your SEO strategy, then get started with an SEO Assessment and we’ll create a prioritised SEO action plan specific for your situation.