Building a sustainable organic search strategy requires more than just “optimising keywords.” It requires a structured process that aligns with your broader business objectives.
At Atkinson Smith Digital, we use a 10-step framework designed to help marketing leaders—whether you are entering a new role and inheriting an existing programme or building a strategy from scratch—define and execute against clear SEO goals.
This roadmap moves from foundational audience research into content production, technical stability, and finally, high-level authority building. These steps typically cover a 3-6 month ramping up period, but from there, should become a cyclical process to ensure your SEO efforts stay fresh and continue to build revenue growth. Read on to learn more.
1. Define Your Audience, Competitors, and Commercial Goals
Every successful campaign starts with understanding who you are trying to reach and what success looks like for your business.
Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP)
You must have a clear picture of your ICP. Ask: What do they want? Why do they buy? What specific triggers cause them to enter the market? This is crucial for sparking ideas about the types of keyword that they may search for to find your offering.
Keyword selection may sound obvious, and often is when you have a clearly defined product in a mature market.
However, we also work with emerging brands introducing brand new products to the market. Choosing keywords in these categories can be more about aligning a new concept or product with the problem they solve, which can be expressed in many different ways. This is where knowing your audience is essential.
Define Aspirational Competitors
Identify brands that are slightly further along their journey than yours. These “aspirational” brands serve as a benchmark for “good” and provide inspiration for your own progress.
If you’re a smaller brand aiming to grow market share, you can often shortcut your way to success by learning what works for more established brands. From there, you can incorporate your own ideas to provide differentiation or target untapped markets your competitors are underrepresented in.
2. Identify the Search Landscape
Once the audience is defined, you can map out how they search on the web through keyword research and clustering.
Using tools like SEMrush, AHREFS, Keywords Everywhere, SEOMonitor and others, you can identify popular keywords relevant to your market.
The first stage is to understand general topics and search volumes, to get a feel for the popular ways that your potential customers are searching for the solutions you offer. Later you will also need to understand search intent behind those topics, which can be done with AlsoAsked.
With your keywords identified, you’ll then use clustering to group search terms into themes. This helps identify the specific topics you need to cover and the exact pages required to satisfy user intent.
For a deeper dive into this methodology, read our full guide on keyword clustering, which leverages KeywordInsights to help streamline the process. It also supports point 3 below, by pulling in your existing rankings to help you identify what existing content you need to optimise vs new content you need to produce.
3. Audit Existing Content
Before creating anything new, evaluate what you already have to ensure it aligns with current search demand using the outcomes from the previous step.
Identify pages that already rank for your target terms and determine if they need optimisation or refresh work.
Look beyond just rankings. Evaluate content length, detail, user engagement, and whether these pages actually convert using your analytics data (such as from Google Analytics).
Furthermore, you should feed in data from platforms like AlsoAsked, which surfaces data from Google’s “People Also Asked” search results feature. This data is a big indicator of what potential customers are looking for. If your pages are missing these themes, this could be a reason for underperformance.
4. Plan Your Content Roadmap
With your audit complete, you can prioritise your production schedule. You’ll likely have a lot of content ideas, so deciding where to start can be difficult, we typically prioritise based on three factors:
- Small Tweaks First: Identify existing pages that could see immediate performance gains with minor updates.
- High Opportunity New Pages: Order new content production from high to low opportunity based on search volume and consider focusing on the high volume topics first as “pillar pages” in your strategy
- Strategic Niching: For smaller brands or new sites, you may find success earlier on if you focus on low-competition topics or “niching down” into specific content with lower volumes to build initial authority
- Scrutinise and filter out less-relevant content: Use this step as an opportunity to regroup with your stakeholders and leverage expertise within the business to ensure the content in your plan is highly relevant. Consider using data from AlsoAsked to support this stage, or spot-check search results for topics that may not feel 100% relevant.
The output of this step should be a prioritised list of pages you want to produce. You can also group these into batches if you prefer to produce content in sprints.
5. Build Content Processes and Delivery
A roadmap is only as good as its execution. You need a clear understanding of the roles involved in your content supply chain.
- Example Roles: This may include writers, designers, developers (for tools/calculators), product specialists (for accuracy), and stakeholders for sign-off.
- Accountability: We recommend producing a process flowchart to illustrate who is accountable for each stage.
With all stakeholders and participants aligned, start by producing content in batches to test and refine the process based on team feedback.
6. Establish a Technical SEO Baseline
While content is being produced, you can address the technical health of your site.
Technical SEO ensures search engine crawlers can actually find and index your content, and is critical for success. For many sites, we start with content because technical issues are rarely “major” blockers, and can be gradually worked on once a solid content process is up and running.
That said, we sometimes see new clients approach us with major technical issues that need to be addressed urgently. We also work with sites that already have large content libraries, where Technical SEO can be a higher priority to help unlock more visibility from that existing library of content, depending on the issues we find.
Establishing your Technical SEO baseline starts with running a technical SEO audit. You can do this with tools like SEMrush, Screaming Frog or SiteBulb. A cost-effective starting point is to use Screaming Frog and export the “issues overview” report to identify the key issues facing your site. From here, you can analyse the results in the next step.
7. Build out a Technical SEO Roadmap
Automated tools lack the business context to tell you what truly matters, which is why you need to analyse the recommendations.
Working with a consultancy like Atkinson Smith Digital helps you prioritise fixes that “move the needle” while ignoring flagged items that aren’t impactful.
When we run technical audits, we score issues by estimated impact and implementation difficulty. Next, we feed any identified high-priority projects into your development sprints.
We take the findings from your technical audit, identify related issues with the same root cause, and define initiatives to resolve them. For each initiative, we produce a project plan with clear goals and acceptance criteria. SEO support is vital during this stage to ensure developers have clear guidance during production and to provide QA once complete to ensure the solution has the right effect.
Many of our clients also run other web development initiatives such as CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation). It’s also important to ensure any new initiatives maintain good technical SEO standards. We tend to work best when becoming an extension of your team, providing high-level SEO guidance on new initiative ideas, before feeding in specific SEO guidance as part of the project scoping and QA stages.
8. Audit Backlinks Against Competitors
With onsite factors in motion, it’s time to shift your focus to offsite strategy, focused on acquiring backlinks and brand mentions from authoritative websites.
Backlinks act as votes of confidence and proof of trust for your site. Backlinks are crucial SEO signals, acting as “votes” of confidence and authority for your website. Search engines view them as endorsements. While quantity matters, the quality and relevance of the linking domain are more critical. High-quality backlinks establish E-E-A-T and are fundamental for achieving high SERP rankings.
Unlinked mentions of your brand also support SEO, and in particular for visibility in LLMs like ChatGPT, acting in a similar way to backlinks do for traditional search engines. LLMs rely on context, relevance, and authority, but they don’t use the PageRank system that Google Search does.
The good news is that both backlinks and brand mentions can be acquired via similar link building tactics, particularly via Digital PR.
The first step to starting a link building initiative (and assess how much effort is needed) is to compare your site’s current link profile against competitors, which can be done using tools like AHREFs, SEMrush or Majestic.
These tools allow you to compare what sites link to one another and even pinpoint the specific pages with these links. Analysing these will give you an idea of the kinds of approaches that work in your industry.
9. Develop Digital PR and Link Building Tactics
Your competitor research can then feed into defining your own strategy. Use your competitor insights to build a tailored strategy that leverages your unique advantages. Below are some of the approaches we’ve used in the past:
Leveraging Your Unique Link Assets
A good starting point is to leverage opportunities that competitors cannot replicate, but are relevant to your industry. Some examples include:
- Supplier and Vendor Relationships: Suppliers and key vendors often have “Partners” or “Resources” pages where they might feature client or partner links. Reaching out to these established contacts is a high-trust, low-effort way to secure valuable links.
- Personal and Professional Networks: Your business network may include others who have the ability to link, for example journalists, writers, or even other marketers working at non-competing companies also working in your industry. A simple, personalised email explaining the mutual benefit of a link exchange or resource mention can be highly effective.
- Industry Memberships and Accreditations: If your company belongs to professional associations, chambers of commerce, or has received industry accreditations, these organisations sometimes provide directory listings or resource pages that can include a link to your website.
Reactive PR
While long-term content strategies are crucial, successful SEO roadmaps also incorporate agile and proactive link-building tactics that capitalise on immediate opportunities. A good starting point is to join a platform like Qwoted, where journalists seek expert sources to cite in their articles.
Responding to journalist queries can yield highly authoritative links from major news outlets and industry publications that are often difficult to secure through standard outreach.
There are generally three keys to success we see:
- Be available and respond promptly: Deadlines are often around 2-3 days, but can close in a matter of hours if good responses are received early. That means being able to provide a quote quickly.
- Avoid AI: Journalists are swamped with AI responses to their requests, and some will also insist on a phone call to verify the source is genuine.
- Build a relationship: Platforms like Qwoted are an opportunity to continue working with the journalists that use your commentary. You can ask them what else they are working on and if you can send them similar insights in future to become one of their trusted resources.
Original Data and Proprietary Research
One of the most effective and sustainable ways to earn high-quality links is by creating content based on unique, proprietary data that doesn’t exist anywhere else.
- Source Newsworthy First-Party Data: Look inside your company for untapped datasets. This might include proprietary survey results from your user base, trend data extracted from your sales and marketing activities, or even data from 3rd party suppliers that you’ve analysed in a new and interesting way.
- Create Unique Data Studies: Turn this raw data into compelling studies, reports, or industry benchmarks. Journalists and content creators crave original statistics to back up their articles.
Strategic Co-Branding
Strategic partnerships can open doors to new audiences and highly relevant link opportunities that pass significant authority.
- Consider Co-Branded Partnerships: Identify non-competing businesses that share the same target audience. Collaborate on initiatives like joint webinars, shared white papers, co-hosting a podcast series, or creating a combined research report.
- Guest Posting and Content Swap Opportunities: A partnership can facilitate a more high-value guest posting strategy where you exchange well-researched, authoritative articles on each other’s websites.
10. Deliver Digital PR Campaigns, Test, and Iterate
Finally, ramp up your outreach efforts. Start simple by beginning with easy-to-deliver campaigns like responsive PR and supplier links, particularly if it’s the first time you’ve run a link building campaign.
To broaden your efforts, determine which campaigns require external support and where you need to build internal skillsets. Continuous testing and iteration are key to finding the specific PR angles that resonate with your industry.
Wrapping up
A successful SEO roadmap is not a “one and done” task; it is a living strategy that evolves as you gain more data and authority. By following this 10-step process, you ensure that every piece of content you produce and every technical fix you implement is driving you toward your commercial goals.
Would you like us to help you build or audit your 2026 SEO roadmap? Get in touch with Atkinson Smith Digital today to start defining your path to organic growth.