Crafting a strong SEO strategy to dominate rankings
**Updated 10th October 2026**
Each year, SEO experts predict what the next big thing in SEO will be.
In reality, no one knows what it will be. So, in this guide to a strong SEO strategy, I’ll focus on what is working now, so you can create an SEO strategy tailored to your specific business goals.
Post summary:
How AI search changes this strategy
What is an SEO strategy?
Why a strong SEO strategy is still important for your business
12 SEO strategies that work remarkably well
How AI search changes this strategy
When I first wrote this guide, a strong SEO strategy meant ranking in Google. That is still true, yet it no longer describes the whole job. Google now shows AI Overviews and AI Mode above and around the standard results, and people ask ChatGPT and other assistants questions that once went into a search box. OpenAI has confirmed that ChatGPT can answer from its own indexed and cached web content, which I explain in ChatGPT has its own search index.
Three things follow from that.
Visibility and clicks are separating. A page can be cited in an AI answer and send no visitors at all. Our article on AI citation tracking explains how to monitor this. Search Console now has a Generative AI report that shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode, although it does not show clicks, so treat high impressions with flat clicks as visibility and not as demand.
The work that earns citations overlaps heavily with good SEO. Assistants quote pages that answer a question directly and early, in plain language, with clear headings, accurate figures and a named author. Strategies 4, 5, 6 and 12 below form the foundation. What changes is how much weight to give structure, original information that other pages lack, and being present wherever your audience asks questions. Our guide to answer engine optimisation for content teams goes further.
Measurement has to widen. Rankings and clicks still matter, though they now sit beside AI citations, branded searches, direct visits and enquiries.
This quarter I would do the following.
Check that your robots.txt, firewall and CDN are ’t blocking the crawlers AI search relies on.
Rewrite your most important pages so each one leads with the answer and then supports it.
Add FAQ sections that answer real customer questions in two or three sentences.
Track AI citations alongside rankings.
Pair organic work with paid search where AI answers have taken clicks from valuable queries.
If you would like help applying this, our SEO team works on both rankings and AI citations, and our content writing service builds pages designed to be quoted.
What is an SEO strategy?
An SEO strategy is a roadmap for search engine optimisation activities, mapped out in clear steps. Understanding search volume is crucial to an SEO strategy because it helps you determine which keywords can drive significant traffic to a site. It is a long-term but effective solution to drive pre-qualified traffic to websites, improve visitor conversion rates and boost website rankings and revenue.
Why a strong SEO strategy should be at the core of your online business?
SEO isn’t an exact science; if it were, then we’d all be doing it. Knowing how to rank higher in search engine results is a closely guarded secret. That said, certain strategies, when used consistently, greatly increase the likelihood of higher rankings and more organic traffic.
These strategies are learned through trial and error tactics that SEO experts use, and it is these tactics that are paying off – but there is a caveat: the more you try to beat the system, the more search engines adapt their algorithms to battle those more unscrupulous tactics.
Understanding search intent is crucial to aligning your content with what users want, which can significantly improve your rankings and user engagement.
These are based on the team’s experience and the latest research from SEO experts.
#1 Optimise for Google's mobile-first index
Mobile optimisation has mattered for years, since Mobilegeddon in 2015, highlighting a crucial aspect of on-page SEO. By 2016, mobile overtook desktop, with mobile and tablet accounting for 60% of all web browsing.
Then in November 2016 Google announced the launch of mobile-first indexing. What this means is that previously, Google crawled the desktop version of a site, using that as their primary search engine index. With this update, Google now uses the mobile version of a site as its primary index. In other words, Google will consider the mobile version of your site the “real” version, even if someone searches from a desktop.
So, ensure that you prioritise your mobile site for content and its design is responsive.
Mobile-first indexing is now how Google indexes every site, so a responsive design is the baseline and not an advantage. Google also retired its Mobile-Friendly Test in late 2023, so use the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console or Lighthouse to check pages. A mobile-first website makes this simple.
#2 Speed up your site
For years, Google has emphasised site speed. With the introduction of the mobile-first index site speed will be more important than ever.
Google again emphasised this importance for websites, especially those with e-commerce websites, and found that those that load in 5 seconds or less received 2 times more revenue than competitors. The same research found that 53% of mobile site visits were abandoned if pages took longer than 3 seconds to load.
Use Google's PageSpeed Insights to find out your website's page speed on both mobile and desktop.
#3 Pay attention to user experience signals
Google announced that RankBrain was their third most important ranking factor. RankBrain is a machine learning system that helps Google sort its search engine results pages (SERPS).
RankBrain focuses on two factors:
How long someone spends on a page (known as Dwell Time).
The percentage of people who click on a result (Click-Through Rate or CTR).
Dwell time matters because if a visitor clicks a #4 result and stays on the page for several minutes, Google sees it as highly relevant. Is a visitor clicks on the #1 result but leaves the page in seconds, Google will then boot this result from the #1 position. Google has always stressed relevancy, and if visitors don't stay long enough on web pages, Google deems them irrelevant.
If pages have an above-average CTR, RankBrain uses this as a sign that the page should get a permanent ranking boost. This is hardly surprising. After all, if no one clicks on a search result, why would Google keep it on the first page?
Similarly, if a result is getting clicked on like there's no tomorrow, why would Google keep it buried at the bottom of the page?
#4 Optimise for featured snippets in search engine results pages
Featured snippets, or rich answers, now account for over 20% of search inquiries. If you want your content to appear for common industry-related questions, you need to intentionally optimise for these queries.
Google is now crowding out the organic search results with these Answer Boxes, Ads, Carousels, “People also ask” sections and more. According to WordStream, organic listing results are now seeing a 37% drop in CTR.
There are a number of ways you can do this, including explicitly ask the question in your content, providing a direct answer even including the question at least one of your headers. Another top tip is to provide Q&A lists to satisfy the “People also ask” sections of SERPS.
#5 Optimise for Voice Search
You could argue that Voice Search is still in its infancy, yet when you think about, we use Voice Search in one of two ways - find apps and information inside our smartphones; and to find information on the internet.
With “People also ask” sections and Google Answer Boxes, Voice Search is only going to become more important. Since 2008, Google voice searches has increased by 35 times, with 20% of them done on mobile.
Knowing this, SEO experts are beginning to optimise their content for voice search - by ensuring the content is included in a featured snippet. (See step #4). You can read this excellent guide on how to optimise for Voice Search here.
#6 Aim for topical, in-depth, written content *and* context with keyword research
Previously, search engines would analyse pages to see how many times a specific keyword would be used and whether this was added in certain tags and images, known as technical or on-site SEO. For example, your page would be crawled to determine whether your target keywords appeared in:
Title tag
URL
Meta description
Image ALT text
H1/H2 tags
This is still important, but search engine crawlers are getting smarter. Not only do they measure the content of your web page but the context. What this means is that to avoid showing shallow content to web visitors, search engines are now checking whether the content on the page has an in-depth knowledge of the topic concerned.
To write comprehensive, in-depth evergreen content, according to Brian Dean of Backlinko, it should be at least 2,000 words long and be inserted with Latent Semantic Indexing keywords (LSI, also known as secondary keywords). LSI keywords are words and phrases that are strongly associated with your page’s topic. When crawlers crawl the page, they see it as highly topical and well aligned with the title.
Lastly, Brian found that even pages that comprehensively covered a particular topic outranked shorter content that was highly optimised for a certain keyword - even when the comprehensive page didn’t use that particular keyword at all. Use this LSI tool to add secondary topical keywords to your content.
Source: https://backlinko.com/search-engine-ranking
#7 Optimise your URL structure
Descriptive, keyword-relevant URLs have been an effective SEO strategy for years. However, some research seems to indicate that using shorter URLs may actually lead to higher rankings.
While there's no set number of words you should include, Google has indicated in the past that it gives less credit to anything after the first five words. This isn’t surprising, as search engines crawl the beginning of a URL to check relevance against the search term.
Plus, you should remove stop words like ‘a', ‘of', ‘the' - search engine algorithms do not read them and they waste valuable URL space that could be scanned for a keyword.
Whenever possible, put your primary keywords in the first few words of your URL so it makes sense as a search term, and keep the URL to around five words total.
#8 Structured data and Schema.org
Search engines, in order to read websites, need to be able to read it easily. Google is pretty good at analysing the context of a website’s content. When it comes to reading a page, search engine crawlers usually need some assistance to find the most valuable information for a searcher.
Structured data is information you add to your website to help search engines understand it. Each blog post should be optimized for structured data to enhance its visibility and relevance in search engine results.
Structured data is a general term that refers to any organised data that conforms to a certain format, it is not only for SEO. When search engines read your website, they want to know if a piece of content is relevant - it could be to a job advertisement, blog article or a product offering.
If you want rich snippets, mobile rich cards, AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) or a listing in Google’s knowledge graph, you’ll need to mark up your pages with Schema.org. Unless SEOs are coding experts, this can be daunting, but Google Search Console has a data highlighter that lets site owners click and drag structured data, but only if the site has a few things to mark up, like products and blog articles.
Correctly implementing structured data might not give you better rankings, but it will indirectly make your site a better search result and increase dwell time and tell Google your web pages are relevant. Ahrefs provides more detail about structured data and its benefits.
Source: http://schema.org/Organization
#9 Adding video to your SEO strategy
Internet browsers show no sign of slowing their insatiable demand for video content. The rise of platforms including Snapchat, Instagram, Vine and Facebook videos are driving video content higher in their newsfeeds. And that's not forgetting YouTube, the world's second-largest search engine
YouTube is growing fast, people are taking to the video platform for not only entertainment but for “how-to videos” for a range of topics from how to wire plugs to user tutorials for software. 64% of consumers are more inclined to buy a product after seeing a video on it.
YouTube then, is a search engine that is too big to ignore as part of your SEO strategy. In fact, you've probably noticed that YouTube videos are appearing as part of your search results - and these surely are going to increase in the future.
The key takeaway here then is to embed videos into your content and boost your Dwell time (see step 3) so that viewers stay on your website for longer, boosting your rankings.
#10 Link building
Links have been one of the most important drivers of rankings for years now, significantly contributing to increasing organic traffic. Google has confirmed they’re one of the top three ranking factors (along with content and RankBrain). In the past, it was easy to obtain links by buying them from so-called “link farms” that would add your website domain to their websites. Google quickly caught on and “blacklisted” this practice. (Again, don’t try to cheat the system.)
Genuine backlinking then is very powerful for increasing domain strength. Higher ranking domains linking to websites act as a “vote of confidence” - passing on what Moz calls “link juice” and thus increasing the domain strength of that website (if the link is do follow). Higher domain strength increases URL strength - and this aids in SERPS when search inquiries are made.
The same with the opposite, if you have lower ranking or low confidence domains linking to a website, this will harm your rankings. Pornography websites are an example of low confidence domains.
If your content is not relevant or competitive, even adding high domain links won’t help your ranking so leave poor-performing content alone. If your content is pushing onto the lower echelons of page 1 of Google, then getting high-quality backlinks to that page could push it higher in the rankings.
Source https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building
#11 Local SEO is a must
Given the move toward a mobile-first mind-set, it's no surprise that many experts are placing increased emphasis on local search these days. If a website has a local presence, like restaurants, it must appear in local mobile searches.
More customers are using mobile to find local businesses, products and information, so ranking for local keywords is essential.
Google's 3 pack at the top of searches displays the top 3 results dependent on the localised search term. The move to the 3 pack was to better satisfy mobile browsing and include maps and reviews of local businesses.
Businesses outside the local SEO 3 pack saw a 40% drop in CTR. Adding critical keywords, plus location and contact details on your website, is vital to appear in these results if local websites are to stay at the top of the page.
#12 User intent is king
You've probably heard that “content is king” – but actually user intent is king. As the relationship between keywords and rankings weakens, optimising for intent becomes even more crucial.
A strong SEO strategy means focusing not just on specific keywords and writing entertaining, engaging and valuable content, but on the motivation behind those words and that content.
What are people actually looking for when they use those search queries? When they click on a search result, will they get the information they wanted? Can they navigate the website easily to find other information? Is it easy for them to complete an action? Whether they buy a product, sign up for an email list, or share a piece of content.
Consider which keywords drive conversions, not just traffic. Search engines want to show visitors relevancy for a specific search enquiry - if the visitor performs more actions on a website, this boosts the site’s rankings.
None of the tactics and tips mentioned above is anything new or even surprising. Experts have been using these strategies to boost rankings in response to the rapidly changing nature of SEO.
If you're planning a strong SEO strategy for 2026 and beyond, get a head start and incorporate these steps into your plan. Or contact the team for more advice.
