Last Updated on 2 years by Christopher Jan Benitez

Every business needs a plan to succeed.

And when it comes to maximizing your online reach, you will need a marketing plan.

But you have to be even more specific than that as there are different ways to promote your business.

Therefore, if you want to rank higher on organic search for your keywords, an SEO marketing plan is the ticket!

In this post, you will learn:

• What a marketing plan is all about
• The different goals of a marketing plan
• Reasons you need one for your small business

What is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a road map on how you propose to promote your products or services to your target market.

There are many types of plans for different small businesses. With SEO, a great example is found in SE Ranking.

Alt text: SE Ranking business marketing plan

Its marketing plan covers the following SEO factors:

• Keyword research – Identify keywords related to your business that you should optimize for your website
• On-page optimization – Set up tracking codes to analyze and measure your site’s traffic and conversions. Also fix your site structure to help search spiders crawl your pages much easier.
• Mobile optimization – Ensure that visitors can properly view your website on mobile devices. That means your site must have a responsive design to adjust to the size of the device’s screen size.
• Content strategy – Learn how to create content that search engines and your target audience will love. Includes developing a content marketing strategy using your blog.
• Off-page optimization – Increase off-page signals such as building backlinks and citations. These help the search engine to index your pages faster and better
• Social media strategy – Leverage social signals to your site that could help increase your organic search rankings

These factors help you gain a better understanding about your site’s SEO.

From here, you can develop a marketing campaign based on what you’ve accomplished in the checklist.

Purpose of the marketing plan

The goal of a marketing plan is to increase your visibility in your market. If done right, you can see an uptick in engagement with your brand, if not an increase in sales and revenue.

Unlike others, the great thing about an SEO marketing plan is the ability to scale and measure the fruits of your labor. We will talk about this in a bit.

Why you need a marketing plan

I already touched upon some of the reasons why you need a marketing plan for your business. But it’s best to list them down here so you know the benefits of a successful marketing strategy.

Leverage online assets

If SEO isn’t part of your marketing mix yet, then now’s the time to integrate it.

Almost everybody uses their mobile devices and laptops to find solutions for their problems.

And if your site is what they’re looking for, then they can visit your site and become your clients.

But that won’t happen unless you don’t optimize your website for organic search!

By creating a marketing plan geared towards improving your SEO (if not your digital marketing campaign), your website can shoot on top of Google search.

As a result, more people will see your site on search engine results pages (SERPs), leading to more clicks to your site.

Fortify your site’s foundations

For starters, you want your site to have a clear hierarchical structure and pages optimized for low-hanging fruit keywords.

However, doing that without a step-by-step process to guide you is tough.

An SEO marketing plan will lay out the details for you so you don’t have to scramble for information.

The marketing plan should also be easy enough to understand and follow even if you have zero experience in SEO.

Because setting up an optimized site is hard enough.

Plus, you don’t want to conflicting information about SEO in your research. Best to have the details in your marketing plan so you can simply worry about improving your site.

Using SE Ranking, you can click on the “How to” button to show the exact process of doing a task.

Establish clear business goals

But before you develop your website, you need to have a goal in mind.

Answer this question:

What do you want visitors to do once they’re on your website?

As you know, visitors don’t amount to anything if you don’t have a call to action.

So, if they’re not on your site to subscribe to your email marketing list or buy a product or service, then what’s the point?

You want to assign a dollar value on your SEO campaign.

Therefore, a marketing plan helps you determine measurable goals to make sense of your small business marketing.

From here, you can use the data gathered by your analytics tools to track your process.

See in the results if you are hitting your goals. If not, tweak your campaign to make sure it is going according to plan.

Develop marketing strategies

By breaking down the factors in your SEO marketing plan, you can scale your business using different strategies.

Bulk of your marketing strategy will deal with off-page optimization.

Backlinks are the most crucial ranking factor for your site. The more high-quality links you can generate for your site, the better your site will rank.

However, links from authoritative sites take time to acquire. You’ll have to jump through several hoops to earn that link.

While link building presents certain challenges, your marketing plan should help make things easier.

It provides you a full view of your site’s current progress in SEO. Therefore, having access to your plan gives you ideas on how to approach your upcoming strategies.

For example, you can compare your existing link profile with your competitors and see links they have that you don’t yet.

You can then plot up a campaign where you try and acquire missing backlinks to boost your link profile.

Ensure the success of your business

Simply put, your marketing plan helps you achieve your goals and grow your business faster.

Without a plan, you don’t have marketing objectives laid out for you.

Therefore, you do not know which factors to prioritize and strategies to run for your site.

Not to mention, an SEO marketing plan allows you to track and measure the organic traffic you’re generating.

Use the data available at your fingertips to determine which campaigns to launch and maximize your growth.

Turn your marketing plan for SEO into action with SE Ranking

Now you know the value that a small business marketing plan brings to the table. But you should also know a plan isn’t the same as a marketing campaign for your site’s SEO.

The plan only gives you an idea of what you need to do to attract more organic visitors to your website. So, if you want to put your plan into action, you need a strategy or campaign.

As business owners, however, developing an SEO marketing campaign requires you to have access to data about your website.

You must know how much traffic you are generating, where you’re getting them, and how you can get even more.

From here, you will have all the information you need to help you achieve business growth online.

Aside from giving you access to an SEO marketing plan, SE Ranking also does:

Track your rankings

See how high you’re ranking for your target keywords over time based on your current SEO campaign

Monitor your backlinks

Identify the most valuable backlinks your site has and keep track of their status. If you lose the link, avoid losing your site rankings by asking the site owner to restore it.

Analyze your competitors

Check out how your competitors are faring, which keywords they are ranking for, and how strong their link profiles are. You can also spy on their strategy and figure out why they are so successful so you can emulate it on your site.

Research for keywords

Find low-hanging fruit keywords that your site should optimize for to rank for them and increase your organic traffic.

Run an on-site audit

Let the tool analyze your site for errors and areas of improvement. This ensures that your site is in tip-top shape and is optimized to rank for SERPs.

The audit also paves way for the tool to monitor the changes on your website. Doing so lets you keep track of all the changes in a period and revert back to the old version if necessary to restore a page’s ranking.