Our Approach to SEO Strategy

6 min read

Most SEO strategy documents we’ve reviewed for prospective clients start in the wrong place: a list of keywords, ranked by search volume, with a plan to write content around the highest-volume terms. It looks thorough. It’s usually the wrong starting point, because search volume tells you how many people are searching for something — it tells you nothing about whether those people are your customers, or whether ranking for that term will ever show up in your revenue.

Our approach starts somewhere else entirely: with the business.

Why Most SEO Strategy Fails Before It Starts

SEO strategy built purely on volume tends to chase broad, competitive, top-of-funnel terms because they look impressive in a proposal. The problem is that ranking #1 for a high-volume, low-intent keyword often delivers a lot of traffic and very little revenue — visitors who were never going to become customers, browsing rather than buying. We’ve seen businesses proudly report huge organic traffic growth to a board or investor, while sales stayed completely flat, for exactly this reason.

Start With the Business, Not the Keywords

Before touching a keyword tool, we spend time understanding the actual business: who the ideal customer is, what makes them decide to buy, where they get stuck in the consideration process, and — critically — which of your existing customers or leads were the most valuable, and what they searched for on the way to becoming a customer. This is the same principle that underpins good lead generation more broadly: define who you actually want, then build the strategy backwards from there, rather than starting from generic volume and hoping quality follows.

Our Four-Step Process

1. Audit

We start by understanding where a business genuinely stands today — not just a generic site audit, but real conversations with the business, and in many cases with its actual customers, to understand what’s actually driving decisions. Technical health, existing rankings, competitor positioning and current content all get reviewed here, but so does the commercial context: margins, sales cycle, and what a genuinely qualified lead looks like for this specific business.

2. SEO Strategy

This is where keyword research and content planning happen — but only once we understand purchase intent, not just search volume. A keyword with lower volume but obvious buying intent (“emergency plumber [suburb]” vs. “how plumbing works”) is usually worth more to a business than a term ten times the size that attracts browsers rather than buyers.

3. Weekly Backlinks & Content

Consistent, ongoing effort — both content built around the strategy and backlink and digital PR activity to build authority — rather than a burst of work followed by months of inactivity. SEO rewards consistency; the businesses that see it as a project with an end date tend to see gains plateau and then erode.

4. Technical SEO

Addressing whatever the audit surfaced — crawlability, indexing, site speed, Core Web Vitals — so the foundations support everything built on top of them. There’s limited value in a brilliant content and backlink strategy sitting on a site Google struggles to crawl properly in the first place.

Content Planning That Actually Follows the Strategy

A common failure point is a strategy document that gets approved, filed away, and never quite translates into what actually gets published. We build content plans directly off the keyword and intent research from the strategy stage, mapped to funnel stage — awareness content for broader, earlier-stage searches, comparison and case study content for the consideration stage, and highly specific, conversion-focused content for the small number of high-intent, bottom-of-funnel terms that tend to matter most commercially. Each piece of content has a clear job to do in that map, rather than existing because it seemed like a reasonable topic in isolation.

How We Measure Success

Rankings and organic traffic are useful diagnostic metrics, but they’re not the scorecard we ultimately report against. We track organic leads, organic-attributed revenue, and — where the data supports it — cost per qualified organic lead, applying the same commercial lens we use across paid media. A ranking that never converts into a lead or a sale is a vanity metric, however good it looks in a monthly report.

A Simple Example

Consider two candidate keyword targets for a mid-sized accounting firm: “what is a balance sheet” (high volume, almost entirely browsers and students) versus “outsourced CFO services for growing businesses” (a fraction of the volume, but nearly every searcher is a genuine prospective client). A volume-led strategy chases the first term because it looks better in a keyword research tool. A commercially-led strategy recognises that ranking for the second term, even with far less traffic, is worth considerably more to the business — because almost everyone who finds it is close to being a qualified lead.

SEO Strategy Looks Different for B2B vs B2C

A B2B business, similar to how we approach paid media, is usually optimising for a smaller number of highly qualified organic leads, often with a longer content journey — comparison guides, case studies, and considered-purchase content that supports a multi-stakeholder decision. A B2C business is more often optimising for volume and purchase-ready intent at scale, with content built around product and category pages, local intent, and faster-moving seasonal or trend-driven topics. The keyword research process is the same; what counts as a genuinely valuable keyword target looks different depending on which side of that line a business sits.

SEO Doesn't Sit in Isolation

Organic and paid media should be informing each other, not running as two separate, disconnected programs. Paid search data tells you, in near real time, which keywords and messages actually convert — that’s valuable intelligence for an organic content strategy. Conversely, organic content that ranks well can inform which audiences and messages are worth testing in paid campaigns. We build SEO strategy as part of a connected marketing program, not a channel that operates in its own silo.

Setting Realistic Expectations

SEO strategy also has to include an honest conversation about timeframe. Meaningful results typically take three to six months to become visible, and can take longer in genuinely competitive categories — there’s no legitimate way to compress that into a few weeks, no matter how good the strategy is. Part of a proper SEO strategy is setting this expectation clearly upfront, alongside the interim leading indicators (indexation, early ranking movement on lower-competition terms, technical health improvements) that show the work is on track well before organic leads and revenue start showing up in the numbers.

The Bottom Line

A commercially-driven SEO strategy looks less impressive on paper than a spreadsheet of high-volume keywords, because it’s deliberately narrower and more targeted. It also tends to actually move revenue, which is the only metric that matters once the reporting period is over. If your current SEO strategy is a list of keywords with no clear line back to leads or sales, that’s the gap worth closing first.
Talk to Medium Marketing about an SEO strategy built around your business, not a generic keyword list.

About

Ethan Caldwell

Reflective Blogger

Dinesh Arasaratnam

Fractional Leader

Dinesh Arasaratnam is the founder of Medium Marketing, a performance marketing agency helping mid-to-large businesses drive growth through strategy, systems, and fractional CMO support. He has advised clients across sectors like energy, eCommerce, SaaS, and education, with a focus on data-driven decision-making and marketing efficiency.

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