SEO Strategy vs. SEO Strategic Goals
SEO Strategic Goals can be understood as the topics a website should appear for in search engines in order to be considered truly present in its niche.
SEO Strategy, in turn, is the clear and deliberate plan that defines how that website will reach those goals.
To draft a solid SEO strategy, here’s a practical starting point:
- Recognize the search patterns of the queries you want the website to rank for
- Understand which page templates should serve each subset of that query universe
Every niche has its own particularities, and for obvious reasons, those nuances can only be addressed case by case.
Still, there are recurring characteristics, behaviors, expectations, and structural “shapes” shared by almost every triangulation between the user, the search query, and the webpage.
🔍 The focus of user intent
Search queries naturally move from broad to narrow.
A useful way to visualize this movement, and connect it to SEO strategy, is to think in terms of zoom levels:
- Zoom-out pages help exploration (home, categories, lists)
- Zoom-in pages help precision (articles, products, single media pages)
When someone performs a broad search, they expect a page capable of exposing as much of the website’s content inventory as possible related to that topic.
The right templates for this type of query are those that offer multiple entry points to content.
This pairing between broad queries and zoom-out pages tends to show:
- A high bounce rate is bad, since the expected behavior is exploratory
- Queries with 1–2 terms, often abstract nouns
- The highest search volume in the niche
- Alignment with Google’s “Know” queries framing
🔎 Narrow queries and focused pages
For narrow queries, the logic flips.
Here, the user knows exactly what they want.
The template that best serves this intent should focus on a single editorial cut at a time.
These templates usually look like:
- Article pages
- News articles
- Single video pages
- Single photo pages
- Product pages
At this point, precision beats breadth — and clarity beats navigation.