What is SEO strategy?
- Bohdan Lytvyn
- August 18, 2025
- 11:17 am
KEY TERMS
SEO strategy
Business strategy
Wasteless SEO
SEO metrics
TARGET AREAS
eCommerce
Strategic situations
Value Stream
SEO waste identification
CONSULTING
SEO value review
SEO strategy audit
GTM Strategy
Defining the strategy
According to the formal theory of strategy, a strategy is a smallest set of choices that optimally guides other choices.
This definition has the core terms of:
- a set of choices and
- being able to optimally guide others.
This means that building a strategy is building a mathematical function of virtually any process that can possibly be optimized to exclude residual values and improve transmission of information etc. The goal of the optimization is to have the smallest number of data points (variables) that would have the impact on other variables, i.e. require the least possible number of interactions between them. For an organization its fastest route to the goal of improving Customer Value.
In the philosophical sense strategy is a “mind game” that aims to acquire an advantage over the counterpart as well as gain the formal right to justify the advantage. This concept emphasises the regulation of reality through socially acceptable means, saying that a strategy might be a game but it is played by rules and the winner must necessarily be recognized as such by right.
Lean manufacturing, Toyota Production System (TPS) and Shingo Model envisage all processes as a flow (stream) with waste (Japanese: muda). Cutting of waste is an objective of continuous improvement and the strategy to achieve this lies in designing the process such as to reduce strain and inconsistency. Waste reduction results in an advantage over competitor(s), which aligns it with both philosophical, military (not directly discussed here) and formal theory definitions of strategy.
SEO strategy definition
SEO strategy is a plan or a sequence of choices made to cut the waste of the process of value delivery involving the discovery of documents through search engines. The object of the strategy, thus, is the process of production and consumption of content of documents: website pages or URLs.
A search engine is a keeper of the shelf (inventory) of documents that uses available data to build ranking signals that increase the probability of satisfying the end customer who takes the document from the shelf and consumes its value. The search engines use algorithms to:
- access the documents,
- retrieve the information,
- index it, and finally
- rank and serve the documents to be displayed in search results.
Cutting the waste includes identifying and challenging the wasted steps in the value stream. This would make the value flow continuously through the value added steps only (responds to the 2 and 3rd principle of “Lean thinking”)
The objectives of SEO strategy
- Being guided by what adds value only.
- Ensuring the process flexibility to avoid strains and overburdens.
- Reduced number of steps in the process of value delivery.
- Reduced degree of uncertainty as regards action of other business units, i.e. better internal alignment.
- More consistency and stability in content production and consumption stream, a balanced flow.
Principle concepts and methodologies of SEO strategy
- Reduction of waste.
- Balanced flow, a balance between production and consumption.
- Customer, any recipient of value, internal and external. Includes multiple relevant stakeholders that span the supply and value chains and beyond, e.g. user, consumer, etc.
- Flexibility as a way to reduce “muri”, strain or overburden.
- Optimal equals Wasteless.
- To guide means make consistence, reduction of “mura” (inconsistency).
What is a strategy: a game or a model?
Strategy can be witnessed in a game or model. It goes perfectly under a definition of a game because it has participants, rules as well as goals and constraints.
High level constraints in strategy games are:
- Uncertainty and its implications
- Moves of strategists (also called choices or announcements of choices)
- Resources and capabilities etc.
The rules include the existence of players (strategists) who possess a certain way of making choices, e.g. they are not made chaotically, but as informed by an order of acquiring information (also called investigating). Yet, full information is rarely available for players.
Business strategy may be thought of as a model to predict the outcomes of internal and external interactions, whose objective is to improve a business performance versus the competition.
Alternatively, it is a model of interactions between units (collectively, an organisation) that aim at arriving at a best possible consistency in performance using the least possible number of interactions vis a vis the competition.
The strategy model participants:
- Set of business units who engage in interactions to share the information etc and collectively form a firm A.
- Counterpart, a firm B.
This implies internal and external dimensions of a strategy.
Necessary elements to the strategy
Strategy might be described as having the following elements:
- Uncertainty or information inadequacy.
- Cost of investigating to reduce uncertainty.
- Choice.
- Announcement of choice (and cost of announcement).
- Value of choice(s) or the value of strategy.
The strategist is a person who investigates the state of things, and announces choices. Business units are - by definition - isolated and don’t have the fullness of information required to make a choice.
Existence of the cost of investigation is a constraint of any business strategy model, without it modelling does not make sense. Other constraints might be: time (number of moves), resources and capabilities. Finally, strategy implies [existence of] “no strategy”.
Strategy vs No-strategy situations
No strategy situation is the one where strategy is not announced (thought it might nominally exist). This is to emphasize that only announcing a strategy, which implies a cost of announcement, makes strategy happen.
Insofar as announcement requires interacting between business units, it requires a certain level of initial internal alignment. Subsequent internal alignment is a consequence of the announcement of strategy. So, “no strategy” situations happen when no attempt is made to guide interactions in a firm toward a certain choice or it is made impossible due to several conflicting strategies.
How does a strategy manifest itself?
How does strategy manifest itself? How do we say that there is a certain strategy somewhere? So, for a strategy to be existent or manifested or expressed means to have 1) a set of choices 2) to be performed in a certain sequence that are 3) bound by a certain design and 4) obey to constraint, the basic of which is availability of at least one identifiable competitor.
Strategy is a multi-player game, so there must be at least one competitor or adversary to play a strategy game or to implement a strategy. Yet, strategy can be targeted inwards: for example, continuous improvement is a principle of inward-bound strategy that includes interaction within other units internally and only pre-supposed existence of a competition.
When do we need a strategy?
Strategy as a decision making tool is used in situations of uncertainty, scarcity of resources (“do more with less”) and inadequacy of information in order to optimize choices.
SEO optimization targets and their examples
SEO targets, achievable through reduction of waste in the process of value delivery, depend on a design of the organisation’s value stream. For example, where the maximum waste happens in the step of shipping the produced document to the search engine’s result page, a firm’s SEO target (and measurable result metric) might be to have more documents ranked in a search engine than competitor(s), which implies cutting off the shipping waste.
Here the relevant way to measure success is to count the number of documents ranked, which may produce to the SEO metric of a “Ratio of published to ranked documents”. Alternatively, where the applicable success index is “quality”, a SEO metric might be “Number of found search terms per document published”. Finally, compound metrics, e.g. involving other metrics outside of SEO alone, might also apply as SEO targets. For example, “Cost per a ranked document” or “Cost per clicked document”, etc. This shows that SEO strategy might have an array of target parameters as regards which optimization occurs.
SEO metric(s)
The parameters for optimization are often called metrics and they are important for measuring if the SEO strategy is effective. Metrics pertain to types of waste that a SEO strategist deals with.
Internal and external dimensions of SEO strategy
SEO strategy has two dimensions, internal and external. Naturally, SEO strategy (like any strategy) regards the competition. In extreme, every strategy is targeted externally. Yet, in practice, strategy may be used internally to optimize the speed of experimenting,
communication around sharing knowledge etc. and most importantly -- used as a decision making tool.
Measuring results also presupposes the existence of external competition. Without a competitor at a sight, it’s hard to build a resource allocation model, and, thus, optimize any process.
Search engine as a stakeholder
Search engines are regarded as customers in the SEO strategy, i.e. they become stakeholders of the processes of production & distribution of content and factual consumers of documents produced by the organization. This consumption occurs through accessing, crawling, retrieving, indexation as well as serving and organizing the documents sources on their search results pages (SERP). Indeed, the SERP itself as well as the AI-mode view of it is a derivative result of a process of analysing and systematization of documents produced by organization: it is a logical step of transformation and adding value to the end consumer.
This stakeholder relations imply value exchange, measuring results and effectiveness of this exchange.
Strategic relationship with a purchaser: rivalry or dependence
We presume that there will be two principal relations: strategic rivalry or strategic dependency on the search engine. These are two extreme states. And then when there's not so much information about something in Google, then we probably are rivals. So we co-depend and we need each other.
When there's a bunch of the like documents in Google, like in or e-commerce for Nike sneakers search query, we are not. A search engine doesn't depend on any other e-commerce shop. Google is someone who plays its own game, who defines the rule, and this is strategic dependency.
Strategic situations in SEO
On the basis of each particular rivalry and dependency distinction, there can be constructed a matrix of strategic situations. I call it the SEO strategy Bingo. I have dedicated a whole course to SEO strategy. If you're interested, please let me know, I will give a link to it.
It is important to emphasize that SEO strategy is not a “catch all” word. Instead, it brings tangible results and represents a mathematical function of optimization: whatever we decide is meaningful for us, we call a metric and optimization works towards this metric in the presence of a competitor, like an extreme case or whatever internal goal we may use, e.g. for optimizing decision making.
This is what strategy is in SEO. It's important for large, medium or even small businesses where competition is tight and where uncertainty is high. This perception of the strategy may be instrumental in understanding what actually your SEO agency or your specialist is doing.