What Is the Difference Between SEO Strategy and SEO Tactics?

Knowing the distinction between strategy and tactics is critical. It's much more important for the team to adopt the same vocabulary.

My company was acquired by another digital marketing firm in early 2019.

One of the first things my team and I noticed about our new office was how our new coworkers used the word "strategy" differently than we did.

That got me wondering about how we use vocabulary in general, and whether or not the SEO community as a whole utilizes it appropriately.

If I were to summarise the key distinction between strategy and tactics, I would state that:

Then why is it at the heart of strategy?

Techniques for how to do it.

Then I asked my new coworkers for their opinions, and I received some fantastic responses:

Multiple techniques make create a strategy. Patrick Willoughby

The planning is the approach... The tactics, on the other hand, are the specific activities you do to carry out the plan. Claudia Miller is a writer.

The strategy is the overall plan, and the tactics are the specific actions that will be taken to carry out that plan. Megan Mars is a writer.

Procedure without strategies is the slowest course to triumph. Strategies without procedure are the clamor before rout. - Sun Tzu

That is exactly what I intended.

Consider the difference between bringing in general traffic to your website and bringing in focused visitors.

A technique can generate traffic, but a strategy-based method will generate focused traffic.

Without a plan, you can't have tactics... That's not true.

You can, but they are strategies developed in a scientific lab through a test tube, with no genuine parental guidance.

And, as we like to say in science, just because something is possible does not imply it should be done.

Without a plan, tactics are more likely to produce a bizarre concoction of Frankensteinian outcomes than anything that approaches a successful digital progeny.

Before and after tactics, there is strategy.

However, when I dug more into this concept, I learned that the boundary between tactics and strategies isn't always clear.

Things start to get a little confusing when you discover that tactics frequently require their plans.

Let me give you an illustration.

When I first began at the new firm, I saw that SEO, social media, usability, and PPC are all considered digital marketing methods that complement the overall plan.

My team, on the other hand, saw each of those "tactics" as a separate strategy that needed to be filled out. We don't just do them for the sake of doing them; we do them for a reason.

Who is correct?

Both.

Digital marketing may be viewed as a single method inside a wider corporate growth plan, depending on how you look at it.

There are several choices within that strategy. This implies you'll need a fresh plan to figure out which solutions are ideal for helping the company reach its objective through digital marketing.

A new SEO approach might emerge from that method.

However, SEO requires its plan since using SEO without a framework for attaining your objectives will not yield the desired results.

Title tag optimization, navigation optimization, and schema implementation are all good SEO methods, but they might backfire if they're not backed up by a plan that explains why they're being employed.

Strategy Tactics to Begin Begin your strategy.

If I had to explain the relationship between strategy and tactics in biblical words — specifically, King James English – it would go like this: Goals begat strategy, which begat tactics, which begat more strategy, which begat more tactics, and so on.

Let's imagine a website's aim over the following 12 months is to increase sales by 10%. The first stage is to devise a plan for achieving your objective. This might involve the following strategies:

• Optimization using natural means.
• Advertising that is paid for.
• Optimization of the user experience on your website
• Marketing on social media.

That is not, however, the entire approach. You must examine each approach and consider how you will employ it to attain the set goal.

Organic optimization, for example, necessitates its approach, which may include the following extra tactics:

• Improvements to the site's architecture.
• On-page SEO is what it's called.
• Optimization on a local level.
• Creating a network of connections.

The next step is to examine the strategy for each of these strategies to see whether another approach is required.

Take, for example, on-page SEO. What does that look like in practice?

And, lo and behold, more strategies are on the way, including optimizing:

1. Titles.
2. Descriptions.
3. URLs.
4. Breadcrumbs.
5. Content.

Moreover, several of these approaches necessitate their own strategy:

What format will you use for your titles and descriptions?

Will the URLs and breadcrumbs have a consistent structure? What exactly is it?

Will all of the information be written in the same tone?

What methods will be used to integrate calls to action?

If you don't have a plan for each method, you could end up "optimizing" without having any consistency.

That may work for a single page, but it's unlikely to help you reach your overall aim. Or, to put it another way, tactics without a strategy may win a battle, but they will not win a war.

In the end, whether you take the effort to design a strategy or not, the actions you perform may be the same. However, the outcome will be different.

You have nothing to judge your performance against if you don't have a strategy. You've got traffic, but is it the correct kind of traffic? Was it profitable, too?

"If you aim at nothing, you'll hit it every time," as the saying goes. Without a strategy, this is the core of internet marketing.

SEO strategies may be implemented by anyone. They're aiming for nothing if they don't have a strategy.

It may appear to be the same, and you may be charged the same, but believe me when I say it isn't. It's more like doing something just to do something.

You could have a few victories here and there, but no driving principle assures your strategies are leading you to the best potential results.

The importance of strategy cannot be overstated.

If you ask me now what the difference between a strategy and a tactic is, I'd answer a strategy is a collection of shifting tactics utilized to achieve a stated objective with the highest potential return on investment.

The tactics should always be driven by the plan (as well as the strategies for those tactics).

You can opt to apply tactics without first developing a sound plan, but you'll never get the desired outcome.