The word “strategy” is the most abused term in search marketing. Read ten articles titled “What is an SEO Strategy” and nine of them describe the same thing: do keyword research, put the keywords on the page, write the title tags, and build high-quality external links. But that isn’t a strategy — that’s just a description of SEO tactics.
It’s like a clothing company describing their strategy as: “we’ll lease some retail space, stock it with products, and sell them to customers for a profit.” That tells you nothing about why this business should win. A real SEO/AEO strategy is about what you do differently from everyone else chasing the same customers — your positioning, your market, your pricing, the ground you choose to fight on.
Search is no different. And as answer engines and generative search (AEO and GEO) reshape how people find things, the businesses that win won’t be the ones with the most tactics checked off — they’ll be the ones who made sharper strategic choices about who they serve, where, and where they refuse to play.
How to tell strategy from tactics
Here’s a filter you can apply to anything in an SEO/AEO plan: if everyone in your market is already doing it, it’s a tactic, not a strategy. Writing title tags is table stakes. Having a clean site structure is table stakes. These are things you do anyway — they don’t differentiate you, so they can’t be your strategy.
Strategy is the set of deliberate choices that separate your approach from the competitor down the street who is also “doing SEO.” The test below makes the distinction concrete.
| Sounds like strategy (but isn't) | Actually strategy |
|---|---|
| “We'll do keyword research.” | “We'll target workout-shirt buyers searching by fabric and fit — and skip the generic ‘men's shirts' war with Amazon.” |
| “We'll write optimized title tags.” | “We'll win Region B first, where competition is thin, before spending against the 10-year incumbent in Region A.” |
| “We'll build some backlinks.” | “We'll point guaranteed placements at the three pages with the most upside, timed two months before peak season.” |
| “We're going to do SEO.” | “Here's who we serve, where we serve them, and — just as important — where we won't play.” |
Most SEOs understand the tactics; the gap is strategic thinking — treating an engagement like a business problem rather than a checklist. Tactics are how you execute. Strategy is deciding what to execute against, and why.
Your keywords are your strategy
In search, almost everything funnels through one decision: which keywords — and now which prompts — you choose to target. Choosing your keywords is choosing your market. It defines who you’re talking to and where they are, because of how people actually search.
The “who”
Keywords imply the buyer. The features they care about, the styles they want, how price-sensitive they are — it’s all baked into the words they use. Two searches can describe the same product and signal completely different customers. That’s why a keyword that mentions price in a way you don’t compete on is a keyword you may deliberately not want.
The “where”
When intent is local, people say so: Internet services. Internet services in Connecticut. Fiber internet in Wyoming. A local internet provider’s strategy isn’t “rank for internet.” It’s a series of choices: do we serve bundle intent (internet bundles, VoIP bundles) or stay pure-play? Which regions do we actually have strong availability in? You don’t want your strategy pointed at demand you can’t fulfill — that’s effort spent generating interest you have to turn away.
On the e-commerce side it’s the same logic. Take apparel — notoriously broad and competitive. Do you go after “men’s shirts”? Almost certainly not. That pits you against Walmart and Amazon for shoppers who only know they want to cover their torso. If you’re a specialty brand, your market is lightweight men’s workout shirts in a specific fabric — and people search exactly that. Shoppers have learned that whatever they want already exists; the job is just naming it.
This is why, for us, prompts are largely dictated by keywords. Keywords are the guiding light because they imply everything — the person, their features, their geography, their price sensitivity. Get the keyword strategy right and the rest of the plan has a foundation to build from.
Demand keeps getting more specific — and AI accelerates it
There’s a long-running trend underneath all of this: demand gets more specific as people realize how many products exist and how precisely they can find them. The more crowded a market, the more exact the search.
AI search pours fuel on the fire. Conversational queries are even less constrained: “I get sweaty when I work out and my current shirt isn’t comfortable — which brands run with a more athletic fit in a breathable fabric?” That’s a buyer telling you their need, their objection, and their preference in one breath. The strategic implication is the same as it’s always been, just sharper: the businesses that map this increasingly specific demand — and structure their content to answer it — are the ones that get surfaced.
The competition you didn’t account for
This is the single most-missed element of search strategy. Your keywords can describe exactly who you want and where you want them — and still be the wrong keywords, because someone has been ranking number one for them for the last ten years.
Region A is your target market. So is Region B. But Region A has an incumbent who’s been doing SEO for a decade, and Region B has almost no one. The strategic move is obvious once you see it: go win Region B first. Then, if you’re feeling ambitious, spend your way through the entrenched competitor in Region A — knowing it’ll cost more and take longer.
Where you choose not to play
Strategy is defined as much by exclusion as by selection. Deciding where not to compete — which keywords to ignore, which regions to skip, which intent to leave on the table — is not a failure of ambition. It’s the discipline that concentrates your budget where it can actually win. A plan that targets everything has chosen nothing.
The second-order strategy: content, conversion, and authority
Once the market is chosen, a second layer of strategic choices kicks in. These matter less than the keyword decision, but they’re where good plans separate from average ones.
Content and conversion. For any keyword you target, you choose how to answer it — and whether you turn that answer into an opportunity. Understanding the searcher’s need is SEO; turning it into interest or a sale is conversion rate optimization. If someone’s learning how to size cowboy boots, the article should end by introducing your boots — a light touch, not a hard sell. Most of this is a repeatable playbook rather than per-client strategy, and the lighter touch almost always converts better. But the principle is strategic: don’t just answer the question and send the reader on their way.
Authority. Link building usually gets a bad rap precisely because there’s no strategy behind it — the “plan” is get backlinks, take whatever you can get. That changes the moment placement becomes reliable. When you can guarantee where a link goes, control the anchor text, and place it within a set window, you can finally put a real strategy on top of authority:
- Which pages to push — dictated by where on-page optimization has already created an opportunity to climb.
- How many links — sized to the goal and the gap, informed by experience of what it takes to move the needle.
- When to push — timed to the business. For seasonal demand — say, spring gardening supplies — you build authority a month or two before peak, let competitors nibble at rankings in the off-season, then push again ahead of the next peak.
Reliable placement is what turns link building from a hope into a lever — which is exactly the difference between a tactic and a strategy.
Strategy lives across the whole engagement
It helps to see where strategic choices show up across the four phases of a search program:
- Discover — the heart of it. Learn the market, learn how people search, and choose the keywords and prompts that define who and where you’ll compete. Most of the strategy lives here.
- Optimize — make the existing site reflect how people actually search, in a structure both search engines and AI engines reward. Strategic choices: how you answer, and how you lead toward conversion.
- Authority — when on-page is done well and you’re still not ranking, win on links and citations. Strategic choices: which pages, how many links, what timing.
- Report — prove it with metrics that match the decision being made, at the level of the person reading. Strategy here is refusing to drown the signal in vanity metrics.
The one question to keep asking
Whenever someone calls something your “strategy,” ask the test question: what are we doing differently from the businesses already out there? If there’s no real answer, you’re looking at a tactic dressed up as a plan. A genuine strategy names the market you’re choosing, the ground you’re choosing to fight on, the ground you’re choosing to skip — and the reason behind each.
That’s the work we do before we touch a title tag: figure out who you serve, where you can actually win, and where your effort is wasted. The tactics are the easy part. The strategy is what makes them pay off.