Step Wise SEO

Suppose you went on a diet but you forgot to weigh yourself at the beginning of it. A week of exercise and green leafy vegetables later, you step on a scale and it reads 163 lbs.

Is it great news or a great disappointment? You’ll never know because you didn’t establish your baseline.

You need to take care of the initial assessment for your SEO campaign so you’ll always know whether it’s time for a celebratory ice cream sundae. Here are your daily task to consider:

Conversions 
Ranks
Indexed Pages
Inbound Links
Site Assessment

Conversions
It is important to track the success of your SEO campaign. In marketingspeak, these measurements are called metrics.

Here we’re interested in only one thing: conversion metrics. Different organizations can have vastly different metrics, ranging from the number of people buying your product to how many third graders download your science report.

Whether it’s online sales, brand awareness, or just eyeballs you’re after, you know what your conversions are because you defined them way back.

If your website has a system in place to track conversions, it’s time to gather some data. The least you will want to know is this:

how many conversions has your site logged per month over the last three calendar months?

And if you can get additional information (for example, total conversion rate for all visitors versus conversion rate for search engine visitors), by all means, do.

The more you document today, the more you’ll know about the success or failure of your SEO campaign in the coming months.

You may know how to get this data by yourself, but if not, it’s time to enlist your IT, sales, or PR team members for the information you need.

If you haven’t done so yet, be sure to welcome them to your SEO team, and tell them what an important task this is for the future of the organization…it may even be time to hand out some bribe cookies!

Open up a new blank document and record your three-month historical conversion numbers and any additional conversion data you can gather. Save this in your SEO Idea Bank.

To be sure, if you haven’t been tracking conversions, you may think you have nothing to document today.

We disagree. Somewhere, somehow, there must be some information about how your website is performing for you.

If there’s a request for information form on the site, how many people have used it? If you suspect that people are researching your company online and then ordering over the phone, see if you can get a salesperson to back you up.
Or, just write down your suspicion. Even a guess is better than nothing here.

If you’re pretty sure that the website hasn’t given you any business, or recognition, or whatever it is you’re looking for in the past three months, make a note of that, too.

If you’re starting from zero, congratulations! Your improvement will be very easy to measure.

Ranks
No matter how often it’s told not to obsess about ranks, we know you better than that. So if you’re the one who spends your nights with visions of Googleplums dancing in your head, today is the day we’ll let you give in to your passion!

Of course, conversions are more important than ranks, and your fundamental business goals are more important than search engine traffic.

But great search engine ranks really do speak volumes, and checking your ranks can be a very enlightening experience.

Rank Assessment in a Nutshell

Here’s how you’ll do it:

• Moving one by one through your short list, search for your top keywords on Google. (To save time, you can set your search engines to display 30 results per page using the Preferences screen.)

• Scroll through the top 30 ranks. If any page on your website shows up within these results, note the rank in the Rank Tracking Worksheet. If you don’t see your site in the ranks, mark “none.”

• We’re looking at the main Web results only! Don’t record ranks in any other results sets, such as See Related, Local, or Sponsored Listings, as part of your standard rank check.

• Repeat with MSN, Yahoo!, and Ask.

Automated vs. Manual Rank Checking
There’s no way around the fact that reviewing all those results on all those search engines for all those keywords can be a bit of a snoozer.

Some SEO professionals have dropped rank checking out of the equation altogether because it is less connected to your business goals than other metrics such as conversion tracking.

Of SEOs that still perform rank checking, some use automated rank-checking software. Available programs include WebPosition, Ranking Manager, and Digital Point Solutions.

But even with all of the available tools, we still perform manual rank checking for our clients, and we insist on it for you too. Here’s why:

• Manual rank checking is more accurate than automated checking. In the ever-changing search engine results landscape, it often takes a human to determine whether your listings are surrounded by directory sites, partner sites, or even sponsored listings.

• Manual rank checking keeps you in close touch with the goings-on in the search engine ranks for your target keywords.

We want you to drink in the details. Keep an eagle eye out for your competition and any interesting or unusual results.

Who is ranking well, and are they doing well on more than one engine? Have you spotted any possible cheaters?

Did an unexpected page of your site (or a PDF or DOC file) show up? These are the kinds of things you can find if you take the time to look.

• Most search engines, including Google, frown upon automated rank-checking programs because they perform multiple queries that can create a burden on the search engine. Many of these tools actually violate the engines’ terms of service (TOS).

If you absolutely must use an automated system (for example, your organization has a need to track a large number of keywords on a monthly basis),

we recommend that you sign up with Digital Point Solutions, mentioned earlier, and get a free Google application programming interface (API) key (Digital Point provides instructions).

If you do that, you will be in compliance with the Google TOS, and that means you will have our blessing too.

As we touched upon earlier, your manual rank-checking task has fringe benefits: it provides a great opportunity to watch out for “uglies”: bad snippets, broken links, or any other interesting, mysterious, or undesirable results your website is showing in the search engines.

Feel free to slip on your headphones as you work: rank checking is one of the more tedious SEO tasks.