Step Wise SEO

Since you’re not a full-time SEO professional, sometimes other work obligations will get in the way and you’ll need to give your campaign a little less attention.

Other times, your website’s unique problems or your own curiosity will inspire you to dig deeper. In this article we’ll help you sort it all out by defining a range of reasonable slacking and extra credit behavior.

The Slacking Spectrum
The Extra Credit Continuum
Day-by-Day Extra Credit Tasks

The Slacking Spectrum
Have you been planning to do the bare minimum from the get-go? If you expected us to disapprove, you’re wrong. Let us reassure you:

Any amount of properly executed SEO that you can muster will bring about some positive effect.

And this is especially true if your competitors are doing absolutely nothing in the way of SEO.

Slacking, as we’re using the word here, simply means taking an honest look at your time and abilities and determining whether you can put off, or even blow off, a task or a group of similar tasks.

Slacking can be the result of a simple judgment call. Or slacking can be a path you’re forced to take due to a lack of time, budget, or manpower.

Take heart: There’s really nothing wrong with having a slacker mentality as long as you follow these important Dos and Don’ts about slacking and SEO:

DON’T beat yourself up. Periodic dips in SEO activity are to be expected for busy people in dynamic organizations.

An occasional bout of inattentiveness to your campaign is common. Dropping the ball every once in a while is no reason to abandon your SEO efforts altogether.

DON’T slack if your competitors aren’t. If you are in an extremely competitive market, there’s probably no easy way to shirk.

You will have to work harder on your SEO campaign to see changes for the better. Likewise, if one of your sleepy competitors wakes up to SEO, you’ll need to step up your efforts accordingly or suffer the consequences.

DON’T blame it on the budget. Just as you don’t need a big SEO budget to be an overachiever, you don’t need to slow down on SEO just because you’re low on funds.

Site edits, link building, landing page A/B testing, and competitive analysis-to name just a few-are tasks that most organizations can do at no extra cost.

DO be realistic. If you anticipate that you never will be able to devote an hour a day to your SEO campaign, it’s time to think about sharing the load with a coworker or hiring a consultant.

Some Slacking Is Not Guilt Free
Priorities will vary from organization to organization, but there are a few tasks you should never slack on because they form the foundation of your entire SEO campaign:

• Defining your conversion goals
• Identifying your audience
• Researching your keywords

And there are also certain red flags that you should not ignore because they can cause all of your other efforts to be wasted:

• Problems, such as coding errors, that block the search engines from indexing your landing pages

• Problems, such as broken links, that dump your audience into dead ends instead of delivering them to your site

Here are some ideas for bringing your SEO Plan in line with your own less-than-perfect reality, whether it’s related to your time, your budget, or your team’s willingness to help:

Cut out early. Choosing your keywords and getting them onto your site using sound SEO methods is a substantial step forward and may - help you realize a positive change.

Cut out PPC activities. This is a no-brainer if you have no money to spend on it. Unlike PPC, organic SEO will continue to deliver improvements long after you’ve quit devoting time to it.

Cut out organic activities. Cutting organic SEO and focusing only on PPC may be a smart strategy if you are short on labor and have a healthy budget to work with.

With PPC, you can expect quicker success than with organic SEO alone. But proceed with extreme caution:

If your site isn’t optimized for your target audience, it may not be an effective destination for PPC visitors.

Cut reporting loose. If you seriously don’t have the time, consider delegating your site visibility check to someone else in your organization.

This will seriously handicap your ability to analyze and improve your campaign. But asking an administrative assistant to gather numbers for you is better than not tracking at all.

After all, if nobody’s collecting information about your site’s performance, how do you know whether you’re wasting what little time you do have to spend on SEO?

Do it all, but with a smaller scope. If you’re low on time, do your slicing the way the SEO consultants do: by limiting your campaign to fewer conversion goals, audiences, or landing pages.

For example, focus on only one product line or one landing page, whittle down your top-priority keywords to just a couple, or focus on only one segment of your potential audience.

In this way, you’re still working toward increasing your targeted traffic using a holistic approach to SEO.

Be a dedicated dud-dropper. We’d love to be able to list SEO tasks in order from the best to worst effort-to-results ratios.

But these factors vary widely from organization to organization-one website’s success story is another’s sob story.

So, you will need to track your own results and figure out for yourself which SEO tactics are working for you and which are wasting your time. Once you have some data under your belt, feel free to slash and burn.

You may have the big idea to strip down Your SEO Plan to just focus on Google ranks and nothing else.

While this is a common sentiment expressed by clients we’ve come across, it really isn’t a reasonable slacking mindset.

A well-rounded approach to SEO is the only kind that will improve your website’s ranks in Google. You can’t really strip out all but the Google-related tasks and have less work to do.

The Extra Credit Continuum
Extra credit in SEO doesn’t require as much soul-searching and premeditation as slacking.

Usually extra credit is just a natural extension of what you’re already doing with your site.

SEO encompasses a wide variety of disciplines and activities, from creative writing to coding. You may just discover one aspect of it that grips you and run with it.

If you’re going full bore on the technology side of SEO, make sure it’s balanced out with a fully developed organic approach too. We’ve said it before: A holistic approach is best.

And, one more thing: Keep your perspective. There is a difference between extra credit and wasting your time.

Checking ranks every day, logging daily unique visits unless you have a short-lived or time-sensitive campaign, and spending all your time trying to decipher Google’s algorithm are not worth the effort.

Turn your attention instead to more reasonable tasks like researching new keywords and gleaning new ideas from competitors or legitimate never-ending tasks like link building.

Day-by-Day Extra Credit Tasks
The internal search on your website can teach you about your site visitors, giving insights into who they are and what they need.

If you already have an internal search engine on your website, don’t let its data go to waste! Data from your internal search engine can help you determine the following:

What are your site visitors searching for? If you sell shrimp deveiners and your internal search function is logging a lot of searches for “shrimp deveiners,” that might be a good thing.. .

Or it may not. It’s certainly nice that your visitors seem to want your product. But why do they need to search for it in the first place?

Why can’t they find it by navigating your site? Finding a large number of searches for your top-priority keywords in your internal search means that you need to make this content easier to find.

What’s the (key)word on the street? When you were choosing keywords, we were supposed to try to get into the minds of your potential customers.

The in-site search engine is a great tool for doing just that. Are they searching for “shrimp de-veiners,” “shrimp deveiners,” or something unexpected, like “shrimp cleaners”?

Keep in mind, though, that this audience, having already decided to visit your site, may not behave the same as your general search engine audience.

Who’s coming to your site? If most of your site’s internal searches are related to finding a job in your organization or some other activity that doesn’t relate to your intended conversion, it may be an indication that a substantial portion of your site visitors are not your target audience.

Are they getting where they need to go? Find the top 10 phrases entered by users of your internal search engine.

Then, take each of them for a spin. What results came up? Were they your preferred landing pages or some crusty press releases?

Depending on the technology behind your search function, you may be able to improve the results by adding your own metadata usually in the form of keyword tags to your website’s pages.

Before you try to go extra-extra credit, take note: These tags are not recognized by the search engines.

For example, for your Sale Products page, you can assign keywords like “discount” or “clearance”-even if these words don’t appear on the page-and your internal search will then be able to show your Sale Products page to anyone searching for those terms.

Of course, you should never manipulate your internal search results to be irrelevant; you don’t want to display your Sale page when someone is searching for “returns,” for example.

But it’s your site, and assigning reasonable synonyms and related concepts to your search function’s metadata may be helpful to both your visitors and your conversion goals.

If you do this kind of extra-credit analysis, your internal search will be much more than a helpful feature for your visitors.. .it will also be a marketing tool for you!