Step Wice SEO

How can you whittle down your list into a manageable group of 10 or so top target keywords? Here are the steps to a nicely honed list:

• The Keyword Balancing Act
• Combining Keywords
• Matching Keywords and Landing Pages
• Finalizing Your Short List

The Keyword Balancing Act
The most useful keywords will strike a balance between popularity, relevance, and competition.

We’re going to ask you to identify some of these more balanced keywords. Here are some examples of a good balance:

Lower Popularity/Higher Relevance A low popularity/high relevance combination means that even if there are not so many people searching for the term, the ones that do come are more likely to click on your listing, and ultimately convert on your site.

But don’t go too low! Unless you have a reason to doubt the data, searches with zero popularity scores should probably not even be considered, except for your company name or a trademarked product name.

Higher Competitiveness/Higher Relevance If you are drawn to a competitive term, be sure that it is balanced out with a very high degree of relevance.

Higher Popularity/Lower Competition/Higher Relevance This is the ideal balance. If you can find terms that are used heavily by searchers, are closely tied to your conversion goal, and are targeted by a reasonable number of competitors, you want them on your short list!

Consider the example below. The term “baby clothes” is popular, but it’s extremely competitive and does not balance that disadvantage with a high relevance level.

Not a good choice. On the other hand, “unique baby shower gifts,” while on the high side in competition, balances its disadvantage with a very high relevance.

Combine Keywords
Once you have your preferred terms flagged, look for terms that can be combined. For example, terms “baby clothes” and “unique baby clothes” can be combined into just one term: “unique baby clothes.”

This is a great way to get double duty out of your SEO efforts, combining the search popularity of both terms.

If you are including geographical information with your keywords, now is the time to combine it with your other terms.

For example, a manicure salon in Franklin, Missouri, may want to combine keywords to create the keyword phrases “manicure Franklin Missouri” and “salon Franklin Missouri.”

Match Keywords to Landing Pages
For a keyword to perform well in the search engines, it needs to be matched to a landing page on your site that would be an excellent destination for someone searching for this term.

A good landing page for a keyword will satisfy your visitors’ needs, answer their questions, and direct them toward conversion if appropriate.

Be sure the page contains information that is closely tied to the search term. And don’t make the rookie mistake of only thinking about your home page:

Pearl of Wisdom: Your home page will likely be the best landing page choice for your company name but not for many of your other keywords.

Let’s say you work for a toy store. For the search term “godzilla action figures,” a good landing page is the page that contains the description of the Godzilla action figures you’re selling and a link to purchase them.

For the more generic term “action figures,” a good landing page might contain a menu of all the action figures you’re selling with links to learn more about each one.

By the way, the landing pages you select today do not need to currently have your keyword of choice on it;

If you can’t think of an existing page that is a good match for one of your keywords, you have two choices: plan to build a new landing page, or drop the keyword out of your short list.

Finalize Your Short List
We’re going to ask you to trim your flagged list to your top 10 or so. You probably already have a good idea of which ones are your favorites, but in case you’re still on the fence, here are some ways to frame your thought process:

Am I being inclusive? While you were assigning landing pages, did you discover that you have flagged too many terms for one audience or that you left a conversion out in the cold?

Does my keyword have a good home? If you love a keyword but you can’t find an existing landing page for it, now is the time to examine your reasoning for flagging it in the first place.

Does it represent a legitimate opportunity or goal for your organization? Do you have the resources to build a page around this term?

Do a reality check now, because it doesn’t make sense to build Your SEO Plan around terms you can’t optimize for.

Am I overcrowding a landing page? For best optimization, each landing page can accommodate only a small number of search terms (one to three is a good rule of thumb).

If you’re noticing that you entered the same landing page over and over again for many of your terms, you should ask yourself whether this is a problem with your site

i.e., whether you have too many different topics on one page), whether you can drop some of the extra terms, or if you just need to use your noodle to identify some additional landing pages.

Will my colleagues agree? It’s important that others in your organization feel comfortable-or better yet, enthusiastic-about your top keywords.

Enlist the help of your colleagues if you can! Send out your list for review, or arrange a meeting with members of your team who hold an interest: writers, content creators, marketing managers, executives, and so on.

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Once you have a long list of possible keywords and tools in hand to help you analyze them, you need to consider the following important part of the keyword research components:

Search Popularity How many people are actually searching for a given term
Relevance How well a keyword connects with your site and conversion goals Competition How many, and how well, other sites are targeting a given keyword

Finalizing your top target keywords will require a balancing act between all three of these factors. We’ll look a little more closely at each of them here.

Search Popularity
Both YSM and Wordtracker provide values for keyword popularity. However, we recommend Wordtracker over YSM for two reasons:

First, Wordtracker pulls from a larger network of searchers. Second, Wordtracker is much more specific about word syntax.

For example, YSM may combine “IL” with “Illinois,” and you will never know which one is actually more popular with searchers.

Wordtracker gives you the option of looking at the specific differences in terminology that you need to know in order to choose the “just right” keywords.

It can be time consuming pulling up the search popularity values for every term on your long list, but you can save time by copying and pasting several words at a time-or your whole list-into the search popularity tool.

If you’re good with Excel, you can even export the search results from Wordtracker for easy import into your Keywords Worksheet!

Search popularity values provided by these services do not give you the total number of searches throughout the entire Internet, so you should only use them for comparing the relative search popularity between two terms.

You may notice while you gather your popularity numbers that you find other tempting keywords that you hadn’t previously considered.

Add them to the list! You’ll begin slicing and dicing this list very soon, but for now it won’t hurt to add more promising ideas.

With these numbers in black and white you’ll have a much stronger command of which terms are going to be good performers for you.

Relevance
Relevance is in many ways a judgment call: How would a searcher feel if they searched for this term and found your site?

Would your site answer their question or resolve their need? Does a good landing page for this term currently exist on your site, or could one be built?

We are going to ask you to classify relevance on a scale from Very Poor to Excellent. Your relevance values should also incorporate the following perspectives:

Your writers/editors Ask yourself if the people that write content on your website will be comfortable using this term to describe your products and services. Better yet, go ask them the question.

Other sites that come up in the search Try entering the term into a search engine and see what other sites come up.

Are the top-ranking websites from organizations that are similar to yours? Surprisingly, in SEO you often do want to be situated in the vicinity of your competitors.

If a searcher enters a keyword and sees a page full of weird, seemingly unrelated results, they are likely to try again with a different search.

Value of the conversion Your relevance level should also take into account the value of the conversion for a term.

For example, if the two terms “ginger syrup” and “crystallized ginger” are equally well matched to your site but you believe that people searching for “crystallized ginger” are going to be more valuable conversions (because it’s a much more expensive delicacy!),

then that keyword should get a boost. It’s guesswork and intuition at this point, but after a few months, you’ll have some tracking under your belt and a much clearer understanding of the conversion values for different terms.

It’s very rare that a one-word term is going to pass the relevance test-unless it’s your business name!

Look at any one-word keywords on your list. In what other context, other than your immediate conversion goal, could searchers be using them?

Keyword: baby clothes, Relevance Rating: Good We would rate this relevance level as Good because it uses two rather generic words to accurately describe the product that
a company sells.

But it also encompasses lots of things that this company doesn’t sell. Searchers could use this term to look for used clothes and large chain stores in addition boutique items.

Keyword: unique baby clothes, Relevance Rating: Excellent This keyphrase uses a modifier-”unique “-to more clearly describe the product that the company sells.

You may be wondering, “Is a subjective word like `unique’ a good candidate for targeting?”

It is, but only if you think it’s accurate, and if you think people will use it to search for your product!

So while “unique” may be appropriate for you to target, there’s probably no point in targeting boastful terms like “best” or “finest.”

Sure, we know your offerings are the best, but is “best truck liners” really more relevant than something more specific on your list, like “heavy-duty truck liners”?

Keyword: cheap baby clothes, Relevance Rating: Very Poor We would rate this relevance level as Very Poor because Babyfuzzkin is a high-end product and does not match the description “cheap.”

While it may be tempting to target popular or appealing terms like “cheap,” if it does not describe your product or service, it is going to be a wasted effort and a bust for conversions.

Keyword: unique baby shower gifts, Relevance Rating: Excellent This term describes Babyfuzzkin’s products very specifically. As this example shows, highly relevant terms are often longer.

Keyword: Babyfuzzkin, Relevance Rating: Excellent You can’t get a tighter match than the company name!

Competition Level
In SEO, you’ve got to choose your battles. Sure, we’d all love to have great ranks for the most popular terms:

“real estate,” “games,” “golf,” or “Angelina Jolie.” But the time and money spent for good ranking on these terms can be prohibitive.

There are lots of ways to assess the competition level for a keyword; see the sidebar “Sizing Up the Competition” for some of our favorite methods.

We’re going to ask you to rate your keyword competition level from Very Low to Very High. What’s most important is that you use the same measuring stick for all of your terms.

Sizing Up the Competition
You know your business, so you know what aspects of your business have more, or stronger, competitors.

If you work for a bank, you don’t need the numbers to tell you that the term ‘low mortgage rates’ is going to be very competitive.

But for terms that are less obvious, you can do a competition gut check by searching for that term, and looking for the following indicators:

• ”Do most of the sites in the top several pages of results appear to have the same conversion goals as you?

Do you recognize some of your known competitors in there? Did you just find new competitors that you hadn’t known about before?

This is only one part of the competition landscape, but it’s an important one.”

• ”Are most of the sites in the top several pages of results trying to sell something related to your term?

Even SEO newbies can see that the vast majority of sites that show up for ‘low mortgage rates’ are trying to sell mortgages.

But search for ‘low literacy rates’ and you can really see the difference-there’s much less of a feeling that the site owners are jumping up and down, shouting,’ Over here!’”

• ”How many sponsored listings do you see for the term in question? Sites that are selling something are likely to spend more time and money optimizing, so terms with a lot of commercial results are likely to be more competitive.”

Industry insight is important, but quantitative values give you more solid ground to stand on. Anyone estimating competition levels for a keyword should research these numbers:

• ”How many pages on the Web are already optimized for the term? To estimate this value, you can perform a specialized search on Google and find out how many sites have that keyword in their HTML page title tag.

Just type allintitle: ‘keyword’ into the search box. For example, a company selling baby clothes would type allintitle: ‘baby clothes’ to find out how many websites are using that term in their HTML title.

• ”What are the top bid prices for the term on PPC services? You need to know how to set up accounts and check these values.”

Here are the competition levels, and the thinking behind them, for a selection of a company given above:

Keyword: infants, Competition Level: Very High On a gut level, most single-word searches are going to rate as very competitive;

there are just too many sites in the world that contain this term. Quantitatively speaking, the allintitle search on Google shows that there are over 2.2 million websites with the term in their HTML titles.

Keyword: baby clothes, Competition Level: Very High This term is also rather competitive.

Obviously, there are numerous companies, some very large, that sell this product online and will be competing for this search traffic.

You can click as far down as Yahoo!’s 10th search results page and there’s no end in sight to the companies selling baby clothes. Google shows almost 200,000 pages with the term in their HTML titles.

Keyword: unique baby clothes, Competition Level: Moderate This one may not be so cut and dried. This is still a very competitive term at first glance:

there’s really not much difference in the “feel” of the competitor listings for this term as compared to the listings for “baby clothes.”

But with only roughly 300 pages showing on Google with this exact phrase in their HTML title, this term goes into the Moderate competition bracket.

Keyword: unique baby shower gifts, Competition Level: High There are only roughly 900 pages showing on Google with this exact phrase in their HTML titles.

You might be tempted to call this one Moderate. But here’s where the gut feeling comes in: Unique is a marketing word, making this term more commercial in nature.

Keyword: babyfuzzkin, Competition Level: Very Low Actually, the competition level for this keyword is nonexistent. There are no sites ranking for it, and there don’t appear to be any sites targeting it in their keywords.
 

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Ask any SEO pro what the single most important part of an SEO campaign is and we bet you’ll get this answer: “Keyword choice!” Here’s why:

The keywords you choose will be the focus of your entire optimization process.

Keywords (also referred to as keyword phrases, keyphrases, keyterms, and just terms) are the short, descriptive phrases that you want to be found with on the search engines.

If you put the time into choosing powerful keywords now, you are likely to be rewarded not only with higher ranks, but also with these benefits:

• A well-optimized site, because your writers and other content producers will feel more comfortable working with well-chosen keywords as they add new site text

• More click-throughs once searchers see your listing, because your keywords will
be highly relevant to your site’s content

• More conversions once your visitors come to your site, because the right keywords will help you attract a more targeted audience

There is no special formula that will work for every site all the time. And this applies to your keyword targeting strategy.

We suggest that by the end of this week, you should have 10 target keyword phrases in hand.

We believe that this is a reasonable level if you give it one hour a day. But you may be more comfortable with 2 or 20 keywords. We welcome you to adjust according to your individual needs.

Here are your daily assignments for this week:

Your Keyword Gut Check

Resources to Expand and Enhance the Keyword List

Keyword Data Tools

Keyword Data Gathering

Your Short List

Your Keyword Gut Check
Here you’re going to do a brain dump of possible target keywords for your organization.

For now, you’ll jot down whatever comes to mind, and save the fine-tuning for later. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Be the searcher. For each conversion you wrote on your Goals Worksheet, take a few minutes to put yourself in the mind of each target audience that you listed.

Imagine that you are this person, sitting in front of a search engine. What do you type in the search box?

Name who you are and what you offer. No keyword list is complete without your organization’s name and the products, services, or information you offer.

Make sure to think about generic and proprietary descriptions. One may jot down more generic words like “baby shower gifts” and “baby clothes,” but he/she should also include trademarked names like “Babyfuzzkin” and a list of the brand names they’re selling.

Likewise, if it’s equally accurate to describe the products for sale on your website with the terms “spray bottles” or “X7 MistMaker Series,” add both to your list.

Name the need you fill. It’s not just what you offer, it’s the itch that your product or service scratches.

So one might write down “baby shower gift ideas” or “baby clothes tree shipping.” If you sold home alarm systems on your site, you might want to list terms that describe your customers’ needs, such as “protect my home” and “prevent burglary.”

Think seasonal. Does your product or service vary from season to season? Do you offer special services for special events?

Think through your whole calendar year. The person at Babyfuzzkin may want to list words like “baby swimsuits” and “Size 2T Santa sweaters.”

A spa resort may want to list things like “Mother’s Day Getaway Ideas” and “Tax Time Stress Relief.”

Embrace misspellings and slang. Here’s something you probably know better than any SEO expert: alternate spellings and regional variations on your keywords.

On a regional note, a company selling soft drink vending machines had better remember to add both “soda” and “pop.”

You do not need to consider variations in capitalization because search engines are not sensitive to caps (besides, the vast majority of searches are lowercase).

However, you should include singular and plural forms on your list for further evaluation.

Locate yourself. Brick-and-mortar organizations include variations on their company name and location in the keywords list.

If your company does business only in Michigan, you really don’t want to waste your SEO efforts on a searcher in Nevada.

And, it is worth mentioning that search engines sometimes aren’t all that smart? They do not necessarily know that “NY” and “New York” are the same thing. So be sure to include every variation you can think of.

Now that you’ve got an idea of what you’re looking for, you can choose to brainstorm your list alone, or, better yet, brainstorm with members of your PR, sales, marketing, and writing teams.

This can work well as an e-mail exercise, too; just shoot out a request for your colleagues to send you their own ideas for keywords.

When Homographs Attack
Homographs are words that have the same spelling but different meanings. For example, invalid means both “not valid” and “a person who can’t get out of bed.” Search engines have struggled with homographs since their inception.

As mothers to young children, we have a strong interest in making sure our homes are lead-free.

So naturally, we use the search engines to learn how. Unfortunately, the word lead, meaning “a soft heavy toxic malleable metallic element,” happens to have a homograph: lead meaning “travel in front of.”

The environmental lead testing search results are crowded out by pages with information on leadership!

In order to get the information we need, we have to lengthen our search phrases: “lead abatement,” “lead contamination,” and “lead poisoning.”

Acronyms are particularly susceptible to this problem. Massive Media, Inc., has spent years targeting the term “AMC,” which is an acronym for one of its products.

But just in the top 10 Google results, this term is represented by the following entities:

• AMC Theatres
• The AMC network movie channel
• The Appalachian Mountain Club
• Albany Medical Center
• Australian Maritime College
• American Mathematics Competitions
• Applied Microsystems Corporation

None of these has anything to do with what Massive Media was trying to promote! Clearly, in targeting this acronym, it was navigating the wrong waters. It doesn’t make sense to spend your energy competing with such a broad field.

If you are unfortunate enough to be promoting a company or product with a name that shares spelling with a common word or acronym, you will need to brainstorm on what secondary terms your target audience is likely to add and combine words to find a more appropriate term to target.

Possibilities are the geographical location of your company, the generic term for the product, names of well-known executives, or the term company or inc. And, as a general rule, don’t target acronyms shorter than four letters long.

Once you start spitting out your list, don’t over-edit yourself; you’ll have time for editing later.

For now, we just want you to get all of your keyword ideas in writing.

Resources to Expand and Enhance the List
On your Keywords Worksheet, you already have a nice long list of possible target phrases.

But are there any you missed? You’ll troll on- and offline for additional keyword ideas. We’ve listed some of the places that additional keyword phrase ideas could pop up.

There are more ideas here than you can use in just one hour, so pick and choose based on what’s available to you and what feels most appropriate to your situation:

Your Coworkers If you didn’t get your team involved in keyword brainstorming, be sure that they jump on board here.

It will help your campaign in two ways: first, they’ll provide valuable new perspectives and ideas for keywords, and second, they’ll feel involved and empowered as participants in the plan.

Your Website Have you looked through your website to find all variations of your possible keyword phrases?

Terms that are already used on your site are great choices for target keywords because they will be easier to incorporate into your content.

Industry Media If there are any magazines or websites devoted to your trade, take a look and see what terminology they are using to describe your product or service.

Remember, now is not the time to edit your terms! So if the words are in use out there, be sure to include them on this list.

Your Website Statistics If you have access to a program that shows statistics on your website, review it to see what search terms are currently sending traffic your way. Terms that are already working well for you can be great choices for target keywords.

Your Customers If you (or anyone on your SEO team) have the ability to check in with customers about what phrases they use to describe your products or services, now is the time to get in touch with them and find out!

Your salespeople might also take this opportunity to confess: “Oh yeah, it’s called Closure Management Technology on the website, but when we talk with customers, we always just call it zippers.”

Your Internal Search Engine If your website has a search box on it, it’s time to get sneaky!

You can use its usage information for your SEO campaign. Talk to your webmaster about collecting the following information about site visitors who use your internal search engine:

• What terms do they search for?
• What results are they shown?
• What pages do they choose to click on (if any)?

Keep a running list of top terms your site visitors are searching for; these are likely to be good target keywords for your SEO campaign.

“Related” terms on Search Engines Many search engines offer suggestions for related terms after you perform a search.

For example, Ask has “Narrow Your Search” and “Expand Your Search” columns along the left-hand side of the search results that show a variety of terms related to your search These related terms can be good additional keyword choices.

Friends, Neighbors, and the Unexpected One major problem with keyword choice is that businesses tend to become too caught up in the insider terminology they use to describe themselves.

If your target audience goes beyond industry insiders, be sure to seek out input from unexpected sources.

Your friends and neighbors or even the neighbor’s kid can provide surprisingly helpful ideas.

Competitors’ Websites For the moment, try breaking up keyword writer’s block by browsing your competitors’ sites to see what terms they are using to describe themselves.

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Maybe you’re an anarchist at heart and it takes divine intervention to get your feet into two matching socks.

But more likely, you’re just so overworked that it’s impossible to keep every sticky note and e-mail where it belongs.

You need help-and we’re here for you! Before you begin your tasks, follow these simple steps to start your new SEO lifestyle with a “headquarters” on your computer.

We call it your SEO Idea Bank!

Step 1: Create a home for your SEO files. Choose a location on your computer or network where your SEO files will live.

The most important thing is to make sure that there’s just one consistent spot where your SEO files are stored.

Step 2: Download tools from yourseoplan.com. On the companion website to this book, www.yourseoplan.com, you’ll find the worksheets and templates that we’ll be referring to throughout this articlre.

Take the time to download these now and save them in your SEO Idea Bank:

• Keywords Worksheet

• Site Assessment Worksheet

• Rank Tracking Worksheet

• Task Journal Worksheet

• Competition Worksheet

And don’t forget to copy your Goals Worksheet, “Clarify Your Goals,” into your SEO Idea Bank as well.

Step 3: Start an SEO task journal. Your SEO Task Journal is a place to document what you’ve done, what questions have cropped up, and what you need to do in the future.

Your Task journal will prevent you from duplicating your efforts and help you keep track of what you were thinking last week and the week before.

It’s also a convenient holding pen for ideas and random thoughts that come up while you are working on Your SEO Plan.

One of the fun things about SEO is wandering down whatever path your explorations take you.

But if you only have an hour and you actually want to accomplish something, you’re going to need to keep yourself on track.

Rather than going off on every tangent that is thrown your way, file those thoughts away in your Task journal for later.

If the Task journal isn’t your cup of tea, use whatever organizational method works for you.

You may be happy using a simple Microsoft Word document, and changing the font to strikethrough when the topic is resolved.

But feel free to get fancy. Consider experimenting with an online database in your own personal Yahoo! Group at groups.yahoo.com, or an online to-do list through a service such as tadalist.com.

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The decision makers in your organization have a lot on their minds these days: shrinking budgets, expanding competition, and out-of-control expenses could keep anyone awake at night.

Why should they be open to your big ideas about SEO? Even if SEO was the boss’s idea in the first place-or if you’re your own boss-you still need to know, in a down-to-the-brass-tacks kind of way, what it’s going to take.

Of course you want to approach your corporate decision makers with a clear vision, a plan, and a lot of cold, hard facts.

SEO is such a cost-effective marketing technique that it should be an easy sell. But change is never easy.

No matter how persuasive your numbers and worksheets are, your plan will need to address the realities of day-to-day operations.

Once your executives are ready to move on your SEO project, be sure you get not just a green light, but a little bit of gas in the tank as well.

Here’s what you’ll need them to do:

• Vocalize the plan to the team.

• Commit to your proposed labor and budget.

• Commit to reviewing your findings after you have completed your Prep Month.

Working in SEO can sometimes feel like wrestling a many-armed sea animal. How will you tame the beast and get some solid information to share with others in your organization?

Get Yourself on Board!
As SEO team leader, you may have to step slightly outside of your comfort zone in order to be as effective as you can be.

You will have to keep yourself organized, which entails documenting results, questions, and communications as you go.

And, like any team leader, you will sometimes need to repeat yourself politely until you get that requested task completed or that important concept understood.

If it helps to take some of the pressure off, you as SEO project leader can comfortably adopt a friendly, easy-going approach.

Since SEO isn’t normally a deadline-driven process, most of the time, you’ll have the opportunity to write “No rush” on your requests and mean it!

Now that you understand how to drum up the requisite levels of enthusiasm throughout your organization, you’re ready to start your Prep Month.
 

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Writers and editors are the wordsmiths who craft the all-important text that your site Audience, and the search engines, will see.

Since SEO is so focused on text, you are going to need some writers in your corner. Writers and editors can help with these important SEO tasks:

keyword brainstorming, writing or rewriting content with keywords (and linkability) in mind, writing or reviewing ad content, and establishing a process for SEO review of new content.

If you’re doing this yourself, be prepared to spend a good portion of your SEO time on writing, keyword research, and related tasks.

Writers are a natural choice as SEO coconspirators. Unfortunately, SEO is often perceived among writers as something that will force them to alter, or maybe even degrade, their creative content.

If you’ve ever seen a page of text that was written primarily for the benefit of search engines, you know that writing for robots just isn’t something that your human audience will respond to.

The whole point of Your SEO Plan is to bring in that audience and speak to them, clearly, in their own language.

Including your writers in the keyword brainstorming process will give them important information about the terminology your target audience is using, which they can then incorporate into their text.

If you educate your writers on concepts like keywords and keyword density, that means less rewriting in the SEO review process. That’s less work for you and more control for your writers.

SEO also provides an opportunity for writers to branch out and write content that isn’t solely there to promote your product or service.

Since linkability increases when a site offers useful or interesting noncommercial content, you can encourage your writers to add things like articles, news, and resource pages to the site.

These might be projects that writers are interested in. Ask them for ideas. Of course, one big step in making your website text more SEO friendly is to make sure the text is actually present.

So coordinate with the IT and graphics departments to make sure that screen real estate can be allocated for descriptive text and that graphic titles can be changed to HTML.

Then you can approach your writers with specific ideas and locations for SEO-related improvements.

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Graphic designers are those creative souls responsible for the look and feel of your website.

In a larger organization, style developers create the style guides that all of the other web page creators have to follow.

In a smaller company, you may be dealing with just a few designers or even an individual who is a combination of graphic designer and web developer.

The graphics portion of the SEO team is responsible for setting up search engine-friendly standards in the style guide, if there is one;

soliciting input from the SEO team leader during site updates; and, because SEO has a way of dropping off the radar after a while, making sure that the standards are mandatory and ongoing.

If you’re on your own, you won’t have anyone else to persuade. But if you’re assembling an SEO team that includes Graphics, you’ve got some convincing to do!

You’ll have the best chance at success with this department if you include the following steps:

• Recognize the value of the work that the Graphics department does.

• Educate about graphics-related SEO skills.

• Formalize your agreements. Let’s look at these three steps in depth.

Value Graphics
First, recognize the importance of what your designers do. Like the IT department, graphic designers often feel that their efforts are undervalued.

The “look” of a site is not just an aside. In a visual medium, the look is the fundamental substance of your visitors’ experience.

And it’s not just a cosmetic thing-your designers are responsible for usability factors as well.

Your organization may have the benefit of user testing, or the designs may be created in a more seat-of-the-pants fashion. Either way, we can tell you this right now:

Designers want you to let them be the designers.

A conflict between SEO and graphic designers exists because SEO is, at least in part, optimizing the website for a nonhuman visitor (a search engine robot), while deigners are entirely focused on the human user experience.

As the ambassador of SEO, your job is to find common ground. Sit down with the leadership – the department head, the style guide developer, the senior designer,

or whoever happens to have the website graphic files on their computer – and figure out how you can make SEO work for everybody.

A website that nobody can find is worthless, but you certenly don’t want a site that people immediately leave because the design doesn’t speak to them. So, you must recognize and acknowledge this fact:

The human audience will always be the most important.

Make a commitment to the graphics department that you will never sacrifice the human user experience for SEO.

Educate and Empower
It’s important to educate your designers about the reasoning behind your SEO proposals.
Give them a quick course on the graphics-related factors.

Again, it’s best not to overwhelm with too many details, so you should limit your explanations to elements that you are looking to change.

Is your designer attached to a JavaScript pull-down navigation? Show how most search engines won’t follow those links.

Stuck on big graphic headlines? Tell them how to get a peek at your website the way that search engine spiders see-or, more appropriate, don’t see-these elements. Show this to your designers for a shocker!

Naturally, there may be too many changes to make in one fell swoop. Go for the big-ticket items first-for example, getting rid of frames, wrapping Flash elements in robot-friendly HTML pages, replacing major graphic headlines with HTML text, and creating a lower-priority list for less significant SEO changes. In other words, do this:

Start with big changes for quicker tangible results.

After you have some results to show from the first pass, you’ll have great ammunition for a second pass.

Don’t be drawn in by the myth that everything that benefits SEO will be detrimental to the design and that you have to choose between a good-looking site that nobody can find and an ugly site with tons of traffic.

Many of your SEO improvements, such as adding IMG ALT tags to graphics, will have no ill effect on the design.

And there are some, like replacing outdated font tags with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), that your designers may have been wanting to do anyway. But most important, if your designers are able to internalize SEO factors, future designs will have a way of coming out more search-engine friendly.

Make It Official
If your organization uses a web style guide, you have a great head start. Because for SEO, rules are good!

It will give your SEO guidelines longevity-so that your standards are followed not just once, but every time a new page is created.

And it will benefit you when, six months down the road, you’re handing off SEO reviews to someone else or you’ve forgotten what you’d planned at the outset.

What if there’s no style guide, just one or two designers putting together pages eased on what feels cool at the moment?

You’ll need some way to formalize your agreements and give them some long-term viability. If you can’t get it in writing, a handshake will do.

Set up a system for your designers to run edits by you in the future. At the very least, be sure that you’re informed of major site edits so that you can coordinate a site review for SEO.

What do you do to have the best chance at success with these folks (graphic designers)

Why do you think a conflict between a graphic designers and SEO exist?

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Whether it’s an IT department of 60 or a single programmer hiding out in the server closet, your SEO campaign is going to need a lot of help from your company’s technical experts.

Not only will they be the final implementers of edits to your website, but they hold the keys to many important technical features of the site that can spell SEO success or failure.

What if you’re a smaller organization and you are the one handling your own technical needs?

Count yourself lucky in many ways-you won’t have the workload and communication conflicts that often arise between SEO and IT.

But once you start doing SEO in earnest, be ready to plug into the tech mindset a little more often than usual.

At a minimum, you will need IT to help with edits to website content, conversion tracking, server settings, programming standards, and the robots.txt file.

Sound overwhelming? It can be, if you don’t prepare yourself. We suspect that working with your technical staff is going to be the most challenging part of your increase SEO adventure.

We have observed three major areas of difficulty:

• IT and Marketing speak such different languages it may be hard to get the communication rolling.

• IT is likely to be extremely cautious about taking on any additional workload.

• It may be difficult to find a way that SEO excellence benefits the IT department. There’s a lot to say here, so let’s discuss these three issues in more detail.

Communicating with IT
Your first task in working with IT will be finding a common language. Your IT comrades are technical thinkers.

They like numbers, logic, specifications, and processes that can be repeated. They are less fond of mysterious or amorphous organic processes.

They probably won’t be responsive to a request unless they fully appreciate the logical reasons behind it.

Ideally, you will go into this conversation with some amount of technical skill under your belt.

You may even want to take a crash course in HTML. But even if you think that HTML stands for “HoTMaiL” and a “server” has something to do with gettting your eggs Benedict before they get cold, you can still develop a good rapport with your IT department if you follow this simple rule:

Never fudge about your technical knowledge.

You need to be very honest about what you know and don’t know. Express your needs, and let them do their jobs by telling you the right way to get things done.

Bringing IT on board as a partner rather than a servant in SEO can make all the difference in your ongoing success.

Obviously you may not want all the information that IT is prepared to share with you. You probably don’t want or need to know the details of why something can’t be done.

If your eyes glaze over at the first mention of “meta refresh,” don’t just, stand there feeling miserable and trying to nod convincingly.

Keep the focus on the overall goals: You need something done. Is it possible or not? If not, what alternatives are available?

There is a give-and-take in play here. If you ask for a layman’s explanation, and genuinely try to understand, you might learn something about the way your site is structured that will help you and Your SEO Plan.

If you explain your SEO needs clearly, avoiding marketing jargon, your IT team will come to understand your SEO needs better and be more helpful to you in the long run.

A word of caution: If you are lucky enough to get your IT department extremely enthusiastic about SEO, you may find some ideas coming your way that fall into the realm of “black hat.”

The IT Workload Puzzle
Like most departments, IT teams are feeling overworked. But even worse, their work is likely to be unrecognized and underappreciated.

Unfortunately, your SEO campaign will probably require a large number of relatively small tasks from IT.

And these tasks can’t be done all at once because you need to assess and adjust throughout the campaign.

If you are frustrated that it’s taking weeks to get even simple requests handled, please realize this:

IT really hates when you call things “simple.”

Here are some possible issues to consider:

• Are there a large number of different people all clamoring for simple changes? If so, it’s only fair that your request is handled in order.

• Could the task be more complicated than you think? If you don’t have the tech savvy to know exactly what it takes to get your task done, be very careful about throwing around the word simple!

• Do the folks in the IT department understand the reasoning behind the change, or do they think it’s just a whim on your part?

Educate on a need-to-know basis; giving them a solid background will help the process.

If you consistently find yourself bumping into roadblocks in the IT department, look for some creative solutions:

• If you have cumbersome work request procedures, can the department create an “Express Lane” for small SEO requests, bypassing the normal pathways?

• Can the department keep your work orders open for a little while, allowing you to make adjustments?

• Is there an individual in the department that can be “yours” for a certain number of hours per month?

Have a sit-down with the department leadership and figure out a way to make it happen.

IT tasks needed for your SEO campaign are almost never urgent. This means that, if you agree to it, they can fit into some of the slower times in the department.

If, like a lot of smaller companies, your IT department is outsourced, you will probably find that you need more hours-at least up front-to get your site up to snuff.

Although it can be frustrating to wait, stockpiling several little SEO requests and submitting them on a weekly or monthly basis may save time and money.

If your IT “department” is a friend, it may be time to stop asking for favors and either figure out how to do it yourself or set up a payment situation.

SEO will generate quite a few site modifications over time, and you’ll fare best if you don’t leave them to the ups and downs of your friend’s generous nature.

How SEO Benefits IT
Can you believe it? Your SEO campaign can actually be a positive thing for the IT department. Here are a few examples:

Interdepartmental collaboration Bringing together the efforts of marketers, wordsmiths, artists, and techies is a very positive thing. Surprising new relationships, new alliances, and synergies can result.

Recognition for IT It’s not often that IT tasks can directly result in sales and profits. This is one of those times.

Participating in the SEO campaign can bring the IT department out of the obscurity of the computer rooms and give them some of the attention and acclaim that they deserve.

New toys Because the SEO campaign can depend on IT for so many things, such as server uptime and server log analysis, the SEO campaign may be a driving force behind getting some new hardware.
How do you see the pros and cons of handling your own technical needs if you’re a smaller organization and you are the one to take care of these things?

Can you think of any other ways that SEO might be positive for IT in your organization?

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Marketing, Sales, and Public Relations make up a corporate SEO trifecta. Get all three excited about your SEO campaign and you’ll have built your “brain-trust” foundation for success.

Here’s some food for thought that might come in handy when you need to deal with these departments.

Marketing: VIPs of SEO
In most organizations, the majority of the tasks relating to SEO will be performed by people in the marketing department.

We’re guessing you’re a member of this department yourself. It’s a natural progression: the marketing department may already be handling the website as well as offline marketing such as print ads, television, radio, billboards and online marketing such as banner ads and direct e-mails.

The marketing team will likely be instrumental in the SEO tasks like keyword brainstorming and research, writing text for descriptions and page titles, writing pay-per-click (PPC) ad copy, managing PPC campaigns, and executing link-building campaigns.

The individuals on the marketing team have, quite literally, the skills to pay the bills, and they probably don’t need any convincing that SEO is a worthwhile effort. What they will need, however, is some organization and some focusing.

We have found that marketing staffers are almost always open to a little education about how the search engines work, as long as the information is provided on a need-to-know basis.

For example, whenever we brainstorm for keywords with a marketing manager, inevitably their list contains terms that are extremely vague (“quality”) so specific that nobody is searching for them (“geometric specifications of duckpin bowling balls”).

When we trim down that list, we always explain the basic concept of search popularity vs. relevance. But when it comes to educating the team, a little bit of – formation at a time is key; you don’t want to drown your colleagues in too many details.

But what if you’re not working in such a receptive environment? Maybe you are one only one convinced of the positive powers of SEO.

Perhaps, for reasons of budget of time, you don’t have the buy-in you need to move forward. Perhaps other marketing programs are taking precedence or the department can’t seem to make the leap from offline to online marketing.

If that’s the case, it’s time to convince the marketing manager of the importance of your SEO project!

Here’s one way to approach it: Focus on the needs of the marketing department. Yes, it’s time for you to go into therapist mode and do a whole lot of listening.

Is there something that they’ve been dying to get done? A new tagline, perhaps? Maybe some changes to the corporate website? Are they feeling overworked?

Do they secretly want to drop one segment-say, billboard advertising-out of the marketing mix? Are they having trouble getting help from the IT department? Tell them SEO can help.

SEO can provide the trackability that they’ve been waiting for. It may provide justification for dropping less-successful advertising venues.

It can forge new alliances between Marketing and IT. On the “warm and fuzzy” side, it may provide an outlet for a creative soul who feels trapped in marketingspeak and wants to do more creative writing.

And SEO is an extremely telecommuting-friendly enterprise. Is there a new dad in the department who would love to spend a portion of his week working from home?

Once you’ve found some common ground and the enthusiasm is starting to grow, look through your conversion goals “Clarify Your Goals,” and consider starting Your SEO Plan with a a pilot project that you can focus your SEO efforts on together.

Pick something close to the hearts of the marketing staff: a recent or upcoming launch, a section of your site devoted to a special event, a promotion, or a product line that’s down in the dumps.

What if you’re at the Bottom of the Pecking Order?
If you’re on the bottom of the food chain in your organization, you may be either ignored or micromanaged by the people you answer to.

Here are some tips that might work for you no matter what department you’re dealing with:

• Create monthly reports, even if nobody’s looking at them. As consultants, we have often asked ourselves, “What’s the point of documenting everything if nobody reads our reports?”

But it always comes down to this: we need them for our own reference. After a couple of months, search engine results begin to blur together-don’t expect to keep this stuff in your head.

• Keep your reporting to a monthly schedule, even if you are asked for more frequent data.

There are rare exceptions to this rule, such as extremely short-lived promotions or unusually volatile PPC campaigns.

But for almost everything else, it really is helpful to set expectations that SEO is about long-term trends, not daily numbers.

• Deliver meaningful information. When you e-mail your boss a spreadsheet detailing your ranks for the last six months, you’re delivering necessary information.

But you can turn that into meaningful information when you summarize it in your e-mail:

“Dear Boss, This month, three of our top-priority keywords made an entry into the top 30 in Google.

Five of our keywords improved in rank, but our ranks for the term ‘industrial strength pencils’ continued to slide.”

• Likewise, if you have to deliver bad news, always deliver a plan of action for addressing it.

You’re the in-house SEO expert, like it or not, and your boss is looking to you for guidance.

The boss doesn’t want to hear, “Holy moly! Google dropped all our pages! “The boss does want to hear,” It looks like our pages have been dropped from Google.

This is probably a temporary problem, caused by Googlebot trying to crawl our site during our server outage last week.

I’ll resubmit the pages using Google’s free submittal form and keep a close eye on the situation.”

• Don’t take all the credit for your success. This is not just to be humble, it’s also because you actually aren’t responsible for every SEO success.

Even if you do everything right, you can’t control what your competitors are doing or the nature of the next big search engine algorithm change.

If you set your boss’s expectations along these lines, you won’t be blamed for every little failure, either.

Selling SEO to Sales
Your sales department will be happy to hear that your SEO campaign will be bringing in not just traffic, but targeted traffic that leads directly to sales.

You will be looking for their help in the following areas of SEO: keyword brainstorming, assistance with conversion tracking, competitive analysis, and insight into the customers’ Web habits.

Since Sales often has the most direct contact with customers, they will have excellent ideas to add to your keyword brainstorming sessions.

And if your conversions are of the easy-to-measure variety, such as online purchases, they’ll probably enjoy monitoring conversion rates on a PPC campaign and adjusting accordingly.

On the other hand, you may have a harder time getting help with conversion for transactions made over the phone or in person.

The sales department may not want to make the effort to figure out exactly how the person on the other end of the phone got their number,

or they may feel that grilling the customers about how they found you will interfere with the sales process.

You need to convince your sales team that incorporating this sort of follow-up into the sales process is not a waste of time because it’s important for everyone to know whether the website is generating profits.

The key to bringing your sales team on board for these more difficult tasks is educating them on the connection between targeted search engine traffic and bottom bone sales:

How can you make it easier for the sales team to track conversions to the website? One way is to set up a special toll-free number and display it prominently on our website-but nowhere else!

In this way, you can easily tell which customers got the number there. It’s not a perfect solution because it doesn’t tell you which search engines and keywords were used, but it does succeed in connecting the dots for the sales department:

SEO – Website Traffic – More Phone Calls – More Sales – Bigger Bonus!

SEO and Public Relations Can Relate
If your company has a public relations (PR) department, you’re in luck. If not, think about this:

If you got a phone call tomorrow from a radio station wanting to do a Story on your company, who would they speak with? That’s your PR department.

PR folks are very well suited to work with you on your SEO campaign. They’re careful about words, they’re excellent communicators, and they probably know how to take the time to track their results.

They are the “keepers” of the brand, creating and monitoring the face that your organization puts forth to the public.

Look to PR for help with keyword brainstorming, optimizing press releases, link building, and keeping your search engine listings and other links in line with your branding.

A typical PR department is primarily concerned with getting your company mentioned in the media and making sure that the publicity is accurate and-ideally-positive.

Many newspaper and magazine articles, not to mention blog postings, are triggered by press releases or other forms of contact from a PR department.

And it’s fair to say that search engines deserve a place among these media sources: just like magazines, newspapers and the like, search engines provide a free, ostensibly unbiased third-party source of publicity for your organization.

Your PR department can think of search engines as a particularly big media outlet.

Even more important from a PR point of view, search engines have become a key research tool for those very journalists, bloggers, and thought leaders PR is chatting up in the first place.

You might meet some resistance from a PR department that thinks of SEO as strictly a form of advertising.

In truth, SEO often does walk a fine line. A PPC campaign is most clearly within the advertising classification,

but other SEO tasks, such as including target keywords in press releases or gaining incoming links from business contacts, fall more directly into the PR bucket.

Once you explain to your PR folks that you will be seeking their assistance only with organic SEO activity, they should be more open to the possibilities.

As the department that protects the company brand, PR will likely have a great deal of interest in the brand maintenance tasks that fall under the SEO umbrella:

monitoring search engine listings and other online mentions for currency and accuracy. You may need to educate the PR team about how to find outdated information online,

but once they know where (and how) to look, don’t be surprised if they develop a passion for rooting out the “uglies.”

What if your website is not trying to sell anything or gather leads, or run advertising for revenue?

What if the only goal of your website is brand awareness? This is when you need your PR department most of all.

The folks in PR are already skilled in handling those difficult-to-measure soft targets offline through clipping services and surveys.

They may even be doing some tracking of online mentions. Now you need to tie their tracking efforts together with the SEO campaign to make sure that SEO gets credit where credit is due.

Fortunately, PR people are generally very comfortable with documentation. You shouldn’t have too hard a time convincing them to document their SEO successes.
Why is it, after all, that organizing an SEO team is so hard?

What does your marketing team know about the importance of robot-readable text, keyword placement, and PPC campaign management?

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