Step Wise SEO

OK, let’s see a show of hands: How many of you are reading this blog because you want a #1 rank in Google?

Yeah, we thought so. As SEO consultants, we know how good it feels when your website makes it to the top of the heap.

Listen, we sincerely hope you get your #1 Google rank, but it won’t help you if it’s bringing in the wrong audience or pointing them to a dead-end website. So don’t think of SEO as just away to improve your site’s ranking.

The term Search Engine Optimization describes a diverse set of activities that you can perform to increase the amount of targeted traffic that comes to your website from search engines (you may also have heard these activities called Search Engine Marketing or Search Marketing.

This includes things you do to your site itself, such as making changes to your text and HTML code.

It also includes communicating directly with the search engines, or pursuing other sources of traffic by making requests for listings or links.

Tracking, research, and competitive review are also part of the SEO package.
SEO is not advertising, although it may include an advertising component.

It is not public relations, although it includes communication tasks similar to PR. As a continually evolving area of online marketing, SEO may sound complicated, but it is very simple in its fundamental goal: gaining targeted visitors.

Do I Need to Perform SEO for My Website?
It may seem like a no-brainer but actually, the answer is not necessarily Yes. If any of the following examples apply to you, you may not be in need of an SEO campaign right now:

* You have a website that you really don’t want strangers to find, such as a training tool for your employees or a classroom tool for your students.

* Your site is already ranking well, you’re satisfied with your sales, and you don’t want to rock the boat.

* You’re in a big hurry-say, you’ll go out of business without a major upswing in revenue in the next couple of months.

This is not to say that SEO can’t help you, but good SEO takes time. You may - need to focus your energies elsewhere right now.

* Your site is going to be completely rebuilt or redesigned in the next couple of months. If this list doesn’t apply to you, we think you’re ready to begin your SEO adventure!

What’s Your Excuse?
We often encounter people who offer the following reasons not to do SEO:
“I don’t have enough money.”

If you don’t have any money in your budget for SEO, simply follow our plan with a focus on organic (that means low-cost or no-cost!) optimization. Believe it or not, you can make substantial improvements without spending a dime.

“I don’t have enough time.” SEO is a very flexible process. If you don’t have an hour a day, use whatever time you do have and work through the plan over a longer period.

“My website sucks!” Don’t give up! This is a very common problem for folks setting out on an SEO campaign.

If everybody waited until their site was perfect before doing SEO, nobody would do SEO.

It is a rare site indeed that couldn’t use a little improvement in the SEO department. And, with the importance of SEO on the rise, if you don’t need it today, it’s a good bet you’ll need to brush up your SEO smarts for tomorrow.

What Are the Overall Goals of My Business?
Most likely, the fundamental goal of your business, when you get down to the bottom of it, is to make money by selling a product or service.

However, there may be nuances to even such a straightforward goal as this. And there are a whole host of other possible goals and subgoals that your business is likely to have.

Perhaps yours is a large company with branding as an important long-term goal. Maybe your company wants to make money with certain products but is willing to take a loss in other areas.

Maybe you are starting up with investor backing and do not need to turn a profit for years.

Perhaps you are a nonprofit, with a goal to improve the world and inspire others to do the same. Whatever way you’re leaning, your business goals will affect your SEO campaign strategy.

What Function Does My Website Serve?
It’s not uncommon to hear that the reason a company built a website is “to have a website.”

While we all love a little bit of circular logic before breakfast, if you’re going to put a lot of time and money into promoting your website, it’s important to have a good idea of what it’s doing for you.

Most websites are built out of a combination of basic building blocks. Whether your site is a web-based store seeking online sales; a personal blog seeking community connections; a political or religious outlet seeking to persuade, uplift, or inspire; a corporate “brochure” displaying branding identity and company information; or just about any other type of website you can imagine, it will likely include some or all of the following features or elements:
* Corporate history, news, and press releases
* Executive biographies
* Product and service information
* Online purchasing/donation
* Support for existing customers/ clients/students
* News and current events
* Articles, white papers
* Religious, philosophical, or political content
* Online request for information (RFI) forms
* Login for restricted information
* Instructions for making contact offline or via e-mail
* Directions, hours of operation, etc. for brick-and-mortar location
* Links to other resources
* Fun, games, or entertainment
* A strong brand identityt
* Art or craft portfolio
* Educational materials
* Information specifically for geographically local visitors
* Software or documents available for download
* Media (pictures, audio, video) available for viewing/downloading
* Site map
* Archived content
* Site search function
* Live help/live contact function
* Ways for members of the community to connect with each other on the site (forums, bulletin boards, etc.)

Now, spend some time clicking around your website. You should be able to tell which of the features in the preceding list are included.

How well is each component doing its job? For now, think in terms of presentation and functionality.

(Is your product information up-to-date? Is your online store full of technical glitches? Are your forms asking the right questions?)

Give each feature that you find a ranking of Excellent, Good, Fair, or Poor. Obviously this isn’t going to be a scientific process-just make your best estimate.

How Is My Website Connecting with the Goals of My Business?
Take a look at what you’ve written on your Goals Worksheet. Is there a disconnect between your business goals and your current website?

Is your website focused on corporate info or, worse yet, executive bios instead of your business goals?

Or does the website provide only content geared toward supporting existing clients when the primary business goal is to gain new clients?

Take a moment to write down any disconnects you’ve identified in “Connecting Goals” on your Goals Worksheet.

Your SEO campaign must support the overall business goals, not just your website.

Some Interim Solutions
It’s your job as the in-house SEO expert to lobby for a website that will deliver for your company.

But you may be wondering, “If my site is far less than perfect and-for whatever reason-I can’t fix it right now, should I even bother with SEO?” Probably.

Here are some ideas for approaching SEO while you’re waiting for your site to come up to speed with your company’s goals:

* Work on getting traffic, but lower your expectations for sales (or whatever action you want your visitors to perform) for the time being.

When you perform your monthly rank checks during your SEO campaign, you may notice an upswing in traffic, which you can use to motivate your people to make some positive changes to the site.
* Ask for “ownership” of just one page, or just one section, and try to bring it up to snuff.

Can’t get a whole page? We’ve had customers who were given just one chunk of the home page to do with as they wished.

Surprisingly, site maps actually represent good SEO opportunities, and it may be easier to convince your boss to give you ownership of yours!

* Focus on off-page SEO activities. While you’re waiting to get your site spiffed up, you can always work on removing outdated listings and cleaning up old links to your site.

* As a last resort, if your current site is so hopeless that it’s actually doing your business more harm than good, you might decide to take drastic measures and disinvite the search engines.

Who Do I Want to Visit My Website?
The person who you most want to find your website is the person who is searching for your website! And of course this is true.

But now let’s dig a little deeper and describe your ideal audience so that you can help them make their way to you.

Who is the target audience for your website? Surely it will include potential clients/customers.

But don’t forget that it may also include members of the press, employees at your own company, current and past customers seeking support, even potential investors nosing about for the inside scoop!

Using your Goals Worksheet, describe your target audience with as much detail as possible: professional status, technical vs. nontechnical (this will affect how they search or even which engines they use), age, workplace vs. home users, geographic locality.

Knowing your target audience(s) will help you make important decisions-such as keyword choices, directory site submittals, and budget for paid listings-when you start your SEO campaign.

Which Pages Do I Most Want My Website Visitors to See?
Now it’s time to start thinking about the top-priority pages for your SEO campaign.

These are the pages that you most want people to get to from the search engines, and for best results, they should contain the most compelling content and the most useful information.

Since your visitors “land” on these pages from the search engines, we call them landing pages (you might also hear them called entry pages).

The main functions of your landing pages are that they speak to your desired audience and contain a call to action for your desired conversion. Illustrate possible paths through your website from entry to conversion.

Often, your landing page and your conversion page will be the same. This is a great situation because your site visitor doesn’t have to navigate within your site to complete a conversion.

Other times your conversion page will not be an appropriate entry page because your visitor will need to review other information first and then make the decision to continue.

After all, the Web is a highly nonlinear space, and your visitors are free to ramble around your site in all sorts of ways.

For the purposes of your SEO campaign, .you need to ensure that for each type of conversion, there is at least one clear path between the search engine and the conversion outcome.

We find it helpful to think backward: first consider where you want your visitor to end up, and then work backward to find a great page for them to enter your site.

What makes a good landing page? One with just the right information that your target audience is looking for.

For now, we want you to begin thinking about what pages might work. If you don’t have any pages that fit the bill, don’t despair!

Get some landing pages built if you can, or think about ways you can add compelling content to existing pages to turn them into excellent landing pages.

And just a heads-up: once you start your SEO campaign, all of your top-priority pages will probably need to be revised at least a little bit as part of the optimization process.

Many site owners don’t think in terms of deeper pages and think that they just want their home page to be found on the search engines.

But in truth, your home page is probably only good for achieving the most general of your goals.

Your deeper pages are more likely to contain a wealth of specific information and specific calls to action that you’d be thrilled for a specific audience to find one click away from a search engine!

Tracking Lets You Drop the failures
Have you ever heard this military strategy riddle? You are waging battles on two fronts. One front is winning decisively.

The other is being severely trounced. You have 10 thousand additional troops ready to deploy. Where do you send them? The answer is, you send them to the winning front as reinforcements.

Strange as it sounds, it makes more sense to reinforce a winning battle than to throw efforts into a losing one.

This strategy is also reflected in the maxim “Don’t throw good money after bad.” You need to know which of your efforts are bringing you good results so you can send in the reinforcements, and you need to know which efforts are not working so you can bail out on them. And the only way to know this is to track results.

Tracking Will Help You Keep Your Job
Even if your boss ignores you every time you walk in the office with a tracking report, even if your department head refuses to back you up when you try to get IT support for conversion tracking, even if Sales tells you there’s absolutely no way you can track sales back to the website, trust us; someday someone is going to want this information-preferably in a bar chart, with pretty colors, and summarized in five words or less.

If you don’t have the information, the measure of your accomplishments is going to default to this:

Are we #1 on Google?
And, if you’re not, get ready for some repercussions!

Tracking Helps You Stay Up-to-Date
“Do it right the first time.” It’s a great motto and a great goal, but it’s not a realistic plan for your SEO campaign.

For one thing, you will need to continually re-prioritize your efforts as described in “Drop the Duds.”

But there’s also another, unavoidable reason that your SEO campaign will need to constantly evolve: the search engines are changing too!

Don’t worry, this article sets you up with best practices that should have a nice long life span (in “Internet years” that is!).

But you will inevitably need to be prepared for some changes. What work best today will not be exactly the same as what works best three years down the road.

And the only way to know what has changed is to track your campaign. Now that you are convinced that tracking is important, take a look at your list of conversions.

Some of them will be easy to track; some may be difficult or close to impossible. Later, we’ll take some time to think through possible ways to track your successes (and failures).

How Much Tracking Do I Need to Do?
Tracking can seem like a daunting task if you’ve never given any thought to it.

Even a little bit of tracking can bring up some interesting findings. And these findings often get people interested in learning more, which may in turn motivate people to do more detailed tracking.

Believe it or not, tracking can be a creative process!
Way do you need SEO for your website?

Have you ever made a critical analysis on what your website is doing and whether these things are good or bad for your company?

Are you convinced that tracking is a necessity?

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