Step Wise SEO

You know the famous question about a tree falling in the forest? The same applies to your SEO campaign:

No matter how hard you work and what you achieve, nobody will know about it unless it’s documented.

And, brains being what they are, even you yourself will probably forget half of what you did this month.

The document you compile this week will be the basis for your future monthly reports, which will be your go-to documents for what you’ve accomplished, what’s wrong, what’s right, and where you need to go from here.

In our expert opinion, the Monthly Report is a cornerstone of a well-balanced plan. Why? Because we firmly believe that data is useless unless it’s interpreted in a meaningful way.

The point here is not just to document your work, but also to do the analysis and mental sifting that allows you to write about it intelligently.

The way you tell your SEO story is what will ultimately separate you from the SEO hacks and newbies out there.

Your Monthly Report is a team builder, a boss pleaser, and a mental reinforcement for your SEO learning curve, all wrapped in a sensible white-inkjet-bond-paper bow.

What major things to include in the report?

Keywords, Landing Pages, and Competition
You’ll start your Baseline Monthly Report with a description of your activities: what you did, what you discovered, and the important choices you (and your team) made. We’ll start you off with a possible first sentence for each:

Your Keyword Choice
“Top priority keywords were chosen based on an analysis of popularity with searchers, relevance to our site, and competition.”

Now, you’ve got some ’splaining to do: Explain the thought process that went into your choices.

Perhaps you want to mention keywords that were considered but disqualified or the various keywords that you combined for more efficient targeting.

Just a couple of sentences will do. You will want to revisit and reanalyze your keyword picks eventually, maybe as soon as six months from now, so getting this down in writing now will save you from having to reconstruct your original analysis.

Your Landing Page Choice
“Top landing pages were chosen to correspond with our conversion goals and our top priority keywords.”

Now, to make this meaningful, be sure to comment on any judgment calls you made when choosing landing pages:

“I picked the `easels’ page rather than the `artistic tools’ page because I think it will be easier to edit.”

This is also the place to make a note of any new landing pages that need to be built and perhaps even your ideas for appropriate content on these pages.

In a broad way, this section gives you a chance to have your say about anything you think is missing in your site’s content.

Your Competitive Analysis
“Top five competitors were chosen based on input from the sales department and observations regarding which sites had consistent rankings in the top 30 spots on Yahoo!, Google, MSN, and Ask.”

Site Visibility
Anybody can look at your spreadsheets to figure out how your site is doing with regard to the hard numbers-ranks, links, and indexing-but probably less than half the people you encounter will want to.

Indexed Pages
First, write your basic findings: “Our site’s top 10 landing pages are all indexed in Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.” Or “Our `Donate Now’ page is missing from Google’s and MSN’s indices.”

What you wrote in this section has big implications for the SEO-friendliness of your site’s design!

Use your knowledge about robot-friendly design to explain your findings. Possible analysis would include

“Having all pages indexed indicates that our site structure is amenable to robot crawling,”

“Our site’s login requirement is probably an impediment to indexing,” or

“The absence of pages in the indices may be due to the fact that our site only launched last month.”

We probably don’t have to tell you that if your landing pages are not being indexed, something must be done about it!

If you’ve determined that the “something” is changing your site’s structure or design, you should say so in this report and make sure this report is seen by the person on your team who can make the change.

This has two important benefits: One, even if you’re suggesting radical changes, you’re backing them up with facts.

And two, if nobody does anything about the problem and it comes back to haunt you later, you have documentation proving that you made this recommendation.

Ranks
Keep the long list of website rankings out of this report unless someone on your team has a penchant for numerical details.

Instead, summarize your rankings in a sentence or two. Here are some possible examples:

• ”We are ranking in the top 30 for only two of our top keywords.”

• ”We are on the top search results page for most of our top keywords.”

• ”Since none of our pages are indexed in the search engines, we have no rankings in the top 30 spots.”

Ranks can be influenced by many factors, and it may be premature for you to attempt to explain yours at this stage.

So consider adding something like this: “I will perform monthly rank checks to keep abreast of the situation.”

Now, here’s the sentence that we don’t want you to write: “Site optimization will be sure to bring us into the top 10 for our target keywords.”

Inbound Links
First, write the basic facts: “The total number of inbound links recorded on MSN for our top 10 landing pages is 537. This number is an estimate provided by the search engine, not a definite number.”

Next, some analysis is needed. There are several approaches you can take:

• The quality of the links: “We have several vendor sites linking to our `factory locations’ page.”

• The quantity of links, compared to your competitors’ links: “Our home page has fewer than half the inbound links compared to Competitor X.”

• The quantity of links, compared among your pages: “Our home page has approximately 500 inbound links, but our other landing pages have, on average, fewer than 15.”

Let your readers know it: “To improve the number of inbound links, this SEO campaign will include a link-building campaign.”

Conversions and Red Flags
Here are two headlines that are going to attract the attention of the people reading your report: Conversions and Red Flags. Make sure you give them what they want to see today.

Conversions
Start with the data you were able to gather about current conversions, whether specific (”Our Sales Director logged 82 confirmed leads from our website last month”)

or vague (”We received $7,000 in donations last month, but it is unclear what role the website played in this”).

Most likely, someone out there is not happy with your current conversion level or you wouldn’t be reading this book.

Be sure to include the goals and hopes of the powers that be:

“Increasing sales of the new Soap Gift Baskets will be the focus of this campaign” or

“We hope to improve our conversion rate (currently only 0.5 percent) by bringing in more targeted traffic.”

Stating this in writing shows that you’re aware of what’s important for your organization.

If you’re feeling the urge to include an estimate of how many new conversions your SEO campaign will bring in, feel free to do your best, but read our note on reasonable expectations first!

This is also the place to discuss plans for future conversion tracking, if you have any.

A Note on Reasonable Expectations
Have you ever heard something like this from your auto mechanic: “Well, we can try to replace some parts, but we can’t be exactly sure that it’ll stop the rattling sound, and oh, by the way, it’ll cost ya a bundle”?

SEO can be pretty similar. There are so many factors involved in SEO

-some within your control (for example, page text and site structure) and some far, far outside of your control (for example, search engine ranking algorithms or partnerships)-that it is very hard to predict outcomes.

But we know that in real life you need to have at least some inkling of what you can expect from your efforts.
Mechanics offer estimates; SEO pros offer reasonable expectations. Here are some factors that can point to success for your SEO campaign:

easy fixes, such as basic optimization factors that are missing from your current site;

well-balanced keywords with low competition, high relevance, and high popularity; a poor current status; an enthusiastic team; a good budget for PPC; and

competitors stuck in the Stone Age. How these factors combine and balance will affect your expectations. Let’s look at some possible combinations and what you might conclude:

Poor Current Status/High Current Optimization/No Easy Fixes This a difficult combination.

Your current optimization level is already high, which means you don’t have a lot of space for improvement.

You should set your expectations low, perhaps focusing on fixing red flags and your least-competitive keywords.

Fair Current Status/Poor Optimization/An Enthusiastic Team You have room to grow and a team that can make it happen.

It’s reasonable to expect to bump up your Fair status. But will it go to Good, Very Good, or Excellent? That depends on the other factors: competitiveness, budget, easy fixes, and so on.

High Competition/An Unenthusiastic Team/A Healthy PPC Budget With two major factors working against you, you can’t expect that your organic SEO campaign will show strong results. The PPC budget just might be able to pick up the slack.

We hope we’ve made it clear that there is a lot you can’t predict in SEO. We’ve done our best to give you a general idea of what you might expect,

but you should be very careful not to make any promises you can’t keep. Remember, reputable SEOs never guarantee any particular rank on search engines.

Red Flags
Through the course of your data-gathering, you probably came across several red flags. These are the isolated tidbits of information that make humans so much better at doing SEO work than any kind of automated system.

For this section, we want you to write issues that do not specifically fall under the other categories in this document, so “poor rankings” or “not enough inbound links” shouldn’t go here.

Red flags are issues that may be detrimental to your overall SEO health and that need to be addressed sometime in the future. Here are some examples:

• None of our files have meta description tags.

• I found several outdated listings for the following URLs available on Yahoo! And MSN….

• I found the term “X” instead of our current products in our listings.

• There are a large number of nonindustry competitors in the top ranks for our terms.

• Most of our inbound links are using the old product names and logos.

Don’t get bogged down in trying to figure out exactly how to handle these red flags. Just make sure to soften the blow with a statement like “I will be working to address these over the next several weeks.” And you will, with our help!

Personalize
Use this section to tune your Baseline Monthly Report for its intended audience. You know your team and your boss, so you know whether they’ll drool over a section titled “How to Bring Us to the TOP!” or a section titled “Search Marketing Best Practices.”

And you know if your team likes to read a lot of details or needs bullet-point summaries that they can glance through while they rush between meetings.

Finalize your document in a way that speaks to your organization’s hot buttons. Possible optional sections are listed here:

• ”Positive Findings” for the organization that likes to see the glass as half full

• ”Highlights of Competitive Analysis” for a boss who focuses on what the other guy’s doing

• Charts of relative keyword popularity, relevance, and competition for a visually oriented team

• Team planning: who will do what, for organizations with a lot of concern about staffing and labor management
Quick Reference
Let’s say you spent weeks researching and analyzing data about keywords, your competition, your site performance, and optimization, etc.

But you want others to be able to “get it” in a 5-minute read (or, let’s be realistic, a 2-minute skim). A Quick Reference should do the trick.

Build your Quick Reference with the following:

What is this SEO campaign trying to accomplish? You may wish to copy and paste your Conversions table, including desired conversions and target audiences, from the Goals Worksheet.

What are the top keywords and landing pages? List your top keywords and the landing pages that you finalized.

We recommend that you break the keywords and landing pages into two separate lists for ease of reading.

Who are our top competitors? Copy the names of your Big Five competitors from your Competition Worksheet.

Use your judgment to characterize the search engine competition as a whole on a scale of Not Competitive to Very Competitive.

What is our current site visibility and performance? Rate the overall level of your site’s current status on search engines and conversion performance: Poor, Fair, Good, Very Good, or Excellent.

If you’re finding mostly negative information in your links and status assessments, lots of red flags, and an unsatisfactory conversion rate, you’re probably in the Poor slot.

To get an Excellent grade, your site would need to have top page results for most or all of its target keywords, a lot of high-quality inbound links, a conversion level that you’re happy with, and very few or no red flags.

What is our current site optimization level? Rate your site’s current optimization level on a scale of Poor to Excellent.

Review your site optimization worksheet. Do you see mostly yes answers? This means that your landing pages are in good optimization shape.

A spattering of yeses and nos? Put your site in the Fair category. A whole lotta nothing? Rate your site Poor.