.jpg)
Operating without a search engine optimization (SEO) plan is like constructing a building without a blueprint. Possible, but not likely to be cost-effective or efficient and the final results are almost impossible to predict or measure. With a blueprint, a builder knows whether it will be a simple stone building or a cathedral. Likewise, with an SEO plan, you’ll move toward website improvement confidently knowing what kind of success you’re trying to create.
Manage expectations
If your company decides to embrace SEO to augment its marketing efforts, managing expectations among key players will be fundamental to success. Everyone with a stake in improving and maintaining the website needs to be on board during the planning stage and agree to the goals set forth. Some of the players to include in SEO improvement planning are executives responsible for the overall business outcome, marketing staff and content developers, the webmaster/programmer, and the web designer.
Whatever changes you make to your site will not occur overnight. This message must be understood by the SEO team to avoid confusion and misunderstandings later. SEO is a long-term project implemented and tweaked over time and everyone on the team needs to agree they are in it for the long haul. The reason expectations must be managed is that, even with carefully laid out plans, you’ll be at the mercy of search engine crawlers coming to your site in their own sweet time to pick up on the enhancements and improvements you’ve made. There are a lot of variables you can improve, but there are a lot of variables simply out of your hands.
Developing benchmarks as the basis for the SEO plan will help the improvement team understand your site’s current level of performance and will create a starting point for developing realistic goals to measure.
Create measurable goals
Every good plan has goals both specific and measurable. The same is true for your SEO plan. Get your team together and agree on a set of goals your website can reasonably achieve. Start by agreeing on the role your website plays in the greater scheme of your marketing strategy. How can the website be aligned to contribute to the business and marketing goals already in place? What do you want visitors to do when they get to your website?
If your website is:
- A distribution channel, goals may include increasing online sales volume or average order value, donations, or subscriptions, or decreasing the number of bounces or exits before a conversion (or action) takes place.
- An information center, goals may include more downloads of white papers, educational materials or other information, an increase in unique visitors, better awareness of an issue, an increase in online form submittals.
- A support center, goals may include improved assistance for products purchased online or in a store, increased hits on the frequently asked questions page, increased use of features such as email, live chat or an 800 phone number.
- A community builder, goals may include an increase in memberships, more people connecting via blog postings, forums, or bulletin boards, an increase in reader comments, or more volunteers.
Of course, improving organic search engine rankings is foremost on most web marketer’s minds. So, you may have goals like these: Improve organic rankings by one page. Based on organic results improvement, decrease paid Internet advertising by X percent.
Goals will be specific to your company, its position in the marketplace, business and marketing objectives, your industry and other factors. Regardless of what makes sense for you, make sure the goals are clear, agreed upon and measurable.
Track online results
Based on the SEO goals for improving organic search results, identify the core metrics you can measure. The deeper you get into SEO, the more you’ll realize the infinite possibilities for measuring key performance indicators as well a minutia. Sometimes minutia is very helpful for content, but not always for higher level analytical analysis.
At the beginning, keep metric measurements simple, yet meaningful. At the very least, when prospects call your office, want to buy your products or hire you, ask them how they found you. Make note every time someone mentions your website and dig a little by asking the role the website played in their decision to act. Even this minimal information provides clues for improving the home page, making the online purchasing process easier and quicker, reworking ineffective pages, or discovering new keywords.
Using your benchmark information, you can compare figures such as sales, donations, memberships, and subscriptions before and after your SEO improvements.
You can also glean useful information from your website’s analytical package or from a multitude of free analytics tools such as Google Analytics. Become familiar with the type of data available and then determine what makes the most sense for you to continually monitor. Data can include:
- Search engine traffic: the percent of visitors arriving through search engines vs. total site traffic, top keywords and search engines used to arrive at your site.
- Unique visitors
- Referring sites: other sites sending traffic to your site.
- Page views: entry and exit pages, page views per visit, top bounce rate.
- Time on site
Using benchmark information, specific goals and your new ability to track and measure relevant data are the building blocks for interpretation and continued improvement. You’ll be able to spot trends and determine whether you are moving toward or have reached your goals. You’ll also identify problem areas such as high bounce rates, ineffective pages, and keywords visitors are using to arrive at your site that are not being optimized to attract even more visitors.
SEO is a continuous loop process. Once you create and execute the strategy and analyze the results, you have the information you need to return to the optimization stage. A website are no longer just nice to have, it is an essential component to your marketing strategy and the time spent getting the site to full potential is well worth the effort.
To learn more about search engine optimization:
How well is your website performing?
In the dark about search engine optimization?
How to gather competitive online data
The Internet Ultimatum: Zero to $1.2 Million in Twelve Months Flat
Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day
Comments