‘Search Engine Optimization’ or SEO for short, is the practice of altering onsite and offsite factors in order to enhance visibility in search engines like Google or other popular websites or niche properties.
SEO can be one of the most cost effective Internet Marketing methods available, but also a field that is unfortunately rife with unethical operators. Many firms jumped into the field with a view of making easy money. Frequently the unsuspecting agree to long-term, expensive retainers when in fact, if the initial investment is executed properly, incremental multi-year investment needs directly related to onsite portions of SEO may fall (depending on overall volume goals), until the website is aged such that it is no longer competitive on an aesthetic basis. Then the investment cycle may temporarily rise again with a redesign of the site, with the next years again most likely seeing a natural rise in website traffic with only minimal incremental additional work providing a high level of benefit. This definitely varies based on the overall competitiveness of the marketplace you are in, but this described scenario in terms of the SEO / website investment cycle holds across many cases.
Many firms offering SEO are not even necessarily aware of their short-comings. This often happens when the firm or agency sees SEO as a numbers and data game only. SEO is very much a left brain – right brain activity. The best SEO is highly quantitative but also highly creative.
Ceed takes a long-term approach to SEO by first focusing on structure of your website – the site needs a good foundation from which to build long term success. Focusing on generating engaging content that also happens to score well in the search engines is generally no accident or easy feat. Marketing Strategy and Creative Strategy are merged so that the investment stands a good chance of long-term inclusion and relevance in search engine results and therefore an ever falling cost per lead when the cost of investment is measured year after year. Once a strong initial investment in SEO is made, it is very worthwhile to continue to invest in incremental updates. This tends to further leverage the earlier investment. Even low investment levels in subsequent years can lead to strong results in terms of falling cost per lead.
Ceed’s first client was a search engine optimization client back in 2001. Since then Ceed has helped many clients achieve solid search visibility. Here is an outline of the general process used during the consultative website optimization process.
Phase 1: Research, Discovery, and Strategy Development
First, keyword research is conducted to help you accurately target your desired new clients or customers. The goal is to discover your best search marketing opportunities, generally in terms of 2-3 word phrases with a high propensity to convert vis-à-vis the type of service or products targeted for sales.
If you are also planning to invest in broadcast advertising placements across the web, research is also conducted in search of the best online media placements – where audience is a good fit with known attributes of the target market(s). Which properties provide best target audience reach per dollar invested? This is also examined and reported on.
Keyword Opportunity Analysis
It can be profitable in the long run to drill deeply into data on keyword usage statistics to find your list of best targets, in terms of overall traffic available and in terms of competitiveness of particular keywords. Google offers Adwords and Insight as keyword research options, and Wordtracker is a long-term industry favorite. The bottom line is to get access to a reliable database of keyword statistics that will span both major and minor search and directory sites for ideas on language being used to search.
Target Audience / Media Research
To create the highest response rates and best ROI possible, it is useful to assess which engines and/or directories your target customers are likely to use when searching for products / services in your categories.
Also it is useful to look at the buying process altogether, taking the time to learn about the steps that your target tends to work through during the purchasing decision-making process. This type of learning is probably best accomplished through conducting a custom primary research study.
Discovery during the strategy development phase will help set overall targeting strategy for your website, with the end goal of helping to increase your return-on-investment over the long-run. Diligent and unbiased research should help you decide how to best allocate your dollars over the course of your program. What is meant by unbiased? The idea of getting past the everyday language we use at work to describe what we do, and on to the actual language used by customers and clients to search for us on the Web. One of the biggest barriers to good targeting can be assuming that you already know what your best keywords are, without actually taking an objective, numbers-driven look at the situation for the most impartial results possible.
Phase 2: Structural Revision
If you are trying to improve your search engine performance, it is important that the technology structure of your website property is reviewed.
Most frequently, structural issues that impact the amount of machine-readable content available include the use of framesets, dynamic content systems, Flash-based sites, or JavaScript. This issues are now overall less of a problem as newer technologies can work around these blocks on content, but issues can still arise so it is a good practice to ensure that your site’s HTML code contains light machine-readable content that accurately describes your site’s purpose.
This step is a must so that content is machine readable by bots and spiders that scan content on the World Wide Web. It may not be that you need to switch off some of the problematic technologies; rather, you can enhance existing content to add to the material that is readable. For instance, it is okay to use some Flash in your site; however you would not want to have your entire website set up as a Flash movie, with only one main point of entry to the material.
These days, most of the big hosting companies, like the one used by Ceed (Sprout-Hosting.com) automatically install Google Webmaster Tools on your account. Ceed can also set this up manually. There are diagnostic tools built in that show any errors that are being reported and even an HTML recommendations section – very useful for double-checking whether Meta fields are working properly.
Phase 3: Editorial and Meta-Content Review
Your visible content and Meta content is edited in order to improve your likelihood of success in achieving high rank on your target keywords.
Text optimization
Based on the selection criteria used by your target search engines, directories and social media websites, existing text is reworked, new text is added, and titles are modified in order to improve your ranking.
Meta-content development
Additionally, careful attention is paid to your Meta tag development.
Phase 4: Submission
Once your code and content is optimized, it is time to submit your site or particular pages (depending on the listing service) to your target engines, directories, social media websites, and paid listing services.
At this stage, you may anticipate some fees, but not necessarily. Based on a common strategy, such as submitting to Business.com, it could cost up to US $299 in fees or more. However, there are great free engines and website media properties to submit your site to, so even if you lack an extra budget for fees, we can still work together submit your site to the free engines and directories.
Once submission is complete and if your domain is brand new, it can take from three to six months or longer to fully realize the benefits of your investment. If we are talking about a modified site, especially one that is ‘aged,’ the work may have a much faster impact, depending on the extent of the changes made to the website.
In addition to general search engines, there are many niche-focused directories out there on the Web, some of which will let you list for free. Plus, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) services are a great way to drive traffic to your site relatively quickly. The most popular PPC services is Google Adwords.
Phase 5: Monitoring
Once your initial submissions are complete, measuring traffic generated by your listings begins.
To carry out this step, your website log file data is needed to create visitor tracking reports. These days, automated software will locate your logs and feed them into a reporting system. The most famous of this type of system is Google Analytics.
Ceed uses a white label system, one of the best on the market vis-à-vis cost, which is a pay for use system. Why? It provides greater detail and more extensive reporting. A range of metrics is reported on. A favorite is keyword x engine x page which is very revealing in terms of search engine optimization performance.
If you are on the Ceed CMS, or a CMS installed for you by Ceed, you can login to view your actual website activity at any time through a simple log file reporting tool built right into the admin tools. The report is basic but useful. You can see who was recently on the site and what they did there while visiting.
To give you an example of what log file data is useful for, here are some examples of questions it can help you answer. For instance:
Which words are generating the best traffic from a conversion perspective? How should this impact the content you are displaying on your website?
Is your blog actually driving leads or are your services pages doing a better job? Are they supportive, integrated sections or creating isolated islands of users?
How are your external efforts at driving traffic paying off? Are you seeing visitors from your social media profiles? Pay per click efforts? How do these compare in terms of conversion and thus pay off in terms of time and money invested?
Which pages appear to be most captivating for users? Are there particular pages with a higher rate of visitor drop-off than others? What are bounce rates by page? What is the most successful content and how could it be replicated / adapted to additional relevant targets?
These are the kinds of questions to be answered with the evidence of data to support further, future actionable website search engine optimization (SEO) adjustments.
Phase 6: Results Maintenance
New learning will emerge over time as performance is monitored. While content updates can occur whenever new learning permits, a schedule of either set weekly, monthly, or quarterly updates is recommended depending on the size of your site and the competitiveness of your targets. At first, results refinement may require a good amount of time, especially in terms of continuing to add valuable, engaging content to your established strategic structure, but this tends to more than pay off in terms of cost of incremental improvements (again, results can always vary – there are many factors at work that combine together for great results). When considered from a multi-year perspective search engine optimization work tends to be extremely cost effective, only second to email marketing in terms of digital marketing techniques.
Search Engine Marketing can require some additional effort beyond a vanilla website design development project, but the reward comes in terms of greater website traffic, conversation, and ultimately, a faster return, not to mention high multi-year return, on your investment.
When the basic principles of strategic keyword information architecture are in place, we have a great base from which to ensure your site’s inclusion in the wired world with minimized fuss, frequently leading to pleasing, long-term continuity through the ebbs and flows of complicated and constant search engine algorithm shifts. When you focus on great content, the result tends to be a natural rise in your rankings in the results as your domain ages gracefully into search engine algorithm shifts that are targeting the removal of content spammers. As the spammers are penalized, websites with great content are usually rewarded with a ‘natural’ increase in visibility in the rankings.
Contact Ceed today to get started taking advantage of your Web presence for lead generation.