Lately I’ve been doing quite a lot of work in the area of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). To people unfamiliar with this subject, it would seem like it’s a part of marketing but I found out first hand that this is not true. Especially if you are a web developer or business owners, SEO IS CLOSER TO YOU THAN YOU THINK. I need not remind you how vital google (or search engines) ranking is for any online businesses, so you never know the day your customers ask for explanation of why their sites are not topping the ranks.
I’m going to start posting about a lesson or a useful tip I learn that can hopefully help you optimize your website for ranking. I intend this post to be generic for both technical and non-technical audience. And if you are a developer-turned-SEM consultant like myself, you’ll find this post series helpful. Any feedback is welcome.
To start off in SEO, the first thing you should be looking at is planning your SEO strategy.
Short term SEO
Short term SEO usually goes from 1-3 months period and not exceed 6 months. Short term SEO is only appropriate for a certain type of projects. For example, promoting seasonal products, promoting a movie or a music album release.
Since you have a short time frame of 1-3 months to monitor, you should start planning and implementing at least a month before the launch of a campaign. The key SEO objective of this type is to sprint the page up to top ranking for search engine. After the short monitoring period, the importance of search engine ranking will become minor.
Long term SEO
Most search engine optimization campaign is usually long term in nature. This is appropriate for online business and not target specific seasonal period of time or a specific marketing campaign. For long term SEO, monitoring the result and frequent updates are crucial as long as the website operates. You should make sure that the search engines ranking of your web site are update and consistent with your goal.
In most case, online businesses should adopt both short term and long term and use them in combination. Having a long term SEO plan for long running business and occasionally implement short term SEO for seasonal products, discount, or new products introduction is a common pattern.
Where to start with SEO planning
IMHO, the best place of start the optimization is first talking to your customers and understand the business goal of the SEO campaign. Without understanding the business goal, you will not be able to come up with effective plan of actions. In most case the main goal usually falls into one of these categories:
Increasing number of visitors
This goal is applicable to all types of web sites. More visitors means more revenue that can be generated from advertising. The plan for increasing number of visitors tend to be long term SEO. Two things to keep in mind when you come down this road are trying to cover all the key content of a web page and selecting highly competitive keywords.
Increasing sales of products and revenues
For an e-commerce websit that’s already open for business, the end result tends to focus on sales and visitor-to-customer conversion rather than increasing number of visitors alone. Picking the righ keywords alone will not be enough. To get the most out of this plan, SEO is usually a part of an special advertising campaign or a special sales event. Remember that the result of a SEO campaign should be measurable and allow you to figure out the return on investment.
Promoting brands or products
When the goal of a SEO campaign is to promote product or services, timing becomes more critical. You would want the result, whether it’s ranking or seachability, to be optimal during the peak of a product’s popularity. This type of SEO campaign usually start at least a month before the PR campaign to start. This buffer time will be spent on page optimization, content generation, and give some time for search engines to pick it up.
You don’t have to optimize an entire web sites, but you have to make sure that all relevant contents are in place. The landing page of the product must be optimized and ready. At minimum, the landing page must be geared up with the information on where to find and purchase the product, links to additional information, and links to store location.Â
One caution though, for this type of campaign, the site visitors tend to spend time to read and drill into the content rather than skim through it if the content hits home. On the other site, if the content appears to be inconsistent with the campaign theme, it’ll like to to damage your business’s credibility.
Other types of search engine optimization goals
A part from the three goals listed above. SEO is frequently use to enhance an image of a product or a brand. Many websites also implement SEO to gain credibility from customers and search engines as well.
A while back I was helping a friend recovered his online business product from negative reviews on various sites. What we did were revamping the product website look to be more professional, revisiting the content of all the web pages to make sure that it’s up to date and accurate. Then we went on a campaign of link building and inviting many customers to re-review the product. His web site started picking up good ranking after positive reviews and external links to information came in.
What you should get out of your SEO planning
A summary list of things you should get out of your SEO planning
- Clear business goals and objectives of the campaign
You must come to a mutual agreement with your customer about the business goals and objectives of an SEO campaign. SEO objectives will be developed from this.
- Desired outcomes and units of measurement
With business goals and objectives in hand, you should set key desired outcomes of a campaign and how to measure result. Again, you and your clients MUST be in mutual agreement. Create a Statment of Work document and have your customers sign it if possible. If things go wrong, this document will become your standing point and a basis of your argument on performance.
- Website assessment
Now that you have outcomes and measurements laid out, the next thing you can do is assessing the current state of the website. Compare the current status and what it should be. Target areas and pages that require optimization.
- Optimization process and required actions
Building on top of your assessment is the plan for actions. Each action should have description and estimate time of when it start, when it should complete, and the effect it’ll have to the entire SEO campaign.
- Plan for report, review, and recommendation for improvement
It’s also important to plan on how you would collect, review, and report results to your customers. Establishing the means of reporting and review will help you rethink website objectives and whether if it’s measurable.
Although it’s not so technical, planning is critical for any SEO campaigns, whether it’s long term or short term. Even with minimal brief planning will help you identify what needs to be done and if it’s going to deliver the desired result. If you are new to search engine optimization, I would recommend SEO planning to be the first thing you do.