How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy: SEO Reporting & Analytics

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After you SEO optimize your website, you will want to know what parts of the program are working well and what still needs improvement. Furthermore, you’ll need a way to quantify the business impact of your SEO work.

To get a good understanding of the effectiveness of your SEO program, you’ll need to understand how your keyword visibility has changed over time, how much traffic that visibility is driving to the website, and what is happening to that traffic.

There are many tools that will give you data on keyword visibility. Tools such as Hubspot’s Marketing Grader, Keyword Spy or SEM Rush can quickly tell you how visible your keywords are. If you keep track of your results from month to month, you’ll be able to see the impact of your work on visibility over time.

Keyword visibility, of course, is only the first step in the process. What you really want to know is how your visibility is impacting traffic and leads or sales. To get this data you’ll need to use a website analytics program like Google Analytics. This tool will tell you how much traffic and how many goal conversions you get from each keyword. By tying your visibility to traffic to conversions, you can get a complete picture of the business impact of your SEO work. To learn additional techniques to rank better on search engines, please download our white paper, “How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy.”

How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy: Link Building

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When it comes to having an effective SEO plan, inbound links is a very important part of the search engine’s algorithm, which determines how your keywords will rank in the organic search results. Each link is essentially a vote for your site’s content. And the more votes your site has, the more popular you’ll be in search engine results.

It is very important, therefore, to get as many high quality inbound links pointing to the most important pages of your website as possible. When you build links, make sure that you use keyword seeded anchor text across multiple web sites to increase your inbound links. You can get links by signing up with directories, issuing press releases, getting partners to link to you, linking from your own microsites, posting on social media sites, etc. There is an almost limitless amount of ways for you to get links, but all of them take time and effort. As you build links, keep track of how Google views your link building progress through Google webmaster tools, to make sure you are focused on getting links that will make a difference.

Don’t forget to include internal links to your most important pages to help spiders easily identify which pages they should pay closer attention to. Visitors will also benefit from internal linking since you’ll be promoting related or more in-depth information on a given topic. Also don’t forget to optimize your anchor text on these internal links as well. To learn additional techniques to rank better on search engines, please download our white paper, “How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy.”

 

 

 

 

How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy: Fresh Content

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Fresh content is a very important factor in keyword visibility. If your site is updated frequently, the search engines will index it more frequently and it will help you get better keyword visibility. A regularly updated blog is an excellent way to provide fresh content. It can also be helpful to make small updates to your product or service pages each month. Press releases on your site are another easy way to make your content fresh.

As you add new content, make sure you use all of the same principles mentioned above to make sure that the new HTML page body copy as well as the tags and links are fully optimized. To learn additional techniques to rank better on search engines, please download our white paper, “How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy.”

How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy: Analyzing your Website SEO

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Once you’ve built keywords in to your website, you’ll want the search engines to index the content and update your website in their search engine rankings. Google has a very helpful tool called Google Webmaster Tools which allows you to see your website the way that the search engines do. It will help you identify broken links or other factors which may be preventing them from seeing all of your web pages.

You can also tell the search engines not to index certain content on your website if you don’t want them to see it. These may be landing pages or ads, which have duplicate content or may be pages you don’t want searchers to see. To learn additional techniques to rank better on search engines, please download our white paper, “How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy.”

How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy: How to Develop Keyword Plans for your Website

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This is part of our Blog Series: How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy. Previously, we covered; What is SEO, SEO Goals, What’s Important to Google, and Keyword Research.

Once  you’ve chosen the keywords, you’ll need to develop a plan to integrate them into your website. In this process, you will need to insert the keywords into the HTML and body copy of the page. The common HTML tags to focus on are the URL, title tag, description tag, alt tag, H1 Tag and body copy.

It’s important to insert the keywords enough times to make the content seem relevant, but not enough times to seem to be “spamming” the search engines. If Google decides that you are trying to trick them, they could blacklist you so that you don’t show up at all on the search engines. One way to see how many times to insert the keyword into each tag is to look at the top organic results for that keyword and see how long their copy is for each tag and how many times they’ve used the keyword in each tag. This will give you a sense of what the search engines think is important for each keyword.

If this sounds like a very detailed process, you are right. In order to do this well, you need to match at least one web page to every keyword you are focused on, and then write copy for all of the different tags mentioned above that include the keyword.

Taking the time to  do SEO copywriting and HTML implementation correctly  is a critical step in the process of making your website more visible to the search engines. To learn additional techniques to rank better on search engines, please download our SEO white paper, “How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy.”

How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy: Importance of Conducting Keyword Research

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This is Part of our Blog Series: How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy. Previously, we covered; What is SEO? and SEO Goals and What’s Important to Google

Once you have established  your SEO goals, you should determine the most effective keywords for placement on your website—words that have low competition and high search traffic, and that are highly relevant to your business.

It’s advisable to start with dozens or even hundreds of potential keywords and then get data on keyword traffic and competition in order to make decisions about the best keywords to focus on. You can also get data from your website analytics program or a paid search marketing program to see which keywords are not only driving traffic, but are also driving leads or sales. You can also see which keywords you are already ranking on, and focus on improving existing organic search term visibility. For example, if you are showing up on the middle of the second page for a particular keyword, it will be much easier to improve visibility and get on the first page, than to take a keyword that you are not ranking for at all, and become visible.

It’s challenging to make decisions about the best keywords to use with all of this data, but since these decisions will drive the success of the rest of the program, it’s critical to do it well. To learn additional techniques to rank better on search engines, please download our white paper, “How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy.”

How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy: What’s Important to Google?

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This is Part of our Blog Series: How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy. Previously, we covered; What is SEO? and SEO Goals.

With over 85% of the search engine market, if you are not focusing your SEO strategy on what Google deems is important, then your strategy will be unsuccessful.

When it comes to making sure your website is getting picked up by Google’s organic search results, there are really only two things that matter to Google. (This is their “special sauce” and the reason they dominate the search market and are worth about $200 billion today.)

These two things are the “On Page” factors and Inbound Links. On Page factors are things about your site that tell Google you are relevant for a particular keyword. These are keywords in the body copy, URLs, and other HTML tags. Inbound links is a popularity contest. Do other websites link to your site with keywords that are relevant? Are these important websites? For example, it makes a big difference if CNN or IBM link to your website vs. getting a link from a non-relevant site with very little traffic.

Focusing your SEO efforts on these two factors, will lead to positive SEO results.

To learn additional techniques to rank better on search engines, please download our white paper, “How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy.”

Google AdWords PPC Comparison: Search Network vs. Display Network

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Google AdWords offers two major avenues for advertising – the Search Network and the Display Network.  Each network offers advantages and disadvantages to PPC advertisers.  But which network is better?

Let’s start by looking at the advantages of the Search Network (these ads run on www.google.com):

  • Simple and easy targeting, just pick the keywords you want and your ads will appear
  • Conversely, you can eliminate the keywords you don’t want to appear for and filter your audience
  • Tapping into Google’s audience, an audience you know has interest in what they’re searching for and trusts Google to provide relevant results
  • Google’s Search Network includes relationships with other Search Engines, so you can tap into those holdouts that still use second tier Search Engines like AOL.

Now let’s take a look at the advantages of the Display Network (these ads run on other websites):

  • A  huge inventory of thousands of websites with tons of relevant content
  • The ability to target specific audiences and sites within that network
  • You can also choose sites or audiences to block to better target your audience
  • The ability to run not only plain text ads, but static or animated banners and other rich media

The fact is that both have advantages you can take advantage of, and which network is better depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.

Things to Consider About Google AdWords’ Ad Networks

The vast majority of advertisers start using AdWords because they want to show up in Google’s search results.  What many of them don’t realize is that when you create a campaign in AdWords that campaign is set to appear in both the Search Network and Display Network by default.  Many advertisers end up running ads in the Display Network unaware and unprepared for what that entails.  When you’re starting up in AdWords be careful to check campaign settings to only show up in the networks you want to show up in.  If you’d like to utilize both consider creating separate campaigns for each Network to help you better optimize your results.

If you are one of those advertisers who unwittingly ended up advertising in the Display Network, you may have had a bad experience.  You may have even willingly gave the Display Network a try in the past and been unhappy with results.  If that’s the case you may want to consider giving it another try.  Google has come a long way in creating options for that make targeting in the Display Network easier and more precise.  Google’s content targeting algorithm has also improved.  The network has expanded and includes much more relevant content.

Google is still the top Search Engine and has a huge audience.  In many cases an advertiser can set up a campaign in the Search Network and, by using the right keywords and ad copy, can run a very successful campaign.  However some advertisers, for one reason or another, may not be able to get enough from just the Search Network.  Google’s tools may suggest more keywords to add but that may not always work.  A properly set up Display Network can help those advertisers tap into a huge inventory and grow their campaign even more.

So Which Network Is Better?

The answer all depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.  Both networks give you options to find a targeted audience to reach out to. The Search Network is often the best place to start for most advertisers because of Google’s audience, but the reach that the Display Network offers shouldn’t be ignored.  Be sure to try both and discover which one works best for your offer.

How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy: Importance of Establishing SEO Goals

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This is Part of our Blog Series: How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy. Previously, we covered: What is SEO? 

The first step of establishing an effective SEO plan is to define your SEO goals. Are you interested in the visibility of certain keywords for their own sake, better branding, or more leads? Define your goals, and then make sure that you focus on those goals and track the results of your activity.

Most of our clients think about SEO as an important tool to help them become more visible on the search engines SO THAT they get more traffic to their website, SO THAT they get more leads or new business. Remember that in order for the last thing to happen, your website needs to be set up to catch and convert the leads which requires a good design, architecture and a strong call to action. All keywords, of course, are not created equal. It will be much easier to rank #1 on your company name than for a keyword like “financial advisors Boston,” or “financial advisors.” Not only do more general keywords have more traffic, they are also much more competitive, which makes it more challenging to rank well on general terms. If you are successful getting on the first page of the search engine results of a keyword with high traffic, it can make a big difference for your business. If you are successful in being visible on a keyword with little or no traffic, you might not even be noticed.

Remember that your end goal is not just search engine visibility, but traffic and ultimately sales or leads, so choose your keywords carefully. If you end up ranking on a keyword that is not relevant to your business, you may increase traffic to your website, but you may also increase the bounce rate from your website, since people clicking from that keyword will leave seconds after they arrive.

Establishing goals is the first step to SEO success. To learn additional techniques to rank better on search engines, please download our white paper, “How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy.”

How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy: What is SEO?

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For those of you who are not really sure what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is, it is essentially the art and science of making your website “relevant” for what the search engines want to see for a particular keyword. SEO is great for getting your site to show up as high as possible in organic search engine rankings. The important thing to note is that it’s not about tricking the search engines into thinking you are more relevant than you really are; it’s about making your website as relevant as possible based on their criteria.

Since the search engines don’t actually publish their search algorithms, it’s only possible to understand how to make your website more relevant by trial and error. Fortunately, there is an entire industry of SEO specialists who focus on this problem every day, so after years of study, we have a very clear understanding of what works and what does not. Below, you’ll find practical steps and killer optimization strategies you can use to ensure your site is search-friendly.

To learn additional techniques to rank better on search engines, please download our white paper, “How to Build a Winning SEO Strategy.”