Search Engine Optimization allows your website to be discovered by search engines by using certain keywords and key phrases within the sites pages. As your websites pages become more popular and shared, your page rankings increase in the search results.
Keyword Analysis
If your goal is to get more people to visit your site, then knowing what keywords are searched is extremely important.
Page Performance
Asset Optimization, Load time, asset minification, server response times, Page Load
On-site Optimization
Optimizing both the content and HTML source code of pages on a website through the sitemap, meta tags, alt tags, schema, load time, image naming, page naming, etc.
Off-Site Optimization
actions taken outside of your own website to impact your rankings within search engine results through backlinks, community building, industry research, business profiles, forums, guest posts, digital news, etc.
Research
There are various areas to research that can improve your online business.
- Keyword: research that aims to identify the keywords of a company’s competitors and other popular keywords
- Link: is a very meaningful tactic that identifies the tactics being employed within an industry vertical to improve a link profile by other brands.
- Competitor: reveals the actual practices that competitors use to secure high rankings on the search result pages.
- User Experience: explores ways to improve a customers experience through design and user flows.
Implementation
Armed with an abundance of usable research, on-site modifications of a few core areas of opportunity will help the website improve its rankings.
- Page Titles, Meta Tags/Descriptions, Alt Tags, Social tags, Location Info, Contact Info, and Schema
- On-site Elements including Image size, video size, page speed, code structure, Layout improvements
- Page Naming and Infrastructure changes (Depending on the size of a website and the number of page level changes required, the initial implementation can take days or weeks.)
Optimization
Once research-driven changes have been implemented on the site, the pages will be crawled or recrawled by search engines, and we will then determine how successful the initial efforts have been, but the work is far from complete. Continuing the optimization of the pages is one of the most important aspects of any SEO campaign and includes practices such as enhancing the relevancy of a page for a particular keyword (by including additional content or variants of the target keyword) and strategically linking other pages to the page being optimized.
Outreach
It is impossible to rank for a competitive search term (a word or phrase that has a high volume of searches) without a high number of high quality, authoritative links and content. For this reason, one of the primary responsibilities of an SEO campaign is to engage in link building and content building. Leveraging outreach initiatives and investing the time in the distribution of content can include guest posting, contacting other sites to reclaim lost links or claim brand mentions, etc.
Analysis
The analysis of the performance can reveal the quality and usefulness of the research, the quality of the implementation and optimization efforts, and the success of outreach initiatives.
What should a company look for as they analyze the performance?
In the past it was common to measure success by the search results position achieved, but a better approach is to measure the uplift in organic traffic as company and marketers become more mature and sophisticated. Keyword rankings fluctuate, sometimes with great frequency, but when traffic and conversions increase, companies can be confident that their search engine optimization efforts are paying off.
- SEM Rush – Analytic tracking and insights
- Google Analytics – Site traffic and goals
- Google Search Console – Onsite search sources and site structure
- Schema.org – Search tagging
- Pagespeed and Performance