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Laying out an SEO strategy
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Del.icio.usLaying out an SEO strategy
When a company decides to embrace SEO in an effort to complement its marketing effort, it has embarked on an “SEO campaign.” Like any advertising or broader marketing crusade, it is a two-pronged effort: strategy and tactics. Common SEO methodology is well known among search professionals. What separates successful campaigns from failing campaigns is the strategy behind the effort. While anyone can drive a car in the dark, having a map, headlights, and street signs sure helps get there faster without disaster.
Effective SEO strategy demands iterative testing in order to refine it. Like advertising, SEO requires long-term commitment in order to see remarkable results; while spikes in revenue can happen periodically, they are the exception to the rule. However, unlike ad campaigns that are grounded with insertion orders and print schedules that run several
4. Enid Burns, “U.S. Search Engine Rankings, April 2007,” SearchEngineWatch, May 31, 2007 ( www.searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3626021).
months ahead of publication, an SEO campaign can stop on a dime to change direction. These are the four steps to a refined SEO effort:
- Strategize.
- Execute.
- Analyze.
- Optimize.
The medium is flexible and fast moving. Companies investing in SEO need to adopt the same traits, because the competition is fierce, and without well-constructed strategy, the best tactics in the world will not produce near the revenue potential.
Envision the end result
The first aspect of any strategy planning is figuring out the end goal. When there is a clear target in the distance, it’s a lot easier to take accurate aim. In regard to SEO, this is based primarily on keywords that define the nooks and crannies across the Web where people will find you. Consider keywords you think are relevant to your business, plus keywords that the user is going to type in looking for a product or service like your own. They are not always the same.
Three levels of keyword detail
Every business has keywords that describe its products or services. Rarely is this a collection of single words, but rather strings of words that detail the company and its offerings. For instance, a company like Rockstar Healthcare Staffing is in the competitive field of nurse staffing. Other companies in their industry are savvy about SEO. Cracking the top ten of the first results page is a challenge, but there are a number of keyword combinations for which Rockstar Healthcare Staffing can still optimize.
When writing down the words for which you want your site to perform well, consider three levels of detail, based on string length and keyword density. These will be referenced through the rest of the chapter, and into Chapters 14 and 15 as well, because determining the keywords that best describe your company can impact many other marketing activities.
Level 1: Long, low-traffic descriptions. These are the multiword phrases that precisely describe the company and its services, but are generally too long to gamble on an exact string match. In our example, Rockstar Healthcare Staffing might describe themselves with the following phrases:
- A national healthcare staffing firm for traveling nurses
- Provides traveling nurses job opportunities with good pay and benefits
- Offers personal and career growth for nurses through healthcare staffing opportunities
All three are loaded with keywords, but they have a slim chance of being typed word for word directly into a search engine. However, direct matches are not the point of level 1 descriptions; when a company can summarize its activity into a few succinct clauses, it creates a foundational language that should be used habitually for the website’s body copy, metadata, and external links. It also establishes a pattern for keywords and keyword phrases that reappear inside level 2 and level 3.
Level 2: Medium, competitive strings. Once a company has crafted a series of brief descriptors from level 1, those can be distilled into powerful keyword strings for which the web-site should rank highly in search engines. It is increasingly important to optimize for phrases, not single words, since studies routinely confirm that people usually type more than one word to find what they are looking for. For instance, a study on the BBC website showed 64 percent of all queries were more than one word,8 and a study by Clickstream on the entire Web in general showed the average phrase length to be 2.57 words.9
Level 2 phrases are the meat and potatoes of an SEO campaign. They are the keyword combinations on which a company in a competitive field like Rockstar Healthcare Staffing needs to focus. Using the descriptions crafted in level 1, several potent keyword strings can be extracted:
- US traveling nurse staffing
- National healthcare staffing nurses
- Nurse staffing good pay benefits
Level 2 phrases, as well as close approximations, represent the ideal combinations people will use to find you. These are the nucleus of ambient findability. They are the golden mean of descriptive accuracy and realistic search engine matching, as shown in Figure 13-2.
Obviously, the more influential and inimitable keywords that can be used here, the better the chance of meeting people’s expectations and finding more qualified leads. For instance, a regional company should optimize for their location. If the search engine market is crowded for “nurse staffing good pay benefits,” emphasize “nurse staffing good pay benefits new jersey,” so when someone defines their region as “new jersey,” Rockstar Healthcare Staffing will top the list, and the visitor will be a more qualified prospect simply because of the words they chose for their query.
Level 3: Short, uber-competitive phrases. For most companies, these are the holy grail of SEO. Topping a SERP for a competitive single- or two-word phrase is the end goal—that’s where the bulk of traffic is going to come from. The key, however, is to resist focusing too many marketing dollars on these elusive spots. By relentlessly optimizing for level 2, the SEO effect will cascade down, and with continued work, a website will rank as highly for “nurse staffing” as “US traveling nurse staffing.”
- Paul Huntingtion, David Nicholas, and Hamid R. Jamali, “Employing Log Metrics to Evaluate Search Behaviour and Success: Case Study BBC Search Engine,” Journal of Information Science, 2006 ( www.publishing.ucl.ac.uk/papers/2007Huntington_etal.pdf).
- WebSiteOptimization.com, “Clickstream Study Reveals Dynamic Web” ( www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/clickstream/).
Referring sites
Success in search engines requires building a network of links. A significant aspect of SEO strategy is identifying other websites that are relevant in content and will provide high- quality links back to your site. These may include alliances, forums, blogs, and more. The list is different for every industry, but any marketing leader in the organization should be able to point to a dozen or more sites to start.
It is also important to plan actual text that should be used for the links themselves. Consider the three levels of keywords in the previous section, and which words you want to reference your website. We’ll cover how the links should be actually constructed later in the chapter.
Focus on ROI
Too many SEO campaigns are half-baked. Where search engine fanatics focus on the mechanics of the process, starry-eyed marketers think appearing in the first page of results will solve all their problems. Unfortunately, neither is the panacea of online marekting. For optimization to truly bring success to the organization, the leaders of the project need to always consider the ROI of the campaign.
Simply put, driving herds of new visitors to a website is not enough to fill the coffers. At most, you’ll score some quick logo impressions, get a couple people to bookmark the site or grab the RSS feed, and possibly make a sale or two to cover the bandwidth bill. This is not smart marketing. The goal of any campaign is to drive conversions—transforming casual, anonymous browsers into actual sales or qualified leads.
Conversion paths should be defined across the entire website. The homepage is most important. Consider Figure 13-3. The well-designed page clearly describes the company’s product and purpose, and the right column offers an immediate means of trying the service without any hassle. For people researching e-mail marketing software, this is a huge time-saver; for the company itself, there’s no better way to collect qualified leads than to have people volunteer their information.
Every SEO campaign should be complemented by an equally detailed plan on leveraging the new traffic into conversions. Sometimes this means capturing information, other times it means driving people right to the online store for direct sales. Part of SEO metrics is finding out the ratio of visitors to conversions, and how much each conversion costs versus how much one is worth.
Regular review and analysis
SEO strategy is not like a refrigerator—it doesn’t get turned on to work without maintenance for the next ten years. Because search engines are being constantly tweaked (Google, for instance, changes its algorithm several times a week10), campaigns have to be closely monitored. Sites that formerly ranked in the first page of results can completely disappear from the search engine indexes without warning. Similarly, a page struggling to crack the top 30 might find itself suddenly sitting pretty at number 5—not from anything the developer did, but because the search engine’s labyrinthine ordering calculations underwent a change that affected that particular site’s ranking.
When it comes to SEO, it’s difficult to get too granular in the data. Because there’s a lot of cause and effect in Web traffic patterns, one number can have a profound effect on another number two months later. Consider the following list of metrics that should be tracked monthly:
- Total number of unique visitors
- Visitors from search engines, organized by search site
- Top search phrases, and where your site ranks for each
- Time spent on website
- Average page views
- Bounce rate (how many people left the site before clicking to a second page)
Keeping a regular, detailed journal on this information can illuminate interesting trends and directly influence future SEO efforts. For instance, you might find that a particular search string for which you worked hard to rank highly brings in little traffic, despite its prominent position. By contrast, another phrase, which had little SEO behind it, is bringing in a surprising number of qualified leads even though it appears on the third page of results.
Many companies only evaluate SEO performance on a quarterly (and sometimes yearly) basis. On the Web, three months is an eternity. To see true success, the campaigns have to be agile, reviewed at least every month, and revised at the drop of a keyword to take advantage of trends in the market, current events, and the maneuvering of competitors.
Analysis is impossible to conduct without good stats-tracking software. Many hosting companies provide weaker statistics software that reports rudimentary information like referring links, number of hits, and top search queries, but they cannot match the level of detail found in proper analytical applications. Following are a few popular examples.
WebTrends
WebTrends is the godfather of analytical software.11 It’s been around for years, helped define the industry, and works with just about every platform. The company’s products are
- Saul Hansell, “Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine,” New York Times, June 3, 2007 ( www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/business/yourmoney/03google.html?_r=1&oref=slogin ).
- www.webtrends.com
expensive but exceedingly detailed, and offer the user every conceivable feature, including the ability to generate detailed reports—complete with fancy pie charts and line graphs— on any detail across any time period, like a single keyword’s performance across a six-month period back in 2003.
Because it installs directly on the server, the program can read the server’s log files to review the visitor traffic information prior to its installation. Since every server produces log files from the second it’s turned on, WebTrends acts like a giant telescope looking back to the origins of the universe.
The company offers a very detailed support section on its website, and even conducts training sessions on its products. For large companies looking to install a true enterprise-class analytics system, WebTrends is the leading choice.
Mint
Mint is a newer service, released in 2005.12 Like WebTrends, it provides very detailed information for just about any metric a designer, marketer, or developer could want. In fact, for most companies, Mint might report on every detail they need to track, just without the custom reports for which WebTrends is known.
The biggest drawback to Mint is the implementation of the system. It only works on Apache servers running PHP and MySQL. It also collects information via JavaScript, not server log files. This means it cannot see historical information, only what it tracks after being turned on, which may be a drawback for companies wanting to dig deep into their site’s history.
These disadvantages are counterbalanced by the software’s plug-in architecture, called Pepper, which allows developers to develop widgets to expand the core functionality. For instance, the Secret Crush Pepper integrates with common blog software to see which visitors are most active, and the QuickTime Check Pepper provides a quick look at how many visitors have Apple’s QuickTime plug-in installed. There are dozens of these plug-ins available.
Mint is a great solution for those looking for an inexpensive ($30) analytics program that tracks just about every nuance possible.
Google Analytics
Over the past few years, Google has been expanding its free software offerings to include a suite of tools for marketers, developers, designers, SEO specialists, and more. One of the most celebrated releases was Google Analytics.13 This free web analytics tool is well-designed, comprehensive, and easy to use.
Like its brethren, it has its advantages and disadvantages. First, it works only with JavaScript tracking, which means historical data is not available. However, the installation is dead simple. There is no database or server-side software to set up as with Mint; just add the JavaScript tracking code inside the <head> tag of the document, and the numbers start
rolling in. All the information is stored remotely on Google’s servers, and is accessed by logging in to its site.
As with the other tools, the information is vast and relatively simple to access. All of the core info is there, including visitors, search strings, and length of visit. As you can see in Figure 13-4, the clean user interface presents all of this in easily digestible dashboards.
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