Campaigns: How to Decide What to Track?

[Suzany]

Hi There!

I'm new to SEOMoz, but not completely new to SEO.  A bit of background: 9 year old content site, medium traffic (low 7 figures unique visitors yearly) with about 85% coming from SE traffic.  (It was 75% but Panda seems to have bumped that up.)

I've created this with zero keyword research. I just built a site that I would have liked to have found online. It's a weight loss/fitness website with tools, calculators and articles.

I'm going to be working harder on getting traffic from other sources, but I signed up here because I want to make sure I'm taking full advantage of my site when it comes to SEO.

Having said that, I'm at a loss as to what to do with a campaign.   My site is huge, with thousands of pages and keywords.  I started a campaign, threw in a few keywords and some competitors just to get started, but this seems so...directionless.

How do I figure out what I want to analyze?

Thanks!

Suzanne

[Suzany]

Thanks, Cyrus!!

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Suzanne,

The way most SEOs work is to move from low-hanging fruit to more challenging opportunities.

1. For most new users of SEOmoz who run their first PRO campaign, this means addressing the site audit in your crawl report, starting with the errors first.

You said you have a large site with 1000s of pages, so it's likely the crawl found 100s or even 1000s of errors on your site. This can make it a little overwhelming to know where to start.

Take advantage of the Help Guides. Here's the guide for the Crawl Diagnostics Tab. Read this top to bottom. If you don't know what something means, this is an excellent time to start researching. If you are faced with an overwhelming number of errors, there are a couple things you can do to prioritize.

• Sort the URLs of the errors by Page Authority. This will help you address your most important pages first.
• Export your crawl results to CSV. Once they are in a spreadsheet form, start to look for patterns. Multiple errors are often caused by the same problem, so making a small fix can sometimes lead to big results.

2. Add more keywords to your campaign. You can get these from Google Analytics. This Help Guide will guide you. Read articles on Keyword Research and find out what keywords you would like to rank higher for. Start to devise a plan.

3. Have you connected a Google Analytics account? This is extremely helpful. Yep, the Help Guides assist with that, too.

4. Check your On-Page reports. These are generated for any keyword/URL ranking in the top 50. Again, can you spot any patterns? Any changes you can make across your site to improve the keyword relevance of your pages? Try improving a handful of pages that already rank well for high volume keywords and see what happens. Experiment.

5. Analyze your links. Use Open Site Explorer Top Pages tab to make sure links to your site aren't being lost to broken URLs. Find out where are your best links are coming from and figure out how to do more of that. Look at your incoming anchor text. Does it mirror the keywords you are ranking for?

(Really, this is a much of a learning process as anything. But each step takes you further)

Examine the links of your competitor. Where did those links come from, and can you earn those same links? Where are your competitors stronger than you? How can you catch up? The keyword difficulty tool is great for this too.

6. Install the MozBar, if you haven't already. Start surfing everywhere with it. Use the tools to analyze pages and figuring out why they rank where they rank.

7. Even though your site has been around for years, there may have been some things overlooked. So pretend it's brand new . Watch this video from Rand about launching a site.

8. When you get stuck, browse old blog post, search Google, or ask a question here. The web is full of SEOs willing to help.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

[Suzany]

I've been doing that, too.   I see a few things I can clean up -- but it's nice to see some A and B report cards.

I just feel like I'm missing the point -- or some specific goals. Or a plan.

Thanks for the welcome!

Suzanne

[rsanchez]

Hi Suzanne,

I feel the same way when I see the campaign view, it kind of just provides an overall view of how your site is crawled by SEOMoz, and how you stack up against the competition.

If you click on the "Research Tools" Tab on the Navigation Menu, you may find that this will help you start in the right direction.  You can check to see if your pages are fully optimized for the keywords you want, how many backlinks you have coming in, whether or not you rank in the top 50 results for certain keywords, etc.

Let us know and welcome to SEOMoz!