How do you prioritize your SEO efforts?
-
If you're an in-house marketing person, almost by definition, you're neither a specialist or expert in the variety of things one might do to improve SEO. We do a bunch of stuff in-house and hire people for other stuff that needs to be done and the work is never complete!
What do you do, as the de facto in-house, on-staff "expert" for SEO? I'm purposely leaving this question fairly open-ended to solicit advise, ideas & direction to develop a framework and a guide for our efforts.
Also, I'm not intentionally ruling out pro's...I'm open to your opinions too - but I will probably only hire you unless you have a full tool bag of skills that include the ability to write auto-responders, write & blog relevant content, set up and monitor page rank, do SEO, set up AdWords campaigns, etc. at a the nice price. And I'll only do that if I can't do/learn/achieve all of the above to a certain degree on my own. Although I'll probably never stop questioning processes, costs and everything else associated with hiring a pro...all of which will make me a pain-in-the-butt client you probably don't want.
Thanks!
-
By focusing on every channel for doing better SEO for all blog posts. You should do SEO of every single blog post on your website.
-
Hi!
I don't know if I got back to you or not but if you're still open to continuing this conversation I'd appreciate your help.
Thanks again for your insights, in any case.
Karl
-
Wow, what a fascinating product you work with and a very interesting website.
I took the liberty of checking out your site and found it pretty impressive. Some effort has already clearly been taken to optimize this site and provide real value to your customer, so kudos to whoever is responsible for that effort.
At a very high level - so take this with a grain of salt because I only spent a few minutes - you have great domain authority and a lot of really strong content, but it appears that you are not ranking for keywords associated with your product that you clearly should be ranking for.
I went to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and typed in "cablevey tubular drag conveyors" (the first keyword in the page title of your home page) and got a long list of great keywords associated with your industry. I went through a couple of the higher traffic ones in SEOMoz's Keyword Difficulty Tool and there's no reason why you shouldn't be ranking for these keywords based on your Domain Authority alone. It very well could be that you just haven't optimized the proper page on your site for these keywords yet, and it is possible that a little on-page optimization is all you need to start ranking well because your DA is so strong.
I am willing to go more in-depth if you want - just shoot me a private message and we can exchange contact information.
As far as a referral goes... there are many good SEO companies and individuals in the SEOMoz community who would be able to provide quality help. My recommendation would be to instantly tune out anyone who says you need link building and content - not that you don't need those things but I don't think they are your priority right now.
-
Hi EGOL,
Thanks for your detailed reply. We all need to make decisions about what we say in our marketing. I'm most interested in figuring out the form we need to follow to make sure our SEO works as well as possible. Content needs to be decided upon often and regularly to be competitive - that's an ever-changing process (for us at least!).
I am all for wearing multiple hats - it's simply a matter of prioritizing my time as I have many different venues to manage other than our site to attract, inform and generally communicate with our most likely target prospects.
The web and our sites are excellent tools to communicate - but they're not the bulk of our marketing - they're a tool. I need to learn how to use this tool better.
-
Hi Back Burner,
At the moment my goal is to understand better what I can do, train my assistant to do, and begin to define and document what I need to hire out.
I have a certain amount of time - and a lot of interest - in learning - but I have responsibility for more than SEO. That's where the prioritizing comes in.
Your comment about "full site audit first" makes a lot of sense. Because that would allow me some perspective and knowledge I need updated.
Who would do this audit? You? Someone you can refer? I'm open to suggestions.
Thanks!
-
As the in-house SEO... my jobs are....
-- know the website... know where traffic is coming from and what they do on our site, identify new keyword niches where we can compete, know where sales are taking place, work to improve conversions, use title tags not only for SEO purposes but also to pull visitors into the site instead of our competitors, develop a text and video content plan that will increase our exposure on google and youtube
-- know the products that we sell and how well they are selling, develop new traffic sources for them, identify new product lines that we can strongly compete for or that can be sold to our current traffic, understand profit margins in a way that allows me to prioritize their promotion in search and on-site
-- develop a text and video content plan that will increase our exposure on google and youtube for relevant keywords and for relevant audiences
-- continuously review different parts of our site and product lines looking for changes that might increase our rankings, increase our conversions or increase our popularity with visitors... it is easier to double your income from current traffic than it is to double you income with new traffic
The above isn't all SEO. Much of it is "webmastering" and "product marketing." But, I don't think that a person should have anything against wearing multiple hats, sitting in multiple chairs and sticking his nose into anything related to the company web.
-
Like most things in SEO, it depends. What are your business goals (lead generation, ecommerce, thought leadership, etc.)? What is the status of your current optimization efforts - i.e. has any on-page optimization, site architecture, link building, content, etc. been done? If so, how much? What is your competition doing and how does your site stack up against them?
Different sites have different goals and are at different points in the optimization process. Prioritizing your SEO efforts is going to depend heavily on where you sit currently and where you want to go.
I would advise a full site audit first to figure out what is working well and what isn't.
Actually, I take that back. First, define your goals - what do you want to accomplish with your site. Then do the audit.
Next, discover which keywords are driving traffic to your site and which ones convert the best. Then start putting together groups of keywords that are variations of your top performers and start looking for new keyword groups to target.
If you're getting a lot of traffic from what seem like good keywords but not converting, then start optimizing your site for conversions.
This is all pretty high level, but if there's one thing I've learned about SEO it's that there are no absolute answers, only problems that need solving, and there are always many ways to skin that cat.
Going through the process of identifying problems and opportunities, developing a strategy to act, and then analyzing success is a constant effort.
Deciding which problem/opportunity to attack first can only be accomplished by having a clear goal in mind.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Best SEO for New Lead Gen Site: Use Corporate Domain or Product Name?
Hello, wanted to poll the Moz community about a URL discussion my company is having. We plan to launch a new publicly-facing resource and want to leverage organic search as much as possible. For the domain, we’re considering these options: the corporate domain since it’s well established or the URL for the product, which is more descriptive of the content that will reside on the page, but doesn’t have much authority because almost all of the relevant content is behind a paywall. The product domain is appealing because we want to build brand recognition. Should we also look at a more specific domain for the topic that doesn’t leverage either branded domain? Any Moz tools you’d recommend to help research this decision? Thank you in advance for your thoughts!
Moz Pro | | Gbtyne0 -
Parked Domains and Local SEO
Hi, I wanted to know what your thoughts were on **Parked Domains **and Local SEO. I came across a company that has a lot of parked domains that were created for different countries. i.e. xxxxx.co.uk, xxxxx.ch, xxxxx.com etc. The content they load are from the main domain xxxxx.com I went to a country specific Google search, for instance google.co.uk and google.ch Searched for the company name and xxxxx.com showed up, not the parked domains that existed for each "country" No analytics exist as the tracking code is on xxxxx.com so I can't see if any specific traffic goes to xxxxx.ch, or other domains. From my understand, parked domains lead to unnecessary duplicate content. So why have them? Simply setup a redirect to xxxxx.com from the parked domain. But are there benefits for Local SEO? Search engines like google will still see the domain as a separate entity if no redirect is in place. If so, I realise content has to be unique..but it raises a question... Why have parked domains at all apart from stopping your competitors or users typing other variance of your URL? What do you guys think?
Moz Pro | | Diamond.Dog0 -
Question about SEO and domains
Hello, Over time we have purchased many domain names that relate to our business. Let us say we sell chairs of type A, chairs of type B, Tables of Type C etc. We also have a main web site (main domain) which has been functioning for many years and is ranked well but not great. Since we have domain chairtypeA.com and chairtypeB.com I was thinking of putting them to good use as follows. STRATEGY A a) Create the domain as a parallel domain but is mainly informational - it talks about chair type A, its history, what to look for etc. It has the same IP address as main domain b) Have all the links on the page be directly linked to the MAIN site- so if you are on page for ChairtypeA and want to see it in a set you just click a link and it takes you to the main site. c) The look and feel of the ChairtypeA site is exactly the same as the main site - in fact except for the Heading, title and content the whole framework is from the main site. My hope is that if people are looking for chairtypeA, we would rank and attract customers. Plus it would use up some of the domain names we have purchased. THE OTHER ALTERNATIVE (Strategy B) is a) Create a domain for chairtypeA parallel to main domain (same IP address) b) redirect it to subfolder in main domain c) refer to the pages also as maindomain/chairtypeA (here is where it is no longer purely parallel) I have 3 objectives a) Use my purchased domain names b) Focus on certain products (liek ChairtypeA) c) Overall increase visibility and ranking Please give me any feedback which indicates whether Strategy A or Strategy B is more effective, or if any has negative consequences. Or you could suggest Strategy C - a completely new approach. Thanks Sam
Moz Pro | | samgold0 -
Why does SEO moz show so many more duplicate page titles than webmaster
My SEO moz duplicate page titles are more than double the webmaster duplicate page titles. Plus, some of the items appearing in SEO moz are not really duplicates. Anyone else seeing this?
Moz Pro | | Stamats0 -
New to the SEO game
Hello everyone! I am fairly new to this SEO game and it all seems a little overwelming. Let me tell you a little about my experience. I have been trying for a couple years to get the ranking up on my LawnAide site and it seems at times that I keep spinning my wheels. Ive been doing blogs getting links with high ranking sites and all the other stuff. But on the local search there are still smaller companies which lower ranking sites performing better that mine. This gets very frustrating. Is there any advise out there?
Moz Pro | | lawnaide0 -
Open Site Explorer - SEO - Company Back Links not visible?
Hi Guys, I am relatively new to the SEO community and have what is hopefully a pretty quick and simple question? I have recently outsourced some of my SEO campaigns to an Australian SEO group which were referred to me buy a friend, and i do not have the time to manage all sites SEO. On pitch the SEO company said they had in excess of 7000 domains, and they would implement a massive back linking strategy for me anywhere upwards of 200 links a month and all legit. Initially there were some basic header and title tag changes needed on the site, and I am now in month 4 of my campaign. Looking forward to using SEOMOZ service and specifically Open Site Explorer, I entered my URL but to my disappointment I could only see 4 links and two I was responsible for. I spoke to the SEO company who responded Open Site Explorer wasn't a good indication of back links and that a lot of their sites were not on the network because of the structure of their linking being only one way. I would appreciate a second opinion (external of this company) on this because of my short time learning and dabbling with SEO. On a side note thoroughly enjoying learning SEO and my journey as part of the SEOMOZ community. Appreciate any feedback or responses I get. Kind regards Bodie http://www.berkeleyriver.com.au
Moz Pro | | Bodie0 -
Where is the best SEO Glossary of Terms?
Where do you feel the best existing Glossary of SEO / SEM Terms explained currently resides. (and is there a better way to ask this question?) 🙂
Moz Pro | | iansears0