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Is Search Engine Optimisation The Right Choice In My Online Marketing Strategy
Date : 18th April, 2014
When considering your Online strategy it is important to ask yourself - Do I need to run an SEO campaign? After all organic SEO is not a quick fix that you buy and hope to get to the top of the search engine listings immediately and then move onto the next marketing strategy. It is however a way of getting you noticed with Google and all the other major search engines. This is where all your customers are searching their products and services online. It is also worth remembering that SEO can be run as a stand alone marketing tool or can be integrated within the bigger picture of your overall online marketing strategy.
As mentioned organic Google top rank listing doesn’t happen immediately and requires a certain amount of tweaking during the months of your campaign. I would recommend at least 3 – 6 months to achieve a successful Search Engine Optimisation campaign. This enables proper analysis and monitoring and control of progress to provide optimum search results. By using any analytic reporting tool will enable you to monitor exact progress and see what keywords are most effective and those keywords that aren’t. This is all part of the strategy which is why it needs to be ongoing.
First of all keyword research and competitive analysis are vital to ensure that proper keyword phrases are being to chosen to ensure best targeting for those visitors seeking your products or services online. This means that if you are an Italian Restaurant in London then you need to concentrate on phrases your customers will type into the search engines such as “restaurants in London.
You need to be realistic about the competition and specifically look at how well your competitors are doing in the search engine results pages (SERPS). This will provide you with enough information to decide on what the best keywords should be used for your campaign. You can then decide how effective those keywords will be when you get to the top of the search engines. There is no point spending a lot of money getting to page 1 if no-one is searching on them your chosen phrases. Keyword and competitive analysis are singularly the most important activities your SEO team will undertake before they begin your SEO campaign.
Once you have decided on the best keywords to use then it is a case of optimising your website’s code. This means looking at content, keyword density, title tags, meta description, internal linking, title tags, etc. With Google’s ever changing algorithms in determining what websites are important enough for page 1 listings this is becoming more and more important nowadays. It is not just about building links, it is more about how well the search engines can spider your website, for example is the website W3C compliant, is the keyword density right, is the meta data correct, etc… If you have a poorly optimised website then it will take a lot more link building to get you to the top. So it pays to optimise the code as best as possible.
Remember the home page is fundamental and is key to Google’s robots finding your website easily as this is the first place that they look. By optimising the home page properly can help generate great search results that otherwise wouldn’t happen. This not only provides a way of Google finding you easily but will also help tell Google about the rest of the website through internal linking.
Other useful tools such as sitemaps will help tell Google about other pages in the website especially those pages that you are optimising. In the sitemaps it is good to set the priority on a handful of pages as this can negate itself if priorities are set on too many pages. This is a very handy tip because Google is constantly looking for important pages that it thinks it should be displaying.
The next important aspect to SEO is to look at page ranking. This indicates how important your website is in the eyes of Google in terms of length of time it is live and also how many good quality back links it has. Page ranking is Google’s vote of confidence for a website starting at the lowest 0 and then going up to the highest being 10.
Any SEO campaign generally wouldn’t be enough just by following an onsite strategy especially true for the more competitive websites. To help improve your ranking in the search results pages will require manual link building back to your website. This is an ongoing process that can takes months and is the reason why organic SEO can take to long. The length of time can be determined by how competitive the search terms are in the first place. The less competitive, then the less time will need to be spent link building. The more competitive however will mean that more time will need to be spent link building to improve ranking.
The quality of links is necessary as Google pays special attention to the importance of relevant links to your website, so beware and don’t get fooled into thinking that buying thousands of links is going to help you, because it won’t. Why because Google will only be looking at links that have a high ranking (relevant). It is also important to remember that Google may even penalise you by black listing you if it thinks you are building links purely for SEO purposes. This is rare but does happen. Link building is time consuming because it involves manually submitting links to directories. It is this careful and slow process that ensures the best possible link building strategy is adhered to all the time.
Whatever your choice of online marketing nothing changes the fact that most (if not all) your customers searching your products and services go through Google or one of the other main search engines first. Coming at the top of the listing for relevant keywords in any major search engine means that you are more visible to your customers. This is probably the most valuable marketing tool any business should invest in.
