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
-
What Moz reports would you suggest running when pitching SEO services to a client?
What do you think the best Moz reports are when presenting SEO services to a client? I need to share reports that show where the opportunity is and where we will be prioritizing our effort. I'd like to hear what you would suggest given your experience presenting SEO to clients. Thanks in advance for your help!
Moz Pro | | mrupert1 -
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 -
New to Moz, need some probably basic answers about Keywords, Linking, Competitors and General SEO
Hi, So I have quite a lot of data colelcted about my site now, regarding keyword research, page crawling and competitor research ect. But I find myself second guessing myself about what I have done and what to do next. I have done basic research for as many relevant keywords I could think of to my site, including branded and non branded terms. If the main competitive keywords for my niche are very competitive, shall I start doing more research for long tail keywords and only try to rank for them? Does is matter how many keywords I am doing research for? Does is matter how many keywords I try to optimise for each webpage? Are the amount of branded keywords I am researching skewing my results? As they are all ranked #1, but nearly all of the non branded keywords are much further down the list... Once I have decided what keywords are worth trying to ranking for for each page, are the techniques to actually rank more highly for them - Title, H1 Tag, Description, Meta Data, Fresh Content and using the keywords on the page? Or are there more techniques I haven't heard of? Under Keyword Rankings - I noticded that some of my keywords are directing to specific pages, like "Cavity Waxes" is directing to the URL ending in .com/cavity-waxes - How do you assign the keywords im researching to specific URLs? - Or does Moz do it automatically? As most of my keywords seem to be unassigned to any URL, is that because they are not ranking highly enough? How do I best use the data collected through Moz? Good practices? Techniques? Tips and Tricks? What is the best practice for finding potential link partners and asking them for mutual linking? Techniques for finding partners that are likely to link with us, but still provides link juice. I must apologise for this long-winded set of questions, but these are troubling me! Any help would be greatly appreciated, Kind regards, Max Johnson
Moz Pro | | BiltHamber10 -
In alt tag of a image can we use #hashtag or domain.com ? Is that good SEO or not allowed ?
Some of the Google Search shows a title has a hashtag of an article, which contain keyword and while tweeting them, the title which has a hashtag automatically very good used for getting traffic to the blog. And other one, can we use the hash tag inside the alt attribute ? Or our domain name with .com in it. Like Google.com or #Google ?
Moz Pro | | Esaky0 -
SEO Web Crawler IP addresses
What are the IP addresses for the SEO Web Crawler? There is a firewall on my clients website before it goes live, I would like to crawl the site before it goes live, but need to provide the web crawlers IP addreses. Thank you for your time
Moz Pro | | sfchronicle1 -
Link Assistant SEO Tool - Any Others?
I have the most boring copier service website, clients cool, concept is really boring; Well I am looking to generate this client some link back juice, cause this guy is struggling for traffic, and I am am struggling to generate a buzz about copier services?? Fortunately, it's only local, so that helps me with testing my localization campaigning. 🙂 Any opinions on this software? http://www.link-assistant.com Do you know of some better "Back Linking Software? I was considering buying it. But once I go to purchase it, I second guess myself; "It just looks shady, and the perpetual up-sale, turns me off.". I really just value the MOZer communities opinions! and I want to see what the community thinks of the above company, and if ya heard anything good, or bad. The Demo seems legit as hell!
Moz Pro | | smstv0 -
Why do some of my sites stop showing up as ranking on SEO Moz (listed as not in top 50) when in google ranks they are top five?
Okay - so i have several campaigns. And of these campaigns, about four or five of them no longer show up as ranking after several weekly crawls by SEOMoz... Not sure why the line on the chart just stops when they are ranking in top 5 for google organics am confused by this can you help me do what i need to do so that the seobot can read my pages and save me time on checking where i rank - thanks Creative Guy
Moz Pro | | creativeguy0 -
Where can I find documentation for the different SEO Pro Tools?
I apologize if this has been asked and answered or if the documentation is right in front of my nose, but I can't find it. I'm looking for information that explains what the various tools do and in particular, what each of the fields in the reports mean? For example, what does the "Find Links on this Domain" link mean in a Juicy Linkfinder Report? I know there are lots of resources on SEO and best practices and so on, but wondering if documentation on the specific tools exists. Thanks.
Moz Pro | | jkenyon0