Most people are familiar with the term search engine optimization, or commonly termed, SEO. This is a critical aspect in both design and success of your websites content and drawing people to it via search rankings. So consider it not the roof of the house but truly a part of the foundational structure of your website. And there are great rewards if your website contains SEO rich keywording and proper tags.
“A website isn’t worth having, if no one can find it!
So if you really want to build traffic to your website or blog, you will be thinking of SEO as something paramount to your site’s developments. Majority of webmasters only do the things required to gain a good amount of search engine traffic, but very little actually measure their site’s SEO value.
You Are Being Out Ranked!
One of the best articles I’ve read about rankings comes for the industry gurus of HubSpot. Rebecca Churt’s blog titled, “How to Conduct a Competitive SEO Audit to Outrank Industry Rivals” says it all. In this article, she lists 5 Simple Steps to Perform Your Own Competitive SEO Analysis which include:
-articulate your buyer personas;
-identify key competitors;
-explore what the competition looks like; and more!
Measuring via Your Analytics
So much data is now available through the various analytics systems, and the one most commonly used (and respected) is Google Analytics. The key to successful utilization of it is to focus on the data that matters most. By focusing on the reporting metrics, you can get a sense of the true ROI and the value of your SEO efforts. Start your analysis by looking at the number of visitors to your site, where they came from, and most importantly, what search terms they used. Just this preliminary information alone, will tell you is how well you are doing at getting more people to visit your website while increasing the visibility of your business and/or service.
What’s the Hook in Link Building?
Within the SEO communities, you will often hear the term “links” and/ or link building. What that really means is that a link from another website links to your company’s site. SEO link building requires that the site linking to yours must indeed be trustworthy link and furthermore, related to your business. Valuable links come from trusted sites like:
- Educational institutions that your company has a relationship with;
- Local and national organizations you or your company has an affiliation to;
- Any number of relatively unknown but reputable business and industry-related directories;
- Similar industry online publications; and more!
The Key is Keywords
While considering the written content of your website, make a conscious selections of commonly used keywords and phrases to increase your chances of climbing the search engine ranks. Think of yourself as the consumer and even consider looking up certain terms in a Thesaurus to determine commonly used words that most users in your industry might use. A test run on your success at this would be search engine sites and paste them in the major search engine sites you want to be found on, then hit the search button. Whatever page your site is will determine how effective your SEO investments are.
Honk Your Horn For More Traffic!
Increased traffic for your website and if you’re not getting enough of traffic as evidenced by your analytics, it means you need to tweak your process (eg, keywording) and do more optimization. Try keeping a record (easy enough in an Excel spreadsheet) how much traffic your website increases after each new method is implemented. Then move forward, scale back or consider a new method based on the data collected and analyzed. This is a simple way to determine the true value of your SEO efforts.
The Sum of it All
SEO is instrumental to content builders whether you are a web designer or blogger. We don’t have the luxury of ignoring the SEO value of our websites; investing time and resources into a zero-yielding ROI and a non-existent consumer base.
