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.
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
-
Are tags in blogs worth anything in SEO value these days and can i remove duplicate title tags?
I have around 12 duplicate tags in the blog and the general consensus is to noindex./nofollow the tag pages which is not an awful way to do things. Should I just arrange my tags better or remove them all together? I believe it's the fact that the same page can be accessed by 3 different url's because of the tags it's under and that in the tag urls, only teaser descriptions of the posts are being display, not the full post, but the seomoz tools still consider it as duplicated content.
Moz Pro | | SEM_at_Lees0 -
Where do you find good SEO analysts nowadays?
We are looking for talent and having a hard time finding staff with good qualification and passion. Any suggestions or feedback would be awesome. We are located in South Florida. Thanks Antoine
Moz Pro | | adupont650 -
Seo moz has only crawled 2 pages of my site. Ive been notified of a 403 error and need an answer as to why my pages are not being crawled?
SEO Moz has only crawled 2 pages of my clients site. I have noticed the following. A 403 error message screaming frog also cannot crawl the site but IIS can. Due to the lack of crawling ability, im getting no feed back on my on page optimization rankings or crawl diagnostics summary, so my competitive analysis and optimization is suffering Anybody have any idea as to what needs to be done to rectify this issue as access to the coding or cms platform is out of my hands. Thank you
Moz Pro | | nitro-digital0 -
SEO Moz Bug? Universal Placements
Had a quick look around and can't find anything relating to this. We are doing really well with our universal placements, google places etc. SEOMoz used to recognise them, but now I have no universal placements according to SEOMoz, though they are clearly all still doing well. But in the program, or problem with the data? Thanks Marc
Moz Pro | | mmch0 -
SEO-Experts help answer my newbie questions!
Hello! Thanks for coming to my rescue; I really appreciate it. I am a newbie at SEO and I still haven't got the full picture of everything in my mind that covers linkbuiling, on page optimization, domain names, website creating, etc. I've really pretty much all the available guides on WarriorForum and BHW without much help on the topics above since most of the information was either provided by some person who didn't know what they were talking about, the information was outdated, or I didn't know what they meant. I have so many questions that I hope some SEO-Expert could answer my newbie questions so that I won't get penalized for my two sites that I currently own. One of them was slapped by Yahoo!, Bing, AOL, and most other search engines with the exception of Google (It's only a matter of time of course). The other site I own is in the making currently without much on-page optimization. Before I start doing some on-page depletion t to my two sites so they both get de-indexed and such because of keyword stuffing, fail link building, and other factors, I wanted to cover the problems I currently have about SEO and this site. 1) Using the SEO-MOZ 'keyword analysis tool', what is the ideal percentage difficulty a newbie like me could take easily with just a few links here and there including 5 posts/pages of great content? (I usually only write 5 posts that cover 500+ words each). 2) Do I need hosting to become successful or to get more on-page optimization for my websites? I currently use Go-Daddy forwarding with masking so that when my site shows up in google the content comes from blogger. 3) What is "Self Cannibalization"? I ALWAYS get that error for both my sites when I use the 'on page optimzation tool' from SEO-MOZ. 4) Using Blogger, What exactly are labels and does using this add any SEO value to my website? 5) I've read so many damn articles about ALT text and Title text for blogger; nothing explained what I put in it though. What am I supposed to put in it that will help me with my on page optimization? (Stuff like do I use spaces or dashes, do I put my keyword in there, how many characters should I not exceed, do I put one word or two words?) 6) On my website, I 'accidentally' didn't know that copy and pasting images from paint straight to blogger would be a bad idea because in the html I saw it was f'ed up because there was literally random characters everywhere for the file name. Since my site is a tutorial site, I have over 50+ images in all my posts combined that I've copied and pasted from paint.exe to the Blogger post. Should I reupload all of them to blogger or keep it the way it is? Will I be penalized for this or nothing would happen? Is there a benefit to fixing it? 7) For a new website that is less than 1 week old, when can I start building backlinks? If I can start building backlinks now, what is the ideal number per day that I should create? 😎 Does post every single page or post of content I have on my website to other Web 2.0s like Squidoo, Wordpress, or Blog penalize my website for duplicate content or what? If I do this, does it give me any SEO benefit? 9) How much stronger is a .gov backlink than a .edu backlink? How much stronger are both of those compared to a regular extension backlink? 10) If I am building backlinks, should I link just my main home page URL or all internal URLs to? 11) I see several people that build backlinks to other websites by typing in a comment and throwing their link in there. Like question 10, should I post ALL the links to my website (Internal + Home) or just my main page link? 12) What is better; .com, .net, or .org? What about .info, .us, and .biz in terms of SEO benefit? 13) I have several pages on my site in which Google indexed them and I deleted the post. Now when I search my site on Google and I click on the link to the post, it is pretty much a 'dead link' because the post cannot be found. Does this harm my site in any way, and how can I take these dead pages off? 14) One of my sites is already indexed by Google but not Yahoo! What should I do to get my site indexed? It's already been about a week. Thanks for attempting to answers my questions. I don't have anything to give, but, I can choose 3 'good answers' for helping me!
Moz Pro | | 6786486312640 -
Dilema in hiring SEO company services
Hi My question is one that most startups face. No large budgets for online SEO marketing and lack of quality SEO consultants willing to work for peanuts. To the point: 1. Where can I read reviews of SEO consultants before giving a contract? 2. Is it naieve to expect an SEO contract based on real ROI i.e. increase in qualified enquiries? All I spoke to over last 12 months refuse to commit, even in part, to this requirement. My take is what good is an SEO contract if all I get is loads of reports of work done? I do not have the capability to analyse the reports hence I employ someone! 3. I have SEOMoz pro memership. Can I do my SEO myself by using the tools in the dashboard? thanks to all for reading my post.
Moz Pro | | dp910 -
What is my next step for SEO?
My SEOMoz trial is drawing to a close and I have spent the month doing a ton of cleanup on my sites to remove errors and warning and otherwise comply with the basics of what I need to do to help position them. What I need to do now is take the next step and move them "up the ladder." SEOMoz looks good and I don't want this to sound like an ultimatum but I am also getting better at Google Analytics and their Webmaster tools. The question is, "Should I pay the money to SEOMoz or just work with google?" I am a very small shop with a very limited budget. Also, time is of the essence...I am prepared to continue my subscription if I can get an answer to the question: "What do I do next and how can SEOMoz help me where just knowing Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools can not?" Thanks a ton in advance!
Moz Pro | | bobbabuoy1 -
Looking to Hire an SEO Expert for Travel Site
Hello Everyone, I hope this is OK to post here. I run a travel website and we operate tours abroad. We are slowly expanding after nearly 10 years in the field. I started the company from scratch and currently do my own website design and SEO work. However, over the last couple of years I've lost the SEO connection due to being so darn busy. I started account here with SEO Moz in order to get the ball rolling again. We continually rank high for keywords, publish superb content by great writers, and overall are doing fine. I would just like to ensure this keeps happening and that we have an expert on board to help us in sustainable organic SEO practices. What I'd like to do is hire an SEO expert to help with our site. It might be part time (10 or so hours per week, perhaps?) Anyhow, I would like if this person used SeoMoz and really had their fingers on the pulse of the SEO world. I want all white-hat SEO, help with page optimization, internal link structure, and help getting quality external links. I know that over optimization is something that is now on the forefront of SEO work, so of course keeping this in mind helps. I would like to be kept up to date (perhaps weekly overviews of data and how we are doing) and am willing to make changes as quickly as needed on the site. I would like to see how we rank with competitors and what we need to do to stay on top - for the long term (no short sighted decisions). I want to learn as we progress, not because I want to do the SEO work myself, I just enjoy knowing what is going on. I will not micromanage. I am too busy for that : ) I am not sure what amount SEO experts are paid, but I have a slightly flexible budget. I really want someone will communicate when needed and is thorough in their responses. Attention to detail is a must. I would prefer an SEO expert located in the US but who also knows how to access / think about markets abroad (Canada/UK/Australia). I suppose we can discuss pay once I have a shortlisted group. I am looking to hire and work with someone starting pretty much immediately (even in May). For starters, I suppose our budget might be $500 to $1500 per month. For the first month or so, we might offer payment on a stipend basis just so we can ensure whoever is hired is the perfect fit. It would be great if this person had worked on travel sites before or has at least traveled abroad a few times. But, no worries either way. Thanks so much! Thomas at [email protected]
Moz Pro | | journeybeyondtravel0