ROI (Return on Investment) is an important metric for the client. If there are no gains, then the client suffers an enduring loss. But while setting up an SEO campaign, many specialists make the mistake of not accounting for the cost of the investment.
It is the pre-requisite factor for a specialist to know that
ROI = (Gains from the investment – Cost of Investment) / Cost of Investment
and only then, a balanced campaign can be benefited.
Setup 1: Getting Ready
Clearly, Understand and Define Business Goals
To reach any desired point, it is important that one would have a clear set of goals. With a clear vision, it becomes easy to choose a relevant path. It helps in keeping the business and the company in the right direction. Goals help improve the overall effectiveness of a company, whereas objectives are the particular steps you take to reach your desired goals. By specifying your goals, your mission is stated by using appropriate keywords.
But it is important to keep in mind that keep your goals simple and clear, specific, and realistic. Pushing yourself and thinking big will give you a competitive edge. Also, sync your mission with your goals.
Define SEO Objectives Based on Business Goals and Key Products
The most useful tactic in any business is setting goals. It helps you stay on the same page as others. There are different ways to set goals for your company. First of all, don’t temper your expectations, as it takes time to build a site. So plan accordingly, begin with smaller goals and then moving upwards with bigger goals. Remember, all that matters is your vision and perception.
If you have set goals in mind, then nothing can stop you—secondly, budget matters. The more you invest in building your SEO profile, the more it will reciprocate with good results. Keep Not only track of your progress but also keep track of your competitors. It is important to stay ahead.
Set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console Tools
To get insights about websites, webmasters use tools such as Google Analytics and Search Console. However, the working style of these tools is slightly different. The functions they perform in somewhat slightly different in order to gather and report data.
Google Analytics let you know about your website when visited by the user. And Search Console is the tool that lets you know about the Google search engine and what happens prior to the users’ visit.
Setup 2: Keyword Research, Competitors Research & Target Audience
Understand and Define Key Customer Segments and their Personas
To gain the right prospect, it’s an inevitable step to not know your customers. So know your customers first, as this will enable you to create a customer profile or customer persona. This will further help you understand their buying patterns by defining their needs.
Also, take into account the customer value, i.e., creating the list of best customers and the business they bring you. Now that you know your prospects campaigning will help to attract the customers.
Topics or Queries vs. Keyword Research
As we know, keywords play a vivid role in every business proposition to generate traffic. Using relevant keywords can significantly increase business sales. These days, Google uses Brain Rank (Artificial Intelligence) to generate SERPs, so focus on topics and not just the keywords. To bring the traffic on your website, work on conversational queries, topics, and long tails keywords to stay one step ahead of the competitors.
Define Target Audience
It is important that you have your goals set. Once you establish your goals, you can focus on your audience. Instead of targeting the masses, target the audience, which means provide the content for the particular group of people. Invest your money, time, and brain for the targeted audience.
Competitor Research
As they say, “keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” This applies to SEO as well. It is wise to keep track of your competitor’s strategies. The main motive of strategic management is to gain and maintain a competitive advantage over the other. Competitive analysis is a great way of analytically comparing companies, products, and services against the other within the industry.
Setup 3: Review, Optimize Site Structure
Review the current content management system (CMS) to see how search engine friendly it is.
A content management system (CMS) is a platform to manage websites. It offers to support the creation and modification of content on CMSs like WordPress, Wix, Shopify, Joomla, and Magento. CMS features vary widely. It mostly includes web-based publishing, format management, history editing, version control, indexing, search, and retrieval. CMS gives you control over.
- Customizable URLs to boost SEO
- SEO best practices for the mobile version of a website
- Find/optimize missing titles and descriptions
- Set canonical URLs within CMS
- Social sharing option
- On-page SEO
- Page Speed
Make recommendations on how your CMS can be enhanced to be more engine friendly.
The SEO audit will determine what CMS changes are necessary to make a website more user-friendly. The factor that needs to be kept in mind is whether or not CMS advances SEO, as it won’t be good if your website is not found on Google. Re-edit your URLs with high-ranking keywords. Add a title, meta description, schema code, alt tags, and header tags to your CMS. Gain the credibility of the website by adding interconnected links between your pages.
Review your website’s usability and navigation.
In 2015, Google announced that user experience will definitely be one of the main SEO ranking factors. The tradition of SEO is of no relevance after this announcement. Without mobile friendliness, a website can quickly lose its ranking or drop to a minimal level. The content on the website should be user-friendly so that it increases the website’s performance. If visitors perceive your website on good terms, then they will come back. In the end, it’s all about UX. The main aim of UX is to convert visitors to consumers. Its role is to:
- Improve the effectiveness of off- and on-site findability.
- Convert traffic
- Test and tailor experiences to target personas
- Help visitors find what they are looking for.
- Turn visitors into returning visitors
Define Keywords in Content – take care of Keywords, Consistency, Proximity, Prominence & Cannibalization
A search engine cannot categories your website without keywords. Without keywords, it’s like teaching kid words instead of alphabets first. The kid would have no background to retain that information. Similarly, keywords form a background, and thus Google shows it to the right people, but without relevant keywords, your website will not be categorized. It is important that you include keywords in Header, Page Title, Meta Description, Meta Description (required for other search engines besides Google), Heading Tags, Sub Heading Tags, Body Content, Image Alt Tags, and Footer.
Using these tactics will generate more traffic when your own blogs or website content. These are the basics to know how to add keywords.
Setup 4: SEO Visibility
Fix Duplicate Content Issues
Almost all SEO experts cite duplicate content as their top technical concern. In simple words, “duplicate content” is the content that is exactly similar to your content. Even the secure protocols URLs [HTTP and HTTPS] are the sources of duplicate content. One method to avoid duplication is by applying “crawl directives.” This would enable Google to know the relative value of numerous URLs. By using “robots.txt,” you can let Google know what particular folders and directories are worth crawling. Robots.txt is a file that allows controlling Google’s bot crawl and index public web pages. Furthermore, canonical tags can avoid content duplication by informing different search engines about the duplicate tags.
Review whether HTML and XML sitemaps exist on your site and whether they are optional.
Make sure to thoroughly check if the website has a sitemap. A sitemap is a list of all the web pages on a website. It lets search engine crawlers crawl the website more efficiently. The sitemap provides the metadata for each webpage.
Check the important pages; they do not contain parameters that make URLs complex.
Overly complex URLs are troublesome for search engines. The complex URLs are not user-friendly; also, they are unfriendly to search engine spiders, as it could lead to spider traps because they are tipped off that the page is dynamically generated.
Check for broken links and errors.
To stay one step ahead of your competitors and gain a higher ranking, you must fix your broken links. We recommend regularly checking the links. Broken links give a negative user experience, and they won’t return to your site. Also, it demonetizes your SEO efforts as it negatively impacts ranking.
Understanding their importance and how to redirect pages is crucial.
301 redirects the traffic when you have taken down your page. It indicated to the users and search engines that the page has been shut down. A feature of 301 redirects is that they transfer authority from the old URL to the new one. In contrast, web pages that are temporarily unavailable but will return in the future use 302 redirects. Unlike the 301 redirect, the 302 redirect does not pass authority. A 302 redirect will make you lose all the link equity.
Site Speed: Check site speed using three different tools.
To provide a greater service to your users, keeping your site fast is essentially important. It ensures higher conversion rates and more engagement. A Google PageSpeed Insight is a tool that enables you to make appropriate decisions for increasing the performance of your website. Pingdom Speed Test analyses monitor the speed of a web page, i.e., whether it is fast, slow, or too big. It presents the data in the form of graphs and charts for simple comprehension, enabling the implementation of relevant improvements. Further, GTmetrix is a complex and detailed tool to speed test, as it checks both pages, i.e., PageSpeed and YSlow metrics.
Check for duplicate content
Duplicate content can potentially harm your site, as it can sometimes affect search engine rankings. It becomes difficult for Google to decide and pick the relevant version, as there is multiple “appreciably similar” content in more than one location. Thus a site can suffer low rankings and losses of traffic.
Add meta tags to a website.
A meta tag is an HTML tag that contains information for search engines for a particular website. It contains keywords that trigger search engines to include the web page in relevant search results. Add meta tags to the title tag, description tag, and keywords tag for better outcomes.
Add 1000 words of content on each page.
It’s important that you make the page user-friendly with detailed information on the topic. Happy user, pleased Google. There are some pages with 50 words, but those sites have excellent link profiles. Make sure your content is 1000 words so Google can find it.
Don’t forget to add H1 and H2 tags.
These define HTML headings. H1 is the most important tag as is usually in the title. These tags are used for creating effective headings.H2 is used for subheadings.
Make sure internal linking is used.
The internal link is a hyperlink to another resource. These links allow a user to freely navigate. Also, it promotes spreading ranking power around the websites. So build SEO and user-friendly sites with internal links.
Understanding the most important way to get indexed
The most important way to get indexed is by sharing on social media. Especially on Facebook and Google+. Also, have a blog that supports your site potentially.
Learn how to determine whether Google has indexed a page.
This can be done by examining analytical data. If the website is not receiving organic Google traffic by inspecting the server log, then the page has not been indexed. But then you can manually spot-check your shortened lists of URLs.
Setup 5: Create Quality Backlinks
The most effective way to generate higher rankings is by getting excellent backlinks. Backlinks are the links from other websites to your business’s website. Each and every backlink has its credentials. Some are good, but some are bad, which would certainly drop your rankings. So stay focused on acquiring high-quality backlinks for your website and gain better rankings.
Setup 6: Measure Progress
Keyword performance and ranking
Keep a check on keywords and monitor them thoroughly. These will generate you higher rankings if your strategies are working.
Organic Traffic
Monitoring the number of unique users is important. Note which keywords are the strongest source for generating organic traffic.
Incoming Links
For search engines, backlinks are the “votes” for quality content. The more backlinks, the better. Often, growing websites have an increasing number of backlinks. SEO SpyGlass offers you the ability to check your backlinks profile.
Indexed Pages
As we’ve previously stated, the more people present, the better. This is applicable here as well. Google indexes more pages, increasing the likelihood of finding them.
Top Landing Pages
The best way to build natural links is by posting on social media. Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ are all considered backlinks by Google. So check your social growth for separate landing pages and your domain for better marketing strategies.
Page authority, domain authority, citation flow, and trust rank
Authority is an important focus for SEO experts. “Page Authority” is the qualitative and authoritative measure for a specific web page, whereas “domain authority” is the overall strength of the website. But both of them are vital for the search visibility of your website. Domain authority, trust rank, and citation flow are some of the ranking factors. Citation flow predicts the potential of a link, i.e., how influential it is. Conversely, the quality of backlinks that are advanced to a website is known as trust flow.
