What is SEO?      

SEO is the best known website promotional tool. SEO is only one part of the picture – but it is the first part. Almost everything else you can do to promote a website will be enhanced or crippled by good or bad SEO.

SEO tries to get people from a search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing and hundreds more) to your website. As 50% to 80% of a typical website’s traffic comes from search engines, it’s a pretty good place to start.

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What does SEO actually do?

Most SEO providers will give you a pretty standard list of what they do, things like keyword changes, directory submissions and even blog posts.

The list of possible activities is much longer (it’s summarised next).

As a site owner you need to take a step back from the packaged offer and ask, Are these the right things to be doing? Are there other things I should be doing, as well or instead?

For sure, you won’t be able to do everything that could be done; you’ll have to choose a mix that delivers the best results for you, within your budget. That’s a more demanding task.

More detail on What does SEO actually do?

Everything changes – really

We’ve been told a thousand times about change and it’s mostly a yawn: at Google, change is built in to the structure of search and in 2010 and 2011 Google really hit the change pedal hard, delivering faster, wider reaching change – and trashing more than half of what we thought we knew about SEO. Many suppliers however are continuing to deliver a so-2009 product.

More detail at Google trashes everything you knew about SEO.

List of possible SEO activities: mix and match

This list aims to be include all the actions we are confident can bring results (anyone who speaks SEO with absolute certainty is deluded or making a sales pitch).

Fixed-price SEO packs will include some of these items (hopefully at a discount to their individual cost), but never all.

You may be better off choosing your own mix and match with an overall discount, or taking a base pack and adding items as needed.

List items include an estimated time per month that should be spend on this activity, to make it effective, for an average site. For faster results, more time is needed.

Table of SEO actions (some items will suit you better than others)

How to to get started on SEO

Keywords traffic survey

The most common and fundamental SEO mistake is to optimise for keywords you think represent what you do, rather than for words people are actually searching for.

If people are searching for “used cars” and you’re optimised for “pre-owned vehicles” well, sorry: no traffic.

It is not possible to reliably guess exactly what people are searching for (and exact is what you need); you have to research. And you can’t make people change their blunt terminology, you can only choose to respond or not to the searches they are making.

Just as important as search volume is the competitiveness of the term. Some words you will be up against heavy hitters it’ll be too costly to beat (government websites, global corporates and “reference sites”).

Sometimes there will be competitors for a term from other sectors; for example, people entering “Manchester” to find out about the city and the soccer team swamp those people looking to buy sheets.

Research can uncover ways of going around high-competition terms to arrive ultimately at the same traffic.

So the first step towards effective SEO is a keywords traffic survey that is specific to the products or services you want to promote, and to your location. This will tell you what search terms to target for maximum traffic result.

If you do the keywords survey before your website is even built, you can build web pages that directly address each of the recommended search terms you choose, ensuring a fast SEO start for your site.

Other pre-start and research based SEO options are included in the list (click here to view).

Initial SEO setup

This is a standard process that includes:

• Registering for Google Analytics (and any other analytics you wish to subscribe to).
• SEO-driven names for each screen.
• SEO-friendly URLS for each screen.
• Setting of keywords on each screen, to maximise support for your targeted search terms.
• Initial links to other sites.
• Recommendations* for individual links to high-value sites.
  • Recommendations* for internal links.
  • Other items of your choice from the list of SEO activities (click here to view).
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Monthly activity

There are some monthly activities that are essentially maintenance, including:

• Link and Load Test. Links do break and often no-one tells you – but search engines will downgrade you as a result, they may even trash preciously hard-won indexing of broken pages. You will also be penalised is site load times slow down.
• Site analytics analysis and reports – essential to tracking what’s happening with the site. These include rankings on each of your keywords, plus traffic counts, most popular pages and changes over time.
  • Recommendations for keyword adjustments and matching content based an analytics.
  • Reporting on changes at Google, Facebook, YouTube, Bing, Twitter and Yahoo. Google especially is driving ever-faster, far reaching changes that have profound impact on website owners.
  • Recommendations for site development based on changing search landscape.
    • Monthly written report, face-to-face report.

In addition, you should have some new activity going on each month both on the site and behind the scenes. You can’t do everything; a good strategy is to try new things one or two at a time, incorporating the successes going while always moving on to the next thing. Options include:

• New content mounted as downloadables (eg newsletters, brochures).
• New content mounted on screen (eg new products, videos).
• Competitor evaluation (periodically choose a competitor and critically evaluate the successes and failures of their site, looking for winning ideas that can be adapted).
• New keyword identification and trial (which may include support pages).
• Related site traffic analysis (to determine what other sites your customers are visiting, mostly used in information rather than product speheres, often used to guide advertising on other websites).
• PPC advertising that specifically supports the SEO and that reaches new domains (eg, Facebook, YouTube).
• Link building especially via high-level exchanges (human-to-human negotiation often built around specific information created for a link target).
• Blog engagement (blogging and/or posting).
• Anything on the list of all possible SEO activities (click here to view).

Your SEO budget

Summarising the above, your budget should include:

• Keywords traffic survey (once off, fixed price quote)
• Initial SEO setup (once off, fixed price quote)
• Standard monthly activity (mostly monitor and report, fixed price quote)
• Variable monthly activity (constantly developing new promotions, pricing is activity-driven)

Get some quotes

As in anything, get some quotes, but be aware that SEO has a very dodgy supplier history.

No matter what your work requirement, you can get a quote at whatever price you want, whether it’s $400 or $600 or $1,200. In fact, one client assures us they have a quote for $120 a month to do “everything”.

Most dodgy quotes either come from offshore or are repackaged from offshore. Checking work done is usually impossible.

The reality is that most leading national and international sites, the kind you would probably like to beat, have full time web promotion departments, sometimes with two or three people and significant spend budgets for keywords, advertising and other measures.

You can check out the pricing at Glide Strategic here or contact me Michael Woodhouse for a quote via email or phone (08) 9218 8888.

SEO and website design

The best time to start SEO is before you design your website.

The best SEO is not bolted on afterwards, it informs the choice of website technologies, directs the choice of functionalities and specifies a lot of the content.

For example, if you do the keywords survey before your website is even built, you can build web pages that directly address each of the recommended search terms you choose, ensuring a fast SEO start for your site.

Advance SEO also helps determine the need for and value of functionalities like e-news and social media integration, RSS feeds, interactive capabilities, page ratings and much more.

SEO research and planning may also suggest that you need “streaming” of visitors so they see information specific to their type of inquiry, which enhances the customer experience and helps maintain navigability on large sites. This is most beneficial, for example, where a site deals with both retail and wholesale customers, or sales people and techs, or sales and service, or where there are multiple product groups or multiple locations with different offerings.

SEO research might also recommend information be customised live to individual users based on known information about them (via login or cookies), location and their current on-site actions. Individually customised information takes a lot of work but significantly improves visit outcomes (conversion to purchase or other action).

Nearly all SEO can be retrofitted to an existing site, but it will cost less and work more efficiently if it is built in as part of the initial design.

(A few functions may be precluded by an existing build, eg interactive functions on a static site or phone app integration with a Flash site).

You can post a comment to this blog, or contact the author Michael Woodhouse via email or phone (08) 9218 8888.