Search Engine Optimization is the best marketing tool for any business. It is best when you have limited budget – and you don’t want to pay per click as you have to in paid online marketing. It also has a huge brand impact. Clients often credit leadership status to groups that are ranking top on the search engine. For that reason, SEO is the best way that allows entrepreneurs to compete with competitors on equal footing.
As long as, it is a smart marketing channel, one would assume that all the business owners would get on it. That is not the case. In Fact, Search Engine Optimization remains one of the most under-invested channels for online marketing of small businesses.
There are many baseless reasons behind this ignorance like SEO is unidentified, indecisive and time-consuming. It can be a bit technical and it takes constant ongoing investment over a long period of time. The outcomes have not been predictable and many other.
Lack of knowledge
Many companies describe SEO like a ‘black box’ — full of doubt. Even if businesses have a general sense of essential things that factor into better SEO that matter — e.g. link building, content, social media channels/platforms, user experience, and many others — what they are ignoring is a clear strategy showing how much each matter so they can prioritize for quicker results. In view of the fact that we are not holding our breaths for Google to release their secret algorithm, we require a Plan B to get sanity and simplicity to the process to ultimately deliver the ROI you were wishing for.
Many people want to get results quickly and the SEO as a channel needs a stable build up over time to doing well. Companies would be more eager to invest the time if there was an amount of sureness about results which unluckily has been usually missing.
The solution is a planned SEO program backed by analytics.
In working with many SEO experts, we have found that the corporations that doing well have a planned approach to SEO supported by strong analytics and measurement structure. Here is a few step structured SEO framework to make a successful SEO program.
- Understand your target consumers search behavior.
A big part of purchasing in both B2C and B2B fields initiate with buyers researching on the internet. Recognize the keywords they use in different stages of the buying procedure. The search keywords of the initial stage may be different from the keywords buyers use as they get closer to making the decision. So understand all the keywords in different stages of the purchasing journey.
- Prioritize the search terms.
You are unlikely to win at all. Make a prioritization matrix using three reasons-
- Relevance to your service
- Search volumes
- Competition
- Make a roadmap.
Make a Roadmap for the Search Engine Optimization which takes a cascading search term approach. Concentrate on easier ranking, the longer string of searches which may have lower volumes before finally getting the high volume, highly competitive major keywords. For example, if you are a real estate dealer and selling a residential project “Godrej Summit” in that case your simple keyword should be “Godrej Summit Gurgaon”.
- Make a Goal.
What is the decisive achievement for commerce and how does Search Engine Optimization play their part? Make goals derived from target rankings for the prioritized search keywords. The goals must comprise ranks, traffic and business results like queries or leads. Top ranking on search engines should make more traffic and if you are focused on appropriate keywords, you should have higher outcomes.
- Map out an action plan.
Be prepared for the keywords that you want to rank for, get all your resource to work mutually.
Technical clean up: If your website is not crawlable, all your efforts will be a waste of time. Put the necessary technical fixes to make sure site crawlability
On-page optimization: Work on your website to make sure that you are addressing the search needs expressed by users while searching
Off-Page optimization: Make sure that your PR effort, other websites that talk about you and your social media effort aligns to the region that you want to be dominant in.
- Evaluate and course correct.
Have a monthly review (don’t be more regular- some ranking movements are just noise) to track site rankings, site traffic and results. Observe where you are standing and what is your competitor doing. There are many tools that can assist you to recognize the impact of specific SEO strategy – employ them for the better result.
