Big secret: Keywords are not magic bullets.

Gone are the days of web pages that veritably scream at you from the computer screen to buy, Buy BUY! or sell, Sell SELL their Widgets or whatever.

This being said, there is still irrevocable value in paying close attention to the keywords your potential customers are searching with, as well as the keywords your competition is using to guide their marketing strategy. I’ll give you an example. ((warning: the numbers in the following example are completely made up. The idea and the alluded to research is not.))

The keyword ‘Advanced Widgits‘ gets an average of (lets say) a million searches/ month. The keyword “AW“, however gets an average search volume of over 8 million a month. This little factoid tells us that while we may have written the most tantalizing and interesting copy ever for ‘advanced widgits’, much fewer people are going to find it than if we had written that copy using the term ‘AW’ instead. With just a little bit of research into keyword trends and some time spent on traffic analysis, we can make a simple change in the focus of our content. With this little bit of knowledge we can help our widgit site appeals to a much larger audience of potential customers.

Another place keywords come in super handy is in the world of Pay Per Click advertising. We’ll talk about this in another session, but its worth mentioning now because there is a lot of value to be found in purchasing ad space in highly competitive markets where your website may not hold a top rank organically.

Lets recap.
Dont:

• pack content with all your keywords
• expect keywords to tell the internet whats on your website
• duplicate content to generate more pages full of keywords

Do:

• research keywords for traffic and trend data
• write content specific to target audiences
• use keywords to guide your content
• consider Pay Per Click

Some of the key points we look into:

• What are competitive sites doing? Is it working? What keywords are they targeting?
• What are the relative traffic rates for the client’s pre-identified key words? What other keywords should they target?
• How well is the site performing in search engines? Is the traffic converting once it gets to your site?

Big Secret: Nobody knows all the answers

For each question, there is an answer, and for each answer, there is a tool. At VIA we utilize a plethora of tools that help us analyze sites and answer these questions. It often takes an exceedingly long time of extreme attention to detail to succeed. These are the days that seem to involve black holes that take us from nine to 5:30 without passing GO. We call it “Going down the rabbit hole.” Sounds yummier than it is, trust me.

This research is a big part of the monthly maintenance expense often dedicated to SEO. Reports, charts, spreadsheets and graphs abound. Kim and Jason spend a LOT of time on the phone, both talking to clients and talking to each other. Sometimes the answers are elusive and there are emails and blog posts to clear up ambiguous questions that they can’t parse out themselves. Fortunately, we have lots of tools to help us glean the answers that allow us to guide our clients through the murky depths of Search Engine Optimization.

We’ll go into detail, and discuss many additional tools, in more specific articles to come. Here are a few to get you started.

Domains

Tools that let you research your own domain and that of the competition can give you a good view of your site from high above. Much information is publicly available for free, most services offer more advanced paid features, and many let you see more detail about your own site by adding their code.

• Quantcast shows detailed traffic and demographics along with information on related sites and advertising
• Compete focuses on comparing one site to another with excellent graphing options and many premium features
• Alexa provides an additional view into the data with the usual domain information as well as links and search terms

Keywords

Where to even begin? These sites are a big help when starting from scratch as you can just give them a domain and they will give you back a list of terms to start with. So much easier to start with a list to whittle down rather than a blank sheet of paper.

• Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool lets you see search volume, leaving the keyword field blank to get an initial list
• Google Trends leads to more tools, including Google Insights for Search, that let you see what people are searching for
• Keyword Spy, SEMRush, and SpyFu all provide useful lists of keywords from just a domain name, if your interested in what your competition is doing, which you should be and many, many more tools

Summary

Be careful! Clicking on any of those links may lead you down the rabbit hole. And that’s the danger in too much data. How much research is enough? One of the hardest things to do in SEO is to find the actionable items in the stream of information. You can drown in that stream if you’re not careful. To purrrhaps paraphrase Avinash “less data, more action”.

See how I waited until the end to warn you? It was a trap! We need and want more people to understand SEO so they will see the value in our services. I’m sinister, I know. I come by it naturally.

• Example 1 is a small website with a specific target audience. This client came to us with a website featuring 10 pages covering 3 product lines and they have two pages that have well defined actions. (We call these Conversion Goals). They weren’t having much success driving traffic to these conversion pages and were interested in increasing their overall site traffic and search rankings.
• Example 2 is a large ecommerce website looking to increase overall sales. This website had pretty good traffic but due to insufficient analytics and lackadaisical content entry they weren’t able to track traffic through the website’s content and they weren’t showing up very well in the search engines.

It doesn’t make sense to try to push these two very different client cases into the same SEO program package.  Example 1 needed a program that would pay attention to their keywords, content and traffic analytics while Example 2 needed much more attention to address all their huge products list and the way they displayed information on their site (Kim calls this their Content Management Strategy.) In the case of Example 1, we began with a 3 hour maintenance program that grew to 5 hours a month over time.  In the case of Example 2, we began with 10 hours a month of dedicated maintenance time for 6 months and the client chose to end the project after that time because they were so pleased with the results that they felt further optimization was unnecessary.

In each of these examples we were able to develop a solid series of actionable items during the technical audit. We were then able to prioritize the items with the client and to estimate how much time we would need each month to accomplish the tasks.

In Example 1, we were able to reconstruct their conversion pages, optimizing the content to make it as easy as possible to use. We also helped the client develop a content management strategy that would help drive users to those conversion pages. By re-organizing their information architecture we were able to move the user through the site instead of causing them to spend valuable time searching for their next click on the page. We continue to advise the client on design elements and content strategies that help them maintain their standings in the search engines as an authority in their field.

In Example 2, we helped the client identify and change a long list of missing technical items that needed addressed to optimize the site for search engine spiderability. (No, I didn’t make that word up). Once we had addressed their technical issues, the site’s search engine rankings jumped up several pages simply because the spiders were able to thoroughly navigate and record their inventory. The resulting increased visibility in search produced a rapid increase in sales, producing a remarkable return on investment (we call this ROI in the office). Applause all around.

The take away from these two stories? Don’t be sold on empty promises that claim to take your site from page 10 to page 1 in 2 weeks or less. A solid SEO Program should consist of:

• Actionable items derived from a concise study of your current situation.
• Measurable goals of success.
• Dedicated time each week or month to address these goals
• Explanation & consultation of your analytics reports (not just piles of graphs).
• Return on Investment

I’ll address the importance of analytics in further detail in a future installment of this series, , but I wanted to mention it here to get you thinking about it.

That said, SEO takes time. Do not expect the revelations of your technical audit to immediately increase your site traffic by a million users a day, nor should you assume that you will go from being ranked on the 15th page of Google to the 1st spot in 30 seconds or less.

The technical audit is merely the first step of a long process that will eventually bring you and your site users closer together in what should be considered and treated as a long term relationship, with all the ups and downs that go with it.

SEO is a hot marketing buzz word these days, but its actually an acronym for a long, drawn out process that should last months. Years, even.  Anyone making claims to “SEO your site” in a day, week or month is lying. Proper SEO starts with a solid technical framework that plays well with search engine algorithms and is easily accessible to both search engine spiders and mobile phone browsers. This foundation should be paired with diverse, useful content arranged to well targeted audiences. Think of your website as your home on the web: as with any building, you want to have a nice solid foundation to build on, you want the framework to be built with quality materials and you want everything to be put together to withstand the rigors of life within.

To continue the analogy, once your house is built, you’re ready to move in. Now, we decorate. As with home interiors, SEO has a decoration phase. Once your site has been up and running for a while, you have a chance to see how its thriving “in the wild”. Web traffic is made up of individual users. Where do they go? What are they doing? What are they looking for? If they leave (we call that a ‘bounce’) where do they go? Why did they go?  The answers to these questions drive change on your website. If nobody is asking them, you are neglecting your website, and by extension, your visitors, whom you should think of as potential customers.

Until you have a workable content management strategy for your site, it does no good to pursue fancy link building campaigns, or social networking webs.

Why drive people to a website that doesnt have much to offer them? Consider these things to be your curtains and pictures. They are nice to have around, but until you have furnished the place it doesn’t really matter because there is nothing to do when your there.

Big Secret: Slow and Steady Wins the Race

The proper approach is to ask and answer these content questions honestly and regularly, and the answers to these questions can be found within the analytics reporting system you should have included in that sold framework discussion we made in the paragraph above. Asking questions creates opportunities for traffic driven change. Ask yourself these questions:

• Does a certain page on your website get little to no traffic?
• What’s on that page?
• Why do you want users to go there?

By defining specific goals for your website you can direct traffic through your space. Do people seem to go to a page but not fill out a form? Why? Is it hiding at the bottom of the page? Are the instructions confusing or ambiguous?

The downside to this train of thought is that too many changes at any given time produce unmeasurable results.  If you make 3 changes to a page, how do you know which one is the most effective? Just like a science experiment, it is more effective to make a single change and then monitor it before making another to make sure you can measure the effect.  These changes can then be considered lessons that may be applied to other places on your website.

While each website on the web is its own unique creature, they should all be tended with care and dedication.  Nothing happens immediately and if you’re not checking in on it on a regular basis, you’re bound to be missing things.

One of the most important but time consuming tasks these folks undertake is the SEO Technical Audit. This process is the first, most logical place to start when attempting to assess a website’s potential for optimization. The gist of the technical audit: Analyze site code and layout design for search engine optimization and usability resulting in a comprehensive report detailing proposed action items.

Any solid strategy for technical SEO implementation must be based on site analysis. Thats technical talk for what happens when we look at your website with an SEO eye. In this process, we try to:

• identify what has been done wrong
• identify what has been done poorly
• identify what has been left out entirely

Then we make suggestions. Sometimes clients follow those suggestions on their own and the process is finished. More often, the client prefers for us to take matters into our own hands and make the changes ourselves. This is where the fun really begins.

We won’t…

• Get your site to the #1 spot on Google for highly competitive keywords for $39.95.

We will…

• Identify ways to optimize your site to attract the searchers using keyword phrases that result in on site actions.

One of my biggest frustrations as Benevolent Dictator and Overlord is trying to talk down my frustrated SEO team from the proverbial ledge. All that whining hurts my ears. Why clients would waste their money and our time identifying SEO weaknesses and developing strategies only to allow the process to fall flat with no action is beyond me.

Big Secret: It does no good to identify an SEO strategy if you don’t intend to implement it.

Technical Audits are exactly what they sound like; we take a look at the underlying code and the information architecture. We can make suggestions regarding design tactics and tool implementation. The fact is that changing meta-tags in descriptions and alt tags in images isn’t going to make a poorly designed site function better. Sometimes its easier and cheaper to redesign. The purpose of a technical audit is to analyze your website to determine an effective list of actions that will result in achieving a specific set of SEO related goals. The next phase, where the real work begins, is implementing the strategies in a way that allows enough time to measure specific successes. SEO is a drawn out process that takes many months to reap benefits. You cannot expect to flip a switch and have all your SEO problems fixed immediately. In fact, I intend to discuss the matter of time and SEO in my next discussion.  For now, I must nap.