Search Optimize Your Site

Unlike signing up for a full inbound marketing campaign, which includes email marketing, social media, blogging and ongoing community networking, I recommend every website have an SEO expert look at their search market, online profiles and diagnose your “search opportunity.”

From my experience, 95% of websites I see are in no way optimized to capture searchers looking for their products. They should be, and here’s why:

• 44% of online shoppers begin by using a search engine

• 75% of searchers never go past page one

• Paid ads have an average click through rate of only 2%

• Inbound (content marketing/SEO) leads cost 60% less than outbound leads

• 40% of U.S. companies use blogging for marketing purposes

If you’re one of those websites, there’s good news. By simply duplicating the on-boarding process that many SEO/SEM agencies do, you’ll be able to immediately increase your search traffic and overall web visitors. If you’re a DIY person, read more here. 

If this, along with adding a few search engine optimized web pages and blogs, turns out to be a big win, you know that inbound marketing is the way to go. If your web traffic and search rankings don’t increase, you’ll know not to invest in a longterm inbound marketing/SEO campaign.

Keyword Research Using Google’s Keyword Tool Planner

In a nutshell, we’ll find what phrases your visitors are typing into Google when they’re looking for products like yours. The Keyword Planner Tool will give us the amount of search volume around those phrases, and a glimpse into how difficult it will be to rank on page one. I’ll also do an examination of Google’s page one results for your most common phrases to further gauge your SEO potential.

From their I’ll set up an editorial calendar and list, with recommendations on where you can include those phrases on your current web pages, or in future blog posts.

Competitor Research 

I’ve been doing SEO for a couple of years. Looking at a website and finding out if it has an SEO strategy is like a barber looking at a haircut and deducing whether or not it was done at Super Cuts or at home in a bathroom.

If your competitors are doing SEO, it can provide insight into valuable keywords and where they are out competing you on Google SERPs.

Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools

Information that will lead to more users and sales is already tucked away in your analytics. Assuming you’ve set up Google Analytics on your website, I’ll dig through your content to see which pages are resonating with users and how you can duplicate their best qualities. I offer expert Google Analytics consulting, and can setup tracking to find your highest converting phrases.

What pages are people spending the most time on and what pages are causing my web visitors to bounce? This is what a traffic data expert can figure out and provide actionable ideas to improve.

By analyzing visitor flow, we can see what pages visitors are looking at and where your traffic is being funneled. Then we ask ourselves if it is optimal for capturing a conversion or a sale.

Most importantly, we’ll see what your search traffic is presently, and what phrases are driving your search traffic. If they’re not the same phrases that we found in the Keyword Tool Planner, then you have a lot of upside.

Webmaster Tools is an important Google resource that ensures your website is being indexed properly, doesn’t have broken links, and isn’t being red flagged by Google. We can also see the average position your website ranks for hundreds of search terms. Using Webmaster Tools, you can even track your searching ranking progress.

Optimization of Current Web Pages

There are a dozen key on-page SEO factors that all web pages should improve. Once we’ve found the keyword ecosystem you need to target, I can take your entire website and optimize its pages for those keywords.

Additional Web Page Creation

From startups to decade old online businesses, the amount of effort put into addressing customer questions is atrocious.  Products, pricing, features, best practices and contracts are complex. They need web pages that provide information, and these web pages need to be optimized for search. Also, Google penalizes websites that are lacking in content, or feature ultra thin content.

I’ve managed six different websites, and I know tricks to increase customer trust, sales, and search rankings with compelling web copy.

Google Profile Accounts

For businesses who cater to a specific geographical region, know this: mobile search is outpacing desktop search, and mobile search is optimized to show local results. If you’re not set up on Google Places, Google Local/Business, Google Maps and other online directories that list your citations, you’re missing out on lots of high-value web traffic.

We can implement a paid service like Yext to cover all your bases.  We can also talk strategies for gathering customer reviews, which play heavily into Google’s local business search rankings.

Full-Site Interlinking and Improved Call-to-Actions

While I’m heads down in your website, I’ll interlink current web pages and keywords to new web pages I’ve created, old web pages that are useful, all of which will increase your websites page rank and domain authority.

Within each page it’s best practice to include a compelling call-to-action, urging each web visitor to take the next step, whether that’s emailing you, requesting a quote, downloading an ebook, or signing up to be a subscriber.

Following this logic, you’ll want to post any new content we make on Facebook, Twitter, Google +, LinkedIn etc. Social shares are seen as votes of confidence by Google, and can improve your web pages’ rankings significantly. You can learn more nuggets about the search game throughout SEOShrugged.com.