As a business and website owner, chances are you’ve heard of SEO, or search engine optimisation. And, chances are you’ve probably been told that SEO is a magic chalice that can help your business generate more leads very quickly.
Whilst there is some truth in that, SEO is a long-term investment that might not necessarily get you immediate results.
A solid SEO strategy will take time to implement and execute, and ongoing monthly/weekly/daily work is required to ensure your website gets to and remains, on the first page of Google and other search engines.
Here are 9 tips on how to monitor, improve and ensure your SEO efforts are positively impacting your campaign.
1) Install Google analytics and segment your traffic source by organic traffic
This will show you how your website is currently performing in the organic results. Is your organic traffic constant, increasing or decreasing? This will give you a good idea on how your site is being found in the search engines and whether your SEO campaign is having any impact.
Source : Kirby Taxis Organic Traffic Growth 01/01/2015 – 22/06/2019
2) Keep up to date with the latest search engine optimisation changes
Did you know that search engines like Google are constantly tweaking their algorithm to provide better search results? In 2018 they made 3234 algorithm changes. Ensuring you stay up to date and implement the best practices can help you stay ahead of your competitors. See https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change for a complete list of major updates. Does your website adhere to the latest recommendations?
3) Continuous authority building
Your website has a domain authority – this is the score algorithmically calculated by search engines on how trusted your domain is. Building authority takes time and continuous ongoing effort to increase your websites trust. This is helped by ongoing link building. Every link to your website from another website helps increase your authority score. Continuous ongoing link building will help your website improve in search results. SEO success depends on continuous SEO. Every day/week/month you need to be looking at ways to get links to your optimised web content to help it improve in search results.
4) Install Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools
By installing Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools you will see how the search engines see your website. These tools will show you any technical SEO issues the search engines are seeing. Both accounts should be checked weekly to ensure that your website remains free of any issues. The search engines will also send you messages if they can see any problems with your website.
5) Consistency Is Key
Your SEO efforts should be ongoing, because chances are your competitors are also doing SEO and by not keeping up to date with the latest recommendations/changes/ongoing link building, you risk losing out on first page visibility to your competitors. Do you think your competitors have got to the top of search results by chance? Absolutely not!
6) SEO takes time to see results
Google have openly stated that SEO can take 4-12 months to see a real impact on your business success. It is only by implementing a solid ongoing SEO strategy that you will see the fruits of your labour come to fruition. Forbes magazine have stated that whatever results you’re getting at 6 months should be considerably less than at 12 months! SEO has a compound effect.
7) Targeting new keywords in fresh content
By fresh content we mean posting at least one blog post/new service per month that targets a new keyword. Search engines love new content and posting fresh new content can help your website improve visibility. By posting new content, you can also target new ways to attract new customers. For example, if you’re a plumber, you might want to look at producing content targeting multiple locations you service. The more quality targeted content you produce each week/month, the more buyer ready traffic you’ll start to receive.
8) Do not stop SEO after or 2 months if you think that things are not working
Ongoing SEO will bring real benefits to your business including new customers, website traffic and a technically sound and updated website. Bear in mind though that your chosen SEO company should be able to give you a list of all the activities they have carried out for you during those months. Unfortunately, we have encountered several real-life scenarios where new customers haven’t got results from their previous agency because they haven’t done anything! If you don’t think it’s working, ask what work has been carried out and get clear explanations on why/what has been done for you and what the impact should be.
9) Customer buying habits change
As the world evolves, so does the way that your customer researches and finds the products/services they are looking for. Who’d have thought that mobiles would be the go-to device for purchasing products/sourcing services (hence the need for a mobile friendly website!)? Or that search engines would topple Yell as the main method of seeking out businesses they need! As well as being technically sound, your SEO strategy should focus on changes in the consumer market. This information can be gleaned from platforms like Google Analytics and your strategy should be able to adapt to these changes in the long term.
To summarise
Search engine optimisation isn’t a quick win that is going to generate hundreds of leads or sales overnight. It is a long term investment that will help your company achieve its long term goals of sustainable growth. Good SEO also focuses on many elements and factors, it’s not just about keywords being on the first page of search results. With hundreds of variables all these need to be monitored, reported on, tweaked and improved over time.
If you need help understanding and interpreting your current SEO campaign or implementing your SEO strategy, contact the team at Go Websites, we are the experts you can trust to start generating ROI from your long term SEO strategy.