The technical, analytical and creative skills necessary to maintain competitive SEO provision are constantly changing, so it’s essential to move with the times and make sure you stay one step ahead of the crowd. If you’re a company owner, freelancer, consultant or agency professional, take a look at the following tips to find out how to prepare your business for the future of SEO.
Integrate your Marketing
The best business people engender an holistic approach to commerce and understand how each facet of marketing can affect the other. Insights and initiatives are shared between marketing and SEO teams to inform future practice and ensure that marketing campaigns work both on their individual merits and together.
Establish Valuable Goals
A few years ago many fly by night SEO agencies offered website owners the opportunity to rank at number one for their chosen keyword, usually through methods like link buying. When the new Panda updates were introduced many site owners found their link wheel packed, keyword stuffed sites completely dropped off the search engine radar, leaving them forced to start from the bottom all over again. Although there is still a certain amount of value to trying to rank for particular keywords and developing quality links, these days the way search engines are updated is a far more complex animal and a truly successful SEO campaign should focus on much more than keywords and be well established before it begins. For example, rather than trying to rank at number one for a chosen word, business owners should instead be aiming to increase their click through percentage or online leads. Obviously all of this takes time and you might have to consider outsourcing. However if you are going to use a digital marketing agency then make sure they follow Google’s webmaster guidelines and understand your goals.
Improve Analytics Access
Even the most savvy businessman can be completely stumped when it comes to SEO and one issue that optimisation professionals are often faced with is business owners refusal to allow access to information that will improve analytics being carried out by the site. In the complex world of the web it’s essential that analytics are utilised daily to develop an effective strategy. Some agencies will be quite happy to take a fee from companies without proper analytics, but their campaign will be pretty useless. As a business owner you should be prepared to give your SEO campaigners full access to the information they require in order to establish and maintain an effective strategy.
Use this SEO tool to see your SEO score or you can try this similar SEO audit tool. It you would like it in Italian you can try this SEO checker tool.
Using lead generation companies such as Lead Forensics can improve your sales leads without even improving your SEO. We miss a lot of opportunities by not knowing who has visited our website and their software gives you this extra information needed to improve your business leads. Check out this Lead Forensics Review to see how lead generation software can help your business.
Forget what you Know
You may have dabbled in SEO or been more involved in the sector a few years ago, but it’s important to understand that your best practice may not be what’s right for today. When working with an agency or SEO professional, accept that they are the experts in the field and unless you feel there really is a serious issue, trust their judgement when it comes to forming your campaign.
Use social media sites to promote your brand. Keep a tab on all your social profiles on sites such as followus.
For creative agencies you can showcase your skills on behance.
For example are you aware that over doing in bound anchor text links can get you penalised? Getting your name and brand out on the internet isn’t a bad thing but if you are trying to force search engines to rank you for certain key phrases then they might not like that. Use branded anchor text or URL anchor text and you should avoid getting penalised.
Transform your Site
You could spend all your time tweeting and blogging to your heart’s content, but if your site isn’t up to scratch then you may as well not bother. There’s only so much that can be achieved through off page optimisation so any campaign should begin with the site and look at ways to make improvements, such as removing duplicate pages, checking for errors in programming and ensuring content is useful and regularly updated. It should be noted here that your SEO team will require access to the back end of your site, if SEO professionals can gain access they can make necessary changes as quickly as possible to ensure that your rankings aren’t affected by errors.
Get Social
Love it or hate it, social media is here to stay and there’s no denying that it’s an incredibly powerful marketing tool. These days, most companies utilise some form of social media such as twitter, facebook or guest blogging, but many don’t make the most of this valuable asset. Consult your SEO company about the right type of social media for you and the best way to carry out your strategy. However, if you want to make the most of social media, task someone within your organisation with maintaining the campaign once it’s been established. That way, your SM contribution will be more valuable to the people you’re targeting.