When people search for something on the Web, they want to find it quickly. If you've done a good job of making your website friendly to search engines, someone looking for what you sell may find you right away. If not, a seeker may turn to a competitor.
How do you ensure that your product reaches customers who are looking for it? You need to understand how your customers use search engines, and how the results challenge your business. You need to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, what to copy from them and what to do differently. You need to see this information through your customers' eyes.
edit A Plan For Assessing Your Competition
You need to have a plan to understand your competition. First you need to know how your customers will be likely to find you. To come up with a list of competitors, try the following:
- Search for your products using the terms you anticipate your customers would use on popular search engines, such as Google. Look at the search results and list your rivals.
- Go to websites that your customers frequently visit, such as industry organizations' sites, blogs, social networking sites, magazines or even general information sites. See what resources are listed there, and who's advertising there.
- Talk with your customers and find out who they think has a strong Web presence in your industry.
- Note which sites your customers link to from their own sites.
Once you have a list of competitors, you may want to analyze which keywords they use on their website and which keywords they rank well for in search engines. This could be a good time to do some keyword research of your own. (Note: You can use the AboutUs Site Report to track how well you rank in Google for your 20 most important keywords over time. You can also track how your competitors are doing on those same keywords.)
Check out how your competitor presents their website content, and what they do to make it easy for their customers to find what they need. Try to find who hosts their site, who built their site, and whether they mention any technology partners. Much of this information can be seen at the bottom of a site's home page.
If this analysis seems cumbersome or too time-consuming, you may wish to hire an analyst to provide you a high level summary of your competition and their strategies.
Creating The Right SEO Strategy
Coming up with an effective SEO strategy and ongoing plan is key to the success of your website. When I first delved into the world of SEO I was definitely guilty of just ‘jumping in’ and not spending too much time planning. This was down to experimenting with various techniques more than anything else, and it soon became apparent that strategising my approach was vital.
I thought it might make a useful and interesting blog post to share a few things that I do to create a plan specific to the website in question. I personally feel that there is definitely an element of gut feeling and intuition involved, but all of this comes based on data and research. There are also many more things I check than can be discussed in one single post, but here are a few things that I always make sure I cover.
What Does ‘Strategy’ Mean To Me?
Whenever I start an SEO strategy there a few things that I always keep asking myself; what are the needs and goals of the website in question, and what’s going on in the market?
To me, an SEO plan should be answer the needs of the website in question and the market it relates to.
Keyword Research
Aim: Find a direction
With any project, this is always my first step. Until I conduct even the most basic amount of keyword research, I feel somewhat in the dark. I usually start off by simply entering a load of relevant keywords into Google’s keyword tool to try and get an overall idea of what’s going on. This is a really easy and effective way of comparing a large set of keywords and trying to suss out a direction to start going in. This information all gets exported into a spreadsheet for use later down the line.
After a while of doing this I’ll start to build up an idea of certain ‘hotspots’ and opportunities to start looking into further. I’ve recently started using SEOgadgets keyword tool to get more of a ‘visualised’ overview, and also to start sorting the keywords into categories. Not only is this really useful for me to see, it’s also a great way to start organising your data into a presentable and understandable format for clients.
To really get into the ‘nitty gritty’ I’ll use the SEOmoz keyword difficulty tool. This allows me to start judging how tricky it’s going to be to rank for certain keywords. I’m constantly comparing different keywords against each other in an effort to keep building an even stronger picture of the market, from which I can then base my recommendations.
Competitor Analysis
Aim: Get the ideas flowing
Looking at websites that are currently enjoying success in your market is a great way of getting some ideas going. I’m not saying copy other people’s work, more look at what they are doing for a bit of inspiration. On another note, it’s vital to know what the competitions doing in order to compete effectively, and keep up with them in the long run.
I usually look into how well optimised their sites are, how active are they in social media, where are their links coming from, are their links natural or have they been manually link building? This can all be very useful stuff when you’re trying to prioritise your SEO tasks.
SEOmoz’s linkscape tool comes is very useful for this, and I’ll normally make use of it by looking through competitors back links to try and see if I can spot opportunities or areas that I should probably be focusing on. Even without a particular goal in mind, just manually looking through these links will create a really good image of what’s going on. It might be quite a laborious task, but in my mind it’s well worth the time.
Website Audit
Aim: Unearthing any potential problems
Every project is different, and every job will present its own unique challenges and potential issues. However, even if someone contacts me asking for help with link building only, I will always insist on a site audit even if it’s at a basic level. There’s no point in going out spending time getting great links into a website only to find nothing happens because it’s an absolute mess. I believe that would be a slight disservice to the client, I’m sure you’ll agree!
(Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a great way of delving into a website)
Depending on what arises from looking into the website, the first step in any SEO plan of mine is to get the website into a good shape. The aim of doing a site audit is to find out if there are any SEO issues, and also to find out what can be improved. From this I can then create an easy to follow task sheet with a prioritised list of recommendations.
Going forwards, you will also be able to effectively uncover areas for future development and build that into your long term plan.
Budget/Time Constraints
Aim: Time to get realistic
Perhaps this should have been my first point, because there’s no point in putting together the most detailed and world conquering SEO plan if the client can’t afford to action any of it. To provide real value to the client, any strategy has to be realistic. One of the first things I’ll ask a prospective client is how much they can afford to spend on SEO. With that in mind I can then create a plan that can actually be put into action.
If money’s tight then I might start to suggest that the client themselves take on various tasks, but the most important thing for me in this instance is to prioritise the most important tasks.
On the flip side to this, I can’t afford to work for free and I don’t want to end up doing way more work than I’m getting paid to do. This is where having a solid strategy not only helps the client and the overall success of the campaign, it should also serve to protect you and make it clear what can be expected from you
Note from MOGmartin, this is a guest post by Sam Page
Sam Page is the in-house SEO Manager for Southwest Equipment in Lewisville, TX. He started working online in 2006 with his own website and has carefully developed his skills in SEO over the last 4 years. He specializes in e-commerce and sales websites. Follow him on facebook.
So, you think you have your website perfectly optimized? Perfect keyword density, great internal link structure, title tags & meta tags nailed, plus perfectly placed landing pages, huh? Those are great things to do, but like everything in SEO, you can refine your page and come even closer to the ideal search engine algorithm buster.
1. Google Caffeine introduced an emphasis on loading speed. With the internet needing to be faster and faster, the quicker your site can load, the better. There are several things a person can do to speed up their loading times. This includes fixing broken links, adjusting images, editing flash or java, streamlining your landing page layout, and checking to make sure your host isn’t slowing you down (most common with shared hosting). Should this be your first priority? Probably not, Matt Cutts mentioned that this affects only 1% of search queries. Speed up your site; Google did.
2. Be careful with your bold text. While it’s important to implement bold text, I don’t recommend using it outside of a citation or heading. I come across pages all the time with keywords in bold and can’t help but think it looks like Spam. If it looks over-optimized to me, it will to Google. I am very sure the staff of spam fighters at Google have already addressed this issue. I still believe the best way to organize your site is by keeping it more formal and using the h1, h2, h3… tags.
3. Don’t forget about social networking or bookmarking. You want to integrate your entire social network as seamlessly as possible. This may not necessarily impact on-page optimization, but it will affect the professional appearance of your site. Just like having a blog on your site to keep your content fresh, I believe that in the next year or two, social media will bring relevance and freshness to your site. Google is ranking with cues from Twitter and Facebook, and Bing / Yahoo is also utilizing Facebook ‘likes’ into their search algorithm.
4. Keep your content FRESH. Want to know how to beat some very important sites in the SERP’s? Be one of the first to report a news story or update and you will likely be on your way to the top. Last night, I was listening to Joe Laratro speak about a site that had beaten major sites like The New York Times and ESPN because they were one of the first to post a story about the officiating of the NY Jets vs. NE Patriots game. He also mentioned that Google drastically moved them up because of how quickly and timely they wrote the story. To Google, authority and timeliness are king. Sure, you can write a story, but it may not be picked up by Google very fast, right? Wrong. You can submit that link to Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz to get it indexed much quicker. Sometimes, you’ll even get your tweets included in the Google SERP’s.
Utilize these tools and cut your website from a different cloth. If you are in a highly competitive market, these tips are absolutely necessary to ranking well and converting traffic.
