SEO process

Strategy

Once you are familiar with the basics of SEO (SEO Demystified), we can examine the key features of a quality SEO package i.e. what’s included in our SEO campaigns and how it can help you.

SEO can be a murky subject, but we present our work process in a transparent manner. Don’t stress if you see some technical terms within this article that you don’t understand. This is here to show you how efficiently your budget will contribute to a standard SEO campaign and why it’s worth it.So read it, print it, research some topics or ask some questions. We’re here to put your mind at rest if there’s anything you don’t understand.

We’ll determine what needs to be done to your site, and if a fresh start is the most cost-effective way to go, then we have an advantage. There’s no point spending hundreds of dollars and lots of time correcting a site that isn’t optimized when we can do everything right in the first place.

Defining a correct strategy could save us both a lot of time and resources in the future.

The primary objective in this step is to determine the following aspects and make these more effective by utilizing SEO

• Company and History
• Branding
• Products
• Plan
• The strategic goals of the site
• Audience
• Free Resources/Tools
• Location

Initial setup & technical audit

After we become familiarized with your industry and products/services that you offer we will start with a technical audit of your site. We examine the whole infrastructure of the website to ensure that all of the various elements of the site are running correctly.

The preliminary steps include the following tasks

• Analysis of on-page elements. These are the internal site elements which are exclusively under our control, as opposed to external off-page elements
• Homepage analysis ensuring the correct information and navigation is included
• Ensuring there’s no duplicate content throughout your site or content that matches other sites out there
• We also perform a grammar and spelling check, examine site structure, breakup and lengths
• Inbound link analysis to see who has linked to your site
• Your sitemap.xml and robots.txt to check Google is crawling the right parts of your site
• Check indexing
• Establishing PPC accounts if you want to create a PPC campaign to run alongside your SEO
• Google Analytics and Webmaster set ups if you don’t already have them
• Set up social media accounts. Google pays attention to social signals like interactions, fans, and how frequently you post content. They’re an integral part of SEO

Other factors that should be taken into consideration include

• Frequent updates
• Server location
• Number of pages
• Repeat traffic
• Bookmarks in Chrome and Google Toolbar (monitored regularly)
• YouTube integration is preferred by Google since they own it

Once we have concluded the audit and set up our tools, we can decide which keyword groups we will target in our campaign.

These are determined by what search engines tell us, competitor analysis and other factors.

Keyword research

When determining the set of keywords we should be targeting in your campaign, the following factors are considered

• Relevancy
• PPC Metrics- Search volume, CPC, Competition
• SEO Metrics- DA, PR, Moz Rank, Moz Trust, MJ Score, Pages and Weekly Pages
• Competition Link Profiles
• Periodic backups to ensure all of your website is fully backed up just in case
• Competition Keyword Analysis
• Commercial Value and Commercial Intent

Once we’ve looked at your keywords we’ll develop a group that best reflects the different sections of your website.

Domain portfolio analysis

If you haven’t had a consultation regarding your domain strategy/portfolio then now is a good time.

Some of the questions you should consider are

• Is your current domain short, memorable and keyword-rich?
• Will you consider purchasing a premium primary domain if required?
• Are there better or more affordable options for the primary domain?
• Is defensive registration required?
• Should you utilize more than one domain when targeting different sectors/product lines?

Recommendations

• If you are purchasing a domain make sure you research its history
• If possible, try to obtain a domain that is keyword rich or an exact match domain. Domains which have the primary keyword as the first word are very valuable
• Register your domains for more than one year in advance because search engines use the expiry date of a domain as a factor to predict the legitimacy of a domain
• Avoid private registration. Match all of the contact information used in the site with the primary contact in the domain registrar (company name, address, email and phone number)

This wraps up the research/setup phase. Now we move on to the on-page optimization.

On-page techniques

At this point, we go back to the site to do more work with the on-page elements

• Optimize meta descriptions ensuring primary keywords appear and they are 160 characters max
• Internal pages optimization
• Give assistance creating landing pages (where necessary)
• Image alt texts
• Create TOS and Privacy Pages
• Give assistance with illustration of pages by using graphics (where necessary)
• Look at internal linkage between pages and the site’s navigation
• Create descriptive URLs
• Text breakup/Flow optimization
• Optimize page titles ensuring primary keywords are at the beginning and they are 70 characters max
• Check compression, bounce rate and page speed
• Place Nofollow attribution to all irrelevant sectors to prevent juice leakage (register, login, logo, header, pic, RSS feeds, tags, archives, comments, category pages, copyright, TOS, feedback and privacy)  
• Ensure headings are correct (H1 with main keyword. H2 also mandatory. H3 optional etc)
• Homepage optimization
• Review content and make additions/alterations
• Meta tags (optional)
• Social media links
• Ensure user engagement where possible in forums, comments and reviews
• If the design allows look at the breadcrumb navigation
• Correct any response issues
• Fix any broken links
• Check redirects and canonical tags for duplicate content indexing (www, https)
• Complete browser compatibility testing
• Check mobile compatibility
• Optimize for location (if necessary)

Google’s Guidelines to site discovery, crawl and index.

In the preceding steps, we built a solid foundation for your campaign. Now we have confidence in and knowledge of your brand to proceed to the next stages which concentrate on off-page elements.

Link building

Once we have relevant content, tools, and resources which are great then other people might want to link to it. We can acquire inbound links to your site.

• Search engine inclusion
• Social shares
• Competitors inbound link analysis
• Establishing diversified inbound links gradually
• User reviews, comments and citations
• Directory, professional clubs and associations registrations
• Press releases (further down the line)

Although this stage appears to be much shorter than previous stages, it actually accounts for 60% of the project and will remain an ongoing task.

This would conclude our work with the organic rankings. We can give the existing keyword groups a boost by aiding the website with a PPC campaign and repeating the process by creating new inbound links and targeting more keywords.

Constant work is required in order to monitor and optimize the established content and to maintain the current rankings you have achieved.

PPC campaign

After all this work with the organic profile of the website is done, we give it a boost.

PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns are there to help the organic rankings improve faster while still generating targeted traffic to the website.

We will be paying for traffic using the same keyword groups we have optimized the website for, and targeting it through the use of various landing pages.

Campaigns managed by reputable SEO agencies should describe their process in detail so you know what the plans are for your site.

You can reference this article when you are in the process of negotiating your next SEO campaign contract to see what areas they’re planning on covering.

Make sure you ask lots of questions and try to digest as much information as possible before making a decision.

We hope that you find the information we’ve given in this article to be useful. Most of the terms described above are all related to the way the web works and we’re sure you already know what some of them mean.

We hope that you find the information we’ve given in this article to be useful. Most of the terms described above are all related to the way the web works and we’re sure you already know what some of them mean. Tags: SEO Digital Marketing