Having worked in the field of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for about five years, I have seen the field expand very rapidly. Every new search engine algorithm update comes with the usual rumours and discussions on its impact on SEO. In my opinion, every update is a new opportunity for marketers to rethink our SEO strategy. It gives you a chance to address certain flaws and align SEO strategies to help grow our business.
I like to correlate my work with practical scenarios from everyday life. In this blog, I have connected SEO practices with two aspects of life. This is one of the easiest way to understand SEO practices. My motive is to share my own understanding of this dynamic marketing area with the readers.
I have divided the scenarios among an old website and new website.
Old website
In an old website, you have everything available in your hand. The big question – Where do you start? This is where most SEO folks end up making mistakes. They take a miscalculated step which leads to the wrong goals and results. At this point, it is very difficult to start all over again.
To understand this, a doctor-patient analogy is extremely apt. The goal of any doctor is to cure his patient by providing the best treatment. Similarly, the goal of any search engine is to give the website the best treatment for it to rank on search engines.
For a doctor to be successful, he/she has to carefully analyze the past data and understand the patients based on these insights. Similarly, for an old website you should focus on the past first by analyzing the performance of the website since inception.
Steps for analysis of old website:
- Stats Analysis: Check the performance of the website through Analytics tools. For SEO, the performance is mainly measured from organic visits. See the number of visits, the change and other visitor stats. You can then examine the factors behind these changes.
- Channel Analysis: Identify the pattern of the visits. For instance, you can categorize visits according to organic, referrals and others and analyze its performance over time.
- Link analysis: Download all the links from WebmasterTools. Check the domains which gave you links, domains which are highly linked and authority of domains along with other factors.
- Keyword Analysis: If someone has worked on the website before, they would have the keyword list with a ranking report right. Check the ranking position for those keywords and identify the poorly performing ones. Also, identify potential keywords for your website. This will help you to understand the keyword structure of your website and help you to create the right strategies for them.
After performing the steps listed above, you will have a lot of information about your old website. Armed with this information, you can figure out SEO gaps such as links from less authoritative domains, spam links and plagiarized content. Now, use this information to understand the status quo. This will tell you the reasons behind your current website performance.
New Website
This is where I would like to draw another analogy of a parent-child relationship. For any SEO professional, his website is like his own child. He has to take care of his website just as much he has to take care of his child.
This relationship goes for new (and old) websites. Just as initial few months are extremely important for a child, the initial three months are extremely critical for websites. You have to pursue aggressive on-page SEO activities. Start with making your website SEO friendly. Right from code, meta tags, content, call to actions, responsiveness of your website, and page load times, do everything that will make a search engine fall in love with your website. Bear in mind that a new strategy, content and design will take up a lot of your time.
Now, let’s say that you have completed your on-page activities. Well, only 60% of the job is done. Your website will now have to grow from an infant to a child. Have a clear objective in mind. Your next step should focus on the following three elements - content, marketing and measurement.
Content involves website, landing pages, call to actions, collaterals and everything else that is needed for conversions. Once you are ready with the content, pursue activities on different platforms such as social media and paid platforms. Measurement is extremely critical to understand campaign performance. Measurement provides an accelerated path towards website maturity by giving you accurate insights on your website strengths and weaknesses.
Remember, SEO is a continuous process. You have to be patient while optimizing your website. Sometimes it takes just a few days to see results. In other cases, it may even take months to get a good ranking. Continuous optimization is the only way to stay on top of organic results.
