Over the past three months, the murdok have run a joint series of radio shows with corresponding articles on the ten basic steps or stages shared by most effective SEO campaigns. Today, we cover the last section (but certainly not final points) in a round-up article aptly named, “Keeping It Up”.
If the initial object of search engine optimization is to attract website traffic, the long-term objectives are to retain and convert that traffic and new traffic into repeating business. As all analytic webmasters know, the bulk of site traffic tends to come from search engine referrals. Retaining strong search rankings is essential to sustaining strong traffic, increasing sales and thus expanding your business.
Even after a website has established itself with its visitors and has a strong conversion record, search engines will continue to provide the vast majority of all new site traffic. If the SEO has done his or her work properly, blogs, social media and paid-search ads should also be driving new and repeat visitors.
Under normal circumstances, sustaining strong search engine rankings, while hard work, is fairly straight forward. That doesn’t mean it is easy by any extent but search marketing maintenance is not necessarily rocket science either. There is a never ending series of regular, methodical tasks to plan and work through. Depending on the size and scope of the website one is working on, a number of decisions should be made in order to prioritize work to most effectively use one’s time.
Generally, when we do the “final” touches on the initial phases of a client campaign, we wait a short period of seven to ten days before worrying too much about where pages or documents in the site are ranking. During that time, there are a number of tasks we perform to help boost the site’s performance, many of which have already been covered in the previous articles and radio segments that make up this series.
Post-SEO: Day 1, Whew! The initial phase is 99.9% doneLet’s pick up the story from the moment site structure, and link-paths while planning the continuance of optimized content files appear on the pages they are supposed to appear on and if the on-page layout is attractive and compelling. He also needs to look into any paid-search marketing campaigns to map out staff work time and assign long-term tasks appropriately. Assuming everything is found working according to plan, Jade is able to do the final “doh!-check” sign-off before moving his focus to post SEO management and metrics.
Post-SEO: Day 2 – Day 7, The Garden is Seeded, now we add water and watch(Please see the other articles in the series and listen to corresponding link building, social media, and statistics analysis forms the foundations for future planning and improvements. Most web analytic and monitoring software we use begin collecting data immediately after installation but it takes a few days for truly informative metrics to emerge.
In the initial week, software suites such as Click Tracks, IndexTools need to be tweaked, trained and tutored in order to get the best overviews of website traffic and unique page performance. The PPC monitoring and click compliance software suite, optimized content and a blog, social media marketing, the pillars of the campaign are set in motion.
Some pages are expected to perform better than others. Similarly, some pages will perform better than expected. Some pages will not perform well at all, including ones you initially had high hopes for. Getting a true grip on how each page in a website or facet of the overall website marketing campaign is performing is like examining each tree in a woodlot. Compared to the intensity of the initial hands-on SEO phase, the work of Keeping It Up (to sustain search rankings and improve conversions) is much more mental than manual.
Analytics play an enormous role in long term search marketing management. From basic ranking reports to local search results in specific cities to eye-tracking studies and mouse-tracking technologies; search marketers rely on data generated by website visitors. Examining the data shows search marketers which pages or files are working and which require improvement.
The first thing SEOs look at is simple, organic page and site rankings across the major search engines under target keyword phrases. Though ranking reports provide the most basic information, the vast majority of search engine referrals come from first page placements and of those, the greatest numbers come from placements above the fold in the Top 1 - 5 spots. Placements on the second and third pages of results can be worked on and improved, moving them upwards in search results.
A problem with basic ranking reports is search engine placements often differ from region to region and city to city. In many circumstances, websites with local relevance will place better in their respective regions. Quite often, people from different places use different words to describe the same things. This is where the conversion optimization begins. Briefly, conversion optimization is the art of prompting website visitors to take pre-planned actions such as clicking a link, buying a product or requesting information.
As analytics and user-tracking begin to paint a picture of how web visitors move through a website, search marketers can improve pages in the site to best meet the actions of the visitors and improve chances of conversion. Phrases such as “time on page”, “bounce rate”, “referral page”, “entry and exit points”, capture the attention of web marketing analysts trying to figure out the very best way to make and remake web pages to increase conversions. For anyone who simply needs to know the language of search marketing analytics, the Interactive Advertising Bureau publishes a 29-page glossary of
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