“On the FOURTH Day of Digital Marketing Planning, your boss will ask of you:
FOUR SEO Factors . . .
THREE Design Directives, TWO Website Questions, and ONE Measurable Marketing Plan . . .”
Are you sure your website has been SEO-optimized? We talk with companies at least once a week that think they’ve “done SEO” — but we discover the most basic SEO elements are complely missing (or poorly executed). And sadly, it has nothing to do with the size of the company — even some giant companies are missing basic SEO elements.
Is your Organic traffic increasing over time?
It’s time for an SEO CHECK-UP. If you’re not sure if your SEO elements have been implemented (or done correctly), or you’re not seeing more Organic traffic, here’s where to start:
1. Keyword-Focused Page URLs
Do you have page URLs that don’t use keywords? That’s usually the first sign that the SEO you think you’ve paid for hasn’t actually been done.
Frequently, web developers are good designers, but they don’t have SEO skills in-house. If they’re building a new website for you, they should be doing keyword research BEFORE they start creating pages. And they should provide a new “sitemap” that shows you the new page URLs that include keywords.
But what typically happens is they don’t think about SEO. So they either use the page URLs from your old website (even though the content focus of each page may have changed), or create page URLs that might use the name of the page. But what you call the page may or may not include your keywords.
A page URL should include the most important keyword(s) on the page, separated by hyphens. How long should the URL be? Google recommends 3-5 words. Getting keywords into your page URL seems to be an important factor of SEO.
If your page URLs don’t include keywords, put that on your “to do” list for the New Year.
If you’re going to change your page URLs to more keyword-focused URLs, be sure each old URL is permanently redirected to the new URL (see below . . .).
2. Keyword-Focused Page Title
Page Title appears as the top line in your browser. But more importantly, Page Title is used by Google as the “headline” when your page is listed in the Organic search results.
Are each of your Page Titles written like the headline it will be? Does it highlight the specifics on the page (to attract visitors) and use keywords? Ideally, your most important keyword should appear at the beginning of your Page Title.
Each of your website pages needs a UNIQUE Page Title (because you want to tell Google that each of your pages contains unique content). And your Page Title can be about 60 characters long.
We see SO many websites that have “paid for SEO”, but are missing optimized Page Titles. Some SEO vendors will merely load an SEO plug-in on your WordPress website, which just slaps in the name of your page. (The name of your page within your website is rarely a keyword-laden headline.)
Ask your SEO resource for a spreadsheet of the optimized page URLs, Page Titles and Descriptions he or she is going to implement (or that have been implemented) – and what keyword(s) each page is focused on and why.
3. Remove Duplicate or Unused Pages through 301 Permanent Redirects
You say you don’t think you have any duplicate or unused pages? Really? Have you had your site spidered lately?
Even the most well-run sites will typically find some “mangled URLs” — various URLs someone created when trying to load a blog post or new page. Those URLs weren’t actually used for the final post or page, but they still exist as live URLs. So they should be permanently redirected (called a “301 redirect”).
If you change a page URL, a copy of the original page may still be in Google’s index. If Google comes across a second page with the same content as a page within its index, Google typically will not index the second page.
You want Google to index the NEW version of your web page, so you need to tell Google that the original page has permanently moved to the new page URL. Use a 301 redirect of the old page URL to the new page URL.
Note that 301 redirects must be coded page by page, to preserve the value of any incoming links to the original page.
Your SEO resource should spider your site regularly to look for old or other unused URLs. Ask to see the spreadsheet from the spider — you should see a status of “301” for old or other unused URLs.
You don’t want the same content on 2 different pages. On your Category pages, don’t list the same content that appears on your individual Product pages. Write unique content for your Category pages — talk about the unique benefits of the entire Category or of doing business with your company. (You can’t have your “why do business with us” message in too many places.)
If your SEO resource is not paying attention to issues like this, it may be time for a new resource.
4. Build Links Between Pages and Blog Posts
Do you look for opportunities within your website to create links between pages? (If you always do, great. If not, maybe it’s time to look through your most recent blog posts and create some links back to appropriate product pages.)
On those links, do you find a lot of “click here” as the link text?
You want to place each link on text that contains keywords that relate to the page you’re linking to (known as “anchor text”). So change all of those “click here” to “How (keyword) solution helps (keyword) companies” or “X ways to use (keyword).”
Each time you create a blog post, look for opportunities to create links within the post, ideally to your product/solution pages that relate to the post.
If you’re paying for SEO monthly, your SEO specialist should be reviewing issues like anchor text and optimizing any new blog posts.
Continue to build content through your blog posts, to give you new ways to appear in Google’s index each month. Once your basic SEO elements are in place, adding new content regularly is one of the best ways to increase your Organic traffic.
If your SEO resource is going to draft blog posts for you, ask to see some sample posts. Ask where their writers are located, and be wary of using writers for which English is not their first language.
When you work with an SEO specialist, you should at least see these basic elements in the proposal — and in their work for you.
Did you miss . . .
“On First Day of Planning, your boss will ask of you: ONE Measurable Digital Marketing Plan?
“On the Second Day of Planning, your boss will ask of you: TWO Website Questions?
“On the Third Day of Planning, your boss will ask of you: THREE Design Directives?
Excerpted from our new BEST-SELLING book, “The Results Obsession: ROI-Focused Digital Strategies to Transform Your Marketing,” now available on Amazon!
Learn more about The Results Obsession and see the Table of Contents
The book includes an entire chapter devoted to expanding upon the key Search Engine Optimization elements we introduced here.
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