As any experienced SEO consultant will tell you, you should
incorporate your SEO strategy into the site planning process long before
your site goes live. Your strategy should be well outlined before you make
even the most basic technology choices, such as the hosting platform and
your CMS. However, this is not always possible—and in fact, more often
than not an SEO professional will be brought in to work on a site that
already exists.Regardless of when you start, there are a number of major components
to any SEO plan that you need to address long before you research the
first title tag.
1. Technology Choices
As we already suggested, SEO impacts major technology choices. For
example, a CMS can facilitate—or, possibly, eliminate—your SEO strategy.
Some platforms do not even allow you to have titles and meta
descriptions that vary from one web page to the next, create hundreds
(or thousands) of pages of duplicate content, or make a 302 (temporary)
redirect the default redirect you need to use. All of these things could
be disastrous for your website.
This problem also exists with web servers. For example, if you use
IIS, the default redirect choice is a 302 . You can configure
IIS to use a 301 redirect, but this is something you need to understand
and build into your SEO plan up front.
2. Market Segmentation
Another critical factor is the nature of the market in which you
are competing. This tells you how competitive the environment is in
general, and when you augment it with additional research, you can use
this information to tell how competitive the SEO environment
is.
In some markets, natural search is intensively competitive. For
instance, Figure 1
shows the Google results for credit cards. In this
market, Visa, Master Card, American Express, and Discover all fail to
make the #1 position in Google’s results, so you know this market is
highly competitive.
This does not mean you should give up on the market, especially if
it is already your business; however, you might choose to focus your SEO
on less competitive terms that will still bring you many qualified
leads.
3. Where You Can Find Great Links
An early part of the SEO brainstorming process is identifying the
great places to get links, as well as the types of content you might
want to develop to encourage linking from other quality websites. Note
that we, the authors, advocate pursuing few, relevant, higher-quality
links over hundreds of low-quality links, as 10 good links can go much
further than thousands of links from random blog posts or forums.
Understanding this will help you build your overall content plan.
4. Content Resources
The driver of any heavy-duty link campaign is the quality and
volume of your content. If your content is of average quality and covers
the same information dozens of other sites have covered, it will not
attract many links. If, however, you are putting out quality content, or
you have a novel tool that many will want to use, you are more likely to
receive external links.
At the beginning of any SEO campaign you should look at the
content on the site and the available resources for developing new
content. You can then match this up with your target keywords and your
link-building plans to provide the best results.
5. Branding Considerations
Of course, most companies have branding concerns as well. However,
there may be strategies that you cannot pursue because of the nature of
your brand, such as the following:
Developing and promoting interesting articles on Digg is a strategy that many
companies employ. Articles that are popular enough to make the front
page of Digg get a very large number of visitors and a good number
of links as a result. But the audience is skewed heavily toward 13-
to 28-year-old males, and the type of content that is required to
become popular with that audience might not fit with some brands
(take, for example, the AARP).
Some companies put up pages about other companies’ products,
most likely as part of a competitive comparison, to rank the other
companies’ brand name in the search engine. Again, this might be
pushing the envelope a bit for some brands.
The list of situations where the brand can limit the strategy is
quite long, and the opposite can happen too, where the nature of the
brand makes a particular SEO strategy pretty compelling.
6. Competition
Your SEO strategy can also be influenced by your competitors’
strategies, so understanding what they are doing is a critical part of
the process for both SEO and business intelligence objectives. There are
several scenarios you might encounter:
The competitor discovers a unique, highly converting set of
keywords.
The competitor discovers a targeted, high-value link.
The competitor saturates a market segment, justifying your
focus elsewhere.
Weaknesses appear in the competitor’s strategy, which provide
opportunities for exploitation.
Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your competition
from an SEO perspective is a significant part of devising your own SEO
strategy.
