A nontrivial part of an SEO plan is figuring out who you are
targeting with your website. This is not always that easy to determine. As
you will see in this section, many factors enter into this, including the
competition, the particular strengths or weaknesses of your own company,
and more.1. Mapping Your Products and Services
Successful SEO requires a thorough understanding of the business
organization itself. What products, services, and types of information
and resources does your organization have to offer?
As we outlined in the preceding section, a critical SEO activity
is to understand who is searching for what you are trying to promote,
which requires thoroughly understanding all aspects of your offering.
You will also need to understand the broad market categories that your
products fall into, as each of these categories might relate to sections
of your website that you may want to create. By having sections of the
site for those categories, you create an opportunity to obtain search
traffic related to those categories.
You also should consider business development and the company’s
expansion strategy at the outset of the SEO planning process. Consider
Amazon, which began as a bookseller but has evolved into a general
purpose e-tailer. Sites that go through these types of changes may need
to be substantially restructured, and such restructurings can be a
source of major SEO headaches. Anticipating those changes in advance
provides the opportunity to recommend architectural approaches to
dealing with those changes.
2. Content Is King
One aspect of determining the desired audience for your website is
determining who you want to reach, which requires an understanding of
what you have to offer visitors to your site, both now and in the
future.
You may have a deep library of “how to” content, great videos, a
unique photo gallery, or an awesome tool that people are interested in
using. Each of these can be valuable in building a world-class website
that does well in the search engines.
The content you have available to you will affect your keyword
research and site architecture, as your site content is the major source
of information that search engines use to determine what your site is
about.You need relevant content to even be
“in the game” in search (i.e., if someone searches for
lefthanded golf clubs and you don’t have any
content related to lefthanded golf clubs, chances are good that you
won’t rank for that search query).
On-site content
also affects your link-building efforts. Link building is very similar
to PR in that the success of your link-building efforts is integrally
related to what you are promoting (i.e., what are you asking them to
link to?).
Consider Site A, a site that has built a really solid set of
articles on a given topic. However, 20 other sites out there have an
equally solid set of articles on the same topic, and many of these other
sites have been in the major search engine indexes for much longer than
Site A.
Site A has a serious problem. Why would someone link to it? There
is nothing new there. Chances are that Site A will succeed in getting
some links to its articles; however, it will likely never be able to
establish itself as a leader because it has nothing new to offer.
To establish itself as a leader, Site A must bring something new
and unique to the market. Perhaps it can offer a solution to a problem
that no one else has been able to solve before. Or perhaps it covers the
same content as its competition, but it is the first to release a
high-quality video series on the topic. Or perhaps it focuses on a
specific vertical niche, and establishes itself as a leader in that
specific niche.
One of the most important decisions Site A’s leadership needs to
make is where and how they are going to establish themselves as one of
the top experts and resources in their market space. If they plan to
make their website a major player in capturing market-related search
engine traffic, this is not an optional step.
When looking at content plans it is critical to consider not only
what you already have, but also what you could develop. This relates to
budget for resources to build the content. A publisher with no budget to
spend on content development has few choices that she can make in her
SEO plan, whereas another publisher who has a team of in-house content
developers looking for something to do has a lot more options.
As a result, a critical part of the SEO planning process is to map
the SEO and business goals of the website to the available budget to add
new content, and to prioritize the list of opportunities to estimate the
size of the ROI potential.
3. Segmenting Your Site’s Audience
Let’s not forget the audience itself! This is very important
background information for the SEO practitioner. For example, Site A may
be a website that sells gadgets. As a result, the site’s developers go
out and implement a brilliant campaign to rank for the terms they
consider relevant. Being young and energetic, they focus on the way
their peers search for gadgets, but Site A is focused on selling gadgets
to people who are age 50 or older.
Uh-oh, Site A is in trouble again. Why? One reason it may be in
trouble is that the target audience for Site A (the over-50 crowd) may
use different search terms to search for gadgets than the younger
generation does, and now Site A is bringing in search traffic from
people who are not interested in its products, and not bringing in
traffic from those who might be!
Similar things can happen with gender. For example, women and men
may not search for their shoes the same way, as shown in Figure 1, which lists the
top shoe-related search terms from Wordtracker.
As you can see in Figure 3-2, search terms used
can vary significantly by gender.
Another major criterion to consider might be location. Searchers
in Austin, Texas may naturally want a different version of your product
than searchers in Chicago. For that matter, because they want different
products, they may use different search terms, which requires extensive
keyword research—yet another critical aspect of the SEO
process.
4. Advanced Methods for Planning and Evaluation
There are many methodologies for business planning. One of the
more well-known ones is the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities,
Threats) analysis. There are also methodologies for ensuring that the
plan objectives are the right type of objectives, such as the SMART
(Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timelined) plan. Next we
will take a look at both of these in the context of SEO.
4.1. SWOT analysis
Sometimes you need to get back to the basics and carry out a
simple overview strategy of where you are in the marketplace, and
where you would like to be. A simple SWOT analysis is a great starting
point. It creates a grid from which to work and is very simple to
execute.
As you can see from the SWOT chart in Figure 2, Strengths and Weaknesses usually stem
from internal (on-site, business operational, business resource)
sources, whereas Opportunities and Threats are from external
sources.
Where does SEO fit in here? To explore this, it is helpful to
use an example. Take Business X. It has a website that was built on
WordPress, makes use of category tagging, adds at least one page of
content every two days, and has excellent knowledge of its industry.
Its domain name isn’t ideal—Businessnameandkeyword.com—but it is
decent.
Business X does not get much traffic from search engines, but
its rival, Business Y, does because Business Y has had its website up
for a long period of time and received some great links along the way.
Business Y doesn’t have any SEO plan and relies on its main page to
bring in all traffic. This is because Business Y has a keyword-rich
domain name and people have linked to the site using the domain name
(giving it keyword-rich anchor text), and because of its longevity on
the Web.
There aren’t a lot of target search queries; in fact, there are
fewer than 50,000 for the core set of keywords. Business X’s site
ranks on the second page of Google results, whereas Business Y is
ranked #3, with Wikipedia and About.com taking up the top two
positions.
Neither of the businesses is spending money on PPC (paid search)
traffic, and the niche doesn’t have much room for other entrants
(there may be 10 to 15 competitors). Both sites have similar link
authority in terms of strengths and numbers. The businesses deal in
impulse purchases—the products evoke strong emotions.
Figure 3 shows
what the SWOT for Business X might look like.
The preceding analysis suggests quick wins for the Business X
site, as well as where the priorities are. It also forms a great
starting point for a long-term strategy and tactical maneuvers. This
example is simplistic, but it illustrates how instructive a fleshed
out SWOT can be. It does require you to have analyzed your site, the
main competitor(s), the keywords, and the search engine results pages
(SERPs).
4.2. Get SMART
Every company is unique, so naturally their challenges are
unique. Even a second SEO initiative within the same company is not
the same as the first initiative. Your initial SEO efforts have
changed things, creating new benchmarks, new expectations, and
different objectives. These all make each SEO project a new
endeavor.
One way to start a new project is to set SMART objectives. Let’s
look at how to go about doing that in the world of SEO.
Specific objectives are important. It is
easy to get caught up in details of the plan and lose sight of the
broader site objectives. You may think you want to rank #1 for this
phrase or that, but in reality you want more customers. Perhaps you
don’t even need more customers, but you want higher sales volume, so
in fact having the same number of orders but with a higher average
order value would meet your objectives better.
Measurable objectives are essential if one
is to manage the performance in meeting them—you can’t manage what you
can’t measure. SEO practitioners have to help their clients or
organizations come to grips with analytics, and not just the analytics
software, but the actual processes of how to gather the data, how to
sort it, and most important, how to use it to make informed
decisions.
Achievable objectives are ones which can be
accomplished with the available resources. You could decide to put a
man on Mars next year, for example, but it is just too big an
undertaking to be feasible. You can be ambitious, but it is important
to pick goals that can be met. You cannot possibly sell to more people
than exist in your market. There are limits to markets, and at a
certain point the only growth can come from opening new markets, or
developing new products for the existing market.
Aside from basic business achievability, there are also limits
to what can rank at #1 for a given search query. The search engines
want the #1 result to be the one that offers the most value for users,
and unless you are close to having the website that offers the most
value to users, it may be unreasonable to expect to get to that
position, or to maintain it if you succeed in getting there.
Realistic objectives are about context and
resources. It may be perfectly achievable to meet a certain objective,
but only with greater resources than may be presently available. Even
a top ranking on the most competitive terms around is achievable for a
relevant product, but it is realistic only if the resources required
for such an effort are available.
Time-bound is the final part of a SMART
objective. If there is no timeline, no project can ever fail, since it
can’t run out of time. SEO generally tends to take longer to implement
and gather momentum than paid advertising. It is important that
milestones and deadlines be set so that expectations can be managed
and course corrections made.
“We want to rank at #1 for loans” is not a SMART objective. It
doesn’t identify the specific reason why the company thinks a #1
ranking will help it. It doesn’t have a timeline, so there is no way
to fail. It doesn’t state an engine on which to be #1, so there’s a
guaranteed argument if it means to rank on MSN and you get the job
done on Yahoo!.
“To increase approved loan applications generated by natural
search by 30% over six months” is a far better objective. There is a
deadline, and the company can certainly gauge progress toward the
specific objective. The company can look at its current market share
and the resources committed to see whether this is achievable and
realistic.