Good Business Practice
With any business expenditure it is essential to know what you might expect in return for your investment. If you buy a new computer, for instance, then you might expect larger storage capacity, speedier operation of common functions or access to new applications which will help your business in some way. For some business investments there are formulae that can be applied to quantify the return you can expect.
When it comes to marketing techniques in general, and SEO campaigns in particular, it becomes more difficult to measure something that can often be, by its very nature, intangible. There are, however, clear indicators for SEO success and methodology practices which help to achieve that worthwhile ROI (Return on Investment). Indigoextra Ltd specialises in Multi-lingual SEO and can help your business to achieve sound results for SEO campaigns in English, French, German and Spanish.
Know your target market
As with any aspect of business, it is essential to understand your target market. With SEO, perhaps the best starting point is keyword research to analyse which of the keywords relevant to your business have a high search volume. The trick is then to select the ones where competition may be slightly less, in order to achieve the results you want. It would be a mistake, for instance, to concentrate on one or two keywords where there is already strong competition from recognised market leaders, unless your site is already performing well for those keywords. Google has a useful tool in its Keyword Planner which, although aimed at AdWords subscribers, provides helpful analysis when it comes to identifying the most appropriate keywords for your business, as it gives results by monthly search volumes.
The competition shown in Google’s Keyword Planner refers strictly to PPC (Adwords) competition and it’s therefore necessary to do a further analysis in order to determine the SEO competition.
On-page SEO
Having selected the keywords on which to concentrate, the next stage is to review the use of those words on your website and optimise your most important pages. This means that the keywords should appear, in a natural unforced way, at least five or six times on the pages you choose and typically be used once in titles, metatags and the URL of that page. As with any SEO, it is important that your website is attractive, user-friendly and easily navigable for the visitor. Artificially cramming every page with keywords just doesn’t work!
It is also far more effective to optimise fully the most important pages (including your home page) and ignore some pages on the site, than to achieve a less than satisfactory result by trying to optimise them all in a half-hearted fashion.
If you have an e-commerce business, better results may be achieved by optimising categories, rather than individual products, especially when you have similar products. The groups of products or categories can then have specific descriptions, making it clear to the visitor just what you are offering, rather than having frequent repetition, which is not only uninteresting, but can be counter-productive.
Using Metatags
A succinct sentence that describes what a particular page contains is an important signpost for search engines, which might otherwise simply extract the first line or two, regardless of whether or not they make sense or add any meaningful information. For some time Google have ignored the Keywords metatag, therefore while you may include it for other search engines, if you do, keep it short.
Focus on quality, relevant links
Google is no longer fooled by automatic links, mass links in footers or forums or other black hat link practices. A single link from a relevant, reputable website will improve your SEO more than a hundred links from poor quality sites (which could harm your ranking, rather than improving it). Ask yourself if search engines didn't exist, would this link still make sense. If the answer is yes, then the link probably also helps your SEO.
Don’t forget to monitor results!
It may seem obvious good business practice to monitor the results of your SEO, but it is worth pointing out that this is an important part of identifying whether or not you are achieving a high ROI for your SEO campaign. If you are not seeing an increase in visitors to the site after two or three months (don’t chop and change every few weeks as this could distort what is happening), then analyze the keywords and try amending at least some of them to see what difference that makes. If you are getting increased visitors to the site, but not seeing increased sales, then this blog on E-commerce SEO for Christmas has some useful tips on possible ways to re-direct pages for less popular items and other techniques that could be useful for your SEO campaign all year round.
If you're comparing SEO to other marketing methods, like PPC or print advertising, then remember that SEO tends to provide you with a prolonged ongoing increase in traffic and links from articles or infographics will generate direct traffic and an improved position with Google for months or years to come.
