Most practices understand they need SEO but they just don’t know where to start! One of the most important areas in a successful SEO campaign is launching it initially. It’s the point in the process where there is a fresh set of opportunities, keywords and goals.
…The following points are crucial when beginning any SEO campaign.
It will be very tough to measure the success of your SEO campaign if you do not have a solid benchmark. In-depth analytical tracking will help you to identify how the work your doing is making a difference.
Its therefore important to take advantage of demographic tracking, tracking calls to actions and other areas that allow you to gain as much insight as possible.
This is typically the starting point of any SEO campaign. In the past, SEO used to be all about keywords and a lot of time was spent in this area. Now, it’s still an important element of SEO but we have also evolved into areas such as quality content and usability.
If we don’t know what people are searching for then we are leaving positive traffic for competitors. It is important that we find out what terms patients are using to find the services that you offer at the practice, you can then use tools and competitive insight to understand the full extent of keyword opportunity that exists. A great tool is the Google AdWords Keyword Planner which shows you how many people are searching for specific keywords.
We may know what terms we would like to rank for but competitive intelligence can tell us what other keyword opportunities exist. You need to know what content competitors have created and what ranks well. If you can find out what has helped it to rank, whether its through social engagement, inbound links or other avenues, this will really help you to move your campaign forward.
Ranking for those important keywords will be pointless if you have a site that is unable to be crawled. What is indexed is what has the potential to be shown up in search results. To be successful in organic search you have to tell search engines the content you want to be crawled and content that is not “search-critical”. Google Webmaster Tools is an imperative tool as this will tell you how Google perceives your site. Specifically, the most used keywords, error pages, your sitemaps, how you link site pages and much more.
You have to tell search engines what content they shouldn’t crawl via robots.txt and what content is important and should be crawled via XML sitemaps. If you have pages similar to one another with duplicated content then Google will not index this. Another reason would be due to pages not loading quickly enough and if the website was not rendering properly for mobile devices, especially since the new Google update has been released on the 21st April, “Mobilegeddon”, which will begin to have massive effects on a websites rankings.
A site’s on-page elements require a keyword(s) to be placed between the title element, page headings and sub-headings, page copy, URL naming and internal linking.
A page should focus on a topic but not appear to be written for a search engine over a user. Moz’s On-Page Grader is a good tool to begin with. This will show you what is important from an on-page perspective. Once you know all the important aspects, you can use a tool such as Screaming Frog to begin looking at these areas in bulk. Keep in mind that manual review is imperative as you don’t want to focus on a certain term too much.
Content is king and in the last few years this SEO element has stolen the show. It very much has become the main point of evolution in SEO. If you can create great content, market it well on social media then you will be up there with the front runners.
A content audit begins with the identification of what content you rank for and what pages hold the most keyword rankings which then enables you to create additional content with these successful metrics.
Google Penguin was an algorithmic update that shook many SEO campaigns. For quite a while what was thought to be good SEO was not the case, for instance building links to irrelevant sites on very keyword specific anchor text. Today, this if attempted, you will be penalised as its about creating great content that is marketed to the right audience, leading to good reception.
If you would like any further information then give the Dental Design team a call on: 01202677277.