Do It Yourself SEO – Website Goals, Customers and Site Review — Part 1 of 4

Many SMBs don’t rank well organically and don’t have the budget to pay for sponsored listings. This makes it hard to be found, which is a dilemma because most Internet users go to search engines first, before buying products and services. So the question for SMBs is: can you really afford not to be found in the SERPs?
You don’t want to miss the opportunity, yet you may not have enough in the marketing budget to hire an SEO consultant. What to do? One option is Do It Yourself. It’s time intensive, about 40 hours per month, but here’s a road map on what you need to do to gain new business. Your first task is to define the business goals for your Website.

Website Goals

Your objective depends on the purpose of your site. For instance, an ecommerce site wants  to increase sales. Here’s a few more examples:

1. B2C site: increase sales
2. B2B site: increase leads
3. Content management site: increase readership
4. Self service site: increase customer satisfaction/decrease customer support calls
5. Blog site: create links and interest in product/service/topic/celebrity

You want to target your site goals by identifying and measuring your site’s key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs should be measured before and after you optimize your site to see what gains you’ve made. A few examples of SEO KPIs:

1. Traffic from branded keywords vs. non-branded keywords
2. Number of unique pages crawled
3. Number of pages yielding traffic
4. Number of visitors per keyword

Knowledge of Web analytics is crucial because that helps you improve site performance. You can hire a consultant if you don’t have analytics expertise. Or you can subscribe to an SEO tool like MySEOServer that takes care of optimizing your site and does analytics for you.

Know Your Customers

You must be in touch with the demands of the marketplace if you’re going to create successful SEO copy for your Web site. To really understand your customers, interact with them as often as possible. Here’s how you can do this.

1. Gather keyword intelligence from your site logs or site search
2. Survey customers to get feedback after every sale or periodically
3. Provide customer reviews on your site or conduct an annual customer audit
4. Use blogs and social networking to interact with customers
5. Communicate with customers through newsletters based on their interests

Before optimizing your site, it’s important to conduct a site review to see how well it’s currently performing.

SEO Site Review

Assess the current search effectiveness of your site to identify what can be done to improve performance. You can also use this data as a baseline to track performance over time. Your SEO site review can reveal unknown factors about your site’s code and structure that could be keeping you from better search engine rankings.

You can hire an external consultant to conduct the site review, or use an SEO tool that provides a blueprint for success. Such tools can tell you if Google is indexing your site, how quickly it is indexing new pages, or point out duplicate content and canonical URL issues. After your site review, you can make the suggested changes and start building Web pages.