SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Search Engine Optimization — Better Information Means Better Results

Search engine optimization can bring a tremendous amount of high-intent traffic to your website and unlike pay-per click marketing, also known as paid search, you don’t have to pay every time a visitor reaches your site.

But optimizing a website for search traffic is not a simple process.

It’s important to understand the three most common reasons for failure in a search engine optimization campaign:

• Poor Workflow Prioritization — There is nearly always something you can do to or for your website to make it more search-friendly. The problem is being able to differentiate the vital from the frivolous, the crucial tasks from the “nice to haves.”
• Hopeless Time Sinks — Much of the work that goes into continually optimizing for search traffic is incredibly repetitive and mundane. This not only discourages talented employees, but saps many of your most valuable resources.
• Insufficient Information — Because search engine optimization campaigns require so much leg work, and because it takes much longer to see results from an organic search engine optimization campaign than from a pay per click campaign, having accurate information at the start of a search campaign or a site redesign is imperative.

Misfiring with a poorly targeted SEO keyword list that doesn’t help drive the specific types of traffic that you are looking for can cost you months of effort that you’ll have to duplicate (but in a new direction) to accomplish the results you’re after.

Overcoming these three pitfalls is imperative for any marketer or business hoping to:

• Increase Productivity — Finding a means of automating away redundant and time consuming tasks is crucial to keeping employees engaged while improving efficiency.
• Receive Greater Value — Man hours squandered on under-informed campaigns, rote tasks that could be handled by a machine or and mis-prioritization can cost your business thousands upon thousands of dollars in wasted resources and missed opportunities.
• Improve Relevance — You’ll be able to generate more relevant, more effective keyword lists and data sets. Possessing the requisite information, automating the right tasks, and better prioritizing how you allot your resources inevitably lead to marked increases in traffic, sales, leads and any of the metrics you deem important to your business.

The question becomes: How to go about answering each challenge

Search Engine Optimization Tools — The Value of Automating Tasks

Achieving maximum efficiency is a pivotal aspect of experiencing success in any endeavor, and is particularly crucial in SEO campaign management.

Automating away mundane, repetitive (yet necessary) tasks frees you and your employees to focus on higher level responsibilities that are equally important to your search engine optimization success.

• Keyword Research — Companies spend hours upon hours attempting to find keywords that are highly trafficked, conversion friendly, and relevant to their business.

They then spend even more time, effort, and money creating content and building links in the interest of targeting these terms. WordStream presents you with a dynamic, ever-growing keyword list that is based on your own data. This ensures that the information you are using to guide the construction of your site is both accurate and relevant to your business.

• Information Architecture Design and Content Structuring — Determining a search-friendly information architecture for your Web content can be a laborious process that involves a lot of guess work.

This is where approach to keyword research becomes unique: instead of querying a third party keyword research tool and getting a static list of a handful of the “most popular” keywords, a list that your competitors are also accessing, you are presented with this list of keywords that is singularly yours. This ensures that the numbers you’re looking at are:

• Accurate and Precise — These numbers aren’t guesstimates extrapolated from small sample sizes or a rough ball park approximation of predicted traffic. They are actual traffic numbers pulled from real activity on your website.
• Relevant — You aren’t querying a database with every keyword for every vertical: these keywords are yours; they’ve been used to reach your site, meaning they are either related to your Web content, or are a part of your ad campaigns.

This provides you with a lot of information while providing both actionable suggestions and in one collaborative, easy-to-use workbench

Having grouped the terms, we wind up with the same hierarchical grouping we had when utilizing workflow prioritization, but this time, we can take things a step further.

We can now create a search optimized page for each of the Keyword Groups. This information can suggest search friendly:

• Title tags
• Headers
• Meta data and meta tags

you even start your seo campaign what the best performing keywords and groups of keywords are. This aids in:

• Content Authoring — Don’t waste time writing content no one is searching for: create content in response to keywords you know that people, and more specifically your customers, are interested in.
• Information Architecture — Develop a site hierarchy based on the most important, relevant keywords after having first actually tested all of the terms and groupings; know how the people you are targeting are responding to each idea so that you can know whether to place things higher or lower in your site’s IA, and create an internal linking structure that really works.
• Keyword Research — Learn from your PPC campaigns which keywords to target: running analytics on a PPC campaign on your own site is the only way to truly gain the most accurate, precise, and relevant information about the keywords you are about to dedicate months to rank for.

In the event that you’ve created content on your site based on your suggested keyword groups, you can use PPC to quickly prove that your groupings are producing the traffic, clicks and conversions that you’ve been hoping for. As narrows the granularity of your keyword groups, you can create more narrowly-focused landing pages and build your content to maximize for low cost, and high ROI.

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