SEO Strategy: 5 issues worth considering
Are you running an e-shop or a website? Or maybe you’re considering setting up your own e-business? There’s probably a million questions regarding its online promotion going around in your head. Don’t worry, there’s nothing strange about this — the competition is really strong. Maybe you are wondering what to do to rise above your competitors and gain new users and future customers? Fortunately there are a number of ways to showcase to your target audience, gain their trust and — as a result — present and sell your products and content. SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation is a common and widely trusted way of promotion, and I can suggest a few particular details to take special notice of when constructing your promotional plans.
SEO is primarily used for raising a website’s position in organic search results. Besides SEO, website owners often choose to extend their promotions with paid ads (AdWords), a social media presence (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube) and engage in additional PR activities. SEO is fundamentally tied up with implementing changes to a website, which as a consequence necessitates lots of patience when working towards desired results. However, compared to other forms of promotion, SEO guarantees long-term effects which are often visible even after the activities themselves have been abandoned.
#1 What to choose — self or agency-led SEO?
At this stage, you’re probably questioning yourself as to whether it’s more cost-effective to put your own time and effort into SEO or commission these activities to a professional agency. This really depends on the level of your SEO knowledge and if you’re ready to work ‘overtime’. If both answers are “yes” then you can start implementing optimisation elements yourself, run link-building tasks or create your own website themed content. It’s also good to have access to basic tools used for analysing the effects of your efforts (e.g. Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other Keyword Planner phrase analysis tools) and also tools that enable you to measure the website’s SEO visibility, e.g. Searchmetrics
On the other hand, if you’re lacking in knowledge about SEO — let alone the time to acquire it — it’s best to commission the activities to a SEO agency. Such companies are backed up by a team of experts, usually with vast experience and a consortium of professional tools that make them more than ready to support you with their best recommendations and knowledge. However, I want to address a caveat here! If you want to outsource Search Engine Optimisation, make absolutely sure that you are precise in your requirements. Get all of your activities monitored by the service provider and — while it might seem quite obvious — make sure that you can ask questions, knowing that they will be answered whenever you might be in doubt. It is best summarised by the following Moz.com blog post quote:
“If you ask, “How do you do it,” and they say, “I’m sorry I can’t tell you, it’s a secret or it’s proprietary,” that is a very, very bad sign. No one has a secret proprietary process. SEO is a very, very open field. It’s well understood. It has origins in a lot of secrecy, but that is not the way it is today and you should never accept that as an answer. That is a red flag.”
https://moz.com/blog/how-to-choose-seo-company-whiteboard-friday
It’s important to be aware of what exactly is being created and to have full insight into the activities of the agency concerning your commission in order to properly monitor the work and the status of all theirs and your plans. Only then will you have a full overview of your decisions cost-effectiveness; when the KPIs will be met and the estimated time of how long it will take to reach them.
Whether you decide to run the optimisation activities yourself or with an agency, it is worth obtaining at least some basic SEO know-how. This knowledge is key to not only building your awareness in the area, but also to understanding what an agency’s recommendations mean to your business.
#2 Budget planning
When you consider starting your online promotional activities, you must be aware that there is no rigid budget calculation model. Concerning SEO as well as other promotion channels, the budget may vary according to the size of the website, number of competitors, topic popularity, assortment and its diversity.
If you outsource your SEO activities, you must take into account that it will involve spending some money on SEO auditing. Why the audit? This is the first main step towards your website’s optimisation, including any technical element improvements, e.g. loading time (that is checked on https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/), internal linking, adjustment for mobile devices (to be detected on: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly). A good audit also includes defining the keywords that are intrinsically relevant to your website, content optimisation for phrases related to these keywords and the final construction of an SEO strategy for the following months. The budget will likely vary according to industry competition but it’s still important to know what exactly is in the scope of the pricing document and then be able to comment on it.
Monthly SEO activities — including, for example, the recommendation of changes after extending a website with new pages, link building, or creating new content — are usually valuated separately, outside of the audit. In the case of any work undertaken on a consistent monthly basis, it’s worth to confirm with the agency what is within their scope, what and when this work will be reported and how its effectiveness will be measured. The more you know about your outsourced activities, the more certain you can be that your business is in good hands. Plus, you will have a better judgment on the effectiveness of the work that you are paying for.
#3 Introducing changes
SEO recommendations might differ depending on the website’s technical layer as well as the content that is to be presented. The most common situation when introducing changes is that an SEO agency delivers a set of recommendations and it then becomes the Client that is responsible for implementing them. It is worth highlighting here that SEO mainly relates to the optimisation of the website itself, taking into consideration the changes in the applied technologies, HTML code elements edits, tagging changes and content editing. By not implementing the key recommendations on your website, you should not expect long-term SEO visibility changes.
If you don’t feel confident on the issues mentioned above or you simply don’t feel like it, it’s a good idea to commision the implementation to a developer. As a general rule of thumb, it is best to have such a specialist onboard, as by having them it becomes easier to monitor all current work, consult on changes and often get a better understanding of the website’s working mechanisms. Moreover, such an employee may speed up the work and make it more agile.
In addition to having a ‘technical’ specialist, it is also worth considering employing a copyrighter who could systematically fill the website with interesting, SEO-optimised content for its users. A copywriter can be considered as necessary for two reasons. Firstly, they can write texts that influence users’ purchase decisions, area guidebooks and other content key to your business KPI’s. Secondly, where SEO is concerned, having unique, valuable and useful content is extremely important in terms of building up the website’s quality and reliability.
#4 Time to see the effects
Before you start your SEO activities, it’s worth remembering about the differences in effects in comparison to the different activities available to you — e.g. the application of an AdWords campaign. In the case of Paid Ads, we can define the strategy of setting up the click-cost named “Target Search Page Location Bidding’” which automatically sets the costs in order to increase the probability of your adverts being viewed at the top of search results or on the first search results page — depending on the option that you’ve chosen. However, you need to remember that each Ad Click costs and at some point you might run out of budget for it; that’s why it’s necessary to monitor and regularly fill in the account or choose an automatic payment option so that the financial resources to back up the campaign are provided straight from a credit card.
The benefits of SEO work quite differently. The common practice is to start with an audit, whose recommendations should get implemented with the widest scope and in the shortest period of time possible. Depending on the available human resources (i.e. a developer and a copywriter) this can take from as little as 2 weeks to up to 3 months — this is a rather individual process for each project. Once the audit elements are implemented, it may take a few weeks to even a few months to see the effects. The timing depends on the complexity of your business area, competition and the quality of the client-agency cooperation. That’s why it’s recommended to evaluate the effects instead on the amount and systematicity of changes implemented, as well as on your priorities.
What is more, in comparison to AdWords, SEO can work for months, even after all the activities have finished. This is predominantly caused by the changes implemented on the website — that is, if they work well enough to maintain their high position in search results and in the viewing of the website. Google robots can still award the technical and content side of the website thus placing it high in search results for specific queries/keywords without the direct need for constant campaigns. Nonetheless, if you wish to constantly maintain a higher position than your competitors, SEO activities should be applied on a regular basis (optionally make them less intense when the competition is not so strong).
#5 Is SEO worth investing in?
Definitely yes! This applies when we talk about time as well as monetary investment. Search Engine Optimisation is applied by a huge number of websites, although it might not be noticeable at a first glance. Organic search witnesses a day-to-day race for the highest positions — regardless of the industry. If you don’t want to stay behind and acquire your traffic exclusively from your social media, AdWords or brand awareness, SEO should be considered.
As I mentioned, in order to be positioned correctly for specific keywords in organic search, a number of decisions needs to be taken. Start with setting up your budget, then prioritise your goals, following this with systematic work and ending up by monitoring the effects and validating the implemented activities. Whoever does the work — whether you or a professional agency — it’s valuable to acquire the knowledge of the Google robots mechanism, get acquainted with the Google periodic updates and be able to transfer this knowledge into action.
It’s worth mentioning that SEO is not only optimisation, but often also involves improving the website in terms of users’ perception. For example, when you decrease the timing of a page’s loading (which — according to Google — is supposed to have a greater influence on ranking: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-in-mobile-search.html), adapt it to mobile, provide the users with interesting and useful content and product descriptions and improve the links to and from your site, your website will likely become more user-friendly, well perceived and accessible than those of your competitors. SEO is not only about building Google organic search visibility, but also providing your customers with the best possible websitepresentation. So, when deciding to start SEO activities, you need to consider the possible obstacles resulting from e.g. the websites construction, which might result in the necessity of rebuilding it if done improperly in the first place. In the end, it is the number of implemented or abandoned recommended changes on your website that determines how high the results are that can be achieved.
Summary
By investing in SEO, you may attract new customers as well as build a stronger bond with the loyal ones, which are real guarantees of success. SEO often necessitates systematic work and achieving results step-by-step. These activities can be long-lasting and, in the long run, bring more measurable benefits. The best examples include creating textbook, generating traffic with niche keywords and then building on this with more popular and competitive phrases.
It’s worth remembering that a reliable SEO agency should present you with an SEO strategy for your website based on the delivered brief. On the basis of the delivered data, the agency should verify the current status of your domain, analyse and evaluate its environment (competition) and define the goals that can be achieved. At the same time, it’s important, prior to starting any SEO activities, to acquire the knowledge on key positioning aspects and in this way be able to verify the agency’s recommendations.
Anna Antczak, SEO Specialist in MakoLab.
This article was initially published in “Marketing przy Kawie” Magazine: https://marketingprzykawie.pl/artykuly/strategia-seo-5-kwestii-ktore-warto-rozwazyc/.
