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Key Recommendations for SEO Best Practice highlighted by e-consultancy.com
1. Review your relative expenditure on search engine optimization and paid search. Consider increasing investment in optimisation if it is significantly lower than your spend on paid search.
2. Adopt a balanced approach to SEO which creates a long term plan and an effective process to maximise your performance in the key areas of index inclusion, on-page optimization and link building.
3. Search optimization is a long term strategy. To identify the correct investment requires a long-term-cost/benefit analysis. If this doesn’t occur, SEM strategy is often imbalanced in favour of SEO.
4. Search engine optimization is not purely a technical discipline to be conducted by a specialist team or agency. It requires a different style to traditional copywriting which requires training of content owners and reviewers.
5. Ensure there is ongoing commitment to optimizing your website for the search engines and responsibility for it within your organization rather than it being treated as an initiative.
6. Set quantitative goals for search engine marketing based on demand through search volumes for different products and topics and conversion on your site to your marketing outcomes.
a) Ensure that you don’t only measure success according to positions. It is often meaningless since it is position for important key phrases such as high volume. Low intent phrases or lower volume, high intent phrases that is important.
b) For non-transactional sites, we recommend allocating points for different types of outcome, e.g. 1 point for a completed job search, 5 points to register a CV, etc. This is also a method for assessing quality that can be used for transactional websites.
7. Use more specific objectives for search marketing as your experience increases. Create objectives to achieve a realistic share of search combined with outcome, cost and value based objectives
8. Ensure sufficient search engine marketing project time is devoted to key phrase analysis, demand, evaluation and selection.
9. Develop a keyphrase repository which enables you to categorise keyphrase in different ways, to help select and refine keyphrase used for SEO and paid search and to assess and improve performance.
10. Ensure your keyphrase analysis and performance reporting systems enable you to compare behaviour and performance at different aggregate levels as well as individual keyphrase levels. Key questions to ask during supplier selection.
11. Use a structured approach to keyphrase analysis to drive results from search optimization. Ensure agencies or internal staff performs quantitative demand analysis, performance analysis and gap analysis.
12. You should assess variation in conversion rates for different key phrases and seek to understand the reason for this variation – is it due to the level of intent of the phrase, the landing page design or customer proposition? You should then focus your search marketing on phrases which attract visitors with a high level of intent which convert to the outcomes you require.
13. Devise a reporting mechanism that enables comparison of relative effectiveness of search engine marketing across different products or services and through different parts of the conversion funnel.
14. Ensure you have the appropriate web analytics tool to improve search marketing which gives a granular view of your performance partitioned into optimization and paid search.
15. Identify a limited set of strategic key phrases to target and then use SEO to optimize for these and monitor performance closely.
16. Use carefully controlled affiliate marketing to increase your share of search.
17. Ensure sufficient budget is allocated to maximise results from continuous online communications such as SEM and affiliate marketing.
18. Ensure that search marketing is integrated with traditional marketing strategies for your company or organisation
19. Target a limited subset of the most important engines in each country for inclusion, optimization and reporting on ranking. Techniques used on the main engines will generally be successful on the less widely used engines.
20. If your search marketing is not currently conducted by a specialist search engine marketing company, consider carefully whether the current incumbent has sufficient knowledgeable and well trained staff to apply best practice, ethical techniques.
21. Companies should budget for sufficient internal resource to collaborate with search marketing agencies to make it more effective. This includes both project start up and ongoing project reviews, together with content authoring requirements.
22. Clients should endeavour to find out the exact skills and experience of the specific account manager and technical staff who will be working with them and check they can work with them.
23. Ensure search engine specialists are retained to monitor and revise the optimization approach based on changes to search engine algorithms and index updates.
24. Evaluate Google Sitemaps for index inclusion, crawling stats and search performance. It also shows top queries for your site and what it considers common words.
25. Report % page inclusion coverage within index for each site to assess any problems with inclusion.
26. Maximise registration of domain names related to your brands and check for brand abuse.
27. Consider using multiple domains to maximise your representation in the natural and paid listings.
28. Ensure your domain location is correct for the geographical markets you operate in. If not already addressed it is a potential source of many additional visits.
29. Plan to manage the impact of site migration on visitors driven by SEO from the outset of any website redesign project. Take care with major site revisions not to use the historical equity of links and on-page optimization built up through time.
30. When selecting a new CMS or e-Commerce solution ensure that you review its capabilities for inclusion of pages within the search engines.
31. Each content author and reviewer in an organisation and agency should be trained in understanding on-page optimization factors.
32. Clearly identify different levels of target keyphrase for each page. E.g. Primary, Secondary and Tertiary keyphrases.
33. Assess the controlled testing approaches used by internal / external search optimization specialists to determine their ability to understand the relative importance of different on-page optimization techniques and review changes introduced by algorithm updates.
34. Educate all content owners on the importance of the title tag and agree site wide rules with the agency on how it is constructed.
35. Ensure a proactive link-building programme occurs as part of the optimization process
36. Include internal site links as well as external links within link building activity.
37. Ensure link-building activities are targeted at building link quality from themed authority websites, not simply link popularity
38. Maximise back links that have good link-context and run link building campaigns which are aimed at increasing links with good page context that deep link into relevant content on your site.
39. An effective link-building strategy is an essential part of search optimization, not an afterthought.
40. Review the opportunities for themed content within your site to combine a valuable resource for visitors that others may link to, with keyword rich content optimized for strategic keyphrases.
41. Assess opportunities for buying links and carefully assess risks
42. Work with the person or agency responsible for PR to assist with search engine marketing.
43. Ensure that the site information architects, site designers and search engine optimizers work together during the new site development or re-design.
44. Ensure site directory structure and hierarchy is consistent with a well optimized website.
45. Don’t underestimate the importance of internal linking. Ensure your internal link strategy includes all the above factors and in particular review text links in body copy and footer links to all entry pages.
46. Create a site-wide policy for site <title> tags and <meta> tags, so that search results are more effective.
47. Ensure your web analytics software can report bounce rates and conversion rates at a granular level, i.e. by keyphrase, by search engine marketing tactic and by search engine.
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