You may have read about how natural search is now one of the most promising customer acquisition channels at your disposal. Yet often, it's hard to develop a strategy from scratch. In this how-to guide, we'll walk through every step of the process to get your SEO program set up - from making the case for natural search, to getting buy-in, to beginning to measure ROI from your efforts. Step 1: Understand the Opportunity in Natural Search The first step in any marketing endeavor is to understand the size of the opportunity for your company in your vertical. There are plenty of search market opportunity calculators out there that can help by letting you input the keywords you care about, and your current rank to calculate your current market share. Before doing anything else, go through this exercise. It will help you understand the size of your current market and your position within it, and you will leverage the analysis in future steps to help make the business case to management. Step 2: Grab the Quick, Easy Wins Now that you ve established the size of the opportunity, before approaching management to lobby for budget, we re going grab some quick wins in the search engine listings so that when you do make your case for budget you ll have some recent traffic/conversion increases from search that can be offered as a taster of what could be achieved with a budget commitment. One way of capturing some quick wins in search is to target striking distance keywords keywords for which you are currently ranking on page 2 of the search results. Identify a handful of keywords for which you are ranking on page 2. These keywords should walk the line between 1) having enough monthly searches that the incremental traffic you receive from moving up the search rankings is enough to be interesting to management, but 2) not too many searches so as to be too competitive (and therefore too difficult to make headway). After using these criteria to choose your striking-distance keyword set, develop some content, tweak on-page factors such as title tags or get out there and build some links to get them moving up the search rankings onto page one.
Step 3: Buy-In, Buy-In, Buy-In Now that you ve got (1) your market opportunity assessment and (2) quick wins in hand, you re going to shine your shoes, put on your Sunday best and make the case to your organization to buy-in to natural search as a legitimate traffic and sales channel. Do this with the one-two punch of the potential of the channel with the market assessment and the quick wins that show what can be achieved with proper budget allocation. Although it would be easier if everyone at your company recognized the opportunity in search as clearly as you, for most SEO professionals, getting company buy-in is an ongoing process that often takes place throughout the year. And, there are two groups to whom you will be appealing: management for budgetary buy-in, and the rest of the organization whose help you will need to enlist to be able to make real progress in the search results. Watch out for the classic blunder that many make in striving to make a case to the organization by talking about search-centric rather than revenue-centric metrics. The CMO doesn t care if you have moved from position 12 to position 6 for a keyword, though he does care that revenue from search has increased by 28%. (If you have persistent issues in getting management buy-in to search, check out Overcoming the Catch 22 of Investing In Search Without Proof of Success for a more detailed approach in how to win budget.) Step 4: Discover Competitive Landscape As you start to gain some traction in the search engine results pages by capturing the quick, easy wins, start to pay a bit more attention to the competitive landscape by tracking who is appearing in the search results around you for your keywords. You may discover that they are not who you think they are-for example, if you are a brick and mortar retailer you may compete primarily with A, B and C in the real world and discover you compete with X, Y, and Z in the search results/digital landscape. Knowing who your competition is in search will help guide your strategic response to enable you to leapfrog the competition, whoever they turn out to be.
Step 5: Scale your Keyword Set By now, hopefully you have gotten management buy-in, maybe you finagled some resource commitments from the IT team or content creators, and you ve gotten your feet wet with some quick wins. Long-term, successful SEO is about moving up the rankings for your existing keyword set, but it s also about expanding your zone of coverage with new keywords you will optimize, create content for, and ultimately leverage to drive traffic to your website. It s time to expand your keyword set so that you can start driving more traffic from additional sources. Ideas for new keywords can come from many sources, including: Competitive Analysis: A great source for new keyword ideas is the competitive analysis you did in the previous step. Discover the keywords where your competitors are eating your lunch and start optimizing and developing content for them. Web Analytics: Keywords that are already driving some traffic to your website that, with some focused optimization, can move up the search rankings to drive additional traffic Internal Sources: Product names, collateral, internal brainstorming Online Channels: Gather keyword ideas from other online marketing channels such as paid search, social media and email marketing. Keyword Suggestion Tools: Tools such as Google s Adwords Tool let you input a keyword and it will spit out suggestions for similar terms. Soovle.com pulls keyword suggestions from multiple sources, enabling you to gather many keyword ideas at once.
Step 6: Build a Content Strategy & Calendar In 2012 the search algorithms placed significant emphasis on quality content, penalizing sites producing thin or no content, while rewarding sites producing quality content in an ongoing fashion. Producing quality content will be critical to your natural search success and now that you ve seen some initial success and built out your keyword list the time is right to build out your content strategy for the year ahead. Start small by producing quality content around your keyword list on a regular basis before graduating to more sophisticated content types such as infographics and full length articles. Step 7: Increase Social Presence in Search Hand-in-hand with a strong content strategy goes a social media strategy. Social media can be used to drive traffic to the content you create and to engage with content consumers, and increasingly, social results are appearing in the search results. Make sure you have a presence on the majors such as Twitter and Facebook, and although there remains some question as to the extent of user engagement on Google+, make sure you have presence there too since, Google increasingly leveraging these social signals in ranking algorithms. Step 8: Utilize Digital Assets for Visibility in Universal Search Digital assets including pictures and videos are increasingly appearing in the search results. A recent study found eight out of ten high volume keywords now have digital assets in the search results. As you become increasingly sophisticated in your SEO practice, start developing digital assets for your most valuable keywords. Not only will you capture more real estate on the search engine results pages with a digital asset such as a video or image, but it provides a good way to connect with users.
Step 9: Measure ROI from your SEO Efforts Now that you ve scaled your keywords and hit a groove developing content, it s important to be able to measure the impact your efforts are having on your online traffic and sales. In this step, it is time to make sure your website s analytics package is set up to track conversions and get some training or spend time working with the software to the point that you are comfortable extracting insight about the content that is and is not working. Doing so will give you the benefit of allowing you to make adjustments to your content strategy to increase conversion rates and it will help you continue to justify budget to management. As you become more comfortable with analytics, you can become increasingly sophicated and learn more advanced functionality-such as segmenting visitors-to derive more insight about who is coming to your website.
Step 10: Use Advanced SEO Technology By now, you re pushing content out regularly, you re developing digital assets for the SERPs, and you have a presence on the social networks. Together with your newfound web analytics proficiency that gives you insight into your web traffic, it may be time to take a close look at advanced SEO technology that will give you similar insight into your search landscape. Technology options run the gamut from basic software tools all the way to full-featured enterprise SEO technology platforms with a dedicated account rep., but some of the benefits the technology will give you include: Automation: Technology can help automate previously manual activities such as reporting and on-page auditing. Time savings from manual activities can then be applied to high-impact activities such as link-building and content creation. Competitive Analysis/Discovery: In a previous step you began basic competitive discovery via manual methods, but as you have scaled your keywords, manual methods will not scale with you. Technology can automate competitive tracking and will automatically discover new competitors you were not previously aware of. Knowing about competitors can give you a competitive advantage and drive a strategic response that can grow traffic and revenue. Mine Big Data for Insight: Technology can be the key that unlocks volumes of natural search data-backlinks, search visibility data, competitive analysis, social network activity, digital assets -previously inaccessible via manual mechanisms. Aside from the insight from big data technology unlocks that can be used to grow traffic and revenue, the natural search insight that technology enables can also be leveraged for other areas of business such as informing product strategy, mining for consumer trends and understanding the on and offline competitive landscape. Conclusion: Get Started on the Path to SEO Success Natural search is among the most important inbound channels a Marketer has at his or her disposal, but knowing where to start can be daunting. In this new year, resolve to tap into this wellspring of traffic and sales by following the progressive plan laid out above. If you stick with it, your new years resolution at this time next year might just be how to best allocate the huge budget management is giving you to grow natural search traffic and revenue even bigger.