3 Ways to Prioritize Your SEO Efforts

Prioritizing is a difficult part of life seen in all aspects of your day; at home, work, socially, etc. We see priorities are a crucial part of our SEO efforts and must make decisions to really PRIORITIZE what is most important goal. The key to a successful SEO strategy (when I say successful I mean those who receive the most links, traffics and really reap the benefits from search engines algorithm updates) are those that have mastered the art of prioritizing.

Here are three ways to help you prioritize your SEO content for your marketing campaign: 

1. Define Your Goals

Understand the purpose of your marketing campaign and what you want to accomplish. Focus on your business’s overall goals rather than SEO goals. Shift your focus from the highest traffic driving keyword to your company’s best-selling product (or highest profit margin) and/or service.  Here are some examples of good and bad goals:

•  Bad Goal: The increase ranking and organic traffic for “movers”
• Good Goal:  To see a 15% increase in traffic for “movers in Fort Lauderdale”

Remember, the key to your SEO goal has to contain a qualitative aspect; this is the only way you can measure your efforts. By having a dependent variable, you can measure, report and analyze the process and/or success of the goal you set.

2. Audit Your Site

Evaluate your site and determine what you want your website goal to be; drive phone calls, lead form generation, product purchases, newsletter subscriptions, etc. Once you know what you expect from your site, create a course of action to make it happen. When creating this course of action use some of these questions to help map out your progress:

·         What optimizations have been done?

·         What opportunities do you see to improve?

·         What is your current ranking for elevated keywords?

·         Who are your competitors that outrank you?

·         What are these competitors doing differently? 

For those that have never used Moz (used to be SEOMoz), they have an amazing guide on how to do a site audit with a step-by-step guide on what to do. If your business is too busy with other to-do, you can always ask our Tandem Team to do a site audit and/or site review for you.

Prioritize your site’s audit. Create a timeline of based on these 4 factors:

1.       How much time and resources will these changes take?

2.       Will these changes impact your SEO and overall business?

3.       What is the expected time frame to see the impact?

4.       Can I, or someone on the team, actually make this change?

3. Small Scale Implementation : Test, Rinse, Repeat

We all know that SEO is a priority but there is no guarantee to the fruits of our labor. SEO is based on best practices rewarded by search engines and previous experience. There is no way to predict a date for our efforts this is why we recommend small scale implementation.

Rather than making drastic changes to the entire site, make changes on smaller scale. In example, add title tags, optimize different pages, and add rich keywords. By creating small project implemented individually you may get a stronger sense of where the site is really benefiting.

An important best practice people forget is testing. You should always test against your original to see what your audience interacts with best. If your test shows no results, diagnose the problem, determine why, and test again. This can be very beneficial if you’re working on huge websites with thousands of URLs.