Posted by John McTigue on Tue, Aug 31, 2010 @ 12:36 PM
Search engine optimization is a vast and dynamic topic, with many experts and even more myths and urban legends. How can business owners or executives make sense of all the debate that goes on and arrive at a sensible search marketing strategy for their companies? Let's start with keywords, since much of the hype centers around this core topic. What's a sensible keyword strategy for SEO these days?
What Are Your Goals?
For most companies, sales are the #1 priority. Without sales there is no revenue. Without revenue, there is no company. So generating more sales leads is their primary marketing goal. This should also be your goal for SEO. You can spend a lot of money on consultants and tools and pay-per-click and content, but if you aren't generating sales leads from these efforts then your strategy isn't succeeding. Marketing takeaway: your keyword strategy is to generate sales leads, not to rank on page #1 of the SERP's.
Who/What is Your Target Market?
You need to understand who will be searching for your products or services and what keywords they will be using to find you. Those are the keywords you should optimize on, not the ones with the most traffic or even the ones your competitors use. The most popular keywords are also the most difficult to rank on, and they may not even be relevant to your business. How do you determine which strategic keywords will drive sales?
- Put yourself in your customers' shoes. Then search for your company's stuff. Don't bias yourself by what you already know - think like a complete stranger. If you can't figure this out, go ask them or try some focus groups. Now check the results. Does your company even show up? If so, how far down the list? Are your competitors doing better?
- Next, do some keyword research. Start with the keywords you tried in your customers shoes or found from research. Find some variations and long-tail versions, for example "inbound marketing agency" as opposed to "inbound marketing", using a keyword suggestion tool like HubSpot's Keyword Grader. You will have an easier time ranking on long-tail keywords than on the high-traffic core keywords, and over time you can build up your authority on those as well.
- Put together a short list of strategic keywords. These are the ones you rate as having the best chance for your target market to find you. Now, we'll focus on accomplishing the mission - getting sales leads via search.
Do This
- Focus on creating web pages, blogs, advanced content and social media updates that include your strategic keywords and are both RELEVANT and INTERESTING to your target market. Again, put yourself in their shoes. What are they most likely to click on?
- Make sure your Page Title and Meta Description are not just keywords but real, valuable information that will "click" in the searcher's mind and cause him/her to click through to your page. This is what they see on the search results page. Rank is important, but so is context.
- Optimize your content, but don't over-optimize. Today's reader knows the difference between a legitimate, well-written Web document and a piece of SEO bait. Focus on one topic and focus your keywords there as well. A really well-done blog post on a popular topic, optimized for the topic itself has a great chance of boosting your keyword ranking.
- Coordinate paid search with organic search. Use the same keyword strategy and content and see how you do.
- Measure results and adjust strategy. Which keywords are driving traffic and leads? Which topics, content types and landing pages are producing those conversions? Which social networks are driving the most qualified leads? Focus on those.
Don't Do This
- Don't focus on keywords with lots of traffic and just try to make your content fit those keywords. No one will buy it. The search engines might rank you highly, but you will not drive sales to your business.
- Don't worry about traffic and keyword rankings alone. Again, you might get highly ranked, but without click-through's and leads, you have accomplished nothing.
- Don't try to "game" the search engines with all the tips and tricks you see out there. Remember, your goal is sales, not ranking. People will find you because you are the best at what you do, and your search strategy reflects it.
Next - Part 2 - Content That Will Click
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Posted by Chris Knipper on Wed, Jul 07, 2010 @ 08:46 AM
Keyword optimization is a key factor in effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Choosing specific keywords to describe and identify your website and fine tuning those keywords to drive the greatest amount of traffic to your business is an art. Keyword selection is so critical to SEO success that many businesses hire an inbound marketing agency to ensure that their keyword list will have the impact they desire. Inbound marketing experts have the SEO, web analytics and HubSpot Keyword Grader expertise necessary to create a dynamic keyword list, track and measure the progress of each keyword, and tweak your keyword list regularly to most effectively meet your company's inbound marketing goals.
Keyword Strategy and SEO
Search engines rank sites using complex formulas that weight keyword prominence, frequency, density, proximity and placement. People often fail to give keyword selection the careful attention it requires. Poorly selected keywords that are not robustly related to your website will perform poorly, hurting your SEO ranking. Before investing time in SEO, take time to create an effective keyword list.
To create an effective keyword list follow these steps:
- Select keywords and keyword phrases. Read each page on your website and consider what it is about. Decide which words most accurately describe page contents. Consider the words a consumer is most likely to use to solicit that content. From your list, select one or two keywords per page and several less common words or phrases that might be triggered by multi-word searches.
- Sort by popularity. Using keyword grader and other web analytic programs, sort keywords and phrases by user popularity.
- Tweak keywords and combinations of keywords in phrases to more closely match actual consumer use. Shuffle word combinations to achieve keyword phrases that resonate with consumers. Don't focus solely on the most common keywords in your business. Instead of trying to compete with top industry leaders for high rankings on the most frequently used keywords, improve your opportunity for SEO success by focusing on medium-use key words. Sometimes it's better to be a big fish in a little pond. Re-optimize pages to reflect keywords and keyword phrases.
- Resort by popularity. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you achieve dependable results and periodically thereafter to maintain best SEO rankings.
What's your keyword strategy, and how well is it working?
Photo credit: ul_Marga
Posted by John McTigue on Sat, Oct 10, 2009 @ 08:34 AM
Since we started using HubSpot inbound marketing tools three months ago, our website traffic, Google page rank, ranked keywords and lead conversions are way up. How did we do it? Here's how.
SEO Strategy
We started with keyword research using HubSpot Keyword Grader. We looked at our previous website experience and took a look at our competitors' sites. We started tracking many keywords appropriate to our business but decided to focus on long-tail keywords that we had a good chance to rank on.
On-Page SEO
We optimize our web pages and blog posts by adding our targeted keywords to titles, url's, headings, image file names and alt tags and link text. We use HubSpot Page Grader to assist us in this process. Page Grader advises us when any of these on-page seo elements are missing.
Inbound Links
We promote our blogs, web pages and landing pages using social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon. We make it easy for visitors to bookmark our pages and posts and subscribe to our RSS feed using social media widgets. These tactics spread the word about our posts and create inbound links. We also engage in social media through groups and communities, building trust and authority, which help to increase traffic and inbound links.
Monitoring
We are constantly monitoring our results using the HubSpot Reports, checking traffic, keyword rankings, inbound links and leads. As you can see below we have improved our Google top 10 keyword rankings by around 600% in a short period of time and are now ranking in the top 100 for many more. Our strategy is to keep up the good work and watch these results improve with time. Ultimately, our goal is to increase high-quality leads and convert those leads to sales, and thanks to the HubSpot inbound marketing tools, our goal is made far easier to attain.
How are you search engine optimizing your website?