SEO That Drives Results

The key to success is having the data intelligence and knowing how to respond
There are a Lot of Moving Parts

Rank Tracking, SEO Review, Results-Driven SEO

The Clarity digital marketing team implements more than a dozen tools to gather and report on a site's performance, configuration, semantic issues, keyword ranking, PPC campaigns, re-targeting and much more. There is not just one tool that does everything. There are many tools, each having their specialty and knowing which tools do what better than the others is just what you need to be competitive and beat the competition. After working with hundreds of clients, it's clear that most people know the basic gist of what SEO is, but have no idea how to really execute it, let alone better than the competition. None of my clients early on, know how to properly execute on a CRO strategy, or even know what it stands for.

All Roads Lead Somewhere

Determine Your Strategy

I'm sure you've heard the old saying, If you don't know where you're going, then any road will get you there? Well, it may have come from Alice in Wonderland, but we've all heard it used in business dozones of times, and it's a very applicable saying. That's true for marketing and your website. If you don't plan for and execute on any strategy, then the site will do whatever it wants to, albeit almost all passively.

You'd be surprised how high the percentage is of our clients who come to us to build an expensive and amazing new website, only to not know of or plan for any marketing (i.e. SEO, CRO, Keyword optimization, A/B testing, etc.). Everyone says, "just throw Google analytics on it and we'll see how it does." OR doesn't, is usually our response. Traffic, performance, conversions, goal achievement don't just happen magically, or in their case, they rely on everything happening magically since there is no strategy in place.

If you don't know where you're going, then any road will get you there. The Cheshire Cat

 

Or it won't. Ron from Clarity
What Role Does the Site Play?

Marketing, Sales, Support or All of the Above?

When we kick off our client projects, the first thing we do is hold a Web Strategy meeting. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss what role the website will play within the company's marketing, sales and support organization. If it's a Sales portal, then that's easy. Distributor ordering portals, and Doctor-Patient portals are easy. But what about your company site, storefront, ecommerce marketplace, B2B site, etc.? What exactly do you want the site to do? And how will we measure that to know that it's working? Does it need to drive traffic?  Just take support questions? Convert visitors to buyers?

I won't give away all the secret sauce, but we have 4 key elements that we cover in the Web Strategy that help to ensure that every project we take on, has a chance to succeed and accomplish the goals our clients want from the sites, and not just rely on magic.

Can We Win a Top-3 Position?

Master Keyword List

Everything starts from a Master Keyword List. The problem is that every single list brought to me, has not been put together correctly. No one takes into consideration the competition, the number of searches for each term, what content will promote each keyword or keyword phrase, are they all optimized, which are champions and supporters, where they written with 10X content in mind and so on and so on. The list is nearly endless and unless this is something you do every day, it would be nearly impossible to understand at a deep level what all the moving parts are and which levers pulled will produce the desired results.

To help you get started, here's an article for you - Building Your Master Keyword List. This will outline what's needed to decide what keywords you SHOULD be optimizing for, not the ones you and your team chose yourself. It talks about why keywords are always chosen incorrectly and walks you through building a high-performance list. Master keyword lists should also be used when you're using keyword bidding to pay for ad placement.

Why & Who are We Writing for?

Highly Targeted Content Strategy

The most common thing I hear during the Web Strategy meetings is that, "I inherited the website. I didn't write most of the content." So my next question is, "then who wrote it, and for whom?" Almost every time we evaluate the content once we've defined our target audience, the content isn't correctly written for that audience, or at least not written in the correct context. There has to be a deep dive into deciding who is coming to the site. Is it already the right audience? Are there enough visitors to accomplish our goals? Do we have to drive more traffic or convert more of the existing traffic? Is this an SEO or CRO problem? The strategy for each answer differs greatly. There's no need to prep your home for a huge Thanksgiving party if no one is coming. Conversely, there's no need to invite 50 people if all you've got is a 6-pack and a pizza.

Which Page is Designed to Convert?

Create Optimize Your Champions

Just like the foundation of a house, there is specific content on your site that is designed and is responsible for converting and representing your keywords / keyword phrases. Just like in politics, after they've held the local elections, each party has to pick a single candidate to run for office. What would happen if one party put up 24 candidates, and the other party put up just 1? Obviously, the votes would be splintered across many candidates and it's most likely that party would lose to the more focused one. That is exactly what happens with the many hundreds and thousands of articles, blog posts, news items, etc. on your site. Which ones are the primary piece of content for each keyword? How do you promote it? How do you treat and prep your champions different from your supporters? Is there a difference in how the pages are written and configured? The answer is yes, and it takes a lot of planning and execution. You have to remember that the search bots are very smart, yet very dumb. They're blind (they don't "see" the images on the page visually like we do), and they just gather a ton of data. It's the algorithms on the back end that set the course for whether or not our content ranks well. What does this mean for you then? It means SEO - Write for Google, CRO - optimize for visitors.

Get Them to Win

Promote Your Champions

SEO is all about promoting your champions. It's a long haul. It's not something you spend $5k and it's done. It's never done. Why not? Because content is ever-changing on the internet and that is your competition. What you rank #1 for today, could be completely gone in a week. If you don't have a strategy and know what keywords you want to own or win for, then you'll never be able to know if you're doing well or not. Once you have your master list, then the next few years are to create a strategy that allows you to place as highly as possibly in the rankings for those keywords. Once you've placed well, then fight like crazy to keep them ranking well.

There are 10 or so steps that could be inserted here that would map what it takes to promote your champions, but that's the secret sauce we save for our clients. We've given you everything you need to get started and on track, but we're paid to help our clients beat the competition, so can't give away all our secrets. To learn more, or to have Clarity help your team win, give us a call for a free consultation or fill out the form at the bottom of the page. We'd love to help you win too!