SEO Consult Blog

Not just anyone would do

When you decide to embark on the glamorous journey of the SEO campaign, one of the most important people who will accompany you on this journey is your SEO consultant.

Thus, not only will your Search Engine Optimization consultant have to be an expert in their field, but you would have to “click” with each other. More than often, neither the business owner nor the SEO consultant will take this into consideration and the business and cooperation would thus not do as well as it should or ultimately fall apart.

For a win-win situation, do not play the blaming game

One of the most important points in the interaction between the business owner and the Search Engine Optimization consultant is honesty between each other. Remember that the SEO consultants are the ones responsible for bringing you customers online so it is advisable to not blame them if results are not showing or are not what you had expected.

It Is also important to note that the SEO campaign that you started is a long term marketing strategy and much time would be spent on playing the waiting game. Instead of blaming them for their lack of results, try to create a warm environment in which both of you can work in by discussing problems and issues that might have arisen and other outcomes that have gone wrong.

Withholding information from each other and playing the blaming game would not get either of you nor your business anywhere. Being humans, both parties will have flaws so it is important in being patient with each other or to point out the flaws in a gentle manner to prevent heated situations.

Choosing the right SEO consultant for you

Since you are going to be spending a long time with your SEO consultant on working on the SEO campaign, one of the first things you should do as a person and not as a business owner is evaluate whether or not you would be able to work with this person in the long run. First impressions, conversations, their dress code and their attitudes are factors that would help you consider and choose the right person.

Obviously, apart from their character, their technological skills should be questioned too. What you should do is have them show you their ranking and look at how their rankings are achieved. You should have a look at their track record and references to find the results and relationships with other clients.

Finally, you could ask a few questions to test their online marketing skills. Some of these may cover onsite and offsite optimization knowledge, how to keep or convert visitors to buyers and the latest SEO knowledge. Furthermore, you should consider the price of the consultants because if they are too cheap or if they guarantee you success in a short time frame be sure to rule them out because they generally use unethical SEO techniques which will lead to the banning of your website.

The goals of converting information

The direction a website tracking tool can point you to is that it helps optimize your SEO Campaign by supplying you with consistent reports.  How these reports help you gain insight and drive your campaign depends on what your goals are. These do need to be set prior to undertaking an SEO campaign.

What do the reports consist of?

Top Referring Keywords show themes and patterns which are difficult to discern otherwise and which can change the direction of your campaign by highlighting large volumes of keywords which are centred on queries that you are not familiar with.

Top Landing Pages.  A lot of useful actions come from this report as it can tell you how to keep your pages fresh which will help ensure your visitors can get to them easily.  Being able to ascertain where your visitors land during their search helps optimise the internal linking structure of our site.  As well as this it will tell you which landing pages are more popular which gives you the opportunity of changing your linking in keeping with themes and keywords from the popular site.
Showing how people navigate through your site is called Click Paths.  They throw some light on the effectiveness of the layout of your site especially if you see a lot of people having to navigate many clicks just to end up on the same page. This can show you where opportunities exist in order to improve the click path, thus helping you engage traffic more effectively.
The importance of geography grows when the web becomes more niche targeted, so

Geographic referrals are important if you want to reach a particular market.  This data will help you develop new content and/or modify your services, or change landing pages in order to satisfy these markets.
How many people have visited your site, or page at any given time, compared to a previous given time helps evaluate the seasonality of our visitors.

Visiting Trends reports correlates referring Keywords which are helpful when you want to identify where to place linking’s and also determine how to improve them.
If a person visits your landing page and goes no further it is generally put down to them not finding what they are looking for. This is called Bounce Rate. The Bounce Rate needs to be investigated for causes, either the client found what they are looking for via specifically targeted keywords, or they did not.  Being able to measure this is important if you want to evaluate the effectiveness of your keywords and content.

What Else?

Apart from these reports there are a host of additional reports available, all of which are designed to help optimise your rankings.  However, site usability seems to have a recurring theme in that it drives traffic to a website and this goes a long way in winning the battle as well as helping you take whatever actions are required to get targeted traffic to your site.