Author: Jim Hedger

It has been a while since we left off with our Ten part SEO tutorials, but better late than never! For those of you anxiously awaiting step Ten (Keeping it Up), here is the final piece of the SEO puzzle.

The ten parts of the SEO process we covered are:

1. Keyword Research & Selection
2. Competitor Analysis
3. Site Structure
4. Content Optimization
5. Link Building
6. Social Media
7. PPC
8. Statistics Analysis
9. Conversion Optimization
10. Keeping It Up

Sustaining Search Rankings and Increasing Site Conversions

Today, we cover the last section (but certainly not the final points) in a round-up article aptly named, “Keeping It Up”.

If the initial object of search engine optimization is to attract website traffic, the long-term objectives are to retain and convert that traffic and new traffic into repeating business. As all analytic webmasters know, the bulk of site traffic tends to come from search engine referrals. Retaining strong search rankings is essential to sustaining strong traffic, increasing sales and thus expanding your business.

Even after a website has established itself with its visitors and has a strong conversion record, search engines will continue to provide the vast majority of all new site traffic. If the SEO has done his or her work properly, blogs, social media and paid-search ads should also be driving new and repeat visitors.

Under normal circumstances, sustaining strong search engine rankings, while hard work, is fairly straight forward. That doesn’t mean it is easy by any extent but search marketing maintenance is not necessarily rocket science either. There is a never ending series of regular, methodical tasks to plan and work through. Depending on the size and scope of the website one is working on, a number of decisions should be made in order to prioritize work to most effectively use one’s time.

Generally, when we do the “final” touches on the initial phases of a campaign, we wait a short period of seven to ten days before worrying too much about where pages or documents in the site are ranking. During that time, there are a number of tasks that should be performed to help boost the site’s performance, many of which have already been covered in the previous articles that make up this series.

Post-SEO: Day 1, Whew! The initial phase is 99.9% done

Let’s pick up the story from the moment the team signs-off on the completion of an initial project. All augmented or freshly created files have been uploaded to the host server, are live to the web and presumably being actively spidered. While the bulk of your attention may already be moved to the next project, you still have a bunch of things to do.

The first critical step is to perform a final “doh!-check” to ensure everything is working properly. Getting a site posted properly can be more complicated than one might think. At this point, every minute counts, as we can expect search-spiders to visit the site fairly quickly after changes are made. “Doh!-checks” are among of the most important post-SEO checkups and can only be conducted with 100% certainty when all files are live.

Scan each page to make sure all our recommendations or hands-on changes have carried over to the live website. Running through all links, check to see if the site looks and acts the way you expects it to.

Search engine optimization and marketing has often been described as a mix of art and science. When reviewing the on-page details, think using of both sides of your brain. Your first priorities are technical. You must verify the website is functioning correctly and is, in fact, search spider-friendly. You then needs to turn his mind to marketing to make sure the website is user-friendly and accessible.

Thinking like a techie, you must inspect the site structure and link-paths, while planning the continuance of link building efforts. Then, shift mental gears and think like a marketer, checking if fresh and optimized content files appear on the pages they are supposed to appear on and if the on-page layout is attractive and compelling. You also need to look into any social media marketing and paid-search marketing campaigns to map out work time and assign long-term tasks appropriately. Assuming everything is found working according to plan, do one final “doh!-check” sign-off before moving your focus to post SEO management and metrics.

Post-SEO: Day 2 – Day 7, The Garden is Seeded, now we add water and watch

The biggest bulk of the heady, heavy work is done! Manually working through each file in a website takes a lot of time and energy. It is bulk work that can be all encompassing for days at a time. That’s why SEO/SEM firms often charge a large up-front fee along with slightly smaller monthly fees. Over the coming months, an enormous amount of work should continue with focus on link building, social media, and ppc management. As with the initial SEO phase, much of the research, budgeting and data entry (i.e. the heavy lifting) is done in the first week.

The day after an optimized site and PPC campaign go live, the analytics should begin to kick in. This is when things get intellectually interesting as statistics analysis forms the foundations for future planning and improvements. Most web analytic and monitoring software we use begin collecting data immediately after installation but it takes a few days for truly informative metrics to emerge.

In the initial week, software suites such as Enquisite Pro, Click Tracks, Google Analytics, and soon Yahoo’s newly purchased suite IndexTools need to be tweaked, trained and tutored in order to get the best overviews of website traffic and unique page performance. A PPC monitoring and click compliance software suite, such as PPC Assurance, can start working immediately to record details of PPC driven traffic.

The first week does give search marketers a fairly good idea of how their PPC campaigns will generally fare in a long-term environment. A lot of tweaking and testing can go into the phrasing of winning PPC headlines and ad-copy throughout the life of the campaign, but in the first week, SEMs get a sense of how the present competition will act. Running in conjunction with PPC Assurance, the dashboards of the PPC networks (Google and Yahoo) provide very good analytic information, providing enough data to run a global advertising campaign from your desktop or laptop computer.

A critical note on pay-per-click management: it’s necessary. Frequent checking and the use of alerts are important to monitor bid-rates and the cost of every click. Diligent PPC monitoring is essential throughout the life of the search marketing campaign.

Post SEO: Day 8 to ∞, In Which SEO and SEM Become Website Marketing

SEO and SEM turn into website marketing when numerous tools are used in conjunction to improve website traffic and increase web page conversions. With the deployment of optimized content and a blog, pay per click advertising and social media marketing, the pillars of your campaign are set in motion.

Some pages are expected to perform better than others. Similarly, some pages will perform better than expected. Some pages will not perform well at all, including ones you initially had high hopes for. Getting a true grip on how each page in a website or facet of the overall website marketing campaign is performing is like examining each tree in a woodlot. Compared to the intensity of the initial hands-on SEO phase, the work of Keeping It Up (to sustain search rankings and improve conversions) is much more mental than manual.

Analytics play an enormous role in long term search marketing management. From basic ranking reports to local search results in specific cities to eye-tracking studies and mouse-tracking technologies, search marketers rely on data generated by website visitors. Examining the data shows search marketers which pages or files are working and which require improvement.

The first thing SEOs look at is simple, organic page and site rankings across the major search engines under target keyword phrases. Though ranking reports provide the most basic information, the vast majority of search engine referrals come from first page placements; of those, the greatest numbers come from placements above the fold in the Top 1 – 5 spots. Placements on the second and third pages of results can be worked on and improved, moving them upwards in search results over time.

A major problem with basic ranking reports is that search engine placements often differ from region to region and city to city. In many circumstances, websites with local relevance will place better in their respective regions. Quite often, people from different places use different words to describe the same things. This is where the Enquisite Pro toolset mentioned earlier is particularly helpful, as it generates an increasingly granular view of search traffic and keyword usage down to the micro-level of zip and postal codes. Knowing how unique pages rank in specific cities and which keyword phrases to target in different places helps improve conversions by allowing webmasters to tailor specific promotions to specific locations.

Use of other search marketing tools to drive traffic and improve rankings starts to take an important role in website marketing. Blog posts relating to best-selling products in a specific region or city might be written and distributed to relevant publications with links back to pages that require a boost or support in the rankings. A well thought through social media campaign could attract visitors to a landing page that re-directs them to a regionally specific landing page based on IP address or their own social media settings.

As time moves forward, analytics packages will begin to flush out a clear view of how website visitors move through the various pages in the site. When navigation patterns become clear, the process of conversion optimization begins. Briefly, conversion optimization is the art of prompting website visitors to take pre-planned actions such as clicking a link, buying a product or requesting information.

As analytics and user-tracking begin to paint a picture of how web visitors move through a website, search marketers can improve pages in the site to best meet the actions of the visitors and improve chances of conversion. Phrases such as “time on page”, “bounce rate”, “referral page”, and “entry and exit points” capture the attention of web marketing analysts trying to figure out the very best way to make and remake webpages to increase conversions. For anyone who simply needs to know the language of search marketing analytics, the Interactive Advertising Bureau published a 29-page glossary of Interactive Advertising Terms.

Good use of analytics allows search marketers to keep track of dozens of site-critical factors, giving them a easy overview of web-traffic patterns and ways to increase them. Getting an easy overview is very important for seasoned search marketers. They are often responsible for several files at the same time.

Working on improving a website and bettering site conversions brings the welcome benefit of working to increase page and overall site rankings. The introduction of improved content, RSS feeds and (hopefully) higher volumes of web traffic create a stronger reputation in search databases. Additional traffic and incoming links are drawn by a blog, social media marketing, and link building efforts.

As weeks move into months, the progress and prosperity of the website should be well established and the marketing campaign(s) fine tuned. Barring unforeseen circumstances and assuming best practices have been followed all the way through, the majority of a search marketer’s working time is likely spent on continuing to update the blog, link building and social media marketing. And on it goes …

Jim Hedger is a veteran SEO, a good friend, and an SEO consultant for Metamend Web Marketing. Jim has been involved in the SEO field since the days of the dinosaurs, and over the course of his career, Jim has shared drinks with Jeeves the butler, tossed sticks to that sock-puppet dog from Pets.com, and walked away from a staring contest with Googlebot, confidently declaring a tie.