Fifteen of your keyword phrases position your site at #3 or better in Google, five others put your site in the top 10, and for another eight keywords your site is hanging back in the rankings. From your perspective, things are good. But clients are always, and understandably, looking to improve. You’re paying, and you want to see results. Now.
Aside from SEO being a long-term activity that bears results over time rather than a turn-key solution, one of the biggest hurdles with SEO campaigns is the lack of visual evidence for progress initially. The first thing a client or agency can point to is a keyword rankings report. After all, clients want to see progress and the agency wants clients happy and on board with SEO. We usually see very solid results in keyword rankings improvements within 4-8 weeks. Showing a report like the one pictured here is no problem for us, but what I want to address in this two-part post are the other things you should be doing and/or noticing as part of your SEO efforts.
In this pictured report rankings have improved dramatically in just two months. We’re happy because the point of SEO is ensuring strong organic results, and keyword rankings indicate just how well your site is showing up. The client is happy because the most visible, most auditable thing for them is going well. I’m not saying anyone should ignore keyword rankings. They play a part in how we plan tactics for all of our clients’ campaigns. They lead to clicks and they lead to sales. I’m saying what is more important are the practices that led to those rankings increases and the practices that will ultimately lead to the sustainability of solid organic visibility for your site.
One of the great things about SEO is that when you combine all of the best practices, a byproduct of the comprehensive approach is that your company will appear in search results for more than just its home page URL. What I would like to touch upon in this post is how your brand can benefit from this increased organic visibility.
Overall SERP Presence
Your presence on SERPs, or search engine results pages, should go beyond keyword rankings. Our goal as an agency is to track a client’s search rankings for a targeted list of keywords. However, just because the site is listed at #4 for a particular keyword, there is more to the story. We like to work on not only making the client website rank highly on the first SERP, but dominating the entire first SERP.
Say you’re a producer of gourmet widgets. With efforts like targeted press releases, articles and blog posts, there is a greater story to tell than a simple “We’re #1 for gourmet widgets.” With all of your SEO tactics, maybe the first SERP looks more like this:
#1 - Your Gourmet Widget Site
#2 - Competitor gourmet widget company
#3 - Yelp reviews of gourmet widget providers
#4 - Your gourmet widget press release about a new store location
#5 - Your blog about all things gourmet widgets
#6 - Another gourmet widget competitor
#7 - Your EZine article about the process of making the perfect gourmet widget
#8 - Another widget competitor
#9 - WidgetSnobs.com - Forum for people who love gourmet widgets
#10 - Your Twitter account - @GourmetWidgets
Add all of this to the fact that you’re running PPC ads, and you’ve just positioned your delectable widgets not as one of many options, but as the gourmet widget for searchers’ consumption. It’s a tasty proposition, this SERP synergy.
If you or your agency is not planning the types of SEO activities that build inbound links and affect SERPs, then your campaign is not a complete one. In Part II of this post, I will discuss how internal site optimization and the heavy-lifting SEO activities (again, things not fancy or incredibly tangible) that maintain great results need to be on the top of your mind, even if you couldn’t be happier with your keyword rankings at the moment.
" John is an expert on SEO strategies and content writing. He is an amatuer photographer and hopes to take up either Bocce or advanced calculus within the next year. " |
