For individuals with a limited knowledge of SEO, their first attempt to embrace an SEO campaign can seem like a daunting and complicated foray into the unknown. Most clients understand the potential of a successful SEO campaign but they are often left wondering just how to measure the effectiveness of the campaign with regards to their business.

SEO has gradually evolved over the past decade from what was once a predominantly technical tool, into an almost essential marketing vehicle that can help play an integral part for a business during the early sales process.

Beyond the obvious sales and revenue statistics, there are several ways for clients to monitor the efficiency of their indulgence into the world of SEO.

Analytics:

The mere mention of the word ‘analytics’ suggests one thing……numbers. It’s true that in business, numbers talk, and the same is true when it comes to interpreting the success of SEO. Clients can judge how successful their campaign has been by installing a piece of analytical software that allows them to monitor website statistics.

Numbers don’t lie, so a good place for an individual to start scrutinizing their success or failure is by analysing the traffic reports that correspond with their website. The application of traffic reports allows the user to compare several statistics before and after the SEO campaign was implemented to see if it has been effective or not. Should the campaign be showing signs of progress then all of the numerical data should eventually increase.

The main mistake many clients make during the analytical stage of evaluation is judging the effectiveness of SEO against the sales statistics. SEO increases are based around online advancement such as increasing site traffic. SEO will only boost sales numbers if there is high demand for the product.

Rankings:

At Ignition Search, we firmly believe that rankings alone don’t necessarily measure success, but we do acknowledge the importance of a good position within search engine rankings.

There are many ways to measure the success of an SEO campaign, and rankings are one of them. People often feel that upon application of an SEO strategy, high ranking search engine results are instantaneous, with their company or product riding high on page 1 Google. In reality though, just like any marketing campaign, rankings take time to grow, especially in such a competitive business environment like the internet. From the implementation stage of SEO, seeds need to be planted in the form of ‘key phrases’ and given time to grow within the site and ultimately the search engine.

A useful indicator of SEO success is the number of key phrases that send traffic to a website.

Branding:

With the analytical statistics showing an increase, your businesses rankings improving, the final tool that can be used to measure the success of an SEO campaign is branding.

Branding is important in helping to measure success as it allows the website to become more visible to other websites, providing links back to your own website and so increasing site traffic and hopefully sales.

Optimisation conducted in the right way can pro-actively brand a business online.

For businesses and individuals not familiar with SEO and how it works, it can appear a daunting and obscure concept. They often wonder whether SEO is a one-off strategy or an ongoing process that requires hard work and perseverance. The answer to this is in the latter. It is crucial to regularly monitor rankings and alter tactics accordingly in order for SEO to work effectively and efficiently.

Minor maintenance and attention to the fundamentals of the sites content can ensure the optimisation for search engines keeps on working over a longer period of time.

Key Areas of SEO Strategy

A vast majority of the world’s population use the internet and ultimately search engines everyday. The primary objective of their original search was based around finding answers relevant to their question. Striving to be the website that provides the desired answer, individuals and companies apply the fundamentals of SEO strategy in order to be the dominant force within a particular subject. These fundamentals haven’t really changed within the last decade but have merely evolved with technology.

The three major areas of SEO strategy are: -

·    Technical – Inserting internal links, site maps and not duplicating content
·    Content – Ensuring the information is viral co-efficient, unique and has a value to the user.
·    Marketing – Currently the main area people are attempting to take advantage of as social media/web  engagement evolves. Also provides for external link attraction and email marketing campaigns.

SEO is still based around having a search engine friendly site structure combined with great content that allows a natural integration of inbound links and user interaction. The most modern and increasingly common marketing tool being used in recent times has been social media.

SEO and Social Media

Social media is designed to delegate information through social interaction, using highly accessible techniques. The most basic form of interaction being used as an SEO tool is blogs. This appears to be the method of choice as it is simple to set up and maintain, as well as providing a great platform for embracing the social sphere. If time is spent optimising a blog then there is a very good chance you could be well on your way to adding new, well ranked search results for new target audiences. Social media applications such as blogs make it easier to venture into different social venues as part of an online media mix.

Choosing Your Social Media Venues

When attempting to establish which social media venues should be targeted to help optimize your online presence, you should first of all consider the audience(s) you are trying to reach. Establishing your target market allows you to determine where to get started and which social media profiles to use. Without defining a target audience, there is no way to offer them substantial, gripping content.

Even though the ultimate objective of participating in social media is link building and reputation management, it should not be used as a personal advertising space. The content management should be directed towards sharing not selling, with a listen first then respond attitude.

The greatest barrier that seems to stop people future proofing their SEO initiatives is trepidation. Anxiety, uncertainty and doubt never play a role in building successful search engine strategies.

We all know that the internet is a huge, ever expanding research tool that allows viewers to dig for information across a vast variety of subjects ranging from the simple to the obscure. As people aim to satisfy their lust for both providing and receiving information, more and more blogs are being set up everyday with the aim of being number one in a highly competitive market.

Here at Ignition Search, we are no strangers to the ‘blogosphere’ and find ourselves monitoring several blogs to see how people are taking advantage of the potential SEO opportunities they can provide. It has been interesting this week therefore to stumble across an in-depth piece of research that details what exactly makes a link worthy blog post?

The information in question was collected from 72,330 different blogs, spread out over 40 different websites and the findings provided some interesting results regarding titles, media content, topics and post length and the effect they have on In-Linking Domains (ILD’s).

What Effect Does the Title Length Have?

It’s easy to presume that the content of a title would have no bearing on the amount of ILD’s a blog post would receive. The recent research carried out however would suggest otherwise and show results that title lengths between 10-18 words would on average have more links. This was further collaborated by an in-depth finding that the ideal ‘hot spot’ number was around 15 words. The data showed that descriptive titles are more beneficial, but going overboard on the length can be a bad move.

Effects of Post Length

For those that contribute to blogs on a regular basis, the ideal length of a post has long been a debatable subject. Assuming the belief that people have short attention spans, it is argued that posts should be between 500 – 900 words long. This has been dispelled by the extensive research, as analysis of thousands of blogs proved that those which were the most SEO friendly and attracted the most ILD’s were the ones around 2,500 words in length. The contributions with limited content had fewer search engine/linked results.

The Contribution of Media

In a bid to increase popularity and appeal to linked domains, bloggers will often break up the content of their article with lists, images or videos, but does this really help? Actually, the results of the survey show that it does. The research highlighted that by adding a list to the plain text of a post, the number of ILD’s received can almost double SEO. These results are even more outstanding when all three media types are applied. Quality content supported by an array of media appeals to more users and as popularity grows, so does SEO rankings and number of ILD’s.

Top Topics?

Those people that write blogs are always interested in producing a finished article that could be considered a ‘top topic’ within the blogosphere in order to pull in the most followers. As mentioned, there are thousands of blogs surfacing across a variety of subjects, so just what are the key words to include in order to help establish yourself as a top topic? In order to determine the key words used, the study analysed all 72,330 posts in order to reveal that out of the 27,658,728 words used, the top 5 that kept resurfacing were: Google, Yahoo, SEO, Site and Search. The blogs that incorporated these words were found to have increased rankings and linked domains.

So there it is, a basic outline of how to build an effective blog that reaches across the blogosphere. Although the research carried out was extensive, it is merely a generalisation on how to build links and not a guide of strict rules to follow. The findings do however provide some food for thought for any budding bloggers out there.

Here at Ignition Search we can feel ourselves steadily drifting away from the uncomfortable side of sales. We’ve noticed that our new business meetings have taken on a very different dynamic in the last 6 months or so with prospects seeking to be educated as oppose to being sold to.

Search Solutions – Information Not Sales

We’re quite glad that in the majority of meetings now we don’t have to go through the old routine of matching features and benefits to needs and trying to ignore the vague air of discomfort that both parties feel whether on the pushing or receiving side of a sales pitch.
Our prospects are seeking to understand why there is such a shift going on toward Inbound Marketing on the Web, and we are happy to be able to provide them with our knowledge on the subject to help them understand.

Of course, we’re not giving away the crown jewels (I’m not even sure they exist when it comes to the fast changing world of SEO) but we are imparting knowledge and helping our clients to understand what we can help them to achieve through an Inbound Web Marketing campaign.

And with knowledge comes new clients.

Culture Shift Reflected in SEO

One of the best aspects of this shift toward Inbound Marketing is that SEO perfectly facilitates the buyers desire not to be sold to.

There is a strong sense of satisfaction on the part of the buyer as the notion is that he has performed his own search for something that he is interested in and found it himself. The fact that he has been driven to a site and liked what he has seen through SEO techniques is immaterial.

So, we think that the face-to-face sales techniques should be similarly empowering to the client. They almost lead themselves to working with us by asking us questions about what we do and how we do it. Our responses empower them to decide for themselves whether Search is right for them, and whether they trust us to deliver it for them.

So, we seem to be walking hand in hand toward a common goal with our clients these days. And all of us seem a lot better off for it.