Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) & Social Media Marketing (SMM) Audit & Road Map
Your SEO & SMM Audit & Road Map is a report that will deliver the following:
Consideration of your …
• Company and marketing strategy and tactics. To maximise results SEO should work with your social media, email, PPC and offline marketing.
• Branding. your brand is your most precious and delicate asset. Our SEO recommendations will enhance not diminish it.
Audit of your site’s current potential and performance
To plan where your SEO should go, we need to first be clear about where it is and has been, including:
• Existing traffic. How many visits does your site get from different sources? How many from search engines? How many of those are from searches with your own brand names as the keywords? How many are not (these are a measure of current SEO success)? What about different countries and languages? What about local, news, image, video and product searches?
• Pages indexed by search engines. Are your pages being indexed by search engines? How many? What happens to old pages (they are valuable)?
• Inbound links from other sites. SEO success requires quality and relevant inbound links from other sites. We will count and record their history. We'll anlayse them for success that can be improved and replicated.
• Bought and other 'bad' links. Paid-for and 'bad' links risk your site being penalised by Google. Or they might just be a cost that delivers no results. We will seek to identify them and recommend actions.
• Response rates for different traffic sources. What groups and types of keywords do you get results for? What are their different response rates? We are looking for benchmarks and success that you can build on. We'll make sure your SEO targets keywords that can deliver more visits and response with maximum return on investment (ROI).
• Content. Do you have the right content to deliver wanted results from search engines? Is it worthy of the links from other sites you must get? Is there enough content to target deep into the long tail of search (this is where most searches are)?
• Marketplace. We'll define your target markets and niches with the keywords that its audience search with. These are the keywords you want success for (but we must prioritse them in your road map).
• Competitors. Who are your main competitors and what can we learn from them?
• Presence in your target keyword markets and niches. What's your market share for your keyword targets? Why? What we can learn?
• Social media presence. What's your presence in social media (eg, facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, Stumbleupon)? Are you setting the agenda for your brand on facebook and twitter? Are you making the most of social media's link-building potential?
• Structure, navigation, build, URLs. Does your site structure, navigation and URLs allow for all pages to be indexed efficiently? Does it distribute your site's precious link power effieciently (from inbound links that likely most go to the homepage)? To make the best of opportunities that arise, can you quickly change what pages and site sections your link power is directed to?
• Technical SEO issues. Eg, does your site have an effective robots.txt page, XML site maps for different content types, one URL for each page and the ability to quickly create 301 redirects and rel canonical tags?
Research of your target audience
Like all marketing disciplines, we need to define our targets, including:
• Size. How many searches are being made by the people you want to reach?
• Keywords (used on search engines). What keywords do your target audience search with? Which do you already have some success for? How can you build on that success? Which groups of keywords bring you the most response and which will be the easiest to get more response for?
• Tastes, interests and passions. What subjects do your target audience get emotional about and respond to? How can you create content that refers to these subjects and starts a conversation with them (resulting in links, traffic, response and positive branding)?
SEO & SMM strategy
What are we trying to achieve?
• SEO strategy. We'll deliver a prioritised list of groups of keywords to target. We'll give you the process used so you can repeat it, including any market, company and product knoweldge that we did not.
• SMM strategy. A prioritised list of online communities to target in order to reach your target markets and SEO goals. We will includes large general istes (eg, facebook, twitter) and smaller speciailist sites.
Content plan
SEO needs content that is relevant (to your target keywords), optimisied (for your target keywords) and distributes relevant link power particular pages. All the following must work must consider any different targeted countries, languages and content types' results (eg, video, images, products etc).
• Existing content. To some degree we will recommend using existing content. Perhaps optimising it or optimising how search engines find it with your site navigation.
• Creating new content. If required we will recommend new content. Often this is 'more the same please'.
• User generated content (UGC). Is there any way in which UGC can be created or used to support SEO efforts? Do forum pages get optimised? Do forum pages link to other related content using appropriate target keywords?
• Link-worthy content. For SEO, your site needs links and we'll suggest content that other sites will want to link to.
• Organising content site structure, menus and navigation. Plans for site structure and optimisation will take into account the limitations of existing site systems. (There is usually a workaround.)
• Internal links to control the flow of inbound link power. Does a blog post about vegetable seeds link to the ecommerce page selling vegetable seeds? Do all pages about vegetables link to each other and with target keywords so that Google sees the cluster of related content you've created? Does your home page share its superior link power with the pages that count most (your 'superman pages')? We'll give recommendatiosn for all.
Link building plan
Link building is the most prized of SEO skills.
• Numerous specific link-building techniques and campaigns. All will be considered when recommending a campaign for your site and budget, including networking to build relationships with sites that might link, creating irrestible content for them to link to and promoting that content to the network and beyond.
• Your link building campaign. Your campaign will result from a proven process given in detail in our link building book and summarised in 62 steps to the definitive link building campaign:
http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/62-steps-to-the-definitive-link-building-campaign
Social Media Marketing (SMM) plan
Online marketing can no longer limit itself to your own site and adverts. On social sites like facebook and twitter, your target audience is talking about your company, products and relevant issues. Are you part of the conversation?
• Big generic social sites like facebook & twitter. Do you have a fan page? Are you appropriately active on relevant interest groups? Should you be? Should you advertise on facebook, what should a facebook ad be like and how can it help with link building for SEO?
• Smaller specialist social sites, ‘local’ to your market. Every market has numerous forums and other intercative sites. We'll recommend a plan for your presence on the most important.
Metrics
Metrics and matching reports are essential to know what is working, what is not and where future efforts should be directed.
• What to measure, how and why. Clear recommendations will be made, including for monitoring sample keywords' postions in search engine results pages (SERPs), visits and response rates for groups of target keywords (using our own custom software) and relevant quality inbound links.
• Simple, action-focused. Recommended reports will be easy-and-quick-to-read and come with recommended anlaysis and action. There is no point in reports that don't get read and aren't then intelligently analysed, resulting in action.
Integrated SEO & SMM Action Plan
• A step-by-step road map for you to follow. All above recommendations will be discussed and explained and then summarised in a simple step-by-step action plan.
• We will recommend what work you might do in-house and what requires specialists. Your long-term goal should be to make SEO an internal skill, even a core skill for all concerned. Until then, there are some jobs that will be quicker, cheaper and more effective if given to specialists. These jobs and those you can do in-house will be identitified.
• Estimates for further work. We will estimate for more specialist work but you can follow your road map using any suppliers you like. It's your journey.
