5 SEO Strategies to Employ Right Now
Search Engine Optimization strategies are fast paced and always changing, but sometimes the easiest fixes are right in front of us. The technical fixes always seem to gain the most attention, so we have some recommendations on shoring up your technical SEO, but we also have recommendations strategically aligned and related to reporting data.
[highlight3]Google Analytics – Paid Search Vs. SEO Reporting. [/highlight3]
This is a very common, when a company is using a paid search channel such as AdWords and they have not connected it with their Google Analytics account, the traffic will become blended and show as Organic. Since Paid search traffic typically can have a great conversion rate, this will give you false data on the effectiveness of the SEO campaign. It also means that you can’t see a true ROI on the money being spent in the paid search channel.
SEO Strategy Solution: Connect your Adwords and Google Analytics account, and make sure that the channel data shows up correctly. Here are the instructions to do this from Google: Link Adwords and Analytics.
[highlight3]Content Planning – SEO first? Or a new website first?[/highlight3]
It’s very common practice for companies to begin the website planning process before looking into the search interest for the keywords related to their website. This creates a problem because the content often times will not match up with the keyword phrases that need to be focused on, once the site has been built.
SEO Strategy Solution: A smart marketer will raise their hand and alert their team to the fact that they should let the data drive their content creation and site architecture decisions. This concept doesn’t just apply to a new site, but for new content in general, whether it’s a new product or a blog post.
[highlight3]Duplicate Content – Create Relevancy through unique content[/highlight3]
How many places do you have a sidebar on your site that pulls in a content block that is similar to another block of content on the site? It’s more common than you may think. A common place where duplicate content occurs is in the About Us Section. A common off-site duplicate content issue that occurs, is copying the About Us content and placing it onto a local directory site – this is very common in the hotel industry and is something that hotel marketing professionals need to keep in mind when they are working with partner sites.
SEO Strategy Solution: We use a tool called SiteLiner to look at internal duplicate content problems. This is very helpful because we can identify modules or content blocks that need just a small amount of content to be rewritten. Stronger content = stronger SEO value and a better customer experience. Learn more about our Content Strategy Consulting.
[highlight3]Assets that are not SEO Friendly – PDFs, Images, Video[/highlight3]
A PDF may look great as a downloadable menu or product list – but it’s terrible for SEO strategy. You do have the ability to customize the title and description of a PDF file, which is great, but what happens when someone accesses that file through search results? They won’t have a site navigation to click on or any other way to become a customer. We see this PDF problem with restaurants or hotels with spa offerings. Images are also an under utilized opportunity – and the 3 things that matter for Image SEO Optimization are the file name, the image ALT text, and the content around the image.
SEO Strategy Solution: Ensure that any PDFs that you are using also have a corresponding HTML page. If you can configure your server, you can use rel=”canonical” HTTP headers to indicate the canonical URL for HTML documents and other files such as PDFs. Say your site makes the same PDF available via different URLs. More details from google.
[highlight3]Big Picture SEO vs. Small Micro Strategy SEO[/highlight3]
Theoretically if your site is ranking well for all of the “city+hotel” keywords in the world, you should rank pretty well for the just the keyword “hotel” – and this concept applies to every industry where there are clusters of content.
SEO Strategy Solution: Instead of building out lots of content pages that address 4-5 topics, consider building out one page that addresses all of those topics – Google will like this, as Panda and Penguin updates specifically address stronger content pages versus many pages on similar topics.