Factoring Time into SEO

We all know that it takes time for your rankings in the SERPs to change. Although they do fluctuate frequently, long-term improvements in your SERPs rankings take time to produce.

Some time needs to pass before the Search Engines are confident you deserve increased rankings. Things that can happen during the days, weeks or months before you see some real results include:

• Increase in aggregate traffic – if more unique visitors are landing on your website, then that means there’s a bigger trend of searchers looking for you, therefore your website is more relevant, so the more traffic you have, the more you’re seen as authoritative
  
• Increase in links pointing to external pages linking to you – this has a snowball effect because you receive more link juice from one link linking to you when other websites are linking to the page that’s linking to you.
  
• Increase in the amount of clicks from searchers – search engines have a general idea of the percentage of clicks the #1 position for a keyword should get (i.e. the #1 result should be getting 40% of clicks, while #2 should get 20% – arbitrary numbers), so when there’s an imbalance of clicks (if the #2 result starts getting 40% of clicks while the #1 result receives 20%), the results in the SERPs are re-ordered (the #2 result would be bumped up to #1 to see if it can maintain the 40% of clicks it has been receiving)
  
• Increase in age of domain – as your domain ages, and you continue to renew your domain for at least a few years until expiration, your website’s authoritativeness increases because it’s an older source of information.
  
• Increase in age of backlinks – as the age of the backlinks pointing to you increase, search engines believe that your website is more authoritative because the links serve as past proof that your website is worth checking out. While search engines love fresh content, they also highly respect older content

Advanced SEO Requires Good Analytics Information

Good quality analytics (such as Google Analytics or another paid analytics software packages) provides good and very useful information. If you pay attention to it you could very quickly increase the overall efficiency of your website. You just have to look at the numbers and list to what they tell you. The proof is in the pudding as they say and if you ignore your analytics information you could be missing out on a great deal of potential business and traffic.

Here are some basic areas for you to review in order to find any holes in your website and to help you decipher data that you learn from your analytics:

Conversions: In case you don’t know, a conversion is a completed action on your website, such as lead, sign up, sale, etc. The most important factor (I think) to learn from your analytics software is the conversion data. Understanding and learning about how and where you conversions come from can help you make much more educated and better SEO, PPC and Social Media marketing decisions. I can’t tell you how many people I still speak to think that the best goal for an SEO campaign is rankings or positioning. Sorry to break it to you, but it is not. Increasing conversions (and visitor growth) should be the starting goal(s) of your SEO and search marketing efforts. I won’t get too deep into that as that is not the main point of this post J

Bounce Rate: Whether you are looking at this overall or down to a single page if your bounce rate is really high try to figure out what is turning people off from that web page. It could be a variety of things depending on your business so take a deep look at your page. Is it too much info? Or a lack of info? Do you have too many ads on that specific page? It could also be a combination of all these items. It might just be that your page needs to have a serious over haul. Bounce rates vary for each client and industry but understanding what yours is and try to improve your bounce rate is very important.

Visitors: When you start to really get into advanced SEO techniques you will need to understand even more so where all of your visitors are coming from. Visitor quality is just as important as visitor growth. You never want to rely on just one stream of traffic because if that stream dries up so does your business. You have to understand where your traffic is coming from because often times it might be from an area that you least expected it to come from. Analytics information allows you to find new locations along with locations of where you might be able to place yourself to find new traffic.

Keywords: Analytics information will tell you what keywords your website traffic is using to find your website. This is a potential to really open things up for you as you grow your business online. As new keywords develop you can capitalize by finding new variations on those specific keywords and using them throughout your website. You have to look at your analytics information very closely otherwise you won’t find those windows of opportunity to help improve your SEO and overall search marketing efforts.

Analytics keeps your approach to marketing your website efficient and smooth. It is all about finding opportunities that could already exist right in front of you. Data and information that you can get from your analytics allows you to find those areas where you can really maximize your efforts in the online world.

Author:

Nick Stamoulis | SEJ

SEO: To Outsource Or Develop In-House Resources?

Online marketing is complex, and it seems that the number of factors you need to consider to make sure you have the optimal strategy is only increasing. Therefore, it might be tempting to conclude that SEO, or more broadly, online marketing, is something that needs to be outsourced. There is certainly a strong case to be made for hiring external expertise, but outsourcing your SEO strategy completely does have some disadvantages. On the other hand, bringing people in-house has some advantages, but requires in-house people to stay current with developments in the industry. Today’s column will investigate the pros and cons of each approach, and the case for doing a bit of both.

The outsourcing option

Whether outsourcing is best for you depends on your situation. Here are some of the pros and cons of taking this route:

Pros:

• Expertise. It can be easier (sometimes much easier) to find someone who has the expertise you need now.
• Leverage industry exposure. SEO consulting firms have visibility into many different projects across many different types of sites. This breadth of experience is very difficult to recreate in-house.
• Persuasive power of an external authority. In my last two columns I discussed how important it is to sell management on the benefits of investing in SEO. Management may simply by more willing to believe the advice of a recognized industry authority over their in-house people.

Cons:

• Lack of understanding of the internal company environment. Any external organization, no matter how skilled, is simply not going to understand your company as well as someone who lives and breathes your company culture every day.
• Less committed. SEO consulting firms are likely to have many clients. Losing one client is not desirable, but it is not a disaster either.

The in-house option

Here is a brief look at the pros and cons of hiring your own internal SEO talent:

Pros:

• Internal expertise. Consulting relationships are often designed to be temporary, and once a consultant is gone, so is a lot of the knowledge gained around a search marketing campaign. Of course, employee relationships come to an end too, but usually not as often, or as quickly, so the knowledge is retained by the organization for a longer period of time. If you have more than one internal SEO resources this risk is reduced even further.
• Better positioned to sell internally. Somewhat paradoxically, external authority can be helpful in selling the benefits of SEO, but an employee is in a better position to sell to many different stakeholders within an organization. There are many groups that are impacted by SEO, and they all need to be sold on the process.

Cons:

• Potentially more expensive. You can hire a consultant and engage only a portion of their time, but an employee generally requires full time work and benefits.
• Scarcity of top talent. You may need to train your in-house talent, because many of the top SEO consultants are making a lot of money, and bringing them in-house to work for you could cost you more than you might be willing to pay.
• Learning on the job. A corollary to the prior point is that to keep costs down you may need someone to learn the necessary skills on the job.

The argument for doing both

While there are compelling arguments for both outsourcing and hiring in-house talent, there are also some strong arguments for doing a bit of both. Given the challenges of staying current with developments in SEO and online marketing, consulting with a firm or individual who makes a living doing just that can be a big advantage. The consultant’s ability to work on different sites and with clients who have a wide range of needs can be a pretty compelling advantage.

On the other hand, hiring an in-house SEO position has advantages as well. As outlined above retaining knowledge and expertise, and the ability to sell across multiple departments in the company can be a huge benefit.

Of course, the needs of every organization are different, but SEO and online marketing are must-haves for your organization. For many, the best choice will be to decide on what expertise is essential to have in-house, and make a plan to build it or buy it. Then, supplement that with external expertise to make sure your in-house team can leverage all of the expertise of external SEO professionals.