DoubleDome Web Technologies Blog

Don’t just jump into an SEO program. So many businesses don’t look before they leap, and they initiate a search engine optimization campaign without really understanding how it works within their whole business model. Here are a few factors to consider when you talk with a search engine optimization company.

1.  How Will SEO Fit Into Your Overall Marketing Campaign?

This is the first place to start. What are your overall short- and long-term marketing goals? How will search engine marketing fit into and contribute to those goals? Don’t do SEO just because everyone is doing it; set out with a purpose.

2.  What’s the Best Timing?

Before you give your search engine marketing company the go-ahead, consider the timing of your campaign launch. For instance, do you have a slow season and a busy season? Start during the slow months so that you’re more likely to be well-positioned during your boon time. Or, if you’ve got a feeling you’ll be doing a website redesign soon, think about doing the site first. Launching a new site during an SEO campaign can seriously impede your success.

3.  Is Your Web Developer Reliable?

A good search engine marketing campaign needs to be fluid, and it requires lots of little adjustments that tend to be very time sensitive. If you don’t have a web developer or web designer, or the one you’re working with isn’t willing to made real-time changes, you should find a search engine marketing company that will be reliable and available.

4.  Are You Ready to Create Content?

Every update Google releases only serves to put more emphasis on relevant content. It’s a huge part of SEO, and you may have to provide a hefty amount of content upfront, along with regular content through mediums such as blogging. If you don’t have the capability to keep up with content creation, talk with a professional copywriter or with your search engine marketing company about it.

5.  What’s the Return On Investment?

If your search engine marketing company can’t provide you with any estimates on ROI or explain the metrics they use to measure success, strongly consider consulting with another company for a second opinion. Discuss your expectations, and learn about their ROI evaluation methods.

6.  Is Your Search Engine Marketing Company a Partner?

Your SEO company cannot make you successful if you tie their hands by only asking them to do one aspect of SEO for you, or by treating them like a vendor. Instead, realize that you are partnering with experts- let them have a complete understanding of your goals and current state of affairs. Let them do what they do best and let them do it with all the information available.

7.  How Much Time Does Search Engine Optimization Take?

A good SEO campaign takes time to be effective, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you. Most of the time, you’re looking at 6 months minimum to start seeing results, so if you’re jumping into SEO in October so that you can finish the year well, you’ll probably be disappointed.

In order for your SEO campaign to be effective, you have to be involved, and you have to work with your SEO company as a team. Partnership and good communication is key, so if you’ve worked with someone who couldn’t deliver that, find someone who will. Don’t be afraid to ask questions.

What other questions would you ask before launching a search engine optimization campaign?

It’s spring- time to get clean, clear, and reorganized. If you’ve been thinking about organizing your website, this is a great time to do it.

But it can be pretty intimidating. Since you did your initial web design, you’ve probably added numerous files, and chances are you’ve changed some things about how business, message, and core offerings. You probably haven’t had time to keep those files organized and well-managed, and maybe they’ve gotten out of control. Maybe you’ve stopped working with a web design company and you’ve lost track of files.

Or, maybe you’re working with a web designer to build a brand new site and just don’t know how to organize and maintain your files from the beginning.

So where do you start? What kind of structure do you want to create?

Most of us have a good number of files, and we need to rethink our organizational structure to make maintenance easier.  There are a few ways to do it, depending mostly on your personal preference.

• All your files under a single directory
• All your files except images under a single directory
• Files divided into multiple directories with imagines in their own directory
• Files divided into multiple directories with images in sub-directories branching from each parent directory

The most important thing is that it makes sense for you and your company. If you have a large network of people accessing the database, it might make most sense to use separate directories with sub-directories. However, smaller companies with only a few people handling site maintenance may find a single directory or single image directory easier to deal with. Discuss the options with your web design company.

Getting Started

You may think that starting fresh with a new web design would be easier, but we find it’s often simpler to create a new organization plan when you have an existing site. You can take a cue from your home page navigation as to how to best organize your files. For example, perhaps the navigation on your home page looks like this:

• Home
• About Us
• Services
• Careers
• Contact Us

From here, you could create four directories:

• /Home
• /About Us
• /Services
• /Careers
• /Contact Us

Your could organize your image files in a separate directory for each parent directory:

• /About Us/images

or in a single directory:

• /Images

Creating New Directories

Most hosting services have a tool for creating new directories. If they don’t, just connect your hosting server with your FTP client, select the destination of your new directory, and create it. Your web design company can help you do this.

Matching Up Your Server and Your Hard Drive

When you’re reorganizing your hosting server, remember to organize the files on your hard drive the same way. It will make maintenance much, much easier going forward. When you create a new file, you’ll know exactly where to save it, and where to find it.

These web design basics make it easier for you to maintain your site and make growth more manageable. What tips would you add? 

Your business can’t do SEO or search engine marketing without implementing a complementary social strategy. And when it comes to social media marketing, everything hangs on your content.

Search Engines are looking for fresh, relevant content, and they’re getting smarter about how they separate the good from the bad. Social media is one way that search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! are starting to do that.

So how can you create shareable, interesting content?

• Answer common questions. Look at your blog posts, videos, and other forms of digital content as real-time FAQs. Ask your sales people what questions and comments they get over and over, and address them. Chances are good that if clients are asking these questions of your account reps, they’re typing them into search fields.
• Think about what your market thinks about. If you run a baby boutique, you don’t just have to write about the products you offer. Think about who would be buying your products – probably mostly new parents – and write about topics they would care about and be likely to share, like baby food recipes or newborn photography ideas.
• Address current issues. Put a fresh spin on a recent holiday, headline, or industry change. To use the baby boutique example above, you could create an informative video about crib safety following a national story about crib recalls.

What social media cues do search engines consider? 

• How many followers, fans, etc. you have
• How many shares, re-tweets, likes, etc. you have
• Who follows you, and their reputation
• Who is sharing your content, and their reputation
• Who you follow, what you like
• Popularity of your content
• Patterns in your social interaction and engagement (natural and unnatural)

There’s no room in today’s search engine marketing industry to be sketchy. The bottom line is to be helpful and authentic, whether in your content or your social interaction.

Practical Ways to Maximize Your Social Impact

• Plan. Create a content calendar and produce relevant content. Monitor your content and produce more of what works. Content alone is great to boost SEO.
• Encourage sharing. Share your content with your followers and fans, and make sure there are social sharing buttons on every piece of content you produce so they can share, too. Monitor the results, and interact with those that interact. A simple “thanks for sharing!” does wonders.
• Be relevant. No one likes getting pummeled with the “we’re so great, and here’s why” message. Share interesting content that people can actually use. Answer questions and comments in a timely manner.
• Set up your Google authorship profile. Google is increasingly looking for ways to verify the authenticity of content and it’s vital to your SEO. Here’s a great article about how to do that and why it’s so important.
• Diversify. Don’t focus on one kind of content, or one social media platform. Produce a variety of content types, from blog posts to videos to infographics. Engage with users on a variety of social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Quora… the list goes on and on.

What would you add? How can you use social media to complement your search engine marketing strategy?

Most SEO campaigns begin with keyword research. This fundamental step sets the stage for every effort in your search engine optimization efforts.

We’d like to suggest that there’s a step before keyword research that many search engine optimization firms are missing:

Consumer Behavior

Understanding your consumer’s thought processes and needs is critical, and arguably even more important than understanding search volume and competitors. Tools like Google Trends http://www.google.com/trends/ can help you wrap your mind around how people find you and what they think about when making a purchase.

Like any business strategy, search engine optimization needs to have short term goals and long terms goals that go beyond profitability. Your SEO campaign should feed into your business goals, like strengthening your brand and gaining a loyal customer base.

Let’s take a look at the steps which lead consumers to a purchase decision.

Need Awareness

This is where it all starts. Maybe the consumer recognizes a need they have, or perhaps they see an ad which raises a desire.

Information Gathering

At this point the consumer is seeking information, increasingly through search engines. This is the point in the process where you need to be in front of the consumer, which might include going for keywords that might not generate an immediate sale. The important thing is being visible for the terms they are using to conduct their search, so that you can make it into their consideration set.

Evaluating Alternatives

At this point the consumer has done their research and are nearing a decision. The consumer typically narrows down his or her options to 3-5 different brands. Based on whatever values or factors are important to the consumer, they will compare within their consideration set.

Making a Purchase

Many search engine optimization firms aim to catch consumers at this stage, but if your brand hasn’t made it into the consideration set, you won’t get the sale. That’s why it’s important that you’ve maximized your visibility at every stage of the decision process.

Post-Purchase

Here’s your opportunity to turn a one-time purchaser into a repeat customer. Provide excellent customer service, encourage customers to write reviews, provide incentives to share about your product. It’s easier to keep a customer than gain a new one.

If you understand what your potential customer is looking for at every point during their purchase process – not just at the point of getting out their credit card – you’ll be able to develop a more “holistic” SEO strategy.

While large businesses have the resources to employ a web designer, or even a whole team, to maintain their web presence, the onus in a small business usually falls on someone who has already variety of other responsibilities.

It’s easy for website maintenance to get pushed to the back-burner, but your potential customers are increasingly interacting with you through your website. In fact, it’s often their first interaction with you. It’s so important to make sure your website it current, relevant, and easy to use. Here are 5 simple ways you can make that happen every month.

Current Contact Info

You wouldn’t believe how many small business websites don’t have a contact form or even a phone number. It seems obvious, but it’s one of those things that many small businesses neglect when they do their own web design and development.

Every month, make sure your contact information is current. Something as simple as a misspelled email address of a call tracking service that isn’t routing to your number could be costing you a lot of business.

Updated Promotions

If you’re an HVAC specialist, a coupon for 15% off an A/C check makes a lot of sense in spring. Leaving that coupon on your website through the winter will just maker you look outdated and leave potential customers with an unprofessional impression of your business.

Make sure your promotions and deals are regularly updated. Customers will want to keep checking in to see if they might take advantage of a new sale.

Functional Links

Because the web is fluid, URLs are always changing. A link to a helpful resource, or even a photo, is a great idea on your website, but if those links don’t work and images don’t show up, your website is going to look abandoned and customers will lose faith in your services.

Check your site to make sure all links are functional and all photos load properly.

Quick Loading

Consumers are pretty impatient when it comes to waiting for a website to load.

This humorous slideshare details a few surprising stats:

• Visitors expect your site to load in no more than 2 seconds
• 40% of visitors will leave your site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load
• For every 1 second of load time, conversion drops by 7%
• For every 1 second of load time, user satisfaction drops by 16%

It might seem a little ridiculous that 1 second could make such a big difference, but that’s the reality of consumer habits. Loading speed is something you might think of during web design and development, but it’s a good idea to regularly use Google’s Page Speed tool to see how your page load times are doing. Get some help from a web designer if your site is consistently slow.

An Active Blog

Small businesses with active blogs get 55% more website visitors and 97% more inbound links. This is great for your SEO, but that’s not all there is to it. Visitors are looking for recent, relevant content. If you haven’t updated your blog in months or even years, visitors may judge that your site is abandoned.

Depending on your industry, this list could go on and on. Website maintenance in a multi-faceted practice, and these are just 5 simple ways to keep your small business site fresh and effective. We encourage small business owners to schedule these kinds of monthly site maintenance tasks because we understand how easy it can be to forget about them.

What tips would you add?