“If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” – Lord Kelvin
In my previous years of doing SEO with clients, I was always the #2 guy, the person leading the team of junior SEO’s and implementing the necessary strategies whether it be on my concept or by mandates of clients. I thought I got used to being #2 until last week.
I realized that I’ll be leading a team of SEO’s and will be heading a brand new department for my company for organic optimization in partnership with our established SEM team. WTF am I doing? Although I’ve been thankful for the opportunities, part of me still questions whether I can do this or not.
Before I could further plan for core campaigns, I had to map out my mission and vision for the department, a thing which I have not done before. Thankfully, I’m part of a great team with excellent bosses to look up to.
Here are a few points which I’ve learned and may be helpful to those of you starting out on online marketing and social media strategies in-house or for clients:
I. Goals Goals Goals – I’m not much of a football fan, but I always imagine a field full of fans cheering for Barcelona Spain when they won against Manchester United. But yes, Goals are your peaks of success. It’s what you aim in the next 2-3 years of your campaign or any time frame given or appropriate for your business. Be precise with your goals as much as possible and make them inspirational for you and your organization. Whether you wanted to be the leading content provider within your market niche or be the most popular social community website within the region, carve it on stone and make it known to the rest of your team. Having definite goals at hand will give you the different paths of actions to take towards each goal.
II. Measure & Metrics – Gone are the days when online strategies were more about trial and error processes. Nowadays, you have all the web metrics you can have for every campaign that you can establish. Whether you’re aiming to measure organic web traffic, pay per click campaign, or even phenomenal social networking sites have ways of effectively tracking your campaigns. Fortunately (or unfortunately) you don’t have any excuses of not having any benchmarks to start with. Do not ever, ever forget to set your benchmarks. As for SEO, we have to get bases for keyword rankings (whether or not you already have some minor rankings for some keywords), PageRank of website before setting any campaigns, analytics data (visits, pageviews, bounce rate, etc.), goals and conversions of what you want to achieve, linkbacks (if any), indexed sites by search engines, etc. Your web analytics will highly depend on the campaign you’re working on or on the set of goal conversions you’re aiming.
III. Always Keep Historical Data – If you come across any statistical data within your research relevant to any of your campaign or highly relevant to your market niche – keep them, bookmark them, or even memorize them! These data will always be helpful in setting your benchmarks and comparing them in the future. Apart from setting the foundations, historical data will mold your expectations in the first few months of your campaign.
IV. Test & Observe – Whether it is a change in design, modification in the back-end programming, additional content, or off-page optimization, record every bit of action with time stamps on them. You may observe spikes on your traffic or drop in your conversions at certain times and you don’t want to go blind as to the causes of these fluctuations in your analytics data. If you can, establish a central flow of information which comes from your developer, designer, content administrator, social media executive, and the rest of the team. Be aware of the changes that happen around your website and study carefully the after effects. If it produces certain benefits, then continue and develop the actions. If you experience negative effects, be sure to know the logic behind the effect before dropping the process.
V. Follow Through – Now you’ve matched your data with the process you’ve exerted. What’s next? Examine the progress, if your activities contributed significant benefits (registrations, leads, sales, etc.), study them and modify to increase those benefits. Research and develop similar strategies in addition to existing ones. For those that have failed to reach the standards of your campaign, pay attention to cause-and-effects. If there is anything to remedy, fix them. If it involves too much cost (time, manpower, and resources), then drop it like a bad habit.
So there you go. Don’t forget to pay attention to tiny details on your website’s progress and your online campaigns. An instantaneous update could make or break your website’s progress.
Before I go, were you part of the Facebook junkies how grabbed the vanity URL’s today? Well I’ve got mine here. Some say it will increase the need for SEO. While some are still debating the positives and negatives on Facebook’s update. What do you think?
If you have anything to add to goals and implementation, feel free to comment or contact me.
5 Planning Tips you should know for your Online Strategies is a post from: Small Business SEO Tips – SaktoSEO