Prioritizing SEO Tasks Based On Impact Pt1
How can you really know if the content and SEO changes that you are making to your website will actually benefit it? In this article, we will be looking at various ways that your resources can be prioritized so that your bottom line is impacted and your business objectives are supported.
“What needs to be done to optimize our website?”
Every search engine optimization (SEO) expert is faced with this question, but unfortunately, there is no easy answer to it. After all, there has never been a website that only needs one single thing.
That is the problem with search engine optimization. It is comprised of numerous things so that when you are faced with that all-important question of what needs to be done, we tend to provide too many recommendations. Most teams, unfortunately, are not equipped with the necessary knowledge or resources for handling them and end up getting very little or nothing is done, instead of everything that needs to be completed.
So how can we guarantee that the necessary changes are being made by our teams in order to drive a successful outcome?
Throughout my career, I have faced this challenging time and time again, and fortunately, I have learned a couple of different ways to handle this. So let’s take a look at some of them.
Prioritize According To Impact
There are only so many hours in the day, meaning that you often can’t get everything done. So, if there are only one to two things that we can get to on our list, then we need to make sure we select the recommendations that will have the greatest impact on the overall website.
For example, let’s examine the technical SEO audit. With a technical audit, some of the things that we may recommend include image compression, heading tags, redirect updates, canonicalization, and 15 other different things. If a development team is bogged down already with their regular daily tasks, it won’t be able to fit all of these things in.
In order to ensure that something gets done, we need to look at what is actually holding the website back. Title tags might not appear to be the world’s highest priority, but if your website doesn’t have them, then just making that change could lead to some fairly significant improvements for your site.
When recommendations are being made, teams need to understand where they need to begin and what things can wait until later. Not everything will be a top priority.
Prioritize according to resources
When it comes to resource the exact same thing applies.
We recommended last year that a client transition their website over to HTTPS from HTTP. They were excited and completely on board, but then we realized the client didn’t have anybody for managing this process.
It is no small task to move a website to HTTPs. Errors can be made, it may be a difficult process, and several times now I have seen it result in the loss of significant amounts of organic traffic (thanks a lot, Google). We were unable to take on that risk. For nearly a year we held onto the recommendation until the right personnel was in place to guarantee a smooth transition. Now everything has been switched over properly, and the website is enjoying a nice increase in traffic.
Here is another example to look at. Other clients of ours needed help with writing content. However, they didn’t have anybody to approve, edit or manage the process, which would result in a backlog of blog posts that went unpublished. Unpublished blog posts help absolutely no one.
We decided instead to switch over to blog refreshes. What we did is identified some older blog posts that could use an update and began updating the content. It wasn’t necessary to have an extensive review for this, and we were able to implement these changes. It resulted in an increase in blog traffic, and improvements were made without having to have any new content.
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Your Site Must Be Responsive
First of all, let’s recap the way things were done back in the good old days. A certain keyword would be selected to focus our article on and we would add a hyperlink to the relevant page each time the keyword appeared in the text. In the days where keyword densities might see words repeated as many as 10 or more times, that included an excessive amount of highlight anchor text and made for a very unnatural situation since no one would ever add a word this many times naturally.
Pessimistic Uncertainties
According to Google Adwords’ Product Management Director Paul Feng, this change is mainly due to security.
Link building is the process of obtaining links from other websites to your web pages, with the purpose of improving the authority of your website, and therefore its search engine rankings. Whenever a website with high authority and with lots of readers links to you, a little bit of this authority gets transferred to your website. This is the online equivalent of expert recommendations.
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