Let's get real. Website optimization is just a lot of hard work. There's no magic involved. Today we present to you five simple tips to keep you on your SEO A-game. The first website optimization tip is to identify your keywords. Want to know the other 4 website optimization tips? Check out our latest Brown Bag Video Tutorial
TRANSCRIPTION:
Hello. And welcome to our video today on Website Optimization Tips. I'm Chad Hill. And I have Adam Stetzer here with me as well.
Good afternoon, Chad. Everybody's always looking for the magic bullet, the website optimization tip that's going to just change their lives. We know that's just not true. It's a lot of hard work. But we want to be helpful today and give some people some guidance.
And I guess our perspective is likely to be, well, it's not about your title tag or your H1. It's a bigger process when it comes to really getting excellent website optimization tips. So, what can we offer our viewers today?
Today we have five simple tips that will get you on the right path. The first website optimization tip is to identify the keywords that your target customer-- prospective customer-- might be using. And there are a lot of great tools out there. The Google Adwords Keyword tool is one. There are other third party tools that can help you get your head around how are people searching for information that you might be able to create. So that's where you should start.
The number one best way to actually understand which keywords are going to work for your business is actually to run a small advertising campaign using Pay-per-Click advertising. Spend a little bit of money. Call it market research. And really test this through. Everybody nods their head when we say that.
But we were surprised that very few people actually do it. The reasons for this are kind of important. The keywords you think people may be using to find you, may not really be the ones that they use. Or the keywords you think will convert and then you'll put them into optimization targets, may actually not work.
So the second website optimization tip that you want to look into is basically, when you identify those key words, is thinking about what kind of engaging and relevant information can you create that answers those questions. And there's obvious things like creating blog posts or services pages on your website. But then there are other things like video content, info graphics, and other forms of content that you can place on your website and also prepare for syndication that we'll talk about in a minute.
Yeah. That's really cool, Chad. Because that's not what most people think about in terms of website optimization tips. They're thinking more, there must be technical tuning things, which I know you are going to hit in a second. But I like that you put the editorial piece up front, and that you talk about being useful upfront. And that's really what optimization is about. You've got to make your website very, very useful to answer questions people have, so they'll want to come back, so they'll spread the word. We'll talk about why in a second. But that really comes before a lot of the technical stuff.
Exactly. So then the third thing that you want to do, is once you've got that content created, is you want to come back and-- as you said, Adam-- tune that content. And again, many people start with this idea of tuning, which is title tags and descriptions and looking for how many times is the keyword in my content. They sort of get stuck on that. But we're really saying that this is the third thing that you're going to be doing.
Once you have the content-- and of course, you've written that content to answer questions about keywords-- now you're going to come back and you're going to look at what kind of title tag should I put in this content. What should my H1 tag be? Did I actually mention the keyword a few times in here? Do I have some other links from other pages to this website or to this web page? And that's really what we consider tuning. And it is again, the third thing you would do after you're well into this process.
Right. So this is where 3-1 redirects come into play, and canonicalization, and schema.org, W-3 verification, all that kind of stuff. But I think, Chad, what you said, is totally right. Don't dwell on this. Far too many people put too much emphasis on the tuning. Yes, we're saying it's important. You absolutely need to use the keywords that you're trying to rank on on your page.
But don't get lost here. And don't make this the entirety of your project. Ironically, it's probably the number one thing people were searching for, looking for website optimization tips. But we're saying it's actually step three. And it's something you should you quickly, but then move on. Because I know steps four and five are pretty hard too.
Yeah. Absolutely. And just one more point on that. If you are looking for that and you're now on our website, you can always search our website for an on-site optimization checklist. And we have a lot of different articles and content we've done on, when you are in the tuning phase, how should you approach that? But the next step is to then, think about once you stood up this content on your website, and it's tuned up, you now need to think about what ways can you earn links back to your website?
So this gets into link building. Content marketing is a great way to earn links and figure out how to build relevant links back to your website. And in order to do that, you again need to create more content. And you need to find places to place that content. There are relevant websites in the category that your business is in. And then get those links back to your website, so that it can help people, help Google, connect the relevance of your website to other properties in that category.
And I think again, this will surprise people. Because what is syndicating my content and building backlinks have to do with the optimization of my website? Well, tells us that your rankings are 70% of the result of this very off-site activity. So you need to put about 70% of your effort into it.
And it's not easy. It takes a lot of time. You need to build relationships. You need to find places where they're talking about your category. And you need to insert yourself into that conversation. Social media is an excellent tool for getting the word out and spreading the word. So people then see your excellent content, which generates backlinks.
Exactly. And then the final thing that you want to do is to look at is to set up the proper tracking, so that you're able to track the results of these initiatives that we just talked about. So you want to make sure that you have Google Analytics set up on your website so that you can see what the traffic trends are.
You're also going to want to make sure that, if possible, you're using a phone-tracking or lead-tracking software so that you know exactly who is been to the website, and then who fills out forms and ultimately contacts your business. Because if you don't have the tracking, then it's going to be really hard to see the results. And one final point on this is that, this all applies that you then also have time.
Because time is also sort of the unwritten sixth item on our list today, which is that once you do these activities, you need to consistently execute, and then have the right time frame in mind, which again, is six months, at least, to really see the results of these efforts.
Right. Six months to a year of consistent execution-- if you're coming looking for those five tips that I could just do in an afternoon, and boom, I'm going to have these great results, we're sorry to burst your bubble. That's just not how search engine optimization works.
You really don't have the right mindset. And that's why Chad's point number five is really about motivation. It's about execution. It's about consistency. And we all need feedback to make that happen. That's why tracking is very, very critical. You need to try things. You see it working on a small scale. And then realize, if I keep at this for another five months, I could see it working on a very, very big scale.
So those are our website optimization tips. Good luck.