SEO as a long-term, ongoing process of enhancing Relevance

SEO Defined in a simple diagram.

In the post SEO Defined in 68 Seconds I quickly elucidated on SEO as the long-term, active practice (art & science) of enhancing your relevance (find-ability & credibility) on the Internet / Web, for those unique values (aka, key words) that you want to be known for.

Click to Enlarge

Where do you start your SEO Strategy Development?

That depends!  It depends on your business mission, your competitive space, the purpose of your web site, and what if any Web Analytics you have available.  I start with an interview to understand the business needs first.  Then I’ll turn to Analytics to see what the baseline data says.  This involves all of these elements 1) Analysis and Gap Reporting, 2) Competitive Landscape, and 3) Keyword Analysis.

Analysis and Gap Reporting on Business and Web Site Objectives

You cannot improve what you do not measure.  The basics here are Webmasters Tools, Google Analytics, and Sales and Marketing data.  The most difficult to get is the internal conversion data.  You’ll need it, so keep pushing.  The goal is to approximate ROI on every dollar spent generating leads and ideally right through to sales.  Your website is at least a lead generator if not also a direct eCommerce site.  Put in systems to measure the site’s effectiveness, the sales funnel, and traffic origination and performance at the keyword level.

Competitive Landscape on the Web and with Keywords

Remember, your web site serves two purposes!  You may love the people functionality of a competitors website and I may grin because I know I can kick it’s butt for SEO.  Or, let me give you the best example I know in reverse.  You may say, I can cream this guys Clarence Bass, his website http://www.cbass.com/ sucks!  I’ll agree and get lost in thought on how to attack such a keyword dominate site.  So we look at both.  Who do you compete with for end-user functionality / mind-space?  Who do you compete with for keywords.  We’ll look at how to do this in another post.

Keyword Analysis and Selection

Picking keyword is a short-term and long-term proposition.  Above all you must think long-term.  However, you also have to eat.  So pick a basket of keywords based on how competitive they are to rank for.  Some you may rank within 3 months and some may take as long as a year.  There are many trade offs and NO YOU CANNOT DO THEM ALL AT ONCE.  Did I shout that? Sorry.  As you move to first page positions in your keywords you will keep building out more sets or keywords.  Ric Dragon calls this concept “cloud of relevance”.    keywords directly impact your Site Architecture, Content Development, and your Link Building Strategies.

We will further discuss SEO as a long-term, ongoing process of enhancing relevance in subsequent posts.

In the meantime, feel free to ask questions, love answering questions.  There will be an ever developing series of How To posts and videos  We will also individually address all of the above items and Site Architecture, Content Development, Link Building Strategies, and Measurement / Gap Analysis.