It’s no secret that your business or organization should have a website in order to remain competitive in your industry. When your audience is looking for something they need, they’ll likely go to Google, Yahoo, Bing, or another search engine for an answer. Is your website optimized to capture these potential customers?
When your web development company initially launched your website, you probably chose a few targeted keywords and populated each page with valuable content. This is a great first step, but implementing SEO isn’t a one-time task. Search engines, like Google, change their algorithms often. They sometimes change them more than once per day to give users the highest quality search results possible. Consequently, it’s important to consistently monitor your website to see how it stacks up against your competitors, and to make adjustments accordingly.
You are probably aware that the best long-term strategy for SEO is the creation of content that your audience is interested in. Content alone is worthless if search engines can’t get to it or have a hard time understanding what the content is. Here are a few tips for maintaining your website’s SEO strategy:
Google Analytics – Traffic Report
If you don’t have Google Analytics set up for your website, this is an absolute necessity. This free service is user-friendly and will give you a lot of valuable data about how users are interacting with your website. One tool to make use of is the Traffic Reportwhich will show you what website users are on that leads them to your website. This will give you a good idea of what tactics are working and where you need to focus more attention or change up your strategy for driving traffic.
Google Analytics – Goal Tracking
Conversion tracking isn’t just for e-commerce websites. Google Analytics Goal Tracking allows you to set up goals in the form of URLs, time on site, pages per visit, and events to track the effectiveness of your efforts. When you track your goals, you can consciously monitor which parts of your SEO strategy are working and which parts need to be re-strategized in order for you to meet your goals. An example of a successfully completed goal could be a submitted Contact Us form.
Google Webmaster Tools – Web Crawl
Setting up a Google Webmaster Tools account for your website is helpful in detecting errors found in the HTML code of your website. This tool will scan the pages of your website and report back if there are:
- Http errors
- Pages not found
- URLs not followed
- URLs restricted by Robots.txt
- URLs that are timing out
- Unreachable URLs
Once these errors have been reported, the website needs to be updated to make sure it is as "crawlable" as possible for the search engines.
Competitive Analysis
In order to optimize your website for search engines, it’s important to keep an eye on how your competition is performing. There are many free tools available online that can scan your competitors’ websites and produce results such as their Meta title, Meta description, keywords, headings and other key SEO elements. Running these scans on a regular basis on your competitors, and on your own website, will give you an idea of how to make changes to your own strategy to stay a step ahead of the game.
Staying on top of your search engine optimization effort is key to remaining competitive in your industry. Stay visible to your audience to meet your goals and to be perceived as a top player in your field of expertise.
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