The second to last part of proper SEO is doing an Analysis of your own site compared to others. Check out how you compare to other similar websites. You need to monitor your traffic rank as well and see if your optimizations and new content are showing benefits. You will be able to draw conclusions from your competitors and other sites that are related to your business. There are hundreds of sites that will review your site’s data for you such as Grader.com or Alexa.com. Google Analytics also helps you but you can’t really use it to check out your competition. The easiest way to find out who your competitor is would be by searching Google for the keyword you want and finding the guy that’s at the top of the page. Then do a search on one of the sites I talked about and see where they are ranked and how many inbound links as well as indexed pages they have on Google. This will give you an idea of what to shoot for in the long run and are the most important part of your analysis strategy.
If you are trying to enter a market and want to see if a specific keyword can be achieved, you can again use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to either search for specific key words and see how many people search for them both Globally and Locally (US) every month. Another important thing to look at in this tool is the ability to see trends, the small green blocks on the right hand corner when you search will tell you if the search trend is increasing per month or decreasing over time. You can click on the key word to pull it up on Google or the best part is search using your website domain name and see what key words your website come up in to try and see if you need to work on increasing your rankings with a keyword or if you are not even coming up on a key word you’ve been trying for. Try putting your competitors website and see where they fit and whether or not you need to start changing some of your content to compete properly with them.
Another way to see if a keyword is worth going after is by checking out the end of a Google search query. When you search for a keyword, at the top of the address bar next to the end of the Google address place the following characters exactly “&start=990”. This will then pull up your Google search in reverse order and give you the very tail end of your Google search. At the very bottom you will receive a very interesting statement that goes much like this, “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 656 already displayed.” Your number could vary greatly during your search but this number represents the number of sites Google is willing to catalog for a specific key word. The lower the number the better chances you have if you write good content of getting into the top rankings, the larger your number is the less likely you will be able to reach the top. A good point of reference is to avoid key words with more than 700 cached sites. Anything below that is easy to work with and you should definitely go after that key word by creating relevant content on your site.
The biggest difference in marketing your website is that you can’t simply throw money at it, well you can if you advertise on Google but you can’t just depend on ads like you can in regular marketing. You need to think differently about your site and your marketing strategy by creating systems that will help you solidify a more permanent ranking on Google that isn’t inflated by ad money. Using Social Media also helps you do that because more people will find the content you are creating interesting and hopefully they will create back links or inbound links to increase your position. The more content you create on your sites (aka more posts and pages) the more Google will have to catalog and the higher in ranking you will go.
The goal is to have at a minimum 100 search worthy items to include pages or posts on any topic or subject that has to do with what your website is about at least. This is why many businesses try to focus on just one site that has all of their products and services verses many sites that have many products and services but the benefit of having multiple sites is that they can link to one another and create a network that Google considers in numbering your back links. If you don’t have time to write out blog posts, news articles, press releases, recipes, product reviews or any number of content you plan on having on your site then you can hire an intern who’s only job is to take the day to day information they are seeing in the office or in your field and blog about them online creating an article a day or more depending on how fast you want your content up.
The beauty of systems like WordPress is that you can set yourself up as editor to make sure you review everything that goes through if that is a major concern in your business. Another great and cheap tool are sites like Fiverr.com where people post things they are willing to do for $5 dollars. Their social media section is a treasure trove of opportunities ranging from having someone write one or two articles for you or having them create back links for you. The negative side of this of course is that you have to check up and make sure they did it otherwise you are wasting your money but whether it’s an intern, an employee or yourself who does it, once the content is up it stays up forever and using the social media automated posting tools I spoke about earlier there isn’t much more that you have to do with those posts.
Use every opportunity you can to create content for your websites, as I am writing these 5 things for common sense SEO, I am also posting them on my site as individual blog posts each, I will also be putting them into a book to give away for free on my website and may print them out on brochures to give to clients. I am using an opportunity that I have to explain these facts to you as also a means to build up my site content and thus a means of getting more Google Juice. If you are sending out an email explaining some part of your business, put that information on your site. If you get to speak in public, try to record it and post it on your site for people to watch your speeches. Some companies post daily on their blogs if not hourly when they are hosting events or at an event in order to generate content that can be searched later. This is what much of the tech industry does and quite successfully may I add to increase their common sense SEO.