I was recently asked by an attorney that wanted to know what I could do and things he could do to improve his site traffic. He also wanted an idea how long each of these tasks would take me. I decided to write this post on a basic overview of SEO and Social Marketing and outline what I can do and help with. If you are interested in help, I would love to help you with your site. Feel free to email me at jason dot bunnell at gmail dot com. Often having a contractor help can be beneficial because there is a lot more stuff to do initially and after the first few months it is more maintenance. Basically there are 4 main areas of focus: site optimization, content, backlinks, and social marketing.
<h3>A. Site Optimization</h3>
- CMS for a site – The first thing I would suggest to anyone wanting to build traffic is to make a site using a content management system like WordPress or Drupal. According to this Wikipedia article, 60 million sites use WordPress and 23% of the top 10 million use WordPress. The great thing about WordPress is that it is like having millions of people constantly working on your site to make sure it is up to date and using the best practices. There are tons of themes and you can purchase some at Themeforrest much cheaper than it would cost you to have a developer develop a custom one. Updating your site and plugins become as easy as pushing a button and creating content for WordPress is as easy as writing an email on an online provider. I can install the latest WordPress, half a dozen plugins I think you would want, and a theme of your choosing in about 4 hours.
- Have page loads below 500 milliseconds – There are a liteny of things to do from caching pages, utilizing a CDN, have a fast host, optimizing images, and more. You can see how your site does using Google's PageSpeed Insight. This can take several hours depending on things like your theme and plugins.
- Submit your site's XML Sitemap to search engines – You need to create a sitemap. There are some plugins that help with this. Once the sitemap is created, you want to submit it to Google and Bing. I can do this in a few hours.
- Google Webmaster Tools – You need to set up your site on this site and check for errors. Google will crawl your site once you submit a sitemap and if it finds broken links or any other problems, it will list them here. And trust me, you want to fix them in a timely manner. This would be a task I would suggest performing on an ongoing basis. The time it takes to perform this task depends on the types of errors you are getting and how long it will take me to fix them.
<h3>B. Content</h3>
- Initial Content – You need to be sure your site has the information your visitors are looking for. I suggest a blog, a contact form, and an about page. Depending on what your site is for, you may want a FAQ page. If you perform a service, you will probably want a page that explains pricing. Being transparent about pricing can really help as that is one of the things people are often coming to your site to check.
- CMS Tutorial – It is important that you have a good title, a well written body, tags, and outgoing links. There are tools like Yoast that can help with this. I think it would be worth the time for me to sit down with people in your organization and give them a quick tutorial of how to use the CMS you implement so they can add content. I can help with content, but it is better if your organization produces content on an ongoing basis. The basics are pretty self explanatory and you may think having me come in isn't worth it but showing how to optimize content for search engines can be tricky and that is where I will focus my time. I can present the basics to everyone in an hour or so.
- Identify Keywords – It is important to research keywords, identify sites that rank high for these keywords, identify keyword alternatives, and determine traffic and competition for each keyword string. I can do this in about an hour and you should probably have this done monthly. You want to be sure when you are creating content, you are targeting keywords that help your ranking.
- Google Analytics – One of the plugins I set up initially is Google Analytics. It is a powerful way to see what content people are coming for, how people are finding your site, how much traffic your site is getting, and demographics on visitors. If you have a site on Dallas, how many people are coming from Dallas versus other cities? How long are people on your site? What pages do they leave from? These are important questions to answer. I can produce weekly or monthly reports to answer these questions.
- A/B Testing – If your site is getting a lot of traffic, A/B testing is a great way to test out alternative formatting or layouts to see what works and what doesn't.
<h3>C. Backlinks</h3>
- Guest posts – Guest posts are one of the best ways to get backlinks. The idea is to find sites that are high traffic and have an audience that overlaps with yours. Often blogs will allow others to guest post on their site and include a link back to their own site. These links are really valuable in improving your rank on search engines. They also can generate traffic organically. Finding sites that offer this can be hard and I can help find some.
- Comments – some commenting systems will allow you to include your name. Some will allow you to add a link to your site so that your name becomes an outbound link. If your comment is spammy, the site owner will probably block you but if you can offer something of value, those comments can help as well. Obviously you want to post on sites that are in some way related to the content on your site. I can help find sites like this as well.
- Evaluate Competing Sites – There are some great tools out there that help with this. I have listed some SEO tools on this site. If a site is ranking higher than you, it would be a good idea to figure out where they are getting backlinks and seeing if you can get some as well. I think this is something you should be doing on an ongoing basis. I can put together weekly or monthly reports on this.
<h3>D. Social Marketing</h3>
- Identifying and Setting up profiles – You should spend time considering which sites you want to spend time on. Some may be counter intuitive. Remember, backlinks are nice but the goal is traffic to your site. You can do this by engaging with customers/clients on social networks, engaging with people that are interested in the area you want to rank for, and even engaging in businesses you use. Anyone that can help get your message and story out there.
- Managing Messages – Depending on how much you rely on social, you might want to consider one of the many tools out there that will help you monitor your brand for both negative and positive messages. If someone gives a positive message, you want to amplify that message so others see it. If there is negative messages out there, you need to address that. Your biggest critic can become your biggest advocate if you take a little time.
- Plugins – If you are active on a particular social platform, you may want to install a widget on your site to show that content. I have a Twitter plugin on this site that shows my latest Tweets. The idea was that people seeing I have an account might follow me.
