It doesn’t matter how well your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy is working for you, it’s always worth taking the time to revaluate and see if it could be doing better. Your returns might be impressive, your strategy masterful, but in these times of tightened budgets, you need to be confident that every penny you spend is worth it.
I've recently written a post titled 7 Reasons Why You Need to Deal With Search Engine Marketing Change, so I thought it would be a good idea to look at how you should review your SEO performance.
Why, if I’m seeing results, what does it matter?
It can be tempting to see a search marketing campaign simply in terms of what you put in and what you get out. If you invest £10 and see returns of £20 then that’s okay, isn’t it?
The answer may actually be ‘no’, especially if you have tasked an SEO agency with getting the best result for your budget. If you put in £10 but only £5 is effective in generating those returns, then half the investment has been wasted. Perhaps a more careful strategy would have netted you £40.
Waste is waste, even if it is being hidden by a generally successful approach, so it's vital that you can have an analytics solution which can measure this as closely as possible.
So how often should I review?
Of course, if you devote unnecessary time to reviewing your strategy too often then that’s also a waste of resources.
However, it partly depends on your business. If you are a national newspaper or the BBC, you should be analysing and implementing new keywords on a daily basis, to ensure maximum exposure within a current affairs environment.
Other businesses may be far less time sensitive. Specialist retailers, for example, may only need to review their strategies rarely, assuming the initial SEO work was solid.
The benefits of a review
One of our clients at SEOptimise has seen excellent results over the last year, but they are redesigning their site and that is a useful point to review the strategy.
Thanks to a full year of their search engine optimisation campaign, we have a wealth of analytics data to consider, allowing us to look at our original work and be confident that every pound spent is spent appropriately.
Ignoring this data and assuming nothing has changed since our initial analysis would be letting down our client, we would be failing to use all the tools at hand to drive the best campaign possible.
A warning
Of course, there is another danger. At conferences and industry events, I often meet disillusioned businessmen and women who have churned through a number of SEO agencies in a short period.
To an extent, this is inevitable within our sector, since there are too many SEO firms with a fabulous pitch (“We’ll get you into the top three Google results for your hugely competitive term in just three weeks!”), unbelievably low prices and then zero results.
If your business goes through SEO agencies faster than printer cartridges, you’re never going to achieve the results you want.
An effective SEO campaign needs time to really build up. However, if you’re constantly switching then you are just back to square one every time. Any effective existing work is likely be lost and refocused when the new agency comes in with its fresh strategy.
You can see how so many firms become rapidly disillusioned with SEO and view it as a con. Find a decent agency with good reviews and previous examples of successful campaigns, there are plenty of great firms out there.
Changing agencies doesn’t always review your strategy, it often resets it, and this can play havoc on your long-term goals.
Kevin Gibbons is Director of Search at SEOptimise and guest blogger for Econsultancy. You can also find him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
10:30AM on 24th November 2009
The key thing is to set your strategy, implement it and monitor it's progress. Don't thrash around.
If the strategy starts with making your “on the page content” easily readable by the search engines AND you optimise your customer's journey to purchase from you, this is the first step to maximising your return on investment.
The next step is to work out why people would want to create links to you website. Work this our with your agency and use them to help you with this expert task. Stick with it and devote your energy to this aspect of the agency's brief. Work with them as a team. If you've chosen a good agency who understands your business then you'll get the return.
<!-- @page { margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } --10:58AM on 24th November 2009
Excellent piece and reflects a common sense approach to assessing your SEO needs and requirements. A breath of fresh air really in the face of the usual rhetoric from SEO companies, who out on fishing trips, will oft tell you anything. For most of us, if t ain broke don't fix it, not that an SEO guru would likely tell you that.
11:24AM on 24th November 2009
You are absolutely right.One should not become complacent just because the search engine is performing well..this was an excellent post.....really benefitted a lot from this post as it had a lot of examples.Thanks a lot!
3:39PM on 24th November 2009
Nice post! It is always a good idea to review your strategies. Know what your competition is doing. Look at there titles, tags and content. Try to figure out why their pages are claiming the top positions in search engine results.
5:04PM on 24th November 2009
Excellent advice! Too many who are new to the SEO world are taking the "set it and forget it" route. Industry buzz words change, businesses evolve, taking stock of your overall SEO plan helps make sure you are staying on target! Thanks for the great information.
6:15AM on 25th November 2009
I think it very necessary, I reviewed it every month.... thanks for nice post.
11:17AM on 25th November 2009
Setting clear targets, whether these are CPA, ROI based and ensuring you are able to measure these from start to finish will enable you to grade the level of success you are achieving throughout the lifetime of any campaign.
Having access to analytics data is central to enable you to review and adjust the campaign focus. This should be a continuous process no matter what level you are operating at.
4:13PM on 25th November 2009
It is very necessary to review and update your SEO strategies for a simple reason. Search engines change their ranking criteria constantly, and if you don't follow these changes, your ranking will significantly drop during time... Nice post
4:26PM on 25th November 2009
Fabulous post ... and great comments. If only every SEO company foresaw the inevitable question, "What did I pay you for?".
Making sure that there is a goal, clear indicators of success are not only helpful to the SEO firm to justify services, but it also gives your client something tangible that can serve as the basis of discussion. In a sense, it is better to know you improved slightly than to not know you improved greatly.
I can't say enough for setting clear expectations and helping clients understand what they need rather than what they want. Again, thanks for the post.
5:09PM on 25th November 2009
I especially appreciate the portion of the article that mentions that different businesses require different time commitments, different strategies. A small business site that has say, 50 hits a day as apposed to a newspaper or major player like amazon.com, do not have identical needs.
Great article!
Terrie Mavros
Site Fetcher SEO
www.site-fetcher.com
5:09PM on 26th November 2009
I find reviewing as often as every month is already helpful enough. Thank you for sharing.
8:00PM on 16th January 2011
thnks