Setting Up An SEO Program
Creating and establishing an SEO program for any size website will help the site rank higher consistently over a longer period of time, while putting goals and objectives in place to measure how effective search engine marketing efforts are for boosting conversions and sales.
The Benefits Of An SEO Program
There are a lot of good reasons why an SEO program should be developed, documented and put into place:
- A program document that outlines major program areas helps define the specific tasks on a macro and micro level. There are a lot of moving parts in search engine optimization anymore, including a content calendar, social media distribution and troubleshooting website issues that could hinder crawling and indexing by the search engines.
- Establishing daily, weekly and monthly SEO maintenance activities gives the program discipline and consistency. For example, by scheduling a bi-weekly download and analysis of your inbound backlinks, you can catch toxic, poisonous links much sooner, and possibly avoid Google penalties for said links.
- Defining roles and responsibilities is critical if there's more than one SEO specialist supporting the website. Perhaps one specialist is responsible for keyword research, optimizing web page/blog post elements and working with the writers to find topics of interest to create content around the target audience. Another specialist could be tasked with maintaining the Google Analytics and Search Console tasks, while yet another may be focused strictly on website technical issues, such as redirects, database maintenance, site re-design and site navigation.
With all this being said, since SEO seems to change daily, this means your program is a living entity that needs to keep pace with the latest Google search formula updates and penalties. It's critical to grow your program's goals and objectives as the business continues to prosper and convert more searchers to buyers.
Someone will need to be the program manager or lead to make sure the team is applying the latest best practices and recommended actions from SEO industry leaders and Google webmaster guidelines.
That same person is probably also responsible for reporting the program's status on a regular basis, with both analytical reports and live briefings to the marketing management team.
Your SEO program should be subject to reviews at least twice a year, to make sure it's implemented the changes that affect strategy and processes.
What's your SEO program like? Could it use a review to improve upon strategy and process applications? Do you need to document an informal SEO program you're running? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Until we meet again, keep it safely between the ditches!
All the very best to you,
Nancy McDonald
Image courtesy of en.wikipedia.org
