As an expert in online marketing, I am always amazed how few clients and prospects take the time to vet the technical SEO skills of their agencies and consultants before hiring them to work on their website. This is a very important consideration, even if you are not specifically hiring the firm to work on your SEO. Over and over again marketers hire agencies and designers to redesign a website with very little thought on the impact of SEO. This can turn out to be a absolute disaster if you rely on search to generate leads or ecommerce sales.
At some point, every company with an online presence needs to make a critical decision about managing the search engine optimization (SEO) of their website. The big decision boils down to this: whether to insource or outsource your SEO. That decision should be based on whether you have the internal resources, expertise, and risk tolerance to successfully manage SEO.
If you are not checking your website every 30 days for broken links and URLs, you are probably taking a major hit with your SEO. Why? Google caches old and broken links, and if searchers click on one of these links they will get the dreaded “Page Not Found” 404 error. Broken links are especially common if you change the URL of a page, change the site navigation, or edit page titles and auto-generate the page URL from the title.
How do you find out if you have broken links on your website?
When it comes to engaging visitors on your website, content is king. Content drives engagement and makes visitors go deep inside your website. It's what drives your domain authority along with inbound links.
What’s crucial to developing content?
The foundation starts with a good content management system. That system can be Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, or one of the many other CMS platforms. Without a solid CMS at the foundation, it is almost impossible to create, publish, and manage significant volumes of content efficiently.
If your on-page SEO is not set up correctly, you are going to have low visitor engagement and high bounce rates (a.k.a, the Super Ball effect). Why is this an issue and why should you care? Having a high bounce rate is like having a bucket with a bunch of very large holes in the bottom. But for a website, instead of water flowing out of the holes it’s your money flowing out.
How do you address this, and is it easy to fix?
Think you know everything about SEO and Google's ranking algorithm? These five key pieces of information really drive home the fact that trying to beat Google at the search engine optimization game is an exercise in futility.
Are you looking to attract the right traffic to your biotech website? Do you want to recruit the top scientists and engineers to work for your life sciences company? Looking for that next round of venture capital and need to stay visible in the VC community? Or maybe you need more leads for your newest bioinformatics tool.
Are you looking to drive more traffic to your bank's or credit union's website? Need more loan applicants? The most cost-effective way to accomplish this is to fully optimize your website for organic search.
Thinking about using Google AdWords to generate B2B leads? Test the waters first. While generating leads from organic SEO is preferred since it is free, spending money on pay per click (PPC) advertising like Google AdWords is unavoidable for most B2B Marketers.
Are you looking to show up on page one of Google search results? Then you will need to make sure your website is fully optimized for organic search.
Follow the best practices below and you will begin to improve your search engine results page rankings. Keep in mind, search engine optimization is not rocket science and you don't need a PhD do to it effectively.