You are about to start a new business. You have a nice product or service to offer, you have your wallet ready to invest, you have great workers and eager buyers ready. With all of these things ready, your business model and element is really ready to prosper. Now you need to plan how to make your business visible in the search and find context.
Many elements are needed to be taken care of, especially nowadays, when you are trying to establish your site. Doing these on-page and off-page jobs right will get the SEO or your business right from the day one.
Step 1: Know Your Concepts and Keywords
Start by knowing how exactly you want your customers to do and what are the concepts you want to be associated with.
This is not just keyword selection or keyword research. Target audience, content, open data and many other things together will make the conversations happen and get you business.
If you are opening a business of selling new and used cars and operating a car dealership, you might want to get a well planned car dealership business strategy. Choose the concepts and behaviours you want to be the identity of your business and select a list of strategic keywords. These keywords will come very handy later on.
Step 2: Content Investments and Content Marketing
Now that you have your strategic keywords and key concepts ready, you can have a highly detailed and minutely tailored content creation plan ready. This is called highly detailed because you will define your website’s user experience, the type of people you hire, what type of narrative is needed, multimedia type of content creation and what you want to invest in.
If we take the same example, we might want to have a high level content creation and editorial guideline ready. The core concept will also dictate how you create the user interface of the site.
Step 3: Ensure Site is Technically Flawless
SEO is becoming more and more technical every passing day. There are two main points here.
The modern content management systems handle this issue well. If you are using WordPress then there are some great SEO plugins to make your life very easy. These plugins take care of the technical side of the SEO rather efficiently.
Most CMS (content management system) also help you create automatic sitemap. Please enable this feature and submit the sitemap to Google and validate the site using Google Webmaster Tools.
One coming up important thing is the open data set, also known as API. If your business needs to get content everywhere, and if this is going to help you business, make sure you are creating data feed or API to gift to third party developers to use.
Step 4: Get Your On-Page and Metadata Right
Different content elements like webpages, images, videos, social profiles. PDFs, local listing pages, and review pages, all require on-page optimisation. This means you should get the target keyphrases inserted into those contents and also at the right areas, heading, body or the description.
That is too much and merits a dedicated article on it alone. However here are some nice optimization tips.
You need to make sure that the content is highly optimised before it is published and it should have the proper social signal integrated and the inbound linking option.
There are so many different emerging metadata schemas like Open Graph, Google’s own Authorship, Twitter Card, schema.org and others. It will be a nice idea to build this front end metadata right into your templates and let them pull out the right data from your database. Otherwise you can also allow your writers to put these values manually when they are putting the contents and publishing them.
Step 5: Create Social Authority Plan
You Google plus profile holds the key to a higher ranking as this world is becoming quickly app based and the search is becoming semantic one. Google Plus, being Google’s own, will define your overall social authority.
This means, you need to quickly identify the potential and capable employees you have and make them active on Google Plus. These employees can not only represent your brand to the world in sites like Google Plus or LinkedIn, but they will also be creating content, spreading them, create brand awareness and get connected with the known figures of the industry. Google Plus posts show Page Rank and Google Plus profile pictures appear in search results, if Google Authorship is set up properly, and thus, you can’t really ignore Google Plus if you are into SEO.
There are some brands which don’t want employees represent them on the social channels while some other want it. Economist, for example will not allow your name on any of the articles while The New York Times might add your twitter handle in the byline or author bio.
Most of the companies go by the middle line, they prefer the high ranked official and the professional writers as well as the product maintenance people to work in the social circles and they are often compensated depending on the quality, quantity, commitment and engagement of the content they create on various social networking sites.
Step 6: Make Your Content Mobilized, Localized, Socialized
Search engines are trying to show as much local content as possible and this is not only when local searches are being done but also during generic web results. This means you need to make your content as local as possible, if you are targeting the mobile crowd to flock in. Local searching is becoming mobile’s forte.
There are a few things to create, geo-specific pages, geo-optimised profiles, location pages, support or reseller pages and others. No matter what is your exact business, you can always find some local relevance for it.
Local is almost the backdoor for the highly competitive pages. Making your site mobile friendly by making it responsive will make it useful for the mobile devices and thus, it will gain ranking in mobile searches.
If you have the location based sales contacts you should get all your locations and agents mentioned on the landing pages for mobiles from certain locations. The link from every big social networking page profile, the link should point back towards the profile page as well.
Step 7: Practice Distributed and Communicative PR
A new business is worthy of a news anyway. Make good use of the most important announcement about your business you can ever make. Use these news to get links to your most internal pages as well.
This is not only press release. It is about telling people, the important people, about the interviews and giving the employees an excellent opportunity to link to the deepest pages of your site with their social profile and giving the opportunity to the bloggers and others to discuss about things they otherwise will not notice.
As noted previously, give some or all of your employees access to social profiles and use them as a PR & social media army to gather the social cues and incoming links you can gather.
Step 8: Train Writers and Publishers on SEO and Linking
Make sure your writers know what and how they contribute to the SEO effort and social media. Train them if they don’t know it. Make them understand things like keywords, keyword density and content matrices.
Make sure that they are sharing their content on their personal social profiles like LinkedIn and Google Plus. If they have a happening profile, its better else we might teach them a few ways to make the profile stronger. This way he is doing content marketing after content creation., tell him that if he can get good links for any content, he will be rewarded.
Step 9: Put the Key Metrics and Reporting Tools in Place
Having a content marketing plan, well defined content metrics and inbound link judging plan ensure than the elements you are creating are not getting derailed or going out of focus.
There are so many different ways and tools to get a content judges, from both the SEO angle and the social sharing perspective. And the evergreen Google Analytics is always there to tell you how well the content doing to get you visits.
Look at the things like organic landing pages, pages viewed, time spent on page, bounce rate and other factors for each page of content created. Add social sharing buttons and the counters and you are good there. Check these counts at least once every week since you launch. You can also pay offshore resources a low amount to get this done.
Linkdex services offers a great way to know how your content is, from both of these angels and also present a nice URL based report. I can’t find anything wrong with this.
Step 10: Spend for Content Promotion and Syndication
By now, you must have a rather detailed plan ready. Now all you need is to formulate how you are going to promote, syndicate and give your content the thrust it deserves.
The enterprise level content plan which we discussed above might become very useful in this step. There are paid links, social sharing and syndication links can come in every step and these things can work in harmony to get the desired effect. This is a major change from traditional approach to SEO.
When this step is implemented properly, the content plan is ready for enterprise level link acquisition based approach. It is now time to check how paid media can support these elements. Keep this plan in front of your eyes, literally, so you can see it always the steps are engraved on your subconscious.
Step 11: Make Someone The Supervisor
This is the last and probably the most important of all the points. Put the SEO matrices and the content matrices on the same sheet and make sure that there are enough employees to do the work you need.
Neither writers nor the developers nor the analysts are SEO people. Thus, you need someone experienced in earned media to handle all your resources well to get the work done.
Recruit them and give them a nice designation, content manager, inbound marketing strategist, media manager or something similar. More important than the designation is the power, authority and freedom they get and that they take complete accountability of this department.
If you are the owner of the company, you can’t have time to get down to this level. Nor the VP of online marketing can handle these. You need to hire someone who will handle and bridge both the content team and the SEO team and pay his total attention to this.
Conclusion
It might be a new business or a startup only, these 11 steps will surely make your SEO efforts highly successful from the word go. Your keywords and your products or services might change over years but the game stays the same, like we pointed our here.