SEO Strategy Checklist – Keeping Your SEO Process Intact and Consistent

SEO Is Broken Down Into Having A Process And Following It. Sometimes you need a quick resource to finding what you can do right now with your time and that is the intent of this post.

SEO Goals List

1. Increase Traffic by “insert number here”
2. Improve Rank for “insert keyword” by “number of positions up”
3. Fix Page Errors by “insert number”
4. Reduce page load time by “insert number of seconds”
5. Create better keyword strategy for “insert terms here” in order to rank “insert position”

The above would be a list from which you would select one goal and plan your work to achieve that goal.

Keep SEO Simple – Consistent – Accurate

Main things in SEO are Keywords, Pages and Links. Just don’t overdue it, I mean how many keywords can you jam into a single webpage? Optimize pages for targeted and high value keywords.

Don’t stuff your titles, you still want people to click through so create a compelling title tag, and begin the title tag with the term your targeting. You can also begin with your brand name if you are building out your name in a niche you wish to own.

Here’s a good SEO starter project.

Be sure to keep track of your rankings with a tool like Rank Checker available for free as a Firefox plugin as well as other SEO tools SEOBook.com.

KEYWORDS

Select 1-3 primary keywords to focus on for a single page

Don’t make a single page relevant for a lot of things (and a lot of keywords)
Don’t overdue it, be strategic with your work (develop tasks you can actually complete)
Don’t put low volume keywords on homepage (you’ll rank easy but gain nothing)

Our Clients Ranking Nationally For Highly Competitive Keywords

Start with a smaller volume, and a smaller set of SERP’s in order to get started and build from there.

If you are feeling brave, then by all means go after it but realize that you may not succeed. Here’s one example of a successful SEO plan, and it was accomplished by being very focused on a single goal.
These two images show a total monthly search volume opportunity of 275,000 queries.

What is your overall keyword strategy?

How will you measure your success – and your process is effective?
Track rankings and traffic for keywords targeted
Focus – There’s only a finite number of search terms you can pay close attention to, but
Don’t Forget about the Long Tail – these can add up to 80% of the results

What keywords are profitable enough?

Grab search volume – Is 5-10% of that traffic enough for my efforts?
based on the above example – 5% of 275,000 is 13,750 – what you might expect if you held the #1 slot
Identify low competition terms – 10% is reasonable
Monitor high competition – 5 % is reasonable
If the competition is really low, then 15% of google volume is achievable
Perhaps you’ll score a double indented listing
Identify the candidate keywords
Determine the profitability range – which convert?
Map the keywords to pages on your website – find any gaps in content.

PAGES

What pages will be specific to that keyword?
Are you lacking content then it will require even more work? You made need to develop pages of content.

TAKE ACTION

ONSITE – 1 week
How do I translate this research into the right actions?
Your Existing Keywords And Content
For every keyword – start with onsite optimization
Do you have a large or small amount of content pages
Using internal links to build on what’s already there before adding to it

OFFSITE – 3 weeks

Onsite SEO is the easy part – Most of the real work in SEO is linkbuilding
What is this all about? – Link building is about marketing and building relationships
Getting links that contain the right anchor text that get your pages ranked.

If you have 100 keywords on your list and you try to tackle this entire list, you’ll be spread too thin.
Start with a reasonable goal “2010 lexus rx350 models” may help eventually get you ranked for “lexus rx350 models”

SCHEDULE

Have A Realistic Schedule. This SEO checklist is to hit the major points, you want to make progress and hit goals so set aside a few hours a week.

Don’t create a list of 100 keywords – you will never have the time to optimize and create all the content for those terms.
Find the right landing page for no more than 3-4 keywords
Start with some easier, low volume keywords that aren’t going to be impossible to rank well for.

Weekly schedule – Devote 4-5 hours of Internal SEO Work on your site before doing anything else. This will make a huge difference.

Find the pages on your site to optimize, use Term Targeting to see how you are doing for the term you selected.
Then do the hard stuff – getting the links! Reach out to your local credit unions, newspapers, etc. If you have Google Alerts setup, everytime you get mentioned, see if the site (if credible) is willing to put a link on the page for you.

Set a Goal for Links, How many text links can you get in a week? Then send out an email, specifically to the person you want to reach and ask for it.

Use Open Site Explorer and check out your competitors, get backlink data on your competitors pages, see how they are ranked for your target keywords and where they obtained links from.
If your competitor has 20 backlinks with keyword anchor text than you need 30 or maybe 40. But also look at the quality of their backlinks using Open Site Explorer, are they from High Domain Authority sites? If not, it might only take 15 to beat them.

STICK TO THE STRATEGY

Don’t overcomplicate the task, just develop a process that fits your schedule. For one week concentrate on analyzing keywords, the next week analyze the pages you’re ranked for and grade them with the Term Targeting Tool, then finally once you’re optimized (you have good content and your page is high quality) seek out links.

Don’t just go out and publish stuff on other sites just to get a link, do your research on the sites using Open Site Explorer. If they don’t have high domain authority then it’s not work your time to obtain a link from them.

Also, diversify your work. Go after some really good high authority domains and see how you can get a link. Install the SEOmoz tool bar for Firefox so you can see which domains have authority. Below is a screenshot of the toolbar in action.

Keep track of your work and whether you are doing it yourself or you’ve hired an Automotive Internet Marketing service provider, make sure you are meeting or exceeding your goals.