I think many website owners don’t really know what to expect from their seo campaign. It seems they’re just not sure what it is their website can do and what an seo webmaster can do for them. So, I thought I would give an abbreviated outline.
1) Optimization
The very first thing you should expect from your seo campaign is that your website is truly optimized. I just received a website this week that was “optimized” from a previous seo firm. Well, optimization of a website page means that the coding of the website page is cleaned, that the meta tags are optimized for the keyword phrase for that page, that the alt tags are written, that there is an h1 tag and if possible and h2 and h3 tags with the keyword phrase or a very similiar phrase. Optimization also means that the keyword phrase is bolded and/or italicized without css, that css and javascript coding are externalized, that css positioning is used to bring the body of content higher (if possible of course) and that anchor text linking is written in on every website page.
The only “optimization” this website had was the meta tags. So, what did the previous seo firm do? Nothing. Meta tags are just a small part of the internet marketing process.
2) Updates
The next thing you should expect from your seo campaign is monthly reviews. I can’t even begin to tell you how many clients I get who have never received any type of information from their seo firm except for a ranking report.
Beyond a ranking report you should get new keyword phrases, you should get recommendations, you should get an analysis of your statistics. All these factors, along with the ranking report help to play a part in making the decision on what to do next in the seo campaign.
3) Realistic Results
You should also expect from your seo campaign results. Now, I don’t mean more people coming to your website, eventually you will get that. What I mean is higher conversion rates. More people buying from your website. The idea of SEO is not necessarily to get a ton of people to your website, the idea is to get the people who are ready to buy to your website. What’s the point of having 10,000 visitors to your website if only 5 of them were ready to buy? It would be better to have 100 people to your website where 80 of them are ready to buy.
4) Be Honest
Finally, you should expect complete open dialogue. What I mean is if you ask the seo company how do you perform your keyword research they should tell you exactly how. What you may hear, more often than not, is something like “we use a specialized program to do that.” Yeah, there are several “specialized programs” that do that. Anybody can purchase those programs and “do that”. But there’s more to keyword research (and everything else in seo) than just plugging in some information into a program and letting it run. If you’re paying for that kind of SEO, well, you might as well put your money in the shredder.
SEO means that your website will change, it means that your website has to keep on changing, growing, etc. It also means that you must be open to what the Internet is telling you. If you sell only red roses, but you find out through keyword research that many people are looking for pink roses, then you want to begin introducing pink roses to your website. By ignoring this piece of information you are basically telling your target audience, “forget it, I’m selling what I want to sell, I don’t care what you want.”. If your audience is looking for pink roses, give it to them.
Your seo campaign will tell you what your audience is looking for. It’s up to you, not your seo webmaster to make you do it.
