Having to conquer the digital world means getting your SEO process right. But what exactly is the ‘SEO PROCESS?’ For some, it is research and application of keywords; while for others it is getting ranked higher on search engines. But is it so? Just the way you planned your venture before starting it up – assessed the pros and cons, the expected outcome, involvement of people, competitors in the market etc.; seo needs to be planned in the same manner.
Given below is the simplified process of new SEO
Let us understand the very first step of the process – ‘Opportunity Discovery Process’, with this simple example. When you were starting a venture, what did you do? Understood the nature of your business, its motives and goals. Then, acquired the insights of market by studying the competitors, target audience and the scope. Exact is the first step of this process. Before diving into the seo pool, you need to get these facts straight:
1. Business Objectives – The saying, ‘Well begun is half done’ goes well with this step. You need to understand where your brand was, where it is today and where you want it to be in the future. This will define your goal, making the later steps easier for you.
2. Market Research: If you have to build content that interests your industry and hits the right audience, then market research is a must.
3. Audience research: This point is self-explanatory. Audience Research gives you an understanding of existing customers and target audience. Google Analytics, Double Click Ad Planner and Facebook Insights are some of tools to study your audience on different platforms. Analytics Mining, Social listening and quantitative analysis are some ways that help you track your target group and catch the keywords they are using to reach you. Based on this data, you can get rid of the whole ‘keyword’ confusion and hit the nail on the head. ComScore, Forrester Research, Quantcast are some of the services that provide you data of the users.
4. Keyword Research: To eliminate unwanted traffic, one needs to consider not only the usage of keywords by target audience, but also its relevancy to the business. Let us suppose, your website sells interior decoration products in Miami and you use keywords such as ‘interior decoration’ or ‘interior decoration products’, without targeting the GEO’s. Targeting keyword along with the GEO’s, where you provide the service would help you get the right traffic and increase the sales.
5. Site Audit: The new SEO process covers UX, as well. This audit report will highlight the short comings the site has as well as the competitor analysis.
6. Asset inventory: With asset inventory, one can understand what you control and what you are willing to do that would be advantageous to your campaign. This can again be achieved with auditing the content, building reputable brand relationship and keeping a record of the offline assets
7. Competitive Analysis: As we all know, competition analysis means a detailed study of competitors. From the way they are presenting themselves into the market to the way they are targeting their audience, every audit detail of the competitor has to be collected.
8. Measurement Planning: This step allows you to measure the results of the efforts you have been putting to achieve the set sales target.
The next step in the new seo process is Content Strategy. You cannot build a website and post the content you, as a website owner are interested in. If the content posted on the site is just seo friendly and not customer friendly, then you will get visitors but they will not be converted into buyers. The content built should hence be of target audience’s interest. Content Ideation, Wireframes and Content Build are the three steps that can help you build target specific content.
1. Content Ideation is the first step where you come up with ideas depending on the keyword research you have done.
2. Wireframes is a blueprint of your website design where SEO and CRO are implemented. Once the designs are set up, the job further becomes easier.
3. Content Build is the last step of content strategy. You can now start building your content. This is where all your research will be implemented based on which the results will be delivered.
Technical Development is a process you cannot afford to ignore. This can be known as the backbone of your complete seo process. Here, you need to recheck your research before implementing it and then make sure that the technical team has implemented it the way it needs to be.
After the research is done, it’s implemented and the website is launched; comes the ‘oh so famous’ promotion platform of today – Social Strategy. As you see in the above flowchart, this includes ‘Link Strategy‘, ‘Public Relation‘, ‘Events‘, ‘Contests‘, ‘Social Media‘ and ‘Social Implementation‘. Merging all the above platforms to reach the target audience successfully is Social Strategy. Creating social networking profiles, coming up with various contests, building links by blog commenting, organizing events are all ways of promotion that will help you spread online awareness and gain viral publicity which would once again help you in getting higher rank on search engines.
And the last two steps go hand in hand, Measurement and Optimization. With measurement, you can study how your website is working, are you reaching your target audience and are you getting the desire result? And then based on this measurement results, you can restart your optimization process.
Why follow this new SEO process?
SEO was earlier more focused on the rankings. High rank on search engines and more traffic on the website were the priorities of seo process. But the new seo process is audience centric and result driven.
This process takes care of the results you get for your efforts and turns visitors into buyers. Earlier, the process was giving you thousands of visitors where only 1% was converted into buyers. With the new process, even if you get hundred visitors, rest assured 90% will be converted into buyers as only the interested audience will be reaching you.
