Planning Your SEO Campaign
Author:
Nick Rinylo 
SEO
As, with most of your marketing efforts, your SEO campaign should be planned carefully to ensure you get the best returns from it. You should plan your SEO strategy carefully as each campaign will be different; there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ in SEO.
There are many tools to help you with the planning of your SEO strategy. Some are paid for, but there are some excellent free tools available from Google Labs, such as Google Trends and Google Insights for Search. These are some of my favourite SEO tools (actually, I love most of the free tools from Google – the Adwords Keyword Tool is invaluable to me too…)
How to use the information
Using Google Trends isn’t difficult, and Google do give a lot of information about how to use the tools so I won’t cover old ground or bore you to tears with unnecessary instructions. If you are a novice to SEO or Google Labs then visit this page for an easy, ‘how to use’ guide. Then come back here to learn how to use the information gathered.
As an example I have inputted three search terms that an imaginary SEO client is optimising their site for. The keywords I have put into Google Trends are: heating, heaters and central heating.
if you click on the above image, you will see that I have refined the search using the drop-down on the left hand side. I have set it only to check the UK search trends, as worldwide information wouldn’t be relevant for my imaginary client. My imaginary client wants local optimisation and the location they want to be found for is in England so I have refined my search down even further to show results just from England.
What do these results tell us?
Well, the results tell us things that we could probably guess at such as there are more searches during the winter than the summer for heating related keywords. I know, anyone could guess that, right…? But this also tells us that heating is searched for considerably more than heaters or central heating. So, I would have to tailor my site towards the keyword ‘heating’ and make ‘heaters’ and ‘central heating’ the secondary keywords.
But, what about Conversion?
This is always my biggest question. Will the keywords optimised bring in the right kind of visitors to the site? Well, there is no real way of knowing this without testing, and monitoring the site over time. I would always advocate that you use Google Analytics to check for conversion, though unless you are at the end of the phone line advertised on the site you cannot absolutely say for certain where the calls come from and whether the caller has found the site through a search engine (unless you have a phone number that is only advertised on the site and track the number of times it is used), and much less which keyword they typed in.
The best way of making sure your site converts the browser into a customer is to make sure the website’s content is good. There are obvious points here, spelling errors should be nonexistent on your site – I would think carefully about whether to give my credit card details to a company that can’t even be bothered to use a spell checker, wouldn’t you? Make sure the imagery is appropriate. Ensure your contact details can be found easily. And most importantly, you must have a ‘call to action’. Make it clear to your visitors what you want them to do next, call you up, fill in a form, click to buy, sign up for a newsletter etc etc. Make it easy for them, don’t hide the phone number in a flash file at the head of your site. Put the number in the copy, ‘ring us on, 01234 567 890 to arrange a visit from your local central heating engineer’.
