How to structurize my SEO efforts?

[Entertainment]

Among other things I am responable for managing SEO for an ecommerce website (excluding IT related matters such as CMS systems).

SEO is all about continuity. It makes sense to have a sort of continuous "plan do check act" circle for SEO, but what does each step roughly contain? Although I am aware of the different tasks to do for SEO, I am struggling to find the right order and frequency to really structurize my SEO efforts.

So..how do you manage SEO weekly/monthly? Do you have a specific dashboard (like the Moz dashboard) you check on a regular basis? What metrics in this dashboard are most important to you? Do you immediately create tot do's after checking your dashboard? Perhaps besides a weekly check you also implement a quarterly more thorough analysis?

[Lee_Thomas]

It is beneficial to use a number of tools to create a picture of where you are, and what your next steps/ goals should be. I would say this is a good process to go through if you are looking to build a to-do list:

Webmaster Tools. This is just good practice to check first if you are checking weekly or monthly.

• Ensure your site is indexing properly, and there are no crawl errors. Your site visibility here is a key indicator whether something has dropped or increased. Also, you need to be on your toes in case you receive a dreaded link warning message.

Google Analytics. The key metrics most people look for here are:

• Traffic
• Bounce Rate
• Time on Page/ Site
• Conversions (if you have any set up)
• Channels

These metrics are your basic indicators of how your website is performing without getting too involved. It is important to know if traffic has increased or decreased, if so where from. Then you can start investigating the why.

Ranking tracker. There are many of these out there, Moz included, and some are better than ever.

• Keywords are the main goal of search. Firstly, having the right keywords for your business, that attract the most searches and generate the best ROI.

Again, find out what's up or down, then investigate the why.

That would be my basic steps if I was monitoring my SEO on a restricted timescale. Once you have your metrics it is time to write some actions to influence them.

Here are some questions I would ask:

• Traffic up/ down? If so what channel is the cause?
• Am I maintaining a steady bounce rate? If not, has something changed with my on-page experience, or is it misleading meta data or perhaps misleading links.
• What keywords are performing or failing? If performing, how can we reinforce what we are doing well with that keyword. If failing I would look at competitors first (Moz, or Searchmetrics are my preferred choice). If so what are they doing better than you? If not, has there been any search algorithm changes that have altered your site optimization (or links if it is Penguin season).

SEO really is a full-time job when it is done correctly. There are a million things you could occupy your day with, but if you are working with limited time, I would focus on the above basics. Then it is a case of building good content whenever you can around monitoring, and putting out fires.

Hope this helps!

[Entertainment]

Thanks for you answer Lee_Thomas. Specifically keyword analysis, how do you monitor this? I have broad interest terms, brand terms, and main model terms. On the one hand I'm considering to look at the top X keywords, but at the other hand, longtail keywords are very important, but you can't put this into Moz and start monitoring this. So at the one hand a prime keyword might be failing, but if the page gets more traffic through longtail this would be no problem, but this would mean you will go back to looking at total organic traffic, instead of individual ranking, however, this you'll have to correct for total increased/decreased search volume.

Do you also have specific times to check if you are targeting all the keywords you want to target?

[Lee_Thomas]

With keyword analysis, again taking limited time into account, I would focus on a small number of high ROI keywords. Keyword ROI is based on the volume of searches your keyword receives per month vs. the amount of competition for that keyword. Essentially it is 'how much work will I have to do to rank this keyword? And if I do get it to rank well, how many visits will I actually gain?'

On a limited time, it is likely that you will not be able to compete for highly competitive terms (although by all means don't completely ignore them). I would take a some time to look the biggest gains on X hours per month. To get a clear idea of this you can use a combination of Moz, Google Adwords Keyword Planner, and software such as Searchmetrics.

When it comes to longtail keywords, if you are building any content on a blog for example, this is where you would naturally hit these terms. If not, just make sure your content is as thick as possible using lots of synonyms and potential search terms (without sacrificing UX, of course!). Searchmetrics shows an indicator of how you are ranking for certain longtail terms which is very useful. Google Analytics can give you some data on longtail terms but sadly it is a lengthy process to get around secure search (the 'not provided' shown in aquistion).

There is no real 'best' time to check keywords. I would just make sure it is consistent. If you have a keyword ranking tracker (Moz, SERPfox, SERPbook etc.) it takes no time at all to check rankings so you could do it on a weekly basis. We have no control over what time anything will change so it is just a case of keeping an eye on it and reacting accordingly.

[Entertainment]

Thanks again. In what specific way do you gauge performance periodically? Obviously you can present some success stories for high ROI keywords. But a lot of times there are a lot of small tweaks you are doing here and there, and you want to show that this was worthwhile. Overall organic traffic can be a good metric, but then you have to be able to correct the data for search volume fluctuations. For instance, I might be getting more traffic because simply more people are searching for "Buy product X" instead that this effect can be assigned to my efforts. Average ranking does not say that much either, because of the importance of long tail keywords (and whether you add these to Moz). Is there a way to correct this data for fluctuations? And perhaps a graph that shows the amount of keywords people used over time to land on your site (to show whether you are doing better long tail wise)?

[Lee_Thomas]

If you are concerned about fluctuations in the search volume there is no 100% accurate way of doing it (that I know of). You can use Adwords keyword planner to see the average traffic by month for a keyword, however this only produces the searches for the exact match that you input. Fortunately you can input multiple keywords, for example if you are looking for the number of searches for an Estate Agents in Springfield you would write in a little list of the likely searches:

• Estate Agents Springfield
• Estate Agents in Springfield
• Springfield Estate Agents

And so on, and so forth. You get the idea. This produces a graph which when you hover over the month, it tells you the combined number of searches for your keyword matches (and breaks it down so you can see how much each phrase contributed). What I would do if I was short on time each month is save the list of phrases for each of your keywords in an excel file and check the total search volume at the beginning of each month for the previous month. This will give you a good idea of whether or not the changes you are making are effecting traffic. Understandably this will initially take some time but once the lists are done it is just a case of a quick check each month.

Using this with Analytics (and annotations, of course) will hopefully give you the more accurate display of how you are performing against the current and past trends.