SEO Planning is the first step toward achieving results.

This essential element is often disregarded.  All senior manger realise the importance of “knowing your market”.  The Internet market is however a little different as what lies behind the website is often critical to success.

The Internet market is driven by search engines and the devices search engines use do not consider the size of the business.  Instead search engines focuses on the relevance of the structure,  content and reputation of a website to satisfy what people are searching for.

For example by not having the correct structure your website may never be seen in search result for mobile users.  Why?  If your website is to slow or does not render well on a mobile device then you will have lost the mobile user market.  As mobile Internet is on the increase this is certainly not desirable.

In our “Planning and Monitoring” we research the top ten traffic generating keywords as the first stage.  There is little point in investing in obtaining top search result positions for “dead end” keywords.

We look at the full range of options provided by Google Insights to ascertain seasonality and trends over 4 years but also what is “hot” and rising over the last 90 days:

On establishing the top ten keywords we then research the top ten competitors for each of the keywords.  We divide the top ten competitors  into two genres true competitors and influencers.  For example if I were BP then Shell would be a true competitor.  However, chances are for any given keyword there will be those that do not compete for business but are blocking a top ten position.  The most obvious “blocker” is WikiPedia and whilst it is a blocker it is also an influencer.  Contributing to WikiPedia is a good thing to build your website reputation.

Our research also considers who in the top ten could be an ally.  For example a comparison website may be an excellent alternate rout to market.  Once we have profiled the top ten websites for each of the top ten keywords we can view the market share that each website has across market. Individual profiles are created for each competitor and is compared to your existing website.  This allows us to view Key Performance Indicators (KPI) on an “like for like” against each competitor but also for each keyword and the entire market.

The KPIs provide us with a benchmark of the entire market, individual keyword and each competitor that we must better in order to achieve results.

SEO Planning is the first step toward achieving results but monitoring allows us to continually improve.  The results of the initial planning stage is refreshed frequently to measure market change refining the benchmark to provide continuous improvement.