SEO management involves integrating different parts of SEO to accomplish your online goals, including driving more leads, increasing your brand exposure and growing your share of traffic.
Today, with more than 51% of traffic coming from organic search, doing SEO effectively becomes increasingly important. Search algorithm enhancements have driven the growing complexity of SEO optimization. Increasing competition is pushing many companies to create more content and to make it better quality, more engaging, and mobile-optimized.
SEO Management in 4 Simple Steps
- Identify demand
- Benchmark competition
- Optimize content
- Measure Impact
Identify Demand
Targeting demand means learning which topics interest your audience and uncovering the queries your customers use to look for your product or service.
First you want to understand which topics your website already ranks for and what keywords are already driving good traffic and make sure to preserve and defend those results. Second, do keyword research to find new topics to expand your reach and new traffic or further engage your intended audience.
The research and analysis involved in targeting demand makes it one of the most complex stages in the SEO cycle. Competitive pressure pushes companies to create more content and target more keywords. Marketers usually require multiple tools to get the necessary information and insights. High-quality targeting consumes a considerable amount of time. Even with free or inexpensive tools, marketers must find the hours needed to track down the information. That is why scalability remains a major SEO management challenge – doing a due diligence this way on 100s of keywords is possible, but it can hardly be done for 1000s of keywords.
Benchmark Competition
Competition usually presents a challenge for marketers, but it is also a big source of opportunity. Each of your competitors is playing their own SEO game to increase their share of voice, and you can leverage their results for your own benefit. Understanding which keywords and pages worked best for your competitors can guide your own keyword selection and make it easier to create content that will drive traffic.
Key insights for data-driven demand targeting and decision making:
- Show which keywords drive the most traffic to your competitors’ sites and identify the pages ranking for each keyword
- Provide keyword gap analysis – the words that your competitors rank for that you do not
- Show the top-10 pages ranking for a keyword with information on all the important on-page SEO factors, including the H1, title, meta description and alt tags.
- Show trended SEO performance of your domain versus your competitors
- Generate a Keyword Gap Analysis target list vs. each of your competitors
Create & Optimize Content
Creating content is always manual – it requires words and images and sticking to your planned cadence to keep your content fresh and your website breadth expanding. To have enough time for content creation, you need full SEO management platform functionality. As SEO analysis, content creation, optimization, and content measurement become more efficient, you will engender a culture of content in your company. The culture of content means motivating everyone in the content value chain to contribute ideas and assets to content production in their area of expertise. This distributed content creation labor can significantly boost your production capacity and keep the cadence highly competitive without impacting variable or project budget.
Measure content
So how well is SEO working for you? This is the question many marketers fail to answer, resulting in low SEO budgets and limited ROI. The lack of data on how SEO drives revenue makes it hard to influence senior decision-makers and help them see the benefits of SEO.
Report. Once you have all the right data in place, the next step in SEO management is reporting it to your stakeholders.