Ingredients of a successful SEO Campaign

Everyone wants to be page one/top five on Google for keyword phrases that customers enter into the search engine when looking to buy a company’s products and services. But, almost no-one recognizes how difficult that is, or the skill set required to accomplish it. Try searching on Google for a phrase that is important to your business. We’ll bet there are at least 10,000 competing pages…and you want to be top five. To complicate matters, the search engines update their algorithms (that dictate rankings) regularly without letting anyone know what the changes were. So, there is no recipe because the rules to the ranking game are fluid. Earning page one organic rankings isn’t easy. That said, here are the key components to a winning SEO campaign:

• CONTENT
  “Content Is King” has become a popular phrase in SEO conversations over the years, but we believe that DMS founder, Kelley Lott, coined it in 1998. At any rate, there was a time many years ago, when repeating a keyword phrase on a webpage would result in high rankings. But, there is SO much more required for a page to rank high today. However, strong semantic content — as defined by the current search engine crawler algorithms — related to the chosen keyword phrases will always be a cornerstone of high organic search rankings.

• SITE SPEED
  This is a fairly recent development, but it is a very significant element in Google’s algorithm. There are tools to help website owners identify whether their site pages are loading fast by Google’s standards like this one: pingdom.com . But keeping pages attractive, interesting, and informative and still loading fast is not easy.

• MOBILE FRIENDLY
  Another factor that has been recently elevated to a key factor is how well the web pages display on mobile devices. Mobile searches have overtaken desktop searches within the past couple of years. Try using Google’s mobile friendly test to see how your website rates: search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly. So, designing a website today is not just about how it looks, but how it performs on both desktop computers and mobile devices with mobile now more important to high search rankings.

• FRESHNESS
  The search engines (particularly Google) reward fresh/updated content in a big way. So, adding new content and updating existing content that are related to a company’s important keyword search phrases is time well spent.

• DOMAIN AUTHORITY (LINK BUILDING)
  What sets Google apart from the other search engines? Lots of things today, but it began with the “Pagerank” element in their algorithm that factored in online popularity into the rankings. Simply stated, domain authority is the number of quality backlinks published on other websites to the site in question. For example, 1,064 other websites have deemed that the content on the DMS website is important enough to their visitors that they have published links on their sites back to our site. Backlink building is a long-term process but well worth the effort, particularly with respect to Google rankings.

• SOCIAL MEDIA
  While it’s important for every organization to have a strong and consistent social media presence, we believe that too many organizations spend too much time/money on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc. Unless the products/services of an organization have strong interest appeal to their target market, social media efforts like blogs (unless they engage many users) are a low percentage game. If you’re selling sneakers, athletic apparel, allergy relief medicine, or something that lots of people are trying to learn about, then these social media sites can be a key component of your Internet marketing strategy. However, only a small percentage of local search companies (with a radius of 60 miles or less) are offering products/services that people want to read about in their spare time. For most local businesses, time and money is better spent on search engine marketing.

• META TAGS
  There are also embedded coding considerations that help pages rank high, but those methods are a bit too complex to discuss here.