SEO Next Steps - After the Basics
What to Do After You Get Your Tags in Order
After getting the website for your business up and running and taking care of the basic aspects of SEO, it can be challenging to know where to go from there. Our clients almost always see immediate benefit from getting their title tags, meta-data, headers, and basic pages in order, but that's just the beginning.
Like everything else in our business, there is no one size fits all prescription. Instead, there are a few general things that we can suggest, depending on the situation. After the SEO Basics, here are a few directions you may choose to go:
Google Adwords
Once you have the foundational steps in SEO taken care of, the next logical goal for most small companies is utilizing Google Adwords. Because it takes some time to get good rankings in Google in most situations, Google Adwords can be a great, cost-effective way to get to the good ranking before organic results can get you there.
Google Adwords accounts are free, but this is a paid service. Granted your ads are properly made and managed, your website will appear at the front of Google long before your content alone can get you there. The price associated with this varies wildly from one market to the next, but it is usually affordable and useful. While Google Adwords runs in the background and siphons traffic (and, hopefully, converting customers) to your site, you can focus on improving other aspects of your site.
Besides affordability, Google Adwords begins working immediately, which is a nice luxury in a largely labor intensive, patience-draining web world.
Content creation
There is a cliche in internet marketing that content is king, and that’s absolutely true. Creating good content that is relevant and useful for your audience takes time, research, skill, and practice, and it’s the long term answer to creating a good website with longtime viability. The first step is make sure you have dedicated, optimized pages for each of your services, From there, it’s a matter of finding out what your customers would benefit from. A blog is a great way to spread information and grab credibility in the field, FAQs can help you nab visitors searching for specific questions, and dedicated pages detailing services or products are a good way to get more, relevant traffic.
Like most web work, this is slow-going and laborious, but is the only reliable, long-term way to get good customers.
Link building
This is perhaps the backbone of SEO after the basics, but link building more complicated and involves a lot of more direct, social outreach. Think of links from other reputable sites as a vote in the wild, mostly lawless internet - each (legitimate, unpaid) one you get tells the search engines that your site is credible, useful, and worth linking to. Creating good content will naturally get shares and links over time, but strategy and some strategic emails to related sites, communication hubs, and blogs will speed up the affair a good deal.
You will want to work with your social connections, webmaster, and good, old-fashioned PR is the backbone of a good link building campaign, and it’s another long affair.
Final Words
All of these options are great, but strategic content creation is, hands down, the most difficult and important. Experience goes a long way, and general writing talent is absolutely necessary for creating readable, interesting, useful content - which is the backbone of your web campaign. Because creating consistent, great content is the key to success and takes such a long time, choosing where to put energy after your initial set-up should always be a matter of situation and needs. As always, we are here to offer suggestions and help - remember to contact us with any questions, and keep an eye out for more tips.