If you think you’re too busy for SEO, these tips can help you get a handle on your SEO efforts:
1. Make it Manageable
When I was in college I got hired for an SEO internship. I showed up on the first day and my boss showed me to my desk. I began doing research to determine what types of SEO efforts had already been undertaken for their site and making a plan of what needed to be done moving forward. Later on in the day my boss stopped by with a big smile and asked me “So, is the site all optimized now for the search engines?” At first I thought she was kidding (this was, after all, slated as a six month internship). She was not kidding. I looked at her in shock and stammered as I tried to explain that this would be an ongoing thing that we would doing to get more traffic to the site and build on our efforts over time. She replied, “I just want you to optimize it as fast as possible and get that done so you can help out in the warehouse after.”
Trying to tackle too much in the way of SEO too fast will cause you to despise SEO, be essentially ineffective and, ultimately, burn out. It’s better to devote 30 minutes a day to SEO than sit down for an entire day each month to do everything on your SEO-radar. Additionally, setting aside one day a month to devote solely to SEO really flies in the face of what SEO is all about. SEO is concerned with the gradual building of your site’s relevance over time by providing content that people are looking for and can find helpful. SEO means proving to the search engines that your site has value and it can be trusted. None of that happens overnight.
2. Read and Listen
No one knows everything about SEO! SEO professionals are constantly reading to stay up-to-date with the latest practices and sharing information. So, act like the pros. Remind yourself when you’re working on your SEO that you don’t need to be physically doing SEO work to be contributing to your site’s SEO. Reading articles, finding new blogs, attending seminars, watching webinars and following social media conversations all count too!
3. Don’t Forget About Local
Sometimes SEO gets this reputation that it’s kind of like working on your site or blog and then throwing it out there for the world to find, but SEO can be local as well. If your local market is important to your business (like a local service provider or business with a physical store), your SEO efforts can and should be locally focused. Things like setting up Google Places and getting listed on local directories can have a huge SEO benefit as well.
4. Hire the Best
If you choose to hire a digital marketing agency to handle your SEO for you, don’t skimp on the time needed to find a good fit. The time you spend upfront to find a company that understands your business and can provide a solution that’s right for you will really pay off, because having to go back and do it again in a few months if the company doesn’t work out will certainly take longer.
5. Only Monitor the Important Data
It can be easy to get data paralysis when trying to monitor the success of your SEO efforts because there are a lot of metrics available to you within Google Analytics. So pick a few metrics that really mean something to your business and just follow those. That’s not to say that you want to ignore everything else because no one metric tells the whole story, but if you’re pressed for time, don’t worry about the metrics that are nice but unessential.
What other tricks do you use to keep a handle on your SEO when you get really busy? Tell us below and we’ll share them with our readers!
By Kate Pierce. Kate Pierce is the owner of LionShark Digital Marketing LLC, a West Michigan internet marketing company. Her areas of expertise include Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Web Consulting for small businesses, Copywriting and Local Online Marketing. She lives in the Grand Rapids area with her husband and enjoys cooking, watching sports and spending time outdoors. Like a true digital marketing expert (i.e. geek), she loves talking about marketing theory and SEM trends… so don’t say you weren’t warned!