Know your customers and review your site
Knowing your customers
You must be in touch with the demands of the marketplace if you're going to create successful SEO copy for your website. Many site owners think they understand their customers but merely use their own preconceived notions of customer needs. To really understand your customers, you must interact with them as often as possible. Below are a few ways you can do this.
- Gather keyword intelligence from your site logs or site search
- Survey customers to get feedback after every sale or periodically
- Provide customer reviews on your site or conduct an annual customer audit
- Use blogs and social networking to interact with customers
- Communicate with customers through newsletters based on their interests
Before starting an SEO campaign, it's important to review your site to learn how it is currently performing.
Conducting an SEO site review
The purpose of an SEO site review is to assess the current search effectiveness of your site and spell out what needs to be done to improve performance. The data is also used as a baseline to track performance over time. The site review can reveal unknown facts about your site's code and structure that might be impeding your search engine rankings.
It is wise to hire an external consultant to conduct your site review because this person comes with a different perspective and can open your eyes to things you wouldn't think of yourself. If you hire an experienced SEO consultant to identify and prioritize the changes necessary to improve your site's performance, you'll have a blueprint for success.
Another option is the Website Health Check Tool offered by Aaron Wall, which provides some of the information you need to improve your site. It can tell you if Google is indexing your site and how quickly it is indexing your new pages. It can flag duplicate content pages and point out canonical URL issues, etc.
After the site review, it's time to implement changes and build web pages.
