When evaluating a client’s site for the first time, there are a few things I’ve trained myself to look for – those high return actions that can have the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time and with the smallest investment.
Here are five of those things and how we can take advantage of them quickly to get results for your site.
- Unique Content – Step one is to ensure that the site has unique content. Is any of it duplicated, and if so, how much of an issue is the duplication? Google won’t list duplicated content, so if your product pages and service pages are not ranking, you’ll never attract visitors to that content. At the same time, is the unique content you do have at a high enough quality level to be indexed? That’s another thing we’ll look at carefully.
- Content Volume – Quality is more important than quantity but there is a certain minimum quantity level to consider. You need to reach and maintain a high enough degree of consistent quality to ensure your content always remains a top choice for search engines, but you need at least 10-20 pages to seed those rankings.
- Link Volume and Placement – Links should be pointing to your site and out from your site. On your site, a good number is 2-3 links per page of content. Those links can point to other sites or to other pages on your own site.
- Social Integration – Are Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and YouTube buttons (among others) used effectively on your site to drive traffic to those portals and boost overall engagement rates? This is an easy fix that can have a huge impact on bounce rate and return visitor rates.
- The Engagement Factors – Finally, how do people engage with the content on your site? Do they leave comments? Share it with others? Submit their own? What can we install or augment to give people more effective ways to engage and interact with that content?
Make these five changes to your site at the right time and in the right way and you’ll start to see the kinds of changes you’ve been looking for but never saw before. There is a lot more to be done of course.
To rank highly in your industry and start to see real results, you have to do more than just the basics, but this is a great foundation on which to start.
