Professional SEO Specialist - janet bartoli roussos

Time to review anything that can be read about this industry - search marketing.

I read quite a bit, but less than I did four years ago, not because I know more, but this was more a matter of eliminating those resources that aren’t reputable or offer the same old basic stuff, no challenge or thought necessary - aka fluff.

Spotlight on: Search Marketing Standard magazine. New publication it’s been a year now, I got their debut issue last summer. It was offered to me as a way to get the magazine into the hands of its audience, they sent it to me as an owner/operator of an internet marketing consultancy.

I have really enjoyed reading this magazine, includes numerous and varied categories: SEO, pay-per-click, case studies, interviews with industry experts - so far the typical stuff you would see, but my favorite category is “under the hood”. This section is all technical SEO related. Since having a technical background in IT, I find this section to be really interesting, and written by Jamie Sirovich the seoegghead.com guy, and the guy who co-wrote “professional search engine optimization with PHP” 2007 –a good read!

So go check it out for yourself - the magazine website is searchmarketingstandard.com, the publisher is a really nice guy too - Boris Mordikovich - very interested in feedback and how to improve this publication.

Not too many industry related hard copies out there that I can think of, but this one is very worthwhile. If you have any publication you recommend - share it!

There are numerous ways to go about this, but to organize yourself somewhat you should really research the competitive landscape first.

One of the first things any competant SEO person should do is to identify your website’s true competitors by analyzing high conversion keyword phrases. You can use whatever keyword tools your familiar with, or read those that I commented on in a previous keyword research tool post.

Identify your most relevant search engines (Google, Yahoo, others?) and identify the top competitors for each phrase. Repeat this process for each of your high conversion and high activity phrases and then compare across keyword phrases. The site that rises to the top SERPs with the most consistency is the true competitor to beat. This could be challenging, not the exercise, the competitor.

Website Goals - Got any? You should –

1. Increase Traffic from X to Y
2. Increase Sales Conversion from 5% to 10%
3. Increase Repeat Customer Retention

This list could be very extensive, but it should be clearly written out and very well planned and organized. Its very easy to say, I can rank #2 in Google for “NY Trees”, big deal, seriously who can’t anymore, it isnt 1995 anymore. Website analytics and overall SEO has gotten to a more sophisticated level and should be thought and planned out well.

Discuss the overall strategy with your client’s goals and audience in mind then –Plan your work and work your plan - a real intelligent project manager professional once said. 

If you have any better ideas on this topic, I would love to hear them. I am testing out a new strategy with a particular client and am always open to new and exciting ideas.