SEO – You Know You Want It!

With 3 SEO Firms and No Movement, We Gave Them a Slam Dunk and Proven Numbers   

SEO: Organic Search PFA “Organic Search – The Client’s SEO Report

Introduction to Organic Search

Organic search is a method for entering one or a plurality of search items in a single data string into a search engine. Organic search results are listings on search engine results pages that appear because of their relevance to the search terms, as opposed to their being advertisements. In contrast, non-organic search results may include pay-per-click advertising.

Every business wants to show up on the top of search results when consumers are searching for product or service that they sell. Every single day millions of people turn to Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines to help them find what they are looking for.

People use search engines to get more information about the products or services that they are interested in purchasing, as well as the businesses that they are interested in purchasing from. Consumers will turn to search engines before doing business with a large national company, and they will also utilize search engines when planning to make local purchases as well.

Reaching the top of the search results takes a lot of hard work and a solid SEO strategy. When done correctly, search engine optimization can help your business attract more leads and sales, which results in more revenue.

If you are not making an effort to improve your organic search engine ranking positions you are missing opportunities on a daily basis.

So, the effectiveness of an organic search depends upon how the search engine perceives our eCommerce site as unique, more closely matching the user’s search criteria, meaningful content, secure site (using SSL) etc.

As part of our Go-Live, one of our clients is already made into full SSL (secure site). Hence that factor will be having a positive effect on the organic search already.

The Google webmaster dashboard was used by us to analyze the SEO performance of the client and the improvements that can be brought in to increase the Conversion Rate as well as iron out other SEO deficiencies.

Some Causes for the Organic Traffic Drop

• New Website, Change in content, URLs, New Pages
• Indexing Everything without Pruning the Content;
• Duplicate Content Internal and External
• Google Algorithm Changes & Updation*
• Changes in User Search Behavior – Check Google Trends
• Competitors working on their SEO; SEO is a persistent effort not onetime affair.

New Website

Whenever a re-platforming is done, there are a few procedures to be followed to ensure that the SEO benefits accrued with the old site are not withered away. The following suggested steps have been implemented by our client’s IT team and Sterlite.

1. Ensure that the page protocol is not inconsistent with the crawled pages. This has been taken care by using proper 301 redirects at the apache level from http to https.
2. Use proper Canonicalized URLs for PDP pages – This has already been implemented by Sterlite.
3. Ensure that the robots.txt is blocking the content that should not be indexed and allow the content that should be indexed. This has already been implemented by Sterlite.
4. Ensure that the old URLS are given a proper 301 redirects to the new relevant URLs. The client’s IT team identified these and the Sterlite team has already configured these 301 redirects.

Change in Content

Content is one of the most important Google ranking factors. Content has been an important ranking factor for a while — but in recent years, we’ve seen a shift away from keyword-focused content towards more relevant content written in natural language.

In fact, the SearchMetrics study cited above found that just 53% of the top 20 queries have keywords in their title tag, and less than 40% of landing pages have keywords in their H1. This number is dropping year-over-year, which “clearly demonstrates that Google evaluates content according to its relevance—and not by the inclusion of individual keywords.”

So, what exactly does “relevant” content look like? The short answer is: comprehensive, at the same time, should not be a duplicate

This is where the client has to put in lot of efforts. The current site is lacking content on many pages as well as the content is having duplicates. Effort must be put in to weed out these duplicates as well as improve the content on the pages to improve SEO ranking.

Creating Landing pages around a focus keyword, product or theme is actually a good way to attract traffic and get good SEO rankings. The new site design leveraging ATG Content Management System + Endeca templates actually make it easy for the business users to create landing pages easily.

Sterlite team can help the site in having a quick turnaround in creating landing pages, content etc., by working from off-shore on a regular basis too, if the client wants help.

Mobile-first design increases SEO ranking and the new website has already been created by Sterlite with a mobile-first design in focus only.

Google Algorithm Changes & Google Updates

Google recently changed their algorithm and also updated their SEO policies, which caused many websites to lose their ranking or got their ranking adjusted. Hence it is clear that SEO must be a constant affair and the site has to keep their strategies in sync with google changes to reap the benefits of updates and newer SEO policies.

Changes in User Search behavior

The Google webmaster tool gives lot of insights into the site users’ behavioral patterns and regularly analyzing the results in that tool will give the site insight into any change in behavioral pattern and do a course correction in terms of adding newer content, newer landing pages etc.,

The competitors are also undertaking similar exercises with their SEO and hence it becomes imperative to keep an eye on the competitor sites as well as keep the content in the sites fresh, up-to-date and attractive so as to not lose the SEO advantage gained by painstaking efforts.

Summary

So, to summarize, the SEO efforts must be put towards the following:

1. Research Keywords and Identify Target Keywords
2. Concentrate on on-page Optimization
3. Develop Content Strategy
4. Attract High-Quality Links
5. Understand that SEO is not a Destination, but a never-ending Journey

How to increase Organic Traffic

1. Content – remove duplication within the site
2. Check Google Webmaster for issues and guidelines
3. Check Google Search Console guidelines; Fix the issues
4. Redefine Keyword strategy based on user behavior
5. Mobile First indexing – Google guidelines
6. Continuous efforts in SEO Implementation, Monitoring – Technical & Content
7. Immediate content improvements

Your implementation may be different but the outcome will be the same. In the long run it is simply about getting you more traffic and hitting home runs!

For a free, no hassle phone consultation, contact us today.