Key Actions to Move the SEO Performance Needle
The following is a quick recap of my PubCon Austin presentation detailing some key steps you can take to move the needle immediately.
I often use many of these when starting a new project, waiting to get initial support from the development team, and/or finalizing paperwork with procurement. You can show nearly immediate results by making some of these changes quickly.
Action 1: Focus on the basics.
Ensure you have maximized indexability. If you are not indexed, you cannot rank and cannot get clicked.
Action 2: Focus on Eliminating Crawl Errors
For every error a Search Engine needs to deal with, it may miss one less relevant page. In the presentation, I showed an example of a site with nearly 15 million errors, and no one was working to reduce them. One comment from the SEO team was, “Our Enterprise SEO tool does not have that metric, so we did not consider it important.”
Action 3: Confirm Index Rates
I showed an example of a site with 20 versions in different countries. Each had 549 pages, but only 12 to 20 were indexed. The question is, which ones are not, and why did Google flag the same errors on every version? We imported the XML site map into our Index Checker tool and could immediately tell which pages were not indexed.
Action 4: Use HREFLang Element for Local Language sites
In this case, I showed where the global page ranked in Australia for a specific product search. They have an Australian page, but the signals to the worldwide page were greater. On the global page, you can only “learn about the product,” but on the Australian page, you can “buy the product.”
Action 5: Top-Ranking Low-Clicked Keywords
In this example, I showed a couple of keyword phrases ranking in the top 5 positions but getting a fraction of the clicks. Changing the meta description to make it more relevant increased clicks to 14.81% and drove nearly 20k additional visitors.
Action 6: End-of-Life Product Opportunities
Showed a case where there were over 500k searches for 20 products no longer marketed by the company.? They removed the content from the site as it was not actively sold, but people were still interested. In my experience, they want the new model, support, parts, or something related. In this case, the company captured $400k worth of opportunity by adding a page giving the searcher those options.
Action 7: Focus on High Margin Products
In this case, we discussed how a person who felt overwhelmed by all of the SEO tasks and new content needs focused on the top 10 highest-margin products and sold $48k in products in 2.5 weeks.
Action 8: Monitor Preferred Landing Pages
This example showed a product search with a non-relevant paid ad and a PDF manual for the product ranking #2. Was the company spending significant money on paid search? The SEO agency showed they were ranking when they replaced the PDF with an actual product page; paid clicks decreased, and traffic and revenue from organic increased.
Action 9: Cost of Not Ranking and High CPC Non-Ranking
I combined these two sections. In DataPrizm, we can show the cost of not ranking by looking at the missed opportunity from organic and multiplying that by the cost per click. I also suggested using paid search terms by cost per click and then seeing what is or is not ranking. If a word is at the top of your CPC range and not ranking, getting it to rank will have a significant impact.
Action 10: Link Recovery vs. Link Acquisition
In this case, I showed a site with more than 2 million links to the home page. We identified links to the home page that should go to the product page. Contacted by phone, the sites shifted over 100 to the product page, resulting in a top rank. It was a win for both sides.
