Sustainable SEO

Part of our job here at SponsoredLinX is to ensure that our clients, current or future, have a sound enough knowledge of the work we perform on their online marketing campaigns, and SEO is no different. The reason for this is so that they can both understand and trust the reasoning behind strategic decisions throughout their campaign/s. Without this basic knowledge, or with ill-informed knowledge, the wrong expectations may be set from the get-go and this could come back to haunt us later.

One foundational element of any SEO campaign is keyword research and strategy. Some believe this process is as simple as copying and pasting your best performing AdWords queries, but in reality the same survival strategy doesn’t always cut it in what are two very different environments.

So what exactly is a keyword in SEO? A keyword is the exact phrase – down to every letter, digit or space in between that someone types into a search engine to find a product or service online. With every keyword comes a completely different set of search results. Google measures the relevance of different web pages to different phrases independently, and on a search-by-search basis. These ‘keywords’ are the building blocks of every SEO campaign. They dictate the entire strategy because they exist as the bridge between your customers’ itch and your website’s scratch.

Unlike in AdWords (PPC), a keyword does not become more achievable the more you’re willing to spend on it. There are hundreds of factors that can dictate whether or not Google will choose your page to be listed as a relevant result for a query. So where we do we start?

When assessing the feasibility of different keywords for an SEO campaign, we always ask ourselves a few fundamental questions first, and it all starts with the website:

1) What are the technical/architectural capabilities of the website? Can we customise title tags, meta-data, URL structure? Can we alter the site and content taxonomy (hierarchy) to better appeal to search engines?
2) Does the site have enough web content?
3) Where is the site hosted? Google.com.au wants to bring its users Australian based websites as results, so they give ‘.com.au’ sites organic weight.
4) What is the existing organic strength of the domain? If this site already has a strong organic presence for some of its most important keywords, do we still need to dedicate some resources to monitoring them? Or can we capture a better return on investment spreading these resources out elsewhere?

Let’s say we have one website that ticks all of these boxes, and another that doesn’t. The website that is easier for us to work with will allow us to communicate with Google a lot more clearly, efficiently and quickly. The website that already has a strong reputation with Google will be able to excel and perform in competitive markets, for tougher keywords. For the website that is missing a lot of these things, it’s a different story.

What this means for SEO strategy, is that keyword competitiveness is relative. How tough a keyword is to rank on the first page of Google isn’t the same for all businesses, it’s simply relative to the capabilities of that business’s website. So if you think your SEO strategy needs updating, or that your website could do with a refresh, contact our Digital Strategy Team here at SponsoredLinX on 1300 859 600 or visit our website to learn more.