Why?

Often in SEO campaigns we think about how effective our SEO activities are using analytics and other SEO measurements but forget to analyse how much money and time were invested in the activity in the first place. Peter Drucker was the influential management guru who said that it is only when we can manage our time that we can manage anything at all.

How?

To carry out an effective SEO campaign that earns high ROI you should consider the time that you spend on SEO activities throughout your working day. To really understand the cost of your SEO activities we suggest keeping a record of all the SEO activities  you undertake in a day and do this for a week. This should should give you a good overview of what you have really been spending your time on.

You could classify the activities that you undertaken:

• Writing Content
• Link Building
• Social Networking
• Client and Internal Meetings
• Research and Development
• Other

Outcome

Once you have gathered the information on how you spend your time you can look at:

• How you can save time on your SEO actitivies in the future.
• Which SEO activities take longer than you realised.
• Which SEO activities are actually providing a better/worse ROI than you had previsouly thought.

When we did this in our business we found that generally we underestimated the time that we spent in meeting and one-to-one discussions. This doesn’t mean that these aren’t invaluable – they are – but it prompted us to look for areas where we could achieve the same outcome from meetings and save time in the process.

It is also a great way to assess how much of your time is spent directly on achieving your SEO goals and increasing the effectiveness of your SEO.

So go ahead, give this excersise a try and see what you discover about your own SEO campaigns. We hope that you find it as useful excersise as we did!

First, you need to be clear of your business’ strategy. A good way to think about this is to consider the purpose of your business and the purpose of your SEO campaign. Once you have these clearly defined it becomes easier to develop long term SEO goals that will meet your business’ requirements.

To define the purpose of your business you need to ask yourself ‘Why does the business exist?’ Once you have considered this question, write your thoughts down. Next, consider ‘Why does my SEO campaign exist?’. Again, write down your thoughts.

With this in mind, think about the following framework:

The answer to these questions will help you to identify long term goals for your SEO campaign. The real benefit in doing this is that it will allow you to tie the goals of your SEO campaign to the objectives of your business.

The SEO goals that you set should be specific, measurable, results driven and most importantly should inform the execution of your SEO campaign.

Our opinion is that until recently SEOs have been creating content for their clients which has distinct similarities to ‘infomercials’ – providing poor user  value and with poorly concealed marketing messages.

However, more recently we have been seeing much content being generated that is genuinely useful and more easily likened to quality newspaper stories – sure, there is an agenda but they certainly provide the user with genuinely useful information which they are looking for.

Drivers Of Quality

• Search Engines – The search Engines have been increasing the sophisication of their algorithims continously for many years now and are becoming more effective at combatting crude techniques for increasing rankings of websites that offer poor user value.
• Social Media Platforms – The engines that give power to the user to rate, rank and increase the exposure of the websites that they are interested in. 24 months ago some SEOs used techniques to manipulate the websites that gain the most exposure in the social media, however increasingly social media platforms are becoming so sophisticated at preventing abuse that the effort required to engineer social media platform results are not worth it.
• Users - A force to be reckoned with. More sophisticated than ever and no longer willing to accept poor content developed only to promote a service or product. If the content is promoting a service or product it had better be even better than ever before.

With the increases in sophistication of search engines, social media platforms and users how does the search engine optimisation industry provide value?

A good SEO company is in touch with the target audience of it’s clients and provides a vital link between the User and the Client. As a SEO company we are in a unique position to listen to the user and understand what they demand in terms of information and content. By understanding what users want and being a major actor in getting that content published SEOs are driving content on the internet forward.