Everyone wants top search engine placement.  Unfortunately, too many people just pick a few phrases and start building links.  There are many pitfalls to that strategy.  In one scenario, you achieve first place ranking only to find out that no one searches for the term.  In another, you achieve first place ranking and your traffic increases, but it turns out people who search for that phrase don’t convert well.  This list goes on and on.  Here are some of the steps WealthNet likes to take it’s customers through.

First, the stuff everyone wants to skip but that ends up having a very high ROI

1. Keyword Analysis – It’s important to define how big your internet market is. We research dozens of phrases related to the clients business to figure out how many searches are being done for which the clients offerings are a potential solution.
2. Keyword Testing- Just because people search for “cars” doesn’t mean they want to buy one. We conduct a quick analysis of each phrases “buying intention” to make sure that we target purchase motivated search phrases as opposed to research motivated search phrases.
3. Competitive Analysis- Who’s already in the #1 position, and what’s it going to take to knock them off?
4. Landing Page Optimization- No sense spending money to rank highly in the search engines if the traffic is not going to convert because the page they end up on isn’t capable of closing the deal.

Now for the stuff people know they want, but has a much lower ROI if the prior steps aren’t performed first.

1. On Page SEO – This is a one time or annual service in which we optimize the URLs and internal linking structure, “canonicalize” repeat content, substitute keywords in existing copy where feasible, etc. to make sure that the site ranks as high as it can for target keywords.
2. Content Generation – This is an ongoing service in which we write blog entries or other articles designed to increase the clients ability to rank for target keywords.
3. Link Building – The real work horse of SEO. The quality of the link building program depends on many factors such as page rank of linking pages, if links have the nofollow attribute, how many phrases we are targeting, etc. Ideally, the quantity and quality of links are informed by the competitive analysis. Are you trying to displace someone who has 1k mediocre links to 50 pages, or someone who has 50k high quality links to 2000 pages? Obviously, the latter scenario requires a significantly higher investment.

Did you analyze your keywords and competition before launching your SEO campaign?  Did you skip that part?  Let us know how well your program is working.  And speaking of link building, don’t forget that our blog has the CommentLuv and KeywordLuv plugins, so you can get some SEO done right now by adding value to the conversation.