Looking for Feedback on my SEO Strategy

ant19

Hey,

I was recently responsible for updating my brothers site and would love some feedback on our current SEO strategy.

- Focused on optimising page speed and achieved 100/100 score on Google's PageSpeed tool.
- Added a Wordpress blog to our site and have set posts to automatically update Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter.
- Occasionally boost Facebook posts to reach a larger audience.
- Added the Local SEO and Yoast SEO plugin to our Wordpress blog.
- Configured the site for pretty urls.
- Removed a lot of pages and focused on quality content rather than having loads of low quality pages.
- Added schema.org markup.

Are we on the right track? How long would it take to get a ROI? I've been learning about SEO since 2012 so I have a good idea of what works and what doesn't work, would love some feedback on our current strategy.

Thanks,
Anthony

PaulPinnacle

- Focused on optimising page speed and achieved 100/100 score on Google's PageSpeed tool.
Speed is fantastic for UX, so a great start. Assuming you haven't had to sacrifice UX/design/aesthetics too much to achieve it, it's a great start.

- Added a Wordpress blog to our site and have set posts to automatically update Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Having a blog is a starting point, but it's all about how you use it that matters. Keep the quality high, add value for users, solve their problems and use it to establish trust in the site and promote the business as experts in the area they operate in and it'll be very valuable.

- Occasionally boost Facebook posts to reach a larger audience.
Social promotion is a great way to expand reach and increase discoverability of the content. As with all things, it's fine in theory but it's the execution that matters. You could get terrific RoI from this, or you could just blow your budget.

The real trick here is to ensure you're targeting it at the right people, whether that's very targeted customers that are fit your target market or even just reaching a handful of influencers in the market that if you raise awareness with and seed your content through they'll go on to spread your name and share your content organically to their followers.

Keep it super targeted with clear goals and you should do well there.

- Added the Local SEO and Yoast SEO plugin to our Wordpress blog.
Repeating myself a little, but it's about the execution rather than the tool again here.

That said, those tools are a great starting point and used well they'll give you a fantastic technical SEO base to work from. Joost has some great guides on how/why/when to use the various settings in the Yoast tools, so if you've gone through them you're probably doing well there (the canonical tags is the one part most commonly needed and yet not used, or understood, so if you've doubts on parts of the tool do shout).

- Configured the site for pretty urls.
Assuming you're using keywords naturally and focusing on the UX of the user that'll see the URLs on a results page rather than on trying to keyword stuff for Google... sounds great. Lots of good guides out there on optimising titles, URLs and Meta Descriptions (be sure the guides focus on users and CTR, if it's about keyword density and sounds spammy avoid it) so lots of stuff to dive into there if you're ever in doubt.

- Removed a lot of pages and focused on quality content rather than having loads of low quality pages.
If they were genuinely low quality and a bit spammy, good.

If they were just 'average' and 'not bad', it's probably worth consolidating them into a smaller number of deep dive pieces and spending time adding further value to them and turning them into pieces of great content. You can then redirect the old URLs to the new content that replaced it (if there were any links/traffic to the old URLs).

If it was just low-quality trash, yeah... just kill it.

- Added schema.org markup.
Great stuff. (If you've ever any doubts there, you can always check the markup in Google's Structured Data testing tool)


Are we on the right track?
Yes... but it's hard to know.

They're all elements that should be part of a good strategy and it sounds like you're trying to do the right things for the right reasons, but it's all about the execution.

Be sure to add in monitoring Google Search Console data (and Bing Webmaster Tools) to (help) stay on top of crawl issues, indexation and any notifications they might throw your way.

How long would it take to get a ROI?
Without knowing how long it took you to do (or how much you paid to have it done), how well it was executed, what competitive landscape it was done in, the ins and outs of the financial details to know profits per sale, how well the conversion funnel is built.... it's very much a how long is a piece of string.

They're all tasks that should be done and that will add value if that's any consolation. You'll also be in a much better position to tackle them or other related tasks in the future, so much further along in the learning curve that has a value for both you and the business (assuming you do help them out again :P).

Hit into your analytics and check your traffic figures from before/after the work, into your conversion rates from before/after the work, into the revenue/profit figures from before/after the work and you'll soon start to paint a clearer picture of what the benefits have been. If you have details of your average lifetime value of a customer and how many new customers this has earned you'd then be able to do projections on longer term benefits. The SEO gains you've made from improving content and gaining links will continue to benefit the business going forward too, so has a lifetime value of its own to consider. When you start crunching the numbers versus the cost of implementing it your RoI will start to take shape.

ant19

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the reply, helps clarify a lot.

Speed is fantastic for UX, so a great start. Assuming you haven't had to sacrifice UX/design/aesthetics too much to achieve it, it's a great start.

The sacrifice I made is invalid html. I had trouble fixing the PageSpeed error "Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content". I think the idea is to defer the sites css from loading before the page loads, only loading the essential code inline. One option I found was to load the CSS using JavaScript, I had concerns about users whose browsers might not have JavaScript enabled so I used a method of placing <link css> right before the closing body tag.

This results in invalid HTML. I'm not sure if this will have a negative impact on our rank but i have read it's recommended in the webmaster guidelines.

Having a blog is a starting point, but it's all about how you use it that matters. Keep the quality high, add value for users, solve their problems and use it to establish trust in the site and promote the business as experts in the area they operate in and it'll be very valuable.

Joost has some great guides on how/why/when to use the various settings in the Yoast tools, so if you've gone through them you're probably doing well there (the canonical tags is the one part most commonly needed and yet not used, or understood, so if you've doubts on parts of the tool do shout).

My brother is updating the blog with previous work that he has done. We typically include a brief description of the work and installation photos, then share to various social networks. As we are targeting specific groups on Facebook, we have seen impressive stats on visitors to our site so I feel that's positive. However, the Yoast SEO plugin reports that we have less than 300 words in our body text and our average SEO score reports are OK. Is this an area we should improve in?

Assuming you're using keywords naturally and focusing on the UX of the user that'll see the URLs on a results page rather than on trying to keyword stuff for Google... sounds great. Lots of good guides out there on optimising titles, URLs and Meta Descriptions (be sure the guides focus on users and CTR, if it's about keyword density and sounds spammy avoid it) so lots of stuff to dive into there if you're ever in doubt.

This is how I have my routes set up.

url/
url/product1
url/product2
url/gallery
url/blog
url/reviews
url/contact

In url/gallery, I'm loading the various image categories dynamically instead of loading a new page each time and going to a new URL.

I was just thinking would it better to have the url like so.

url/gallery/category1
url/gallery/category2

or even

url/gallery/product1/category1
url/gallery/product1/category2
url/gallery/product2/category1

Without knowing how long it took you to do (or how much you paid to have it done), how well it was executed, what competitive landscape it was done in, the ins and outs of the financial details to know profits per sale, how well the conversion funnel is built.... it's very much a how long is a piece of string.

They're all tasks that should be done and that will add value if that's any consolation. You'll also be in a much better position to tackle them or other related tasks in the future, so much further along in the learning curve that has a value for both you and the business (assuming you do help them out again ).

I've been learning about web development, marketing since my brother launched his company in 2012. At that time I had very little experience in this stuff but offered to help him get off the ground. When I'm off college I work with my brother applying stuff that I have learned. This is the third site that I have done.

We have seen some improvement since I started learning. We are ranking well in Google Local as well as organic listings for some of our targeted queries. Our goal is to be on page one for each of our targeted queries. I feel like what you are saying is you think the groundwork is there, it's just how we execute the strategy now. My brother is going to update his blog regularly and next summer, i'll start working on the site again when I'm off college. Just hoping we'll see a better rank before then.

Thanks again for the advice and feedback Paul, definitely got me thinking!

Regards,
Anthony