Your search-engine visibility strategy
If you care about people finding you on the internet, you care about search engines. And you already know how tricky it can be to gain and retain valuable high placement in their results pages. Some search engine marketing firms sell services by promising high rankings, but many good minds dispute the value or even the legitimacy of some such services.
External Design just focuses on what works. If high rankings are important to your business — especially for search terms and phrases for which there are many competing web sites — you need a visibility strategy. And you need to track it over time in order to make informed course corrections amid the changing internet landscape.
Optimizing for high rankings
How can you know what works?
Search-engine rankings fluctuate, that's their nature. Say you need consistent high rankings for several
competitive keywords. Tracking the results of your search engine optimizations will help you to evaluate and
improve your visibility strategy. Having regular access to hard data and unbiased reporting will
be invaluable to you.
"We believe objective, quantifiable data is critical to gauging the effectiveness-over-time of your visibility strategy. At first it may feel like tough love but, in the end, everyone wins."
Search-engine optimization (SEO), the art of achieving and maintaining good, high rankings in the search engines, is delicate and requires specialized knowledge. These organic rankings are very different from pay-per-click and other monetized schemes. Optimizing for high rankings must be done with full knowledge of what can happen when good intentions go awry. At least one SEO firm, and all the client sites it had worked on, was banned from Google because of unapproved practices (often referred to as "spamming the search engines").
This and other events make it clear: a site's owner pays the price for bad SEO practices, even if unaware of those tactics. If you elect to use an SEO service, be absolutely certain they are reputable. If possible, get expert consultation on that firm's proposed approach. Conversely, if you elect to do this job in-house, be sure your staff is expert and stays up to date on current search-engine practices.
Audit the results of your search engine optimization
Detailed rankings reports can help guide your in-house visibility strategists or the work of outside optimization consultants. The reports can show your current rankings, ranking trends over time, competing web sites and more — all for multiple keywords and phrases, on multiple web pages, as ranked in the indexes of multiple search engines.
Visibility Statistics, mini-summary* |
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First Place Rankings: |
Top 5: |
Top 10: |
Top 20: |
Top 30: |
Moved Up: |
Moved Down: |
Same: |
Total: |
net: |
Keywords: 24 |
Engines: 11 |
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*This summary is from many pages of reports and charts that help to verify the effectiveness of your online marketing campaigns.
- results from multiple search engines
- rankings for each of multiple web pages
- rankings for multiple keywords & keyword phrases
- trend reports of rankings-change over time, by keyword and page
- search engine submissions included, if requested
- optionally, suggestions for code and content optimization
It's painless to have accurate, third-party reports that measure how changes to your site, changes to competitors' sites and ambient, net-wide factors affect your search-engine prominence. A set of reports can be generated as frequently as you like, with a regular schedule usually preferable.
Contact
us for search-engine rankings reports
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