SEO How-To Guide: The Best Practices For Marketers

With the age of digitalization and more and more businesses looking forward to taking their business online, the growth prospectives for digital marketers have also grown immensely.

The primary objective of digital marketing is promoting a business or its services before the right set of audiences. Since digital promotions are measurable, they offer a far more feasible approach to results-driven campaigns.

Of course, to achieve the right results, your customers rely upon your knowledge and expertise. And if you cannot provide them with the right strategy, they’ll sooner or later ditch you and lookout for a new prospect to get them the desired results.

Since every business is different, you cannot use the same strategy for each and every client you partner with.

So, what are these practices that can help you design the right strategy for your client?

Know Your Client First

To begin with, you need to understand your client and the industry they operate in. Unless you are completely aware of your client, you cannot identify and cater to their needs. For example, if you are proposing a guest posting service to your client, you need to maintain niche relevancy. And in order to maintain niche relevancy, you need to identify the industry.

You can simply consult your clients for a quick run-up through their business model and how do they serve their customers. Moreover, once you know your client, it becomes easier for you to identify their target audience.

Knowing the target audience you can very easily target the platforms and practices that you need to undertake. Only the right practices would fetch you the accurate results. For example, if your client is a seller for leather bags, identifying the target market for your client, you can propose the target keywords.

Keep Up With The Latest Updates

Although understanding your client’s needs is indispensable, you need to be aware of SEO updates at the same time. Especially when your practices are designed keeping in mind the most popular search engine- Google.

Google keeps on rolling out minor updates from time to time. While there are some major updates including the Humming Bird, the Panda, and the Pigeon, you also need to learn about the micro-updates known as Freds. Familiarizing with each and every update you can outsmart your competitors.

What you can do is include the minor updates into your marketing strategy. No matter how insignificant these Fred updates may seem, you simply cannot ignore them. For example, this year Google rolled out an update that targetted leased domains and penalized them. You wouldn’t wish your client’s website to be penalized because of something as insignificant as a leased domain.

All in all, you need to be flexible with the changing environment of the SEO industry. And keeping up with these minor updates can ensure that you do it effectively. Having said that, ensuring that your marketing strategy complies with Google’s guidelines, you can rest assured that your practices are White-hat and ethically correct.

Include A Detailed Plan Of Execution

As a marketer, it is indispensable for you to keep up with the latest practices. Since you are accustomed to the practices that fall under SEO, you already know what you need to do in order to improve your client’s Google rankings. But, is your client also aware of what these practices are?

Think of it as a conventional bond between you and your customers. You need to educate your clients about how SEO works, and what needs to be done in order to promote their business online. This can help mend firm trust for your business, amongst your customer base.

It is noteworthy that including a detailed plan of the campaign that you’d be running for your client can help them understand the efficacy of your projects. For example, Adam White of SEOJet.net says that in an SEO proposal to a potential client, you should include a link building strategy section and specify how many links per month it will take to increase your client’s Google ratings.

Once your customer knows exactly what needs to be done, and how, they would surely entrust their resources with you.

Do Follow Up The Progress Of Campaign

Designing a detailed plan for the execution of search engine optimization for your client is just one part of the strategy. You need to ensure that your plan is being executed the way you designed it. And in case it is not, then knowing what went wrong or why did the deviation occur should also be your concern.

A strict follow up on your campaign can help identify the key faults in your plan. Plans often go unplanned, and for the same reason, marketers design contingency plans. What’s worth learning is the reason behind any amendment.

Learning the discrepancies and faults in your original plan can help you improve your practices. And this is not just limited to a particular plan or a client, but to the overall set of operations that you follow.

Pay Special Attention To The Content

Regardless of whatever practices you follow, the content-quality can never be ignored. You need to pay special attention to the content created for your client’s promotional projects.

You may consider any of the practice, be it on-page or off-page, there’s always content that stays in the limelight. Without optimal content, all your efforts can run down the flush and in the end, its nothing but a waste of your efforts and of course the resources as well.

Moreover, if the content is spun or plagiarized, it may lead to penalties for your client’s website. And ultimately these would show up as degraded search result rankings. Needless to say, that this would harm your reputation as well, and sooner or later, you may run out of business.

Search engine optimization is not an overnight process and requires extensive research and study of the subject. Keeping up with the best practices in the industry is the only thing that can help you stay in business.