Gold, Silver or Bronze: What Medal Does Your Search Engine Optimization Deserve?

Most of us are watching the Olympics but do you know what medal your Search Engine Optimization efforts would be awarded if there was an Olympic event for SEO? Today, search engine optimization must be an integrated part of your marketing strategy. Since search is now much more social and content oriented, the medal your SEO would score might surprise you.

Here are some questions to consider and a scoring system for your SEO efforts.

Do you have a blog on your website? Do you post daily?

Google and other search engines are looking for websites that add fresh content, so unless you’re adding new web pages daily, the blog is the best way to add new content quickly and easily. If you have a blog give yourself 10 points, if you blog daily give yourself another 10 points. If you blog weekly give yourself 5 points and of you blog sporadically give yourself 1 point.

Do you have videos on your website that link to YouTube?

If you allow us to state the obvious, YouTube is owned by Google and we are a video loving nation. People love videos and Google knows it. You have to use video marketing and in your search strategy. If you have video on your website give yourself 10 points. If you have a YouTube Channel with multiple videos give yourself another 10 points.

Do you use video search engine optimization?

Since the American public loves video so much, Google is pushing video to the top of the search rankings. This means that video tagged properly, hosted on video sharing sites, and using the right set of descriptive terms can rank in days, instead of months. If you have your videos tagged with your most important keywords AND you have the videos hosted on a few different video sharing sites AND if you have your keywords in the descriptive text give yourself 10 points.

Do you have a list of strategic keywords or keyword phrases?

Let’s not assume every business owner, executive or marketing professional knows what their keywords are but if you don’t, you might as well stop any SEO work right now. You MUST have a list of at least 100 keywords or keyword phrases and you MUST know the global and local search volume from Google. If you have this list give yourself 10 points.

However, there is more to it than just a list of highly searched keywords. You MUST know the difficulty of those keywords and you MUST prioritize those keywords based on search volume and difficulty so you end up with a set of keywords that you’re going to use to actively optimize your site. You don’t want a list of words that all scored a 99 difficulty rating or you will likely never rank for any of them, but select a list that includes some highly searched difficult terms, some highly searched less difficult terms, and some highly searched low difficulty terms to ensure you are able to drive traffic to your site now and in the future. If this sounds like a list you can put your hands on give yourself another 10 points.

Do you post content outside of your site with a link back to your website?

Back links are critical to SEO success given the recent updates to Google. Not just any back links, but legitimate links to your site from blogs, websites, email campaigns, videos, slide shows, and more. One of the best ways to get these back links is to provide content or guest blog on other sites. Some of these sites allow anyone to guest blog. If you have an active guest blogging effort, give yourself 10 points. If you are guest blogging more than four times a month to four different sites give yourself an extra 10 points.

Do you analyze and track the sources of traffic to your site, so you know if your organic SEO efforts are delivering results.

If you know how much organic traffic you get to your site every day, week and month AND you can compare that traffic to last month and last year then give yourself 10 points.

Now let’s see how you did and what medal you would earn at the Olympics of Search Engine Optimization.

If you scored 90 to 100 points then you earned a Gold Medal. If you scored 70 to 80 points then you earned a Silver Medal. If you scored 50 to 60 points you earned a Bronze Medal. If you scored less than 50 points then you need to consider adding a significant number of tactics to improve your search results. The good news is that this post includes everything you need to add. The better news is that most of these can be added quickly and with minimal effort.

To learn more about how adding these elements of search engine optimization will help your company, click here to watch this video on Cranking Up Your Conversion Rate.