Simple doesn’t mean easy. When it comes to building a scalable search strategy, breaking the process down into phases makes it much more effective and scalable. This concept grew from years of tweaking and working through processes on my own. I needed to find a better, more straightforward way to think about search strategy and how we as an agency could create a focused plan of action for each of our clients. While many of the actions we take to grow search traffic are simple (link building, content, etc.), the way we approach these actions is very different depending on the company we are working with. The Simplified Search Productivity Cycle is designed to help keep your SEO strategy focused and results-driven.
The Simplified Search Productivity Cycle is broken down into four parts; Goals, Strategy, Results and Adjustments. In the video below, I walk through each phase of the cycle and how they are connected to each other. If for some reason you can’t view the video, you can watch it here.
Video Transcript
Hey. What’s up, everybody? I’m Ryan Shelley. You’re watching another episode of the SMA Marketing Minute. I want to share with you, in this episode, something that I call the Simplified Search Productivity Cycle.
Whether you’re trying to rank for a product or a service or you’re trying to put yourself out there as a thought leader; SEO is an extremely important part of your strategy in online marketing. People are Googling everyday terms and keywords, trying to look for content that’s going to meet their needs. I think a lot of times, in the online marketing space, we hear, “Well, if you just create good content, it’s going to generate backlinks naturally. People are just going to be flooding into your site.” The truth is, there’s a ton of great content on the Internet that completely goes unnoticed. It’s because a lot of these people know how to gain backlinks. They’re going to outrank your content, whether it’s good or not. They know how to position their content better and really use a process in order to generate more traffic.
The people who just keep publishing in the spray and pray tactic never really get the traction that they probably deserve because their content is really good.
The way to make sure that you’re doing the right things and to stay focused on the end goal, which is generating more people coming to your site and more traffic; is that we need a process. A lot of times, we can over-complicate a process and put too many loopholes and tricks here and there. It makes it really hard and messy to really see if we’re getting our end goal that we really desire.
What we have here in the Simplified Search Productivity Cycle is 4 steps to the process. The process just keeps going, going and going. It starts with goals.
How do you measure success? What’s going to determine whether or not you achieved your end results? Are you trying to rank in the top 10 or the top 3 for a specific keyword. Do you want to generate so much traffic? Do you want to see some ROI from that traffic? What does success look like?
Once we have those goals defined, we can move to the next phase which is strategy. What are some actionable tasks that you can do to promote your content? How can you get your content in front of the right audience whether it be, maybe, some social audience? Maybe it’s a thought leader in your industry who may read your content and link back to it in an article.
Maybe you can do an interview with a thought leader in your industry, where they would share that with their community as well and would generate some traffic to your site. What’s your strategy around generating traffic and getting your keywords? What’s your strategy around backlinking? How are you prospecting? Are you doing it locally? Are you doing it more by region? What areas are you going to target in order to promote your goals?
After you do your strategy, then you’re going to look over the results. We do this month by month. We want to look at our results. I’m looking at statistics daily, analytics daily to see how we’re doing tracking. You want to look at 4 different things. You want to look at what worked, what didn’t, why did it work or why didn’t it work and then what’s next.
You want to know what’s working so you can continue to do that. Then you want to know what’s not working so you can stop doing that. Then you want to move onto what’s next. What are you going to do about it?
This is where we make the adjustments. This is the last phase of the cycle. We want to make sure that actually what we’re doing is heading towards the goals that we set in the first place. We may even want to look at our goals and say, “This is what I thought I wanted. In reality, this is what I want.”
Making those adjustments along the way is going to help us make sure that we do get the end results that we’re looking for. By simplifying the process, setting goals, putting together actionable tasks, reviewing our results, then adjusting our strategy once again to meet our goals, we can make sure that we have a process that works and we have a process that we can follow.
Instead of just hoping that our content is going to get some traction, we can actually start to create traction for our content, for our sites. In the end, get the traffic that we really deserve and hopefully capture on that ROI that we really all are looking for. I hope you guys like this episode of the SMA Marketing Minute.
If you want to learn a little bit more about our SEO processes, you can check out all the SEO articles we have on our blog. Just search SEO in the search pane. If you have any questions or comments, please leave those below. We love to keep the conversation going. We will see you on the next SMA Marketing Minute.
Until then, happy marketing.
