What’s the first thing an SEO should do
Recently, I was listening to an interview of an SEO, where the question was:
“What’s the first thing, as an SEO, you do when your SEOing a site”
Amazingly the answer given, by this celebrity SEO was:
‘The first thing I do as an SEO is keyphrase research”
Ok, lets examine why this is shit.
Set the scene
So imagine you’ve got a website, it’s doing ok, your happy. You feel it could be doing better but aren’t really entirely sure how, why or what. Then you hear of this thing called ‘SOE’ or something. Who knows.
You call the recruitment agency and say ‘Get me one of these ESO people for my website’
After spending a few weeks (during which time the traffic on your site has stayed static) interviewing a right bunch of weirdos you pick the least weird of them all and offer them a job, may be give them a couple of months probation just for safety.
So they work their months notice and turn up on day 1, you find them a desk and a computer (which they say is rubbish) and leave them to do their thing.
What happens. Nothing that’s what. You ask your new SEO employee ‘ok, show me what you’ve done’, and they give you a great big spreadsheet of numbers and words and things. Doesn’t mean a thing to you but it looks clever, maybe it means something, here and there a word catches your eye, it looks like a product you sell, and then there’s numbers next to it… don’t know what the numbers are but it looks clever.
Your new expensive employee looks at you gleefully and says ‘It’s a Keyphrase Research report’.
You look at your traffic graph, it’s flat.
Your SEO is making no difference, if you discount the fact that the ‘Phrase Densikey’ thing might be clever. Nothing.
Here’s the non-bullshit answer.
The first thing an SEO should do when they start working on a site is make sure that Metrics are correctly implemented. Is all the traffic being counted? Is where the traffic coming from being correctly measured. If you don’t have this, any SEO work you do will always be open to ambiguity. As an SEO you can sometimes get instant traffic upkicks (and impress your new employer) immediately just by auditing metric implementation.
Beware the bull shitters – Keyphrase reports come later in the SEO cycle when you’re pushing for the last nth percentages, not at the start when you can get great traffic increases from the simple understandable actions.
After this is done, the SEO should go and have a cup of tea with the Boss and tell him how you mended his metrics and what they’regoing to do next and that SEO is not really wierd, and although the machine he gave the SEO isn’t as good as the one you’ve got at home you’re sure he’ll buy the SEO something blistering once you treble his conversions (so sometimes next week).
What to do second … coming soon
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