Emails to Clients That Turned Into Blog Posts*
An Ongoing Series
Every so often, we respond to an email from one of our website clients that asks a great question or covers a common experience. We’re sharing them here on our site so you can benefit from a little Ogre Knowledge, too!
Have your own great question?
After a recent redesign and rebuild of a long-standing client’s website, our contact person, B., asked if we had any suggestions for improving their SEO. While CleverOgre recommends hiring a dedicated SEO agency for long-term planning and execution, we provided a list of suggestions she could tackle herself.
Good Morning, B.,
As you probably know, SEO is a huge topic with many different strategies and tactics. For our websites, we provide foundational SEO at launch — clean code that loads fast and is well-organized, with appropriate metadata (page/post titles, page/post descriptions, schema metadata, and image metadata including alt text, titles, and descriptions). However, SEO is not a “set it and forget it” endeavor — to get to the top ranking spots, your strategies and tactics should be regularly assessed and refined.
While hiring an SEO specialist is usually the most effective choice for developing a long-term SEO plan, there are plenty of things you can do on your own:
- Check out your site traffic, see which pages are attracting the most visits, and view other metrics on Google Analytics to see what is currently working — and what isn’t. We have an account set up for your website, send us an email address to add to the account if you’d like to take a look at the details.
- NOTE: The email must either be a Gmail address or you can link a non-Gmail address to a Google account first, as described in this Google Support document.
- Identify the questions your potential clients are asking about the services you provide:
- Start with your front-line staff, the ones who answer the phones, greet visitors to your office, or work with clients in the field. Often, they hear the same questions asked by potential clients time and again.
- Next, research the types of questions people ask online about your industry. There are many tools available for doing this research; for example, I’ve used SEMRush, which offers a free trial.
- Add new, deep content that answers the questions and includes the keywords and phrases identified in your research. I know that during the redesign, there was a focus on limiting the amount of written content on the website due to personal preferences at your company, but Google will recommend a website with lots of informative written content over a bare-bones site almost every time. Many SEO specialists recommend anywhere from 300 to 1000 words per page. However, the bigger factor Google looks for is the “quality” of the content — how well the writing answers common search queries related to your industry.
- Here’s the low-down straight from Google on creating helpful content.
- Expand the amount of engaging details and descriptions in your project posts, and once they are published, post a link to them on social media. Traffic from large, popular sites like Facebook and LinkedIn back to your website is a strong signal for Google.
- Maintain the SEO practices we put in place: Make sure every new page and post has metadata set for titles and descriptions (set in the Yoast box at the bottom of each page and post), and that every image uploaded has title and alt text that includes relevant keywords and phrases (I noticed that you haven’t added these elements to any of the newly added images I checked in the Media Library)
- Yoast is a great resource for SEO tactics explained in layperson’s terms. There are a ton of great articles, videos, and even free SEO courses (as well as paid) on their website: yoast.com
Hopefully, this will help you on your SEO journey!
*Edited for spelling, grammar, style, formatting — and to protect our client’s personal info — while remaining true to the spirit of the original email.
Want to have a team that provides answers like these to your website questions? Drop us a line!