Whether in-house or outsourced, you’ve finally elected someone to head up SEO duties for your website. (Perhaps you’re even taking on the job yourself, with or without specialized support.) You’ve found someone whose skill set marries both marketing savvy and technical expertise.
Now what? What are the SEO’s duties, day to day, week to week, and month to month? What should you expect them to do, and how will their performance be benchmarked?
It depends on your needs, of course, but this truth outlines what you should expect functionally from the person (or firm) charged with optimizing your site for search.
The first order of business is a complete site review. The SEO should review a complete outline of the site and its structure, together with a hierarchical listing of every page on the site. If you can’t offer this analysis, the SEO should conduct it. The SEO should also review the site’s hosting, page redirects, error pages, URL structure, and use of JavaScript.
The source code, programming languages, databases, Flash, content management system, shopping carts, and code validation are all examined and, where appropriate or necessary, tweaked, adjusted, or changed altogether.
In this step, the SEO looks at the site through the eyes of a search engine spider. What part of the site is more important to the crawler? It should be the same elements that matter most to the user, and the site owner. HTML code is also checked for accuracy and syntax. At this stage, the SEO should be able to make specific recommendations regarding page text elements, and source code including the URL, filenames, page titles, descriptions, and meta tags.
The SEO must then conduct a thorough keyword analysis to reveal which keywords drive the most traffic, and often, which keywords are the most competitive. Less competitive keywords (often, part of the long tail discussed in Truth 40, “Wag the long tail”) count a lot. They can still drive a tremendous amount of traffic, and make it easier to optimize specific pages. The SEO should then competitively analyze the websites currently in the top 5 to 10 positions for the top keywords or phrases, paying special attention to those site’s structure, page titles, links, page elements, content, and meta tags.
The SEO should deliver a baseline report on the site in question for the targeted keywords. This should reveal where the website ranks for specific keywords on various search engines—at least, the Big Three (Google, Yahoo!, and MSN).
The SEO then analyzes web page content. Often, much of it will have to be rewritten, taking into account page placement, keyword density, keyword prominence, and word count.
Links matter, and links relevant to the site’s content and site owner’s business matter the most. The SEO should examine both internal and external link structures, and come up with a strategy for link building going forward.
Using the baseline initial report for each important page, and taking important keywords into consideration, the SEO should monitor the site for performance on at least a monthly basis. These reports not only indicate rankings and search engine status, but also indicate where further performance tweaks are necessary. They can also monitor a site’s change in rank relative to search engine algorithm changes, and where a site or its pages stand relative to online competitors and changing user search patterns.
The preceding list covers the basics, but there are plenty of other tasks that require SEO expertise, depending on a company’s needs and the nature of its business and interactive marketing strategy. An SEO can train staff, ranging from webmasters and developers to copywriters, marketing, and PR, in the basics of optimizing a site and its content for search, for example.
It’s also not only valuable, but also critical, to get your SEO to take a look at the data generated by your web analytics package. There’s an enormous upside in knowing which keywords and phrases are driving users to a specific site or page, and insights that can be gleaned from the actions visitors take once they get there.
There are some additional duties you might also expect from your SEO, or you may even deem some tasks important enough to seek out a practitioner with specific expertise in search optimization. This might include deep knowledge of local search, or search in another geographic area, particularly when foreign languages and search engines are involved. Some search optimizers focus on social media, and others on public relations, optimizing press releases, and online reputation management—that is, how to help “bury” negative citations about you, your company, brand, or products, online.
So what does an SEO do on a day-to-day basis? Plenty. The more you understand what they’re working on, the better your communication will be, and the more solid the results.