The tech geniuses at Google are working hard to create a better internet. Although we appreciate their efforts, changing SEO strategy every time an update rolls out, especially unannounced ones, is a challenge. Worse, if you don’t take prompt action, Google penalties could obliterate your hard-earned rankings.
I was looking over the analytics for our blog, Driving Rain, the other day and noticed that several posts had garnered particularly high traffic. For example, in conjunction with the website design work we’ve done for Clayton Christensen and Innosight, I had written a blog post about how we applied Professor Christensen’s “Jobs-to-be-done” methodology in creating his website, which has been among our most popular, at least by the standard of “number of visits.” Another popular post we wrote was in conjunction with our website for Jim Stengel, former CMO of Procter & Gamble, which also drew a large number of visits.
Neither Clayton Christensen nor JimStengel were in the original list of keywords for our website, but upon viewing our analytics we learned how popular they were as keywords, hence the increased traffic they brought our way. Our end result has been an increased number of leads from other companies, including consulting companies, interested in the kinds of services we provided Messrs. Christensen and Stengel.
This is kind of a mini-post. I’d like to reference an important post I saw on HubSpot’s blog indicating the rise in importance of branding to SEO, in the aftermath of Google’s Penguin 2.0 release. While we have always stressed the relevance of branding to user experience, it is good to know that Google is recognizing the validity of branding in the realm of Search. I recommend you read the post but here is what I see as the key takeaway:
We like to say that your website is a living, growing thing; it’s not static, but rather constantly changing. Many people believe that maintaining a website is a lot of unnecessary work, so we’ve brainstormed six quick ways to revitalize your website that will improve your design, marketing, and visitor engagement.
On many occasions our clients say, “We want to be #1 in Google.”This is a worthy goal, but too general to result in success. It does however, lead to interesting follow-up questions, like “For which search terms do you wish to rank?”
As we enter our seventeenth year of designing and developing websites, there are very few clients that aren’t on at least their third generation websites.And with the average website needing a refresh after three years, our clients’ websites are accumulating lots of content. From an SEO perspective a lot of content can be good, from a user experience angle it can become a problem. To make it easier upgrading websites with a growing body of content, we engage our clients in a collaborative process we call “Website Triage.”
Well, almost. Regardless of the fact that we provide integrated services, often when a client comes to us for a website, they are not thinking about branding, yet it is often the issue that will make or break the website. Branding is often considered more of a consumer concern or maybe just an expensive “nice-to- have.” Of the six key components of a website development project — Content, Information Architecture, Search, Design, Interactivity and Programming — “content” is nearly always the chief area of focus, where the most time is expended and where differing opinions can affect outcomes and timing.
In our many Web engagements clients often question whether they need an outside writer on the project. The reason for rumination is usually either related to budget or whether internal resources have the time to get the job done. From experience I believe that hiring an outside writer is necessary and often mandatory. Here are five reasons to consider:
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