Don’t be so afraid of negative results.

A slight dip in visitors from day to day (or even month to month) isn’t the end of your website. As a site owner, I know how easy it is to get lost in the overwhelming pages of data available and see doom in every number. Relax. It’s more important to take a step back and look at the big picture. What overall trends are you seeing? These are a much better indication of your SEO success. Sure, there may be outliers that you can’t easily explain, but one blip shouldn’t derail your entire SEO campaign.

“It should be more.” – compared to what? I’ve had several full service SEO or SEO consulting clients in the past look at the results of their SEO campaign and say “it should be more.” More what, exactly? More visitors? A better conversion rate? More qualified leads? A better rank in the search engines? Too often site owners don’t have a clear idea of the goals they are trying to accomplish, which means they can’t recognize a successful SEO campaign when it happens. They only see what isn’t happening, not all the great results that are. Don’t let yourself or your SEO get so focused on a missing element that you can’t see the positive growth. SEO success doesn’t happen overnight, nor does it happen all at once. Like a complicated puzzle, a strong SEO campaign will come together with time.

Be realistic with your definitions of success.

If you own an e-commerce site and only dream of being the next Amazon, you’re never going to be happy with the results of your SEO campaign. In my opinion, comparing yourself to megalith game changers like Amazon or eBay will only set your site up for failure. While it’s possible, the odds of your site getting millions upon millions of visitors each day is highly unlikely. Instead of stacking your success against the competition and seeing how you measure up, compare your own small successes over time. Take a look at the past year and see how your business has grown or evolved. That’s real success.

Rebuilding a b2b Website? Incorporate seo Now!

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet 

On-site optimization has become more important than ever to capitalize on changing user search behavior and the new search algorithm updates. Aged and established B2B sites that had never done any previous SEO have the luxury of a strong search engine trust factor, something that only time can bring. A little onsite SEO and they see dramatic results relatively quickly. New B2B sites that build SEO right into their web design get off on the right foot and don’t have to worry about scrambling to catch-up down the road. If you’re looking to redesign or re-launch your B2B website, optimize it as you go!

Here are 3 benefits of incorporating seo into the initial design process:

Your content is ready to rank.

Optimizing your content to incorporate important keywords is one of most important components of onsite SEO. If you create your content with SEO in mind, you’re already a step ahead of the game. As the search engines crawl and index your site, they will know exactly what kind of search queries your site matches, so you can rank well for targeted visitors from the get-go. You can start collecting data on your visitors and their search behavior from the day your site launches and know what keywords are working and what keywords aren’t much sooner than if you waited 6 months to optimize your content.

You can create a strong internal linking structure.

Developing an internal linking structure helps move your visitors along through your site, as well as helps boost the SEO value of internal pages. For most sites, your homepage is going to receive the lion’s share of the links, but the search engines don’t just rank homepages. Your internal products and services pages have the potential to rank as well. By linking from one page to another, you are spreading out the link juice that first page has earned to other pages, making them more important in the eyes of the search engines.

A good internal linking structure can also help increase your conversion rate. You want to lead your visitors down a predetermined path of conversion that keeps distractions at a minimum. By linking related pages together you can provide all the information your visitors need to make a purchasing decision without ever having to leave your site. It also helps keep your visitor focused—too many links and they don’t know where to go next!

You’ll be able to build SEO friendly URLs.

I can’t tell you how many sites I’ve come across that have the worst URL structure! It’ll be a string of numbers, letters and keywords that is far too long and has no SEO value. The problem is that because the URL structure is tied directly to the way the site was built there is no way to optimize them without redesigning the entire site! Save yourself some headaches down the road and build a URL structure you’ll be happy with for the life cycle of your site.

Common Onsite Enterprise SEO Challenges

Writing by Nick Stamoulis    

While the same white hat SEO guidelines should apply to all websites regardless of size, larger websites (think 1,000+ pages) face a unique set of challenges that smaller website may not have to deal with. Smaller websites are often able to make decisions quickly and act on them ever quicker because they don’t have to worry about these 3 common onsite SEO challenges:

Scale

The most obvious problem facing many large websites looking to begin their onsite SEO is the sheer size of their website. I can tell you first hand that optimizing a 1,000+ page website is no small feat; the keyword research alone can easily take 40-80 hours of work, while actually optimizing the content (including writing Meta tags, optimizing the URL structure and so forth) can take twice the amount of time, depending on how content heavy the site is. Getting the ball rolling on the onsite SEO is oftentimes the hardest step, especially if your marketing team is already maxed out on time. Where are you going to squeeze an extra 50 hours of work into your work week? Even if you try to spread it out over a month, things come up and your onsite SEO is pushed even further down the priority list. Many enterprise websites outsource their SEO for that very reason, leaving the heavy lifting to someone else.