Chapter Fourteen : Building Your SEO Plan - An example

Building Your SEO Plan : An example

To take a rather simple, although not often used example, let's look at a plan built for a company whose business is to send personal trainers to people's homes for an hourly free. And remember, your objective should be, as ours always are, to keep the plan as simple as possible.

Note: As this is an actual client sample, some details have been left on purpose.

Objectives and goals.

i. Higher search results in the local area of service. The client does not want to attract customer's outside its service area of two counties of Central New Jersey.

ii. Increased (50%) local traffic to the website (to be measured using Google Analytics)

iii. Increased (50%) number of leads generated per month via the client website.

iv. Note: As the client does not sell online, there is not a quantifiable online sales goal. You could set an offline sales goal – however these are often difficult to track and tie back to online SEO efforts unless you track leads through the process – which this client did not.

The who.

i. For this client, their ideal target was the McMansion stay at home mom. In other words, women in their 30s and early 40s who stayed at home and took care of the kids. There was a clear need amongst these women and they clearly had the money to spend. This client's service meets two key needs of the client.

l The need to exercise without having to go anywhere and find someplace for the kids to go

l The need for social interaction

ii. How to reach them. When conducting keyword research – which in this case was done using the Google Adwords tool, it was clear that two keyword themes were needed. In addition, given the limited geographic area that this client served, a local twist was required. Overall, the keywords, as listed below, were matched to the likely searches that the target demographic would conduct.

l Step One : Identified the two keyword themes – personal trainer and in home fitness. Note: There were several variations and misspellings identified, including personal trainer, trainer, fitness coach, at home fitness, workout at home, etc (all used semantically). However the two primary keywords used (remember it is difficult to optimize for more than two to four on any given page), were personal trainer / personal training and at home fitness / workout at home.

Second, a local twist was added to ensure that only local targets were reached. First, a state level was added – NJ. Then a series of towns – which I have omitted intentionally.

l Step Two : The where. One of the most challenging issues when optimizing a site for a local niche business is finding places to build relevant inbound links. The usual suspects were used for macro level links including social media sites, blog comments, etc. This included a facebook page, a myspace page, comments on moms blogs, in forums like babycenter, etc. In addition, links were built from several sites that served the businesses locality including craigslist (which is also a great free way to advertise), blogs about the towns, local forums, etc. Note: Some of the best inbound links that any local business can build is from mapping programs like Google maps – which again is free.

Focus. While we did some general research when we were figuring out who we were targeting, here's where we landed when it came to keywords. Given then relative volumes, three primary locally focused keyword sets were selected:

1. Personal trainer NJ

2. Personal training NJ

3. At home fitness NJ

These keywords were then supplemented and given a local flair on each page by adding the following elements:

- A box on every page with the businesses address, phone number, Google maps link and a list of the four to five towns served.

- Mention of the localities served several times on the home page, about us page, services and contact page by incorporating the town names into the copy.

Note: These keywords were all chosen based on extensive research conducted (as described in this guide). Given the focused service of this company and the relative local market, there was not much ranking needed to identify the best opportunity to focus on.

The Value Proposition. Proven personal training and fitness motivation delivered to you in the convenience of your home, locally. No need to go to find a baby sitter and go to the gym. And of course, a way to break up the monotony of the day with a friendly face.

SEO Mix. This section is purposely shortened / omitted. Instead I'll keep it high level – which is more valuable for you anyway, unless you are in the same business – and then I apologize... This is the same table we discussed in the template section.

Name	Type	Site Name	URL	Landing Page
Fitness Blog	Content density - **to build keyword density a blog focusing on local fitness activities was added to the site.	*this was a blog placed on the clients site		N/A
BabyCenter	Link building	BabyCenter	www.babycenter.com	Home page (in forum signature) as well as referenced posts in the Fitness Blog

I think you get the point. The objective of this section of your plan is to outline all the tactics you will use. Remember, don't try and start with too many right out of the gate.

Schedule. The SEO activities for this site (at least the vast majority) were completed within two weeks. The remainder were then set as maintenance. Therefore the schedule was broken into two sections. Note: One of the key elements when building any project plan is creating small, manageable steps. Again, much is omitted with enough left only to give you a flavor. Your goal should be to identify each step you need to take, per the SEO template, to optimize your site.

Initial Work

	Description	Due	Complete
1	Identify keyword possibilities for SEO efforts	xx/xx	Y / N
2	Identify potential sites to build inbound links (blogs, forums, etc.)	xx/xx	Y / N
3	Identify which page / site structure elements can be implemented	xx/xx	Y / N

Maintenance

	Description	Due	Complete
1	Add one keyword dense blog post / week	xx/xx	Y / N
2	Add ten inbound links / week via identified forums, blogs, etc. / month	xx/xx	Y / N
3	Update craigslist, kijiji ads	xx/xx	Y / N

Tracking Plan. Note: This was intentionally omitted given that it would have not value to you. Instead the table was placed here with one example. One other thing to consider is that it is often very difficult to break down techniques per page and track them separately. Instead, I would track at the page level and keep a list of the techniques you used separate for comparing the effectiveness of different tactics on different pages.

Tactic	Date Implemented	Page Views	Leads / (Sales – again sales were not used in this case)
SEO on Home Page	1.26.2008	3,569	25

Measurement. This is really up to you. Basically it is how you are going to track against the goals you set in section one. Two key questions you need to answer:

- How often will you check your results?

- What technology will you use to track them?

For this client, they were checked bi-weekly, to ensure performance and make the necessary adjustments. This is the frequency that I would recommend. And when it comes to technology, there is nothing better (since it is free) than Google Analytics (http://analytics.google.com).

SEO In Conclusion... Wrapping up and getting started...

SEO is something you and any other small business can and should do. I hope you can see from this free quick start guide to SEO that it is certainly not all that complicated and can add quite a bit of value to your online marketing efforts. So what are you waiting for, get started.