Spring is a great time to take a fresh look at your SEO management setup.
No matter how you manage your SEO Enterprise-wide, it’s easy for your keyword lists, your tag and grouping structures and even the pages you are focused on to become outdated over time. This can lead to a waste of resources, inaccurate reporting and frustration with having to wade through tens of thousands of unnecessary keywords or tags.
Here’s a simple process we put together to Purge, Organize, and Grow (POG for short) your SEO management structure:
Purge: Remove the Irrelevant
The search landscape and Enterprises are constantly evolving entities. Not every keyword you were targeting is as relevant today as it was when it was added nor is every tag or group you had built in the past still relevant to your objectives now.
Keywords that have lost relevance
An example is the keyword "iPhone 4" -- during its launch, “iPhone 4” would have been an essential keyword for anyone selling iPhone 4 accessories. Now, unless you still expect to sell tons of those, it would be doing little more than taking up space. Spring is a great chance to clean out the keywords that are no longer as valuable for potential traffic.
You can quickly find keywords to remove by searching for:
- Keywords for products that you no longer carry or services you no longer offer.
- Keywords containing old model numbers or references to a specific year – Such as 2011 Mother’s Day or iPhone 4, etc.
Tags and groupings that have lost purpose
It’s also a good time to take a look at your keyword tags or keyword groupings. Within seoClarity, there is no limit to the number of such groupings you can create. This provides tremendous flexibility with reporting and insights for anyone in the Enterprise.
At the same time, this flexibility and freedom also mean that potentially thousands of tags/groupings may get created over time for various purposes. Merchandisers may create one to track a new category launch, content marketers may have created yet others to track content additions or blogs and so on – and these purposes may no longer be relevant.
Look for tags that have:
- Very few keywords
- Were created a long time ago
- Reference old tests that were being run or projects that have long completed or
- Products/services that the Enterprise is no longer involved in
Like that box of old clothing you no longer wear, there’s no better time to get rid of your excess keywords and tags.
Organize: For Insights and Priorities
Once you’ve discarded keywords and tags that are no longer relevant, it’s time to organize and optimize the ones you have left. Here are the three quick and easy ways to think about organizing:
Organize by seasonality
Some amount of seasonality is a given for any Enterprise. For Retail & E-Commerce businesses, this may mean the ever important holiday season in November-December. For travel companies, it may relate to the busy summer season and so on.
Within seoClarity, clients have the ability to quickly view the seasonal trends across all their keywords AND also research new keywords based on the peak seasons that they already know of.
Organize by current position
This is an often overlooked technique to help benchmark performance. Grouping keywords by their CURRENT rank positions easily allows revisiting them over time to look to visualize how their performance has changed. If for example, you had a group of keywords in rank position 20 - 100, you could come back in a month and check how many of them have moved up or moved out from the rankings to gauge performance.
Organize by benchmark keywords
With potentially hundreds of users in the Enterprise adding/removing keywords and tags, it can be easy to lose track of what truly is a benchmark of performance. This is a great time to identify the keywords that reflect the CORE strength of your SEO performance (by department/category/business line/team etc.) and add them to a benchmark tag. Be sure to LOCK the tags so no other user can change it once it’s built.
Organized keywords will maximize their impact, and help ramp up your organic traffic during different times of a year.
Grow Your List: Target More Effectively with ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’
It goes without saying that the wisdom of many trumps the wisdom of the few. When looking to grow your list of targeted keywords, you could, of course, start with the Google Keyword planner, or your PPC keywords – but there is a better way.
seoClarity’s proprietary Wisdom of the Crowds methodology is an innovative approach we developed to help Enterprises conduct powerful keyword research while breaking through the limitations of vocabulary, industry knowledge, etc. that standard research methodologies are plagued by.
The first step is to identify your true competitors and for each competitor research what content and keywords they already rank well for (you can find this within the Clarity Data Grid – seoClarity’s 120 million keyword data set). Next, by combining the keyword lists and identifying keywords that multiple competitors rank for, you can quickly get a list of keywords that are:
- Not brand related or related to a specific competitor
- Most likely keywords that the audience is searching for based on the combined knowledge of the competitors
- Where you may not have a representation
This is a proven methodology that can be applied to a domain level or even a specific product level. seoClarity users, of course, can do this right within the Data Grid Comparison feature.
CONCLUSION
If you're an enterprise company and serious about your SEO, you are probably using an enterprise class SEO platform (if you're not, take a read at our 7 Must-Have Capabilities in SEO Platform to help choose one).
With any platform, it takes a certain amount of simple housekeeping to make sure things don't get out of control, and you’re process has been streamlined efficiently.
While seoClarity makes it easy with Dynamic Tags and ability to easily add, delete or reprocess data, sometimes these priorities can get put on the back burner. That’s why taking the time to do a thorough spring cleaning will be a huge benefit to your enterprise. Happy Spring Cleaning!
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