If you are a small business and you don’t read the Small Business SEM blog, it’s time to start. Matt McGee is one of my favorite SEO bloggers out there, he shares great search marketing insights and great finds in all of his blog reading. A recent post that was really a letter to small business owners, titled Put Down Your Ranking Reports really caught my eye, and is definitely worth reading.
It’s easy to just look at keyword ranking reports. It’s another thing to deeply analyze your site and figure out what makes for more traffic, better conversions, and happier clients. Ranking reports are nice because they have numbers, your brain easily reads and interprets them, and you feel informed. However, ranking reports can lull you away into a false sense of security. So they’re neat and fun, but step out and go beyond the ranking reports.
One of the problems, however, is you need to get an outside analysis of your site. You know it too well, you see it every day. You are way too familiar with it to give it the full kind of analysis it needs to get you to the next step. So, what do you do about that?
Option 1 (Free) – Ask your spouse, your jogging buddy, your Uncle Joe, or a good business friend to have a look at your site. Even try standing next to them as they go to your site for the first time and see where they wander, click, and how they accomplish a task (like look for one of your services or find a certain product).
Option 2 ($100) – Not that I have a lot of spare time, but for $100 I’ll give your site 30 minutes (contact me). I’ll dig as deep as I can and identify all the things I would change if it were my site. There are plenty of other SEOs qualified for this too, make them an offer for 30 minutes of their time and I’m sure you’ll get some takers.
Option 3 (More Money) – You can hire an SEO consultant or an SEO firm and this should be a standard part of their services. If you don’t have the time to do your own SEO or to do in-house SEO, this is the best way to go. It might seem expensive, but if you’ve found the right SEO it will pay for itself after time.
Thanks again to Matt McGee for bringing up the topic. At SoloSEO we have a whole slew of tools for analyzing your site, and not just rankings. For example, our Search Engine Viewer tool helps you to analyze the pages of your site to optimize the title and descriptions for best viewing in the search engine results. We have a built-in checklist and task management system that enables you to create your own customized checklists (for new sites, monthly or annual reviews, etc.), and then items that need addressed automatically go into your task list.
