In a world where posturing doesn’t pay the bills and results define the scope of SEO competence. What are some of the genuine SEO factors that separate amateur SEO’s from professional SEO companies; meaning those capable of producing stellar results regardless of the competition, market or keywords?

What Separates Professional SEO's from Fly-by-Night Amateurs?

Knowing where to look and why is what separates the SEO pros from the wannabes, and did I mention “performance“…

A professional SEO has:

• The ability to define areas where others see obstacles and formulate a scientific plan.
• The ability and know-how to implement an array of optimization tactics simultaneously to develop page level and domain authority.
• The ability to produce superior value (regardless of the price).
• The ability to differentiate their websites from their competition through tangible and quantitative competitive advantages.

What are some of the tools a professional SEO would use?

Competitive Intelligence

If you are still worried about meta-tags as a revolutionary SEO technique, then your focus is askew. With various dimensions to any SEO campaign, you need tangible market intelligence to create a blueprint that you can use to produce sustainable yet progressive benchmarks and goals.

Understanding that post-click marketing is equally as important as SEO as well as design, usability and conversion optimization are equally as important for performance.

All of these components are holistic and require consideration before any aspect of the campaign is implemented. The more thoroughly your tactics overlap, the less friction there is to account for diffusion of the ultimate objective (to acquire and retain your visitor’s attention).

What happens next is all a condition of two things 1) what their intention was for visiting in the first place and 2) if you can facilitate that emotion with a solution that satiates their original intent.

Targeting Consumer Behavior, Not Keywords

SEO is not about products and services as much as it is about finding the right type of consumers to cater your marketing efforts towards. Also, it’s not always about more traffic, it is about maximizing the conversion of the traffic you receive.

Amateurs focus on keywords, professionals focus on conversions. Actionable intelligence allows you to be more efficient, and since time equals money or time to market to acquire a larger percentage of market-share, then efficiency is the ultimate equalizer for business.

Competitive intelligence in this regard implies understanding the motivating factors that compel consumers to purchase and then shifting your business model, landing pages, keywords and modifiers and imagery to speak directly to that intent instead of being nebulous general or “just another website” which they can pass up without regard.

Just as a penny saved is a penny earned, and 90% of the waking day spent in survival mode for most individuals struggling to stay afloat due to economic duress, things that may have worked when disposable income was more abundant no longer reach eager eyes to engage your offer.

Use competitive intelligence to determine the undercurrents in a market and more importantly, how is your message going to provide more value to the consumers your keywords target.

Facets such as stemming your campaign into new keywords, more structured value propositions, narrow casting vs. broad casting, niche marketing or focusing on more specialized products or services? Refinements based on this premise alone can redefine your entire online monetary model; yet, it also must “FIT” within the other critical metrics.

Conversion Optimization

SEO ends and conversion optimization begins with the first click or instance when a visitor engages the snippet of the meta-description in a search engine. Just as the search engine snippet (the description in search engines for that page) is the first attempt to market your product or service.

Something this critical (and how you use it for SEO alone) can differentiate your offer and can be the first thing a visitor engages or the last thing that prospects ever sees, so make it count.

Each action should be structured to lead the visitor through a series of mini-conversions through building rapport with benefits. Depending on why they are there, either to fix something or remedy a real problem or to consider something they might not need by want, determines the tone used to convey significance through either urgency or by proposing value.

CMS Optimization

Regardless of what you are selling, the infrastructure of the website should be optimal, which means integrated CRM (customer relationship management) features within a CMS (content management system). The ability to make site wide changes by amending one file, the ability to segment each page from the site wide changes, modify headers, pull data from various sources, have unique titles, meta descriptions, naming conventions are mandatory for SEO.

Programming best practices into a CMS can create a scalable site capable of devouring markets if the site architecture is built on a premise of pliability and relevance. Aside from content, the content management system is a critical component of SEO for producing rankings.

Content Saturation

Understanding that search engines reward impeccable content as well as use a collective array of term frequency, link assessment and volume of data on a given topic to score the page and websites correlation to specific and broad queries.

If you competitors have 1000 pages and their main keyword is present in 750 of those pages, then the amount of concentrated optimization to each page requires less fine tuning (due to the pool of topical relevance those occurrences produce).

Content creation based on filling the gap between your current position and those web pages that occupy the top 10 positions means the more relevant content you have, the higher the probability of you leveraging that content in unison through internal linking of selecting a champion page or folder to produce buoyant rankings.

Authoritative Deep Links

Another well known fact is, rankings are by the page in search engines, and in order to win the ranking battle, you need to have a significant array of deep links specifically to each page that you want to contribute to the global site profile.

To understand the threshold, look for pages, not just a domain ranking in the top 10 results, ten see how many deep links they built to identify that page as an island of relevance.

An example would be www.website.com/web-design.html if that page had a top ranking for the word web design, then see what is supporting it both within the website as well as how many deep links it has to “rank on its own independence and authority” vs. a top level homepage / ranking.

Depending on the strength of the inbound links and the site architecture and internal links determines just what the tipping point is to catapult a page past competitors to reach the top 10.

Execution Timelines and Search Engine Reciprocity

Professionals know that changes take time and in order to surpass competitors, you need search engine trust. Trust is not always about content saturation, link volume or time, it is a unique fusion of all three. The longer you wait to get started/optimizing keywords and their respective landing pages, the stronger the barrier to entry you have to overcome as the pages with authority cement their ground.

These are just a few metrics involved in topical level SEO tactics, yet any one of them magnified through execution is more than enough to make any website a contender.

With over 200 metrics that search engines cross-reference to determine which pages are deemed worthy of representing a given keyword or topic, you need to manage as many granular changes as possible with consistency to surpass the less formidable contenders that are vying for the same industry, market share and consumers.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites