Your Search Engine Profile

SEO (Optimising your site for search engines) is a balancing act and its becoming much clearer to more and more SEO professionals that this balancing act can be a very delicate one when looking at activities needed to help a webpage move up the rankings; and these activities go towards developing a Search Engine Profile for a particular page or site.

There are numerous factors that you can spend your time on, some of the more basic ones being:

On Site Factors
  • Is the HTML coding clean and correct?
  • Can search engines easily see all of your webpages within a couple of ’clicks’?
  • Is your navigational structure working in favour of visitors and search engines?
  • Are all your internal pages linked to from other internal pages?
  • Do you have a good robot.txt file on your site?
  • Etc etc
Off Site Factors
  • Are you Followed and Liked on key social media channels?
  • Is your site mentioned often on social channels?
  • Do you have a good number of backlinks to your site?
  • Are ALL backlinks of a good quality?

Do too much of one element and not enough of another (i.e. too much time with social media without building fresh new content on your site) and you’ll find it difficult to rank well, you need a good blend of a number of different factors (social, on site elements and quality link building etc).

But to what degree you do each of these (your Search Engine Profile) differs from sector to sector and website to website, the important element is to work out what your key competitors are doing and what their likely Search Engine Profile is, then attempt to get somewhere close to that.

It is unfortunately a long, manual job, but it’s a job worth doing and will pay you dividends in the long term.

Optimise your LinkedIn pages

Whether it’s your person page and you want the next great job offer, or it’s your company page, a well optimise page will do you a world of good.

Think Visually
Use bold images to provide a real world glimpse into you or your business.

Think Digitally
Whatever you say, keep it brief. Remember that online, attention span is shorter.

Think Video
Showcase with real stories or examples to engage members more deeply.

Think Customised
Adapt your content to viewers based on their LinkedIn profiles. Target based on geography, job title, industry that you want to attract etc.

Lost rankings due to Hummingbird?

Impossible. Googles major overhaul of their algo that was recently announced, but unlike their previous Penguin and Panda updates, Hummingbird is not a penalty-based update (i.e. aimed at cleaning their SERPs from low-quality content), instead their changes is in response to the way that we are starting to query their search database.  Google now better understands the meaning behind our searches rather than understanding the ‘search terms’ that we might actually use. 

This is needed as more of us generate conversational queries, these are longer more complex questions and are growing as we use mobile and in particular voice searches more. 

If for example you are using a mobile device and you talk about Starbucks then Google knows that there is a good chance that you want the location of your nearest coffee shop, so it is more likely to serve the stores location results to you rather than information about the chain – Google is starting to better understand context

So a quick tip to help Google provide better search results would be to understand what your users might actually be asking of your products or solutions and use those keyphrases in your pages; questions like “how do I ….”, “where can I ….”, “what is the ….” etc etc This will help future proof your rankings. 

So Hummingbird didn't hit my rankings! 

You haven’t been hit by Hummingbird but your rankings have been hit (as many have), what is the reason?

Just prior to Hummingbird, Google did release a number of updates to Penguin and Panda, and it is highly likely that one of these has hit your site. 

Let’s consider what Google wants to achieve for its users. It wants to be able to provide the best search results. How will it know when it has achieved this? 
Quite simply is a search user visits and interacts with a page that was served in search results, then Google can pretty much accept that its ranking for that particular page must have been right. 

But what indicators can Google take that a visitor is happy with the page that they found? Well in really simple terms, ANY interaction with a site is likely to equate to longer time on the page (and site), this means longer average time on page AND lower bounce rates. 

So I would look at the pages on your site that have the highest & exit and check their bounce rate and average visit duration; if they look wrong, then that would be a good indicator for me as to why Google has slapped you in their SERPs. 

If visitors are leaving your site quickly, why would that be? What are they expecting to see that they are not? What information is missing? What expectation isn’t being satisfied? Fix these page problems and your rankings will slowly improve. 

Now I realise that this isn’t a perfect science. IF like many site you have contact details for example on all pages and that’s all the visitor wants then you will tend to get a higher than average bounce rate and a lower than average duration time, but the figures must stack up in Googles mind.

What’s the Purpose of Business Development?

You have a business with a great marketing plan, an absolutely brilliant brand image, you’re growing brand equity, have a constant supply of successful campaigns going out, through social media channels you are increasing your Fans, Followers, Pins etc and engaging with your market.

Are you booking the right kind of (profitable) work with the clients you pursued, or are you a hapless bystander who took whatever projects (and price) that came your way?

So what’s next, how do you take your business to the next level?

Answering these questions is where business development comes in.

Business Development Role

A supreme understanding of all media (both online and offline) is just the start, the key role of business development is to understand to the nth degree customer relationships, how to build brand advocates, and how to cultivate strong brand equity through customer service.

Business development must involves an evaluation of customer feedback and some form of sentiment analysis to determine if current the marketing strategies and tactical outputs are indeed as effective as originally planned.

Only by working through this analysis can it be determined if there are any missed opportunities or refinement to existing strategies or campaigns.

Where Businesses Fail

We are all seen businesses and business owners start off with the very best of intentions. They go big (often punching above their weight), as they should, they employ the perfect marketing strategies designed to target their perfect audience (and customers), and slowly they start to build their brand equity. However, if their marketing plan is not evaluated and re-evaluated how can they be sure that their plan is continuing to be effective (or are they simply wasting time, money and energy!).

As technology changes, trends change, and the target audience responds differently to marketing messages, so much the marketing plan needs to change. Consider the following questions when re-evaluating marketing plan:
  • Have the core demographic changed?
  • Is there any new technology been employed by the market? (apps, mobile devices, web platforms, media etc) 
  • Have the trends changed? How have changing trends altered your audience’s behaviour or attention?
  • Are you still making the best of your company’s available resources? 
  • Have there been any legal, political, social or major economic changes since the marketing strategy was devised?
  • Is every aspect of the business on track with the marketing plan? Is every department remaining consistent? 
  • Is every aspect of your marketing and advertising still remaining true to your brand message?

The Purpose of Business Development

As already mentioned, Business Development should understand completely customer relationships and how the market and customer behaviour changes, how the interations you have within your business alter those customer relationships.

With this knowledge, business development teams are able to refine marketing plans and improve your overall business plan.

They should be in a position to be able to:

  • Identify gaps within your marketing strategy
  • Recognise unused internal resources and missed opportunities
  • Cultivate and grow current customer/partner relationships
  • Attract new customers and partners
  • Brand advocates
The more you can let ‘business development’ into the marketing planning process, the more you can tie activity to desired results, the more leverage you have in driving client development behaviour.