Best Practices for SEO Research

Whether you are a new company with a fresh website or a veteran company with a built-up internet presence, search engine optimization is vital. Keeping up with this large topic can be overwhelming. Before you begin to work on SEO, you need to check out the field—see what’s happening. While there are services for SEO research and analytics (we like Moz.com for this), there are some best practices for surveying the search landscape on your own. Without further ado, here are the best practices SEO research. Running through these steps before optimizing your website, content, and brand will help you better use your time, money, and resources.

Best Practices for SEO Research

Survey What’s Out There

Surveying the search landscape is a key step in the process of creating content that is optimized for search engines. First things first, search your topics, keywords, and product/service names. Do this on various search engines, with a few different terms, and from multiple devices and locations.

Doing this will increase your knowledge of the field. This includes what popular searches are, what’s a common mistake, how locations change the search results and more. SEO services will help with this sort of research. However, doing some of the searching yourself allows you to organically see what things look like on the results page. What grabs a person’s eye, what keyboard mistakes are easy, and what order makes sense. Add this personal research to the analytics from SEO services.

Look to Your Competitors

When you’re doing the above step, take note of your competitors. See where they’re ranking, how they’re wording things, and what they’re working on. While you won’t use this information to copy, it can help inform how you run your SEO.

Some other competitors of yours might be less obvious. These are the informational articles, the Wikipedia posts, and the Facebook pages. While these aren’t directly competing for your business, they’re competing for the searcher’s attention. These types of competitors are just as important to keep an eye on as your direct business competition.

Identify Your Specialty

Once you’ve researched what’s on the web, research inside your company. Ask yourself—what do you have that sets you apart? This can be a price difference, a quality difference, a specific service/product you offer, a brand specialty, a family-oriented history, or a new location. The list could go on and on. What’s special and unique about your company? This is where you’ll stand out from the competition, it’ll give you something to focus on once you start ranking higher in search results.

Find Your Site’s Loading Speed

This is an important step in the research process. Research your site’s speed. This is vital to do because how fast your site is factors in to the search engine’s equation. Before you can improve your loading speed, you have to know where it’s at right now. So testing the site speed is the foundation for improving this important part of your SEO.

Monitor Keywords

If you have a site up and running, you probably have some keywords you’re working on targeting already. However, this is an SEO opportunity where research can really help. When researching keywords that are related and topics that are connected, you could possibly find some new keywords that would benefit your company’s SEO. There are many websites where you can do keyword research and brainstorming. Keep an open mind and research away!

If you’d like to talk with us about SEO (or other) marketing options you’re considering, give us a call at 262-363-4238 or reach out to us at [email protected]. Our services include branding, marketing, and website development with an emphasis on industrial sector companies. We’d love to talk with you!