It was around day five of waking up extra early to water my still struggling lawn when it hit me. There’s something to learn here.
Landscaping Your SEO Project
I researched planting and caring for sod for about a month in preparation for the work I’d be doing in my back yard. As I began the fifth day of watering, all that research came together with the countless articles, guides, lists, and case studies I read every week regarding SEO. Essentially your lawn – like your SEO strategy – needs three things: Preparation, attention, and time.
Preparation puts you in the best position for success. That means having a plan in mind from the outset, ensuring your site’s structure is coded in a way that will be easy for search engines to decipher, and taking care of small but important details like meta-descriptions and title tags right off the bat. This is the tilling of the soil, the balancing of soil pH levels, and all the other tedious but essential steps that will have a major effect on your project over time.
The same way you can’t drop some sod and hope for the best, you can’t expect your site to optimize itself. So what kind of attention should your site be getting? There are lots of aspects of a website to focus attention on and different sites may require more effort in different places. Two areas we always find folks need help with are layout and content.
A good layout will be clear to search engines as well as users, making navigation simple. When customers can easily work their way through your site, they’ll feel comfortable, they’ll be more likely to explore more pages (And more products) and the increased time on site will boost your organic rankings. By keeping a close eye on how people are using your site and what portions of the buying cycle are more or less successful, you can find areas to adjust and improve your layout.
Content will provide answers to shoppers’ questions, inspire the confidence to make a purchase, and engage them in a way that will keep them coming back. Whether you’re adding more details to your product descriptions or generating entertaining blog posts, videos, or other media to further your brand, it’s a matter of attention. The attention you pay to these portions of your site is like water for your lawn – it’s essential to growth!
If you’ve done your job preparing the site, and you keep a close eye on the areas you need to improve and the content you need to provide, you’ve got a recipe for success, but SEO doesn’t take effect over night. It takes time for search spiders to crawl and index your pages, and visitors may only trickle in until the right information is getting pushed to the search engines. This is how your site forms its roots, and waiting for it to happen can be like…watching paint dry.
Just like landscaping, SEO is hard work with few opportunities for effective shortcuts. There’s lots of advice out there on both topics. Some of it is wonderful. Some of it might leave you with a sad looking property. The key is to filter out the noise and take care of the fundamentals first. Luckily, the experts at IntuitSolutions have the experience to effectively handle the fundamentals and the expertise to bring things to the next level when the time comes. Call us today to learn how we can help you cultivate a hearty and healthy SEO strategy that will make the neighbors jealous!
