SEO Challenges

There are many reasons why it may be difficult for your business to achieve high rankings in the search engines for certain key phrases because there are many different combinations of challenges to a business on and offline every day.

High Competition for Key Phrases

For example, in some markets e.g. insurance, there’s likely to be very high rates competition for the same main key phrases. Other industries may face the same problem to differing degrees. Overcoming this challenge can begin by targeting key phrases that although aren’t the main key phrases, they are related phrases which are more ‘niche’ and attract less competition. Experience SEO people say that by optimizing many pages in your website for less competitive but still useful key phrases you help to increase the likelihood of your main website to rank for the main key phrases.

Time Constraints and Frequency of Optimisation Work

Optimisation shouldn’t be a one-off event because competitors, search engines and the business environment don’t stand still. The challenge is therefore to make more time to study and plot over time your own search engine rankings as you carry out more SEO work. Also by studying your own website stats on a regular basis you can get a much clearer picture of any positive or negative changes, and this can help you to develop strategies and tactics for increasing visitor numbers in the right way. For example, if the stats show that one page is doing particularly well for one key phrase then it may not be a good idea to try and optimise it for other phrases. A better idea is to optimise more and more individual pages in the website for more, different individual key phrases.

Not Knowing Where to Focus the SEO Work

Google checks approximately 200 ‘signals’ when ranking a web page but some carry much more weight than others. Focus most of your effort on these areas. Google has its own new SEO guide available to help identify these areas. To very briefly summarise some of the most important areas to focus on, pay particular attention to the domain name and page names (do they contain relevant key phrases?), the document / page title, the body text (including H1, and H2 to H6 headline Text), and the quality of the incoming links to your web pages. Keeping your content updates is also a great idea.

Not Knowing Which Keywords to Optimise For

You may focus on terms that you are familiar with as an industry insider but these may not be the key phrases that your customers would be using to describe your products / services. Use a Keyword Selector Tool such as Wordtracker for a keyword / key phrase ‘reality check’, to discover longer tail key phrases (which may be more likely to result in conversion), and potentially valuable niches.

After you have carried out some high quality keyword research you will hopefully know which key phrases are actually being used in search engine queries, in what numbers, what the level of competition is like for each, and you may have discovered some hitherto unknown keyword opportunities.

Research shows that most searches involve 2 to 4 word phrases, so these will be more effective for optimisation. Research has also shown that 4 word key phrase use by web searches means that they are more likely to buy i.e. they are in the later, more informed stages of their ‘buying cycle’.

Customer keyword use is likely to be linked to this buying cycle. General, generic, single word and short tail ‘browsing’ key phrases are more characteristic of the early stage whereas long tail, very specific key phrases are more characteristic of the later ‘buying’ stage. Optimisation often works better with key phrases that visitors use for ‘comparing’ those key phrases between ‘browsing’ and ‘buying’.

When choosing your keywords and phrases to optimise for, pick targeted phrases over those that just bring volume and avoid single keywords. Pick phrases that are likely to be used by people who are more likely to be interested, and pick key phrases that you actually know (through doing research) that customers actually use i.e. not just the standard terms from within the industry, or not just terms that summarise product / service groups.

Follow These Popular Optimisation Tips

Here are some tips which should help to solidify some of the points made above, and should help you to overcome many of the SEO challenges that you are facing:

• Optimise a web page for no more that 1 or 2 key phrases.
• Optimise at least 5 or 6 pages in your website.
• Make sure each page contains plenty of body text e.g. 300 to 400 words.
• Make it easy for human visitors and search engines to find out what your page / website is about.
• Link your pages together throughout e.g. a uniform text based navigation system, and using relevant text links in the body of the pages making sure that the important pages and information can easily be reached from your ‘root page’ (home page).
• Avoid reliance on code / script / file which are known to cause access problems to search engines e.g. JavaScript, Flash etc.
• Check for serious code errors, avoid the use of ‘frames’ and avoid the use of entry pages.
• Choose a relevant key phrase based domain, and use relevant key phrase based page names (URLs).
• Avoid elements which the search engines associated with spam and less trustworthy pages e.g. size 1 font text, keyword stuffing, multiple document titles, duplicate content etc.
• Make the page look attractive and read well i.e. balance your optimisation efforts with the knowledge that human visitors will need to have a good experience of the page in order to convert.
• Concentrate on ‘off page’ optimisation too i.e. get high quality incoming links. These can affect rankings in a very positive way.
• Think local. Is your service focused on a specific local area? If so include relevant city / town / regional names in pages, and consider signing up to ‘Google Places’. At the time of writing this article there appears to be a much stronger focus on local results in Google.
• Make sure that your website has sitemaps – XML and visible / html sitemaps. This could help the search engines as well as human visitors to find out more about your pages.
• Sign up to Google Tools and use as many as you can to help you.