Web Strategy Consulting
Because of recent large-scale, industry-shifting trends in Search Engine Optimization that have all but redefined the classic model of SEO, I’ve redefined my role from a SEO Consultant to a Web Strategy Consultant. I now provide organizations with a Web Strategy Blueprint that includes an array of metrics and specific tasks that are customized to meet the unique goals of your organization.
Some of the factors that helped me make the shift to a Web Strategy Consultant include:
- The Vince algorithm update by Google that gives better known brands higher rankings than smaller, lesser known sites.
- The Panda algorithm update by Google and its focus on a user’s behavior as well as the trust and authority of websites based look/feel/content/style/etc.
- The Caffeine algorithm update by Google that improves Google’s indexing infrastructure by promoting websites that are fast, both for the user’s sake as well as Google’s ability to crawl it more efficiently.
- Social media’s huge impact on internet user’s behavior – Comscore said in 2011 that internet users spend more than 20% of their time online using social media sites.
- The separation and expansion of the social media markets; LinkedIn recently surpassed MySpace to become the number two social network in the United States & Facebook, FourSquare, Google+, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Tumblr all have at least 10 million active users.
- The dominance of content creation as the number one marketing tool for ranking well in the search engines, over 50% of companies in a recent Hubspot survey run an active blog.
- Mobile’s huge increase in popularity causing local portals like Bing Maps, Citysearch, FourSquare, Google Maps, UrbanSpoon, Yelp, etc. now offer massive potential value to local businesses and service providers.
While at one time my job merely covered limited accessability enhancements, keyword research, link building and other search vertical tasks, it is now much more complex as you can see.
I now provide comprehensive, strategic web consulting services by creating a blueprint for your organization that enables you to manage all the metrics, reporting, data and platforms that are necessary to beat your competition, drive highly targeted leads and ensure long-term customer retention and/or repeat business. I can provide this service once, monthly,quarterly, semi-annually or annually depending on the level of commitment you’re interested in making.
Web Strategy Blueprint
My new Web Strategy Blueprint takes into consideration a variety of new factors that are vital to a successful website. I have not only revamped my offering to include many more data sets and verticals, but I’ve also added another factor, Page Speed Optimization, to the mix. Page Speed Optimization is optimizing your website for speed for a better user experience but more importantly, for better search engine rankings. Google now penalizes your rankings for slow pages.
Using Google’s Web Performance Best Practices I give you direction on how to speed up your website by as much as 300% by adding features such as a content delivery network or CDN, HTML caching, Google Pagespeed and minification. You want your website to deliver an excellent user experience to promote session times and allow search engines to easily index your site for higher search engine rankings.
Search Engine Factors
- Site Accessibility – Creating a site search engines can easily crawl & index.
- Keyword Research & Targeting – Choosing the right keywords and employing them effectively.
- Content Strategy – Set a plan to how to leverage an organization’s resources and how to produce valuable, useful, relavant, share-worthy or viral material.
- Content Creation – Execute on creation of blog posts, evergreen content, infographics, interactive works, apps, tools, etc.
- Link Building – Investigating, tracking and acquiring linking opportunities.
- New Search Protocols – Schema.org, Rel=Author, Video XML Sitemaps, etc.
- Search Verticals – Images, local, video, news, blogs, social, mobile, product, etc.
- Community Management – Creating & participating in conversations around your brand/sector in positive ways to drive awareness and adoption.
- Social Media Promotion – Employing Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Quora, etc. to improve your reach.
- Social Network Reach – Improving the size, depth and breadth of your social networks to reach more potential customers and connectors.
- Reputation Tracking – Watching your brand’s search ressults, social media remarks and web content to track success and monitor for damaging information.
- Local/Maps Optimization – Optimizing for placement in local search and protals, both web and social, plus monitoring local activity.
Page Speed Factors
- Optimizing caching — Keeping your application’s data and logic off the network altogether
- Minimizing round-trip times — Reducing the number of serial request-response cycles
- Minimizing request overhead — Reducing upload size
- Minimizing payload size — Reducing the size of responses, downloads, and cached pages
- Optimizing browser rendering — Improving the browser’s layout of a page
- Optimizing for mobile – With the massive amount of mobile traffic available to you, getting your site mobile ready is a must.