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How often should you re-evaluate your search engine optimization strategy?
Good question from today's Focus Interactive Summit on search engine marketing - http://www.focus.com/c/BoU/. How often should you re-evaluate your strategy given how often the search engines change their algorithms?
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6 Answers
You can't day-trade algorithm changes. Google says they do ~500 algo changes a year and they are probably the ones with enough data to correlate an index effect.
What you can do is listen to how the engines view the web. Whether you like it or not, they are the ones curating it and they are the house rules. Luckily, that world view is remarkably consistent and it's something you can marry to your overall web strategy.
Save the day to day exploitation to the SEO's and competitive webmasters. A business of any real size shouldn't be changing it's overall search strategy so much as making it a persistent effort. Get your content indexed. Integrate yourselves into the web graph (read: links). And do it harder than your competitors.
It's not rocket science. The search engines don't overlook too many brands...
I'm a white hat SEO, therefore nothing can replace the basics of well-written tags, copy, page organization and content which should always be the foundation; I work in a very narrow, vertical market so I use Keyword Discovery and the Google keyword tool twice a year for keyword research (the keywords users search by), then monthly when I measure rankings, conversions and other online metrics, I check the competitors in the top 5, even if we are #1. The results are always interesting. Annually, I make certain that my SEO objectives are in line with our business objectives when I create my strategic plan.
Somewhat tricky question, though in my opinion while tracking the effectiveness of a solid SEO Campaign monthly, it is always good to re-evaluate on an every 6 months basis. As it is a good practice to not stress over any major search engine changes and updates, that is what your SEO Team is for. Though having good communication with your SEO Team and being aware of major shifts is needed.
A good SEO Consultant or Firm will be monitoring your ROI, Analytics, Search Engine Updates and Algorithm Changes, Ranking Changes, Web Presence, etc. So you will stay informed and keyed in to any Strategical Changes that might need to be made. If something in your SEO Strategy is not working it will be pretty evident, the results always show.
You should look at the strategy once a month to see that the website's organic traffic is still growing and you are still continuing to get leads.
You need to explore a re-evaluation when there is a change in the market such as a new competitor, a drop in organic traffic or a reduction in leads/sales through your website.
You need to look at trends to see if there is a downward trend in traffic around a particular product or service and you might just have to re-evaluate your strategy around those areas and not your whole campaign.
I agree with Brian Provost that 'you can't really day-trade algorithm changes'. A strategy should be good enough for 6 months at least; of course, you may have to keep making some tactical changes based on the results you see through whatever analytics tool you are using.
I agree with the 6 month review concept.
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