Business Assets + Historical Tracking = Serious Value

2Feb2009 Filed under: Online Marketing Author: JW

One of the areas we rarely touch on here at SEOmoz is how to use your offline, general business assets for SEO. Today I want to tackle that along with the seemingly unrelated subject of watching historical progress. At the end of this excercise, I think you’ll see why these two tie together so nicely.

Leveraging Business Assets for SEO

Chances are, your company/organization has a lot of valuable commodities beyond your website that can be put to good use to improve the quality and quantity of traffic you receive through search engine optimization efforts. These might include things like:

Other Domains You Own/Control
If you have multiple domains, I’ve talked just this past week about how to use those intelligently, but the major items I’d think about are:

Can you 301 redirect some of those sites back to a subfolder on your main site for additional benefit?
Do you own exact keyword match domain names that would make for effective microsites?
If you’re maintaining those sites separately, are you linking between them intelligently?

If any of those produce valuable strategies, pursue them – remember that it’s often far easier to optimize what you’re already doing than to develop entirely new strategies, content & processes. Particularly on the link building side, this is some of the lowest hanging fruit around.

Partnerships On & Off the Web
Partnerships can be leveraged in similar ways, particularly on the link front. If you have business partners that you supply or work with (or from whom you receive service), chances are good that you can set up link strategies between their sites and yours. While reciprocal linking carries a bit of a bad reputation, there is nothing wrong with building a "partners," "clients," "suppliers," or "recommended" list on your site or requesting that your organizational brethren do likewise for you.

Content or Data You’ve Never Put Online (or never made accessible)
Many times when we work with companies, we find a distinct lack of awareness around moving content from offline to the web. Yes! Those hundreds of lengthy articles you published when you were shipping a print publication via the mail are a great fit for you website archives. Yes! You should take all your email newsletters and make them accessible on your site. Yes! If you have unique data sets or written material, you should apply it to relevant pages on your site (or consider building out if nothing yet exists).

Customers Who’ve Had a Positive Experience
Customers, as I’ve mentioned in the "headsmacking" past, are a terrific resource for earning links, but did you also know they can write? Yes, it’s true! Your customers & website visitors may be valuable converts to the new-fangled "user-generated-content" phenomenon sweeping the web. Seriously, if you’ve got UGC options and see value in the content your users produce, don’t forget to reach out to customers, visitors and email lists for both links & content opportunities.

Your Fans
This principle applies equally to generic enthusiasts of your work. For many businesses that operate offline, or work in entertainment, hard goods or any consumer services, chances are good that if your business is worth its salt, you’ve got people who’ve used your products or services and would love to share their experience. Make video games? Reach out to your raving fans. Written a book? Mobilize your literary hordes on the web. Organize events? Collect attendees online. Like customers, fans are terrific resources for link acquisition, content creation, positive testimonials & social media marketing (to help spread the word).

Assessing Historical Progress

Equally important in web marketing & SEO campaigns is historical tracking. I’m not referring to classic web visitor or search analytics, but rather, the tracking of macro web development & website upgrades over the life of your online presence.

Why Having a Timeline of Website Changes is Important
It’s late on a Tuesday and you’re in a marketing meeting with the executive team. Four-and-a-half months ago, an interesting trend materialized where your site started consistently increasing search traffic from Live.com month over month. At first, it looked like a blip, but now, you’re pretty sure that this is something real. Your boss wants to know – what did we do right? And you can only answer – uh, probably something?

If you’re not keeping a timeline (which could be as simple as an online spreadsheet or as complex as a professional project management visual flowchart), you’re in trouble. Sure, you can see which instantaneous reactions to content developed, links acquired or dev changes made have an impact, but there’s obscured visibility into what technical modifications to the website might have altered the course of search traffic, either positive or negatively. If you can’t map changes, both those intended to influence SEO and those for which SEO wasn’t even a consideration, you’ll be optimizing blind and could miss powerful signals that could help dictate your strategy going forward.

Types of Site Changes that Can Affect SEO
So what are these changes you should be tracking on a regular basis? I like to have, at the least:

Content areas/features/options added to the site (this could be anything from a new blog to a new categorization system)
Modifications to URL structures
New partnerships that either send links or require them (meaning your site is earning new links, or linking out to new places)
Changes to navigation/menu systems (moving links aroundon pages, creating new link systems, etc.)
Any redirects, either to or from the site
Upticks in usage/traffic and the source (for example, if you get mentioned in the press and receive an influx of traffic)

When you track these items, you can create an accurate storyline to help discover causes and effects that relate to SEO. If, for example, you’ve seen a spike in traffic from Yahoo! that started 4-5 days after you switched from menu links in the footer to the header, you could make some smart hypotheses to help explain it. Without that tracking, it could be months before you noticed the surge in an analytics audit and there’d be no way to trace back to the responsible modification. Your design team might later choose to switch back to footer links, your traffic falls, and no record exists to help clear up the temporary positive impact.

Combining Business Assets & Historical Data to conduct SEO/Website SWOT Analysis

A classic staple of business school is the SWOT analysis – identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats faced by a business or project. By combining data from your business asset assessment and the historical tracking data (and visitor analytics), you can employ some very compelling analyses of these four foodgroups of the business world.

Identifying strengths is typically one of the easier objectives:

What sources of traffic are working well for your site/business?
Which projects/properties/partnerships are driving positive momentum towards traffic/revenue goals?
Which of your content sections/types produces high traffic & ROI?
What changes have you made historically that produced significant value?

Sourcing out the weaknesses can be tougher (and takes more intellectual honesty and courage):

What content is currently sending low levels of search/visitor traffic?
Which changes that were intended to produce positive results have shown little/no value?
Which traffic sources are underforming or underdelivering?
What projects/properties/partnerships are being leveraged poorly?

Parsing opportunities requires a combination of strength & weakness analysis. You want to find areas that are doing well, but have room to expand as well as those that have yet to be explored:

What brainstormed, but undeveloped or untested projects/ideas can have a significant, positive impact?
What traffic sources that currently send good quality traffic could be expanded to provide more value?
What areas of weakness have direct paths to recovery?
Which website changes have had positive results? Can these be applied to other areas or applied more rigorously for increased benefit?
What new markets or new content areas are potentially viable/valuable for expansion?
What sources of new content/new links have yet to bet tapped?

Determing threats can be the most challenging item of all. You’ll need to combine creative thinking with an honest assessment of your weaknesses, competitors’ strengths and consider the possibilities of macro-events that could shape your website/company’s future:

In your areas of weakness, which players in your market (or other, similar markets) are strong? How have they accomplished this?
What shifts in human behavior, web usage or market conditions could dramatically impact your business/site? (At SEOmoz, we might think about this from a "what if people stopped searching and instead, navigated the web in different ways" perspective. It’s a bit pie in the sky, but it can make a big difference when, say, Expedia destroys the travel agency business or Craigslist makes classifieds obsolete.)
Which competitors have had the most success in your arena? How have they accomplished this? Where does it intersect with your business/customers?
Are there any startups in similar businesses who have had massive success in a particular arena that could be dangerous to your business if it were replicated in your vertical/market?

Conducting SWOT analysis from a web marketing and SEO perspective is certainly one of the most valuable first steps you can make as an organization poised to expend resources. If you haven’t taken the time to analyze from these bird’s-eye-view perspectives, you might end up like a great runner who’s simply gone off the course – sure, you’ll finish fast, but where will it take you?

This hasn’t been my most accessible post, but I hope these higher level business + SEO piecse of advice can make a difference in your organization beyond simply optimizing for keywords and earning rankings. As always, I’d love your feedback, and I expect there are plenty of areas where my thinking isn’t thorough.

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