15 Jan SEO. It’s Cake.
The following is a guest post by Advokate’s SEO Guru, Erika Austin.
SEO: always be better
If you’re in the digital marketing world, maybe you’ve heard at one point or another that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is dead. SEO, to me, isn’t about algorithms.
This is important: It’s about ongoing effort and the art of being better. There will be new competition popping up everyday and you need to be the most innovative and relevant in what you do.
If you are just starting to create a website:
Think about the words that help describe your website and what you offer. Write these down. Are there pages that speak to each of those concepts you thought of? Does your homepage immediately convey that? Typically, your homepage is your first impression to make on your audience. Your pages should help support your homepage with more detail.
If you are starting with an existing website:
I’ve have been referring to my optimization process as CAKE which involves three different layers:
- CAKE
- ICING
- PAN
Making the cake is the hardest part because it’s figuring out what you care the most about. Next you need to figure out what is the ONE THING this page is meant for. Is this page going to be relevant to my business and my customers? What will they take away from this page, and what is the next step we expect them to take. I look at the ones that I find the most relevant to my market, because that is the thing I want to offer. I see those pages as my inbound pages — the core to my business. My base layer. My cake.
You first focus on the cake. What is the keyword search volume for these keywords? What is the existing traffic coming to this page looking for? Is the (search) market declining or is it my ranking and relevance that’s declining?
All of the other pages that aren’t core to my business or not the heart of what I offer but still drive traffic to my website. Examples of this are blogs, they receive a lot of content at first because it’s fresh or trending content. These keywords can be outliers that are difficult to predict or maybe extremely competitive. Try to focus time in creating new content – for the purpose that it is a bonus to your already existing cake! This is your icing. You should still think about what the next step is when someone gets to this page.
Everything else is PAN. It’s usually supporting pages that help add credibility to my website. About Page, PAN! Company Page, PAN! Careers Page, PAN!
You get the idea. We have no expectation that anyone will find our PAN in search engine results, but they add-value to the visitor by providing more credibility to your website. The cake wouldn’t be able to be baked without the PAN to structure it.
