The big big question : What do you do when you’ve achieved your goal of getting a site to appear at #1 in organic search results? Is that the end? Do you now just sit back and reap the benefits of your hard work? Not at all. Firstly, congratulations! It’s a hard task getting to the top with so much competition. But, now that you are there, here’s what you should do in order to maintain your site’s #1 ranking:
1. Optimize your website: Ensure that your website has all the necessary interest triggers to keep customers interested in browsing your site (sturdy architecture, good content, easy navigation paths ). Make sure that you also have strong conversion triggers to convert traffic to leads (this depends on your business model and what you defeine as a lead). So, this could be a newsletter signup, a free report download, a request for more information about your products etc. Try to have capture capabilities at every conversion point, perferably in the form of a simple form. The aim of this exercise: To leverage your high ranking to build a community of users that you can communicate with on a regular basis.
2. Fill SEO gaps: There’s always something you have to do. Sure, your content is outstanding, you have all your meta content covered, all your redirects are taken care of, but check other areas too. Dont forget your anchor tags, check your images – rename them appropriately and make sure that their alt tags are complete. Make sure that you create an xml sitemap and submit it to Google webmaster. Don’t forget to recheck your keywords and capture some relevant longtail phrases.
3. Do SEM: Carrying on from the previous point, test keyword groups and lists, especially any relevant longtail keyword phrases. If you rank well for the common terms in your industry, chances are that you’ll rank well for the long-tail terms too. If not, then use PPC and have some long tail campaigns in play. This wont cost you much and you’ll get visitors who are in an advanced stage of the buying process, which means that your conversaion rate from PPc will be higher than usual.
Use wordtracker to identify key long tail phrases and test them on your site. Think about A/B testing to see which version gets you the most conversions – Let’s be honest here – we’re not being altruistic. Business is business – all the above efforts mean zip if we dont have strong conversion numbers. And always have something on tap to capture information should anyone be willing to offer it.
4. Spreading the word, socially: Have a social network strategy in place. Connect with folks on social networks, build trust and talk about your product or service offering help or solutions. Place backlinks to yourself on social bookmarking sites like del.ico.us and misterwong, digg, furl and reddit. Also, be creative, visit blogs that dicsuss your products and comment on them with a backlink to your site.
5. Web PR: Build press releases which contain your key search phrases (hyperlinked back to your site) and release them through Internet Press Release distribution services such as Transworld News or PR Newswire. Note that these services may sometimes charge a fee. Try newsvine too. Should this work, you just use an organic inexpensive tool for driving traffic, doing better outside SEO and spreading the word for your business on the web.
6. Email Marketing: Use this customer contact tool delicately. Send promotional messages from time-to-time to your opt-in list, make sure that your message is creative, concise and adequate. Do not overdo it.
7. Build a blog: Dynamic content is key to remind the search engines that your website is alive and kicking. For a blog, you can get some neat wordpress templates for free. It’s very simple. Get a domain name from Godaddy.com, get a hosting provider like dreamhost to host your website and then visit one of the many wordpress forums, select the template that best matches your business and design sensibilities and you’re good to go. Make sure that you consistently enter content into your blog and build another community in there. You can always get feedback from your community about your products, your services and ideas on how you can improve your services to your customers.
So, this in short is what you need to do when you’re done SEOing your site and have acheived your SEO target of #1 or 2 or 3.
