Organic SEO campaigns rely on site and page structures to be effective. Boosting the signal to noise ratio by using clean code and appropriate markup at a page level will pay great dividends. At a site level, defining the site’s IA appropriately and always including sitemap.xml to standard are more methods to raise the level of success for an organic campaign.
The importance of content is indisputable. Content always has been, and always will be, King. Word selection is a cornerstone for both types of SEO campaigns, and their consistent use and placement in copy are also key for organic campaigns. Still, the content must be clear and useful to the audience to build and retain credibility, and it must remain constantly in sync with all other marketing and outreach efforts. A coined term or phrase amplifies this balanced chance between success and failure.
SEO campaigns (both paid and organic) are dependent upon proactive and reactive actions to events and conditions in order to be as successful as they can be.
In analyzing site traffic data, knowledge of all outreach efforts – from social to formal – must be recorded along with other news-making events related to the organization’s purpose. For instance, noticing that site traffic to specific content increases in the face of news relating to the organization’s mission can be the spur to add or edit relevant content, and opens possibilities to promote some lead content to prominence on the home page.
This same cohesive, global knowledge is vital for planning purposes. Knowing that an event will occur, or certain news is about to break – from the sensational to the expected – should be a spur to make site adjustments in advance.
In real-time reactionary situations, noticing that traffic to certain subject matter on the site is spiking should lead to the investigation of the cause – eventually informing site managers of the event(s) serving as the driver. From there action can be planned and executed.
As another example, noting that content on a specific subject is visited en masse upon release can validate editorial decisions.
Just as awareness of various events and activities must be maintained, various tools may be used to form a more complete picture. Recording activities of the user through Print-view or Send-to-friend type tools provide more weight to trend reports than knowing that a page was loaded and potentially not viewed (as time on page can mean that a page was loaded and left). Similarly, using mouse tracking tools and competitive analysis data can help to see the micro- and macro-views of users’ actions, respectively.
