Balanced site indicators. Part 1: Strategy
With this article, I would like to open a small cycle dedicated to the promotion paradigm that I brought up over many years of work and which I currently actively use in working with client projects and my own company's projects.
The material will be useful, first of all, to business owners who are planning SEO promotion on their own or with the help of professionals, and it may be useful for colleagues to explain the principles of search promotion to customers. I actively use this concept at meetings and successfully achieve an acceptably high level of understanding even among people who are far from SEO and even from computers.
I must say at once that since the concept claims to be universal, there will not be real cases in these articles: they simply will not be required.
I called it “Balanced Indicators of the Sites”, and I formalized it for convenience in such a scheme:
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This is the most common presentation. In the course of the narrative internal communications will become much clearer. In today's first article, I will talk about the central connecting element, Strategy, and its key indicators or components.
The answer seems obvious, but we still talk it over (and I advise you to speak for yourself and even prescribe everything related to progress - this allows you to quickly check your goal with the results and assess how close you are to it, and if you’ve approached at all).
Strategy is a model of actions leading to the achievement of goals. The model is needed so that actions are taken consistently, do not contradict each other and are carried out with maximum efficiency.
A strategy cannot exist separately from the goal to which it is directed. So, it would be nice to unambiguously identify this goal.
It may seem that the answers are infinitely many. In fact, the goal can be described as: attracting from the search engines the maximum number of users who perform the target action.
Targeted actions may be different: it depends on the type of project and how it interacts with its audience.
In fact, there are many more of them, I have listed those that can be simply set up and monitored in the process of promotion. It is easy to see that they, plus or minus, fit into the standard and well-known sales funnel.
For an online store, of course, the main target action will be the paid order. For a company that does not engage in direct sales online, this will be one form or another of contact with a potential buyer. For a medical center this may be an appointment.
That is, depending on how far the moment of consumption of your goods and services is distant from the moment of the first contact with the user, the target actions may be different. Therefore, we do not set any specific framework, but we consider it important to specify these goals, to speak, and maybe to prescribe.
Why? Because it depends on the goals from which actions the strategy will be formed, and how these actions will determine the state of the remaining parameters. For example, how will your ...
It is clear that selling a lot of popular products is better through an online store, and one is not known to anyone yet - through a promotional website or landing page. And it is better to attract advertisers to an information project through an online media site.
The site is one of the central parts of the promotion strategy. This is where you bring the user, this is where he performs the target action. And it is with him that an SEO specialist works, trying to achieve high positions.
When you create a website, you should already know exactly for which target actions it is created. Literally everything will depend on this: the choice of the CMS and the contractor developing the project, the amount of content being created, the number and complexity of interaction scenarios, connected services, etc.
Ideally, you should have this understanding already at the development stage. And if it is not, then you need to create it at least before the start of work on SEO. Otherwise, a situation arises when the site ceases to meet the goals of promotion and it turns out to be ineffective.
In general, the conflict of compliance with the essence of the site to the goals of promotion is quite common. Sometimes a company grows or changes more quickly than a website manages to react to it. It happens that the site was created when the goals and objectives were still very fuzzy, and when they finally took shape, it turned out that the site does not correspond to them. This is the question that must be constantly asked: is your online platform still responding to the goals set? Do not contradict the other elements of the strategy?
In the following articles I will expand in more detail what this correspondence is made of and how to understand that something is going wrong. And now I propose to consider ...
Very often, keywords are perceived as the basis for advancement, for the sake of which everything is started. This is not true. Semantics is one of the most important installation elements, but it itself is determined by the same goal of advancement.
We distinguish different types of requests that are suitable for different types of projects:
In addition to vital requests (that is, requests consisting of the name of a company or brand), which are generally important for all projects, for each type of business priority has its own type of requests. If your goal is direct sales, then you are primarily interested in transactional, and the rest only as a supplement. If you are the owner of "Wikipedia", then you need the most uncertain information requests, such as the "world": with them you get maximum traffic.
It is very easy to determine exactly which keywords you need, if you know exactly what purpose you are pursuing on your website. At the very least, the priorities you can accurately place.
There is also a query conversion option. That is, how statistically likely is the commission of a targeted action by a user who has come to the site for specific keywords. Conversion is much more difficult to calculate: this requires real verification by experiment. Obviously, the potential conversion rate of the request “to sign up for the Dostoevskaya metro haircut” is higher than that of the query “bob haircut”. But between homogeneous queries, this difference is much less predictable.
Naturally, the greater the percentage of conversion queries in the semantic core, the higher the overall efficiency of achieving the goals, so if there is a possibility, then this parameter is best monitored. And there is such an opportunity - through metrics, which we will talk about in the next section.
The frequency of requests also matters. The higher the frequency, the more willing to get into the Top 10, which means that the more difficult (read, more expensive) will cost promotion.
If according to your transactional requests with narrow geo-referencing and a good forecast for the conversion of Yandex Wordstat per year shows “they asked for 0 times”, then this request will not work. It is required to find a balance between good frequency (so that there is someone to buy) and not very big complexity (in order to have enough time and energy).
From what semantics will be adopted, depends on how your site will be transformed. And vice versa, the semantics will depend on what the user can do on your site. And all this works together to achieve the stated goal. Here it is even impossible to clearly distinguish what comes first: the site or semantics. Yes, most often, the site by the time of the start of the promotion is already there. But it is still processed under the selected semantics, it becomes quite different.
Therefore, by the way, the best option is when the site and promotion are done within one project and by one performer. In this case there is an opportunity to work in parallel in both directions, correcting them relative to each other.
Your goal is always tied to a specific geography of coverage (if you cannot say that these are specific regions, then your geography is “the whole world”). If we are talking about business in the real sphere, then you probably know your capabilities well. A hairdresser does not need to attract people from the other end of the world, perishable products are usually not sent over long distances, building materials are almost always easier to buy in your city than to be brought from another region. If we are talking about an information project, where the value to the user is the access to certain resources, the geography is not limited.
This point is important to take into account and speak in detail when you formulate a goal. The whole promotion strategy depends on it. And that means semantics, and your site. If you want to get the maximum coverage throughout the country, then be ready to provide real addresses in the regions for the Directory, think over the content at least for groups of regions, etc. If you now have little idea how you will ship products to the opposite edge of the country, it’s better to concentrate on your native region.
When formulating goals, always adequately assess your competitors. Adequate assessment begins with the correct definition of its niche. If you are going to compete with Wikipedia, then be prepared for the fact that you will need to create as many (or better even more) pages and fill them with the same (or better even more) information. And at least the same way to work out the structure, internal relink, etc.
This does not mean that Wikipedia cannot be defeated: if you have the resources and the desire, then you can take any height and beat any competitors. But if there are no resources, then trying does not make economic sense.
There is a reverse side of the same medal. Your competitors have achieved a higher position in the aggregate of their parameters. Having learned these parameters, you will receive a minimum level, above which you are already winning. You do not have to go round all the three corps: in order to get ahead is enough and a centimeter. Of course, it’s wise and right to make sure that you have a chance. But becoming Wikipedia to get around the three regional competitors is almost certainly not advisable.
Before the start of the promotion (and even better, before the start of the development of the site) it is important for us to determine the purpose for which we are developing the site and are going to promote it. Based on this goal, we are working on a basic strategy, answering questions:
Having formulated the answers, we get intermediate target results leading us to the main goal. It remains only to paint the path to achieve them and the strategy can be considered ready. And about what the intermediate results are, and what actions we will perform - in the following articles.
The material will be useful, first of all, to business owners who are planning SEO promotion on their own or with the help of professionals, and it may be useful for colleagues to explain the principles of search promotion to customers. I actively use this concept at meetings and successfully achieve an acceptably high level of understanding even among people who are far from SEO and even from computers.
I must say at once that since the concept claims to be universal, there will not be real cases in these articles: they simply will not be required.
I called it “Balanced Indicators of the Sites”, and I formalized it for convenience in such a scheme:
')
This is the most common presentation. In the course of the narrative internal communications will become much clearer. In today's first article, I will talk about the central connecting element, Strategy, and its key indicators or components.
Why do you need a strategy?
The answer seems obvious, but we still talk it over (and I advise you to speak for yourself and even prescribe everything related to progress - this allows you to quickly check your goal with the results and assess how close you are to it, and if you’ve approached at all).
Strategy is a model of actions leading to the achievement of goals. The model is needed so that actions are taken consistently, do not contradict each other and are carried out with maximum efficiency.
A strategy cannot exist separately from the goal to which it is directed. So, it would be nice to unambiguously identify this goal.
What is the purpose of SEO promotion?
It may seem that the answers are infinitely many. In fact, the goal can be described as: attracting from the search engines the maximum number of users who perform the target action.
Targeted actions may be different: it depends on the type of project and how it interacts with its audience.
- Visit the page / pages / a certain number of pages. Such KPIs are important, for example, for information projects and electronic media.
- Sending goods to the basket. This is one of the main KPI for online store.
- Filling the form. Suitable for different types of sites, including those that are not engaged in online commerce.
- Registration of the application. It is typical for areas where additional actions are needed before paying for goods or services (for example, to sign an agreement for website promotion, you need to see, evaluate, etc.).
- Contact by email / phone / chat. Today it is useful to almost any project.
- Payment order. One of the options for the final target action in the funnel for online stores.
In fact, there are many more of them, I have listed those that can be simply set up and monitored in the process of promotion. It is easy to see that they, plus or minus, fit into the standard and well-known sales funnel.
For an online store, of course, the main target action will be the paid order. For a company that does not engage in direct sales online, this will be one form or another of contact with a potential buyer. For a medical center this may be an appointment.
That is, depending on how far the moment of consumption of your goods and services is distant from the moment of the first contact with the user, the target actions may be different. Therefore, we do not set any specific framework, but we consider it important to specify these goals, to speak, and maybe to prescribe.
Why? Because it depends on the goals from which actions the strategy will be formed, and how these actions will determine the state of the remaining parameters. For example, how will your ...
Site
It is clear that selling a lot of popular products is better through an online store, and one is not known to anyone yet - through a promotional website or landing page. And it is better to attract advertisers to an information project through an online media site.
The site is one of the central parts of the promotion strategy. This is where you bring the user, this is where he performs the target action. And it is with him that an SEO specialist works, trying to achieve high positions.
When you create a website, you should already know exactly for which target actions it is created. Literally everything will depend on this: the choice of the CMS and the contractor developing the project, the amount of content being created, the number and complexity of interaction scenarios, connected services, etc.
Ideally, you should have this understanding already at the development stage. And if it is not, then you need to create it at least before the start of work on SEO. Otherwise, a situation arises when the site ceases to meet the goals of promotion and it turns out to be ineffective.
In general, the conflict of compliance with the essence of the site to the goals of promotion is quite common. Sometimes a company grows or changes more quickly than a website manages to react to it. It happens that the site was created when the goals and objectives were still very fuzzy, and when they finally took shape, it turned out that the site does not correspond to them. This is the question that must be constantly asked: is your online platform still responding to the goals set? Do not contradict the other elements of the strategy?
In the following articles I will expand in more detail what this correspondence is made of and how to understand that something is going wrong. And now I propose to consider ...
Keywords
Very often, keywords are perceived as the basis for advancement, for the sake of which everything is started. This is not true. Semantics is one of the most important installation elements, but it itself is determined by the same goal of advancement.
We distinguish different types of requests that are suitable for different types of projects:
- Informational. These are requests that clearly indicate that the user is looking for information about something. For example, the query “world station” is informational. "Grooming car" - too. A simple life hack: if, by your query, the article in “Wikipedia” is in the first place in the results, the query is almost certainly informational. It does not work 100% of the time, but for the general understanding it will fit perfectly.
- Transactional. Requests in which the user explicitly expresses the desire and willingness to receive a service or buy a product are called transactional. “Sign up for a haircut online” - just such a request. “Buy a model of the station world” - the same. This type of inquiry usually makes the biggest interest for a business: it eliminates users with a deliberately low probability of purchase.
- Navigation This is the case when the user knows what exactly he needs, but does not remember what address it is at. And it can be both an address in the real world, and the address of a site, a group on a social network or even just a phone number. Such requests are of the form “Hairdresser’s World site”, or “haircut for haircut phone”.
In addition to vital requests (that is, requests consisting of the name of a company or brand), which are generally important for all projects, for each type of business priority has its own type of requests. If your goal is direct sales, then you are primarily interested in transactional, and the rest only as a supplement. If you are the owner of "Wikipedia", then you need the most uncertain information requests, such as the "world": with them you get maximum traffic.
It is very easy to determine exactly which keywords you need, if you know exactly what purpose you are pursuing on your website. At the very least, the priorities you can accurately place.
There is also a query conversion option. That is, how statistically likely is the commission of a targeted action by a user who has come to the site for specific keywords. Conversion is much more difficult to calculate: this requires real verification by experiment. Obviously, the potential conversion rate of the request “to sign up for the Dostoevskaya metro haircut” is higher than that of the query “bob haircut”. But between homogeneous queries, this difference is much less predictable.
Naturally, the greater the percentage of conversion queries in the semantic core, the higher the overall efficiency of achieving the goals, so if there is a possibility, then this parameter is best monitored. And there is such an opportunity - through metrics, which we will talk about in the next section.
The frequency of requests also matters. The higher the frequency, the more willing to get into the Top 10, which means that the more difficult (read, more expensive) will cost promotion.
If according to your transactional requests with narrow geo-referencing and a good forecast for the conversion of Yandex Wordstat per year shows “they asked for 0 times”, then this request will not work. It is required to find a balance between good frequency (so that there is someone to buy) and not very big complexity (in order to have enough time and energy).
From what semantics will be adopted, depends on how your site will be transformed. And vice versa, the semantics will depend on what the user can do on your site. And all this works together to achieve the stated goal. Here it is even impossible to clearly distinguish what comes first: the site or semantics. Yes, most often, the site by the time of the start of the promotion is already there. But it is still processed under the selected semantics, it becomes quite different.
Therefore, by the way, the best option is when the site and promotion are done within one project and by one performer. In this case there is an opportunity to work in parallel in both directions, correcting them relative to each other.
Regions
Your goal is always tied to a specific geography of coverage (if you cannot say that these are specific regions, then your geography is “the whole world”). If we are talking about business in the real sphere, then you probably know your capabilities well. A hairdresser does not need to attract people from the other end of the world, perishable products are usually not sent over long distances, building materials are almost always easier to buy in your city than to be brought from another region. If we are talking about an information project, where the value to the user is the access to certain resources, the geography is not limited.
This point is important to take into account and speak in detail when you formulate a goal. The whole promotion strategy depends on it. And that means semantics, and your site. If you want to get the maximum coverage throughout the country, then be ready to provide real addresses in the regions for the Directory, think over the content at least for groups of regions, etc. If you now have little idea how you will ship products to the opposite edge of the country, it’s better to concentrate on your native region.
Competitors
When formulating goals, always adequately assess your competitors. Adequate assessment begins with the correct definition of its niche. If you are going to compete with Wikipedia, then be prepared for the fact that you will need to create as many (or better even more) pages and fill them with the same (or better even more) information. And at least the same way to work out the structure, internal relink, etc.
This does not mean that Wikipedia cannot be defeated: if you have the resources and the desire, then you can take any height and beat any competitors. But if there are no resources, then trying does not make economic sense.
There is a reverse side of the same medal. Your competitors have achieved a higher position in the aggregate of their parameters. Having learned these parameters, you will receive a minimum level, above which you are already winning. You do not have to go round all the three corps: in order to get ahead is enough and a centimeter. Of course, it’s wise and right to make sure that you have a chance. But becoming Wikipedia to get around the three regional competitors is almost certainly not advisable.
Total
Before the start of the promotion (and even better, before the start of the development of the site) it is important for us to determine the purpose for which we are developing the site and are going to promote it. Based on this goal, we are working on a basic strategy, answering questions:
- What should be the site?
- What are the requests we will bring people?
- In which regions should we be found?
- What is the minimum threshold to beat competitors?
Having formulated the answers, we get intermediate target results leading us to the main goal. It remains only to paint the path to achieve them and the strategy can be considered ready. And about what the intermediate results are, and what actions we will perform - in the following articles.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/441130/
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