Steps in the SEO Process
Learn more about 1Digital’s SEO process
Click each step below to learn more…
1. Discovery
Screening Process
Before we begin any digital marketing campaign, we need to create a plan that’s tailored to your business. There is no one-size-fits-all digital marketing campaign. We need to ensure that whatever campaign we launch is a good fit for you and your business.
After we determine you’re a good candidate for search engine marketing, your Project Manager will request full access to your online store, your Google Analytics account, and your Google Search Console in order to provide you with an in-depth SEO Audit.
View sample SEO auditSome questions we’ll ask you
Prior to your campaign starting, we’ll ask you several questions in our SEO Questionnaire.
- Who/Where is your target audience?
- Are you running any other campaigns?
- Who are your competitors?
- Why is your business unique?
- What are some of the keywords you think people should be able to find you by searching?
- And more!
2. Project Setup
Setup
Our SEO projects begin with the creation of a shared workspace on our project management system, Podio. On this shared workspace you can: communicate with members of your marketing team, review and approve content, and keep track of the marketing activities being performed.
Next, we will require any logins and credentials we did not receive during the discovery phase. Much of this will be covered in the SEO Questionnaire that you’ll fill out when beginning a project. We will invite you to our client SEO dashboard where you can keep track of your campaign’s keyword analytics.
Kick-off Call
During the setup phase, we’ll also have a Kick-Off meeting where we will take the time to introduce you and your team to the functionalities of our project management system, Podio. This will be our home for communication and collaboration. This introduction will show you where to find your project, your content and more. Next, we will discuss your campaign with the vital members of your campaign’s team. These members include your Project Manager, Content Coordinator, Writer and more. During this meeting, we will discuss the questions you provided in your SEO Questionnaire. This will help us to build your keyword list! Lastly, we will set up a day and time to have monthly meetings where your project manager can keep you updated as to the progress of your campaign. We will make a recurring Google Calendar event for these meetings so you’ll be aware of them ahead of time.
Monthly Meetings
As a part of our ongoing monthly SEO service, we offer monthly check-in meetings. Monthly meetings are a useful tool not only for you to keep track of how we’re performing, but also for us to stay in the loop with what you’re doing with the site and make sure our campaign is always up to date with the latest changes in your inventory, strategy, and anything else we might synergize marketing with!
We view our SEO campaign as a partnership. So we ask that our clients be able to commit to checking in on the campaign over a screen sharing call once per month before taking on an SEO campaign. Your SEO project manager will coordinate a recurring meeting time with you once the first month of SEO work has been completed. Our most successful campaigns are the ones where our clients take on some of that responsibility to keep us updated in the same way we try to keep them updated.
SEO QUESTIONNAIRE SEO DASHBOARD Next Step
3. Keyword Selection
Keyword Selection
When beginning any search marketing campaign, keyword selection will be the most crucial part of the process. Keywords are the search terms that the campaign will endeavor to get your site to rank more highly for. The number of keywords covered in our digital marketing plan will have been decided in the Discovery and Project Setup Phases. Now we will have enough information to make our keyword recommendations. These keywords are chosen for a number of qualities including, how quickly we’ll be able to rank you, what your competitors are ranking for, where your traffic is coming from, how they build your authority with Google, and how much intent to purchase the search term indicates. Once we present you with a list of suggestions, we’ll rely on your expertise within your industry to help us refine it even further. This will mean paring down a longer list of suggestions to the finalized list that we will target. You are welcome to do this yourself, as we are confident in all of our suggestions, or have us finalize the list using our best judgment. After the keyword list is finalized, the campaign is ready to begin in earnest.
Campaign Strategy / Keyword Changes
From time to time 1Digital® may decide that some keywords may need to be swapped out depending on the competitive nature, traction or SEO strategy. Changing keywords is a vital part of 1Digital®‘s escalating SEO strategy; however, changing keywords at the wrong time, or changing the wrong keywords can adversely affect an SEO campaign. All keywords will need time to display results and are a part of the overall strategy for ranking related keywords.
For this reason, we limit client-initiated keyword changes to once per 6 month campaign period with the approval of 1Digital Agency. All keyword changes must be discussed with your SEO project manager and approved by both parties before taking effect. Changing keywords within the initial term of your contract will impact your contract length and extend that term by a minimum of 3 months.
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4. On-Page Optimization
On-page Optimization
On-page optimization is the process of going through the backend of your site and strengthening the qualities of your pages that search engines pick up on. This process makes your site as visible to search engines as it can possibly be and allows it to rank more easily for the search terms we’ve decided to target. Though on-page optimization activities will continue throughout your campaign, much of the work will be completed directly after keywords are chosen.
1Digital® will only be responsible for optimizing the pages which are the targets of keywords in our finalized list. The more keywords in your campaign, the more pages we will update and optimize on a regular basis. We will monitor errors on all other pages and alert you when we think they should be addressed by adding additional time to the campaign in a particular month. Some clients have a critical mass of SEO errors at the outset, which would hold the campaign back. If this is the case, we will identify this in the Discovery Phase and make you aware of any additional time and cost added to the campaign to rectify this before we begin.
On the other hand, if for any reason your dedicated hours are not used in their entirety each month, those extra hours will be used to optimize non-targeted pages!
On-page optimization activities focus on:
- Meta Tags
- Meta Descriptions
- On-Page Copy
- Hyperlink Optimization [Title Attribute (Link Title)]
- ALT Text Optimization [adding appropriate image title]
- Heading Tags (H1 to H6)
- Internal Linking (keywords in anchor text)
- Recommendations for URL optimization (adding keyword in URL)
5. Content Creation
Content Creation
All organic search marketing relies heavily on an effective content marketing strategy. On-page optimization, though crucial, is only the tip of the iceberg. Content marketing represents the ongoing process of distributing content around the web to signal to Google that your site is a trustworthy publisher and worth ranking highly. During content creation, we’ll be writing two different, but equally important, types of content for your business. Content that is meant for off-site, to build your network of backlinks, and content that is meant for on-site, to build your readership. We’ll rely on your quick approvals or comments on all content we post in Podio for your review. In order to make this process as productive as possible, we request approval or changes for content within 2-3 business days of receipt.
Timely content approval is crucial for a successful campaign. If you don’t have time to review your SEO content, we highly recommend that you talk to your project manager about putting some or all of your content on auto-approve. Auto-approve will allow us to keep your campaign working as efficiently as possible. Should we not receive your approval for a content item within 14 days of its submission to your project workspace, the item will be automatically approved and published. For off-site content, automatic approval occurs after 48 business hours.
On-site content is meant for your customers to read. It should accomplish two goals: promotional value and SEO ranking. The content should be useful to your readers. It should be entertaining to read and educate your readers about your company and products. This content will also help improve your website’s SEO rankings. Search engines will see that you are publishing worthwhile content and improve your rank for targeted keywords as you continue to do so.
All Off-Site content is created to be posted on websites that are specifically designed to be repositories for this kind of content. The main thing these off-site articles accomplish is they have at least one of your tracked keywords and serves as a valuable link back to your website. That way, when Google’s algorithm is trying to find results for one of the keywords that you target, it will register that there are informational articles about the keyword that link back to your website. This tells the Google algorithm that you are an authority on the keyword and signals Google to give you higher rankings in organic searches for that keyword. Customers will not be reading off-site content. It is purely for SEO purposes. You can always follow where off-site content is being posted in your SEO Project Report spreadsheet, which can be found in Podio.
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6. Reporting
Reporting
Reports are an essential part of your Search Engine Optimization campaign. Each month, clients are asked to schedule a call to discuss the work performed both on and off your site. In this meeting, your SEO Project Manager will show you various tools and reporting features that help to show you how your campaign is progressing. One of the tools that 1Digital Agency uses for reporting is our proprietary SEO dashboard. This tool was designed and built to provide you with updates that are specifically relevant to your campaign. 1Digital Agency believes consistent and detailed communication throughout the course of work is imperative to the success of your SEO campaign.
In addition to monthly meetings with you SEO Project Manager, you will be able to access various updates in our project management system, Podio. These updates will show you various data points such as work performed each week, current rankings, links to off-site and on-site content and more.
Lastly, your project manager will send you occasional videos to share weekly achievements and status updates.
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