Business Objectives and Goals

Define success: What does success mean? How do you define online victory? What are you expecting out of your website? These are some of the first questions we will ask when we start a new online campaign. Wither it’s SEO, PPC or a new website. We want to know exactly what you want to get out of your online presence. Are you looking to sell products directly on your site? If so, how many? How many products do you need to move to break even? How many do you need to move to make a profit? Identifying exactly what you want will help us all be on the same page, and deliver exactly what you want.

Manage Expectations: How realistic are your goals and aspirations? Do you expect to invest 5% of your marketing budget online, but hope it will drive 50% of your future growth? For many businesses, this is exactly what they expect. We help bring you back to earth and guide you to healthy expectations over a realistic timeline.

Candid Consulting: When looking over your goals and expectations, we are not afraid to tell you the truth. If you’re expectations are unrealistic, for sales or Google rankings, we will be honest and upfront with you- even if it means you’re not ready for online marketing. We’ve been doing this FOREVER, we know how to scope out an online market and massage you into goals that are actually doable. At the end of the day, isn’t that what you want?

Keyword Analysis

Measure Twice, Cut Once: Gravitate Online has the most robust and effective keyword research process in the industry, and there is one simple reason, we take the time to do it right. Before we unleash a full court press on your SEO services, we want to make sure we are going after the phrases that will bring you the best return, will bring you lots of eye-balls and are terms we can actually dominate in a reasonable time frame.  Balancing these three concepts is critical to hitting your goals.

Phrases Targeting ROI: We don’t want to spent hundreds of hours helping you show up for a term that makes you no money. The best way to prevent this is to get you involved in the keyword research process. A few times during the process, we will be sending you a report, showing our deepening analysis of the phrases we are going after and asking for your feedback. We make it easy for you to help us rank the terms, based on those terms that represent actual products you have in stock, or services you are currently providing- and more importantly, the ones that make you the most money.  When our list is complete, you will feel confident that we are going after customers that can influence your bottom line. It takes a little more time, but is always worth it.

Focus on the Eyeballs: Gravitate Online will  do the research necessary to go after terms that people are actually typing into Google.  It’s not going to help your business to show up for phrases that have no or only little search volume.

Calm Down Boy: You’re looking at phrases now that have tons of search volume and you start to salivate. Take a breather. Some of those terms are simply out of your league at this point. We don’t want to burn money going after phrases that are way too competitive. It’s like setting a goal that you will run a Marathon…tomorrow.  You’ll get there, you just need to pace yourself and do the work required. Your site will need time, energy and a lot of TLC first. We go after phrases that are competitive, but doable within the next 6 months. So, when you hear that we are confident we can get you to rank for a phrase in 6 months, you can trust that we’ve looked over the competitive landscape and are projecting success with open eyes and a clear mind.

The Process: Gravitate Online has created a process to balance the focus on ROI, going after search volume and reaching for doable phrases through the following outline:

1. Identify products or services that bring in the most money for the business
2. Generate keyword phrase idea for the homepage and top 10 landing/category pages highlighting search volume
3. Send report to client to make sure phrases are applicable and profitable
4. Refine list based on client feedback and check for each phrase and map out the difficulty and competitive nature of new list, eliminate words that are not realistic
5. Reduce list to 10 phrases per page
6. Send new list to client to help rank priority as high, medium or low
7. Consider client feedback and create final list, highlighting the first 2 phrases that will be focused on for the homepage and 10 landing pages (100 phrases total)
8. Communicate expectations of success to client and integrate phrases in the client SEO tracker to assure accountability

Competitor Analysis

Keeping Up with the Joneses: If you want to rank with or above your competitors, then you have to know where they are, and how they got there. Once this has been identified, you can follow a consistent plan to  not just keeping up, we’re leave them in the dust. We do this by following a concise 3 step process:

• Identify Your Competition: We pick your brain about who you want to beat online, then we supplement it with our own research. We compare notes with you and come up with a list of 3 targeted competitors
• Know How they are Doing: We take notes on how they are ranking for the keywords we are interested in. We then note some key indicators that give us clues into how they are getting the great rankings. We compare these indicators with your site and draw up a plan to improve your indicators to surpass the competition. Indicators may include:
  • Number of quality links coming into the site
  • Source of quality links into the site
  • Quality content on the site and content upload frequency
  • On-page optimization factors, such as meta data, clean code and crawl rate
  • Social participation
• Track What They Do: Now that we know how and what they are doing, we keep our finger on their pulse and watch what they do. If they make major changes, enhance their content or increase their link building efforts, then learn from their experimenting and cherry pick strategies that work. Why reinvent the wheel? If someone is doing something that works, it’s sometimes better to duplicate and enhance than to explore un-chartered waters.

Backlink Analysis

Count the Votes: Every backlink/inbound link is a popularity vote that Google looks at to determine your value as a website. At this stage, we count these votes and see how many other sites have linked to your site, products, services and content. We do the same thing for your competitors, so we know exactly what we are competing against. We don’t just look at the total number of links, but also the Page Authority and Domain Authority of these links. We want to know how legitimate the links are, and if Google trusts them or not. Chances are, your high ranking competitors have many more quality links than you do- we can remedy this, but first we have to know if this is the case, hence our initial backlink analysis!

Establish Benchmarks

Know Where You Stand: Good, bad or ugly…we need to know exactly where your site stands in the eyes of search engines. That way we can intelligently map out a way to hit your goals. The benchmarks we monitor closely are:

• Daily Average Visitors: The average number of visits that come to your site over a month’s time, higher is always better.
• Daily Average Unique Visitors: The average number of actual individual visitors who come to your site, higher is always better.
• Domain Authority Score: SEOmoz provides a score from 1-100 that represents how well Google is likely to rank your site in search results,  including all sub-pages, higher is always better. It includes in it’s score an aggregate of mozRank, link profile and the trustability of your site.
• MozRank: A more specific SEOmoz score from 1-10 that summarizes how popular your site is on the web, it is most closely affected by the number of quality links to your site. Higher is better.
• Incoming Links:The total number of links pointing to your site from outside sources. It includes high and low quality links. Higher is better, although quality is not shown, as in MozRank, it still reflects overall number of links, where it is always better to trend upwards.
• Alexa Rank: A popularity ranking of all the millions of sites on the internet, based on traffic. Lower is always better.
• Indexed Pages: Total footprint of the site can be quickly seen by how many pages are indexed. Higher is generally better.
• Keyword Score: The percentage representing how many keyword phrases from those we are focusing on are ranking on the first page. The higher the percentage the better.
• Sales (when applicable): eCommerce sites care more about this statistic than any other. Success is achieved if overall sales are trending upward, year-over-year.