subject: Factors which may be affecting your SEO campaign [print this page] Factors which may be affecting your SEO campaign
A critical part of any SEO campaign is analysing the factors that may potentially be hindering its success. Far too frequently, people focus purely on ways to improve their SEO campaigns, without examining the factors that could be holding them back from ranking highly in the first place.
Webmasters will often have their own thoughts on what factors could be influencing the way their SEO campaign is going, and although many of these may be familiar to some, not everyone is fully up to speed on the factors affecting SEO.
In today's post, we aim to flag up some of the most commonly influences on SEO campaign success. It is generally a good idea to eliminate some of the most simple and commonplace of these first, in order to really get to the heart of the matter.
Industry competition
Even if you have been working within your particular industry for many years and are confident that you know it inside out, this will not necessarily guarantee you high rankings. What this knowledge and experience will do, however, is to help you immensely when it comes to your keywords and target audience.
The competitiveness of your chosen field determines how well you perform in the rankings. In an extremely competitive market packed with big-name brands and well-established websites, you may struggle to achieve high rankings in an international market amidst such stiff competition.
A possible solution to this is to focus your energies on long-tail keywords or target local searches. Alternatively, you could consider branching out into a different market.
Choosing keywords
Wise keyword selection is a key factor in any successful SEO campaign. There are many tools available at present which enable you to pin down the strongest keywords and get your SEO campaign off to the most promising start. With these tools, you can gauge what people are searching for and assess the competitiveness of each keyword or phrase.
The most popular tool is the Google Keyword Tool, mainly because it gives you so much information to work with. The most effective way to choose your phrases is to undertake keyword mapping for your site, beginning with the home page and moving on to lower pages such as categories and products. It is recommended to limit the number of key homepage phrases you choose to between two and five, as any more than this could diminish the relevancy of each of your phrases.
Links quality
You need to look deeper than the sheer number of links your competitors boast in order to find out how to rank the highest for your key phrases. You could have as many as 4,000 links, whilst your competitors have less than 3,000, but they could overtake you in the rankings. But why does this happen? It may well be the case that your competitor's links are good quality, relevant and come from trusted sources which are valued more highly by Google than your links.
Quite often, it is necessary to manually source these high-quality links, but there are a range of other options available to you. Ultimately though, link quality is one of the most essential SEO ranking factors.
Google Instant
Google Instant may have caused quite the stir online and throughout the world following its launch, but in terms of websites and SEO it won't really be one of the negative factors affecting SEO campaigns.
Similarly to the way Google added Auto Suggest to its search function, Google Instant aims to point users to wider, more profitable search queries. By using auto-complete and instant result displays, Google is making common queries crop up more frequently. This results in higher cost per click ads.
Although it is possibly too early to tell right now, recent research has shown that this has a minimal effect when comparing the length of search queries. Therefore, while it is a smart idea to pay close attention to Google's ever-evolving algorithms and search experience for users, there is no need to worry about it in terms of your SEO campaign.
