As a seasoned digital marketer, you understand that driving traffic to your website is crucial for SEO success. By publishing value-adding content and optimizing it smartly, you’ll generate decent website traffic, attracting more visitors and boosting your search engine rankings. This creates a positive cycle of increased exposure and traffic, leading to exponential growth for your blog traffic and brand.
This is the beauty of Search Engine Optimization. However, to reap this reward, you must put in the effort by consistently providing quality content and optimizing your site regularly.
While this may sound like heavy lifting, you can achieve this by simplifying the process by developing a standardized procedure for SEO. Standardized SEO processes can help your brand produce consistent, quality content and increase your team’s organization and productivity.
In this article, we’ll explore 5 SEO processes to standardize to drive more traffic to your website. We’ll also provide concrete examples from our strategies to guide you in customizing and implementing them yourself.
What Standardized Process looks like
When you think of standardized processes, you’re probably picturing complex steps and procedures. But what if we told you that you see a standardized process in action whenever you’re ordering your favorite McDoubles?
Mcdonald’s has been in the business arena for many decades already. Through the years, they have developed an almost automatic workflow for tasks as simple as flipping and assembling burgers. From the kitchen ergonomics to the distance between workstations to a specific amount of sauce per sandwich—everything is optimized to maximize efficiency.
This is why even with a heavy crowd during peak hours, Mcdonald’s, for the most part, can still serve its customers without being overwhelmed. This is what a highly-optimized procedure looks like!
Mcdo, and other business empires of its league, understand the value of having a standardized system. The great thing about this is you can implement it in your business regardless of industry. Process standardization will significantly benefit business performance and efficiency, whether for your marketing, operations, admin, or so on.
Benefits of Standardized SEO Processes
Like making burgers, this can be applied in digital marketing, specifically SEO, where most tasks are simple and repeatable. Having a system in the works will let you easily manage different teams across the organization and save you from headaches and mistakes that could easily be avoided.
Here are 3 core benefits of having a Standardized SEO Process:
- Roles are defined – When roles are defined, outputs are refined. Being in a position where you are managing different talents of varying skill sets, personalities, and responsibilities, having a workflow lets your staff know what they need to do from the get-go. This helps staff complete tasks efficiently and eliminates the guesswork and unnecessary office drama that would likewise affect your business’ productivity and camaraderie.
- Uniform Performance, fewer mistakes – Simple tasks become complicated when everything is in disarray. A streamlined procedure means you and your team can tick off tasks simultaneously without creating unnecessary mistakes and confusion. This will let your team perform better, achieve greater results, and produce output faster.
- Makes it scalable – Once your team runs like clockwork, your business can scale its SEO initiatives, speeding up your results, ranking you higher in search engines, and attracting even more prospects to your business. Developing a standardized process for your SEO is key if you want to scale your business to the next level.
5 SEO processes to standardize
Now that we have painted what a standardized procedure looks like and what you can get from it, it’s time to dive down into the specific processes we recommend you optimize and standardize to maximize the desired results. Don’t worry; we will give concrete examples and guide you through them as promised. However, these guides are not set in stone, so you can customize them according to your needs and goals.
Here are the 5 SEO processes to standardize to increase organic traffic to your website.
1) Keyword research
Keyword research is a building block of any SEO strategy. Targeting the right keywords in your content determines how relevant your content is to visitors based on their search intent. Having keywords with high search volume and low competition is a surefire way to rank higher in search engines.
One effective way to standardize this process is by creating templates that keep tabs on important numbers of your keywords. Here’s a step-by-step procedure on how you can do it:
- Create a Google Sheet/Excel document and divide the sheet in 3-5 collumns.
- Label the columns according to what is relevant to your strategy. In our example, we’d put 1. Keywords, Search Volume, Competition Score, and Keyword dificulty,
- From there, feel free to list down relevant keywords and paste the numbers respectively.
- You may even take it up a notch by color-labeling them by their difficulty with green as the easiest and red as the most difficult—for example.
Again, the numbers you put depend entirely on your overall marketing strategy. You may customize these columns with what you see fit and include other aspects, such as Cost Per Click (CPC) for PPC campaigns.
By structuring your keyword research process, you can easily create a bank of keywords and broadly view their corresponding numbers. This gives you a bird’s eye view and helps you assess which ones apply to your sites and web pages.
This also sets proper guidelines and keeps things simple regardless of who conducts the research process. This allows you to achieve better results and get to your goals faster.
2) SEO content development
Content development and creation are everything in SEO. Search engines value well-written, engaging, and valuable content with user intent in mind. Ensuring all posts, audio-visual materials, and web copy follow SEO best practices to create content that ranks well on search engine results pages (SERPs).
For example, you can create a Google doc or MS word that links to the content creation process. From collating main keywords and gathering images and other media files to creating the page title and the copy itself. Here’s an excellent example of how you can do it yourself:
- Create a blank document and create 3-5 headers depending on your SEO strategies.
- You can rename these headers into the subprocesses that is involved in your content development. In this example, we create 1. Content brief, 2. Main and Sub Keywords, Image links, internal links, and Article Copy.
- From there you can customize the process in accordance to your preference and needs.
Having a standardized procedure in content development ensures that your output is compliant with the best practices in google, avoiding penalties that affect your domain authority, organic traffic, and search rankings. Some of the best practices to consider are keyword density, Natural language processing (NLP), header tags, and so on.
Like keyword research, this will allow your team members to work on the project simultaneously. Say your SEO expert can conduct the keyword research section. At the same time, your graphic designers and copywriters can work on images and copy, respectively, increasing efficiency and productivity without the unnecessary need for them to “Wait for their turn.
3) On page optimization
On-page optimization involves improving the structure, readability, and overall quality of your website’s pages, making it easy for search engines to crawl, index, and rank.
One way to standardize this process is by creating a checklist with technical SEO considerations. This helps your staff regulate on-page elements such as site speed, broken links, and crawl errors that could slow your SEO progress. Here’s a sample:
Standardizing processes for on-page SEO can cover everything from constructing templates and guides for important meta tags, page titles, meta descriptions, and headings to optimizing image alt texts, videos, and schema markup data. Having a checklist in place can help your team in making sure every single thing checks out.
4) Link building and Interlinking
There are two processes you can optimize when it comes to links. These are internal links (from your websites) and external/backlinks (from credible sources outside your page). Here’s how you can do it:
For managing your interlinks, an excellent way to standardize this process is to create a document that compiles your links and segregates them by topic and relevance. Organizing your published content this way is crucial, as search engines emphasize link quality and relevance over quantity and volume. Here’s a sample to give you an idea:
Another essential aspect is creating and managing backlinks. This process is notorious for its tedious and time-consuming in nature as it involves multiple steps, from curating webpages to constructing pitches and reaching out to content creators and authors. Even with its tedious nature, this process should not be slept on. You should carefully choose websites with relevant information and high authority, or your SEO efforts will be in vain.
You can make this task more efficient by standardizing SEO processes for your link-building efforts. Here’s a great example:
- Create an excel/sheet and compile curated webpages and articles that you think will be beneficial to your brand and content.
- Gather the content author’s contact information and list them accordingly
- Prepare templates for outreach emails, pitches, and follow-ups to ensure your messages are personalized for each recipient and effectively convey your point.
- Develop guidelines for site and page types that are appropriate for a link and how to measure the success of your outreach.
- Additionally, you could set a process for tracking responses to your outreach efforts to measure which tactics are most effective at generating links from high-quality websites.
Aside from the benefits of allowing your team to work seamlessly together, doing this can help you prioritize future link-building activities and identify areas for optimization to improve SEO results.
5) SEO reporting and analysis
Part of achieving SEO success is monitoring your progress as you reach your milestones. This is where a standardized SEO reporting process comes in very handy.
To standardize this process, you can select tools and designate dashboards to help track SEO metrics like keyword rankings, organic traffic, backlinks, and website speed. The metrics you choose should reflect your search engine optimization strategy and overall marketing goals. So for example, if you want to track how many visits your content has, you can create an excel/sheet that tracks organic traffic per week, month, or quarter. You can audit your content and website and encode the numbers manually.
Subscribing to software is also a good idea in tracking your SEO performance. For example, you could use tools that generate SEO reports to keep tabs on how your site is doing.
Tracking your SEO performance regularly is crucial as it gives you real-world data that will help you make an informed decision, monitor your progress, and reshape your strategies depending on what is working and what is not.
Standardize the Process, Maximize to Success
In conclusion, streamlining your process is crucial to achieving long-term success and improving your brand both internally and externally. With a well-defined process, you can consistently produce high-quality content that resonates with your audience and boosts your search engine rankings.
If you find optimizing and standardizing your SEO workflow to be time-consuming, don’t hesitate to enlist our help. At Search Leads, we offer comprehensive SEO services that can help you achieve your digital marketing goals. With our already-established SEO workflow and expertise, we can take repetitive tasks like content creation and keyword research from your shoulders, allowing you to focus on scaling your business.
Contact us today to learn more about our services and how we can help increase your brand’s organic search traffic. Let’s work together to take your business to the next level!
