9 ideas for what’s next, after achieving top search engine rankings.
So, you’ve achieved SEO Zen. The website is ranking for all of the top keywords that you’ve been targeting. Perhaps it’s taken months or even years to get to this point. Sure, you may not be ranking #1 for every single keyword in your niche, but you may be doing very well. Enough that you’re satisfied that traffic and sales couldn’t really get any better. But can it?
If you’re ranking for all the top keywords that you’ve been targeting, what’s next? Here are 9 different ideas on what to work on next:
- Diversify your services
- Consider other content types
- Expand the funnel
- Conversion Rate Optimization
- Expand your content
- Optimize on other channels
- Keyword gap analysis
- Improve CTR
- Monitor your website, company & brand for SEO
Let’s look at each of these in a bit more depth.
Diversify your services
Diversify the services that you (or the website) offers. If you’re already ranking for the majority of the keywords that you’ve been targeting, do some research and see if there are other similar services that you could offer. That would allow you to expand content on the site related to those services. If you are targeting a certain location (a certain city), are there neighborhoods or other cities or towns close by where you could also offer your services?
Consider other content types
Consider other content types. If you’re already ranking for your ideal keywords, then take the existing content and convert that content to videos or even podcast content.
Expand the funnel
Expand the funnel so to speak and see if you can target your customers earlier in the buying cycle. Maybe they don’t even realize that they need your services, or they don’t realize they have a potential problem that they need addressed.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Look into Conversion Rate Optimization. For the visitors who currently come to the website, can you make changes to the pages they’re visiting so that more contact you? Simple changes such as shortening the contact form you’re using, moving the contact form on the page, or even making “buy now” or “contact” buttons have a different color can actually make a difference.
Expand your content
Consider expanding content or creating additional websites that approach the subject from another angle. Sometimes this can lead to different types of search queries, longer search queries, questions that people ask, or could, in theory, get you more coverage on the first page of search results.
Optimize other channels
Look at other channels outside of organic search that can bring traffic, leads, and sales to your website. Are you doing Pay Per Click and Social Media advertising? YouTube Ads? Hopefully by now you know what keywords and topics convert visitors from organic search. Look at the other channels and take advantage of your SEO knowledge to run Google Ads.
Keyword gap analysis
Do some keyword gap analysis by looking at the keywords your competitors are ranking for that you’re not ranking for. There may be some areas that you still can take advantage of by looking at competitors’ search engine rankings. That might give you ideas of more pages, more content that you can create to target those keywords.
Improve CTR
Improve the CTR (Click-Thru Ratio) of your search engine listings. Without making major changes that will affect your current rankings, you may be able to change or update some of the Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, etc. that show up in the search engine results pages. Tweaking the copy can oftentimes lead to more clicks on your search engine result listings.
Monitor your website, company & brand for SEO
So, you’ve done search engine optimization for your website. Well, to be honest with you, SEO is never done, it’s an ongoing process as many top SEOs will tell you. If you’re at a point where your website is ranking well, and you’re fairly happy with the results so far, then one thing that you probably aren’t doing is monitoring your website, your company, and your brand(s). Monitoring, as in getting notified when there are changes, is a good thing. You’ll not only be able to quickly identify possible issues that you can deal with, there are other ways to use mentions of your website, your company, or your brand. Let’s take a look at the various ways that you can set up monitoring, and what each of these types of monitoring will do for you.
Creating a list
First and foremost, whatever type of monitoring you are going to do, you will need to come up with a list. There are several “types” of things that need to be on that list. Here’s some ideas:
- Your domain name (i.e., vizion.com, also other domain names you own)
- Your company name (Vizion Interactive)
- Your address (123 Main Street, Dallas, Texas)
- Your company phone number (214-555-1200, the main number)
- Your email address (most likely this is going to be the public one listed on your website)
- Your product name(s) (if you have unique names for your products or services)
- Your trademark(s) (if you own a trademark)
- Employee Name(s) (could be the CEO, CMO, any employee who is “in the spotlight”)
This is generally a short-list of the types of information that you should be tracking. For example, you may already have a Google Alert set up for your company name, but did you know that you should also have them set up for those other items?
Setting up alerts
Alerts are generally something where you get “alerted” via email, text message, or automated phone call when something happens. There are several types of alerts that you can set up, but the most common ones used for marketing purposes are whenever “something” such as a keyword, a company name, or something in your list above gets mentioned. Usually you get notified via email, or you can log into an online portal to see the results.
Google Alerts
Google has a service called “Google Alerts” that notify you whenever something in your list (such as your company name) is mentioned. You generally start with a search query, and if Google sees that keyword, then you’ll receive an email. You can choose the frequency, the source, and the location. For example, for your name, you can set up a Google Alert that is set “As-It-Happens”, for any source (Automatic), and it’s delivered to your email inbox.
Keep in mind, though, that these alerts are only for web pages that can get indexed in the Google search engine. Google does a great job of crawling and indexing, especially news websites. However, I have personally come across websites and web pages that mention a company, employee, or brand name and the page is not allowed to be indexed in Google. In those cases, someone had created a negative page about an employee but disallowed it from being indexed in Google, most likely so they could just share it on social media and the employee would probably not find it.
Manual searches
Honestly, one of the best ways to monitor is to just do some manual search queries on Google. For example, there are a few that I like to do periodically:
Company Name in quotes (i.e., “Vizion Interactive”). If your company name is more than one word, you’ll want to search in quotes.
Company Name Review (i.e., Vizion Interactive review). Or ‘company name reviews’.
Employee name in quotes (i.e., “John Smith”). Or search for your name.
Domain name in quotes (i.e., “Vizion.com”). This can reveal some interesting results and opportunities for links, as well.
All of these can be set up via a Google Alert, but oftentimes it’s just better to do the search manually and study the results. Google Alerts will show the new ones that are added, but you may want to study the results and maybe even see if you can get the results to shift a bit if there are less than positive pages that are showing up in the results. For example, if there’s something negative on a page, you may want to see if you can outrank that page. This is getting into “online reputation management” territory, but it’s good to perform manual searches regularly to see the results for yourself.
Social media
There are pages, posts, tweets, etc. on social media that may not get indexed in the search engines. It’s just a fact of life that not all tweets get indexed in Google, so oftentimes there will be mentions of your company or keyword that don’t get into a Google Alert. So you won’t know about it if you don’t include the social media websites in your searches. Manual searches are best, and Mention.com does include these in alerts. However, keep in mind that I prefer some creative manual searches rather than relying on alerts. Besides, it gives you the opportunity to respond to the post or tweet, or even ReTweet or share a post if it’s positive in nature.
The Twitter search isn’t that great, but it will reveal results. Searching for your brand, company name, domain name, and viewing the results is best. Look at Top, People, Latest, Photos, Videos tabs. I personally like to search for my domain name. That will show you the Tweets where someone included a link to your website. Those are great, usually you should RT these.
Also take a look at the keywords that you’re targeting. Can you get top rankings for these keywords in the search results? Sure you can. It may take some optimization, such as including keywords in the description of images attached to Tweets. Depending on how competitive the industry is, you may also need to post more often than usual to keep your top-ranking spot.
I’ve already mentioned optimizing some other platforms, but monitoring your own brand and even keywords can be helpful on Facebook. Facebook ads can be another option, but as for monitoring, a simple search for your company name will show you where you’re mentioned; possible replies and comments could be helpful.
Ideally, you’re already ranking for your company name if you have a LinkedIn company page. Employees should have their full profiles filled out, as well. Monitoring posts can be helpful, and hopefully you’re already posting regularly and commenting on any posts that mention your company or your brand.
PublicWWW
PublicWWW is a code search engine. Code search engines are different from the typical search engines that you or I use on a daily basis. Code search engines allow you to literally do that: search the actual code of web pages on the internet. This can be helpful to identify mentions of your company or brand, but you can also search for anything that is used in the code of a website. Here are some ideas for searching:
- Search for a tagline, a sentence, or some unique text on your website to see if someone else has copied your content.
- Search for unique Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics codes. For example, each GA code snippet has a unique ID for tracking. Look to see if any other website is using your code.
With a code search engine, the possibilities are endless because when you’re searching on Google, you’re only going to search content, not the actual code of websites.
Hope you found these tips helpful! Feel free to share this post and give us a shout on social media!
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