While the holidays have provided a welcome lull in the number of search marketing conferences vying for our attention, what hasn’t lapsed is the day-in-and-day-out “noise” of SEO advice. The best SEO advice anyone can give you is to sell a great product and to provide a terrific user experience. Even the most “expert link building advice” can’t help you, if you own a website that no one wants to link to.
If your site is over two years old, then consider a facelift. Two years may not seem like a long time, but when you look at those hundreds of thousands of competing websites, you’ll see that websites have gotten faster, cleaner, brighter and laser-focused on their visitor. Ask yourself, honestly, if you can really compete for eyeballs let alone links.
Your friends, family and employees can be your most reliable focus group. They’re not as close “to the forest” so they can identify problem areas, comment on clashing colors and fonts, pick up on typos and tell you how they really feel about Flash. (Please tell me you only use it sparingly, if at all.)
Taking Digital Asset Inventory
While you were looking at your website with a critical eye, did you inventory any link-worthy assets? You need incentives for other Webmasters to link to you. You may already have a number of digital assets such as widgets, white papers, blog posts, eBooks, photos, a video library and so on, that you can leverage immediately.
In fact, this may give you the impetus you need to move forward on redesigning your website. There’s nothing more encouraging than realizing you may not be as out of the Internet marketing loop as you had previously thought. You just may need to refocus, not reinvent, the wheel. Yeah!
Matching Your Customers’ Online Preferences
Once you know what you have, in terms of content, and where you need to fill in the gaps, are you creating content designed to attract links, likes and shares? This can be tricky, again, because you may be too close to your product to know what your customers really need rather than telling them what they want.
Have you thought about how your customer prefers to consume content online? You want to spend time determining ways that make it easy and enjoyable for them to give you permission to begin a conversation. Do you have a fun photo gallery linked to Flickr? A YouTube channel broadcasting unique ways to use your product? A How-to e-book free to share?
Respecting their privacy, time constraints and preferences will go a long way toward creating a positive relationship and one they’re more likely to promote through word of mouth.
That’s the best kind of endorsement for any brand.
Photo credit: Dan
