Office of Marketing and Communications

Managing SEO Process

Is there a best way to approach SEO at Ohio State?

Quick Rules of Thumb on SEO Approach

  • Google Tends to Reward Quality and User Experience: This is a very simple, yet handy rule to understand when approaching all things SEO. The more we follow this, the more we get closer to having our pages rank well.
  • Simplicity Beats Complexity: The goal is to make it easy for any site visitors to accomplish a goal. Whether that means finding information on OSU dorms, finding a doctor’s office, or learning about a researcher, increasing simplicity always is best. This means reducing ambiguity, being specific, eliminating complex language, eliminating jargon and acronyms where possible, and making content visually easy to follow.
  • If A Strategy Is Showing Great Results, Consider Other Ways To Implement It: If any given SEO strategy is showing great immediate results, consider other ways it can be used. While it’s important to stay on a given plan, being data dependent means adjusting our future plans based on what we know to work.
  • Keywords Matter, But Google Is Good at Understanding Synonyms: Keyword research is important to understand the topics people are searching for, but it’s not necessary to be overly obsessed with matching keyword phrases exactly. Google is very good at picking up on synonyms, and intent of a given page with enough context. As a result, we suggest looking at keywords as a way to target topics on each given page.

How should you prioritize your SEO tasks?

Figuring out what SEO tasks should be done first is critical, and can make an SEO process far more efficient and effective. There are two primary considerations for Prioritization:

Time and Estimated Impact

Time

Time encompasses the estimated effort and cost it would take to complete an SEO task. Certain tasks can be done extremely quick. For example, creating an XML sitemap for a site that does not have one can be accomplished in less than two hours at little cost. Alternatively, a project could be enacted to improve website speed by changing the content management system being used due to the CMS slowing down load time dramatically. This would take a long time and would likely be quite costly.

Estimated Impact

For any given task, time is important, but we have to weight this against how much we expect this to impact SEO results. A task that involves a lot of time may not seem worthwhile, but if it involves a potentially enormous impact on traffic, it may be worth the time to undertake.

Prioritization Tips

  • For most sites, optimizing content and title tags for keywords if this hasn’t been done already is one of the quickest and highest impact tasks.
  • Identifying critical issues such as ultra-slow site speed, or technical issues preventing Google from crawling a website can reveal potentially high impact issues to focus one’s time on.
  • Take inventory of resources that would likely be required to implement a change or fix. The more people who are needed to be involved, the more difficult it will be to accomplish quickly.
  • For a site with decent authority (most Ohio State websites qualify), creating new content pages for keyword phrases that are related to services and topics covered on your website can be a great way to expand your site’s footprint without needing technical expertise to identify or fix issues. Pursuing lower volume low competition keyword phrases to target is usually better than spending lots of time trying to rank for one highly competitive keyword phrase.
  • Issues that affect a LOT of pages tend to have a higher potential impact. Similarly, issues or opportunities that affect pages with high search volume can represent a major opportunity. Look out for pages or site sections that once received lots of traffic in the past, but are no longer doing so. Since these pages once ranked highly, we know there is likely still potential to regain rankings, but typically some issue may be holding them back.

Building a Process and Strategy

  1. Identify Issues: First, it’s necessary to identify any potential problems or issues that are present on a website. Auditing the website for errors, gaps, and roadblocks can showcase where time needs to be spent.
  2. Identify Opportunities: Research competitors and websites that are ranking for keywords that you ideally would want to rank for. Look for what we could be doing to gain some of that search engine share.
  3. Gauge potential impact & time commitment of tactics: Using what we learned about prioritization, estimate the potential time and cost of any activity, and then gauge that against the estimated impact of that activity.
  4. Create a roadmap once tasks are prioritized: We suggest utilizing quarterly or bi-annual roadmaps since these leave room for flexibility, but allow for some long-term vision as well. Allow for time to implement and troubleshoot.
  5. At the completion of a roadmap, revisit changes: Once you finish a quarterly or biannual roadmap, revisit the tasks that were accomplished and set up ways to track the success of these projects. Check in on these periodically to see where the most success came from. There will likely be some hits and some misses in any given strategy.
  6. Build new roadmap based on previous successes: Build off previous successes by creating strategies based on what worked previously (if possible). Identify any new opportunities or issues that came up, and then start the process over again of strategizing, prioritizing, and executing.

SEO best practices

SEO is not always very straightforward. There are a lot of guidelines, but knowing which ones apply and where to focus one’s attention is critical to success.

There is no one size fits all approach. Each website is unique, from the size of the site, to the industry and audience that it speaks to. As a result, it’s important to understand some of the nuance that comes with that.

An optimal approach means using data and best practices. Instead of taking shots in the dark, it’s far better to make a series of educated guesses with higher probability of a positive outcome. Using data (such as keyword research for example) can help us make better decisions with how we build our content, which will result in a better chance of ranking. Similarly, if we see traffic declining on a portion of our website, it may be worth researching what could be causing the issue. This may help us recover a portion of lost site traffic.

Define a Longer Term Strategy and Stick to It. Unlike other areas of marketing, SEO is a slow strategy that tends to build off momentum. Don’t expect immediate results, and don’t be disheartened if results don’t pick up right away. Create subtasks where relevant and prioritize your SEO tasks.

Set Realistic Expectations. Also, be realistic with expectations. We wouldn’t expect a newly created and very broad heart disease page to outrank a WEBMD page that has been around for over 20+ years. For situations like this, we suggest shooting for smaller wins via lower competition niche keyword phrase targeting.

Measuring SEO

Measure your SEO a few times a year, or after signifigant page changes. This is a long-tail process, so give your site time.

Traffic by Source

To measure the effects of SEO and content, filtering by Organic sources will provide accurate data specific to SEO.

Rankings for Organic Search Keyword Phrases

Rankings can be tracked for a given website to see how individual webpages rank within search results, and those results can be tracked over time to gauge whether rankings are growing or declining. The “average position” supplied by Google Search Console can help you understand your rankings.

Positions 1-10 are considered the front page of Google and will result in click-through-rates much higher than those on subsequent pages. Your goal should be positions 1-3 to get the strongest click-through-rate and subsequently the most traffic to your site.

  • If your average position is low, take all the necessary technical steps to optimize for SEO (title tags, URLs, mobile-friendlieness, use of H1 and H2 positioning, etc…). Also, explore the site engagement rates for the landing page. Look for opportunities to improve average page speed and reduce bounce rate to signal higher rates of engagement to Google. This tells Google that your page is useful for that keyword and supports stronger rankings.
  • If your average position is strong, but your CTR is low, consider optimizing your meta descriptions to help users understand what content you’re offering on your site.

Site Engagement Metrics

These metrics identify how users interact with the content. The higher the engagement, the more likely users are to accomplish the desired outcome – this is not only good for your conversions of key goals, but also tells Google that your page is relevant to the user’s query – a big part of search ranking.

The following metrics should be considered for all Organic traffic sources:

  • Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is simply the percentage of landing users who leave a site without navigating to another page. Historically, Organic traffic has the lowest bounce rate of any sources because the content tends to be highly relevant and matched to the users search queries.
  • Pages per Session: Content that is engaging encourages the user to read more. This metric simply measures how many pages the user views prior to leaving the site. Be cautious however of using this stat as an absolute measure of organic engagement. Sites with low content volume and heavy calls to action will have a lower pages per visit but a higher conversion rate, which may be desirable.

Engagement events and conversion goals have been instrumented on the Aggregate view of the osu.edu Property and are administered through the Global GTM container to represent a broad mix of enterprise lines of business. To learn more, visit the Web Analytics Playbook.

  • Engagement Events Completed:  Events are triggered when users click to watch a video on your page, click a link to an external property, subscribe to mailing lists and consume content.
  • Conversion Rates for Key Goals: Conversion rates are important to compare for organic traffic versus non-organic traffic. Conversion rates are a function of goals completed divided by sessions generated.