There are two ways to carry out an SEO campaign: proactively and reactively. Reactive SEO is about assessing the effects of already implemented keywords, what your customers are searching for and responding to changes in the market as they happen. Once an SEO campaign is in full swing, it is worth looking at some of these assessment techniques to work upon your strategy and improve your initial bassline.
However, when you’re starting an SEO campaign, you barely have anything to work with, anything to react to. This means you have to begin with a proactive approach. You need to be sourcing ways you can actively promote your website and company’s image and build it up to be a face the public recognize on a day to day basis.
Proactive Techniques – What Are They?
Proactive SEO techniques are ones where you’re actively seeking the methods and solutions to changing your website for the better. One useful tool in this process is Google Rank Check, which allows you to monitor your keyword rankings and assess their effectiveness. These include:
- Assessing competition – Looking at what your competitors are doing, what works for them, what doesn’t. It’s also about comparing it to your current website layout and seeing how you compare. It’s all about being critical of your own work in order to implement new changes which can affect your results in Google’s rankings.
- Finding appropriate keywords – Keywords sometimes seem like they’re obvious to your business. For example, if you’re selling car insurance, you may think that ‘auto accident’ is an obvious keyword. It is, but it’s not exactly efficient or appropriate as the results in Google for this search term are astronomical. However, more specific and in depth keywords are more effective. You can use keyword tools and your own research to proactively find keywords which will help you rank more highly.
- Producing fresh content – This counts for your website as well as your social media. Producing fresh content will allow Google’s robotic spiders to find you more easily and re-index and rank you more often, pushing you up those rankings to the golden spots at the top.
- Getting your face out there – Actively using social media as a marketing tool is now factored into Google’s algorithms and by building profiles on social networking sites, you’re actively creating ‘talk’ around your business, creating a forum for people to share your content, and organically producing backlinks to your site. This is a great forum to set the SEO ball rolling so that it can unfurl naturally within a fast paced environment that changes more quickly than Google re-indexing does.
Why Start with Proactive Techniques?
1. You can’t react to nothing
Firstly and most obviously, reactive techniques come from reacting to changes you’ve already made. If you have implemented any SEO techniques, then you can’t react to how they’re working. Reactive techniques focus on assessment and improvement. You need to put in those SEO changes to look about in the future and say, right, ‘car insurance for young women’ works as a keyword and ‘auto accident’ doesn’t, and actively react to those changes.
2. Building reputation
To be the best, often you need to be the first. You want your competitors to be analyzing you to see how they can improve. To do that, you need to be proactively getting some new ideas in place on how you can improve your SEO.
Proactive work also shows how hardworking your company is to consumers. For example, petsmart.com call customers who have a bad experience with the company to avoid nasty comment and negative responses online, generating bad press for their company online. This isn’t technically an SEO technique but the idea of being proactive avoids them gaining a less than perfect reputation.
This works with SEO also. By bringing new ideas to the table and actively getting your campaign in full swing, you’ll be recognized by Google’s spiders before other companies, which bodes well for your rankings and also for consumers searching for your services.
3. It Entices Creativity
Companies that only use reactive methods can get a bit lazy. By only responding to what other people are doing, and changing behaviour of consumers and the industry market, companies aren’t coming up with any new and effective SEO methods.
As industries change, the methods to draw public attention change too.
Companies that jumped on the social media bandwagon early were prepared when Google introduced this as an SEO factor that affects rankings. By being proactive, you’ll be first in the arms race for new creative ideas as you’ll be generating your own way to build popularity, rankings and web traffic, without looking to others for recognition and reassurance.
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