For a little over 2 years now, I’ve been working full-time
at Douglas Marketing Group as an online marketer. Part of my job description as
an online marketer is to develop search engine optimization strategies for new
and existing clients to help increase their search engine rank position,
traffic, lead generation and of course customers and clients.
One of the companies I worked with recently was a commercial roof consulting company head quartered in Michigan called BTA or Building
Technology Associates. They work closely with facility managers and businesses
across the United States on ensuring their roof is in tip-top shape.
When I first started working at DMG two years ago, the
website had already been designed and in production so I didn’t have much say
on the overall strategy of the website. About 6 months after the site was
launched live, they noticed that they were showing up for a few of the keywords
they targeted, but not as many as they liked. They asked me to take a look and
offer up some recommendations on how to better target their website towards
their audience. Below are 4 tweaks I recommended to help increase their
position in the search engines.
- Optimize the title and description META tags on each page of the website – BTA had done a good job optimizing most of the pages on their site, but they missed several of the “secondary” pages. Another somewhat crucial mistake was the mismanagement of the tags on the homepage. I recommended they change the META tags on the homepage with a better more specific selection of keywords which better targeted their key audience.
- Add more text-based content to the homepage of the website – Again, while the website featured a small snippet of text-based content on the homepage, it wasn’t nearly enough. I recommended they add at least 2 or 3 full paragraphs of text content that people will want to read. Information about their commercial roofing services, links to tips and money saving information – basically anything that the user will find useful.
- Targeting lead generation pages – This one doesn’t have as much to do with overall SEO as the others however it was still a big factor in improving rankings for specific pages. Creating pages geared towards their keywords i.e. “emergency-response.aspx” which offered information on the spot was a big part in optimizing their site for their secondary keywords.
- Guest posting – Many people who work in SEO aredown on guest blogging but I feel if done properly it can still be an asset to any overall SEO strategy. Guest blogging takes quite a bit of work but the results can be very beneficial. I had BTA contact similar sites to theirs (competitors excluded of course) and ask them if they could write a guest post on their blog. Then write a blog post that relates to your business and helps their users/readers as well. Be sure not to stuff the backlinks to your website with keywords and also be sure to make your blog make sense. You wouldn’t believe how many guest blog posts I’ve seen that either make no sense, don’t relate to the website at all or are just overall garbage.
