SOSTAC
• Situation Analysis
Where are we now
• Who you are;
• What you do;
• How you interact and trade online by addressing internal and external
factors impacting the business;
• Who your digital customers currently are (how do they interact with the
brand, the platform/s used, demographic breakdown;
• SWOT analysis – what are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and
threats to the whole organization;
• Competitor analysis – who are your competitors? How do they compete?
e.g. price, product, customer service, reputation, what are their key
differentiators?
• Digital channels landscape. list out all the various digital channels used and
success of each for your organization – what’s performing well or not?
Who are your Digital Costumers
• Creating customer personas helps brings to life who your existing customers
are and what their motivations are.
• Persona creation also helps to get buy-in across your organization in helping
to paint a picture and bring to life your customer profiles.
• To create a series of personas, a majority of this work can be completed by
extracting existing data through your CRM system and analytics and then
build on this to create a profile picture of your existing customers.
• Objectives
Where we want to be
5S
• Sell - Grow sales
• Speak - Get closer to customers though dialogue and participation
• Serve - Add value
• Save - Save costs
• Sizzle - Extending your brand online
• Strategy
How we get there
• Segmentation and Targeting
• Positioning and Marketing Mix (OVP)
• Multichannel Experience
• Engagement and Content Strategy
• Contact Strategy
• Tactics
What we need to do to get there
• 1. Products/Services: Integrated toolset for SEO, blogging, social media,
website, email and lead intelligence tools.
• 2. Prices/Fees: Subscription-based monthly, Software-As-Service model
based on number of contacts in database and number of users of the
service.
• 3. Place/Access: Online! Network of Partners, Country User Groups.
• 4. Promotion: Directors speak at events, webinars, useful guides that are
amplified by SEO and effective with SEO. PPC Social media advertising,
e.g. LinkedIn. Hubspot looks to form partnerships with major media
companies such as Facebook and Google plus local partners including
Smart Insights who it is collaborating with on research in Europe.
• 5. Physical Evidence: Consistent branding across communications.
• 6. Processes: More sales staff are now involved in conversion.
• 7: People: Investment in online services.
• Action
What we need to do to get there
• Resource allocation;
• Editorial Calendar;
• Media Schedule;
• 90 Day Plans;
• Digital Roadmap.
• Control
How we monitor performance
• People: Engagement;
• Process: Regular Reviews;
• Tools: Reporting Platforms;
• Qualitative Feedback;
• Prioritized actions.
• SEO isn't just about building search engine-friendly websites. It's about making your site
better for people.
organic (non-paid) search engine results.
Why does my website need SEO?
web traffic is driven by the major commercial search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo!
the primary method of navigation for most Internet users.
exceptional rate of return
Search queries—the words that users type
SEO also helps boost rankings so that content will be placed where searchers will more
readily find it.
Search engines have two major functions: How does Google Search work?
1. Crawling and building an index
2. Providing search results to users with a ranked list
Once the engines find these pages, they decipher the code from them and store selected
pieces in massive databases, to be recalled later when needed for a search query.
results that are relevant or useful to the searcher's query.
the more popular a site, page, or document, the more valuable the information it contains.
Information from Google webmaster guidelines:
• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately
describe your content
• Use keywords to create descriptive, human-friendly URLs.
One of the most important elements to building an online marketing strategy around SEO is
empathy for your audience. Once you grasp what your target market is looking for, you can
more effectively reach and keep those users.
Build for users, not for search engines.
Three Types Of Search Queries People Generally Make:
• "Do" Transactional Queries: I want to do something, such as buy a plane ticket or listen to a
song.
• "Know" Informational Queries: I need information, such as the name of a band or the best
restaurant in New York City.
• "Go" Navigation Queries: I want to go to a particular place on the Internet, such as
Facebook or the homepage of the NFL.
An important aspect of SEO is making your website easy for both users and search engine
robots to understand.
The engines by themselves have no formulas to gauge the quality of content on the web.
So, you can’t just build a perfect website and write great content; you also have to get that
content shared and talked about.
Indexable Content
your most important content should be in HTML text format.
A crawlable link structure—one that lets the crawlers browse the pathways of a website—is
vital to them finding all of the pages on a website.
As far as Google can see, they don't exist! Great content, good keyword targeting, and smart
marketing won't make any difference if the crawlers can't reach your pages in the first place
Rel="nofollow”
Adding the rel="nofollow" attribute to the link tag tells the search engines that the site owners
do not want this link to be interpreted as an endorsement of the target page. Nofollow, taken
literally, instructs search engines to not follow a link (although some do).
Obviously, if you want your page to have a chance of ranking in the search results for "dog,"
it's wise to make sure the word "dog" is part of the crawlable content of your document.
The order of the words ("pandas juggling" vs. "juggling pandas"), spelling, punctuation, and
capitalization provide additional information that the engines use to help retrieve the right
pages and rank them.
keywords you want to rank for are prominently used in titles, text, and metadata.
Title Tags
Search engines display only the first 65-75 characters of a title tag in the search results
The closer to the start of the title tag your keywords are, the more helpful they'll be for
ranking,
The brand name mention, helps to increase brand awareness, and create a higher
click-through rate for people who like and are familiar with a brand.
Creating a compelling title tag will help grab attention on the search results page, and attract
more visitors to your site.
Meta Tags
Meta Description
The meta description tag exists as a short description of a page's content.
Meta descriptions can be any length, but search engines generally will cut snippets longer
than 160 characters.
Duplicate content is one of the most vexing and troublesome problems any website can
face.
Canonicalization happens when two or more duplicate versions of a webpage appear on
different URLs.
Canonical Tag to the rescue!
Rich snippets are a type of structured data that allow webmasters to mark up content in
ways that provide information to the search engines.
Google uses structured data that it finds on the web to understand the content of the page,
as well as to gather information about the web and the world in general.
Structure Data - Breadcrumb
A breadcrumb trail on a page indicates the page's position in the site hierarchy, and it may
help users understand and explore a site effectively.
Structure Data – Local Business
Don't use FAQPage for advertising purposes
Suggestion: The question is visible on the page, and the answer is hidden behind an
expandable section.
Structure Data - Product
Maintain the accuracy and freshness of your product information, so your customers find the
relevant, current items they're looking for
Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return activities in the
search marketing field.
It's not always about getting visitors to your site, but about getting the right kind of
visitors.
Search engine optimization involves constant testing, experimenting, and improvement.
Remember, even though SEO is typically one of the highest return marketing investments,
measuring success is still critical to the process
Long tail keywords often convert better, because they catch people later
in the buying/conversion cycle.
A person searching for "shoes" is probably browsing, and not ready to buy. On the other
hand, someone searching for "best price on All Star size 42" practically has their wallet out!
Usability and user experience are second order influences on search engine ranking
success.
Signals of Quality Content
1. Engagement Metrics
If you click the first link, then immediately hit the back button to try the second link, this
indicates that you were not satisfied with the first result.
Transactional Searches Identifying a local business, making a purchase online, or
completing a task.
Navigational Searches Visiting a pre-determined destination or sourcing a specific URL.
Informational Searches Researching non-transactional information, getting quick answers, or
ego-searching.
To earn trust and authority with the engines, you'll need the help of other link partners. The
more popular, the better.
Earning links from highly-trusted domains can result in a significant boost to this scoring
metric.
Universities, government websites and non-profit organizations represent examples of
high-trust domains
Common Search Engine Protocols
Sitemaps help search engines find and classify content on your site that they may not have
found on their own. Sitemaps also come in a variety of formats and can highlight many
different types of content, including video, images, news, and mobile.
Robots.txt
The robots.txt file, is a file stored on a website's root directory (e.g.,
www.google.com/robots.txt).
By using robots.txt, webmasters can indicate to search engines which areas of a site they
would like to disallow bots from crawling, as well as indicate the locations of sitemap files
and crawl-delay parameters.
Disallow Prevents compliant robots from accessing specific pages or folders.
Sitemap Indicates the location of a website’s sitemap or sitemaps.
Crawl Delay Indicates the speed (in milliseconds) at which a robot can crawl a server.
Rel="canonical" Often, two or more copies of the exact same content appear on your
website under different URLs.
For example, the following URLs can all refer to a single homepage:
http://www.example.com/ http://www.example.com/default.asp http://example.com/
http://example.com/default.asp http://Example.com/Default.asp
Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster
sites create happy users
Users hate spam, and the search engines have a financial incentive to fight it.
Keyword Stuffing
Involves littering keyword terms or phrases repetitively on a page in order to make it appear
more relevant to the search engines.
In search engine optimization, measurement is critical to success.
4. Conversion Rate by Search Query Term/Phrase
5. Number of pages receiving visits from search engines
Knowing the number of pages that receive search engine traffic is an essential metric for
monitoring overall SEO performance.
