How to Assess Your SEO Starting Point

When you’re researching SEO for your business, there some factors that will help you reveal your current situation in regards to SEO (for both your website and the organization of your business) and how much work will be need to be done.

Here are some factors that you should consider before starting your SEO campaign:

Assess Your Staff and Potential Workforce

Do you already have staff that will be able to take on extra work that might be needed for your SEO campaign? Some of the work that will be involved might be small changes or extra procedures that will need to be added to the current responsibilities of your current staff.

Do the people in your organization already have as much work as they can handle? In this case, you should be ready to hire additional employees, if necessary.

If Your Organization is Departmentalized…

If you’re part of a bigger organization with multiple departments, assess the communication between departments that might play a role in the success of your SEO campaign. The different departments that could be involved might include some, or all, of these: web design, programming, webmaster, content writers/copywriters, legal, product design/development, PR, database administration, customer service, or other departments.

How is the communication between these departments?  Do they work well together and communicate well? If there are changes that would require 1 or more departments to work together and be on the same page, would that be possible?

If the different departments in your organization don’t work together seamlessly, consider how difficult it will be to catalyze their collaboration.

What’s The Current Attitude About SEO?

Again, if you’re part of a bigger organization, assess the current attitude on SEO in your workplace. Are your co-workers (including superiors) in favor of SEO, indifferent to SEO, or against SEO? Are they knowledgeable about it?

This can affect the success of your SEO campaign in two key areas.

1. If you have to get approval for a SEO campaign (or a budget for SEO), then the decision-makers’ current attitudes on SEO matter. Will you have to make a strong case and sell your organization on a SEO campaign? Or has SEO been on the backburner but simply not been done yet? Definitely something to consider.

2. Your SEO campaign will most likely require small changes to daily operations and tasks for some of the employees in your organization. Most employees don’t like changes, especially extra tasks that they will have to do. If they are enthusiastic about SEO, then they will likely welcome the changes. However, if they don’t care about SEO, then you’ll likely be met with resistance when trying to implement the changes. This can be a factor that influences the success of your campaign.

Assess Your Starting Point

Here are the important metrics that you must be aware of before you start your SEO campaign. You probably are already tracking these (or your analytics/webmaster department probably is), but here they are:

• Your traffic levels, including how much of that traffic comes from the search engines.
• Your search engine rankings for the keywords that you know you want to target.
• Your on-page SEO situation – meta tags, title tags, spider accessibility, heading tags, image alt tags, etc.
• Current volume and location of backlinks.
• The number of pages on your site.
• The number of pages on your site that will need optimization (if you can estimate this, if not, a SEO company will be able to tell you).
• The amount of content on each page on your site.

If you take a good look at your organization and consider these factors, you should be able to get a decent idea of your starting point, how much work will need to be done, and what challenges will need to be overcome in executing your SEO campaign.