The first component of work focuses on understanding your market. We need to know how your website currently serves the market, how it compares to your competitors’ websites, and (most importantly) what the market expects.

Web Analytics

If you don’t have it already, we’ll organise a web analytics service for your website. Google Analytics is free, reasonably effective, and is the de facto standard for most small websites. However we also use other applications (such as Mint, AwStats or Webalizer) if they can provide additional insight into the way your readers interact.

Competitor Analysis

We’ve found that the effort of studying your competitors’ websites can pay big dividends. For example, we can see if they use SEO techniques and what search terms they have optimised for. Not only does this help us make a qualitative judgement on how hard it would be to beat them, but it’s good information that helps us with keyword research.

Website Analysis

In a similar way we study your existing website, and we look for aspects that can be improved from a search engine visibility perspective. These include links and link text, metadata, navigation, site search, body text, inline tags, and general compliance with search engine guidelines.

Keyword Research

Using a number of subscription-based tools, we research a large set of keywords and phrases that are potentially relevant to your business. These are then organised into clusters of like terms (similar themes) to be used in paid search advertising and web page optimisation.

Paid Search as a Research Tool

Occasionally there is value in running a small paid search campaign to determine reader response to specific keywords and concepts. Results are fast, and with correct management the costs can be kept low.