SEO Project Steps

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Here are the steps we’ll take in your project. The order may change a bit depending on your specific needs, but we’ll hit all of these items at some point:

  1. Getting acquainted: We’ll talk to you and your team about your specific concerns and goals, as well as your audience.
  2. Personas: We then prepare search personas. These are simple character outlines that describe your 2-3 typical reader types. We use this to guide keyword decisions and analytics setup.
  3. Analytics review: We take a look at your analytics configuration to make sure you’re tracking search terms, conversions (subscriptions or email sign-ups, most likely) and keywords generating those conversions.
  4. Site scan: Next, we use Portent’s SEO toolset, PythiaSEO, to scan your site for any potential search visibility problems.
  5. Webmaster tools: We set up Google, Yahoo! and Live webmaster tools. All three search engines provide feedback regarding standard and news rankings and problems for your site.
  6. Initial recommendations report: We’ll send you our first recommendations report. It’s an Excel spreadsheet that lists pages and edits for each page. We also use this sheet as a log, so we’ll never pester you to make the same change twice.
  7. Site feeds: You probably already have a ‘site map’ you’re submitting to Google. We’ll validate that feed and make sure it’s being crawled by Google. We’ll also help you add any additional feeds, such as an optimized Yahoo! sitemap.
  8. Ongoing recommendations: Every week, we’ll send you more recommendations. Recommendations will cover code changes for better search visibility, copy edits for keyword richness and other ideas that might build links, help you better stand out or otherwise help you in the search engines.
  9. Reports: Every month, we’ll send you a report detailing site traffic, keyword rankings, pages and links in the search indexes and any issues we’ve seen.

Other stuff we’ll do:

  • Training. At least once a month, we’ll get on the phone with you and your editorial or development teams to discuss the month’s changes and do a little impromptu SEO class. These calls will last 1-2 hours. Our goal: Make our changes make sense, and start helping you build SEO right into your editorial process in a way that doesn’t compromise the quality of your content.
  • Training classes. If more than 1 publication in your region signs on with Portent, we’ll hold periodic onsite SEO training.
  • That other thing. If you call or email us, you’ll talk to a real person who knows your account and SEO.

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