SEO is a highly specialized science and art. It comprises the responsible use of both software and services. It’s not a one-shot solution to everything and it takes constant monitoring and administrating to make sure things go right. In order to facilitate this, you need to have your detective skills in order applied to every area of SEO.
What’s meant by ‘detective skills’ are those skills that allow for proper and objective, subjective, analysis, theory, and application. You have to dig in deep regarding your efforts of the past and present. This means evaluating your efforts from day-one and then seeing where things went successfully or where things went wrong.
It takes a lot for someone to swallow their pride, but when it comes to business and a specialized field like SEO, if your head is bigger than your business, you’ll end up in trouble in the short and long term. What’s needed here is a statistical assessment and tactical evaluation of all you’ve done and are doing.
Statistics can be boring. Many people just ignore them or don’t analyze them properly. This leads to errors being made. One reason is arrogance and delusion. Sometimes webmasters and marketers will hire an SEO company that promises the world but when the stats come in there’s grave disappointment. This leads people to lose faith and wallow in despair when what they should be doing is analyzing what went wrong and getting their hands dirty correcting it.
By now you should have months if not years of website statistical data. That data should be specific and broad in its coverage. You need to understand what each statistic means and its relevance to you and your site and business. This is where the detective work comes in. You’ll need to sleuth through it all, pinpointing what was successful and what wasn’t. This will give you an invaluable comprehensive map of the winning actions that you can reference to easily.
You don’t want to leave anything to chance. You cannot afford to have your competition get ahead of you, and it’s a good bet that they get their detective work done as well.
Sharpen your analytic skills so that you can investigate and evaluate your progress even at a glance. There are many online tutorials and once you get the basics under your hat, the smoother things will run. Also, don’t forget the valuable SEO tools available online such as the suite of tools provided for free by Google. All these products and services means a better education and overall equity from your actions.
If you’ve extra staff members who are adroit in analyzing statistics or even trusted colleagues, ask them to give your analyses the once over. Two detective heads are better than one and what you’ve missed that was successful or detrimental, someone else might pick up and save you much headache and money.
It’s all about paying attention to what you’ve done, what you’re doing, and what you plan to do. If you’ve missed a major flaw in your application of SEO, whether large or small, it will embed itself in your actions and plague you down the road. Sometimes that one piece of copy, or that picture or video, can change the face of your fortunes. Even sometimes mistakes can be enough to push you over the top, but if you’re unaware of them you can’t capitalize on them.
So take the time to do the detective work your SEO calls for. Leave no stone unturned and make it interesting to you like it’s a video game and you won’t get bored.