Many companies and professionals in the SEO sphere often make “best practices” recommendations to clients that include items like:<\/p>\n
* Switch from underscores to hyphens to separate words in the URLs
\n* Employ the H1 tag for page headlines
\n* Use H2s and H3s for subheadlines
\n* Use the keyword you’re targeting on the page in bold\/strong at least once
\n* Change your internal links to contain the anchor text you’re targeting on the page
\n* Move the keywords to the front of the title tag
\n* Reduce the code to content ratio
\n* Apply relevant alt tags to images & photos
\n* Nofollow links to pages like login, register and legal disclosures<\/p>\n
These “little” tweaks are often at the bottom of the list of priorities and, in many organizations starved for dev & implementation resources, don’t make the final cut when the SEO recommendations are applied. The discussion goes something like this:<\/p>\n
Client: We have the bandwidth to do some of these; which ones should we perform?<\/p>\n
Consultant: Ideally, you should do all of them – that will give you the maximum opportunity to rank well.<\/p>\n
Client: Not gonna happen – give me the top 3.<\/p>\n
Consultant: OK, do X, Y & Z.<\/p>\n
Client: And we can skip (all that stuff in the bullet points above)?<\/p>\n
Consultant: Well, no. Not really. Individually, they won’t have a huge impact, but taken together, there’s the potential for a serious bump in traffic.<\/p>\n
The problem comes from quantifying the value of individual “little” tweaks. We all know that canonicalizing duplicate content, setting up scalable link acquisition strategies and improving the keyword targeting across a site can have massive SEO and traffic results, but when it comes to the “little” things, tracking value and making the case to a busy dev team, an overworked client or a skeptical CMO can be extremely challenging.<\/p>\n
How have you dealt with getting clients\/devs to go that extra distance? What “little” changes have you seen make a big impact? Or, are these kinds of slight improvements even worth the trouble?<\/p>\n
p.s. I’m not suggesting that all of the bullet pointed items above are “little” and not worth the effort – in my experience, a few of those I mentioned have had a real impact on SEO for certain sites. I’m simply using them as examples of recommendations that don’t make the “final cut.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Many companies and professionals in the SEO sphere often make “best practices” recommendations to clients that include items like: * Switch from underscores to hyphens to separate words in the URLs * Employ the H1 tag for page headlines * Use H2s and H3s for subheadlines * Use the keyword you’re targeting on the page […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[17,267],"yoast_head":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n