Keyword Research - This begins with a competitor analysis. There is always going to be someone out there doing it better for certain keywords. You want to be able to identify what they are doing and what keywords they are targeting. This will eliminate some of the leg work that you have to do. SEMRush is a fantastic tool for doing this, it is a subscription service but does provide some free options.
Identification of the primary and secondary keywords you want to rank for in organic search results. Primary keywords are ones that are going to direct visitors to your home page and some of the top level service pages. Secondary keywords are ones targeting your landing pages or blog. Primary keywords might make up anywhere from 5 - 20 and your secondary keywords could be anywhere from 100 - 1000.
Site Hierarchy - This has to do with where you place the keywords. This is essentially the template of placing those keywords in your site in various locations and these are dependent on how difficult its going to be to rak for them. For example if you are targeting a very competitive two word string, you likely want to have this on your index page. Several longer tail keywords would be on your pages in your blog
Analytics and Tracking - I recommend that you use Google Analytics. It is the easiest one to understand and it's completely free. It also allows you to quickly share it with anyone that you are working with in your company or anyone that you are outsourcing it to.
You want to review the past analytics and trends to identify what is going on with your website at the time you begin making seo changes. This is critical to set a benchmark so you can monitor what seems to be having the greatest impact on your ability to improve your search engine ranking results. You'll be able to identify the low hanging fruit whether it be through keywords or by identifying pages that are doing well based on how long visitors are staying on them.
You'll also be able to identify pages that are not performing well and need adjustment in some form. Subsequently you want to maintain an ongoing review of your analytics. Every week or every month you want to use your Analytics account to identify and review areas where you have been attempting to improve your rankings and possibly conversions if you are try to have site visitors sign up to a newsletter, for example, or make a purchase from the site.
Conversion Optimization - Here it makes sense to begin with the pages that receive the most traffic. So using the information that you gathered from Google Analytics you identify your pages from number one on down to the lowest performing.
Review the traffic flow through Google Analytics. Traffic flow analysis identifies patterns that your customers take when they are traversing your website. Your home page is most likely the page that they arrive at the most , from there analytics provides great insight about what areas of your site are then traveled to. You'll normally see common patterns emerge that you might want to reinforce or possible move more traffic tin another direction for improved conversions.
Once again after any variation testing you've put in place it's critical to re-analyse your traffic patterns to gauge the success of your conversion efforts on the site.
On page optimization - These techniques have been around since the beginning of the search engines. These days on page work does not have nearly as great an impact as it once did. Many SEO experts would agree that it is far less than 50% of overall optimization and probably closer to only about 20%.
However, it is critical. If you don't make proper use of your keywords there on your page in Title tags, Headers, Description tags and copy then you might not show up at all. The Title tags and Description tags need to be optimized for all of your landing pages otherwise if there is no congruency between their description and what a visitor finds on the landing page if they click on the link will cause them to bounce back out to the SERPs.
Finally, once you've created a template that includes these basic elements for on page optimization, then you can re-use that for future service pages or future inside pages targeting various keywords.
