Example Website Business Plan
CompanyEC is an interactive recruitment marketing company founded in 2003 and headquartered in Minnetonka Minnesota. This company utilizes interactive marketing and technology to help its clients find better, engage better and know better candidates activities through multiple channels of recruiting. The goal of the company is to help businesses find better job recruits at an affordable cost. This company believes that recruiting is a form of marketing and they take pride in their marketing skills. By using online tools such as search engines, social networks, employee referrals, past applicants and recruiting networks, CompanyEC finds the best possible job candidates for the position.
This document will include details on CompanyEC’s current search engine optimization (SEO) plan, along with a new SEO plan that will assist in improving the sites structure and its content. Ultimately, this plan will help by improving visibility, sales and user experience for the company’s website.
SEO Plan Objective
This SEO plan will go into details and will place together an effective marketing strategy that will consist of CompanyEC making adjustments to its title and meta tags, pursue possibilities for incoming links and create a stronger architectural design for its website. In addition, this strategy will also include details of how to increase traffic through new content, a social networking presence, through the use of proper link baiting and by upgrading keywords and creating a PPC campaign that will increase site and customer conversions.
CompanyEC’s Current Website
CompanyEC’s current website has over 335k backlinks and over 20k indexed Google pages. CompanyEC also has a great flat site structure that benefits its users and that is easy to navigate (Baxter, 2009). Another positive about the website is that its navigation links are simple and aren’t crowding the page.
Website grader has recorded that CompanyEC doesn’t have a blog, RSS feed, is missing image ALT text and that its domain name is set to expire in nine months. In addition, the website doesn’t have any del.icio.us bookmark subscribers. The website currently shows as having 20k+ pages crawled by Google. That number is far from being accurate and needs to be investigated and corrected.
Website Improvements
A Strategy that could work well with improving site conversions for CompanyEC includes adding an online blog and newsgroups. This is a great way for the company to start conversations about progress of company, success stories and interact with its users. In addition, this will also help the website with increasing stickiness and unique content, which can benefit the site within search engines. By utilizing this strategy, site visitors will help add content to the website through their questions and responses that will ultimately get indexed by search engines and help draw new traffic to the website.
In addition to creating a site with user interaction, CompanyEC also uses videos to draw their users in. Though these videos may be affective with users, the uses of video ALT tags aren’t being very effective and need to be upgraded. The ALT tags for each video currently says “Play this video.” These tags need to be updated and should include details of the video and keywords should be taken advantage of also when creating these ALT tags.
Keywords and PPC
CompanyEC currently has a very short list of keywords that aren’t very effective. From the home page of the website, the keywords are CompanyEC, Online Recruiting, Interactive Recruiting, Social Network Recruiting, Mobile Recruiting and Recruiting Dashboard.
This list of keywords is very short and isn’t being as effective as it can be. By including more relevant to content keywords, CompanyEC can take proper advantage of the search engines by using its keywords to the fullest. Each page of CompanyEC.com includes a keyword list of only six words or less. A good keyword number to keep in mind is between ten and twenty to produce the best results.
In addition to having a small number of keywords, CompanyEC also is not creating a strong list of keywords. While Online Recruiting and Interactive Recruiting is what the company does, these keywords aren’t direct enough to the types of users that CompanyEC are trying to draw in. To make these keywords direct, they should read “Online Job Recruiting” and “Interactive Job Recruiting.” There are many other keyword that can be added to this list, however, this is the direction that CompanyEC needs to be headed. Being that recruiting is a broad term used for job openings, school admissions and the military for example, CompanyEC could be wasting time and money by not creating these keywords to be more direct within its niche and toward its audience type. Being that CompanyEC doesn’t seem to be focused on military or educational recruiting, directing the keywords away from them by using a negative keywords list will help in creating a strong keyword and ad campaign.
With more popular keywords, the company can easily gain more exposure. The current list of keywords, though relevant to the company, is not relevant to users search results. By changing or adding the suggested list of keywords to the website, the company will be found easier by its targeted users. CompanyEC is currently ranked at the top of the search results for its current list of keywords. However, it isn’t beneficial to be ranked high for a list of keywords that aren’t being searched very often.
By upgrading its keyword list, meta tag descriptions and ALT tags, CompanyEC has a great opportunity to increase traffic through its organic search results. CompanyEC should also look to include a sitemap on its website for use with search engine. In addition, sitemaps are also beneficial toward helping some users find their way around the website easier. Overall, it’s a good tool to have and wont hinder the websites structure or performance.
CompanyEC should also include A/B Testing for their PPC ad campaign. According to the laws of A/B testing, by creating multiple copies of the control ad, the user does not lose as much profit due to the control ad always running. Instead of the user losing 50% of ad impressions to the testing ad, that percentage shrinks to 20% because of the additional control ad copies.
In addition to this type of testing saving profits and potentially accelerating the testing process, it also allows for CompanyEC to create a valid testing environment by “comparing the performance of the test ad against the copies of the control only (Thies, 2008).”
In addition to upgrading its onsite search optimization, CompanyEC should also look into marketing its company in well-known directories such as Yahoo, Business.com and DMOZ.com to increase site rank and popularity within search engines. Listing the company website and brand within .org, .gov and .edu websites will also greatly help increase credibility within search engines. CompanyEC should also look to add an RSS feed to its website. Though it currently is involved within social networks and users can stay updated through these tools, having an onsite RSS feed allows for search engines to index them and allows for users an easy click to stay updated with site content.
Job2Web already has a great social networking campaign in place. It utilizes and is involved with all of the most popular social networking sites such as MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube to market its company and product. However, the website itself doesn’t have direct access for users to connect with them via these social networks. The website should include easy click links for these users to follow, like or befriend the company. This is another user interaction strategy that CompanyEC currently doesn’t take advantage of.
CompanyEC should also setup quality backlinks on niche websites and not just broad sites. By including its link on sites relevant to its own will positively help in its rankings. These niche websites should also include sites with a high page rank. Other link building strategies can easily come from participating in blogs and other online forums and local event groups. When placing a backlink on these sites, they should create these backlinks by utilizing unique keyword descriptive anchor text.
Another option to find credible backlinks is to search CompanyECs competitor’s link groupings. “A local link grouping would be a page on the Internet where all or most of your competitors get incoming links from (Caldwell, 2009).” By searching CompanyEC’s company’s keywords, common backlinks of their competitors can be located. Once these backlinks are indentified, CompanyEC should include its business name and link within those same sites if possible. Nonetheless, these links should be on niche websites that are relevant to the works or CompanyEC’s own in order to produce the most favorable results.
Conclusion
By utilizing blogs and newsgroups to involve its site users, CompanyEC can create an affective stickiness strategy which will help with sites user click-through rates and length of time users spend on the website. This could ultimately help with increasing search engine credibility.
In addition, including keywords and better descriptions within the sites video ALT tags will create an extremely effective strategy plan that is not only beneficial for search results within search engines, but will also be helpful by creating higher traffic within video directories.
Overall, the biggest concern that I see with CompanyEC is that they do not create many opportunities to get their users involved with the company. Though CompanyEC does have accounts on every major social networking site, their website doesn’t say this and they have failed to include user interaction directly on its own website via blogs, newsgroups or RSS feeds. In addition, CompanyEC should include an easy bookmark feature on its website. By including a bookmark widget, CompanyEC can gain user dedication and rank better with search engines that index bookmark websites such as Del.icio.us and Google bookmarks.
To create a strategy that will encourage user interactivity, CompanyEC can also setup email marketing and newsletter campaigns, along with creating polls and surveys to gain user feedback on what else the site could do to enhance the user experience. The newsletters should include information on upcoming specials, events and changes that CompanyEC has made within its company that can benefit its users. Allowing users to opt out of receiving emails and referring a friend for discounts should also be included within each newsletter.
The website should be regularly checked by utilizing web stats and tracking tools such as Google Analytics. By viewing monthly reports, CompanyEC will be able to see which keywords, content and PPC campaigns are being most affective. In addition, it will also allow for CompanyEC to see where visitors are coming from, how long they stay, where they go when they leave and how CompanyEC stats compare to its industry benchmarks.
This website business plan will improve user experience and search engine credibility. With these new changes to CompanyEC.com, it will only be a matter of time until it sees an increase in profits and user activity.
