Why is an Account Manager beneficial to a campaign?

An Account Manager is not only a point of contact for a client when a campaign begins but they are also able to explain the more technical sides to SEO in terms of securing links, writing SEO friendly content and discussing the data provided by Google Analytics.

Within this conversation there are a variety of topics that could arise, below are some examples.

1. Home page canonicalization – What is this?

   • Canonicalization or canonical issue refers to the different ways of accessing a homepage; these issues are typically overlooked by most webmasters. You could successfully access the same homepage from a variety of URLs such as:
     • www.example.com
     • example.com/
     • www.example.com/index.html
     • example.com/home.asp
   • Why is this important? It is important as search engines see these links separately, and distribute the value of linking (i.e. Page Rank) across the various homepage URLs.
   • The implications of this are that the amount of links to a homepage are lessened and so could affect progress within the search results, leading to a decrease in traffic to the website.

2. Duplicate content

   • As with the canonical issue, sometimes duplication of content occurs without the website owner being aware, this can be repaired easily by indicating to Google your preferred URL so that it does not spend time crawling in the wrong place.
   • However, sometimes duplicate content is created as a means to manipulate search engine rankings or gain more traffic. This does not follow best practice and is not condoned by the Search Marketing Group, as it can lead to poor user experience when searching the site.
   • In some instances if Google believes that the content is intended for this purpose it may make the appropriate changes in the indexing and ranking of the site involved. The rankings on the search engine may then suffer or even be removed completely from the results pages.

3. Sitemap – why is it important?

   • Sitemaps are a method of showing Google about the pages on your site that may not necessarily be found otherwise.
   • Simply an XML Sitemap (Sitemap for short) is a list of pages on your website.
   • Having a Sitemap and submitting it to Google draws its attention to the entire website helping with the indexing and ranking process.

4. Crawl depth and budget

   • Crawl depth is a simple term used to describe how deeply a website is crawled and indexed by the Googlebot.
   • Crawl budget is largely dependent upon Page Rank as this is the importance that Search Engines place on a site as a whole and its individual pages, not only the homepage. There is a correlation between a site’s Page Rank and its crawl budget, the higher the PR the more budget it has and so the deeper it will be crawled.

5. Detailed conversion monitoring

   • The key concept of conversion monitoring is that by tracking the performance and conversions on a site it is possible to identify which keywords are more valuable (SEO) or clicks (PPC) and so create a more efficient campaign.
   • With sufficient data about a site’s customers, it is possible to make better decisions about how to run a business and correlate this with the direction of a campaign. An example would be that if a product on a site is particularly popular, then investing in moving up the rankings for this term could lead to more traffic and conversions for a site.

This service is often included free of charge, however, naturally for more detailed projects we charge on a transparent time and materials basis. For more information on Account Management contact us.