I was thinking about SEO and the importance of running reports and tracking metrics when it struck me that it’s very similar to trying to loose weight.
Optimization and link building are like diet and exercise. Through your diet you fine tune the foods that you eat focusing on the healthier foods that help your body to run well. At the same time, you exercise, building up your bodies strength and ability to perform.
You can, of course, try just one or the other.
- In weight loss, if you choose to limit yourself to just dieting, you won’t loose weight as quickly as when you both diet and exercise. You also may run into the possibility of a plateau. Your body adjusts to your diet and you stop loosing weight. With search engine optimization, if you only optimize your website, but do no link building, your search rankings won’t increase as quickly as if you had done both. You will also get to a point where your rankings won’t continue to increase, a plateau of sorts. You may even start seeing your rankings drop if your competitors are actively building links.
- If you only exercise, but do not control the food you eat, you won’t loose weight as quickly, either. But your body will still get into better shape and will get stronger. Most likely, you will eventually loose all the weight you wanted to. With SEO, if you only building links, you won’t increase your rankings as quickly as if you had also optimized your website, but you will continue to build the strength of your website in the search engines and may end up ranking well for all your keywords eventually.
Your best option, of course, is to do both.
The Scale:
When you are trying to loose weight, you do the work of dieting and exercising, but you also get on the scale every day. You track how far you can run, how much weight you can lift, or how many inches your waste has shrunk. These are all important things to do because it tells you if what you are doing is working and it encourages you to continue. As you see the pounds coming off, it motivates you to continue.
Similarly, you can see if the SEO is working or if the optimization for some keywords needs to be re-evaluated do to poor performance. You can determine what keywords need more than just on-page optimization and thus need to be targeted when link building. Also, as you see your rankings improving and your website traffic increasing, it can encourage you and motivates you to push on.
Drop and Give Me 20!
With a healthy SEO diet and a good link building regiment you can get your church’s website into great shape in no time and turn your website into a lean, mean, converting machine. And don’t forget to track your progress and pay attention to those metrics. They will show you what’s working, what isn’t, and give you the motivation you need to push on.
So, let’s start tracking the progress of your church’s SEO and we’ll begin with Search Ranking Reports.
Photos by joeduty and puuikibeach
How is your SEO diet coming along?
