It is the Little Things That Add Up to a Lot in SEO

Think about the last time you visited your mechanic. Why is that many of us would gladly lay out $800 to fix a major problem if our mechanic told us it needed immediate attention, but at the same time very few people are willing to spend the $50 to make sure a little problem doesn’t become a $800 problem. The same thing can be said about SEO – clients see the “big” things, but often don’t see the value in the little items that add up to sizeable shifts in rankings. How do you as an SEO company show that the little things matter as much as the big optimization items?

First, you have to make sure that you have a solid understanding of what constitutes the small things in SEO. Consider it a best practices document. This list is by no means complete, but includes:

• Making-sure-your-links-look-like-this instead of your_links_looking_like_this.
• Make sure that keywords are towards the front of title tags, rather than buried at the end.
• All images and imbedded media should have alt text tags describing them.
• Less code, more content!
• Login pages, legal text and general “fluff” should have nofollow tags.
• Page headlines should always be within a H1 tag.
• Similarly, subheadings should use H2 and H3 tags.
• Bold face keywords that are the main topic of the page at least once on the page.
• Internal links should always contain anchor text that you are targeting on the page.

Sounds easy doesn’t it? Little items that by themselves don’t add up to much, but put together can have measurable SEO impact. So now the question is how do you sell the client on this?

One way to accomplish this is to build-in this best practices work into your quote. Don’t ask the client if they want it, instead just deliver it as part of your standard SEO services. It’s one of those things that will set you apart from the competition because of the quality you deliver in the end.

Another way is to have a boilerplate site that you use to measure impact before and after. Why not find a non-profit organization or charity with a website in your area and offer to do the little tweaks for free? It not only helps you build your portfolio but also gives you an excellent way to show off how it impacted the results before and after the “little things” was taken care of.

Sometimes we focus so much on the big picture we forget that if it weren’t for the little pixels, there wouldn’t be a picture. Make sure in your SEO practice you are providing value from start to finish by establishing best practices guidelines that put emphasis on both the big and the little things to give your clients the very best you can for both them and yourself.