Aviation marketers should be aware of best practices for basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to elevate organic Search Engine Results Page (SERP) ranking for key word search.

Achieving better SEO results is a matter of making small modifications to your website. These modifications totaled together can elevate page rankings and improve search results. SEO can seem like black box technology when in reality it’s a matter of understanding your audiences, providing quality content and knowing how to optimize your site to be more search engine friendly.

The one factor not to lose sight of is that your content needs to be relevant to your audience, so avoid the temptation of stuffing key words in an attempt to increase your page ranking. SEO is about making your site more visible to search engines. Remember that the consumers of your content are the users, and not search engines.

Step 1 – Benchmark where your site stands and how it compares to the competition

To measure SEO progress you need a starting point.  Digital marketing provides data chains on past user interaction with your website, blog, or micro site. A free online tool to monitor and compare your site with others can be found at Alexa.com.

Here you can enter up to 5 different URLs for comparison. For example, comparing fix winged manufacturer Gulfstream to Cessna, Embraer, and Bombardier reveals that in the previous 3 months, Bombardier generated more site traffic than Gulfstream.

Other analytics include:

• Site traffic stats
• Search analytics – key word search query, % of site visits from search engines
• Audience demographics
• Company contact information
• Reviews
• Related links with shared key words
• Click stream – visitor traffic preceding and leaving the site

It is advisable to compare the information obtained from Alexa with your website referrer log to track where your visitors are coming from and the search terms used to find your site.

Step 2 – Interpreting referrer data

Interpreting the referrer data can give you insight into how well your inbound and outbound marketing is working by reviewing referrer sites and key word search terms.

If 60% of your visitors log on to the site directly from the URL, that’s a good indication that your site is established and viewers are going directly to the source. The downside is that you’re not attracting a lot of new users.

To increase traffic in new users, look at the following:

• Make sure your page titles accurately describe the page content
• Create unique title tags for each page
• Use brief but descriptive titles  that incorporate key words. Limit the description to 65 characters including spaces.

Checking the referrer log will also tell you which search engines – Google, Yahoo, Bing – are the most active in sending new users to your site.