I’ve had several conversations lately regarding how to improve search rankings for web sites and the conversation always comes back to one thing: consistency.

Successful SEO efforts depend on consistency in the usage of terms throughout the company’s many online presences. While on-page SEO is certainly a large factor in how Google sees and ranks your site, it’s certainly not the only one, and like anything else associated with SEO and Google, how important that factor is changes from day to day. You’re better off investing your time and energy in a content development plan that will build consistency going forward, preventing a lot of the fluctuations in rank that can occur without it.

This content development plan gives your team a chance to get on the same page. Your social media team, web development team, and content creation team all need to be focusing on the same goals and search terms. Now is the time to ask “What are the terms we want our company associated with?” All of your teams need to be coordinating their efforts on those terms. If your targeted search term is “reconstructive knee surgery,” your web team needs to have Titles, Headers and ALT tags using that term; your social media team needs to have conversations on various platforms using that term; and your content team needs to write about that term.

While coding, tweeting and writing about this term will each have a positive ranking effect on its own, the real strength comes from the combined efforts. As long as you’ve linked your Facebook Page back to your company website, Google knows about (and indexes) this connection, as well as most of the other connections your site has on the web. When all of these connections are speaking the same language and using the same terminology, Google will find your site more “relevant” on the topic matter (term) you’ve targeted.

Now, of course it’s not as simple as building content and linking to it and making sure all terms are the same – there are a lot of other factors that go into Google’s ranking –  in order to jump to the top of the rankings for a certain term, but you’re building a foundation. More importantly, you’re creating a process within your company that will keep all the necessary teams aiming for the same goals and this will ultimately make SEO success more frequent and consistent going forward.