There are many times during the life cycle of your website that you will need an SEO expert.
If you don’t enlist the help of a true professional for the following five scenarios, you’re risking your rankings, traffic, and revenue in 2023:
1. Site redesign
This new year, many are planning to update their websites. The problem is that SEO never comes into the conversation during a site redesign or is not handled properly. This is a problem.
A site migration is when a website undergoes major changes, such as URL updates, a redesign, or changes to the content management system or hosting provider.
Any of these changes can negatively impact your website’s performance in search results if managed well.
And make no mistake: there is a lot to consider. So much so that we typically divide our SEO checklist into pre-launch, launch, and post-launch activities when involved in a site migration.
Even when done correctly, it’s common for sites to see a temporary drop in organic traffic (80% of SEOs expect it), but should recover and even surpass previous benchmarks.
When it doesn’t, however, something has gone terribly wrong. The website may never recover and may experience a long-term drop in traffic.
If you are going to make significant changes to your website, make sure you have the guidance of an experienced SEO throughout the process. A website design agency may not have the necessary experience.
2. Deep analysis
Even if you tick all the boxes on an SEO checklist, there might be something sinister going on in your website scene that’s causing your traffic to drop. Only a deep audit can uncover something like this.
It is common for site owners to focus only on the top performing pages. But this is only a small representation of the quality of your website. The other 80% of web pages on your site could be hurting your overall quality and relevance, thus affecting your traffic.
An example? Google’s useful content update, which analyzes the entire website in terms of content quality. If some pages are considered bad, it can affect the whole website.
Let’s also not forget the impact that well-organized, quality content across the site can have on relevance. In accordance with Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide:
“Browsing a website is important for helping visitors quickly find the content they want. It can also help search engines understand what content the website owner thinks is important. Although search results are provided at the page level, Google also likes to get an idea of the role a page plays in the overall image of the site.
In other words, web pages do not exist in a vacuum. There are many cases where Google considers the site as a whole when ranking.
There are other hidden problems in a website that can be easily missed without a technical SEO audit. For all these reasons, it is critical for website publishers to better understand their site through a proper audit.
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3. Ranking for highly competitive terms
Let’s face it, what keywords they are not competitive these days? Do a search for any keyword and you’ll find millions of results. However, page 1 is all that matters.
Some keywords are easier to rank for than others. For example, you might have an easier time ranking for something like “list of the best video games in 2022” instead of just “games”.
We should know. It took us years to help a client rank #1 for the highly competitive term: “games.” But we did it. And it stuck.
Ranking for million dollar keywords isn’t just by following a checklist. It happens with deep SEO expertise from professionals with decades of experience – those who live and breathe technical SEO and understand what’s happening in search right now.
Sure, you can get SEO guidance anywhere, but if you’re trying to rank in highly competitive terms, don’t settle. Get an SEO expert.
4. Navigating the changes on Google
Search engine results pages are constantly changing.
In 2021 alone, Google conducted more than 700,000 experiments, resulting in over 4,000 changes to search. That’s about 11 changes per day. Do you have time to track and analyze all algorithm updates and how they apply to your website?
Algorithm updates cause changes on the first page and competitors move forward. Maybe they have more resources and bigger budgets, maybe they did a little better than you. Now you have to figure out what changed and how to get back on track.
Countless factors influence your ranking in search results. Trying to figure that out should be left to an SEO professional.
5. Technical SEO
Anyone can do easy on-page SEO, but it takes knowledge and experience to get the technical part right. Things like mobile usability, site speed, structured data tagging, robots.txt, server maintenance, page experience and much, much more.
Technical SEO requires the expertise of a professional who works in conjunction with a website developer or webmaster to ensure that the correct changes are done well. One mistake and it can quickly undo your SEO results.
Each website must ensure that the technical part is correct in order to rank. Because? Because if a site can’t be crawled, it won’t rank.
Google’s Gary Illyes once said a Reddit thread:
“[I] I really wish SEOs would go back to the basics (i.e. MAKE THIS DAMN SITE TRACKABLE) instead of focusing on silly updates and terms made up by ranking followers, and talk more to the website developers once it’s done with the first part of this sentence”.
Level up your SEO game in 2023
A new year brings new possibilities for your website.
It’s time to seriously consider how you’re going to integrate expert SEO strategies so you have a chance to compete on page 1.
The views expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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