Step 1: Does Google know you exist?
The first thing you need to do is use Google’s Webmaster tools to determine what problems your site may be experiencing. These include pages not indexed, missing, identical content on multiple pages and outdated Meta information.
Sometimes updates to your site aren’t crawled or found by the search engines. It is a good idea to use the WordPress sitemap plugin to inform the various search engines on a continuous basis of your site changes and updates.
Google penalizes you for having identical content on multiple pages and it’s also confusing for your visitors. If you have multiple pages with nearly identical content consolidate them.
Often the purpose of your site or business changes direction, or the content of a page may change. In these cases what you have for your meta description may not match what is on the actual page or site.
Lastly don’t compete with yourself by having older and newer versions of the same product on your site if your customers will more than likely be looking for the new one. This is huge in the consumer electronics industry, having last years camera come up instead of this years will hurt sales.
Step 2: Create great content for important topics
Tons of high quality content is crucial for SEO success. One of the easiest ways to achieve this is creating a customer-focused blog. The blog should be informative and helpful rather than promotional. Of course the post should have a way to lead customers to your products but you need to first fulfill their need for information.
Look at the data of what was searched for on your site. This could lead to ideas for content that needs to be produced that isn’t found on the site as well as ideas for where more content needs to be made.
These searches could also lead to new product opportunities for you, if you see that many of your visitors do a search for particular brand on your site that you don’t carry. With data in hand you could approach a vendor letting them know that you have a market that’s ready for their products.
Step 3: Links from Other Reputable Sites
Although links are the most powerful aspect of SEO, all links aren’t created equal. You want links from reputable authoritative sites that also have high quality content. Links from spammy sites will actually get you penalized by the search engines. Google assumes that if those sites link to you then you must have similar content.
Another source of bad links are old unkempt blogs and sites. These sites may have been authoritative at one time but are no longer updated. Google once again assumes that your site is outdated as well.
Content scrapers just copy and paste content from other sites. These sites are irrelevant and often contain only other peoples content and some sort of advertising.
In either case you will want to reach out to the site owner (may be difficult) to ask them to remove the links to your site.
Step 4: Use History to Set Expectations
The phrase history teachers everywhere use to keep you interested in learning history is “You can’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’ve been.” This bit advice works well for SEO research.
Look at the sites traffic and click data for the same time in the previous year or seasonal uptick. This will help you set benchmarks for what to expect in the upcoming season. Obviously this year won’t be the same but getting excited about 1000 visitors when last year on the same day you had 12,000 is moving backwards. You won’t know unless you pay attention to the data though.
Taking these 4 steps will lead to results such as year-over-year increase in leads sent from natural search, increase in natural search traffic, and an increase in sales which is the purpose!
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