It is more competitive than ever to get good rankings on the internet. It doesn’t matter how competitive or niche the industry, rising up through the search engine positions is a long contested battle.
And it’s easy to see why. Search engine users very rarely look beyond page 1. You may also be guilty of this! When was the last time you looked further than positions 5 or 6?
Search engine optimization or SEO is all about thinking like your customer. You know what they’re looking for, and you know you want to be their first choice. Your online marketing efforts should target specific search terms, you need to spend a lot of time honing your SEO in order to hit the top spot.
Never has it been more essential to have good website content in order to achieve good rankings. Link building has long been the sole online marketing strategy for online marketers. But did you know your search engine optimisation efforts may all be in vain, and that they could actually be letting you down?
‘Black hat’ SEO has been in existence for some time and Google is constantly trying to clamp down on those webmasters who try to trick the system. This is spammy, overly optimized web pages and websites. It has always penalised websites that paid for backlinks, but now even the most above-board efforts are losing steam.
Overly optimised websites really are paying the penalty now. Many website have been affected by Google’s changes. Once penalised, all your online marketing efforts will have been for nothing. If you are sure you were doing everything by the book and still been penalised, where do you go from here?
One of the most common offences which has resulted in penalisation is keyword stuffing. Google may conceive this as an attempt to cheat the system. The problem for web owners comes however, when not every page on the website is seen as ‘over-optimized’. Unfortunately, it is likely that the whole website will be penalised and be lost from the search results.
If your SEO efforts have failed, what do your do next? The first thing to do is check your keyword density. You need to check both the onpage keyword density as well as meta data. Rewrite your content if you find the keyword density to be over 3%.
Most importantly, don’t panic. Google is always making changes, so update your site gradually and monitor how your rankings are affected. If it is all getting a bit much for you, then a digital marketing agency will have the experience and expertise to steer your site back into the rankings.
If your website isn’t performing as well as you’d like, get in touch with Bird and Co Creative to talk about ways to increase your search rankings.
