This Article Will Help You Turn Around Bad SEO into an Optimized Website in 12 Easy Steps
Wait, do I have bad SEO? This is a question a lot of web designers, entrepreneurs, and business owners ask themselves. If you do find this to be the case, don’t worry. Though bad SEO has consequences long-term, the quicker you make a change, the closer you’ll to deriving some benefit from your strategy.
What is bad SEO?
Bad SEO can be happen out of clumsiness or lack of experience, more common than not. Alternatively, bad SEO can also happen with so-called ‘experts’ who use black hat SEO techniques. Black hat SEO are outdated strategies used to ‘hack’ SEO and often involve illegal means of ranking your site higher. In almost every case, black hat SEO strategies are eventually discovered and when they are, a site gets penalized. If you find your site has bad SEO, it’s no reason to panic.
What is white hat SEO?
White hat SEO is high quality content, using keyword clusters that are on-brand, and wrapped in a visually appealing website. White hat SEO, to put it succinctly, is the good kind of SEO and adheres to Google guidelines. This is what you want. To get you started on optimizing your site in 12 easy steps, we look to white hat SEO practices to cover strategies you may be using that are outdated, cheating, or considered low quality.
Is your website your best work?
Web design isn’t meant to be rushed through. If you’re not committed to making the best site possible for your brand, you are unlikely to see the big returns some sites do. In this vein, a high quality website doesn’t just get the technical aspects of SEO right but it engages, sparks some magic, contributes value, and has a reason to exist.
Step 1 – How many times do you use your keyword?
A lot of websites overstuff keywords in with no relevance. Content can appear clunky when you do this. You need smooth, easily readable content that blends in keywords naturally. Instead of stuffing in the same keyword again and again, slow it down. Instead, choose 3 or 4 keywords. Blend them in naturally, only once or twice in a short piece of content. The ultimate goal’s not necessarily to maximize keyword usage but it is to deliver high-value content.
Step 2 – Prioritize unique, eye-catching high quality content
SEO is built around content marketing, such as how-to articles, blogs, opinion pieces, and informational blogs. Your content shouldn’t be duplicated from anywhere else on your site or elsewhere on the Internet. It should also be written well and something that users are going to appreciate. It shouldn’t be promotional or sales-focused. Give it some real value! If your content is good enough, it will sell the reader on the idea of buying from your business.
Step 3 – How do I know what SEO keywords to use?
Keyword are important. Keywords in SEO should relate to your business. Choose long and short keywords. Look at keywords that are going to build you authority in your category of the marketplace. Researching these can take a lot of time but the work does pay off if you choose correctly.
Step 4 – Eliminate any spam or duplicate content
If you have duplicate content, remove it because you will be penalized in the eyes of Google. Secondly, if anyone is leaving spam links, irrelevant comments, or similar content, a site’s reputation can become damaged in the eyes of Google. Don’t let this irrelevant content affect your site ranking. There are a number of tools, apps, and built-in tools to use to help manage comments and duplicate content like this.
Step 5 – Does every page have a purpose?
Look at your site. If there are blogs written that don’t have a strong purpose, plagiarized or borderline duplicate, or are pages you don’t need, get rid of them. An efficient website is one where every page deserves to be there. A stronger website like this suggests to search engine crawlers you are a high quality site.
Step 6 – Do you have clickbait articles with a high bounce rate?
Clickbait can work in some cases to get you clicks. If you don’t deliver though, you’re going to lose a user and they may not ever come back. Luring people onto your site through misleading, deceptive language isn’t ok. It may not punish you in the form of search engine rank but you won’t win any customers this way. By all means, avoid clickbait. Instead, write better and create more engaging content marketing.
Step 7 – Do you have an internal and external linking structure?
There’s a dual approach any excellent SEO website takes. There’s external links which you can’t really control which is when other websites recognize the value in your website and they link directly to it. Then, there’s internal linking structure which involves you linking to other pages on your website, setting up 2-4 internal links per article or blog. Doing this interlinks your website, communicating relevancy, authority, and quality.
Step 8 – Incorporating SEO images
SEO images, video, graphics, and media keeps a user engaged, and ups the quality of your content. When you have images or video, ensure they have been optimized with meta data, descriptions, and the incorporation of keywords. Search engine crawlers cannot discern what’s included in an image and so you need to tell them through meta data what’s there. Doing this will help them classify it and can in fact be an opportunity to further elevate your website’s rank.
Step 9 – Is my website mobile responsive?
There are more users surfing the Internet today through mobile devices – i.e. smartphones and tablets – than there are people doing it on laptops and desktops. A website that’s mobile responsive adapts to screen size, shifting around elements and ensures a user never needs to zoom in. Responsiveness makes browsing a website so much easier! It’s also so important to SEO that Google and other search engines have adapted a mobile-first approach. A website that isn’t mobile responsive ranks lower than one that is. If you haven’t already, get your site formatted to be mobile ready.
Step 10 – Are my website pages loading fast enough?
Page speed in SEO must be optimized to rank high. Search engines like Google value loading speed very much, which has made it a priority for web designers and digital marketers. As we continue to design, and add images, video, media, and graphics to our web pages, it can slow things down. You’ve got to have a firm grasp on web coding and design to ensure your page doesn’t take longer than 3 seconds to load.
Step 11 – Look at your analytics
In changing your website’s design, removing bad SEO and replacing it with good SEO, pay attention to your analytics in the weeks to follow. SEO rank changes take time to happen but you’re likely to notice other changes including a lower bounce rate, more clicks through your website, and overall indications of an improved user experience. Analytics give a wealth of information on a website’s performance, well worth perusing to see if your efforts are making a difference.
Step 12 – Coming up with a long-term SEO plan
SEO is all about ongoing effort. If you do everything right today and fine-tune your bad SEO into something turned around, it still takes long-term planning to elevate your site to the rank you deserve. SEO is an investment in best practices, eliminating what’s outdated, obsolete, or not working. Planned activity on your site, such as through content marketing and blogs, directly impact SEO. Search engine crawlers will come back to crawl your website somewhat regularly ensuring its’ pages are still quality enough to rank where they do. A long-term SEO marketing strategy’s necessary for this reason.
