Post by account_disabled on Jan 28, 2024 3:13:52 GMT -5
“expert” on the subject at hand Original research, quotes, or insights from their brand Charts, tables, or graphs that help communicate information more clearly If several of your higher-ranked competitors have added this it could be a good sign that you should also update your content. Step 4: Perform a Technical SEO Audit It’s important to perform a technical audit following a traffic drop because the reason for the decline might be unrelated to the recent Google update. Even high-quality content will struggle to rank well if your website has significant technical issues affecting crawling and indexing. But before you fire up SEO audit tools
or outsource this work, ask yourself the following questions. 1. Has there been a theme update or site change recently? A theme update can change internal links (such as navigation menus) and page speeds, which can affect search rankings. Tip: Keep a log of these kinds of changes so you can reverse them if there’s a negative traffic impact. 2. Is everything working OK on a mobile device? Google crawls websites using a “mobile-first” browser. Sometimes, problems can occur in a mobile view, while the desktop version works fine. Following a traffic decrease, visit your website on a mobile device and check how it looks. Click through Special Data to some important pages, looking for anything unusual. This can include it being hard to navigate to pages, ads or popups covering a large portion of the screen, and videos or images not appearing. By considering these two things, you might find areas to troubleshoot first or add as a preface to an SEO audit brief. Next, you can complete your SEO audit. This can be a significant undertaking for larger sites and can
take up to a week to complete. To help you know what to focus on, I’ve written this companion guide, How To Perform A Quick Technical SEO Audit In Hours (and Not Days). Step 5: Perform a Content Audit Your instinct might be to take the pages with the biggest traffic drops and look at ways to improve the content. However, this might not be the best way to proceed if you’re experiencing traffic drops across several pages. In this case, Google might have leveled a site-wide classifier against your website. From Google’s commentary on the Helpful Content Update: This classifier could be why some pages on your website may still be performing well while others have tumbled down the rankings. Google may have classified most (if not all) of your site as “unhelpful content.” At this stage, you should ask yourself, “How does Google identify unhelpful content and do it at scale?” One way could be pages that don’t receive any search traffic. After all, Google has crawled and indexed these pages and decided they’re undeserving of high rankings in search results. It’s natural for every website to have some of these pages. But, it could be a problem
or outsource this work, ask yourself the following questions. 1. Has there been a theme update or site change recently? A theme update can change internal links (such as navigation menus) and page speeds, which can affect search rankings. Tip: Keep a log of these kinds of changes so you can reverse them if there’s a negative traffic impact. 2. Is everything working OK on a mobile device? Google crawls websites using a “mobile-first” browser. Sometimes, problems can occur in a mobile view, while the desktop version works fine. Following a traffic decrease, visit your website on a mobile device and check how it looks. Click through Special Data to some important pages, looking for anything unusual. This can include it being hard to navigate to pages, ads or popups covering a large portion of the screen, and videos or images not appearing. By considering these two things, you might find areas to troubleshoot first or add as a preface to an SEO audit brief. Next, you can complete your SEO audit. This can be a significant undertaking for larger sites and can
take up to a week to complete. To help you know what to focus on, I’ve written this companion guide, How To Perform A Quick Technical SEO Audit In Hours (and Not Days). Step 5: Perform a Content Audit Your instinct might be to take the pages with the biggest traffic drops and look at ways to improve the content. However, this might not be the best way to proceed if you’re experiencing traffic drops across several pages. In this case, Google might have leveled a site-wide classifier against your website. From Google’s commentary on the Helpful Content Update: This classifier could be why some pages on your website may still be performing well while others have tumbled down the rankings. Google may have classified most (if not all) of your site as “unhelpful content.” At this stage, you should ask yourself, “How does Google identify unhelpful content and do it at scale?” One way could be pages that don’t receive any search traffic. After all, Google has crawled and indexed these pages and decided they’re undeserving of high rankings in search results. It’s natural for every website to have some of these pages. But, it could be a problem