How To Identify The Negative Elements in Your SEO Strategy?
When it comes to getting a great amount of visibility and traffic for your website, the best and only solution is robust SEO.
Although it is a long-term solution, SEO benefits are mainly qualitative and relatively difficult to quantify. You need to think about the advantages, such as increased awareness of the brand and inbound traffic, which can differ according to the situation.
Nonetheless, with the passage of time, you can certainly reach a point where you can draw a conclusion from the data and insights you have obtained.
The best thing is that you can look at the checkpoints and know what needs to be taken care of and what issues impact the response to the campaign. Originally, searching for such negative factors may be difficult to find, but when you know how to find them, it will make things simpler. Here’s how you can find them.
Experiencing a drop in Organic Traffic
We first have to look at the organic traffic, as in the number of visitors who have landed on your website via search engines. Some of the most effective methods for determining the effectiveness of your SEO campaign include calculating organic traffic.
By signing into the Google Analytics account and clicking the ‘Acquisitions’ tab, you will be able to calculate it appropriately.
So you can clearly witness the raw numbers earned for the audience from organic sources and other avenues like referrals, social media profiles and, of course, direct visits. Apart from knowing the exact number, you may also provide some additional information about the sources of your organic traffic.
Make sure you’ve got an eye on the numbers without missing them. You can also schedule a day when you’d go back and test the numbers. If not every week, then you should have a comprehensive bi-weekly or monthly assessment.
The time you are allotted for evaluation will depend on the traffic you receive. If you are getting massive traffic within a week, then it is better to conduct a weekly evaluation, as this way you would know about the dip as soon as it happens.
You would not have to wait for weeks to know that your traffic has been dropping.
Decline In Traffic For More Than 2 Months
Like we said earlier, SEO is all about long-term growth and results. This means you should be witnessing growth over a consistent time. Make sure you can see an overall pattern in how traffic has increased over time.
Organic search activity is said to be consistent, but some unpredictable variables, such as notifications from Google, can still make it difficult for you. If, in a single month, you don’t witness much development, you don’t have to panic.
However, if for more than two months you don’t see any growth in the stats, then there are chances of a serious problem.
Your aim is to witness measurable growth in organic visits, but if this does not happen, then consider it a negative element. You do not have to specifically blame SEO for it. Instead, you can make some alterations in the strategy you are following currently.
Drop in Keyword Rankings
You need to understand that the things in the SEO world have changed tremendously over time. One such shift is the drop in the keyword rankings that we have witnessed. They are no longer just as important as they used to be. Gone is the time when the only thing that counted in SEO was keywords.
There was a time when SEO professionals only had to get a high ranking for one keyword, and this could lead them to absolute success. But, you should know that the keywords are less important nowadays as times have changed considerably. Google translates target-based search requests, rather than the keyword phrases entered. Technically, therefore, it’s more about content being relevant and of high-quality than content focused on common keywords.
Since rankings are one of the most essential metrics to measure campaign success, you need to make sure that your keywords are not affecting it.
Pick your target keywords in the right manner. This allows you to measure your results in a week or a month and see if your aggressive strategy is actually paying off or not.
If, due to those selected keywords, you are experiencing a fall in the rankings, then you should find it a negative aspect of your campaign.
The primary reason for the negative elements is that you are going off track in your strategy. If you have witnessed any of the above-mentioned negative elements in your SEO strategy, ensure you track down the culprit. Some of those issues can be:
- Over-Optimization of Content
- Directionless and Poor Link-Building Strategy
- Negative or no reviews on the website
- Misplaced or unidentifiable peripheral elements
Once you have found the culprit for the negative element, you can take corrective steps as soon as possible.
Building links that are spammy in nature
Did you know that spam backlinks can be the reason behind many penalties and other ranking issues? As a matter of fact, negative SEO can cause several repercussions in the form of backlink spam. These negative SEO attacks can result in a huge number of spam links being generated with the use of software.
You need to know that these negative SEO attacks can cause many problems, but they aren’t as potent as this is a type of spam that Google has focused on in the past. That’s more of the reason why you need to monitor a website’s link profile and utilize the disavow tool when required. It can help reduce the effect of this type of negative SEO.
Hacking the website of a competitor
Hacking the website of a competitor is illegal and is the most harmful type of negative SEO. Google is known for removing websites that have malware from search entirely, which can damage the site’s incoming traffic. Even after fixing the hack and getting the site restored, it’s quite common to see the long-term repercussions because of reduced search performance.
By having the most robust security practices and ensuring the technology is updated on the website, the chances of your site getting hacked will be reduced considerably.
Artificial traffic spam
If you bought your traffic, it can be very harmful for your site’s user signals. It can also cause reduced organic search performance. This type of negative SEO can be quite difficult to defend against. But, there are many things which can be done to counter this, such as blocking the source of the traffic. Alongside this, you can try to get in touch with the service provider as well.
Duplicate content spam
Using another website’s content, basically copying it, can create duplicate content issues. There are many black hat SEOs who follow this tactic to reduce a website’s ranking. In case the spam site scrapes the content quickly, and it gets indexed before the original version, it can prove to be damaging to the website’s search performance.
The best way to use canonical tags, along with following the right type of internal linking and link-building practices, can minimize the effectiveness of this type of negative SEO.
With the help of a plagiarism tool or by using sentences from a website’s posts into Google search, it’s possible to know whether illegal scraping has been implemented or not. In case, there’s any scraped content is found, you need to get in touch with the website owner so as to get it removed.
Another approach can be to file a Copyright removal request with Google. When you do so, it’s crucial to get substantial proof that the content is owned by the website. The proof can be that they wrote it in the first place or that the other website is scraping it.
The second option can be achieved by adding sentences to the content that state that it was created by the original website before it was scraped. It will make sure that the sentences signify who the original author of the content is.
Wrapping Up
Negative SEO is unacceptable in the SEO industry and isn’t used at all in white hat SEO. There are many cases in which nothing much can be done to prevent it. So, you need to monitor the most crucial site metrics, such as your link profile, website speed, copyright infringements, and online reviews.
In this way, the website owners will be able to ensure that the occurrences of negative SEO can be found out before they cause any big damage to the website. Just by responding quickly, the ill effects of the negative SEO can be reduced significantly.
Looking to get rid of these negative SEO elements and get the best SEO results for your business? If yes, Kinex Media can help you a lot. Get in touch with us now and have a free consultation with our SEO experts today.
