How To Identify The Negative Elements in Your SEO Strategy

When it comes to garnering visibility and traffic for your website, the solution is SEO.

Although being a long-term solution, SEO’s benefits are mainly qualitative and relatively difficult to quantify. We are thinking about the advantages, such as increased awareness of the brand and inbound traffic, which can differ according to situation.

Nonetheless, with the passage of time you can certainly enter a point where you can draw a conclusion from the data and knowledge you have obtained.

The main appeal is that you can observe 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.

  1. Experiencing Drop in Organic Traffic

We relates by organic traffic to the amount of visitors who have entered your website via search engines. Some of the most successful methods for determining the effectiveness of your SEO campaign are to calculate organic traffic.

Through signing into the Google Analytics account, and clicking the ‘Acquisitions’ tab, you will calculate the same.

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 on the sources of your organic traffic.

Experiencing Drop in Organic Traffic

Make sure you’ve got an eye on the numbers without having to miss them. 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 following for evaluation will depend on the traffic you are receiving. If you are getting a massive traffic within a week then it is better to conduct 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.

  1. 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 consistent time. Make sure you are able to see an overall pattern as in how traffic has increased with 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 any serious problem.

Your aim is to witness measurable growth in organic visits but if this does not happen then consider it as 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.

  1. Drop in Keyword Rankings

Okay, things in the SEO world have changed tremendously with the passing times. One such shift in the Keyword rankings was witnesses. 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.

Optimizers only had to get a high ranking of one keyword and this can led them to absolute success. Keywords are less important nowadays times have changed. Google translates target-based search requests, rather than the keyword phrases entered. Technically, therefore, it’s more about content appropriate and of quality than content focused on common keywords.

keyword ranking chart

Since, rankings are the most essential metric to measure the campaign success; you need to make sure that your keywords are not affecting it.

Make doubly sure you have a set of keywords with you as targets for calculating and evaluating your rating based on them in one month or week, reflecting on the aggressiveness of the campaign.

If, due to those selected keywords, you are experiencing a fall in the rankings then you should find it as a negative aspect to your campaign.

The primary reason for the negative elements is you going off the track in your strategy. In case you have witnessed any of the above specified negative elements in your SEO strategy then ensure you are tracking down the culprit. Some of the culprits are:

  • Over-Optimization of Content
  • Directionless and poor Link-Building Strategy
  • Negative or no reviews over 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.

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