Starting Your SEO Campaign: Risks to Take and Avoid
When starting an SEO campaign for your domain, there are some risks that you should be aware of. If you decide to redesign your existing website and alter the structure of your URL, you may risk losing your site’s current rankings. Yet if your existing site is now showing a loss in organic search rankings, you may benefit from risking the change to a fresh, new, holistic website design. This may result in significant increases in SEO.
Risks to Take and Some to Avoid When Starting Your Site’s SEO Campaign
Major risks that you can take and others to avoid as you begin your website’s new SEO campaign include the following:
Risks to Take
1. Meta Information from A/B Testing. Most SEO experts agree that your website’s click-through rates affect its search engine rankings. If web searchers are not clicking on your homepage, Google may omit this page from results for a search phrase. Your site may also lose listings if Google gives the keyword content and strategy in your meta titles and meta descriptions a low rating.
By performing A/B tests for different meta title and meta description pairs for your site pages, you can determine the strongest ones. If you optimize the pages of your website and evaluate the results, this can help to boost your page and overall site rankings significantly.
2. Altering URL Structure. Optimizing your website URLs and using keyword-compatible rather than inferior structure can result in higher search rankings. Having brief keyword-friendly URLs in subfolders can also improve your Google rankings considerably. Simplifying your URLs enables site users to determine the main focus of your page content in SERPs.
You should also 301-redirect your old URLs to their new web addresses to maintain the full link value of these older pages. Altering all of your URLs at the same time can damage your organic search rankings. For this reason, it is important to change them in increments, testing the results before making changes to the URLs of additional pages.
3. Enhancing User Experience. When you optimize your web pages for the ultimate user experience and examine the resulting metrics, you can determine the best SEO strategies for gaining high rankings in highly competitive Google terrain. You want to optimize any site pages showing low performance. You can calculate your site usability metrics, including on-page time, bounce rate and time spent on-site, from analysing current user experience.
To enhance user experience for your site pages, you can include product reviews, use video content as description content for categories and input product or category explanations where helpful. It can also be beneficial to remove unnecessary content from your category pages. As you progress with these additions and changes, continue measuring your usability metrics with Google Analytics.
4. Obtaining Top-Quality Backlinks. Quality backlinks are a major factor in attaining high Google SERPs rankings. There is really no need to be concerned about getting Google penalties from backlinks that are of high calibre. If you are not receiving good results from your existing site backlinks, Google may not be rating them as high-quality links. However, rather than overcrowding your website with a large quantity of new backlinks, focus on replacing the older, non-productive ones with top-calibre choices.
Risks to Avoid
1. Disallowing Low-Quality Backlinks. SEO experts often disclaim low-quality (or “neutral”) backlinks. Yet Google’s Penguin 4.0 update did away with website penalties for poor caliber backlinks. Since you are not always able to control what websites link to your own site, Google is currently ignoring backlinks in terms of penalties. In general, a good rule is to disavow only backlinks that your new customers and ongoing clients might object to if they visited these domains.
2. Deleting or Consolidating Site Pages. There is no need to delete content pages or URLs. If you do delete some site pages, remember that your website will no longer rank for the page-related keywords. If you need to maintain rankings for these key terms, keep the page. When deleting a product page, keep the URL and insert a message on the page informing site users that this product is no longer available.Refer them to other similar or related products on your site. When you consolidate web pages, ensure that the 301 for the old URL redirects correctly to the new URL. Also, be sure that the new page incorporates all keywords and phrases that your old site page ranked for.