Nine times out of ten, a decrease in website traffic is related to the organic health of your website. The good news is that this can be improved with SEO management.
Many businesses manage their search engine optimisation (SEO) in-house, however, it’s becoming increasingly popular to hire an SEO agency to manage website performance. Working with an agency frees up valuable time for internal teams, and your company will benefit from the technical skills, knowledge and advice of a professional SEO expert.
In this blog, we learn about the reasons why a website may experience a decrease in organic traffic, how to identify website issues affecting organic performance, and the benefits of using a digital marketing agency to manage search engine optimisation. Additionally, the blog highlights the top five SEO mistakes made by websites.
How Can Search Engine Algorithm Updates Impact Organic Traffic?
Search engines use complex algorithms to determine how authoritative websites are in addressing a particular subject. When we talk about SEO, we mean improving website health and user experience in order to satisfy these algorithms. Good SEO optimisation should result in the website ranking highly in search engines.
Of course, algorithms are always being changed and updated, however if you follow guidance from Webmaster Guidelines and always keep the end user in mind, negative impacts from algorithm updates should be short-lived.
The signs of an algorithm update tend to be random peaks (and/or) troughs in impressions and user volumes. This happens when search engines start to crawl, index and rank websites based on their new ranking rules.
How to Identify Website Issues That Might Impact Organic Performance?
SEO hygiene is something that should be part of your ongoing SEO strategy. This is not a one time fix. You should be introducing new and updating old content, as well as rectifying technical errors frequently. There are a lot of tools you can use to identify website errors. Most of the technical SEO tools can be costly for many small to medium businesses. If this applies to you, you can utilise tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics and SEO Site Checkup for free. Identifying website issues might feel like a gargantuan task, which is why outsourcing your SEO management to a specialised team of experts will ensure your website health and free up valuable time for your employees.
What Are the Benefits of Using a Digital Marketing Agency to Manage Search Engine Optimisation?
Marketers must constantly adapt to changing marketing conditions, evolving search engine algorithms, and evolving customer priorities. As a result, SEO techniques are constantly evolving in response to these changes. Staying up-to-date with the latest optimisation strategies can be challenging, as it requires continuous learning and adaptation. If implemented incorrectly, organically, they can be difficult to recover from and may require significant time and resources to fix.
One major advantage of working with a digital marketing agency is that they can take on the heavy lifting, staying on top of changing trends and algorithms, and continuously assessing your SEO strategy.
By partnering with an agency, you can enhance your overall digital marketing strategy, identify areas for improvement within your business, and implement solutions to drive growth. An agency can help increase your visibility to potential customers and attract them through a variety of marketing channels tailored to your needs.
Ultimately, the marketing agency should seamlessly integrate with your business, understand your operations, and align with your objectives to deliver results. If you decide you’d like to outsource your marketing efforts to a dedicated team of experts, contact us today to find out how we can help with SEO optimisation, social media management, web design, PR or a combination of our services.
What Are the Top Five SEO Mistakes on Websites?
1. Not Knowing Your Audience
A fundamental principle of SEO is to have a deep understanding of your target audience, down to the most granular level. This requires marketers to truly listen to the customer’s voice. One common mistake is selecting overly broad keywords, rather than focusing on more specific long-tail keywords that are favoured by both search engines and users. To be effective, it’s important to use the language that your potential customers would use to describe your products and services.
Consumers today demand instant gratification, which means that historical data alone is no longer enough. Marketers need to use different methods and tools to really understand their customers and keep up with what they want.
2. Publishing the Wrong Content
The key objective is to create content that directly addresses the questions and requirements of your target audience, utilising appropriate search terms. If it doesn’t answer the needs of your audience, it won’t rank well. Search engines want their users to easily find information that helps them. Trying to do too much or creating poor content purely to include keywords, or failing to properly address a subject will result in a low ranking for your site.
3. Neglecting Title Tags and Meta Descriptions, As Well As Failing to Provide Context Through Schema
SEO doesn’t end with including keywords in your content. Meta titles and descriptions are fundamental parts of your SEO optimisation. Skipping this step will likely result in ranking lower in typical searches, and even lower for specific searches. However, if implemented correctly, title tags, meta descriptions, and schema markup will improve the ranking of your content.
4. Not Including Quality Links
Links are a very important part of SEO optimisation, and can be split into two sections: external and internal links.
An external link is something that links to content ideally on a high-ranking and well maintained website. An example of this would be backing up your argument with external facts and figures. Check out what Hubspot has to say about backlinks (sometimes known as inbound links) on their handy blog.
See? It’s as easy as that! The reason these are so important is they help build your authority on the subject, and they will drive traffic to your website if backlinks are reciprocated on other websites.
Internal links are exactly what you think they are. Linking this piece to other relative content published to your side. Have you ever wondered how an SEO strategy will benefit your business in the long term? Read our blog to find out. Easy! Internal links are essential because they signal to the search engine that the page is important. It’s all about building your authority on a subject, remember?
5. Forgetting to Use Analytics and Tracking Tools
It might seem obvious, but there’s no point going to all this effort if you’re not going to keep track of the results. As mentioned above, there are free tools you can use such as Google Analytics which will provide you with a comprehensive overview of the effectiveness of your optimisation. Once you’ve started tracking it, the next step is to analyse the data, looking for trends in the numbers and evaluating why certain pieces of content aren’t working. Tools like this will also help you with updates to the algorithm. Get in touch with the team about our Google Analytics training if you’re interested in learning how to use it more effectively.
If you’re already using Google Analytics, have you migrated to GA4 yet? Universal Analytics is due to sunset this year, so make sure you make the move before you lose access to your data.
SEO optimisation should be a key part of your marketing strategy, bringing together a healthy website with high quality content that consistently prioritises the journey and experience of your consumers. As you will have gathered reading this blog, optimising your website to rank well is time consuming, and an always evolving task. By letting an SEO expert look after this for you, you can get on with what you do best, running your business.
Contact us to see how we can help level up your business. In the meantime, for more best practice guidance and exclusive news, sign up to our newsletter.
