Your website traffic determines a big junk of your online success.
Now and then, the unexpected decline in website traffic may be the effect of the changes in the algorithm. In some cases, they are the result of bugs, unintentional changes or exaggerated engineers with just a little SEO knowledge.
The Missing Links
With the growing technical complications of websites and SEO, there is a wide list of possible issues which can affect website traffic and rankings. Some of the problems that have come across are many, including:
- Rel=canonicals. A typical issue has been accidentally dismissed or broken out of the rel=”canonical” link element. This states the canonical page from those with duplicate content.
- Nofollow links. Sites with “nofollow” link tags for the links on a home page. In a single case, all the paginated links on the blog were nofollowed. Moreover, this keeps multi-paged posts from having link equity.
- Meta Robots. The nofollow and the noindex meta tags have been shown on pages where they did not belong. Moreover, noindex was also removed inadvertently, which has progressed to Google’s index receiving floods of low-quality pages.
Reality Is More Strange Than Fiction
Imagine a website that has a nice, friendly m.dot application. But, the mobile crawler was not seeing this site. There was some old cover code that served up the old “dumb” phone or feature phone edition of the site to the spiders. Another website, a software service, had an opt-out page to remove their service. Some content they may want to index, and some they may not. In this case, there is usually a logic that is implemented to find out whether or not to include the “noindex” tag. Any time there is logic and “if” statements, there is a risk of a bug.
Google SEO strategies need to have the tools and processes in place to prevent these mishaps, and implement education programs, so that every part of an enterprise (large or small) understands what can impact SEO.
Medium and small-sized retail websites is the core of Google Analytics. This service has restrictions that make it less suitable for more complicated websites and larger enterprises. For instance, the system gathers data via a Java Script page tag inserted in the code of pages the user wants to gather data on. The page tag operates as a Web bug to collect visitor details. But because it’s dependent on cookies, the system can’t gather data for users who have disabled them. Google also uses sampling in its reports than evaluating all available data.
It’s best to utilize something that checks and alerts the user to change and look for potential issues.
Recommendable Tools
- SEORadar It concentrates clearly on monitoring the changes and generating some alerts. The free edition has a decent security features, which involve redirect monitoring if URLs have been changed.
- RioSEO. This is the only other comprehensive change monitoring system that is concentrated on SEO.
- In-house developed scripts and tools. Some companies will prefer to enhance their own test and monitoring solutions.
- Robotto. Somewhat controlled, but still useful. It checks for robots.txt changes and basic HTTP redirect tests.
- Manual process. You can set up a manual process to maintain regular archiving of content . You will need this to examine changes, and this will be invaluable if you need to troubleshoot SEO or other website issues. For example, they could perform this through saving audits and running them with the Screaming Frog.
Web owners and managers should monitor page types or page templates that produce significant website traffic. For instance, on an e-commerce site, that would include product pages, category pages and brand pages. Technically, you should also monitor revisions and content adjustments.
Pages which are vital for the purpose of indexing (indexes, HTML Sitemaps, and all other pages which seem to fulfill a major role in achieving indexed content, even when you do not gather significant website traffic.
Moreover, you need to monitor individual content pieces or blog posts that generate significant website traffic or are otherwise important strategically.
Education
With Google analytics the user will be in a state of perpetual education and training. You want everyone on the team securing and preserving the website’s SEO. You have to know the risks and the potential effects of different changes to the site.
Make as much testing as possible over to QA. Give them a checklist for their validation process. However, do not rely on it. If a thing breaks, all eyes will be on SEO.
While the company-wide training is good, individual training with each team is also necessary. This becomes more personalized. It helps get buy-in and commitment. Give backup material and cheat sheets to describe all the on-page SEO strategies as elements of importance.
Over-communicate when discussion on SEO tips comes up. Always explain the “why.”. Individuals just would not acquire it by sitting over one PP presentation. What it needs is repetition.
Process
Search engine optimization’s shouldn’t completely rely on other teams to sustain a website’s SEO. It should be proactive by making a method for monitoring and determining site changes and make the process a habit.
You need to monitor changes made to the website and attend product meetings.
Have a discussion with the QA group to quickly point out the possible problem areas in every current release to let them understand where to focus. Repeat the SEO training sessions on a regular basis. Moreover, you need to indoctrinate new employees. Test the site before a release goes out. Test again after the release goes out.
Moreover, SEO, particularly the in-house kind of SEO, is tremendously stressful. We need to take control of all of the uncontrollable and somehow learn to predict what has appeared to be unpredictable over time. You can manage things easier, This is by controlling what can be controlled and preventing the SEO disasters.