Ruhani Rabin
5 min readOct 7, 2018

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When was the last time you revisited your SEO strategy? In most of the cases, businesses don’t have the in-house resources to manage and update digital marketing strategies. So they outsource their needs to agencies that work as digital marketing experts and SEO experts. Most of these agencies have too many clients to handle and too little resources, so they turn to SEO resellers. Now, when you go and ask for an SEO audit report, does your expert hand over an official report they have generated or an analysis they have purchased from a reseller?

There are a few intricacies of SEO that you need to understand and auditing your existing campaign is one of them. Even when you do not have decorated experts on your team, you can run a few analyses on your own.

Most website owners do not know when to go for SEO analysis. Do you know if your e-commerce website or business site needs an SEO audit right now? How do you understand when a site requires analysis?

Here are the nine telltale signs that your SEO is sick and it requires a little investigation –

#1. Your organic traffic is ebbing

There are no new groundbreaking algorithm updates from Google. You have not noticed any changes in new SEO trends. However, your traffic flow from the search engine results page is dwindling by the day. When you run the keywords for search, your website is barely visible on the first few pages of the search results. There is nothing better than organic traffic if you want robust sales, kick-ass reviews and fantastic overall business performance.

You want to sell sports gear to people in Brooklyn; you need to be visible to them online! However, convincing the organic traffic to take a look at you might require more than a neon sign on Route 66.

#2. Competitors have taken over

Your business competitors have taken over your market domain. You can see your competitor brands swoop in and take the higher positions in the SRLs, and push your site down. It is easy to think that they are using black hat techniques, but the cause might be your SEO strategy. Run competitor analysis to find out what they are doing right now to outperform you. Find out if you can do it too!

#3. Your keyword game is becoming weaker by the day

No matter how much of an SEO-novice you are, you need to use keyword tools including Google Search Console and SEMRush. These will give you an idea of how your primary keywords are performing. These will also include your local SEO keywords. In case you are paying for the “best” keywords of 2018, but you are not ranking for them. Your SEO strategy is not working. Since you have already made Uncle Scrooge insecure with your expenses on this year’s keyword game, you might as well want a Brooklyn SEO expert to take a look.

#4. Your conversion rate is definitely not a cause for happiness

When you do not attract the right traffic, convincing them to pay for your products and services is close to impossible. Not being able to rank for highly paid keywords have a close relationship with a low conversion rate. For example — If people in Brooklyn do not know about your products, they will go to your competitor and spend their moolah. Your keyword game should focus on search intent and purchase intent of potential visitors. Not every visitor coming in through paid ads wants to spend money. On the contrary, most people coming through search engines have higher than average purchase intent.

#5. People are bouncing too quickly

Has it ever happened to you? You have gone to a friend’s party, but the music was dated, food was terrible, and the drinks were bad, the people were strange, and you just needed to bounce? Well, if the content of a party can make you skedaddle, there is no reason your website content can shoo your visitors away. With thin and bogus content, you will find it impossible to hook new visitors and turn them into paying customers. Focus on recent website content trend. Create value-adding and shareable content.

#6. You are worried about search results only

When was the last time you visited your site as a customer? Have you checked out the recent changes in navigation options? Have you visited the payment and shipping pages? Have you tried looking for specific products and services? You need to think about the people using your site, rather than worrying about the search engines only. Not paying enough attention to UX can tick Google off massively.

#7. You are investing for quick fixes

Are you one of those website owners, who believe in quick results from search engine optimization? Sadly, SEO can take between 3 to 6 months to show any effects. You need to have patience before you reject one strategy and replace it with the next gimmicky trend. Even experts like Neil Patel need to wait for weeks before their pioneering optimization ideas take flight.

#8. There’s SEO, but there are no goals

What? There has to be goals for search engine optimization? Well, that might be news to you, but for the SEO experts, it has always been the foundation for setting up a strategy. Optimization needs to have several objectives including increasing organic traffic, increasing sales, improving brand awareness and establishing company authority. These are only some of the most common brand objectives that most SEO campaigns uphold. You need to find out where you are spending your resources before you can set up a new strategy.

#9. Your SEO belongs to a museum

Your SEO is so old that you can see its metaphoric fossil forming! After you have done everything you can to get your strategic objectives in order, eliminate the quick fixes, reduce the bounce rate and invigorate the conversion rate, you may end up back to square one. That is when you need to find out the expiry date on your SEO campaign. In reality, no digital marketing strategy should come with an expiry date because even the oldest ones are foundations for a new policy. Nonetheless, you need someone with the right training and skill set to take a look at your existing plan for possibilities of salvation.

It is possible for every webmaster to keep an eye on their website performance. It will help them figure out how to allocate their resources in the future, and how to utilize the current strategies they have in place. Moreover, it will help you understand if you are getting the best SEO deal in Brooklyn.

Originally posted at RuhaniRabin.com
Click here if you would like to write at RuhaniRabin.com

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Ruhani Rabin

Ruhani Rabin being a tech and product evangelist for two decades. He was VP, GM, CPO for various digital companies. Obsessed with Generative AI now.