In the marketing realm, it’s only a matter of time until you have a client come to you with a website that’s in dire straits. It’s clear there is something wrong and finding out what this is imperative to get things back on track.
As a marketing pro, having a type of SEO triage plan in place is the best way to find and fix the issues with the site. We are here to help you create that plan and ensure you can get your client’s site back on track as quickly as possible.
The Competition
Conducting a simple competition analysis is a must for a few reasons. The first is making sure there’s not a situation where you are up against impossible odds.
If this is the situation, you must explain that your efforts aren’t guaranteed to provide quality results. Let your client know the resources and time needed for a full turnaround.
It’s also important to determine what the competition is doing to help you see where you need to make changes or improve your own efforts.
If the page operates in a less competitive niche, you can succeed with strong on-page SEO and minimal link-building efforts. However, you may have to wait a few years to achieve a spot in the top of search engines in more competitive arenas.
Look Into the Keyword Targeting Strategy
Another problem that may be impacting the rank of the site is targeting low competition, low volume keywords that are simple to rank for. They are not longtail, which typically has a decent ROI.
These are keywords someone else may have selected to target to make themselves look good but won’t provide much of a return for your client. In this situation, you should try to cast a wider net and find more suitable keywords. This is going to help you drive much better results.
Also, by doing this, you can set yourself apart from the other SEO professional who selected the extremely easy keywords by providing a better return on their investment.
Check CSS or HTML Code for Crawling and Indexing Issues
Be sure the code used on the web pages isn’t interfering with crawling or indexing. If code is interfering with a critical process, Google may have a hard time ranking the site and may not view the page as valuable enough to index.
You must repair these problems right away.
Be sure that the site isn’t using display:none for the CSS code. If this is used, links may disappear and keep Google from indexing the pages.
Helping Your Client Bring Their Website Back to Life
If you want to help your client bring their website back to life, the first step is to know what’s wrong. It can take some time to get to the bottom of the problem, but once you do (with help from the steps above), you can begin making changes and improving the site and where it shows up in SERPs.