If you need new marketing ideas, the first thing you should do is brainstorm with your team. When you’ve decided it’s time to upgrade your accounting software, there are a few things you should keep in mind. Do you ever have a moment where you’re doing something routine, like brushing your teeth, and you suddenly realize that you’re going to die? Or even when you notice a flat tire in the car?

My guess is you turn to Google.

This report indicates that a majority of marketers are planning to focus on SEO strategies in the upcoming year. Your business will have a difficult time succeeding digitally if it does not have at least some presence on Google. This guide provides a strategy for improving your online presence through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In this document, you will be informed on what SEO is, how it operates, and what you have to do to have your website appear in search engine results.

I will make sure to begin by comforting you with something.

So many resources make SEO complex. They intimidate readers with difficult vocabulary, complicated concepts, and hardly ever provide tangible examples.

I promise you, this guide isn’t like that.

SEO can be broken down into its most basic parts in order to create a successful SEO strategy. All elements of SEO can be used to construct a plan for success.

Continue reading to learn more about SEO, or skip ahead to the section that interests you most.

I typically explain SEO as a way to make sure your website appears when someone searches for your product or service category on Google.

But this simplifies the discipline a bit.

There are a lot of ways to improve the SEO of your site pages. Search engines take into account various factors when determining how to rank a website. These factors include things like the website’s title tags, keywords, image tags, internal link structure, and inbound links. Search engines also take into account site structure and design, visitor behavior, and other external, off-site factors to determine how highly ranked your site should be in their SERPs.

SEO primarily affects two things- rankings and visibility.

Rankings

This is how search engines determine where to place a particular web page in the SERP. The ranking of a web page starts at position zero and goes up to the final number of results for the query. A web page can only be ranked for one position at a time. Over time, a given web page’s position in SERPs may shift due to any number of reasons such as that page’s age, competition from other pages in the SERP, or changes to the search engine’s algorithms.

Visibility

This term is a ranking factor that determines how prominently a particular domain appears in the search engine results. A domain has lower search visibility when it is not visible for many relevant search queries. A domain has higher search visibility when it is visible for many relevant search queries.

Both are responsible for traffic and domain authority.

On-Site Issues That Can Cause Rankings to Fall

1. You Haven’t Updated Your Site in a Long Time

If you want to stay competitive, it’s important to keep your website updated regularly, depending on your niche.

A competitor analysis involves looking at what your competitors are doing in order to figure out what you need to do to keep up with them.

If your website stagnates without any growth in content or links, you will not benefit from any growth.

It is not always the case that taking the long way around and waiting years for any traffic will help. You won’t achieve any competitive benefit if you don’t take action.

If you have not been putting in a lot of effort into your blog recently, one simple strategy you could use is to blog every day.

The result of your efforts could be either simple or complex. If it’s the latter, then be prepared to put in a lot of hard work to see any progress.

If you are only blogging occasionally, it may not be enough to generate the links required to keep your site afloat.

A competitor analysis is a way to figure out what your competitors are doing to be successful.

2. You Haven’t Made Any Significant Changes to Your Content

This supports the ongoing updates part of our discussion.

If you don’t update your content, you may damage your ranking in search engines and reduce traffic.

Your ranking on the first page of a competitive niche could drop simply because your content is outdated and no longer relevant.

If you haven’t updated your site or changed your content, your site is an irrelevant and out-of-date result.

3. You Updated Your Site With a New Design

Updating a website’s design does not necessarily mean that traffic will decrease.

This is particularly important if you have considered things like redirects, which could cause problems with your site’s ability to be crawled and indexed.

One potential reason your website may have lost search engine ranking is that its new theme uses a lot of JavaScript, which can get in the way of website crawling and indexing.

If your design uses JavaScript in a way that makes it difficult for search engine spiders to understand, your site will be less likely to show up in search results.

If your site can’t be crawled or indexed by Google, it’s not going to rank well in search.

If you’re using WordPress and have the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” setting turned on in Settings > Reading, you may experience issues with search engine rankings and traffic.

Your SEO professional should be part of any new site launch project to ensure the project is successful.

There are things that experienced developers can spot that a normal developer may not notice.

If you’re using a headless CMS, be aware that it might interfere with basic crawling and indexing, which could affect your search engine rankings and traffic.

An SEO professional who is knowledgeable about server-side issues is important, as they can negatively impact your SERP performance.

4. You Removed Traffic-Driving Content

You start a new content audit project.

One of the suggestions for improving your site is to remove any thin or duplicated content.

Although the audit evaluates the quality of the pages, it does not determine whether the pages are getting any traffic.

You have a problem when your content audit is not helping you, but hurting you instead.

There is more than one perspective to the content issue, as this example illustrates. Another perspective would be that not all content is appropriate for all audiences.

If you don’t take care of the technical SEO side of things by considering which pages are or are not receiving traffic, it won’t matter how much content you combine into masterful pieces.

If the pages you removed had a lot of traffic and the new page isn’t as relevant or great, you could lose that traffic.

5. Your Robots.txt File Can Cause Indexing Issues

One of the most common technical errors I come across during audits is when clients have disallowed crawling for all pages and folders because they have improperly configured their robots.txt file.

This file is crucial for your crawling and indexing, and can cause serious problems if you don’t use it carefully or don’t understand how it works.

If you include “Disallow: /” in your robots.txt file, search engines will stop crawling and indexing your website, which will result in less traffic.

6. Links Removed from Sites

This happens more often than you may think.

If you experience a decrease in traffic, check to see if any links that were previously sending you traffic have been lost before assuming it is due to a penalty.

Webmasters like to clean up their links.

You can improve your website’s link health by learning how to audit and remove links.

7. A Site Linking to You Went Down

If a site linking to you went down, you could be looking at a loss in traffic from that site.

There is no known way to prevent or protect against this happening.

To acquire links from another site, simply replace the current site with a new one.

If you want to increase traffic to your website, you need to find other websites to link to you.

8. You Embedded Your Analytics Tags Incorrectly

It’s important to have accurate reporting so you can keep track of your progress.

If you don’t implement your Google Analytics or GTM tags properly, you could introduce errors into your reporting, which would affect your traffic numbers.

Although your rankings may be good, your traffic could be lower than it should be.

If you set up your Google Tag Manager account incorrectly, your reporting could be affected.

This can be disastrous. This can cause you to think that your traffic has decreased when it hasn’t, leading to unnecessary panic.

If you include more than one GTM tag by mistake, you can also introduce over-reporting.

Think you have increased rankings and traffic? If you accidentally include more than one GTM tag on your website, you could be over-reporting your traffic, rather than increasing your SERP performance.

If you are certain that you have not made any changes to how you report things, you should be okay. You should always check to make sure you haven’t accidentally included more than one GTM tag.

9. There can also be errors in Google Analytics data and how it’s processed.

A rogue bot visiting your site can skew your Google Analytics data, even though it’s not an error with Google Analytics itself.

This text is saying that GA processing issues can sometimes show a decrease in numbers even when there has not been a decrease in the thing being measured.

If you’re part of the SEO community online, you can stay up-to-date on issues like this. If a lot of people are having the same problem with GA, it’s likely that something is wrong.

This can also happen when you have a redesign.

If your developer did not correctly implement or reinstall Google Analytics, you may see a drop in your search traffic.

If these types of mistakes happen, it can also result in less traffic being reported, which can be a problem.

If you’re not seeing a drop in your search engine rankings as well, then it’s probably just a traffic drop.

Keyword Optimization

Make sure Google understands what keywords you want this page to rank for. To achieve that, make sure you include at least the main keyword in the following:

• Post’s title: Ideally, place it as close to the start of the title. Google is known to put more value on words at the start of the headline.
• URL: Your page’s web address should also include the keyword. Ideally, including nothing else. Also, remove any stop word .
• H1 Tag: In most content management systems, this tag displays the title of the page by default. However, make sure that your platform doesn’t use a different setting
• The first 100 words (or the first paragraph) of content: Finding the keyword at the start of your blog post will reassure Google that this is, in fact, the page’s topic.
• Meta-title and meta-description tags: Search engines use these two code elements to display their listings. They display the meta-title as the search listing’s title while the meta-description provides content for the little blurb below it. But above that, they use both to understand the page’s topic further.
• Image file names and ALT tags: Remember how search engines see graphics on a page? They can only see their file names. So, make sure that at least one of the images contains the keyword in the file name.

Thealternative text (ALT) tag is text that is displayed instead of an image on a website for visitors who are visually impaired. However, since the ALT tag is located in the image code, search engines also use it as a relevancy signal.

While we were out for a walk, we came across a cat. While we were out for a stroll, we came across a feline. Google and other search engines use them to determine a page’s relevancy better. They do this by looking at how often the keyword is used on the page, as well as other factors.

Let me illustrate this with a quick example. If your main keyword is “Apple,” you could be referring to the fruit or the tech company.

When Google finds terms like sugar, orchard, or cider in the copy, it imagines what happens. The most obvious choice for ranking queries would be immediately apparent.

That’s what semantic keywords do. Adding them will help to make sure that your page is not coming up in searches that are not relevant.

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How To Attract Google Search Traffic With Fresh Content An SEO Guide to Google Advanced Search Operators 6 Best Keyword Research Tools for Traffic Use in 2022 How to Analyze Your Local Organic Search Competition