Evaluating and Overhauling Your SEO Strategy

Years ago, a good way to get your site ranked at the top of the search results was to put a lot of keywords on your web page and then hide them by making their color match the page’s background. If you’re optimizing your website, changes to SEO tactics and strategies shouldn’t be worrisome.

Naturally, your business needs a comprehensive audit from time to time. Evaluating and fix what isn’t working is natural, so doing the same thing when it comes to your website’s optimization strategy shouldn’t be a foreign concept.

Back in 2012, Google made over 500 updates to its search algorithm and here’s how to initiate your SEO evaluation and overhaul your strategy.

First off, you need to audit your inbound links

Before, the more links you had, the better your rankings were, this way companies figured out massively scalable link spam strategies, blasting forums and blogs with nonsense to create links.

Google caught on to these scams and started penalizing websites that engaged in these tactics. An inbound link profile audit, followed by removal and disavowal is needed from time to time.  The goal is to identify bad links that are pointing to your website, and get them removed.

Next you need to audit your website from a technical SEO perspective.

Once you’ve identified and removed spam inbound links, it’s time to look at your website from a technical perspective. Is your website crawlable by search engines, is the content organized, does it load quickly? What about your title and meta tags as well as your HTML and an XML sitemap?

Last but not least, you need to evaluate your content strategy.

 This video by Matt Cutts is a great source of information on awesome content.  

Overhauling your content strategy doesn’t mean you should simply write up a bunch of new blog posts and queue them up for publishing.