Many brands often try all sorts of approaches to attract new visitors but may often neglect their SEO strategy, which is crucial to gain new customers. It is an essential feature of digital marketing that you cannot afford to leave behind, so make sure that you plan your budget accordingly. Focusing on your SEO strategy is vital and is one of the top ways to convert results.
There is plenty of information available on the top SEO trends, but many fail to understand what it is when they should incorporate it into their strategies, and why they need to do so. We will help you understand the Why, When and How for an efficient SEO strategy.
When Should You Focus on Your SEO Strategy?
Although there are times when you need to consider refreshing your SEO strategy for better results, in the long run, there are certain times when it is critical:
Site Relaunch
Relaunching your website is a significant task to undertake and you should always perform an SEO audit before you give the green light, just to be on the safe side. An efficient audit can help identify potential SEO pitfalls so that you can fix the issues prior to your relaunch. This often consists of pre-launch and post-launch audits that include factors such as, smooth web analytics, review of technical issues such as coding, and images that affect a page’s overall speed. It also includes reviewing links, benchmarking SEO metrics, and reviewing content for your website.
Site Pre-launch
People often think that they should launch their websites first and focus on SEO later. Although you may think your website is more or less ready for launch, it may need significant tweaks to rank on Google. On-page SEO may work, but often it isn’t enough, and if your website lacks backlinks, external links, meta descriptions, keywords, and SEO titles, you can’t expect to attract many visitors. A significant pitfall that most companies face is not checking the load time for their new pages. Page speed has a significant impact on your rankings because your website can lose a lot of organic traffic and its rankings may proceed further down in Google’s results.
Keep in mind that Google can take about two months to rank new domains and will more than likely not find value in a website where it cannot quickly extract relevant content. If Google and other search engines recognize you as authoritative for a product or service, it will feed visitors’ results with your content. Also, not planning your SEO pre-launch can result in higher costs to redesign your website and revisit every element. By not planning ahead you will lose time and — more importantly — the opportunity for conversions.
Site Post-Launch
Sometimes you may think that your website is ready, but you may still not see an increase in visitors. This is the perfect time for you to revisit your SEO strategy and make technical changes to optimize your website. The best way to do this is to perform thorough internal checks for at least two months and observe the changes in traffic and rankings. After your website launch, you should make an SEO checklist to confirm whether internal links work well and that no pages contain a 302 redirect (temporary redirect) because Google will not filter authority sources unless the redirect is permanent, such as a 301 redirect. Apart from this, you should also check for 404 errors because your site’s crawl impact takes a negative blow if Google takes too long to find your unique URLs.
Another crucial point to add to your checklist would be to determine page speed. According to a 2020 study by Google, Deloitte, and 55 Data Company, a mere 0.1 millisecond change in site speed has dramatic impacts on customer behavior. Page ranking affects every aspect of digital marketing, such as traffic, site rankings, conversion, and customer engagement.
Rebranding
Whenever a company is rebranding for any reason, be it an outdated image or a change in management, they will risk losing their SEO ranking progress and may have to start from scratch. While rebranding is a good thing and may be necessary at times, you need to understand how it impacts SEO. You might be worried about the hit that your website will take, but it doesn’t have to be a devastating blow as long as you carry out research. It is crucial that you revisit your existing strategy and make changes to prevent low rankings. For example, make sure that your old website redirects to the existing correct pages and uses similar URL structures and similar content. Apart from this, try to keep to your original domain name and preserve your old content as much as possible.
Site Rebuild
Often companies wait until the website is almost complete before implementing SEO because many business professionals consider it to be an addition instead of the heart of their website. Good SEO can maximize customers and improve revenue if incorporated correctly. If you think that it isn’t necessary, you risk losing time and resources to fix essential features later, and organic traffic results from significant technical SEO issues. When you’re rebuilding or redesigning your website, you will need to focus on: technical problems that affect page speed, structural issues such as site navigation, access, organization, and efficient URL structures. Apart from this, content is another significant element that can benefit from SEO direction for content development, publishing, and displaying.
Content Refresh
Your website can run into two significant problems; how to create new content and how to update existing content. Website content has a lifespan and after a while, it will stop generating results and website traffic may come to a halt. A dynamic SEO strategy and content creation go hand in hand. For example, if you’ve produced a good blog post that has resulted in better traffic for your company, you should update the content so that it continues to have value and generate traffic back to your website after a long period of time. There are plenty of benefits to aligning your strategy with content and one of the most significant is ranking better on Google.
Google’s aim is to serve the best results to the user’s search and it requires fresh content that is up-to-date. Hence, whatever you post needs to be authoritative, trustworthy, and relevant. Your SEO strategy can include certain keywords that your brand focuses on that you can include in your content. You can also utilize deep-linking and reposting on social media for better results.
Expectations and a Successful SEO Overhaul
If you’re reevaluating your SEO strategy, your website ranking is bound to drop. Since Google takes about two to three months until it recognizes new domains, be patient, and wait until then for traffic to pick up.
Here are a Few Tips for a Successful Overhaul:
- Don’t change your website name unless you need a fresh start. This could lower your rankings.
- Refrain from doing away with your old content completely. Try to produce similar content if your old website achieved good rankings.
- Keep important keywords that rank well, redirect to new pages, and create relevant inbound and external links.
- Promote your new brand or your site relaunch on social media as much as possible.
How HUSL can Help
We partner with brands to help them plan and execute SEO strategies and campaigns. SEO is just one part of a larger digital strategy. What happens if your SEO campaign is successful but you aren’t converting traffic on your pages into leads and leads into revenue? Drop us a line, and let’s see how HUSL can help you build and convert quality traffic.