Not every business owner understands the seo and thus they turn to a good and professional SEO agency. A marketing agency knows the inside out of seo techniques, seo definitions and the best seo practices. An effective seo strategy will be time consuming and patience will be needed with certain seo risks.
Being a marketing agency, you have to make sure that your client understands what exactly will you do for them and how will it be beneficial. A good seo practice may effectively enhance the online reputation of your client.
Your client may be nervous initially and not sure about how it is going to go around, and that’s pretty obvious. This is because anything that is new to him will make him nervous, after all its about his business. Some risks have to be taken, but some can also be avoided.
Here in this blog, be will discuss the seo risks that can be avoided and the ones that have to be taken anyhow.
SEO risks you have to take
1) Apply and test small and big changes
The main aim of seo is to get the maximum number of traffic and sales for your client. Nothing like this will happen if nobody clicks on the website.
It might be that you are focusing on the right keywords but not getting any clicks for those. There may be many reasons for this. And the reasons can be found out only by making some changes in the website and then testing them.
You will have to do some changes in the meta tags of the pages, titles, page content and much more and see if that works for you. You might get some errors in initially, but that is how you have the exact reason for zero clicks on the website.
Such small changes and experiments will give you the exact website layout that will give your client the desired site traffic. You might end up with some mistakes in the beginning but gradually you will find the right solution.
2) Exchanging high-quality backlinks
Backlinks are an integral part of SEO. They play a major role in deciding SERP rank of any site. You can place your link on other websites to improve the link juice of your client. But if you are doing this for yourself, others will also want the same from you.
You might have a risk of losing some visitors to the websites that place their link on your website. But you have to take this risk because you are getting the same in return. This tells Google that you have some good referral sites and thus improve your online authority.
But before you place the link on a website, make sure that the site is not malicious or . This will increase the risk of your site getting penalised by Google.
3) Improve the URL structure
The homepage of any website should have short and simple URL like www.sitename.com
The user should be easily able to recall the website URL to reach it.
The inner pages can have a little longer with the target keywords and based on the page content. The length of the URL should not be very wrong else search engine will replace a part of it with [……..].
So it is important to change some of the URLs if needed to abide by the Google guidelines.
4) Redesign the website
A website redesign can be time-consuming, expensive and involve some risks. The website might have an outdated look or some old features. You have to optimise the website in a way that it is readable both by the search engines and users.
With changed web design there might be some changes in the rankings for the web pages a well.
There also can be a risk of users getting lost in your new website because of new changes.
Google knows that a website redesign is quite common and thus the rankings can come back again with time. The users will also get used to the new site and features. In fact, your client may even get new users because of these updated changes.
5) Purchase expired or available domains
There are many website owners who do not renew their domains for any reason. That domain is available for anyone to buy.
Buying old or used domains can give the benefit of their past web authority and reputation. The link juice for the domain can benefit your SEO efforts.
Make sure that the domain is relevant to the business you are buying it for. When the user visits the website and the website something out of their query, user experience may degrade and thus bounce rate may increase.
There can also be spammy links and content on expired domains that will be directed to your site. Hence the website rank may drop off and invite Google penalty.
This method is however quite inexpensive and drives lots of site traffic.
SEO risks you must avoid
1) Doorway Pages
These pages are created with the intention of driving the users to your desired site for certain search terms. Doorway pages are easy to create. Being a trustworthy SEO provider, you must not create these pages for your client. Google can penalize the site for this.
In order to avoid any such penalties and restrictions, you must avoid his SEO practice. If you still want these in your website, make sure the pages have unique and relatable content.
2) Neutral Backlinks
There may be some backlinks that bring benefits for the site, some that drive in harmful traffic and then there are some backlinks that do absolutely nothing for your site. Such backlinks are neutral backlinks with no effect on your site.
In the penguin update, Google realized that not all the sites that link to your website are under your control. Thus it becomes difficult for Google to punish the malicious websites.
Know that if Google takes manual actions against a website it means that it has poor quality and malicious websites linking to it. No actions by Google means that the link juice for the site comes from good authority websites.
You can disavow some links but carefully. You should not disallow all the neutral backlinks because it can end up blocking websites that bring in good traffic.
3) Deleting a page on the website
If you delete a page – be it a service page or product – from a website, all the keywords that it ranked for will be gone. The seo optimized URL will also be gone.
Instead of deleting the page and losing the rankings, just leave the page as it is. You can display a message on the page and redirect your users to some other relevant content.
If you plan to merge 2 pages into one, make sure you add 301 redirects on old urls to avoid losing any link juice.
4) Exact match keywords as anchor texts
Earlier using the exact keyword as anchor text for your page was considered to be good to drive in maximum site traffic.
But now it is considered to be black hat seo to have way too many keywords as anchor text on a page. It is unnatural to get links from a poor website. Here is a great guide you can follow for Anchor Text Optimization.
5) Too many SEO changes on the site
It is good to update your website with new and fresh content every now and then. But it should not be overdone. Making changes just for SEO purpose quickly catches the attention of Google. The changes may be suspicious for Google and end up getting a red flag for your website. The visitors to the website will also notice these frequent changes.
The user experience may degrade because of poor site navigation and content. The site may lose value as well as users.
I appreciate you providing this transit-related information. It was informative and fascinating.