How To Fix Your SEO In 7 Steps

UPDATE JULY 2017 >> Google+ and authorship (author pictures on the search page) are now a thing of the past, the below regarding G+ may no longer be relevant unless you are a old school G+ user. ALL ELSE STILL AS RELEVANT AS IT WAS IN 2013.

The good news is 90% of you asking the question: How To Fix My/Your SEO? Need do nothing to your SEO but to change the way you see what SEO is, so in other words what you need to fix is your understanding of SEO and how Google works in 2013 and where things are headed in a near and not so near future.

That’s a lot easier to fix than your site or your SEO, since shifting your perspective requires only that, a shift in your perspective rather than changing code, copy or promoting tactics.

Kingly Street Arch Clock
No Minute Gone Comes Ever Back Again Take Heed And See Ye Nothing Do In Vain

I have had my fair share of enquiries that more or less all start with the line: can you fix my SEO? These are website owners or managers and CEOs of small organisations from competitive niches such as real estate to less competitive third sector limited companies and charities.

    1. Fix Your SEO Understanding

Even a company with three or four people in their marketing team has a considerable budget, a pattern emerges when a recently appointed SEO manager, (London wages I’m going to guess 30K minimum) asks for help with fixing their SEO and link building, making enquiries with lines such as, our link graph is horrendous, we really want you to help us build better links… at this point I start yawning…

…my response is stop building links all together!
Woot? Comes the surprised response. Yes save your time and money and start doing something different from what everyone does, and that is to stop building links and fix your site instead, stop pointing irrelevant links at poor pages.

    1. Fix Your Site

Stop building links with anchor text to pages that are not relevant to the links you’re pointing at it, if your site consists of six or seven pages, or sixty or seventy and those pages cannot even link to each other properly, you’ve got far bigger problems ahead of you before going anywhere near building the right links, or promoting your site, the thing you need to do is to fix your site.

Here are a few good questions that will help you if your site isn’t built yet, but will equally help you if you can answer them and address these questions in your current site.

Fix your SEO from as little as £120

    1. Fix Your Analytics

The most common mistake novices and sadly not so novices make, is to analyse their own traffic to death. Here’s an example:

Query: I have a WordPress website, it needs some seo / fixing. I think it has been setup wrong, but i have know idea what the problem is. There is a downward trend on the analytics, the site started at 80 views a day with low bounce rate and now we are lucky to get 10 views a day with a high bounce rate.

A brief look shows that there’s nothing to fix there in terms of SEO, but the understanding of the person in question, the 80 views per day he refers to are mostly his own traffic.

So the only thing this person needed to understand is that SEO is a process and not a quick fix or a WordPress plugin and in this case also how Google Analytics and filters actually work.

    1. Fix Your link Building

No Minute Gone Comes Ever Back Again Take Heed And See Ye Nothing Do In Vain

Stop believing in the link fairy, there’s no such thing as SEO magic dust, unless you’re working with very large budgets and can afford to burn your domain or domains and make a return before Google and the ever faster and more accurate algorithm updates catch up with you, (Penguin 2.0 has just been unleashed in the wild and with it burying the old school SEO) and then move your content to a new domain or set of domains, and move the link networks that artificially inflated the rankings on those sites.

I am talking in particular to you the one-person-show or the small team that spent the last few years investing time and money on creating the best possible site in your niche, it just does not make sense to throw links at it left, right and centre, with few exceptions the only links acceptable in 2014/13 (yes in that order) are either earned links, (the ones you didn’t build) or links that form part of your social activity.

    1. Fix Your Social

Now the good news is fixing your social for SEO purposes is pretty easy, it’s done with a (+) as in Google+, everything else is very much secondary, but I am a great fan of social, so I’m going to continue to argue that you use Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and yes Facebook (if you must 🙂 for their social and marketing value and as channels of their own.

NOW (pay attention to that word, you’ll hear it a lot in future as far as search and SEO are concerned) social for SEO in 2013 means understanding that Google wants to know who you are as much as what your pages are about, that means you’ll need to use Google+ to manage your own identity as a web author (look for rel=”author”) and Authorship, and as a brand or web publisher, (look for rel=”publisher”). That’s way out of my league all that, I hear you, Google those and learn what you can, if you need help ask someone, wink 😉.

If you know what PageRank is and if you also know that toolbar PageRank has been meaningless as an indicator of a webpage’s value for years, you should keep an ear out for what some call the author rank, that even before being publicly acknowledged by Google has already earned itself an aura, congrats on the mastery of mystery and PR Googlies.

    1. Fix Your Local SEO

I Need Help With Local SEO.

I have tried and failed many times with this domain – maybe this is the problem…
CAn you quote me on fixing my local seo problem.
I have just deleted my google places account on my old Google account and set up a new google account and started a new google places page. just waiting for the code to be sent – i think i may have got my telephone number banned or something as everytime i make a drastic change google has to send me the code rather than call me with it.
can you help?

I’m terribly obsessed with ranking #my-keyword for position #1, even though I have absolutely no evidence that it will bring me any business value, but I do want it and not just on my own computer but on every single computer throughout the world regardless of any customization anyone does in their machines or any of the other local and individual factors that will no doubt influence the results, I’m not even interested in business goals or if my site works properly, but solely on ranking for this magic keyword…

You get my point, there are some things to consider when trying to rank locally or even nationally or internationally:

      • Your competitors may be way larger than you
      • Your competitors may have ranked for your keywords for years before you arrived
      • Aim for realistic keywords
      • Keyword rankings may not translate into sales
      • Learn what trophy keywords are
      • Improve the conversion path for your visitors
      • Focus on business goal everything else is secondary
      • What you see on your computer is different from everyone else

Your Google is and will increasingly be different from everyone else’s.

Fix your SEO from as little as £120

UPDATE JULY 2017 >> Google+ and authorship (author pictures on the search page) are now a thing of the past, the below may no longer be relevant unless you are an old school G+ user.

  1. Fix Your Google – Yes Your Google Is Unique

Once upon a time there was an Internet, this Internet was built with many pages that linked to each other, a romantic algorithm defined the reputation of page by the number of links pointing to it… there was a search engine that come to define search and become itself the adjective to mean search on the Internet… one component of that was called PageRank, which ironically was so called due to the name of the person writing the algo, that was Mr Larry Page and nothing to do with pages themselves.

Then along came the big bad wolf of link farming and webspam and link networks and the Penguin’s (Algorithm updates that specifically address link spam) and in a different corner of the web Facebook was growing like a virus, so Google was attempting to fight its growth first with Google Buzz, then with Google Wave, remember that?

Finally, they had a brainwave and launched their social network Google+, it was initially so well received that they decided to throw the all company at it, and so Google+ became Google itself, forever linking search with social (by social here that means largely Google’s social and not social more broadly).

This and the other piles of Big Data they collect on you, me and our cats, meant that they can now personalise your search results (and yes the ads that go with it) and starting to rank you as an “Author”, rather than your crap content, (feel free to argue the contrary).

The very distant future points to a science fiction Google that wants to be the Star Trek Computer, but for NOW we have for the geeky, brave and tech enthusiastic… well, Google Now and mobile growing at pace, and a conversation with a search engine is also already possible.

I’m not even going to mention Project Glass or Self-Driving cars.

It is time ye start thinking how you’re going to adapt to all that and teach your Google who you are so that it can serve you and your clients better.

May well be the that Google serves itself and its shareholders better, glad you brought that up, I could agree with you easily, either way, there’s little you can do about the latter other than play along, that’s if you want to play Google, SEO and web marketing. Alternatively, you could try and kick Elephants for a living, if you do I would love to hear how you get on.

Congratulations Your SEO Is Now Fixed. There are Only Another 7 Things To Go.

Fix your SEO from as little as £120

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