Owen Radford
Every now and then you can potentially get yourself stuck in a rut with regards to your SEO – or indeed many other aspects of business and life.
So if you find yourself circling the same old ideas and not getting very far what do you do? In this article I’ll take a look at a few of my strategies and hopefully help you to get going forwards again!
Longer Perspective
It can help to change the time frame you’re looking at in Google Analytics. Obviously you need to bear in mind recent one-off events and seasonality, but when you feel that traffic is slipping lengthen your time frame. Is it really slipping, or is it just down slightly on last month? Are you down at this time of month every year because people don’t buy your type of product around now?
Take A Break
Unfortunately, you may not be able to take long, but taking a break from working on this aspect of your business can be very helpful. Maybe you can only grab a day, or even part of a day, but often when faced with a problem it’s working on something else that allows you to relax enough and come back to the original problem with a solution. It seems counterintuitive, but it’s often far more efficient to work on something else for a while as opposed to sticking rigidly to one task.
New Tools
There are many, many SEO Tools out there. Even if yours is brilliant it could be worth taking up someone else’s offer of a free trial. This is almost related to the next point about obtaining an external opinion, because each tool is imbued with the approach of the team that developed it. What they think is important about SEO, how they think progress should be measured and which website issues are errors and which are mere warnings. Try it and see if you have a new perspective for your website.
External Review
Talk to a colleague and get some input on your website. Perhaps even ask one that’s not an SEO, they’ll look at other things such as design and UX elements that you may have missed as you chase down those last few 404 errors. Sure these things don’t have a direct place in the algorithm, but if your friend helps you improve these aspects your bounce rate should go down and time on site and pages per visit should go up. These are things that Google does see and that do have an effect on rankings.
So there you have it – my tips on how to give yourself a fresh start on a long-term SEO project!
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