What is SEO repair? Well, you’re probably hoping that it’s a way to bring your high ranking on google back. You probably have a shiny new website, but your traffic has started to decline. You need to find out why ASAP and get it fixed and back to where you were – and that’s exactly what it is.
I recently had a client that I’d worked with for a few months to build out his local SEO strategy. I was creating pages and building links to improve his presence in local areas. After a few months, he had decided that he was happy with the pages that were on page one of google and decided not to continue using our services. A few months had passed and I was alerted to him having a new website. Great! I had suggested that he update his, not particularly mobile-friendy site and he had taken my advice. But with his limited budget and the high web design fees, they had obviously decided that the extra pages I had created weren’t needed or were superfluous. Huge mistake.
SEO repair is needed in these situations where you may have high traffic landing pages from an old site, that simply no longer exist on the new website. Think about this for a second. Imagine a homepage – this could be seen as the most important page of your website, but there are other pages and these may be generating more traffic. If you get rid of these traffic generating pages, two things happen. Google can no longer link to these pages and drive traffic to your website AND google will assume your website is poorly maintained, that you can’t be “bother” to replace the page or 301 redirect it? That means your website probably doesn’t have a high “quality” rating from google. This might not make a huge difference to your SEO, but I like to look at it as every point counts when you’re trying to rank those few extra hard to gain places in google. It’s good to remember that search engines are very logical, they use algorithms and equations to rank people, so everything will have a points value and you really should try and get all the points you can.
It won’t take much for your web guy or SEO guy to put in a few redirects, or even copy over the correct pages – I dread to think how much it could cost per year for the lost traffic of those pages the new web builders left out.
There are plenty of tools out there to help, even Google’s webmaster tools have enough in them to help figure out if you have lost any important pages. It lists all the 404 errors, and also inbound links in case they are linking incorrectly. Again, and inbound link to the wrong place can actually be a bad thing. Google simply see a link that doesn’t go to a page and wonders if the page no longer exists because you don’t look after your website. It’s best to try and get these page linked correctly, while also knowing when it’s ok to let a page die or possibly be merged into another page to create better, more informative content.
SEO repair is great for people that have had a new website to replace an old one and have seen a gradual decline in your traffic. It isn’t usually instant as the google index can take about a week to update itself. Sometime the high ranking links on google will still point to your site initially, but as soon a few potential customers visit those links and are faced with a “page not found” message, it won’t be long before google removes the links. The point is, even if is only 1 person a month that finds you via that page, it’s probably worth keeping it around… don’t you think?
