SEO promotion: the flip side

August

2020

Speaking generally about SEO promotion, you should pay attention to these main points:

Creating content that is as unique and useful to users as possible.
Building an acceptable link profile.
Technical solutions to the site's optimization issues.

Beyond these major milestones of website promotion, there are other dangers and risks to consider when promoting web resources.

Consistency — the main requirement of the SEO process

When you start SEO promotion of a website, you need to understand that there will be no stops along the way. However much effort you put in, the process always involves negative factors beyond the control of the owner or the optimizer: unexpected moves by competitors, changing market conditions, new algorithms and plenty of other obstacles.

Under these conditions, to stop developing the site means handing the positions you have won over to competitors.

Choosing a platform and technical errors

Technical errors made during optimization can ruin the positive results of months of work by an SEO specialist, so before making serious changes the developer should ask a professional's opinion and get their support. Make regular backups and use a version control system such as GIT.

It is also important to choose the right CMS platform for the web resource, because it determines what the site will be able to do when you implement various tasks.

Most modern engines come with many SEO modules, though only some of them are convenient for specific tasks, especially if you choose a custom platform for development. Think in advance about which third-party services you will use on your site and how they might affect the SEO process.

Randomness in SEO — the chance factor in results

Google's ranking of websites involves a great many different factors, and often even the search engine's own employees have no idea how they work. For the most part, the algorithms are based on artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Experienced SEO specialists create several websites on the same topic right away to reach TOP positions in the chosen niche. If you apply one promotion strategy to at least two sites on the same topic, identical actions can give radically different results.

SEO promotion of new websites

When you launch a new web resource, you need to be patient, since young sites move up quite slowly because of their specifics. To become competitive, a new site needs a lot of time for search engines to collect enough information about it; only then can it rank well.

For fast results you can drive traffic to the site through social media or contextual advertising. You can get data both through Google Analytics and directly through the most widely used browser, Google Chrome, or even launch a new topical resource on an old domain, and also attach a domain to the new site.

Regular algorithm updates

Search engines make various small changes to their algorithms every day, while global updates that can significantly affect search results happen a few times a year at most.

If your site's position in search results drops, it is important to find out as early as possible. So you need to track search results constantly with rank monitoring services and compare them with the dates of search engine updates — this lets you take the necessary preventive measures urgently.

Detailed information about new Google algorithm releases is available at https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change.

Teamwork on SEO processes

Pinning high hopes on a TOP freelancer found in a competitive niche is a mistake. Flexible setup for successful SEO promotion often requires the work of specialists in related fields.

To get good results promoting websites in a competitive niche, you need to involve:

An internet marketer or strategist.
A copywriter.
A programmer and a front-end developer.
An SEO specialist.
A designer.

Sometimes hiring a professional agency is more cost-effective than keeping your own in-house SEO staff.

Diversification

SEO — just one of the channels for attracting new customers. When promoting a new website through search, take care to use other traffic channels as well, to rule out the risk of errors. Keep in mind that paid traffic can be stopped or restarted if critical errors occur, while SEO gives you no such option.

Competitor actions with negative consequences

Competition is often accompanied by black-hat methods that lead to a loss of the positions you have achieved.

DDOS attacks

The essence of this attack is maximum load on the site: tens of thousands of virus-infected computers try to access the site at the same time, creating a constant heavy load on the working server.

As a result, the server goes down and stops responding to requests. Server operation must be restored as quickly as possible. Cheap hosting providers suspend the account even under fairly small loads, and all the more so during powerful DDOS attacks. To keep your resource safe, use hosting with reliable DDOS protection, as well as services that protect the site with hardware and software, for example cloudflare.com.

Content theft

Competing resources can copy the unique texts on your site — manually or automatically with bots and screenshots. Whichever text Google indexes first is considered the original source, and that may well be the competitor who stole it.

To avoid such problems, remember to submit your site's pages to Search Console for indexing after each new piece of content you publish.

To check the original source of content, copy a line of text from your site and enter it into the Google search bar, putting «your text here» in quotation marks. A higher position in search results indicates that your content came first.

Link spam

Competing sites can point a large number of links from irrelevant sources at your web resource, and this powerful spike will seriously hurt the site's chances of reaching TOP positions. If you notice a sudden flood of irrelevant links to your resource, use the backlink disavow tool available on Google's official site https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=ru.

Website hacking

Absolutely any website can be hacked, especially one on a popular yet highly vulnerable CMS platform or through plugins. Hackers can place hidden links on the site and even redirect all its traffic to another resource.

Flawed strategies

Flawed strategies include insufficient immersion in the client's business and chasing traffic. Promoting a marketplace and a niche store requires different approaches, especially since similar businesses in the same niche differ quite a lot in budget and promotion methods.

Beginners and amateurs work with general search queries, while true professionals need precise characteristics, because chasing coveted traffic risks spending the SEO budget inefficiently and missing a whole range of important target queries.

Conclusions

SEO promotion — the cheapest channel for attracting traffic; yet to use it effectively you need to take into account the possible risks and mistakes that can harm the performance of your web resource.

We also recommend reading

TOP categories: sales department development, IT infrastructure setup, website competitive analysis, sales development plan, website improvement Kyiv, graphic content, buy host and domain, staff recruitment, website content creation, sales manager testing, turnkey sales department automation, sales department audit, sales scripts development, turnkey online store creation from scratch, KPI for sales manager, professional website support, USP creation, order a corporate website.