The first step, prior to doing anything, is to determine what you’re doing. Are you experiencing a drop in sales or traffic? You have dropped abruptly, and you’re seeking out the reason to explain the cause. Do you know for sure that your rankings in search engines are down because you’ve been tracking the rankings of your keywords?
If you still need to get in the loop with your website’s performance, It’s time to gain some clarity. You may be in a state of panic, but you can you should try to get out of it for a moment.
It’s never too late to be on top of your data, which is why it’s always simpler. HOW TO KEEP ON TOP OF YOUR DATA
Most people find it difficult or impossible to browse through the 50 pages of Google every day to find out which positions you are in for the keywords you’re looking for. It’s good to know that tracking your search results doesn’t need to be a time-consuming process.
GOOGLE ANALYTICS
Out of all the programs included in the SEO tools, Google Analytics will be the base and the one you’ll use the most often. It’s completely free, feature-packed, and offers the foundational data for a variety of different SEO tools.
Go here for a detailed guide to setting to set up Google Analytics.
Google does not provide the exact keywords users find your site via. However, you will still be able to look at the general health and previous changes to your organic search results.
WEBMASTER TOOLS
Another important step in solid SEO best practices is signing up to Google’s Webmaster Tools.
Similar to Analytics too, GWMT costs nothing but will play a significant role in a few of the procedures we’ll discuss in the next chapters.
MOZ
A common tool to track SEO certain parameters is the rank tracker of Moz.
To be able to utilize it, you’ll have to be a subscriber to Google Analytics linked up to your website and be a Moz Pro subscriber. If you’d like, you could avail their free 30 days trial that includes all the features and ought to be sufficient to get you through the penalty recovery process.
It’s not required. It is possible to use the free subscription to serve our needs by following this guide.
SEARCHMETRICS
Searchmetrics is a powerful tool that provides you with a quick overview of past search visibility. You can then use it to pinpoint any potential issues and also pinpoint when they occurred.
The tool is a paid one. However, its Free version will show your search results over the last few months.
IS IT TOO LATE TO START TRACKING NOW?
There’s no time to wait until it’s too late to gather information on the information that affects the sales funnel.
There’s a lot of information that is not available to you even if you’ve done nothing to monitor your website at present; however, that’s an additional reason to begin as soon as you are able to. When you begin changing your website and make changes, the results will be a shot off in the dark unless you’re following them and observing the changes.
We’ll discuss this more later in Chapter 7; however, for the moment, If you haven’t yet, at a minimum, Google Analytics set up and enrolled in Google Webmaster tools, this should be your top priority right now.
Remember that SEO requires time. Don’t make unwise decisions that will result in costly losses in the end. Conduct the due diligence required today; it’s likely to pay off in the future.DIFFERENT TYPES OF GOOGLE PENALTY
- Algorithmic Penalty
These types of penalties or filters are automatically activated through Google’s Google algorithm. They are implemented as a result of an algorithm update or in response to the detection of behavior that is to be in violation of Google’s guidelines.
Verify whether you’ve been affected by a major change that is taking place recently. If you’ve suffered an algorithmic penalty that seems to come in the middle of nothing.
Here are the most important Google updates from the last few years:
- Panda (2011)
This update was targeted at content farms and boring, sloppy content. Keyword stuffing, nonsensical content as well as duplicate content were all targeted and were penalized.
- Penguin (2012)
In this update, Google tried to create an example of websites that were attempting to cheat the system by obtaining hyperlinks through paid sources or using automated link-building programs or any other low-quality hyperlinks that are not scalable. We’ll go over link profiles in more detail soon.
- Hummingbird (2013)
Google has been a major player in the development of software that better understands human speech. This is mostly aimed at preparing for a rise in voice searches made on mobile devices. They’ve made use of these advances within their search engine through this update, making the algorithm more adept at comprehending more complicated and lengthy searches, as well as the motivation behind these changes. In the end, this update is expected to give everyone more mobile-friendly results for search however, for a lot of website owners, it’s adversely affected traffic from search queries with longer tails.
Manual Review PenaltyThe owner of a website is informed of an automatic review penalty by a notification within Google Webmaster Tools. To get rid of this penalty, you’ll need to do something that is scrutinized by a person on Google’s Webspam team. We’ll go into this the details in chapters 5 as well as 6,
It’s hard to tell when a manual check will occur if you’re at risk of being the victim of one. With the number of websites available online and the small staff of Google and its employees, it’s highly likely that a manual check must follow an automated warning in the event of “suspicious activity,” and there is a chance that manual sanctions remain mostly triggered by algorithms.
To test it For a test, visit Webmaster Tools and click on the “Manual Actions” link under “Search Traffic.”
You’ll likely get a message saying, “No manual webspam actions found.”