If your site is like most sites, you’ve attained organic traffic before having actively invested in your SEO. As a result, a precedence has been set. This precedence is part of what makes up your organic visibility. When you seek to make a change on your site, i.e. optimise your site, you put your current organic visibility at risk. So, what are you to do with SEO when SEO may be a risk to your SEO traffic...?

SEO is a vast channel. Before you buy into SEO, from a partner, you've got to know the services you need. Simply hiring a partner to improve your SEO may not be very beneficial. If the SEO you need is relating to on-page work and you hire a partner that supplies you with technical SEO, you won't see the traffic uplift you expect. You've got to know what you need and you've got to be specific with what you need. Most importantly, you've got to ensure you never buy into SEO without the services being outlined. This will be a costly, frustrating mistake.

The SEO strategy put together during pitching is different to the SEO strategy required to improve your business’s SEO. It doesn’t matter how glamorous the SEO strategy or how detailed-oriented it may seem on a pitch deck, the goal of an SEO pitch is to win your business. Basing your SEO strategy from the strategy pitched to you is a pitfall to avoid.

As a non-SEO, you may think if you have multiple pages targeting a keyword means you have more of a chance to rank higher in the SERPs. This is completely and utterly incorrect. It actually has the opposite effect. It confuses Google, making them unsure of the best page to rank for the targeted keyword. If you rank for a targeted keyword and notice the landing page that ranks keeps changing, you've got to address this problem before it worsens.

The great thing with SEO is that you benefit from it even when you haven’t invested in it. This is the default for every website. However, there is a difference between simply receiving traffic and receiving targeted traffic. Regardless of the amount of traffic you already acquire without having invested in SEO, you’ll still need to invest in the channel to ensure you are driving the acquisition, as opposed to simply receiving it.

The search landscape of SEO and that of your industry require 2 different considerations when you seek to grow your organic traffic. The SEO search landscape is pertinent to SEO as an industry. The search landscape of your industry refers to how Google treats websites and search results in your industry. When you commit to SEO you’ll want to follow both the SEO search industry and what the search landscape is like for your industry.

It’s a mistake to view SEO as a check-box - something that’s done on a site right before new pages are launched. The typical approach when publishing new pages, is to have SEO come in right at the end of the production phase to ‘optimise’ the pages right before they’re published. This is a mistake you’ll want to avoid. To improve your website optimisation process, SEO must be integrated with other disciplines rather than added as a bolt-on at the end.

Your SEO implementation rate is the percentage of how long it takes you to implement SEO recommendations upon having received the recommendations. Let’s say you commission an SEO work to be carried out. This takes 10 days, 10 working days. You receive the doc and after review, the recommendations are approved - signed-off. You have the implementations begin immediately after sign-off, let’s say, the very next day, and it takes 5 days for the implementations to be completed. Your SEO implementation rate, for this project, is at 50%.